On Sat, 28 Feb 2004 04:31:51 GMT, Larry Jaques wrote:
On Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:28:48 -0500, Gary Coffman
brought forth from the murky depths:

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 04:55:53 GMT, Larry Jaques wrote:
Don't you agree that we should be pursuing alternative fuels
much, much more than we are now? If nothing else, reliance on
fossil fuels makes us too dependent upon the external sources.
Add smog and toxic wastes to that and it's pretty clear.

What alternatives would you propose? The website does a fair
job of explaining why alcohol, biodiesel, etc aren't viable. We've
known how to make synthetic gasoline from coal for 60 years,
but the costs, both in dollars and in environmental effects, make
that unattractive.

Nearly all alternatives are efficient and viable in small
quantities.

It only appears that way because you're feeding parasitically
off the dominant oil economy.

But solar electricity/hot water should be part
of all new homes (+5% cost, 2-5 yr ROI, cheaper than building
more dam/nuke/natgas plants), electric/gas hybrid cars should
be put out by every mfgr by now, and new buildings should be
made semi self-sufficient.

Solar hot water is often economical for correctly sited buildings
(many are not) with room for sufficient storage capacity (demand
for hot water peaks in the early morning when the sun hasn't
been heating any water for better than 12 hours).

But solar electricity is not economical on household and larger
scales, ie where average demand is 15 kW or greater. Solar
electric costs about $5 a peak watt installed, but you can only
get about 4 hours of peak sun, even on a bright sunny day. So
you really need to spend in excess of $30 per average watt to
have sufficient capacity. That's $450,000 for the average
residence.

In addition to that large up front cost, you have periodic battery
replacement costs over the life of the system (the sun isn't shining
during residential peak electricity usage times), and system life
is currently about 20 years (the solar cells degrade).

No way you can amortize that out to a lower figure than just
buying power from your utility. Even running a diesel genset
works out cheaper (which is why that's the method of choice
at remote sites where grid power isn't available).

Solar water heating and solar electric also have to be able to
contend with extended sun outages in most climates. In other
words, clear sunny days are not the norm for weeks at a time
in many areas of the US. This means the systems have to be
even more oversized, and storage has to be huge to see you
through bad weather periods. That costs big $$$.

On the automotive front, gas/electric hybrids have some potential,
especially in large vehicular systems like delivery trucks, buses, etc.
But the benefits are relatively modest while the costs and complexity
are relatively high.

The currently available small commuter vehicles have two strikes
against them. The first is that the efficiency improvement is small
compared to small diesels while costs are higher. The second is
that buyers don't want them.

People want SUVs, pickups, large sedans, etc which can serve
other purposes besides just commuting, and which offer a
perceived safety advantage in collisions. GM will be fielding a
hybrid pickup (1500 series) in a couple of years. We'll see how
the numbers work out on that. I'm not optimistic.

What can all of us do to make this happen? Dare we even
contact our congresscritters nowadays?

Getting government involved in subsidizing these systems is
a sure way to run up costs and delay implementation. If the
systems aren't viable in the marketplace on their own, pushing
them into the market with government subsidies or mandates is
just a greater net loss, and tends to delay system improvements
which might make them viable in the marketplace without subsidies.

In other words, when you subsidize or mandate something, you tend
to perpetuate it in a state not competitive in a free market.

Bush is proposing $1 billion for the hydrogen economy, but we've

Quick Q: Where will he get it?

Mostly from the income tax, and increases in the national debt, same
as any other government boondoggle.

understood the chemistry and physics involved with that for nearly
a century. It is the daunting cost of switching over the infrastructure
that's the hold up there, and a billion won't begin to touch it. Besides
what we really need to make the hydrogen economy go is plenty of
nuclear power. That's not happening.

IDAGS for "hydrogen production" and found some new ideas out
there, including algae. http://tinyurl.com/2yr9r

I'm aware of that work, but it is horribly inefficient, and requires
significant nutrient inputs which are to date oil subsidized. As
with most so-called "renewable" systems, it isn't, and depends
on an oil subsidy to even begin to approach cost effectiveness.

Nuclear waste disposal is a high-level ongoing problem.

Only in the minds of those who already oppose nuclear power anyway.
If you took all the high level waste from every commercial nuclear reactor
since the beginning of the nuclear age and piled it up 3 feet deep, it
would barely cover one football field. Of course that would be a silly
thing to do, since reprocessing it will turn it into more fuel, but it gives

What percentage/type of nuclear waste can be/is reprocessed?

About 99% of non-breeder nuclear fuels can be recycled. The
remaining 1% has other uses (for example, cobalt 60 sources).
Of course with a breeder cycle, you get more fuel out than you
put in (U238 and Thorium are bred to fissile isotopes).

Presently, in the US, there is no breeder activity (the two main
breeders in the US are currently shut down), and spent fuel rods
from commercial reactors are stored on site rather than being
recycled.

In other countries, France, Taiwan, Japan, etc recycling for power
reactors is occurring at about the 70% level at present. North
Korea is believed to be running a breeder, as are India, Pakistan,
and probably Israel. The Russians and the British have the
capability, but their breeders are also currently shut down.

The issues with respect to breeders at present are, first that there
are sufficient excess stockpiles of refined U235 in the US and Russia
to be a drag on the market. In other words there is sufficient low cost
(subsidized by previous national weapons programs) U235 to run
existing reactors for their expected lifetimes. So there's presently
no economic demand for breeders.

And second, there is a fear of proliferation of weapons grade materials
produced by breeders. That's a concern mainly because all current
breeders are designed primarily to produce weapons grade materials.
It is technically possible (and feasible) to design breeders incapable of
producing weapons grade materials, but no one is presently operating
one.

you a feel for the scope of the issue. If we desired, we could simply
pile it up in a desert somewhere, put a fence around it and walk away
for 500 years. At that point the radioactivity would have decayed to
the level of the original ores dug out of the ground.

Oops, most uranium is deadly enough right out of the ground.

Oops, it isn't. *Nothing* is without risk, but natural uranium is
a *much* smaller risk than many other industrial chemicals that
are routinely used in bulk quantities, and to which the general
population has a much larger exposure.

So is the less powerful radon gas in large enough quantities.

So is water, in "large enough quantities." In fact, natural uranium
itself is practically benign, it is the radon daughters produced by its
decay that is the primary hazard associated with natural uranium.
Since U238 has a very long half-life, radon production is low, so
other than in a confined space the effects are negligible.

And what about dirty military and scientific waste, with much
longer half-lives?

A basic fact about radioactive materials is the longer the half-life,
the lower the radioactivity level. In other words, materials have
short half-lives because they are intensely radioactive. Materials
with long half-lives have to have lower radioactivity (otherwise
they'd decay quickly). So worry about the short half-life stuff,
the long half-life stuff will take care of itself.

The military programs did produce a lot of waste, and they didn't
handle it very well. It needs to be reprocessed, but there's presently
no economic incentive, or facilities, to do so in the US. *If* we had
an active breeder program to produce fissionables for commercial
power, the issue would be trivial. But we don't, and it isn't.

But we could put all of it in Arizona or
Nevada. They wouldn't mind. Who needs those states? They both
have desert, too. Now. But in 500 years, it (and every other
square foot of dirt on Earth) will be full of people if things
go on as they have. I'm betting on a bigass (highly scientific
lingo there, wot?) turn of events which will slow things down
shortly. I just hope the Shrub doesn't start it. (WWIII)

Yes, a national sacrifice zone would deal with the issue. It needn't
be very large as noted in a previous post. I believe lack of water
will keep large areas of the US southwest virtually uninhabited
for a very long time. Most population growth is occurring in cities
and their suburbs. Exurban growth is currently actually negative
over the US as a whole.

I don't expect that trend to change much in the next 500 years
unless there is a radical reduction in transportation costs and
times. Neither seems likely in the context of this discussion.

Now there *are* large quantities of *low level* waste. But we've set
the standards for that so strictly that it makes no sense at all. The
concrete blocks in your foundation are more radioactive than most
of what is classified as low level waste. Yet the rules say we have to
entomb low level waste forever. Nonsense.

Yeah, some of the regs are pretty stiff. Perhaps a new look
should be taken.

Indeed. Realize that we're talking about radioactivity levels lower
than that of ordinary granite, or concrete, in most cases. It simply
doesn't make any sense to treat that more restrictively than we
do granite or concrete.

No, hydrogen is not made by electrolysis of natural gas. Water

I did some personal fuel-cell research a couple years ago and
according to several sites I visited, their source was natural
gas. Perhaps they've changed, but that was the soup du jour back
then. YMMV
http://www.eere.energy.gov/RE/hydrogen_production.html
shows a few methods, including those I remembered.

Yep, that site lists the 4 main methods. Today, steam reforming
of natural gas is the cheapest, so it is what's used for bulk hydrogen
production.

Electrolysis is the most efficient, and can be very cost effective if
abundant supplies of electricity are available.

Photo-disassociation is just another form of electrolysis, with the
added inefficient step of photoelectric generation of the required
current.

Bio-production is *extremely* inefficient, and is currently done with
an oil subsidy. Without that subsidy, it isn't even in the picture.

is the source of hydrogen using electrolysis. Hydrogen from
natural gas is produced by steam reforming over a hot iron
catalyst. We do need large quantities of electric power to make
hydrogen by electrolysis, that's why we need to be pushing nuclear
power plant construction in a big way.

I wonder if nuke power might be better in the long run than
all the coal/gas/oil we're burning to produce electricity
now. And I saw how much damage was done in the hydroelectric
producing states a few years ago when the PRK was in trouble.
It affected the cycle of fisheries and many other systems.
I have a copy of "The Ultimate Resource" by Simon on hold at
the library. It may prove to be interesting.

Nuclear is clearly the best option. With breeding, it is virtually
limitless in supply (at least 100,000 years), and it has the fewest
external environmental impacts of any industrial scale power
production method we know how to build.

I'm thinking we might be better off without many of the
chemicals and fertilizers being used nowadays, so downgrade
the need for oil in that use, too.

Then you condemn the world to starvation.

We don't really NEED all these people, now do we?
(Only half kidding.) snort Vive Malthus!

The sticky question is, who gets to die? The Earth can
only support about 1 in 60 of the people now alive if we
revert to a pre-industrial (pre-oil or viable substitute)
civilization.

Properly nourished plants don't get eaten by bugs, so once we
go back to organics, there will be enough. Add more hothouses,
hydroponics, home gardens, etc. and food will be plentiful.

You haven't researched this very carefully, have you?

Removing many of the fertilizers and pesticides would stop
other problems from occuring, such as poisoned wells/streams,
algae blooms from the fertilizers, human/animal deaths, etc.
Saaay, you're not a ADM investor, are you?

No, I'm not an ADM investor, nor am I a fan of their business
practices. But Green Revolution farming methods, and
industrial scale farming, is how we currently feed the world.

In 1900, 9 out of 10 Americans had to live on farms in order
to grow sufficient "organic" food to feed the nation (a nation
with a much smaller population than at present). Today the
number off the farm is approaching 99 out of 100, but the
remainder does feed the nation, and a good chunk of the
rest of the world as well.

They couldn't do that without synthetic fertilizers and chemicals.
For example, using best "organic" practices, corn yields are about
70 bushels to the acre in my area. Using Green Revolution methods,
current yields on my farm are 240 bushels to the acre, with *much*
less labor input and a much lowered tillage requirement (less oil).

While I'm definitely not a Global Warming believer, I do feel
that we should be reducing our burden on the planet.

The next Ice Age is coming! Or at least that's what some of
the current crop of Global Warming doomsters were saying
in the 1970s. There's even some reason to believe that they
had it right the first time.

Ice core evidence and climatological models say ice ages
require the Arctic Ocean to first become open water before
the glaciers can begin to creep down across the continents.
(The Arctic Ocean is the primary moisture source.) That
means a warming period is a necessary precursor of an
Ice Age. The ice cores also show a CO2 buildup 80 times
the current level immediately before the onset of the last
Ice Age.

Throw another log on the fire, it is getting chilly in here.

On a more serious note, I'm a firm believer in stewardship.
We need to manage our resources in an intelligent way
for Man's benefit, now and in the future. I am not an
Earth Firster or one of their fellow travelers, who believe
that non-human ecosystems are automatically more
valuable than the human ones.

I have a healthy self-interest, and a more than passing
interest in the futures of other members of my species.
I'm much less concerned about the fate of some hoot
owl or horny toad. I do believe that we have to tread
intelligently, but I don't believe that necessarily means
we can't tread heavily.

I think that eventually we'll need to turn the entire Earth
into an engineered environment. I believe we will be able
to do that successfully. And I think we have a moral
obligation to do it rather than let billions of humans perish.

Gary