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I've seen a lot of posts more recently which I believe to be related to the results of bad ideology, or actually advocating for it, which is even worse, in my opinion. It's the fruit of very narrow thinking that ignores the problems such thinking actually creates. It's popularized in mass media as explanations for human-caused shortages of goods and services, rather than taking ownership of our own bad behaviors, which are driven by bad ideology.
The very real and severe problems that the COVID lockdowns created never had any "natural" element to them, meaning the people in charge shot everyone in the foot as part of an ill-advised and blatantly obvious "power grab" to illustrate that our current ways of doing things weren't working. These clowns are basically the newest form of Luddites, people squandered time and money by destroying the factory machinery whilst claiming that nobody will have a job or material wealth because "the machines were taking over". Our modern Luddites have simply taken a more indirect approach to doing what the historical Luddites did- making goods or services artificially more expensive so that fewer and fewer people will benefit from the super-abundance that human ingenuity has created. Well, those "infernal machines" did take over, everyone had more affordable and better quality clothing to wear afterwards, and higher paying jobs became ever-more plentiful as a result.
The Luddites were not just completely wrong about the end result, they were horridly self-destructive and irrational overly-emotional actors who carried out their ideology in spite of being proven completely wrong. Now we see a new group of Luddites who are using mass media and political ideology to carry out the same wantonly-destructive belief system. Dr. Robert Zubrin labels these people "merchants of despair". Their bad ideas, despite being ultimately self-destructive and self-defeating, simply won't go away. Unfortunately for everyone else, most people don't have the skills to evaluate the validity of their ideas, or lack thereof, and/or the vocabulary to convincingly express to others why such "limited pie" ideas are so wrong and so egregiously bad for everyone.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that most of the people who concoct such ideas, as well as many of those who are convinced to believe in and emotionally invest into the outcome of those bad ideas, suffer from manic-depressive psychological disorders. Feed someone a steady but subtle stream of negative ideas, especially as it relates to humanity, and they will eventually view humanity in a fundamentally negative way. It's been scientifically proven that most people, regardless of mental health state or ideology or other factors, tend to exaggerate transgressions committed against them by others and minimize their own transgressions.
I know little to nothing about human psychology, but by observing how blame is shifted for simple traffic accidents where nobody is actually hurt, I can understand how this is fundamentally true. I don't have to understand or agree with that underlying premise of behavioral psychologists to observe how such a statement of truth affects human-to-human interaction following a real-world problem. It may be solely one person's fault, or the fault of both people, or an otherwise unavoidable problem that neither party truly caused (such as a bridge collapsing onto the roadway creating a multi-car pile-up accident), but they both want to blame each other no matter what an objective observer like a camera happens to show. We both minimize our own responsibility in causing the accident scenario while we maximize the responsibility of everyone else at the same time. An objective observer who was disinterested in who was blamed for the accident wouldn't be so dismissive of the role everyone involved played in the ultimate outcome, assuming the objective observer's end goal was to minimize death / injury / destruction caused by traffic accidents and to maximize the utility everyone received from their personal transportation.
No logical leap is required to understand why and how such degenerate ideas continue to spread. It's more or less "baked into" our human condition / psychology. The only way to overcome the results of that problem is to stop assigning value to ideas, however enamored we are with our own ideas, and to start assigning value to end results.
After watching this, I thought it was very insightful as to how accurate the various predictions of doom and scarcity played out over time, with the concession that no theoretical model of how the world should work survives first contact with how it actually works:
Spoiler Alert:
The ideas of the Luddites and all other similar "limited pie" theorists are almost universally dead wrong and ideological dead-ends. Unfortunately, that never seems to give pause to the next group of us "upright-apes" from believing that our own ideas are "better" than the last group that was proven wrong. Our own thinking couldn't possibly suffer from the same issues that plagued the last group's bad ideas.
Examples:
Machines will leave us poor. A lack of highly productive machinery left almost all of humanity "poor" for most of human history. After the machinery was built, we became absurdly more wealthy. A king from antiquity is worse-off than a homeless person by our modern standards. If you were born poor, then the likelihood of you ever becoming wealthy was near-zero. Under free-market capitalism, uneducated and dirt poor young men and women became billionaires. I think mostly free markets literally steamrolled over that problem.
We'll run out of oil or lumber or metal. Well, now we have the machinery to synthesize oil from Hydrogen and Carbon Dioxide. There are more trees now than there were 100 years ago, because humanity now has the energy to make a lot more steel and concrete for construction, as opposed to using lumber. Various types of steel or concrete or steel-reinforced concrete construction can last for hundreds or even thousands of years, as the leftovers of Rome and other advanced societies of the classical world has proven over enough time. Modern stuff is deliberately designed to not last very long, so it has to be periodically replaced, due to another idea known as "planned obsolescence". That notion itself could either be a good idea or a bad idea. Maybe we periodically get rid of structures that no longer serve their originally intended purpose or maybe they're highly inefficient designs compared to more modern ones, and need something to cause them to "go away" after enough time has passed for better / more efficient ideas to materialize.
We'll run out of energy, in whatever form. The entire universe proves the absurdity of that idea every day of the week. This bad idea is particularly puzzling, yet a lot of people believe it anyway. They're literally bathed in energy from the Sun every time they walk outside. There's more Uranium and Thorium than we know what to do with, and the use of coal / oil / gas is purported to bring about "climate apocalypse" from CO2 emissions. I guess the notion of recycling our own CO2 emissions has never occurred to such people.
We'll run out of food or water or other vital resources to support our populations. Industrialized agriculture, computerization of supply chain management, all those advanced and hyper-productive machines that can take us to other planets to get at the resources there proves how baffling this idea is. This can only become "true" if we decide to stop using our advanced technology. We now have this idea of "vertical farming" that can pack so much food production into a single highly-controlled building / greenhouse environment, that a single skyscraper with sufficient power could feed a million people, year-round, without requiring a single pound of soil to grow the food in. The water and nutrients are both recycled and fed back into the water used to grow the crops. It requires a lot of input energy, but almost no land area to speak of, and once built the greenhouse will last for many decades and protect the crops from the ravages of pests that might otherwise eat the crops before they can be harvested. Whether it rains or not is also irrelevant. The greenhouse could be built in the Sahara Desert, and the crops would actually grow faster there with more sunlight.
We'll run out of ideas required to sustain our advancement. This is only true if we stop making new people. Every mouth also comes with a pair of hands and a brain. If the hands and brain are fully developed to make them highly skillful and creative, then the only practical limit is what those minds can conceive of. Otherwise, this notion is every bit as false as all the other bad ideas listed here.
So, how could we ever "run out" of these things? Well... It's pretty obvious that we'd have to deliberately work at hurting ourselves. One way to "hurt ourselves", amongst many others, is to stop making more people. What could the point of doing such a thing possibly be? We would potentially create a state-of-existence in agreement with the psyche of our manic-depressives. There aren't any other logical or rational explanations for doing such things to ourselves.
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21st century super-ambundance? I suppose that is going to depend on who you are and where you live. Ultimately, if human beings are able to colonise the solar system and exploit the boundless resources of space, then the premise of this post is true. With an ever expanding resource base and no environmental conflicts, there really are no fundamental limitations on human wealth.
The problem is that we do not (yet) live in that bountiful situation. We are stuck on the surface of a ball of rock, some 8000 miles wide. So long as our domain is limited to living on single ball of rock, our achievements are going to be limited by the resources available within the thin skin within a mile or so of the surface of that ball of rock. In such a constrained environment, growth obviously has limits. For those that believe in a more bountiful future, really the only option is to expand beyond it. Exploring the practicality of that idea is the bread and butter of this board. But ultimately, if we fail to achieve it, the LTG predictions will come true. The LTG studies were a set of scenarios. They were not flawed as such, but they all rest upon the assumption that the Earth is a closed system and that the resources of Earth were the only ones available to humanity. Within the limits of that assumption, the LTG scenarios give us a glimpse of what can be expected for human prospects innthe 21st century.
Space based resources are really the only wild card that can dramatically alter the LTG outcome, because they are the only activities that move us beyond the strictly limited environment of Earth surface. So the whole future of humanity depends upon the success of men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in expanding the human sphere of influence and moving our resource base beyond the limited amount of stuff that we can pull out of Earth's crust. No pressure!
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-17 17:34:02)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
Humanity was supposed to be extinct or slowly starving to death several times over by now, remember?
How many times do these doomsday nutters have to be proven wrong before you accept that their understanding of humanity is as limited as their own biases and beliefs?
LTG / "limited pie" thinking is as false as the day is long. 22 over 7 never ends. There is no "limited pie", anymore than there is a "limited π". There is only closed-minded thinking asserting that the rest of humanity should be as constrained and fixated in their thought process as the LTG crowd clearly is.
I do think human stupidity is either functionally or truly limitless. The people who constantly think we're "running out of something we can't live without", typically fall into that category.
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Calliban,
Humanity was supposed to be extinct or slowly starving to death several times over by now, remember?
How many times do these doomsday nutters have to be proven wrong before you accept that their understanding of humanity is as limited as their own biases and beliefs?
LTG / "limited pie" thinking is as false as the day is long. 22 over 7 never ends. There is no "limited pie", anymore than there is a "limited π". There is only closed-minded thinking asserting that the rest of humanity should be as constrained and fixated in their thought process as the LTG crowd clearly is.
I do think human stupidity is either functionally or truly limitless. The people who constantly think we're "running out of something we can't live without", typically fall into that category.
What you are saying is ridiculous. Someone (who exactly?) made a prediction that humanity would run short of food at some point. That person turned out to be wrong. Maybe they did not consider the importance of ammonia based fertilisers, or diesel powered farm equipment, or grain transportation, or something else. Your arguement appears to be that because someone made flawed predictions in the past, the entire idea of a food shortage in the future is bogus and anyone that thinks that way is a doomsday nutter. That is a bit like saying that because a building fire alarm system has given us false alarms in the past, there will never be a major fire and we need not take the idea seriously! What you are voicing is dogmatic belief and it is not scientific reasoning. It makes about as much sense as a religious belief that god will always provide. That is one of history's all time bad bets.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-18 03:36:37)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
A guy runs into a Police station and screams, "We're all gonna die!"
The officer sitting behind the desk perks her head up and says, "You're correct, sir. We're all gonna die. When would that be? In the next 5 minutes, 5 years, or 5 decades? If you can't tell me which, then there's not much I can do with that information. Now, unless you can be more specific, this pile of paperwork isn't going to complete itself."
Every American President from Clinton to Trump has made these observations about the Russia-Europe situation:
1. Europeans don't have enough weapons to effectively counter Russia
2. Europeans are overly-dependent upon Russian oil and gas
3. America can't wave a magic wand and fix decades of European defense and energy policy mistakes
4. The people your fellow Europeans voted into power are busy making their energy problem worse
5. If you're running out of food, tell your governments to stop using their own farmers for target practice
You want America's help?
America wants something approaching rational adult behavior.
1. Stop telling your farmers to quit producing food over climate change
This is only starving your own people. It makes no sense.
2. Start producing gas from domestic or procuring it from allied sources (America, Middle East, anybody but Russia)
Poor people suffer the most from high energy prices, so either make energy cheaper or realize you're shooting yourself in the foot.
3. Keep your nuclear reactors online, rather than shutting them down
Unless wind and solar become base load power, you need reactors.
4. Procure your own weapons that all of you can share (buy from America or make your own, we don't care)
F-35 is the best deal you're going to get. It's presently cheaper than prior generations of fighter jets, American or European, and does more than any of them. If it didn't work, then America wouldn't procure and deploy it. Modern IADS are not a problem you can ignore. They make all prior generations of aircraft flying coffins in a shooting war with an enemy so-equipped. Modern wars are not won without air supremacy. I don't think anyone likes the fact that modern fighter jets are so expensive, but this is "like" vs "need".
5. Start coordinating with each other for common defense, you don't need America's permission to do this, we've been begging for you to do it for the past 30 years
This bothers me the most of all the issues noted here. You have the money, the equipment, and the manpower. Start using it. As if you ever needed it to begin with, America has already given the "green light" to do what you think is necessary. You have American support for anything short of initiating a nuclear war with Russia. America has removed itself from the battlefield because the Russians threatened to nuke Europe if we remained. Yes, we would've wiped the floor with the Russian military inside of a week, but NATO could easily do the same.
America provided precision artillery shells (M777 and Excalibur) and rockets (HIMARS), ATGMs (Javelin), MANPADs (Stinger), radars (counter-battery and air search), and a literal handful of IADS (Patriot) to stop hypersonic missile strikes on civilian targets. Combined with people willing to fight, that was sufficient to repel a Russian invasion. It would've been better if Ukraine had stealth tactical strike fighters to destroy Russian tactical fighters on the ground or in the air, but in reality the drones and guided artillery shells and rockets are doing the job as effectively as any stealthy aircraft ever could. Stealthy drones the size of large cruise missiles would be nearly impossible to find and shoot down if more options are necessary.
Germany has the Wiesel AWC. In sufficient numbers, these small but highly mobile vehicles could mount M230 30mm chain guns, Griffin / Javelin / Hellfire / Spike / HOT / etc, Stinger / StarStreak / Mistral / RIM-116 / AIM-120 / Peregrine / etc, 120mm mortars, and radars or EO systems. They would serve as ad-hoc IFVs, battlefield command posts, ambulances, recon, battlefield surveillance, etc.
You can do this defense-in-depth thing on-the-cheap, but it cannot be done for a song-and-dance.
You don't need every weapon in America's arsenal, but there are certain key capabilities we've developed because we found them necessary through experience. Patriot and THAAD were developed in response to American military bases getting hit with SRBMs and IRBMs in Iraq.
Counter-battery radar / EO systems were developed in response to artillery and mortar attacks.
F-35 was developed to attack air bases, ships, and other IADS-defended targets without unacceptable loss rates.
* M230 30mm chain gun - attack infantry / light armored vehicles / field fortifications at close range for minimal cost
* Griffin - low-cost / lightweight fire-and-forget guided missile to attack light armored targets and field fortifications
* Javelin and Hellfire - fire-and-forget heavy ATGMs, expensive but delivers results
* Stinger - low-cost / lightweight defense against drones / helicopters / low-altitude attack jets
* RIM-116 - powerful cruise missile and low-flying aircraft defense
* AIM-120 and ground-launched variants - powerful medium range fire-and-forget radar-guided anti-aircraft missile
* Peregrine - 150 pound lower-cost / lightweight AIM-120 complement, similar range, fire-and-forget radar-guided anti-aircraft missile
* Patriot and THAAD - defense against hypersonic glide and ballistic missile weapons
* M777 - medium range precision 155mm artillery strike (Germany already has the more capable PzH-2000, but it's also 5X the cost)
* HIMARS and ATACMS - long range precision artillery strike (not sure if you guys have equivalent systems or not)
You have everything else covered. Your small ships are as good or better than American ships, and lower-cost. Your ship-based weapons are as good as American weapons, or you've purchased American weapons to arm them.
All of this stuff "goes together" with modern technologically advanced nation-states that have secure energy and food supplies, because defense-in-depth weaponry protects what took so much time / labor / capital to create, from would-be foreign invaders who might otherwise destroy or take what you have if they think they can "get away with it". When you're properly armed and organized, your potential enemies know that they cannot get away with it.
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Europe's problems are largely self-generated. That is so painfully obvious at this point, that arguing against it would be folly. Had Europe followed the French example when it comes to energy production, the Russians would not be holding us by the short hairs right now. European domestic fossil fuel production could never have kept pace with domestic demand.
But the solution has been obvious to everyone since the 1950s. Back in the 1950s, men like Hubbert and Rickover, knew that the Earth's fossil fuel supplies would not be sufficient to meet human energy demands forever. They weren't particularly worried, because they knew that nuclear energy would fill the gap and that by 2000, breeder reactor technologies would supply as much energy as humanity was likely to need.
By the early 1990s, the European (British and French) and US advanced nuclear programmes, had succeeded in developing fast reactor technologies that could have allowed Europe to become energy self-sufficient for millenia to come. But the visionaries of the 1950s underestimated human stupidity. Political pressure from green groups forced the closure of breeder reactor programmes and a short term splurge in natural gas production from the North Sea, meant that Europe didn't build another nuclear reactor for over two decades. Warhead reduction initiatives in Russia and the US, led to a temporary easing of uranium prices. Now we are having to recreate a nuclear workforce from scatch. In the mean time, regulatory requirements creep is making nuclear new build a very costly and time consuming process.
Europe could come out of this crisis renewed. We could use what is left of our energy supply to kick start a small modular reactor programme. This would be factory built units, employing mass production to bring down costs. Final assembly on site would take place in months rather than a decade or more. I hold out hope for this. A crisis can be an opportunity for renewal, but only if there happens to enough adults in the room to understand the predicament and do what needs to be done.
When it comes to Europe not having sufficient weapons to counter the Russian threat, what we have seen in Ukraine suggests that this is probably not the case. Russia of today is not the Soviet Union. The Soviets could have overwhelmed the Europeans by sheer weight of numbers on the battle field. Russia of today would struggle to take on even a single West European country on the battle field. They no longer have the numbers. Their equipment is old and poorly functional. The invasion of Ukraine is an act of desperation on their part and it is showing the entire world just how weak and disfunctional the Russian military has become.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-19 10:36:50)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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What bothers me about the whole 'Merchants of Despair' argument that Zubrin advocates, is that it is likely to foster complacency. It suggests that resource limits are not real and that warnings of shortages should never be taken seriously. Resource limitations are very real and very dangerous, so long as we remain stuck on a dingey little planet and so long as we neglect to develop new sources of energy like advanced fission and space solar power.
If we continue growing our technology base and spread out into the solar system, then I think the future could be brighter than any of us can imagine. But if we hold back new technologies, if we remain stuck on old ones with dogma preventing us from moving forward and if we remain confined to this single ball of rock, then ultimately, we are as stuffed as an adolescent bird that refuses to fly the nest. Food shortages, mineral shortages and energy shortages can and will do enormous harm to humanity, if we fail to plan ahead and fail to put sufficient effort into new technologies. We are going to see the results of complacency in real time over the next couple of years, as food shortages leave millions of people hungry. The idea of perpetual abundance only holds true if the right people take the right actions, at the right time.
Since the 1960s we have seen the growth of a movement that seems determined to return humanity back to an agrarian civilisation. This group has used warnings like those from the Club of Rome to try and justify their vision for agrarian future of renewable energy and organic food. On the other side of the debate, cornocopians insist that resource shortages will never occur and that discussion of planetary limits is the preserve of doomers and fantasists. Both groups are myopic in my opinion. The Club of Rome computer modelled scenarios tell us what will happen if business as usual is carried out using existing and foreseeable technologies in a closed environment. All scenarios tell us that such an arrangement ultimately leads to collapse, as resources fall short and pollution leads to food shortages and poissoning. The thing that makes the Club of Rome scenarios difficult to deny, is that one can double or triple resourceestimates and still get the same results on a slightly longer timescale, because of growing demand in a finite environment.
One group of people took that to mean that we should abandon new technology and trying to develop a steady-state economy. Doing this and holding technologies back, tends to make the predictions of Club of Rome self-fulfilling. There are far too many human beings for this vision to be achievable without culling 90% of them. And sustainable abundance is not achievable on the limited confines of the Earth over an indefinite period, without abandoning the use of refined metals. Another group consisted of sceptics, who believed that business as usual would continue and that the green agrarians were doomers, simply because they didn't like their vision of the future. The problem with this group is that they are wrong. Resource limitations are real and they will become a problem if we fail to access new resources beyond what exists on this little ball of rock. The third option, that no one seems to seriously discuss, is to expand the human resource base beyond the limited confines of Earth. We can only do this by unleashing the technologies that the greens want to shut down. We need nuclear reactors to power economies that are outgrowing fossil fuel resource bases. We need nuclear powered space ships. We need genetic engineering so that we can grow food in space. We need to expand our energy bases and grow our economies so that we can build the infrastructure that allows us to do this.
In summary: Green agrarianism will doom us to poverty. Sustainable abundance is not possible in the limited confines of a finite planet. The third way is to do what everyone on this board knows needs to be done. We need to fly the nest. Human civilisation ceased to be sustainable in the limited environment of Earth, as soon as we started refining metals and started burning fossil energy. Our numbers were unsustainable as soon as they exceeded 500 million. When we started doing these things, we committed to a path that would ultimately outgrow what our planet can provide. We have reached the tipping point where the nest will no longer sustain us. We either fly or die.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-19 11:33:06)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
I hope you understand that there's only so much that America can do. If you keep driving towards the cliff with the accelerator pinned to the floor, then eventually you'll reach a point of no-return where nothing short of a magic wand will save you. America doesn't have one of those wands. We are supplying gas, food, and weapons to the extent of our capacity to produce and deliver them. The Biden administration is very slow to react to changing events on the ground, unfortunately. If we destroy our own economy to supply more than we actually can, guess what happens to the supply?
Russia sensed weakness, which is why they attacked when and where they did. They were gravely mistaken about our ability to fight back, but even that has its limits. Will we be so lucky next time? I wouldn't bet my country on it.
As far as the question of nuclear power is concerned, there never was any question if humanity was to continue advancing technologically. We don't have anything else that provides stable power, apart from burning something.
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The US does not have sufficient LNG export capacity to replace Russian supply to Europe. LNG liquefaction facilities are expensive and take about a decade to build. They are also an explosion hazard that no one wants in their back yard. So I don't expect the US to come to Europe's rescue. Militarily, I doubt that will be neccesary. If the Russians are struggling in Ukraine, which is the poorest country in Europe, then they are in no position to take on Western European powers.
What I find frustrating is that it was obvious to me ever since the North Sea peaked back in 2000, that Europe needed another baseload energy source that wasn't natural gas. That could either have been coal or nuclear power. We had ample time to prepare. But the leadership dithered and conned themselves into believing that they power the entire continent with windmills in the North Sea. My suspicion is that the next few years will see a paradigm shift in European energy policy. The Germans will remain stuck in fantasy world and will become the world's biggest electricity importer. The French will be overwhelmed with orders for new PWRs.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-19 16:57:58)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
Somebody pulled that 500 million number out of their rear end. It has no connection to reality. Refining metals was certainly not the "beginning of the end" of sustainability on planet Earth, either. How exactly does one become convinced of things like that? Computer models? A model is only as good as the input. Garbage in, garbage out. They teach us that axiom in computer science because it's true. I know how to mess with a computer model to make it show anything I want it to show, except that I get paid based upon the accuracy of predictions, rather than inaccuracy.
We can use some of our metal to synthesize more fossil fuels. No basic chemistry or physics forbids it. There is no danger of running out if we start now. If most of us drive lighter cars that get better gas mileage, then we only need about 1/3rd as much to start with. This is not an impossible task. It's expensive and won't happen in a day, but far less expensive than not having any gasoline or diesel or kerosene. Beyond that, cars can run on methanol or Propane, which are both storable fuels, energy-dense, and less energy-intensive to make, as compared to gasoline or diesel.
We can use EFI / EI for bleeding edge efficiency, but going from 9:1 to 11:1, all the way to 16:1 or 18:1 using higher octane fuels, GW says we do not even need any electronics to get much better fuel economy on account of the increased combustion efficiency, although EFI and EI enable the use of catalytic converters to make combustion engines much easier to live with. Synthetic fuels also contain less Sulfur and other contaminants.
The US has more than double the LNG production capacity of Russia, as does Australia and Qatar. The US was also the world's #1 exporter of natural gas in the first half of 2022. 71% of that went to Europe.
Sometimes I wonder if you just assert things as a reaction to ideas you don't agree with:
Reuters - U.S. becomes top LNG exporter in first half of 2022 - EIA
As for Ukraine, I'm sure the near tens of billions of dollars in direct military aid they've received from either the US or European allies had nothing whatsoever to do with their ability to fight the Russians. All those NLAWs and Javelins and 155mm artillery shells and other munitions just fell from the heavens and that's how the Russians are being pushed ejected from Crimea.
I find it equally frustrating that we have not invested ten times more into nuclear power, knowing full well that burning hydrocarbons cannot be the answer to every power or propulsion problem we need to solve. Eventually, we must expand our resource base to the entire solar system. However, natural resources are nowhere near depletion here on Earth. I do admire the pragmatic approach the French have taken to providing nuclear power for a modern industrialized economy. I wish the US would accept the writing on the wall and follow suit. We have no shortage of Uranium or Thorium fuel to work with.
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Calliban,
Somebody pulled that 500 million number out of their rear end. It has no connection to reality. Refining metals was certainly not the "beginning of the end" of sustainability on planet Earth, either. How exactly does one become convinced of things like that? Computer models? A model is only as good as the input. Garbage in, garbage out. They teach us that axiom in computer science because it's true. I know how to mess with a computer model to make it show anything I want it to show, except that I get paid based upon the accuracy of predictions, rather than inaccuracy.
When Christ was executed back in 36AD, the Roman Empire was close to the height of its power. The population of the empire was estimated to be 60 million. The population of the entire world was 300 million. By 1350, a whole millenia later, it was 370 million.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
In 1650AD, Earth's population had risen to approximately 500 million. In over 1600 years, population had managed to grow by 60%, or by 0.04% per year. Western European countries were the most advanced on Earth. Yet the population of England and Wales at that time was was a meagre 6 million, barely a tenth of what it is today. Fast forward to 2020, less than four centuries later and global population has exploded to nearly 8 billion. What could account for the explosive growth of the past few centuries? The answer is fossil fuels applied to food production. The enormous stored energy of fossil fuels has allowed the production of fertilisers and pesticides, it has allowed mechanisation of farming, food storage, rapid transportation, food processing and the delivery of food to consumers who live thousands of miles from where it was grown. Without fossil fuels, none of this would have been possible. Without fossil fuels (or some other substiture that does the same things) it will not be possible in the future.
Fossil fuels are gradually depleting. Running out of fossil energy is not something that happens overnight, resource depletion doesn't work that way. But as the grade of resources gradually runs down, it becomes more difficult with each passing year to sustain production at current levels. Less production means getting by with reduced levels of everything those fuels do. That includes production of food. In theory, there are far more fossil energy resources in the ground than we have used to date. The problem is that what remains is lower grade than we have used so far. There are other energy sources that can substitute fossil fuels. But they are held back by either poor EROI (most renewables) or institutional inertia (nuclear energy).
The reason that society became unsustainable when we started refining metals is that it took a couple of billion years for Earth to accumulate the ore resources that it had at the beggining of the industrial revolution. We have drawn down these ore resources in just a couple of centuries, far more rapidly than nature can regenerate them. Could we recycle to extend resource lifetimes? Yes. We could and in most cases do. But there are practical limits to recycling. Things get distributed and lost. In many cases, unmaking something is as challenging as making it to begin with. So recycling cannot extend resource lifetimes indefinitely. Unless we can reduce our usage of ores to the same rate at which nature regenerates them, then metal refining is unsustainable. I would suggest that we passed that point a long time ago with most resources.
We can use some of our metal to synthesize more fossil fuels. No basic chemistry or physics forbids it. There is no danger of running out if we start now. If most of us drive lighter cars that get better gas mileage, then we only need about 1/3rd as much to start with. This is not an impossible task. It's expensive and won't happen in a day, but far less expensive than not having any gasoline or diesel or kerosene. Beyond that, cars can run on methanol or Propane, which are both storable fuels, energy-dense, and less energy-intensive to make, as compared to gasoline or diesel.
Quite true and this will entend resource lifetime. The problem is that we are substituting one form of resource use for another. We are building heavy equipment using a lot of refined metals dug out of the Earth, instead of digging the fuels out of the Earth. It will take a lot of energy to build that equipment. The metals used to build it are only partially recyclable.
There really isn't any way of escaping the conclusion that so long as we remain confined to Earth surface, technological civilisation is on borrowed time. Sure, there are all sorts of technological work arounds that we can apply in the short term to improve our situation. Nuclear power. Recycling. Synthetic fuel production. But these alter the timescale, rather than the final outcome. They substitute one problem for another. So long as we remain stuck within a finite environment, the growth cannot continue. And even a steady state economy becomes difficult to sustain at high levels of resource consumption. This is what the limits to growth work told the world and it is obvious.
*********************************
Post script. Richard Heinberg looks at how well the scenarios of tge 1972 LTG have aged in the 50 years since.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022 … g-reality/
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-20 01:15:20)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
What are the limits to doomsday cult ideology?
I don't think there are any.
Prove me wrong.
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Calliban,
What are the limits to doomsday cult ideology?
I don't think there are any.
Prove me wrong.
I'm not sure what to say about that. But believing that endless growth and super-abundance is possible in a finite environment, is the same as believing that the human economy is a perpetual motion machine. It would have to mean that it does not need real inputs. To believe in infinite growth, you would have to believe that it is possible to have more and more stuff, ad infinitum, using material and energy inputs that do not grow with time. Some economists and politicians seriously believe that. But physicists and engineers do not.
In reality, the economy is a thermodynamic machine. The things we value are the product of energy acting on matter. And it has been shown beyond reasonable doubt, that increasing global GDP correlates with rising energy use. Plot one against the other and you get a linear trend. If you tried to produce an infinite quantity of goods and services within the finite confines of planet Earth, you would melt the surface of the planet. In reality, other limits would become apparent long before you reached that point. New technology and new energy sources can only take you so far, so long as you remain stuck on an 8000 mile wide ball of rock. There are limits to what nature will permit you to do here. Limits on what you can dig out of the ground and consequences to the ecosystem whenever you do anything. One limit may be rising levels of greenhouse gases that screw with the Earth's temperature. But if we keep trying to grow in a finite space, then eventually we end up hitting one limit or the other. For most of human history, that didn't matter, because humanity was tiny in both numbers and footprint and growth was slow or non-existant. But we have reached the point where limits are becoming visible. Where I live in the UK, there isn't a square inch of land surface that hasn't been touched or altered by human beings in one way or another. That is the reality of living on a finite ball of rock. Eventually, you exhaust the agar in the petri dish. There is only so much of anything to be had.
I could go on, but I think the point is proven beyond reasonable doubt. The solution to the LTG problem, if one exists at all, is to expand our horizons and expand our resource base beyond what can be found on our little ball of rock. What space colonisation ultimately offers mankind, is new living space and new resources. And that is really the only solution that allows growth to continue without exhausting local resource bases. The solar system is vast compared to Earth. It will take millenia to fill it out. And by the time that happens, the stars may be reachable.
The alternative is to try to reach some sustainable, steady-state economy here on Earth. That appears to be what the Greens are pushing for. We know that it is possible, because it was reality for most of human existence. But I doubt that the sort of lifestyles that would keep us within planetary limits indefinitely, would be pleasing to most people alive today. I doubt very much that it woukd allow sufficient food production for most people alive today. So the only reasons anyone would push for that are either pure sadism or complete ignorance of what that kind of world implies.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-20 09:36:11)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
I asked about the limits to doomsday cult ideology. You instead responded to the question by answering a question that wasn't asked. Thank you for proving my point. There is no limit to how nutty people will become after convincing themselves that they're doomed in one way or another.
I am fully aware that if human population was continually increasing every single year, without end, that we would eventually exhaust all resources. Since that doesn't describe what's actually happening, when can we dispense with the doomsday cult ideology?
Speaking of beliefs in perpetual motion machines, I've explained this numerous times. We, as in all of humanity, removed 2/3rds of all investment dollars devoted to all oil / gas / coal production. We cannot delete 2/3rds of any input and expect output to remain unchanged, nor expect it to increase when demand increases. If we did the same thing to steel or lumber production, then the end result would be a reduced steel or lumber supply over time. The supply reduction is not an indicator of a problem with obtaining Iron ore or trees. It's an indicator of magical thinking, specifically thinking that total global steel production can continue upwards after we deliberately decide to stop making steel. We are not actually running out of energy, in any of its various forms. We are running out of investors with enough functional grey matter between their ears to comprehend how deliberate human decisions to stop investing in something will always reduce the available supply.
Humanity's total available supply of people is presently going down, not up. We now have population decline. We have a drastic reduction in the supply of young people. The population bubble caused by the baby boomer generation is temporary. All following generations are much smaller. This is the opposite of growth. Even so, this fact of life does not mean that the people who remain must become poorer or that they cannot continue to enjoy the fruits of the labor of prior generations. It does mean greater efficiency in production is required. We are addressing the production problem using computers and faster manufacturing techniques.
We are also expanding into space at the rate that available rocket technology and life support technology makes that possible. Our first attempts will always be less-than-ideal, but it's a learning process. We will not go from expensive hobby rockets to nuclear powered interplanetary transports without significant investment of labor and capital.
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Calliban,
I think what you're actually taking note of and so deeply concerned about, which is understandable, is what the world looks like when it's run by a cabal of greedy and narcissistic sociopaths who incessantly vote and act against the interests of their own people. Here in America, you're effectively a slave to our federal government from birth, unless you renounce your citizenship. That's the real reason why "Social Security" cards are issued to everyone. It's about become a debtor to our centralized banking system. How else would they track their slaves? You live in a prison that has no walls, but make no mistake, you're still a prisoner and you're still living in a prison.
That's also why the 13th amendment still exists. Slavery was abolished, except as punishment for a crime. Here in America, being born is punishable by a lifetime of servitude to our federal government. It's a wonder that people still want to come live here, but I guess a stunningly beautiful prison is preferable to what lies beyond the walls of our reservation. That makes me wonder how bad life must be outside of the prison. That's something I don't devote much time to, because it's so depressing.
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Calliban,
I think what you're actually taking note of and so deeply concerned about, which is understandable, is what the world looks like when it's run by a cabal of greedy and narcissistic sociopaths who incessantly vote and act against the interests of their own people. Here in America, you're effectively a slave to our federal government from birth, unless you renounce your citizenship. That's the real reason why "Social Security" cards are issued to everyone. It's about become a debtor to our centralized banking system. How else would they track their slaves? You live in a prison that has no walls, but make no mistake, you're still a prisoner and you're still living in a prison.
That's also why the 13th amendment still exists. Slavery was abolished, except as punishment for a crime. Here in America, being born is punishable by a lifetime of servitude to our federal government. It's a wonder that people still want to come live here, but I guess a stunningly beautiful prison is preferable to what lies beyond the walls of our reservation. That makes me wonder how bad life must be outside of the prison. That's something I don't devote much time to, because it's so depressing.
All true and indeed, even more true for my own country (UK) than the it is for the US. The UK is a good example of why a country needs strong constitutional protections and checks and balances, that limit the damage that bad actors can inflict when they get into positions of power. The UK doesn't have that in any meaningful way. It is not a republic where all men are equal under god. It is a monarchy with democratic reforms. It really is a police state, where the only freedoms you have are those allowed by His Majesty's government. Most people live with it because they feel assured that living by the rules will afford them protection. That isn't true of course, or at least, it is only true if you are prepared to live as a pathetic Yes Man.
It was out of fear that the US might turn into exactly what the UK actually is, that the right to bear arms was made part of your constitution. Unfortunately, small arms offer only limited protection when the government goon squad bash down your door, shoot your dog and drag you screaming into the back of a van. In the UK, the government has gone out of its way to criminalise private ownership of weapons, precisely because an armed population is harder to bully, even if in reality, the protection is thin. But the sort of terrorism that governments have spent so much effort trying to curtail over the past 25 years, is exactly what citizen resistance to oppressive government looks like.
But I digress. The topic of your thread is about 21st Century Super-Abundance and why fears of shortages are really always unwarranted and basically, doomer philosophy. I think this is basically wrong. During the 1990s, the UK had abundant natural gas thanks to the North Sea. Energy prices were low, business was booming. The UK was one of world's largest oil exporters. The world looked rosy and starry eyed neo-liberal idealists told us that natural resource shortages would never be a problem, that the price mechanism would always allow alternatives to fill any gaps. They told us that renewables were getting cheaper and cheaper and woukd displace fossil fuels, in spite of the reality that they were the most resource intensive forms of energy and really depended on fossil fuels for every part of their supply chain.
How foolish all of that looks now. Anyone describing the present situation back in 1997, would have been written off as a doomer. And yet here we are, paying $300/MWh for natural gas, with thousands of MW of wind power generation that will do very little to keep us warm this winter. What a shame those neoliberal idiots didn't listen to the doomers that told them that North Sea oil and gas production was going to peak. Had they done so, we would have at least a dozen light water reactors generating power right now and what is left of North Sea gas could be heating our homes, rather than being burned to produce electricity when the wind inconveniently stops blowing.
This is not to say that people alerting the world to potential problems will always be right. Some of them have their own reasons for latching on to problems. They may want these problems, because they cannot face the world as it is. So they latch onto talk of a crisis because they want to see the end of system they loathe. The sorry story of Y2K non-crisis is a good reminder that people with an axe to grind can exagerate problems because they want a crisis. But the Y2K issue was a problem that had to be dealt with. The doomers in this case played a useful part in raising awareness of the problem. And it was dealt with. Some people were disappointed that it didn't end the world. Others laughed at the idiots that said it would. Either way, it got dealt with.
The Peak Oil problem was and is something that has been widely misunderstood. A peak in conventional oil production, coupled with rising Chinese demand, was the single most important causal factor behind the 2008 Great Recession. The bubble of inflation it caused, led to central banks raising interest rates. This made a lot of loans unservicable. The Peak Oil problem was widely misunderstood by people on all sides of the debate. Some doomers seemed to expect it to result in the rapid end of civilisation. When it didn't, doomers were disappointed and a lot of other people thought the idea was in some way debunked. Both were wrong. Conventional Peak Oil came and went. And the result has been a slow errosion of prosperity as wages have failed to keep up with rising cost of living. But there was no sudden collapse of civilisation. Oil wells take decades to deplete. And marginal deposits (like Shale oil, deep water oil, polar oil) can and did increase production as conventional oil production stagnated and slowly declined in most of the world. A long period of very low interest rates has allowed a lot of development of energy resources that were not considered viable before 2008 - tight (shale) oil and gas and tar sands. But even now, before a widely anticipated recession, oil prices are still around $90/barrel, which would have appeared wildly expensive in the 1980s and 1990s. And how long tight oil production can continue to grow is an open question. The problem isn't so much running out, it is running out of energy that is cheap enough to allow prosperity to continue.
Again, if we had taken 'doomers' seriously, there are plenty of things that could have been done to avoid the problems caused by Peak Oil. We could have set better fuel efficiency standards for vehicles starting in the 1990s. This would have blunted the impact of rising Chinese oil demand and would have made higher fuel prices more affordable. We could have started the industrial buildup needed for nuclear renaissance a good deal sooner and looked for ways of shortening build times. This would have moderated natural gas demand and allowed more of what remains to be used for industry and heating. We could have extended railways and built better delivery systems that were more rail based, using trucks to fill in the gaps. Had these things been done in the early 90s, we would be in a much better position now. But instead, everyone chose to ignore the people giving the warnings, called them 'doomers' and were apparently shocked when disaster struck in 2008. People are apparently still unaware of why they keep getting poorer, as declining surplus energy is eating away their wages and groceries that used to cost a trivial proportion of their income are now pushing them into bankrupcy.
My point is, that in the long run, the doomers are usually right. You should never dismiss these people out of hand, because what they have latched onto is usually a real problem. The sensible thing to do is to look at the situation cooly, examine the evidence behind the what they are telling you and then act to mitigate the problem long before it appears. In 1972, the Club of Rome published scenarios informing the world that unchecked economic growth woukd cause us to collide with planetary limits at some point in the 21st century (LTG). That is now happening, though demographic population decline is going to collapse demand for most resources before physical depletion causes supply issues. The LTG 'doomers' could not have foreseen that very easily, because it wasn't readily apparent in demographic data at the time. Still, that doesn't mean the limits in the model don't exist. It is a lack of oil and natural gas resources globally, that is causing the energy and food shortages that will in turn cause global famine over the next few years. In many cases, we aren't going to reach limits in the timescale that the modellers thought, because other limits will be reached first. But much of the work of visionaries like Gerard O'Neill was predicated on the need to cheat LTG by expanding the human resource base off planet. His work is still something that we can follow and is still a valid solution to human problems.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-23 09:45:17)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
Fears of non-human-caused shortages are unwarranted at this time.
We, as in all of humanity, removed 2/3rds of all investment dollars into all oil and gas production over the last 10 years.
When, if ever, will you address that very real fact?
I think you won't because you can't.
Humans decided to move their investment dollars into photovoltaics and batteries and wind turbines, aka "green energy", because the people doing the investing are ignorant of basic math whenever their ideology becomes involved. Nobody who did know that the technology wasn't capable / ready, had the personal integrity to tell the investors that their futurism fantasy was just that- a fantasy. Current technology, as Peter Zeihan has repeatedly pointed out, does not permit photovoltaics / batteries / wind turbines to replace coal / oil / gas / nuclear.
In simple terms, what that means is that the investment dollars need to revert back to oil and gas production, especially synthesis of petroleum products. The only way we can make Sun power work for us is to use it as heat to produce the hydrocarbon fuels that have orders of magnitude greater gravimetric and volumetric energy density, as compared to the technologies used to store electricity. The best possible use of Sun power, aka "green energy", is the recycling of CO2 into new hydrocarbon fuels and aerospace products such as Carbon Fiber and plastics. Anyone who thinks otherwise has a math equation that doesn't balance on both sides of the equivalence operator- the input energy is being squandered on short-term extensions to the coal supply, instead of recognizing that the way you achieve energy independence is to have a functionally unlimited supply of energy production and storage. Since we can't store electricity, we store heat or chemical energy instead, which we know how to do at the scale required.
This is a bridge solution. If people don't like it, then they can invent electrical storage technology that does work at the scale required. I don't know how to do this, nor does anyone else who is actually sharing and profiting from what they know about how to store electricity at the scale required. That's why we have endless "science experiments" with photovoltaics and batteries, rather than admitting that it doesn't work at the scale required and moving on to solutions that do work at that scale.
The corollary to that statement is that we need to investment a lot more money into nuclear power if we want that all-electric futurism fantasy to come true.
A second corollary is that motor vehicles need to be lighter so that smaller combustion engines that burn less fuel are practical.
I can't make this issue any simpler.
Yes, to reaffirm your beliefs, since that's so important to so many people, over enough time we will actually "run out" out of something, but if we do those things I noted, in order to maintain global energy supplies, then that won't happen for many thousands of years. If we manage to control fusion and generate net power output, either as process heat or electricity, then many tens of millions of years.
I don't have an ideological dog in this fight, except that I know that I never want to run out of power. Power is power, but only if it's available and usable and maintainable. That doesn't describe photovoltaics / batteries / wind turbines using existing technology. The short term solution is to stop trying to "fix" something that encompasses a basic math problem and to instead focus attention on proven feasible solutions, however distasteful some ideologues may find them to be. Solve that which can be solved, removing the immediate problem / threat, and leaving what is optimal or best for some future version of humanity with much better technology than our own.
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Has anyone (RAND?) done a study on what a fully nuclear powered society would look like? Things such as how much nuclear power would cost if we had to make the steel and concrete using electricity (NO FOSSILS!), the round trip energy efficiency of liquid fuels synthesis etc. Given that the cost of nuclear presently ranges between $50-150/MWh, I suspect full nuclearisation would put us somewhere between today and a decade ago in energy costs (cheaper electricity, but it has to substitute for even cheaper gas and diesel, so the overall energy costs would be pretty high).
Bear in mind, a barrel of oil has 1.4MWh of heat energy when burned, so $50/MWh power is equivalent to... $35/barrel oil, if we assume half the energy of the oil comes out as useful work (very high efficiency if we're using it for heat, about 40-50% if using it for transport). Hmm.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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For Terraformer re #18
Thank you for providing this (to me ** very ** ) interesting question!
It seems to me applicable to ** all ** off-Earth civilizations, Louis and his enthusiasm about solar power aside.
It ** might ** even be applicable to Earth, if things get bad enough, which it appears almost certain (to me at least) they will.
(th)
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We don't need a "fully nuclear powered society". We don't need a "fully solar powered society", either. A "fully wind powered society" is a pipe dream. The obsessive desire to apply singular solutions to every complex problem is the greatest single impediment to the practical application of all existing technology to adequately address real existing problems that we're so focused on not solving with our "solutions to nowhere". What we need are people who recognize the practical limits of technology. Electricity is very useful, but it's not a "magic totem" that solves all problems and it probably will never be within our lifetimes.
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Then what do you propose we replace fossil fuels with, if not nuclear or wind or solar? A nuclear or wind powered grid would mean Britain still being an 80+% fossil fuel powered country. Don't claim nuclear is a solution for anything if your plan still leaves us terminally dependent on oil and gas.
If you can synthesise hydrocarbons at 50% efficiency, that $50/MWh electricity is equivalent to $140/barrel oil. Pretty expensive, but justifiable for applications where there aren't any viable alternatives, like long haul flights.
What we need is energy. That is not a complex problem, any more than starvation (on an individual level) is a complex problem. It is a simple problem, with a range of options that may fix it.
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To answer Terraformer's question: The materials requirements of a light water reactor (PWR or BWR) are dominated by low alloy carbon steel and iron (mild steel) and concrete, with a large part of the steel being reinforcing rods in the concrete. It takes about 40 metric tonnes of steel and 90 cubic metres (180 tonnes) concrete to produce 1MWe average nuclear power capacity. From that you can infer that a 1000MWe plant requires some 40,000 tonne steel and 180,000 tonne concrete.
http://fhr.nuc.berkeley.edu/wp-content/ … _input.pdf
The embodied energy of recycled steel is ~20MJ/kg. Fresh steel is 30MJ/kg. Embodied energy of concrete is 1MJ/kg. Let us assume that all steel is fresh. The embodied energy of 40,000 tonnes of steel is 1.2 billion MJ, or 1.2 million GJ. The embodied energy in the concrete is 180,000GJ. So total embodied energy is 1.38 million GJ. A 1000MWe reactor produces 1GJ of electricity per second, so energy payback time is 1.38 million seconds, or 16 days. New build LWRs are expected to have operational lifetimes of 60 - 80 years. During that time they will generate (in electricity) over 1000x the amount of energy needed to make the steel and concrete in their structures. So I think we can say with some confidence that there will be absolutely no problem with using nuclear energy to build new nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants have high power density. That pays dividends.
To produce steel without fossil fuels, we would first produce pig iron by passing hydrogen through a mixture of hot iron powder and iron oxide. The iron/iron oxide powder mix would be heated by induction to temperatures of 1000°C. The crude iron powder that comes out of that furnace would be converted to steel in an electric arc furnace. Cement would be produced in the same way it is presently, but with electrolytic hydrogen replacing natural gas as the heating fuel.
To produce synthetic fuels, hydrogen is the key enabling ingredient. It can be reacted with captured CO2 over an appropriate catalyst to produce either methane or methanol. Methanol can be used to build up heavier hydrocarbons if desired, by passing it over a zeolite catalyst. It is a clean burning fuel without bothering with those extra steps, but has only half the energy density of diesel. Another alternative is to put the hydrogen gas stream from the electrolysis cell straight into a haber reactor along with nitrogen, which reacts at 500°C to produce ammonia over an iron oxide catalyst. Nitrogen is everywhere, we have plenty of demand for ammonia already as fertiliser and at -33°C, anhydrous ammonia can be stored as liquid in carbon steel tanks at atmospheric pressure. The downsides are that ammonia vapours are irritant and highly annoying. Also, a litre of ammonia contains only a third of the energy of a litre of diesel.
To get $50/MWh from new nuclear power plants today, would only be possible if capital costs are brought down by mass production and rapid build times. But it is possible under those conditions.
A large part of energy needs in northern countries is low grade heat, mostly for space and water heating. In the UK, we need about 600 million MWh of heat for these applications, annually. Coincidentally, if all UK electricity were provided by light water reactors, this is almost exactly how much waste heat they would produce, with a condenser temperature of 30°C. It would be really neat if we could devise a system where the waste heat from nuclear reactors is used for heating in urban areas. We could use concrete pipes to transport heat into urban areas and inject heat into aquifers a few hundred metres underground. During winter, we would pump warm water out and use heat pumps to supply hot water at 60°C to district heating systems. If nuclear heat is supplied at 30°C (303K) and a heat pump raises temperature to 60°C (330K), then theoretical carnot COP is 10 and a practical COP of at least 7 should be achievable in modest sized units. If 2/3 of UK space and water heating is provided this way (i.e all urban areas), then 57TWh of electricical energy could provide all of the UKs urban space and water heating. That is about an additional one-sixth of existing electricity production. The downside is we woukd have to build a heat distribution system.
Producing synthetic fuels using nuclear power is a much tougher problem than generating electricity or heating our homes and business. The UK uses a tad over 50 million tonnes oil equivalent of transportation fuels each year.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic … he-uk-2021
That is about 600TWh. We would need 1200TWh of electricity to produce that much fuel, if electricity were converted to fuel at efficiency 50%. This is probably realistic, as electrolysis is 80% efficient and we are including extra reaction steps which turn CO2 into CH3OH. 1.2 million GWh is a continuous power of 137GW. That is 44.7x Hinkley Point C. Or about 350 of Rolls-Royce's new small modular reactors.
One way of bringing down the energy cost of making syntgetic fuels is to start with a biomass feedstock. If we have to convert CO2 into methanol, then 3 units of hydrogen are needed:
3H2 + CO2 = CH3OH + H20
However, if biomass is gassified, then we get a precursor syngas, with a composition of: 1CO + 1H2
We therefore only need add one unit of hydrogen to produce a syngas suitable for methanol production. We wouod only need 15 Hinkley C's to produce all of the UKs fuel. Which is still a lot. The crazy thing is that if we could somehow deliver 100% of the UKs transportation using electrified passenger rail and rail freight, then a single Hinkley C would be enough to power all of the UKs transportation. Whilst this is clearly not practical in reality, the arithmetic gives a clear indication of what sustainable transportation would look like. We would be seeing a lot of electric trains and trams and far fewer cars.
Summary of UK end energy uses:
Electricity ~300TWh
Low grade heat ~600TWh
Liquid transport fuel ~600TWh
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-25 15:28:45)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Finally, some math.
I do suspect though that ammonia and synfuel production may be solar powered and shipped where it's wanted. Guess it depends on how sensitive electrolysis and carbon capture are to intermittency. If they can handle only being run during the day time, there are a fair few areas with lots of sunlight and water available. Of course, that still has some security implications. And whether or not it would be cheaper to synthesise it here with nuclear or over in Australia with solar is an open question. Should still invest in efficient electrified transport either way.
Use what is abundant and build to last
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Direct CO2 capture will have to come down quite a bit for synthetic hydrocarbons to be viable, either way... $134-342 per tonne is a lot, especially since most of that isn't the carbon you're after. Nitrogen is a lot cheaper.
Maybe a solar powered ammonia plant in Australia could be profitable right now?
The estimated costs of CCUS-equipped ammonia and methanol production based on natural gas are around 20-40% higher than their unabated counterparts, while the cost of electrolytic hydrogen routes is estimated to be 50-115% higher.
This report of course is from 2019. And the electrolytic hydrogen probably isn't assuming we're using the cheapest possible solar power. So, open question. I wonder if anyone will try it. The north coast of Australia isn't too far from places where billions of people live and farm.
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Finally, some math.
I do suspect though that ammonia and synfuel production may be solar powered and shipped where it's wanted. Guess it depends on how sensitive electrolysis and carbon capture are to intermittency. If they can handle only being run during the day time, there are a fair few areas with lots of sunlight and water available. Of course, that still has some security implications. And whether or not it would be cheaper to synthesise it here with nuclear or over in Australia with solar is an open question. Should still invest in efficient electrified transport either way.
Carbon capture, I don't know. But electrolysis would be sensitive to intermittency because the electrolysis stacks have high capital costs. Every part of that synthesis plant will have labour costs and capital costs. If it only runs 1/3 of the time, then those costs will be spread over 1/3 of the output. That is before worrying about other pesky problems like thermal gradients, if you are running the plants up and down cobstantly. To produce fuel cheaply, you really want to be running every part of that fuel synthesis plant 24/7. Maybe that is possible using solar thermal power with heat storage. I don't think it is with wind or PV.
My suspicion is that we are living in a bubble so far as RE is concerned, especially wind and solar. The amount of steel, glass, concrete, silicon and copper, etc, needed to produce each MWh of output is huge compared to competing energy sources. For wind and solar to remain competitive depends upon a combination of factors that look as if they are bound to fail as globalisation unwinds.
1. Continuing mass-production in China of steel and cement. Cheap wind and solar depend upon cheap steel.
2. Continued mass production of poly-silicon in Xinjiang. The Chinese are using otherwise stranded coal and Uiyger slave labour to produce dirt cheap solar panels.
3. Reliable global supply chains for rare and semi-rate metals, like rare earths, silver and copper.
4. Continued production of aluminium for transmission lines.
5. Low interest rates and low bond rates, for both producers (China) and consumers (West).
6. Continued free trade in finished parts.
7. Cheap natural gas to power backup plants.
8. Build times remain rapid, with no delays due to supply chain disruption.
The list is not exclusive. But sustaining any of the items on the list is questionable from this point forward. Interest rates are already climbing and capital will never be as cheap again as it was 2009 - 2020. China is collapsing as an industrial power. Russia, supplier of a large chunk of the world's commodities, is falling off the world's markets. Supply chain issues are getting worse. Natural gas is relatively cheap (for now) in the US, but it is the only place in the world where this is still true.
Kbd512 is developing a plan that uses solar thermal electricity to synthesise hydrocarbons from CO2 extracted from sea water. From a technical viewpoint, the plan is workable and every part of the process uses solid 20th century thermodynamic steam plant and electrochemical technology. The main problem with the idea is the low power density of sunlight. Huge quantities of steel will be needed to build the concentrators and heat transfer pipework. My own estimates were that to replace global diesel production, would require a doubling of global steel production. This is doable, but it is clearly a collosal project.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-09-25 16:48:47)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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