# Biodiesel



## Loafer (Jan 7, 2004)

Well I never knew it was actually commercially available in Toronto, but it is....Queen and Pape and in Markham.

Also, from what I can assertain any diesel engine will run on it.....although if it is an older car that has run on regular diesel for a while you might get some problems with the biodiesel dislodging bit sin your pipes and clogging up your filter.

Any using this stuff yet on ehMac, I'd be interested to hear more about it.


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

I read that Neil Young used biodiesel-powered tour buses exclusively on his last tour. (Or they were using plain old vegetable oil in modified diesel buses.)

All that's needed now is an electric/biodiesel hybrid car for the ultimate green machine.


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## Carex (Mar 1, 2004)

Send a PM to bolor. I think he has talked extensively elsewhere about biodiesel, he may even be a user.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

Willy Nelson has the whole SW INCLUDING TEXAS - all fired up over Bio-diesel.












> Welcome to Willie Nelson's Biodiesel
> Home of Farm Fresh Biodiesel
> 
> Put a B20 biodiesel blend in your tank
> ...


http://www.wnbiodiesel.com/


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

While bio-deisel should be a component of our move away from fossil fuels, I found the overt optimism of Mr. Nelson's site to be unrealistic. They seem to be implying that the USA can easily replace all of it's imported oil with bio-deisel. Everything I've read about this subject indicates that would be impossible. Estimates I have seen indicate that the US would have to replace every bit of it's productive farmland with bio-deisel crops as well as find some extra farmland to come up with even enough fuel to replace current usage. There are some currently speculating on the possibility of vast ponds in the desert producing bio-deisel from algae, but like so many alternative energy hopes, that also is vaporware.

The big problem that we all have here is the continuing assertion that the world can somehow carry on wasting energy in the same fashion as we always have and just switch over from fossil fuels to some variety of alternatives with no change in our current lifestyle. Nelson's web site shows a picture of a big-ass shiny pickup truck, that can be happily driven on bio-deisel. The implication is that somehow America can keep on buying and driving ridiculous vehicles and just convert all it's farmland over to soybeans for fuel and all will be well.

If our Titanic world is going to somehow avoid the iceberg of the rapidly approaching energy crunch, we have to rid ourselves of this delusion very soon. In the short term we have to reduce our per capita energy use and wastage drastically, to a fraction of what it is currently, while researching and implementing any and all forms of non-fossil alternatives ASAP. 

Mr. Nelson's site makes no mention of this and indicates to me that he and his bio-deisel friends are just participating in more mass denial about the problems facing the world. The delusions of infinite energy supporting our wasteful consumer lifestyles are the real barriers to making any of the necessary positive changes for the future. The longer we as a society keep our heads in the sand, the more painful will be the required transition.


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## Snapple Quaffer (Sep 2, 2003)

Good points, GA. The world's vast deposits of oil, with which we were blessed, had their origins in organic matter which accumulated over huge stretches of time (certainly by comparison with the time interval in which we have been using those deposits up). The rates of the original "stockpiling" and current consumption are enormously different.

The bio-fuels cannot supplant the oil deposits. They represent a cleaner alternative for sure, but you'd end up needing a whole new planet to turn into a farm for bio-fuel the way we use energy these days.

Mendeleyev (of Periodic Table fame) was so alarmed at the possibility that this once-only, never to be replaced resource, and its immense potential, would be squandered that he advised the Russian government of the day that thay should take steps to preserve it!

Excuse me - I feel a bout of hysterical laughter coming on.


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## Loafer (Jan 7, 2004)

Well said GA, I couldn't agree more
but if governments could force car manufaturers to release more fuel efficient cars to be made available then maybe Biodiesel could be useful in the way forward. Maybe putting an outrageous car tax on anything that doesn't do better than 20mpg one year, then raise it each year by a few mpg's....people would take a serious look if the extra money per year is worth it for that extra horsepower and the car industry would continually have to keeping raising the bar each year.

The reason I was actually asking is that we recently took possession of a smart car (I' don't want to get in a debate about the advantages and disadvantages of the car) and as a diesel engine it could run on Biodiesel but as I have just heard from the place I got it, it would actually void the warranty if I filled it with BD......another 4 years of which I kinda wanna keep it case it craps out on me.

Anyone know why exactly it would void the warranty, is this some kind of car industry/oil industry ploy to stop people using their home brew biodiesel which, from what I have read, can be produced for as little as 20c a little.

Anyway, whatever way you look at it, in the mean time having the opportunity not to burn some fossil fuels has to be looked upon as a good short term solution maybe not long term I agree.


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

There is no reason to abandon our "wasteful consumer lifestyles." Yes, we will run out of fossil fuels, perhaps in 10 or perhaps in 100 years. So what? When we start running out, the economic pressure of rising prices will force us to adjust our method of energy consumption.



GA said:


> In the short term we have to reduce our per capita energy use and wastage drastically, to a fraction of what it is currently, while researching and implementing any and all forms of non-fossil alternatives ASAP.


Oh nonsense. I say, using it 'til we lose it. We do need to worry about greenhouse gas emissions, but it make no difference if we run out of oil. We can and will switch to other forms of power. Solar power is great, but compared to oil, it's very expensive. Why switch now while oil is cheaper?


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

In perspective


> A gallon of gas represents about 196000 pounds of fossil plants, ..


Nuclear +hydrogen long term and in the meantime conservation and what ever alternate fuels we can make use of for the moment.....

There's lots of energy out there for a sustainable population - say one around 1 /10th of the current level..............one way or another.....Ma Nature bats last so either we manage it or she'll impose the limits.......in a very draconian manner.

This months Nat'l Geo has an excellent long article that's actually pretty positive.

Now about electing politicians that will actually DO SOMETHING long term


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## HowEver (Jan 11, 2005)

lpkmckenna said:


> I read that Neil Young used biodiesel-powered tour buses exclusively on his last tour. (Or they were using plain old vegetable oil in modified diesel buses.)
> 
> All that's needed now is an electric/biodiesel hybrid car for the ultimate green machine.



"Harvest."


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## MacDaddy (Jul 16, 2001)

I love his OS X style buttons at the top. nicely done Willie!


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

lpk said:


> There is no reason to abandon our "wasteful consumer lifestyles." Yes, we will run out of fossil fuels, perhaps in 10 or perhaps in 100 years. So what? When we start running out, the economic pressure of rising prices will force us to adjust our method of energy consumption.


Actually we will probably not run out of fossil fuels for some time to come. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of half of the fossil fuels that the earth produced are still in the ground. We are approaching, or possibly have approached, what is known as "peak oil" production.

In a little over 100 years we have sucked up and burned most of the first half of those fuels, but unfortunately the other half won't last another 100. The world's exponentially increasing population means that we used most of that first half in the last few decades and with dramatic increases in demand, the second half will last a much shorter time. Add to that the fact that much of the second half is considered uneconomic, meaning that it requires more energy to get it out of the ground than it will provide. 

The fact that the world is looking towards Canada's huge oil sands deposits, which are only barely economic, producing only slightly more energy return on energy invested (EROEI), shows we are already starting to become desperate for sources. Also the use of the Alaska Wildlife Reserve for oil production, which will only add, at most, a year of extra capacity to US reserves at the current rate of use, shows that the barrel's bottom is in sight.

So what? Oil and natural gas will get more expensive and make other alternative energy technologies more feasible, as Mr. McKenna is saying, no?

Maybe. I have no idea how the confluence of factors will actually play out, but I think I have a few reasons to believe that it may not be smooth or pretty, if nothing changes in how we use energy.

No matter how much we might wish it to be so, there is no alternative energy source, even all of them in combination, that can come close to replacing the huge supply of stored energy of the world's fossil fuel. And even with some wishful thinking about future technological advances, these sources will not be anywhere near as cheap as oil and natural gas have been. Possibly, if we focus on tech development, as if our lives depended on it, there may be something more to look forward to. The pittance that has been spent on alternative energy since the 1970s, when many scientist could already see the writing on the wall, has not been enough to change the alternative energy scenario by much.

It has been estimated the average North American has the equivalent of 50 energy slaves working for him or her, round the clock. At the present cost, these slaves are reasonably affordable for most. What happens when the EROEI of fossil fuels falls from 1:30 down to 1:2 or 1:<2, where most of the alternative energies reside? What happens to the economy, when most can't afford to gas up their car, afford much food, which becomes very expensive through heavy reliance on fossil fuels or buy many consumer goods, which also heavily rely on cheap fossil fuels for their distribution and manufacture? What happens when the average person can only afford 1 or 2 energy slaves and has to lay off the others? Can we quickly revert to a society with a per capita energy use that existed in 1900? This will be true whether we are using alternative energy or vastly more expensive fossil fuel dregs. If the economy is in trouble, how do we start to implement the vast infrastructure changes required to use alternatives?

Our lives, our economy and most of what we depend on in our modern industrial society depends on very cheap energy. There is no magic solution that will provide the world with another gold mine of cheap energy like the fossil fuel gift that we are currently burning through. We need to start getting used to the idea that energy will become much more expensive, and putting systems in place to carry on comfortably using less. If we don't, the transition and the landing will not be soft.


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## Jordan (Jul 20, 2002)

I'm in the process now of making my own Bio-Diesel from used veggie oil generously donated by local restaurants.
I'm trying to get free or super cheap equipment so I can start.

Bio-Diesel may void warranties because there may be natural rubber components within the fuel system, Bio-Diesel softens and degrades natural rubber.
Generally European diesels are good for Bio-Diesel because Europe has been using Bio-Diesel for a few years now, made from Rapeseed.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

In re-reading my previous post, I realized that I didn't explain my "energy slave" analogy very well. Hopefully the quote below will clarify it.


> It has been estimated that the average sustained human power output is roughly one-twentieth of a horsepower. ... If we were to add together the power of all of the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compare that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each of us Americans has the equivalent of over 50 "energy slaves" working for us 24 hours each day. In energy terms, each middle-class American is living a lifestyle so lavish as to make nearly any sultan or potentate in history swoon with envy.
> 
> Richard Heinberg, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2003)





Jordan said:


> I'm in the process now of making my own Bio-Diesel from used veggie oil generously donated by local restaurants.
> I'm trying to get free or super cheap equipment so I can start.


Great work, Jordan!  All of us who are sitting around doing very little except expelling our own bio-gas, owe people like you a debt of gratitude.


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## CN (Sep 3, 2004)

GratuitousApplesauce said:


> It has been estimated the average North American has the equivalent of 50 energy slaves working for him or her, round the clock. At the present cost, these slaves are reasonably affordable for most. What happens when the EROEI of fossil fuels falls from 1:30 down to 1:2 or 1:<2, where most of the alternative energies reside? What happens to the economy, when most can't afford to gas up their car, afford much food, which becomes very expensive through heavy reliance on fossil fuels or buy many consumer goods, which also heavily rely on cheap fossil fuels for their distribution and manufacture? What happens when the average person can only afford 1 or 2 energy slaves and has to lay off the others? Can we quickly revert to a society with a per capita energy use that existed in 1900? This will be true whether we are using alternative energy or vastly more expensive fossil fuel dregs. If the economy is in trouble, how do we start to implement the vast infrastructure changes required to use alternatives?
> 
> Our lives, our economy and most of what we depend on in our modern industrial society depends on very cheap energy. There is no magic solution that will provide the world with another gold mine of cheap energy like the fossil fuel gift that we are currently burning through. We need to start getting used to the idea that energy will become much more expensive, and putting systems in place to carry on comfortably using less. If we don't, the transition and the landing will not be soft.


One can only wonder what will happen during the transition period...if there is no alternative energy source that provides as much energy as we get from fossil fuel at the time, it could be a very harsh time. Imagine having to change your lifestyle from what it is now to something vastly different...using much less energy (ALOT less...not just turning off a few lightbulbs). The transition would not be overnight by any means, but would likely still be relatively quick...scary really


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

Everyone, stop making it sound like the end of the world. It won't be. Like Steve Jobs says, we can manage another transition.

Gas prices have managed to exceed $1/litre in some places. I can remember pumping gas in high school for 30c/litre. That is more than 3 times the price in 15 years. Despite this, our economy is quite strong. There has been a reaction by business to increased oil prices, like the hybrid cars. There has also been an upsurge in gas-guzzlers like SUVs in the same time frame. If the price of oil is still so reasonable that the middle class will knowingly purchase such things indicates that we can handle a price surge without having the market collapse.

Some growing pains during a market correction? Sure. Another Great Depression? Not a chance.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

That's a narrow view point - it's the type of energy that's also a major factor.
Climate change is no small threat - far far greater than running out of energy and if we hit a tipping point it could indeed be the end of the first world.

The last time the planet hit an 11 degree warming phase due to volcanism just about everything died off despite it being a rise over time.
This time it's not a rise over time and some species are already stressed and we're under a 1 degree rise.
60% of the coral reefs DIED in 1997 - and we've not even scratched the rise that IS coming no matter what we under take.

All we can do is make it less worse and soften the curve. The way we are going we are going to make it far worse than the current rise.

Sequestering MIGHT help but do you really want global tinkering trying to fix what's broke when we don't know the dynamics already?

I quite confident first world can transition - I'm not confident the ecological costs of getting there will leave a much of a habitable planet.

300,000 kids die in Europe of pollution each year now.
Toronto had more smog days in the spring than all of last year 

and we still have another 2 billion in population to come 

Hydrogen, nuclear fission Gen 3 and 4 and maybe 50 years out fusion plus a 90% population drop. The ONLY long term solutions to keep the planet livable.

Renewables have a role to play but they won't do the heavy lifting.

For every gallon of gasoline you're burning 98 tons of plant material the earth has produced and producing 24 pounds of carbon load.

It's not sustainable.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

lpk said:


> Everyone, stop making it sound like the end of the world. It won't be. Like Steve Jobs says, we can manage another transition.


Who was talking about the end of the world? The facts are there and action is necessary if the world wants to avoid some serious problems. The transition from cheap and easy energy to expensive and difficult energy isn't like a small computer company changing its chip supplier. Just where are the plans for the world to smoothly and easily make this transition. Where is the giant energy Intel waiting to provide us with all the cheap and fast chips we could possibly need? Where is the replacement for fossil fuel that can step in and easily fill the increasing voracious hunger the world has for energy?

Belittling the problem, ignoring it, or labelling it a "correction" won't make the problem of the coming energy crunch, go away. A buck a litre gasoline is nothing compared to what it might cost when demand starts to seriously outpace supply. Calling it a price surge might be a gross understatement.

It has not been popular or polite to mention the coming end of our relatively short, century old, oil guzzling party, since it's been known about for the past 30 years. I apologize if some people find my speaking of it offensive. If you know about some alternative stuff to guzzle that will keep us just as fat and happy as we've always been, then please speak up. If you don't, then please cover your eyes and ears and go on about your business.


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## nxnw (Dec 22, 2002)

GratuitousApplesauce said:


> Actually we will probably not run out of fossil fuels for some time to come. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of half of the fossil fuels that the earth produced are still in the ground. We are approaching, or possibly have approached, what is known as "peak oil" production.
> 
> In a little over 100 years we have sucked up and burned most of the first half of those fuels, but unfortunately the other half won't last another 100...


And that's not all. We already know whgere a lot of the ofther 50% is. Places like the arctic, places like offshore. As such, finding it, processing it and transporting it to the refinery is much more expensive - but worse - ecologically hazardous. The fact that the oil is there doesn't mean we should be drilling for it.

With China increasing its use of fossil fuels exponentially (it used to be an exported, but now it is importing more and more at a stunning rate), a crisis is coming and we are not ready for it.

We're treating this planet like it's disposable.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

I recommend Jared Diamond's *Collapse* to anyone serious about this issue. The difference between "mining" a non renewable resource and managing sustainable resources will be the difference between long term species and civilization survival and .....well.......collapse.

There ARE choices to be made. His work on Australia and how different it is from England in terms of sustainable agricultural is marvelous and frightening.

There ARE limits we are starting to see the walls that contain us and the energy requirements to bust those walls and enjoy the resources of the larger solar system require very careful management to get us there.

Inuit in Greeland survived for many years when the Norse did not........they managed the same resources differently.

In my mind Europe and Japan are ahead of NA in managing their energy use.....and WE have a geographic problem they do not. Time to play catchup, or go the way of the Greenland Norse.

















all that's left of a 400 year old society 
It surely WAS the end of their world. The oil age is only a century old.
Wonder how OUR management will be viewed????


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

GratuitousApplesauce said:


> The transition from cheap and easy energy to expensive and difficult energy isn't like a small computer company changing its chip supplier.


I was being facetious. I didn't think anyone would take such a comparison literally.



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> Belittling the problem, ignoring it, or labelling it a "correction" won't make the problem of the coming energy crunch, go away. A buck a litre gasoline is nothing compared to what it might cost when demand starts to seriously outpace supply. Calling it a price surge might be a gross understatement.


Exaggerating the problem, wailing about it, or labelling it a "oil guzzling party" won't accomplish anything either. Words like "market correction" and "price surge" are value-neutral economics terminology which remove the hysterical, fear-mongering phraseology you are engaging in.



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> It has not been popular or polite to mention the coming end of our relatively short, century old, oil guzzling party, since it's been known about for the past 30 years. I apologize if some people find my speaking of it offensive. If you know about some alternative stuff to guzzle that will keep us just as fat and happy as we've always been, then please speak up. If you don't, then please cover your eyes and ears and go on about your business.


Temper, temper.

I love this kind of arrogant talk that the scare-mongers of "population explosion" and "resource depletion" engage in. It seems everyone has a prediction of doom, whether it's impending global famine, or a global super-virus, or a global depression. And if you don't agree with their tyrannical solutions they say you're willfully blind, in denial, or have some agenda to protect. Or they they you to "please cover your eyes and ears and go on about your business" (ie shut up and go away and do what you're told).

Books have been flying out for 30 years, predicting our fate - and the prophecies have fallen flat. Paul Ehrlich has made millions re-publishing the same book over and over, with corrections for his endless failed predictions. James Davidson (The Great Reckoning) fortold of a coming stock market crash in the 90s, which never happened, or anything even close to what he predicted.

No matter what any of these psuedo-scientists say, the facts are clear: demand for oil will continue to rise, oil production will fall, the rising price of oil will stimulate initiatives; to burn less oil; change to more nuclear / wind / hydro /solar power; move to fuel-cell systems; and so on.

How do we know? Take a look at the consequences of the OPEC strike in the 70s. That event was a microcosm of what is to come - over a period of decades, not months!

Nothing exists that demands the regimentation of private energy consumption under state technocrats, which is what these psuedo-scientists want.

We have real energy issues. Urban smog is the most serious, and a change in the way emissions are tolerated are required. We basically need Drive-Clean 2: The Next Stage. But we don't need histrionics.



> I apologize if some people find my speaking of it offensive.


If you're not sorry, it's not an apology. Besides, it's not your "offensiveness" that is at issue, but your unfounded predictions.



> It has not been popular or polite to mention the coming end of our relatively short, century old, oil guzzling party.


It is also not popular or polite to have the funeral before the patient expires. The "relatively short ... oil guzzling party" has many more years of life in him. Stop using his sickness as a chance to say "I told you so."


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

lpkmckenna said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > The transition from cheap and easy energy to expensive and difficult energy isn't like a small computer company changing its chip supplier.
> ...


Why use it then? Your facetiousness wasn’t evident to me. But thank you for clarifying.


lpkmckenna said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > Belittling the problem, ignoring it, or labelling it a "correction" won't make the problem of the coming energy crunch, go away. A buck a litre gasoline is nothing compared to what it might cost when demand starts to seriously outpace supply. Calling it a price surge might be a gross understatement.
> ...


It seems to me that you are using such “value-neutral” terminology to mimimize or deny that there might be some kind of problem. If I am exaggerating the problem, then what in your mind is the nature of the problem, if you believe there is one at all? I don’t believe that my arguments and questions are an exaggeration and you haven’t stated why they are, other than to use non value-neutral terminology to describe my posts, such as “wailing”, “hysterical”, “fear-mongering”, “tyrannical”, “arrogant”, “scare-monger” etc.


lpkmckenna said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > It has not been popular or polite to mention the coming end of our relatively short, century old, oil guzzling party, since it's been known about for the past 30 years. I apologize if some people find my speaking of it offensive. If you know about some alternative stuff to guzzle that will keep us just as fat and happy as we've always been, then please speak up. If you don't, then please cover your eyes and ears and go on about your business.
> ...


No temper, honest. I’m sorry if you interpreted it that way, or that I was telling anyone to shut up and do what they are told. In retrospect that paragraph was not a good one and didn’t convey the point I was trying to make. I'll withdraw it and try to restate.

The point is this. There have been those who have been stating the basic fact that the fossil fuel bonanza will someday soon come to an end, for a few decades now. They have been generally ignored or called chicken-littles, as you appear to be doing now. If this basic fact is wrong or unfounded, then please explain how. If you believe that our industrial society has an effective plan B, that will mitigate this problem and replace the vast supply of cheap energy that our society requires to continue as we always have, then please present it. I would be much relieved to know that my worries can be laid to rest.

I was apologizing to those who may not want to hear that information, as in “I’m sorry, I know you may not want to hear this, but it’s looks like you might have a serious health problem.” If you can show me that you don’t have that problem, then great, tell me all about it. If you don’t want to hear about it, then go off an be as you were.


lpkmckenna said:


> Books have been flying out for 30 years, predicting our fate - and the prophecies have fallen flat. Paul Ehrlich has made millions re-publishing the same book over and over, with corrections for his endless failed predictions. James Davidson (The Great Reckoning) fortold of a coming stock market crash in the 90s, which never happened, or anything even close to what he predicted.


lpkm, you must know that that argument is fallacious. Simply because someone made a prediction about population problems or stock market crashes that may not have panned out as predicted, does not invalidate the argument that the world is headed into a serious energy crunch. If I’d actually taken that course in logic, I’d be able to name that logical fallacy for you. Maybe you know its name? 


lpkmckenna said:


> No matter what any of these psuedo-scientists say, the facts are clear: demand for oil will continue to rise, oil production will fall, the rising price of oil will stimulate initiatives; to burn less oil; change to more nuclear / wind / hydro /solar power; move to fuel-cell systems; and so on.
> 
> How do we know? Take a look at the consequences of the OPEC strike in the 70s. That event was a microcosm of what is to come - over a period of decades, not months!


I think that some of the oil industry geologists, who are speaking out about the limits of our world’s oil might quibble with being called psuedo-scientists, nor does your naming them so, help your argument.

The prediction you have made may come to pass, without much dislocation, if the price of oil takes a smooth upward curve over an extended time and doesn’t start spiking very sharply when the point occurs for the first time in our history that supply will never again be able to meet demand. The OPEC strike of the 70s was a temporary shortage in oil inventories and the market reacted to it as that. I’m not an economist so I won’t try and predict what the reaction could be to the general realization that permanent and ever increasing shortage will be the rule. Economists within the oil industry have differing opinions about this. Some say what you do, others state that the reaction could be large unprecedented price spikes that occur over a very short period.

But even if our world has the foresight and intelligence to start phasing in alternative energy for events that may start occurring before 2010 or even under the most optimistic predictions 2030, or even if the rising prices follow a long slow upward curve to give us time to make those infrastructure changes smoothly, where is the evidence that alternatives can supply the massive dose of energy that our industrial society requires? Nothing I’ve seen indicates that alternatives can come anywhere close to filling that bill, but I am open to any evidence that this can be so. Mostly what I hear from those who say that alternatives can replace our current and future energy usage at anywhere near today's levels is the blind faith that somehow technology will find a way. In the computer world that's called vapourware.

I am not predicting doomsday, as you seem to be implying, I'm not really predicting anything, but I am very concerned that our governments and leaders seem to be barely aware of the problem and not even close to talking about solutions to it. I have more questions than answers. Any “histrionics” that I may appear to be exhibiting are simply expressions of concern, because I see an obvious problem on the horizon, with not much talk of solutions occurring. For those who deny that there is a problem, any discussion of it at all must seem like histrionics.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

> But we don't need histrionics.


Well SOME histrionics based on reality would not hurt to get the slackard powers that be moving. The numbers are scarey enough - it just has to penetrate.

I can see the changes in the environment clearly over my lifetime and the acceleration is marked in the past decade.
We're relatively secluded from it in the Great Lakes region and it's still much in evidence.
The smog this year is just plain HORRENDOUS and thats' FACT not histrionics.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

Histrionics. EhMac's word of the day today. Invoked in two of today's top threads.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

The mighty Chevron itself seems to be joining the "scare-monger" camp:


> It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30.


and ...


> Energy will be one of the defining issues of this century, *and one thing is clear: the era of easy oil is over.* What we all do next will determine how well we meet the energy needs of the entire world in this century and beyond.
> 
> The trends are in motion.
> 
> ...


and ...


> At 6.4 billion and climbing, the world’s population is expected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Yet our known fossil fuel reserves are in decline, and alternative energy sources are not expanding rapidly enough to meet future demand.


All taken from Chevron's web site set up to discuss these issues: http://www.willyoujoinus.com/

Although they seem to be soft pedalling some of the facts, to be expected from a giant corporation, basically they are saying the same thing that those who are talking about peak oil are saying: An energy crunch is headed our way, sooner than we might think, alternatives cannot replace what we get from fossil fuels, we do not have a workable plan B in place, so, how do we solve this problem? If we wait and don't start to address it now, we will be forced into a situation that we won't like much. Denial of the problem is no longer an option.


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

GratuitousApplesauce said:


> Denial of the problem is no longer an option.


I am not denying that we will run out of oil. We will. I am simply stating that things will merely be uncomfortable, rather than catastrophic.



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> lpkm, you must know that that argument is fallacious.


Why does everyone keep telling me what I know? You don't know what I know, unless you are a mind-reader. I was refering to The Population Bomb and The Great Reckoning because I could recall their names off the top of my head, and they were well-known books of popular-yet-spurious predictions.

But the comparison is apt. Known facts (we will run out of oil) leading to uncalled for conclusions (a painful transistion to a less comfortable future) requiring drastic state actions (government control over oil distribution, rationing of fuel expenditures, huge infrastructure expenditures, huge investment in alternative energy development, banning SUVs, taxes based on total km driven per househouse, etc).



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> I think that some of the oil industry geologists, who are speaking out about the limits of our world’s oil might quibble with being called psuedo-scientists, nor does your naming them so, help your argument.


I am not calling them psuedo-scientists. I am in fact affirming that we are going to run out of oil. I am denouncing the writers of doomsday prediction books as psuedo-scientists.



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> I am not predicting doomsday, as you seem to be implying, I'm not really predicting anything.





GratuitousApplesauce said:


> What happens to the economy, when most can't afford to gas up their car, afford much food, which becomes very expensive through heavy reliance on fossil fuels or buy many consumer goods, which also heavily rely on cheap fossil fuels for their distribution and manufacture? What happens when the average person can only afford 1 or 2 energy slaves and has to lay off the others? Can we quickly revert to a society with a per capita energy use that existed in 1900? This will be true whether we are using alternative energy or vastly more expensive fossil fuel dregs.


This sounds like a doomsday prediction to me.



GratuitousApplesauce said:


> No matter how much we might wish it to be so, there is no alternative energy source, even all of them in combination, that can come close to replacing the huge supply of stored energy of the world's fossil fuel.


What about nuclear power? I think the nations that rely more heavily on nuclear power will weather the transistion better than us.



GA said:


> The longer we as a society keep our heads in the sand, the more painful will be the required transition.


Describing society as having its "heads in the sand" because they don't see this issue the way you do is arrogant. Do you think my head is in the sand because I doubt the transistion will be as painful as you do?


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## lpkmckenna (Jul 4, 2004)

MacDoc said:


> Well SOME histrionics based on reality would not hurt to get the slackard powers that be moving. The numbers are scarey enough - it just has to penetrate.


Maybe it wouldn't hurt, but I can't see it helping. Nobody listens to a drama queen.



MacDoc said:


> I can see the changes in the environment clearly over my lifetime and the acceleration is marked in the past decade.
> We're relatively secluded from it in the Great Lakes region and it's still much in evidence.
> The smog this year is just plain HORRENDOUS and thats' FACT not histrionics.


The smog is unbelievable this year. And speaking of observed changes, I can remember swimming in Lake Ontario as a boy. Now I have to go to a beach up north.


The biggest contributor to smog is vehicle exhaust. The biggest contributor to vehicle exhaust is suburban highway commuters. The biggest contributor to excessive commuting is unnecessarily high cost of urban living, limited mass transit, lousy quality-of-life in urban areas, restrictions on construction, and plain bad government.

Most people I know who have now bought homes did so not because they wanted a big backyard or hate city traffic, and they definitely aren't happy with the monotony of suburban subdivisions.

Land is cheaper. Taxes are lower. Crime is lower. Schools are better. Roads are better. And on and on and on.

It seems that our society hasn't figured out how to prevent the deteriorating quality of life in the cities, which creates urban sprawl. Hence the long commutes and the excessive exhaust.

I think I'll drive up to the beach tomorrow, and spew a cloud of noxious crap out the ass of my Cavalier as I do so.


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

> Nobody listens to a drama queen.


Hmmmm Rachel Carson just might argue with you on that.

Also I'd hardly call Jared Diamond a pseudo scientist nor David Suzuki. You play right into the hands of the "heads in the sand" crowd with that kind of rhetoric.

The earth passed it's sustainable point about 100 years ago - all we are doing is mining the past.
We can either start managing the decline now or suffer the inevitable decline in resources, living standards and environment THAT ARE ALREADY HAPPENING with little say about the outcome.

There ARE salmon off Toronto and trout back in the Thames.

It took a bloody long time to get the lakes and rivers starting back to health and will take longer time frames and harder decisions for the atmosphere climate and ecological repair.

The time to get started is right now and THE two issues are climate/fossil fuel use and population control.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

lpkm said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > Denial of the problem is no longer an option.
> ...


I wasn’t necessarily directing that sentence at you personally. It seems to me from your previous posts that you think our world will be able to transition easily to a non-fossil fuel future. I don’t see how that is possible, based on the options that we have currently, but I do think that the transition will be painful if we don’t start addressing and realistically asessing our options now. I think there is a potential for some catastophe, although I personally hope those who are sanguine about the world’s future are correct, even though they don’t seem to be presenting much in the way of compelling arguments for their predictions. I don’t claim to know how the future will play out, as you seem to. All I know is that based on the facts as they stand, I don’t have much reason to believe all will be fine.


lpkm said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > I am not predicting doomsday, as you seem to be implying, I'm not really predicting anything.
> ...


Those are questions, not predictions. It is entirely possible that fossil fuel energy and any alternative energies that we could transition to, will become very expensive and difficult to access, in the future. If that is not true, then why? I’m all ears. 

A scenario where society is using far less energy per capita, does not have to be a doomsday scenario. If it were to be forced on us, in the space of a few years with no plan B infrastructure ready, then some serious dislocation may occur, meaning that some catastrophic things could happen. I sincerely hope we are smarter than that.

You appear to be trying to paint my concerns as extremist, fear-mongering, etc., which is why I posted the Chevron quotes. If you want extremist, look at dieoff.org or lifeaftertheoilcrash.com for visions of utter hopelessness. These people believe that the future will play out one way only and are making some very definite predictions, based on the assumption that humanity has no better sense of self-determination than an exploding population of bacteria in a petri dish. I don’t subscribe to that, although world events sometimes make me wonder.


lpkm said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > No matter how much we might wish it to be so, there is no alternative energy source, even all of them in combination, that can come close to replacing the huge supply of stored energy of the world's fossil fuel.
> ...


Ah, nuclear power, the great white hope.

The world’s 442 nuclear reactors provide about 5 percent of the world’s current energy use. To up that percentage significantly, to replace much of the energy for transportation and a percentage of the electricity that is now fossil fuel generated, would take some time, likely on the decade scale and be very costly. If some of the peak oil theorists are correct, we may see prices spike well before 2010, others say by 2025. Either way decommisioning current aging reactors and replacing them, as well as building many thousand more new reactors would have to be started very soon and at great cost. 

The cost of the new reactors would have to much larger than the old ones, that were built entirely using fossil energy. Add to that the cost of the uranium, also mined, processed, transported and sent to waste treatment, using fossil fuels. Add to that a massive increase in the cost of disposing and dealing with all this newly generated waste. Nuclear energy will not be a cheap alternative, nowhere as cheap as today’s fossil fuel energy is.

Politically, the difficulty in convincing people that they will have to live next to many more nuclear plants than they have in the past, would be huge. And if we wait until fossil energy becomes more expensive, therefore making the cost of fabricating and building of these plants much more, the politcal difficulty of convincing people to build them would also be harder.

The safety issue is a big concern, although if society becomes possibly more desparate for energy, they may put that aside to some degree. Right now, the nuclear industry is trying to sell a new and unproven technology called Pebble Bed Reactors, using graphite pebbles rather than water for cooling, calling it “100 percent safe”. This technology is completely unproven at this point and there are many who say that the safety claims are much exaggerated.

Finally, the world has been heading into a period of natural uranium shortages for several years now. Supply for the current operating reactors may not be able to equal demand in coming years, much less a possible 10 fold increase in demand.

Personally, I think the belief that nuclear power can save the day is just as much of a fantasy as thinking that North America can run it’s entire fleet of vehicles by planting soybeans.


lpkm said:


> GratuitousApplesauce said:
> 
> 
> > lpkm, you must know that that argument is fallacious.
> ...


I wasn’t intending on telling you what you know, but please pardon me if my sloppy phrasing might lead to that impression. To restate it, by that I meant to say that I would be surprised if you didn’t know that the argument was fallacious, given your demonstrated reasoning abilities, that you’ve shown on ehMac. No offense intended by my remark.

That said, the comparison is not apt, if the logic of it is faulty. Your assumption here is that the conclusions are uncalled for, because of your opinion that other conclusions in the Population Bomb and The Great Reckoning were uncalled for. This does not follow if you don’t demonstrate how the potential scenarios that I am presenting are uncalled for, which I don’t see that you have done. You have only stated that you believe them to be false, not stated why they are.


lpkm said:


> GA said:
> 
> 
> > The longer we as a society keep our heads in the sand, the more painful will be the required transition.
> ...


I don’t see how your perception of my possible arrogance has anything to do with the debate. I will deny that I am an arrogant person, but I’m sure that it is something I am fully capable of and maybe demonstrate at times without being aware of it. Arrogance is not a quality that I aspire to so I will endeavour to try and keep that aspect of my personality, if I can see it coming out, at bay. But whether or not I am arrogant in my opinions or phrasing doesn’t prove that my points may be wrong and is nothing more than a red herring.

I really don’t like name-calling on this board, especially given the ugliness of some recent threads. I can see that you are an intelligent person, who has made some great contributions to various threads here. Can we not just take the standpoint of “I respectfully disagree”?


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

GA your green underwear is showing. 



> As of June, 2005, 31 countries worldwide were operating 440 nuclear plants for
> ... Nuclear power plants provided some 16 percent of the world's electricity ...


and that number for France is 79% of electricity.

PBR reactors represent a strong scaleable and inherently safe design - the one in Germany ran for 21 years and the facility was closed for political and economic reasons just after Chernobyl in the anti-everything- nuclear backlash.

Easily accessible uranium may indeed represent a 50 year window at high use but reactors are able to breed fuel.

Here's the contrast. The US study in 1996


> An analysis of the safety issues related to such use of PBMRs is provided in a 1996 study on transmutation by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. That safety analysis does not directly apply since the operating conditions and fuels would be different than the proposed PBMR. However, it is noteworthy that the study concluded "At this stage of its conceptual development, there is little information about the safety features of the PBR [Pebble Bed Reactor], its dominant risk factors, or its environmental impact." The study further stated that *"It is not clear how the core [of the PBR] would react to any event that may interrupt the flow of helium coolant." *3


the reality operating in China NOW and with the coolant turned off ( and in Germany the reactor operated for 21 years )



> This unusual margin of safety isn't merely theoretical. *INET's engineers have already done what would be unthinkable in a conventional reactor: switched off HTR-10's helium coolant and let the reactor cool down all by itself.* Indeed, Zhang plans a show-stopping repeat performance at an international conference of reactor physicists in Beijing in September. "We think our kind of test may be required in the market someday," he adds.


http://www.energybulletin.net/1868.html

and one "green emininence" has certainly lent his weight to the nuclear program of safe reactors.



> In May, British eminence green James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a single self-regulating organism, published an impassioned plea to phase out fossil fuels in London's The Independent. Nuclear power, he argued, is the last, best hope for averting climatic catastrophe:
> 
> *"Opposition to nuclear energy is based on irrational fear fed by Hollywood-style fiction, the Green lobbies, and the media. … Even if they were right about its dangers - and they are not - its worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heat waves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear, the one safe, available energy source, now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."*
> 
> ...


There's been a nuclear reactor at McMaster for 50 years. 
The world went on a horrible tangent in developing "weaponizing" nuclear reactors instead of designs that were safe and energy producing as envisioned by early pioneers.



> Today's nuclear power plants are the fruits of a decision tree rooted in the earliest days of the atomic age. In 1943, a Manhattan Project team led by Enrico Fermi sustained the first man-made nuclear chain reaction in a pile of uranium blocks at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Lab. A chemist named Farrington Daniels joined the effort a short time later. But Daniels wasn't interested in bombs. His focus was on a notion that had been circulating among physicists since the late 1930s: harnessing atomic power for cheap, clean electricity. He proposed a reactor containing enriched uranium "pebbles" - a term borrowed from chemistry - and using gaseous helium to transfer energy to a generator.
> 
> The Daniels pile, as the concept was called, was taken seriously enough that Oak Ridge National Laboratory commissioned Monsanto to design a working version in 1945. Before it could be built, though, a bright Annapolis graduate named Hyman Rickover "sailed in with the Navy," as Daniels later put it, and the competing idea of building a rod-fueled, water-cooled reactor to power submarines. *With US Navy money backing the new design, the pebble bed fell by the wayside, and Daniels returned to the University of Wisconsin. By the time of his death in 1972, he was known as a pioneer of - irony alert - solar power. Indeed, the International Solar Energy Society's biennial award bears his name*


Just as then there are crucial decisions to be made as Jared Diamond points out so clearly in Collapse.
In my mind and that of many others only a hydrogen based fuel economy will provide long term solution without destroying the atmosphere and ONLY nuclear will supply that kind of power for the earth's population.

Yes it has it's drawbacks but no other technology ( and remember France is already almost 80% nuclear and Ontario is almost 40% ) can supply the amount of power required over the next 50 years and yet not add in any significant way to the global warming burden.
We get 25% from coal which is poisoning us and adding enormously to carbon loading of the atmosphere.

Choosing the scaleable PBR approach as China and S Africa are doing is something I'd like to see Ontario go after in a big way.

Reduction of energy use, alternative fuels have their part to play but nuclear is THE ONLY heavy lifting energy source than can possibly initiate the hydrogen age and even then the world population will need to drop significantly over time to be sustainable.

I suggest we not make a second compounding error - the promise of safe nuclear was there but for the weaponeers and it was the wrong choice then leading to Chernobyl and 3 mile Island.

We get our transport and 25% electricity from fossil fuels that IS making the air unbreathable and heating the planet. That in my mind is NOT a road to be taken further.

We get close to 50% of our electricity in Ontario now from a badly managed nuclear industry yet little of it makes the air unbreathable.
Taking the same sort of enormous step that created the Niagara Falls Hydro systems ( if you've never read the story - many died and was a massive bit of engineering that sees payoffs to this day ) is needed now to introduce scaleable meltdown proof nuclear programs here.

Will it not be ironic if China clears its air FIRST.
China intends to have 30 PBRs operating by 2020.
Where are we??



> according to Andrew Kadak, who teaches nuclear engineering at MIT (including a course titled "Colossal Failures in Engineering"). Kadak is a big-nuke guy by background. From 1989 to 1997, he was CEO of Yankee Atomic Electric, which ran - and ultimately closed - the '60s-vintage plant in Rowe, Massachusetts. Now he's helping INET refine its fuel ball technology and working with the US Department of Energy to build a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Research Lab.
> 
> "The industry has been focused on water-cooled reactors that require complicated safety systems," Kadak says. "The Chinese aren't constrained by that history. They're showing that there's another way that's simpler and safer. *The big question is whether the economics will pay off."*


With oil at a huge premium and climate change an accepted and unavoidable slow motion train crash in progress...... getting on with this kind of nuclear approach is to me the only long term sustainable option given the earth's population.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

MacDoc said:


> GA your green underwear is showing.


Could be, I don’t think I’ve wasted much energy trying to hide it.


MacDoc said:


> > As of June, 2005, 31 countries worldwide were operating 440 nuclear plants for
> > ... Nuclear power plants provided some 16 percent of the world's electricity ...
> 
> 
> and that number for France is 79% of electricity.


I don’t know if you noticed, but I said that nuclear plants account for 5% of the world’s *total energy use*. I’m aware that in different countries nuclear provides some larger numbers for electricity.


MacDoc said:


> PBR reactors represent a strong scaleable and inherently safe design - the one in Germany ran for 21 years and the facility was closed for political and economic reasons just after Chernobyl in the anti-everything- nuclear backlash.


That reactor was closed in 1986, right after Chernobyl, during the anti-everything-nuclear backlash, as you say. Here’s the part that they fail to mention in the pro-pebble bed cheerleading articles. 9 days after Chernobyl, that reactor had an accident, where one of the pebbles got stuck and during attempts to release it, it was cracked, which released radiation into the environment. Understandably, when people in Germany were wondering if they were going to start glowing in the dark from the effects of the Chernobyl catastrophe, they had little tolerance for a leaking reactor, that had no containment building.

Pebble bed technology has not been proven to be inherently any safer than current reactor technology and is just as prone to accidents resulting from human error, just like the older technology. Errors in the handling of the fuel and in the manufacture of the hundreds of thousands of pebbles required to run one of these things, has to approach nil, for them to be 100% safe, as proponents are arguing. The costs for waste disposal is greater because coating the fuel in layers of graphite and other materials to protect the flammable graphite means that the physical amount of spent waste is much greater than in the older technology.

Your quotes about the pebble bed reactors having the coolant switch off are dependant on one thing; as long as the pebbles are perfect the graphite won’t burn. A single tiny crack in a pebble and you have problems. If we scale up the manufacture of these fuel pebbles to the millions, it can be virtually guaranteed that there will be many imperfect pebbles make it into these reactors. Companies manufacturing these, seeking to contain their costs will cut corners. The accidents at Chernobyl and Windscale in 1957 both involved burning graphite, which released radiation over a long period of time.

The push to implement pebble bed has been using the same kind of hyperbolic Popular-Science-style language about their safety and cost, that was used to justify the original nuke power push. Increasing the amount of nuclear reactors by a factor of 10, to take up some slack from fossil fuels is just playing Russian roulette. We’ve witnessed 3 large bullets in the chamber, not to mention ongoing radiation leakage that the nuclear industry does its best to avoid talking about. Do you really want to see a pebble bed reactor in your neighbourhood, so that folks can continue commuting from the burbs in their new nuclear-power-generated-hydrogen SUVs?


MacDoc said:


> Easily accessible uranium may indeed represent a 50 year window at high use but reactors are able to breed fuel.


The info I’ve seen on uranium supply doesn’t talk about a 50 year window, more like 5 or 10, at current use. And nuclear reactors breeding fuel? Got links?


MacDoc said:


> and one "green emininence" has certainly lent his weight to the nuclear program of safe reactors.
> 
> 
> > In May, British eminence green James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a single self-regulating organism, published an impassioned plea to phase out fossil fuels in London's The Independent. Nuclear power, he argued, is the last, best hope for averting climatic catastrophe:


James Lovelock may have come up with a theory that appeals to mystical folks and science fiction fans, but I don’t know if he’s exactly a green eminence. I’ve read that he has been a supporter of nuclear energy, all along. His fanciful theory probably best explains his grounding in reality. 

Nuclear power is not and probably never will be carbon free, it is heavily subsidized by fossil fuels to continue. It’s contribution to global warming would be significant if increased massively. Mining uranium, transporting it, fabricating and building the plants are all things that would be very hard to duplicate using any other form of energy. If these energy intensive processes could eventually be replaced by hydrogen, the cost of that non-fossil energy would be huge, adding to nuclear energy’s huge economic cost. 


MacDoc said:


> Coming to terms with nuclear energy is only a first step. To power a billion cars, there's no practical alternative to hydrogen. But it will take huge quantities of energy to extract hydrogen from water and hydrocarbons, and the best ways scientists have found to do that require high temperatures, up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. In other words, there's another way of looking at INET's high-temperature reactor and its potential offspring: They're hydrogen machines.


If the point of increasing the amount of expensive and risky nuke plants worldwide and here at home is so we can continue on with the wasteful suburban car culture, using hydrogen fuel cells, then why not just start seriously looking at redesigning our cities, curbing suburban sprawl and moving away from our auto-centric way of life. They’ve taken great strides in that direction in Europe, why are we incapable of it?

We seem to be only too willing to think of our current auto-centric culture as the only workable alternative and are willing to take on great planetary risk to be able to continue it. If we could start to reduce our per capita energy use, it might give us some more time to come up with some real alternatives, rather than adding many thousands of nuclear reactors world-wide or converting all of our farmland to soybeans for cars.


MacDoc said:


> With oil at a huge premium and climate change an accepted and unavoidable slow motion train crash in progress...... getting on with this kind of nuclear approach is to me the only long term sustainable option given the earth's population.


Yes, this is the only option unless we can learn to think differently. C’mon we’re Mac-users, right.


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## Loafer (Jan 7, 2004)

Can I just point out already today I have seen people on TV talking about not driving so much when the price of gas is at $1 a litre.

The days of people driving SUV's from the suburbs for 1 hour to work every day are certainly very limited.

Scramble now for a home on the subway line before it hits $2 a litre!!

Maybe.....just maybe, the powers that be do care about the environment and they are fabricating this scare and keeping crude oil prices artificially high to push more and more people towards conserving energy in order to slow global warming......and to be honest, I would't mind, I look forward to the day when you can look out over Toronto without seeing a brownish haze.

The higher gas prices go, the better in my opinion.
My wife catches the train to work and I work from home


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

> Do you really want to see a pebble bed reactor in your neighbourhood, so that folks can continue commuting from the burbs in their new nuclear-power-generated-hydrogen SUVs?


Yes I do so I can breathe.
You CANNOT alter the energy use for first world society in any meaningful way. YOu can nudge it a bit - save a bit here or there but there is NO bridge to hydrogen except nuclear and the sooner we get on with it the better.

It's already here - more please.


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## GratuitousApplesauce (Jan 29, 2004)

MacDoc said:


> You CANNOT alter the energy use for first world society in any meaningful way.


That's a sad assumption, MacDoc. It's means that maybe we are as stupid collectively as run-away bacteria crowding out a petri dish. I continue to hope we are not. 

Essentially we are looking at a lower energy future, either done voluntarily and intelligently through choice, or involuntarily because of scarcity. Nuclear is not an alternative that is workable for reasons stated in above posts and from the quote below. Nuclear, biodeisel, these are all incapable of replacing fossil fuels, not only at current levels, but keeping up with exponential growth in world-wide demand.


> But environmentalists on both sides of this argument are overlooking the strongest objection to nuclear power, even as the nuclear industry is hoping no one notices it.
> 
> The objection is rooted in energy economics, hence the oversight. As energy economist Joseph Romm argued in a blog exchange with Brand, "It is too often the case that experts on the environment think they know a lot about energy, but they don't."
> 
> ...


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## MacDoc (Nov 3, 2001)

It's nice sounding pablum but unless you want to reduce your living standard by about 80% or population by 80% that's ALL it is.

Nuclear is ALREADY here - Hydrogen HAS to replace fossil fuels. No amount of "tighter housing" will replace fossil fuels with hydrogen.
Why is that so hard to understand.

Even if you achieved a 40% better use of energy that still does not solve the fossil fuel issue for 8.5 billion people.

Let's take a current cost of 1.5 billion US for a major plant ( it is much less for PBR but th epower output is smaller as well )

A retrofit of a condo to reduce energy use costs about $3/4 million dollars.

So you can do about 1250 medium sized condos for the cost as a BIG plant.

To house a million people in 60 unit condos means about 8500 condo buildings in total.

and you STILL have not even scratched fossil fuel other than dropping the overall energy requirement by 40%.
So you can then house 400,000 more people with the same energy footprint that an inefficient set of condos.

The GTA will grow by 2 MILLION people in the next 10 years. We would not even be treading water in terms of fossil fuel use if right today we started retrofitting every single condo.
The GTA plan does call for 40% more density by 2015 and that will help somewhat for transport costs.

ONLY doing that AND replacing fossil fuel with hydrogen and electricity from nuclear will gets us even close.

Upping electricity to 80% nuclear and the rest renewable wind/hydro is step one.

That means doubling the current nuclear from 10 giga watts to 20 and then 25 for population increases PLUS increasing wind and hydro /solar.
That's just to eliminate electricity fossil dependence. $15-20 billion.

THEN the hydrogen needs means upping the that about twice again to get heating and vehicle to no fossil use.



> We do three basic things with it: generate electricity (about 40 percent of the raw energy consumed), move vehicles (30 percent), and produce heat (30 percent


We need 6-8 times the current nuclear energy at current population levels to replace fossil fuels and that really does not take into account a full accounting of the fossil fuel component in getting there but at least the primary needs are close to carbon load zero.

Then another 20-25% for population growth.

That's just for Ontario AND assumes a 40% better energy use in newly built and retrofitted buildings AND renewables taking up 20%.

You are simply dreaming if you think any combination of energy saving techniques and renewables can get even close given population and anything remotely resembling an energy conscious first world life style.

Hydrogen as fuel, fuel cells, renewables AND nuclear as the heavy lifter MIGHT make the planet liveable.

I suspect it will take that AND an enormous population drop in the longer term.

There is no magic elixir to fix this, it's wishful thinking to look for any other path that sustains a reasonable life style AND population AND the atmosphere.

I would say sequestering carbon in conjunction with the ramping down of fossil fuel will ALSO be a requirement to keep the carbon loading from cooking us.


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