The Exxon Valdez is going to pale in comparison

Dr.Ghastly wrote:
Bear wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

Electricity doesn't come from nowhere. An electric economy is a nuclear economy.

Windmills, solar, hydro etc. There are non nuclear alternatives to producing electricity.

We need to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.

There's nothing wrong with nuclear.

There is the exploding and toxic waste. What we really need is fusion.

NathanialG wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:
Bear wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

Electricity doesn't come from nowhere. An electric economy is a nuclear economy.

Windmills, solar, hydro etc. There are non nuclear alternatives to producing electricity.

We need to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.

There's nothing wrong with nuclear.

There is the exploding and toxic waste. What we really need is fusion.

Nuclear power plants don't explode and the newer generations greatly reduce the quantity of waste. At the end of the day, I'd rather have a couple thousand pounds of radioactive waste than billions of tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere.

It's worth pointing out that the Gulf has constant oil leakage from the seafloor, and there are microbes in the local environment that have evolved to eat oil. If they can keep the concentrations down, and off the coast, it may not have that much impact.

Not stopping the leak for three months, however, would likely be a disaster.

Either the spill is not going to be a problem because of the microbes, or it will be a problem in spite of the microbes. In the latter case they really don't matter, except for extremely long term (decades perhaps) mitigation of oil which falls to the bottom.

Which position are you comfortable with? Because both can't be usefully true. Given that the oil has not yet been consumed by microbes, and is fouling the land and water and beginning to kill wildlife in both, I know which I'm going with.

I just don't think the spin is useful here. This is why offshore drilling was limited in the first place.

It's worth pointing out that the Gulf has constant oil leakage from the seafloor, and there are microbes in the local environment that have evolved to eat oil. If they can keep the concentrations down, and off the coast, it may not have that much impact.

Not stopping the leak for three months, however, would likely be a disaster.

re:nuclear... from what I understand, most 'nuclear waste' isn't terribly radioactive anymore. Radioactivity is energy, and if they're putting out highly radioactive waste products, they're wasting energy. Mostly, they don't do that, and the stuff that they DO put out with lots of energy typically has a short half-life, and will only be really dangerous for a couple of hundred years. (every nuclear weapon in the world, for instance, will be useless within thirty years, without constant reprocessing... they lose about half their explosive material every twenty years or so.)

Low-energy wastes, like depleted uranium, really aren't dangerous to just be around. Where they're dangerous is if they get into air in powdered form, or into the water table. Most wastes are best thought of as highly poisonous refined metals, rather than 'nuclear waste'. They're terrifically toxic, don't get me wrong, but the radioactivity typically isn't the problem. And, being metals, they're usually not that difficult to contain and store.

Further, we really understand radioactivity... how to measure it, what it does, how to clean it up. CO2 is a diffuse problem, and we have no way at present to deal with it once it's released.

Well, the instant they stop adding oil to the environment, it starts disappearing, because it's getting eaten. It shouldn't be as bad as Alaska, and out on the seafloor, it should only really be a problem in areas where there's a LOT of it. If they can keep the overall dilution level high, and stop new oil from being added to the problem, it really may not cause that much environmental damage, and what damage does happen shouldn't last very long. Almost all of it should be gone within a few months... that's the nice thing about microbes, they scale up to pretty much any food source. When you can double your population size every twenty minutes, you can get very big, very fast.

So the biggest concern is capping the well, and stopping the problem from getting worse. Areas of the seafloor with enough oil to cause serious problems should repopulate very quickly, once the oil is gone. It's not like the coral reefs, which take centuries to build.

The equivalent in land terms, as long as it stays out to sea, would be a brush fire in an area with some small trees. The small creatures and plants will be back within a year or so, and the larger ones back within two or three. It's not a permanent scar, just a temporary one. Oil is part of the environment there, it's not a foreign invader in the same way it was in Alaska.

The shore, however, has much more complex creatures with much longer life cycles. If the oil makes landfall in any quantity, it could take a long time for fisheries and wildlife areas to fully recover.

Oops, I just went to look, and it's hit shore. That's very bad.

When you can double your population size every twenty minutes, you can get very big, very fast.

Note also that they'll have other environmental limitations in how quickly they can consume the oil; they'll probably need other nutrients, and possibly energy, to break it down, and those will likely limit how fast they can do it. That's why it hasn't turned into a three-foot-tall underwater oil plume with glowing red-hot microbes sucking the entire spill into their collective gaping maw.

Here's an article on the situation with the microbes.

So could bugs help cleanse the gulf? A number of companies have tried to create bacteria that could break down oil on demand, but Lee and colleague Albert Venosa of the Environmental Protection Agency say that experiments have shown that novel bacteria, even if they show promise in the lab, cannot compete with bacteria already living on beaches and marshes. Experiments have shown that adding nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium to the beaches can speed up the ability of natural bacteria to break down oil. "What would've taken 5 or 6 years to accomplish can occur in a single summer," says Lee.

So, without artificial boosts we're talking 5 years or more to remove the oil. That's not a timeframe that will help the marshes or, and these bacteria are not in the ocean (so the oil on the bottom will be dealt with by other microbes, or be broken up and washed ashore slowly). On the other hand, massive doses of nitrogen and phosphorus will cause algal blooms in the water as a side effect. Not sure what potassium does, but I know it's not good for vertebrates in large quantities (it messes with the heart).

Seems like a long shot.

Experts fear the spill could expand to be carried to the East Coast of the US...

There is actually much greater net atmospheric radioactive waste created by the burning of coal than there is with the operation of a nuclear power plant. It's just that coal doesn't have to pay for it because it's all going into your lungs instead of into a waste pit someplace.

Ok, Robear, point taken. The BBC made it sound like it was better than that, and they definitely claimed that there were indigenous microbes that ate oil. So we can upgrade it to 'disaster', although it's not yet at 'catastrophe' level -- the damage shouldn't be decades-long.

re: Coal plants... I posted this before, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but IIRC, if you exclude Chernobyl, but include Three Mile Island, one coal power plant, in an average year, releases more radioactivity into the atmosphere than all the nuclear power plants have since the dawn of the Atomic Age. If you include Chernobyl, it's more like the total emissions from the east coast of the US for one year. And even our oldest and crappiest nuclear plants are enormously safer than Chernobyl.

Older reactors work on the 'just short of exploding' theory... they maintain a constant reaction that requires active cooling, and which can have a runaway meltdown if something goes wrong. They have many many failsafes, but they're still running along at just short of criticality. More modern plants use the coolant as part of the reaction process, so that if the coolant stops, so does the reactor. And there's a new design for small installations that you, in essence, 'plug in' to a huge concrete bunker. They drive a small steam plant on top. The design of the reactor has a slowly spinning shield with a slot. If the shield stops spinning, the reactor stops. If it spins too fast, the reactor burns up uranium faster than it's supposed to, and becomes very inefficient, but has no way to melt down or explode.

After twenty years, they take the old plug out, put a new plug in, and you've got about 10KW of power for two more decades.

Like I said. Modern pebble bed reactors are just about idiot proof.

Electricity doesn't come from nowhere. An electric economy is a nuclear economy.

Windmills, solar, hydro etc. There are non nuclear alternatives to producing electricity.

We need to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.

IMAGE(http://www.geography.hunter.cuny.edu/~tbw/wc.notes/14.climate.change/US.energy.consumption.pie.chart.jpg)

Nuclear is the only energy source that has the capability to meet demand... Note that fossil fuels make up about 86% of US consumption...

Ok, Robear, point taken. The BBC made it sound like it was better than that, and they definitely claimed that there were indigenous microbes that ate oil. So we can upgrade it to 'disaster', although it's not yet at 'catastrophe' level -- the damage shouldn't be decades-long.

Sorry, my old ecology and biochem courses rearing their heads. Remember where BP is from. They can place news articles pretty handily when they need to.

So apparently, BP's been hiring local fishermen in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to help deploy oil booms in the Gulf. But one of the stipulations they included in the temporary work contract was a waiver to the person's right to sue BP in the future. Stay classy, BP

Film @ 11

They were told to stop doing that, and apparently have.

OG_slinger wrote:
NathanialG wrote:
Dr.Ghastly wrote:
Bear wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

Electricity doesn't come from nowhere. An electric economy is a nuclear economy.

Windmills, solar, hydro etc. There are non nuclear alternatives to producing electricity.

We need to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.

There's nothing wrong with nuclear.

There is the exploding and toxic waste. What we really need is fusion.

Nuclear power plants don't explode and the newer generations greatly reduce the quantity of waste. At the end of the day, I'd rather have a couple thousand pounds of radioactive waste than billions of tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere.

Going to respond to everyone quoted here at once.

If we're looking to replace fossil fuels, we're going to need a ton of energy. Green sources like wind and solar aren't going to cut it unless we build a TON more. Like more than is reasonable to expect when nuclear is available.

There are dangers to nuclear energy. In all likelihood Chernobyl will never happen again. We're not using that reactor design anymore and we have precautions in place to ensure it doesn't happen again. That said, there is still the highly toxic waste and we don't really have a good way to get rid of it other than "reprocess the good stuff, then bury the bad and hope for the best." If we dramatically ramp up nuclear power production, we dramatically ramp up nuclear waste production. There's also the question of our responsibility to the future. It is possible that the waste will be dangerous longer than we're around to look after it. In fact, there are facilities that house cooling waste and if we ever lose ready access to any of them (say, due to war or other disaster), the water in their cooling pools will boil off and the structure will explode in a cloud of radioactive steam.

Nuclear energy is clean right now and it looks pretty safe, even though the book isn't closed on that either. The problem is that we are going to have to live with the consequences for a very long time. While I'm in favor of building new nuclear power plants, I've been called a luddite and a fearmonger for suggesting that maybe we ought to be very sure we can deal with that before we go building up a full-blown nuclear economy. Apparently the best solution to one serious problem is to run head-long into another.

There's also the question of corporate responsibility. Oil production is fairly safe... except that companies cut corners or are lax on protocol and we end up with plant explosions. Coal mines are about as safe as a filthy hole in the ground can be... except when they're suddenly very not. The more common nuclear becomes and the longer we go without a disaster, the more the number crunchers will look for ways to cut corners and maximize profits. So yes, I believe that technology will continue to make nuclear power safer. Human nature and culture all but ensures that there will be a nuclear accident in the future whether we expand nuclear power production or not. It'll just come faster if we do.

I was just reading about this, Lobster... it looks like one of the best ways to get rid of the stuff is to dig very, very deep holes in a subduction zone (many thousands of feet down), and put the waste down there. Because it's in a subduction zone, it will gradually get sucked into the Earth's mantle.

In nature, there's a nuclear reactor that 'burned' for tens of thousands of years in Gabon, and pretty much none of the poisonous isotopes or radiation escaped into the greater environment. Deep burial really does seem to work.

Yucca Mountain might not be a good idea, but Yucca Big Damn Hole might work really well.

Note also that there are ways to reprocess nuclear waste. I didn't realize this until I looked it up, but our present reactors are terribly wasteful, emitting a bunch of high-radioactive metals. Most other countries reprocess the fuel rods, pulling the contaminants out, and then re-use the fuel to get more energy out of it. The final waste in those countries is much more concentrated and much less dangerous.

India has pushed that technology ahead even further, and they get something like four times the energy out of the same original fuel. And there's a demonstration reactor going that will 'eat' any waste you put into it, giving some useful power, and resulting in very low-energy waste.

By abandoning the field so thoroughly, we've really put ourselves behind the curve. We shouldn't have the waste problem we already do. It's very much a fixable problem, even if we keep the existing, old-style primary reactors. (Newer ones have much less of a waste problem to begin with.)

Malor wrote:

I was just reading about this, Lobster... it looks like one of the best ways to get rid of the stuff is to dig very, very deep holes in a subduction zone (many thousands of feet down), and put the waste down there. Because it's in a subduction zone, it will gradually get sucked into the Earth's mantle.

Also the worst-case scenario is a radioactive supervolcano, which is both an awesome way to destroy mankind and also a great name for a band. That does actually sound like a pretty good way to get rid of it, though. Plus once we've got the holes we could dump all sorts of other crap in there too, right?

Malor wrote:

By abandoning the field so thoroughly, we've really put ourselves behind the curve. We shouldn't have the waste problem we already do. It's very much a fixable problem, even if we keep the existing, old-style primary reactors. (Newer ones have much less of a waste problem to begin with.)

In the mind of the American public, a nuclear reactor is still a giant stationary nuclear bomb. I don't know why we're stuck in that mindset but I'm guessing the oil companies aren't too broken up over it.

Robear wrote:

They were told to stop doing that, and apparently have.

Damned Big Government interference.

You know, dealing with any kind of large-scale digging in a subduction zone just doesn't sound like too keen of an idea to me...

At some point, countries relying on lots of energy are going to have to examine their pain thresholds for what they want out of the system. People love having their electronic gadgets run but just want to ignore the costs of it.

The other aspect with oil derivatives is we have not yet created an equal portable source of energy, to enable a replacement to oil powered transport, or got replacements for materials to the same scale of production or reduced our need for them. Remember back two weeks to when the volcano inconveniently spewed ash into one major transport route, now imagine that but because the cost of oil based fuel is eye-wateringly expensive. Or if you can't mass produce cheap plastic mouldings for everything under the sun.

'Subduction zone' just means that the earth is subsiding in that area. But it happens very, very slowly, over millions of years. It's just geology, it's not like WoW, where the earth is a thin skin over teeming evil, and anytime you dig, you're certain to die horribly. We dig a few thousand feet down, clear out some chambers, load it up with waste, and fill it with concrete. Voila, a cement plug floating in the crust, on the ultimate non-express train downward.

It's not like we'll be digging right at the fault. We could dig our holes a couple hundred miles away. I don't remember which California plate, for instance, is subsiding, but if it's the mainland one, we could dig our holes in Reno and it would be fine. It's not going to set off any earthquakes, but we still know where Reno's going to end up eventually.

(Reno would be a great spot, if that's really a subduction zone.... a pit under a pit. )

There is plenty of fossil fuels for the truly critical fossil fuel functions if we reserve it for that. The problem is that our current allocation of fossil fuels is incredibly inefficient for the purpose.

Industrialized nations achieved "Peak Wood" a long time ago. Getting there resulted in the denuding of native forests all over Europe. Nowadays, there seems to be plenty of wood to be found for things like making furniture or violins, but we don't exactly use it for powering locomotives or operating forges anymore. We have found far more efficient methods of getting those tasks done.

I suspect the same will be true with fossil fuels. Once we get our heads out of our asses and stop burning figurative violins for heat, we'll have plenty to take care of things like making plastics.

We can all be righteous and indignant when we stop driving cars or using any petroleum product. Nuclear is a nice dream, but it doesn't fix any day to day problems. Cars, ships and a lot of other stuff runs on black gold. We'll hopefully learn to contain these problems and maybe prevent them, but we're not getting "off" oil in the next 25-50 years, it's impossible.

MaverickDago wrote:

We can all be righteous and indignant when we stop driving cars or using any petroleum product. Nuclear is a nice dream, but it doesn't fix any day to day problems. Cars, ships and a lot of other stuff runs on black gold. We'll hopefully learn to contain these problems and maybe prevent them, but we're not getting "off" oil in the next 25-50 years, it's impossible.

I don't think it is a binary problem though. Getting "off" petroleum is as likely as our getting "off" wood. There will clearly be functions we must have petroleum to complete, but I think it is simply inevitable that we will transition to more modern technologies.

TheWalt wrote:
Electricity doesn't come from nowhere. An electric economy is a nuclear economy.

Windmills, solar, hydro etc. There are non nuclear alternatives to producing electricity.

We need to stop making excuses and start finding solutions.

IMAGE(http://www.geography.hunter.cuny.edu/~tbw/wc.notes/14.climate.change/US.energy.consumption.pie.chart.jpg)

Nuclear is the only energy source that has the capability to meet demand... Note that fossil fuels make up about 86% of US consumption...

Note that the pie chart you posted is not electricity production, which is what was being discussed. It is energy consumption from 1999 (source unclear).

This (ugly) chart shows electricity production in January 2010:
IMAGE(http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/fig2.jpg)

And the Titanic was unsinkable too! If the stupid thing hadn't sunk you would all see that!

It is like watching a bunch of people who have never had a history class talk about this stuff. Name one, just one human invention that has never failed. The space shuttle - one of the most rigorously tested, highly engineered machinery ever built has blown up twice! Nothing, nothing, nothing created by human hands is perfect.

Perhaps nuclear is the only way to go, and perhaps the trade offs are worth it but you have to plan for how you will deal with a complete and utter failure. Not how to prevent failure - because you can't - but what to do when failure occurs.

MaverickDago wrote:

We can all be righteous and indignant when we stop driving cars or using any petroleum product. Nuclear is a nice dream, but it doesn't fix any day to day problems. Cars, ships and a lot of other stuff runs on black gold. We'll hopefully learn to contain these problems and maybe prevent them, but we're not getting "off" oil in the next 25-50 years, it's impossible.

If we're not allowed to be righteous and indignant until we're no longer using fuel then we're not allowed to be righteous and indignant until the problem's already been solved.

This is just a fancy way of saying "love it or leave it." I don't buy that.

BP was one of three finalists for the U.S. Department of Interior's Safety Award for Excellence this year. The award honors companies for "outstanding safety and pollution prevention performance by the offshore oil and gas industry." Plans called for the winner was to be announced today at a luncheon, but the event has been canceled. It's unknown whether BP was selected as the winner.

Classic!