After reading the first two paragraphs, whole bunch of questions came to mind. Apologies if they are answered in the essay, but I just had to get them down before they evaporated.
Should we rather be working on developing non high energy alternatives to steel and concrete?
Do things like that exist?
Do we need to build as high and as strong as we do?
Can we function as a society with low and weak things?
I’m not thinking about solutions as much as I am thinking about a way through. How do we live within and a part of the metabolism of the planet? How should we use energy in a way that doesn’t cause these pulses of overconsumption? How do we allow for personal growth without economic growth? There are so many questions right now. We need to know which ones are the most productive to ask.
Finding the right questions isn’t the same as seeking solutions.
Honestly, friend, most of us *don't* do those things. Most of us are going to be the bulk of the near-term human population reduction. After that, the last time humans were fully sustainable within the environment was before civilization. Before agriculture. That's the period the survivors will need to look for for inspiration. There's no "going back" to that, but something similar is what we'll need to return to sustainability.
There are no solutions / we have been building a pyramid with no foundation/ no idea how to limit the impact / no means to control our own actual needs / no plan at all other than more money . It’s a collapse of civilization via starvation and war / Gaza in microcosm . The oligarchy think they can buy protections with wealth . As others have stated. The collapse is upon us . Tell the young generation their future has been cancelled
"Their primary form of energy output is heat...", says it all. Too many humans exhausting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including the heat in global warming, driving climate collapse and the potential extinction of all life on the surface of the planet in as few as 17 yrs., 2042. Our only hope for a future livable planet is a dramatic reduction in heat energy use/production, whatever the source.
Life is beautiful. Thankfully, the real beauty of life exists independently of the existing civilisation. Those who have invested too much on this civilisation will suffer; those who have not, will not—not to the same degree, at least.
Again, fine analysis and writing, but your pieces seem to go absolutely lightest on the transnational corporate ownership of all institutions.
You don't seem to note that there has been an on-going revolution in corporate domination of all corners of life, especially highlighted now in this extreme-rightist totalitarian power grab. Mega-corporations do not bend to the fluctuations of political oversight, but instead absorb all attempts to restraint hem.
Fossil fuel companies (which basically means all companies) own the processes of extraction and production, rendering the notion of "nationalizing" anything a dead relic.
"What can be done"? Nothing against this reality except to acknowledge defeat. The war that is now lost could never have been be won. 1.7C now, 2C in due time, then 3C, endless iterations of "polycrisis" and hopium calls to "fight" - with what? Where? To undo what amount of damage?
Humans have acknowledged defeat before. We only have to die once. For many of us lucky ones now is not the time to do so, and it may be some years yet, even a decade or two, but it's not that difficult to see the cliff's edge from here.
The main barrier to replacing fossil fuels with nuclear is weapons proliferation issues. There's plenty of breedable fuels out there; the problem is to keep the bred fuel from being diverted to make bombs.
We might have commercial fusion reactors online before the regulatory issues are worked out for breeder reactors. There's a couple of companies claiming to have plans for commercial fusion reactors by the 2030s. (Superconductor technology has advanced greatly.)
This may be the case, but again, it's the scaling up that is the issue.
If humans needed to build 3 nuclear reactors a day for the last 30 years whilst phasing out 2 coal plants/oil fields, can you imagine how many fusion reactors we would have to build to phase out FF and fission reactors? 5 a day?
You can have fusion powered civilisation for a while, until the pollution kicks in, but it would be for only a planetary population of 500,000,000.
And history of energy shows us that, no new energy system has replaced an old system, it has merely added to the mix. The UK burns 8 times more wood now than it did in 1750 (thanks to the stupidity that is DRAX and increased population) - no FF infrastructure has been displaced by renewables, they have just allowed humans to burn even more energy.
So even if these fusion reactors came on line en masse, will the Chinese shut down their coal mines? Will Saudi turn off the oil spigots? No, they'll just burn more energy by building more stuff.
Because the more energy you use, the more pollution you get. CO2 and CH4 that is causing the warming is a waste management problem. Although by far the bigger pollution problem is the PFAS forever chemicals, micro-plastics, nano-plastics, car tyre rubber fragments, as these are gradually sterilising all mammals on earth and have been for 30 years.
Latest research shows that micro-plastics interfere with photo-synthesis in plants and crops. So bye-bye food if it continues.
So whilst many of these pollutions are not always a direct outcome of energy production, but of manufacturing the stuff that civilisation uses, it is thus an existential threat.
In addition, it's the resources like concrete to put the fusion plant in/on, steel to make the girders to hold it up, the rare earth metals to join the electronics, the copper for the piping, and so on. Whilst we won't run out of these materials, we have dug out all the easy to access and rich quality ores. The ores that are left are contain less mineral/metal, and are becoming harder. Which means more wear on your machine tools grinding the ores, more heat to extract the mineral and convert it to usable format. And so on. See Simon Michaux' work on this.
Indeed, 2025 is peak copper apparently. Again not that we'll run out of it, we just won't be able to increase production of it. And the copper we do produce will require more energy to extract.
Similarly with concrete, the world is actually running out of sand for making cement. Hence China dredging its rivers, and here in UK various license applications to dig up beaches just off-shore. Unfortunately desert sand isn't the right type for using in concrete.
It is also a problem because once you look at the world through an ecological lens. This planet isn't just us and our hubris and selfishness, there are 8.7 million other species (or more, some say 10 million). On current extinction trends, all wildlife will be gone by 2048 (another comment further up the thread said 2042) according to WWF figures. Whether religion and techno-utopians like it or not, we are a part of nature, we are animals, we cannot exist without the habitat that nature provides.
Now some humans of the Elon Musk variety might not be bothered if all other life forms go extinct, but get this: 28% of our oxygen comes from trees, 68% from phytoplankton in the ocean, the rest from other sources such as rock weathering. So if all the wildlife disappears (trees and phytoplankton are wildlife after all) bye-bye being able to breathe. So, you might be able to manufacture oxygen and we all live with diver breathing suits, but there'll be nothing to look at and no natural food. And even then it won't be for 8 billion humans.
No argument whatsoever on the need for treading more carefully on the earth with a higher population. I have had many an argument against those who want to boost the birth rates in developed countries.
Nuclear done right has the smallest eco-footprint. Solar covers a lot of land. Electric cars require a lot of scarce minerals like copper. Nuclear to methanol allows vehicles which are built of abundant/recyclable steel and aluminum. And methanol biodegrades rapidly when spilled.
As for tires, methinks the solution is to burn them in an oxygen atmosphere -- much more complete combustion. When making hydrogen to make methanol, you get oxygen as a byproduct. Handy, that.
'Developed' = trashed in order to maximize resource extraction, profit, and the number of consumers living a western-type 'lifestyle'. All at the expense of Nature and the people who did ok in their 'undeveloped' country before 'progress' arrived.
"Nuclear done right has the smallest eco-footprint."
Did you read the article??
Nuclear requires huge amounts of concrete, steel and energy to build (as well as other materials = more mining). Even then, the power plants only last 40 years at most. Then all the mining, construction, and energy use has to be done all over again...
As for burning tyres in an oxygen atmosphere, where do you get the (presumably pure) oxygen from? That requires energy.
"When making hydrogen to make methanol, you get oxygen as a byproduct" - but making hydrogen by splitting water into 2H + O requires lots of *energy*.
All technical so-called 'solutions' require energy and/or 'natural resources' (aka bits of the living world to be destroyed).
Developed = rich enough to give a damn about the environment. Many a large animal on the brink of extinction has come back in the United States. Deer, beavers, and alligators have gone from scarce to nuisance. Large birds (another nuisance!) have made an amazing comeback with the banning of DDT.
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply to painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
This is a good solution, but I have serious doubts that it will be implemented.
The same thing goes for longterm storage. Despite the hundreds of reactors and decades of use, there isn't any long term storage anywhere in the world. There are technical issues, but those aren't the problem. The problem is political will, which doesn't seem to exist.
In related news, it would seem that Europe is hell bent on battling Russia. Near by, the USA and Israel are salivating over the notion of seeing Iran being pulverised. Apparently, there are several aircraft carriers and supporting destroyer groups all headed to the Indian Ocean.
Iran has become a capable military force with its amazing missile tech. Russia has a mutual military support agreement with Iran. Iran and Russia will never bend to the USA and Israel. But regardless, apparently this needs to happen... whatever it is we keep trifling with. And just to make certain it does, false flags are nearly a certainty with this lot.
The potential consequences are both easily imaginable, and yet... unimaginable.
All good points. My contribution is to point out the use of ultra high voltage (UHV) transmission lines. This allows China to burn coal where it is mined in the interior and transmit electricity to the coast, where the factories and people are. This is only a stop-gap solution, of course, but it gives China an edge in their industrial base. This edge will likely be short term, but the US will not be able to keep up. France uses these UHV lines too. The US has a few but the maintenance of the overall infrastructure is so degraded it is not likely a UHV buildout will be prioritizef. And as B says, it will fail in the long term anyway.
Now that electric engines can be built with just copper and cheap metals (no magnetic chemicals needed), perhaps there is also an opportunity to realign our transportation system with a focus to bringing the experience (eg: food) to the person. Small simple pod type cars without all the metal, glass and rubber might help us have 80% of what we are used to, at 20% of the complexity.
It is kind of an exciting time in that regard, because our 1950s-to-now experience is absolutely coming to an end. But, we are innovative, and can do amazing things when there are no other options. Technology (ie: non-magnetic chemical electric engines) and automation, physically moving in efficient slow motion.... might just be a new means to build a lower energy civilisation which is still enjoyable to live in.
There is an incredible amount of opportunity, if we didn't have to worry about the pesky financial system crashing down. Perhaps even there, there is room for innovation and not by using horrible ideas like CBDCs.
When Art Berman suddenly changes his tune on oil and insists we have 60 years of BAU remaining... (apparently he had meetings with some fellas in Washington just prior to making this statement).... you know we are very close to total collapse
Quiz - who said - when things get really bad... you have to lie
I find your honesty and credible data do refreshing!
We are already on the way down, some areas more than others and it would be nice to see a mature, sober response to the poly crisis while it’s still possible to soften the blow.
It seems that the civilized version of humanity was too clever for its own good.
entonces, el proximo panorama mundial es decrecimiento. Decrecimiento del consumo, decrecimiento de la produccion, decrecimiento del derroche, decrecimiento de la poblacion, decrecimiento de la cultura de la banalidad
A lovely statistic I calculated the other day is that the highest grades of uranium ore have the same energy density as firewood when you balance out the trace of extremely energy dense uranium with the vast bulk of useless rock. In many ways uranium is just coal with a whole bunch of extra steps.
While nuclear power may be producing low heat to generate electricity, electric power can be used to generate high heat necessary for glass and steel production.
After reading the first two paragraphs, whole bunch of questions came to mind. Apologies if they are answered in the essay, but I just had to get them down before they evaporated.
Should we rather be working on developing non high energy alternatives to steel and concrete?
Do things like that exist?
Do we need to build as high and as strong as we do?
Can we function as a society with low and weak things?
We have to stop thinking in solutions. You can skip to the last few paragraphs to read more on this.
I’m not thinking about solutions as much as I am thinking about a way through. How do we live within and a part of the metabolism of the planet? How should we use energy in a way that doesn’t cause these pulses of overconsumption? How do we allow for personal growth without economic growth? There are so many questions right now. We need to know which ones are the most productive to ask.
Finding the right questions isn’t the same as seeking solutions.
Honestly, friend, most of us *don't* do those things. Most of us are going to be the bulk of the near-term human population reduction. After that, the last time humans were fully sustainable within the environment was before civilization. Before agriculture. That's the period the survivors will need to look for for inspiration. There's no "going back" to that, but something similar is what we'll need to return to sustainability.
Yes, agreed. I always recommend these two links
Firstly, sustainable human population was in the order of 35 million, before we wrecked the planet:
http://paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html
and this is nearer to what our future might be:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
What about the spent fuel ponds? https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
This is an extinction event https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
That's correct. Agriculture fundamentally does not work. This fact is totally obscured by the professional obscurers called historians.
How do we live within and a part of the metabolism of the planet?
By doing what we were built to do, hunter gathering. As long as we don't get too good at hunting, that is.
Right. Unfortunately, humans have always consistently gotten "too good" at hunting, driving multiple species to extinction.
Yes they exist... in DelusiSTAN
Should we rather be working on developing non high energy alternatives to steel and concrete?
If that were possible, obviously it isn't.
There are no solutions / we have been building a pyramid with no foundation/ no idea how to limit the impact / no means to control our own actual needs / no plan at all other than more money . It’s a collapse of civilization via starvation and war / Gaza in microcosm . The oligarchy think they can buy protections with wealth . As others have stated. The collapse is upon us . Tell the young generation their future has been cancelled
"Their primary form of energy output is heat...", says it all. Too many humans exhausting too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including the heat in global warming, driving climate collapse and the potential extinction of all life on the surface of the planet in as few as 17 yrs., 2042. Our only hope for a future livable planet is a dramatic reduction in heat energy use/production, whatever the source.
Life is beautiful. Thankfully, the real beauty of life exists independently of the existing civilisation. Those who have invested too much on this civilisation will suffer; those who have not, will not—not to the same degree, at least.
Great though painful summary of what faces us.
Again, fine analysis and writing, but your pieces seem to go absolutely lightest on the transnational corporate ownership of all institutions.
You don't seem to note that there has been an on-going revolution in corporate domination of all corners of life, especially highlighted now in this extreme-rightist totalitarian power grab. Mega-corporations do not bend to the fluctuations of political oversight, but instead absorb all attempts to restraint hem.
Fossil fuel companies (which basically means all companies) own the processes of extraction and production, rendering the notion of "nationalizing" anything a dead relic.
"What can be done"? Nothing against this reality except to acknowledge defeat. The war that is now lost could never have been be won. 1.7C now, 2C in due time, then 3C, endless iterations of "polycrisis" and hopium calls to "fight" - with what? Where? To undo what amount of damage?
Humans have acknowledged defeat before. We only have to die once. For many of us lucky ones now is not the time to do so, and it may be some years yet, even a decade or two, but it's not that difficult to see the cliff's edge from here.
NuCor has been using electric arc furnaces to make steel for 50 years.
They are already using Icelandic geothermal energy to make methanol. https://carbonrecycling.com/
The main barrier to replacing fossil fuels with nuclear is weapons proliferation issues. There's plenty of breedable fuels out there; the problem is to keep the bred fuel from being diverted to make bombs.
We might have commercial fusion reactors online before the regulatory issues are worked out for breeder reactors. There's a couple of companies claiming to have plans for commercial fusion reactors by the 2030s. (Superconductor technology has advanced greatly.)
This may be the case, but again, it's the scaling up that is the issue.
If humans needed to build 3 nuclear reactors a day for the last 30 years whilst phasing out 2 coal plants/oil fields, can you imagine how many fusion reactors we would have to build to phase out FF and fission reactors? 5 a day?
You can have fusion powered civilisation for a while, until the pollution kicks in, but it would be for only a planetary population of 500,000,000.
And history of energy shows us that, no new energy system has replaced an old system, it has merely added to the mix. The UK burns 8 times more wood now than it did in 1750 (thanks to the stupidity that is DRAX and increased population) - no FF infrastructure has been displaced by renewables, they have just allowed humans to burn even more energy.
So even if these fusion reactors came on line en masse, will the Chinese shut down their coal mines? Will Saudi turn off the oil spigots? No, they'll just burn more energy by building more stuff.
Why is this a problem?
Because the more energy you use, the more pollution you get. CO2 and CH4 that is causing the warming is a waste management problem. Although by far the bigger pollution problem is the PFAS forever chemicals, micro-plastics, nano-plastics, car tyre rubber fragments, as these are gradually sterilising all mammals on earth and have been for 30 years.
Latest research shows that micro-plastics interfere with photo-synthesis in plants and crops. So bye-bye food if it continues.
So whilst many of these pollutions are not always a direct outcome of energy production, but of manufacturing the stuff that civilisation uses, it is thus an existential threat.
In addition, it's the resources like concrete to put the fusion plant in/on, steel to make the girders to hold it up, the rare earth metals to join the electronics, the copper for the piping, and so on. Whilst we won't run out of these materials, we have dug out all the easy to access and rich quality ores. The ores that are left are contain less mineral/metal, and are becoming harder. Which means more wear on your machine tools grinding the ores, more heat to extract the mineral and convert it to usable format. And so on. See Simon Michaux' work on this.
Indeed, 2025 is peak copper apparently. Again not that we'll run out of it, we just won't be able to increase production of it. And the copper we do produce will require more energy to extract.
Similarly with concrete, the world is actually running out of sand for making cement. Hence China dredging its rivers, and here in UK various license applications to dig up beaches just off-shore. Unfortunately desert sand isn't the right type for using in concrete.
It is also a problem because once you look at the world through an ecological lens. This planet isn't just us and our hubris and selfishness, there are 8.7 million other species (or more, some say 10 million). On current extinction trends, all wildlife will be gone by 2048 (another comment further up the thread said 2042) according to WWF figures. Whether religion and techno-utopians like it or not, we are a part of nature, we are animals, we cannot exist without the habitat that nature provides.
Now some humans of the Elon Musk variety might not be bothered if all other life forms go extinct, but get this: 28% of our oxygen comes from trees, 68% from phytoplankton in the ocean, the rest from other sources such as rock weathering. So if all the wildlife disappears (trees and phytoplankton are wildlife after all) bye-bye being able to breathe. So, you might be able to manufacture oxygen and we all live with diver breathing suits, but there'll be nothing to look at and no natural food. And even then it won't be for 8 billion humans.
Is that a world we want to live in?
No argument whatsoever on the need for treading more carefully on the earth with a higher population. I have had many an argument against those who want to boost the birth rates in developed countries.
Nuclear done right has the smallest eco-footprint. Solar covers a lot of land. Electric cars require a lot of scarce minerals like copper. Nuclear to methanol allows vehicles which are built of abundant/recyclable steel and aluminum. And methanol biodegrades rapidly when spilled.
As for tires, methinks the solution is to burn them in an oxygen atmosphere -- much more complete combustion. When making hydrogen to make methanol, you get oxygen as a byproduct. Handy, that.
"developed countries"
'Developed' = trashed in order to maximize resource extraction, profit, and the number of consumers living a western-type 'lifestyle'. All at the expense of Nature and the people who did ok in their 'undeveloped' country before 'progress' arrived.
"Nuclear done right has the smallest eco-footprint."
Did you read the article??
Nuclear requires huge amounts of concrete, steel and energy to build (as well as other materials = more mining). Even then, the power plants only last 40 years at most. Then all the mining, construction, and energy use has to be done all over again...
As for burning tyres in an oxygen atmosphere, where do you get the (presumably pure) oxygen from? That requires energy.
"When making hydrogen to make methanol, you get oxygen as a byproduct" - but making hydrogen by splitting water into 2H + O requires lots of *energy*.
All technical so-called 'solutions' require energy and/or 'natural resources' (aka bits of the living world to be destroyed).
It's a zero-sum game - and the game is nearly up.
Developed = rich enough to give a damn about the environment. Many a large animal on the brink of extinction has come back in the United States. Deer, beavers, and alligators have gone from scarce to nuisance. Large birds (another nuisance!) have made an amazing comeback with the banning of DDT.
Let alone the impossibility of dismantling all those nukes safely before we exit.
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
See:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/its-an-efficient-machine-to-destroy-nuclear-waste-nuclear-future-powered-by-thorium-beckons/4019310.article
There are several "waste-burner" reactor projects ongoing. It would be nice if we could clean up our long-lived waste.
And Covid Vaccines are Safe and Effective...
What will it take before you realize you are being played... over and over and over
There is no way to dispose of spent fuel - if there was they'd be doing it
I said it would be nice IF..
I don't expect any of the new nuke projects to happen - too many dependencies on fossil-powered "civilisation"
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply to painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
— Carl Sagan
This is a good solution, but I have serious doubts that it will be implemented.
The same thing goes for longterm storage. Despite the hundreds of reactors and decades of use, there isn't any long term storage anywhere in the world. There are technical issues, but those aren't the problem. The problem is political will, which doesn't seem to exist.
It really doesn't matter in the scale of things.
In related news, it would seem that Europe is hell bent on battling Russia. Near by, the USA and Israel are salivating over the notion of seeing Iran being pulverised. Apparently, there are several aircraft carriers and supporting destroyer groups all headed to the Indian Ocean.
Iran has become a capable military force with its amazing missile tech. Russia has a mutual military support agreement with Iran. Iran and Russia will never bend to the USA and Israel. But regardless, apparently this needs to happen... whatever it is we keep trifling with. And just to make certain it does, false flags are nearly a certainty with this lot.
The potential consequences are both easily imaginable, and yet... unimaginable.
All good points. My contribution is to point out the use of ultra high voltage (UHV) transmission lines. This allows China to burn coal where it is mined in the interior and transmit electricity to the coast, where the factories and people are. This is only a stop-gap solution, of course, but it gives China an edge in their industrial base. This edge will likely be short term, but the US will not be able to keep up. France uses these UHV lines too. The US has a few but the maintenance of the overall infrastructure is so degraded it is not likely a UHV buildout will be prioritizef. And as B says, it will fail in the long term anyway.
Has there been an update to Prof. Simon Michaux's plan for a Purple Transition?
His framework is to burn iron powder to generate the higher temperatures needed.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://dctransformation.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/DCT24-Simon-Michaux-The-Energy-Paradox-Part-2-The-Future-not-Green-ot-Purple-Presentation.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwirhcnj7KCMAxUTkokEHfYUIQgQFnoECBgQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1dcHGObfZixDTxcnIjgDNJ
Now that electric engines can be built with just copper and cheap metals (no magnetic chemicals needed), perhaps there is also an opportunity to realign our transportation system with a focus to bringing the experience (eg: food) to the person. Small simple pod type cars without all the metal, glass and rubber might help us have 80% of what we are used to, at 20% of the complexity.
It is kind of an exciting time in that regard, because our 1950s-to-now experience is absolutely coming to an end. But, we are innovative, and can do amazing things when there are no other options. Technology (ie: non-magnetic chemical electric engines) and automation, physically moving in efficient slow motion.... might just be a new means to build a lower energy civilisation which is still enjoyable to live in.
There is an incredible amount of opportunity, if we didn't have to worry about the pesky financial system crashing down. Perhaps even there, there is room for innovation and not by using horrible ideas like CBDCs.
Art Berman was in total agreement with you on nuclear in this great discussion aired the other day https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/reality-roundtable-16
When Art Berman suddenly changes his tune on oil and insists we have 60 years of BAU remaining... (apparently he had meetings with some fellas in Washington just prior to making this statement).... you know we are very close to total collapse
Quiz - who said - when things get really bad... you have to lie
I find your honesty and credible data do refreshing!
We are already on the way down, some areas more than others and it would be nice to see a mature, sober response to the poly crisis while it’s still possible to soften the blow.
It seems that the civilized version of humanity was too clever for its own good.
This proves that we are https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-species-ever
entonces, el proximo panorama mundial es decrecimiento. Decrecimiento del consumo, decrecimiento de la produccion, decrecimiento del derroche, decrecimiento de la poblacion, decrecimiento de la cultura de la banalidad
Well presented difference between the need for high heat and lower heat applications.
A lovely statistic I calculated the other day is that the highest grades of uranium ore have the same energy density as firewood when you balance out the trace of extremely energy dense uranium with the vast bulk of useless rock. In many ways uranium is just coal with a whole bunch of extra steps.
While nuclear power may be producing low heat to generate electricity, electric power can be used to generate high heat necessary for glass and steel production.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_melting_furnace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace