China chokes on a coal-fired boom

[hack89]

This is why Kyoto will unfortunately fail:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2524271,00.html

[bemildred]

1. Yep.

There is no chance in Hades that anything useful will be done about global warming in anything resembling a timely manner. Symbolic gestures and the like will abound, of course.

[pitohui]

2. i have said this many times when people prattle abt alternative energy

we already have an alternative to oil and it is coal

i honestly think this is why the usa does not worry too much about running out of oil, first we still have quite a bit that has never been drilled, but our real fallback plan is the coal

it's too bad we can't get serious and develop some manhattan project-like research to find a safe alternative -- every alternative suggested to date has serious consequences for the earth and wildlife

i weep for this planet

[Sirveri]

3. It's all about nuclear.

It's Clean, safe, and reliable. 3 out of 3 is better than 2 out of three like you'd get with coal and solar.

[Moochy]

17. Some may quibble about "safe"

Like those with thyroid cancers in Ukraine.

[Sirveri]

23. Modern plants are shining examples of safety.

If you put a bunch of people from coal fired plants with no real nuclear background or training in charge of a highly complicatedly designed nuclear plant which has an inherantly unstable positive void coefficient, then disable all the safety protocols and computer systems which monitor neutron flux profiles in order to perform a test which you interupt mid testing and then you proceed to restart the test several hours later without accounting for susbsequent Xenon poison changes, and you do it all in the middle of the night when everyone is exhausted. Then yes, you'll probably have a problem. That and some other stuff I didn't mention happened at Chernobyl. Apparently the Ukraine still didn't think the reactors were a big enough risk that they kept running at least one of the four reactors until the year 2000 when they finalled shut the last plant down. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1071344.stm

While it is possible to 'break' or even meltdown a modern nuclear plant, it's difficult to do unless you do it on purpose. Most people who are afraid of nuclear power simply do not understand it or how it works and base their fear out of ignorance.

[Moochy]

24. Ignorance vs General Electric PR?

It seems that if it was so viable it would not need such huge federal subsidies, the world round.

I've noticed a PR blitz for nuclear power lately... seems like GE etc. are trying to kickstart the domestic nuclear power industry? Hasn't been a new plant started for over a decade I believe.

So have they figured out how to make radioactive waste warm, fuzzy and huggable too?


Full Steam Ahead!!

(just mind that steam, it's *slightly* radioactive.)

[Sirveri]

29. Ignorance, how funny.

Truly hilllarious considering that I do maintenance on nuclear plant systems and have extensive knowledge about a lot of their inner workings. That's why I'm not fearfull of them, because I know how they work. If you actually knew how they worked and truly understood Radiological controls and other things about nuclear power, I'm fairly certain you'd be wondering why we don't have more reactors too.

[Moochy]

30. Sorry was in a hurry... should have been more clear

I was referring to my ignorance of the technical aspects of your nuclear power safety advocacy. Glad to know DU's has our very own nuclear technician. :)

While I will readily defer to your expertise re: the quality and safety of US facilities as compared to the safety of Chernobyl at the time of the accident, the problems of the nuclear waste disposal
remains. None of the advances in technology have reduced the half-life of any of the waste products have they?

I do know that Britain and Scandinavia are going hog-wild with new reactor plans.

It just seems like, well, the lotto in reverse, but perhaps the probabilities are even more infinitesimal than the lotto. Sure the odds may be smaller and smaller that a chance accident will occur, but like you said, there still is the possibility of deliberate sabotage, and the consequences of that are still quite dire, no? Is the theory still that a supercritical reactor would plunge into the upper crust, a China Syndrome?

Cheers
Moochy

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

20. Don't forget about the waste it produces.

Here's Monbiot.com » Thanks, But We Still Don’t Need It

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/07/11/thanks-but-we-still-dont-need-it/


.... My Great,Great,Great,Great,Great,Great,Great,Great,Great-Grand-children will have to deal with its waste.

[Sirveri]

22. Coal produces waste as well.

So does Solar, because mining TMG to make Gallium arsenide creates pollution too. Nasty carcinogenic stuff.

In general one of the longest lived fission products present in fuel waste is Cesium 137. It has a half life of aproximately 30 years. However after five half lifes it can be considered to have decayed to background levels, which is 150 years. Assuming an average generation of 25 years length that would be 6 generations. You've got about 5 too many 'greats' on your example. The reason I mention Cs137 is because it beta minus decays, and that decay emits a high energy gamma which is highly dangerous to people. There are other forms of waste, most of them transuranic elements. These do have extreme half life lengths, some as high as thousands of years. However this means that the element is almost stable, so it doesn't decay often enough to give any signifigant dose of radiation. In addition the primary decay method for transuranic elements is alpha emission. Po210 which was used to poison that Russian guy in Britain who's name escapes me at the moment was an alpha emitter. Alpha particles are so massive and highly charged that before they can interact with your body, they will do all their damage to the dead layer of skin or surrounding air and clothing molecules, thus not harming you at all. The only exception being if you injest the substance, hence Po210 being an ideal poison, it has a fairly short half life of 138 days, which means it decays fairly rapidly, so it pumps out a lot of alpha really fast, whereas Pu239 has a half life of around 24110 years, which means that over your life time if you injested 100 atoms (which you probably have) you'd be lucky for one single alpha to emerge whereas the Po210 will have given off most of its activity to your GI tract within the year. While it is worth noting that the Pu239 emits an alpha 3 times as powerful as a Polonium alpha the fact remains that you would need to injest over 20,000 times the amount. Oh and P0-210 isn't generally produced in reactors unless you're manufacturing it. Of course this shouldn't matter since most transuranics can be reprocessed for reuse as fuel and thus never enter into the waste system. The other arguement in the article is nuclear weapons production. I don't see nuclear weapons EVER going away. However, there does exist a completly untapped fuel cycle that would make weaponization of nuclear plants difficult, and that is the Thorium fuel cycle.

To boil all of that down, I'm basically saying that ALL power sources produce pollution, since nat gas is peaked and quickly going away that leaves us with coal and nuclear. Coal produces 891 tonnes Co2 per MwHr while nuclear produces a whopping 16 tonnes. In addition nuclear requires less tonnage of fuel thereby reducing transport costs to a transport grid which is based heavily on oil which also is a major contributor to pollution. So pick your poison, global warming, or a fuel source that your own source admits is perfectly safe and whos only complaints are about waste disposal/nuclear proliferation. My only problem with nuclear power is that Carter signed a presidential order that we can't reprocess nuclear fuel, meaning a lot of unprocessed fuel is sitting around at power plants instead of being reprocessed and used. Get that stupid thing off the books and a good chunk of the waste will disapear.

http://www.uic.com.au/nip67.htm Info on Thorium fuel cycle
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/ Chart of Nuclides for half-lifes and mode of decay and Q values.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle Random nuclear fuel cycle wiki info.

[dave_p]

13. Overpessimistic

But China isn't going to be fixed on coal forever. It'll move to other sources too, but right now its economic growth is outstripping any hope of matching clean energy: that'll change over time. It's no reason for others not to cut emissions in the meantime, and China can be called upon to do its part when its richer than now and growth slows to manageable rates.

[bemildred]

14. I was not talking about China.

Although it is true the OP is about China. I was saying that there is little historical evidence to suggest that the human species, as a whole, will marshall the political coherence and will to do anything effective to stop or slow global warming in a timely manner. There is good reason to think it is too late already, global climate is not to be steered around like bicycle.

[Barrett808]

4. To be fair, Kyoto is a framework which envisions bringing in developing nations

However, there is doubt about whether "cap-and-trade" can work. Early in 2006, the price of carbon credits in the EU market crashed, which isn't a good sign.

I suspect the cap-and-trade approach (recommended, ironically, by the US) will need to be replaced with a revenue-neutral tax.

Ultimately, we'll need to close the carbon fuel cycle by developing various techniques for emissions recycling and air-mining. The technologies already exist (emissions recycling) or almost exist (air mining), so this is a real possibility. A properly designed carbon market might then allow us to begin pulling the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere that's necessary for stabilizing the climate and ocean chemistry.

On good days, I think it might be done. On bad days, it seems we're certainly doomed.

[lovuian]

5. Mother Earth will take care of China

the more they puff the more water will come over their land

China is going to have major ecological disaster

of too many people for too little land

[superconnected]

7. that's what I was thinking, the earth will correct the problem.

[depakid]

9. China is the poster child for overshoot and collapse

which is why "economists" with their long term predictions of Chinese dominance just crack me up (in a sardonic way). It's actually going to be a frightening situation....

[AngryAmish]

16. 3000 years of Chinese History is not to be scoffed at

[depakid]

18. It is when one considers the laws of thermodynamics

and meshes them with economics and ecology.

The Neoclassical "Cult of Growth" is not only unsustainable, but with cheap energy inputs going into decline over the next decade and beyond- it GUARANTEES a collapse. And not just in China....

[robcon]

19. I disagree.

Like Malthusian economics, thermodynamics constrains growth only if technological change is unable to produce more output with the same inputs. I think the history of the last three centuries suggest that technological improvements will continue to provide more and more economic growth.

There are physical limits: we are nowhere near them now.

[depakid]

21. That's "magical thinking"

of the type known as "the cornucopian fallacy"

The evidence and the projections suggest rather clearly that we're at or very near our limits- in terms of inputs (energy and natural resources) as well as sinks. The key concept here is "throughput."

When one does the math, it's clear that unless something "magical" happens in terms of a new energy subsidy to replace cheap fossil fuels- we've long since overshot. And Joseph Tainter laid out the case rather clearly back in 1988 that we've reached diminishing returns on "technology," which is a product of eduction, transportable high density energy and cheap and plentiful resource inputs.

Thermodynamics is unforgiving. It tells us simply that 1. You can't get something for nothing; and 2. that the macroeconomic "circular flow" or "general equilibrium" cannot grow without increased energy inputs- or in the relative short term (say the next decade or maybe two) without drastic increases in efficiency and waste reduction.

Neither of those things is remotely likely to occur. In fact, present trends show the opposite to be true- which leads inescapably to overshoot and collapse. This happens in all sorts of systems, because, wishful thinking to the contrary, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine.

I suspect that high growth rate China and the wasteful and inefficient US (in which "self organized complexity" evolved based a one time endowment of low entropy energy alongside an accrual of unexploited natural capital) will be among the first to experience decline and fall- commensurate with their rise.

[robcon]

27. and your conviction that "we're at or very near our limits" comes from what?

You sound like classic Malthusians... who were locked into unchanging technology, which meant
-population would continue to grow geometrically
-food would only grow arithmetically

Both of those assumptions were/are wrong.

The same is true of the energy assumptions you make...

1. the market has no reaction to scarcity
2. the efficiency of current energy use is very, very low and has a lot of room for improvement
3. there will be no continued technological improvements

edit:grammar/spell

[Strelnikov_]

33. But, By Jiminy, Everyone Knows That Technology Will Find A Way

Thats what everyone in my cargo cult says, anyway, and I'm sticking with it.


Sorry, folks, technology does not equal energy. And we are rapidly using up a one time bounty of a concentrated, high quality energy source. Conservation and 'technology' are going to have problems just mitigating depletion, growth of available energy is a fantasy.

And I generally agree with your China assessment. The 'miracle' is simply a transfer of wealth from the US to China. A house of cards.

[Divine Discontent]

34. that's why they'll take a Starbucks type of expansion

relatively soon!

CHINA COMING TO A COUNTRY NEAR YOU!



www.cafepress.com/warisprofitable <<-- antibush prodem stickers/shirts

[Ezlivin]

6. Here in Texas, TXU wants to build 11 coal-fired power plants

Gee, can we be like China? I've grown so tired of seeing the blue sky. As King's X said, "Black the Sky".

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentID=5404

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/072806dnpropowerplants.1227d94.html

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112206A.shtml

http://texas.sierraclub.org/press/newsreleases/20060421.asp

http://www.stopthecoalplant.org/news/news_dmn_041106.php

[kurth]

8. Very soon the stars at night will be small and faint

deep in the heart of Texas.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

11. We don't need to breath

I imagine that Goodhair will be selling his stellar retreat home in Horseshoe Bay when his term is up and getting the hell out of the state before the smog over lake LBJ blots out the last of the sun.

[robcon]

10. This is often given as the rationale for Three Gorges,

the largest hydroelectric project in history. It causes a lot of scars among the people and the land in China, but hydroelectric uses 'free' fuel and no pollution.

[Sirveri]

12. Better to change a small econsystem than the world.

That's the idea, if we can do a controlled change of an entire ecosystem in one location, rather than increasing the total carbon in the air, then it's probably for the best. Best to kill off a small part rather than the entire planet.

[David__77]

15. They're working on it finally.

Thankfully, China will radically increase its use of nuclear and hydro power.

[BulletTrain1964]

26. Personally, I don't think that China expanding its nuclear power

would be anything to be thankful for.

[barb162]

25. watch the Olympic athletes collapse on those pollution levels

next Olympics

[Javaman]

28. Read the book "coal" sometime. It paints a very scary picture...

of what was and we will become again.

London wasn't given the nick name "the big smoke" because people loved cigarettes.

Read on the history of Pittsburgh. Around the 1880's, the air in Pittsburgh was so choked with smoke, that it's been recorded that people couldn't tell day from night.

Weeeee...

[Chemical Bill]

31. I understand the same thing happened in London in the 1500s. n/t

[Coventina]

32. Congratulations China! You've entered the 19th century!

Oh wait, your "medicine" and human/animal rights are still back in the 11th......

[Hoping4Change]

35. Perhaps a solution would be a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

If China wants to to screw the environment then the world should screw China's hope for a successful Olympics.

[hedgehog]

36. My son has spent a lot of time in China installing equipment for

industry. He says it's amazing how fast China is moving ahead. The coal burning is only a bootstrap and is being phased out ASAP as China can develop renewable resources. In a few years, we'll all be buying Chinese tech. Too bad American companies have been discouraged from going in that direction by policies that encourage oil consumption.

[sgsmith]

37. Too bad

That 25% of the power plants being built in China are unlicensed and illegal. Just makes it easier for sloppy work to be done, ending up killing the workers.

[hogwyld]

38. You all are missing the obvious silver lining in all of this!

China is actually helping us to become better people!! By pumping out all of that smoke, they're helping us to build up resistance to the toxins. Similar to an alcoholic building up resistance. Thank you China for your help, and may your progressive ideas conquer the world!!

Oh yeah......:sarcasm:

[ohio2007]

39. that's a lot of global acid rain

not to mention cause for global warming.I don't no if its high sulfer content coal or not but just the same,they are going to choke us all

[ohio2007]

40. forgot the link to my rant

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=426647&in_page_id=1811&ito=1490