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Honesty being “inconvenient” for psychopaths like Truss as evidence of “government cruelty” is simply a symptom of the global rush towards fascism, which in turn is a symptom of ‘peak oil’ i.e. ‘Energy Returned On Energy Invested’ becoming too uneconomic for extractors to invest in future supply demand i.e. fuel is too expensive to carry on running civilization.
Truss and all the other political / corporate / military psychopaths know this at least at some basic emotional level, i.e. that modern civilisations’ primary energy – FOSSIL FUEL – supply is fast running out and CAN’T BE REPLACED by wind or solar (since they require high energy density fossil fuels to build).
https://energyskeptic.com/2022/fridley-alternative-energy-wont-save-us/
When (medium energy density) coal took off in the early 1800’s (replacing low energy density water, wind & wood) globally only 1 billion people were alive. Burning coal for about 120 years enabled global population to double to 2 billion in 1927 when oil was beginning to take off. Over the next 50 years it doubled again to 4 billion in 1974. And over the last 50 years its doubled again to nearly 8 billion today.
Without cheap plentiful fossil fuels human civilization is collapsing already : expect global population numbers to shrink at a much faster rate than the historic population growth outline above i.e. complexity cannot be sustained and elites like Truss will do all they can to cheat others everywhere out of fair shares of diminishing resources.
Chris Hedges is recently beginning to understand this inevitability too.
Chris Hedges: The Final Collapse – Consortium News, 15 August 2022
As I may have mentioned before, Natasha, fossil fuels aren’t running out and they CAN BE REPLACED by wind and solar energy because you don’t need fossil fuels to build wind turbines and photo-voltaic panels since you can use biofuels instead. Biofuels are already being used on an immense scale, such as bio-ethanol from corn / maize making up around 10% of US petrol – or ‘gas’ as they call it over there.
At last! Finally Lapsed Agnostic agrees that low energy density solar and wind energy flow harvesting machines NEED high energy density liquid hydrocarbons to power machinery to mine and refine (i.e. process heat that electricity CAN’T provide) ALL the raw materials, and heavy transport (not battery powered skate boards but 20 ton trucks and earth movers) to build, connect to the grid, maintain and replace wind & solar farms every 25 years! Hurray ?
Not even Liss Truss has gotten this far in logical reasoning about the world!
But then Lapsed Agnostic mistakenly claims that:
” […] you can use biofuels instead [of fossil fuels to build net energy sink wind & solar infrastructure]. Biofuels are already being used on an immense scale”
and that therefore its possible to build net energy sink wind and solar infrastructure.
However this is utter nonsense. The most obvious fact is that LAND use can’t scale anywhere near sufficiently for biofuel to not remain a tiny niche since they require huge amounts of land to convert low energy density solar radiation into useful hydrocarbon liquid fuels, as some quick search engine powered reading around this topic would reveal. For example, let’s look at the impossible scale of biomass required (from a 2010 paper):
- 150 EJ/year = 15 billion metric tons of plant biomass = 200 billion cubic meters of bales, wood chips, pellets, etc. Agricultural products: Rice, wheat, soy, corn, etc: 2 billion tons, 2.75 billion cubic meters.
- Coal: 6.2 billion cubic meters, Oil: 5.7 billion cubic meters. Therefore, the biofuel biomass required would be much larger than all energy and agricultural commodities now.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1189139
https://energyskeptic.com/2017/alternative-energy-reading-list/
https://energyskeptic.com/2016/are-biofuels-sustainable-and-viable-energy-strategy/
https://energyskeptic.com/2015/biofuels-do-not-scale-up-enough-to-power-society/
So why does Lapsed Agnostic (like far too many others) still fail to do some rudimentary reading behind such unrealistic “Biofuel” (and many other similar e.g. hydrogen) claims? Why not read what those you disagree with are saying? Why not know your enemy? Why not do some basic scientific / logical reasoning, before offering such fantasy beliefs here in comments on this blog?
I give links to everything I claim here, yet once again Lapsed Agnostic fails to cite any references to support the mantra of what climate scientist James Hansen labels “tooth fairy” ideas and misguided dangerous beliefs such as: ‘biofuels will save us’. Such failures of logic perhaps amount to too many people being victims of mainstream ‘grooming’ into believing that humans can continue on our recent trajectory of growth forever into the future ignoring all the obvious limits of living on our solitary ‘Pale Blue Dot’ by taking on trust the anti-scientific ‘hot air’ pedalled by for example the so called ‘Green New Deal’ idiots, Greenpeace and dozens of other similar outfits?
https://www.withouthotair.com/
https://archive.org/details/atomichumanismthecasefornuclearpowerv1
Meanwhile where to grow all these monoculture biofuels when the UK’s 250,000Km2 is 57% farm, 35% natural, 3% green urban, and 6% built on? (BBC summary based on 2017 Corine data)? And if grown abroad, what about ‘extractivism’ i.e. locals getting pissed of with colonialism stealing their land and resources for foreign corporate profit? And fast running out irrigation water?
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=extractivism&ia=web
Not even Liss Truss has gotten this far in logical reasoning about the world!
But then Lapsed Agnostic mistakenly claims that:
” […] you can use biofuels instead [of fossil fuels to build net energy sink wind & solar infrastructure]. Biofuels are already being used on an immense scale”
and that therefore its possible to build net energy sink wind and solar infrastructure.
However this is utter nonsense. The most obvious fact is that LAND use can’t scale anywhere near sufficiently for biofuel to not remain a tiny niche since they require huge amounts of land to convert low energy density solar radiation into useful hydrocarbon liquid fuels, as some quick search engine powered reading around this topic would reveal. For example, let’s look at the impossible scale of biomass required (from a 2010 paper):
150 EJ/year = 15 billion metric tons of plant biomass = 200 billion cubic meters of bales, wood chips, pellets, etc. Agricultural products: Rice, wheat, soy, corn, etc: 2 billion tons, 2.75 billion cubic meters.
Coal: 6.2 billion cubic meters, Oil: 5.7 billion cubic meters. Therefore, the biofuel biomass required would be much larger than all energy and agricultural commodities now.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1189139https://energyskeptic.com/2017/alternative-energy-reading-list/
https://energyskeptic.com/2016/are-biofuels-sustainable-and-viable-energy-strategy/
https://energyskeptic.com/2015/biofuels-do-not-scale-up-enough-to-power-society/
So why does Lapsed Agnostic (like far too many others) still fail to do some rudimentary reading behind such unrealistic “Biofuel” (and many other similar e.g. hydrogen) claims? Why not read what those you disagree with are saying? Why not know your enemy? Why not do some basic scientific / logical reasoning, before offering such fantasy beliefs here in comments on this blog?
I give links to everything I claim here, yet once again Lapsed Agnostic fails to cite any references to support the mantra of what climate scientist James Hansen labels “tooth fairy” ideas and misguided dangerous beliefs such as: ‘biofuels will save us’. Such failures of logic perhaps amount to too many people being victims of mainstream ‘grooming’ into believing that humans can continue on our recent trajectory of growth forever into the future ignoring all the obvious limits of living on our solitary ‘Pale Blue Dot’ by taking on trust the anti-scientific ‘hot air’ pedalled by for example the so called ‘Green New Deal’ idiots, Greenpeace and dozens of other similar outfits?
https://www.withouthotair.com/
https://archive.org/details/atomichumanismthecasefornuclearpowerv1
Meanwhile where to grow all these monoculture biofuels when the UK’s 250,000Km2 is 57% farm, 35% natural, 3% green urban, and 6% built on? (BBC summary based on 2017 Corine data)? And if grown abroad, what about ‘extractivism’ i.e. locals getting pissed of with colonialism stealing their land and resources for foreign corporate profit? And fast running out irrigation water?
Thanks for your reply Natasha. Heavy-duty mobile mining equipment doesn’t need liquid hydrocarbon-based fuels to operate – think of the power generated by electric locomotives etc – it’s just far more convenient for it not to have to be connected to high-voltage power cables or overhead wires. Neither do blast furnaces for ore refining – think about the heat generated by electric arc welding equipment etc.
Using biofuels to make renewable infrastructure isn’t utter nonsense or even partial nonsense – it makes perfect sense. Biofuel may not be able to replace all the fossil fuel used today, but it doesn’t have to since at present most fossil fuel is used for mass transportation and domestic heating, whereas comparatively little is used to make wind turbines and solar panels. If, as most Western politicians desire, in 20 years’ time most people in the developed world are either driving electric vehicles or using public transport, the amount of biofuel being used is likely to be much less than gets used now.
Provided they are sited at suitable locations, wind turbines and solar panels are not net energy sinks because over their operational lifetimes they produce a *lot* more energy than it takes to make them. This is a demonstrable fact. Here is an analysis of (mostly land-sited) wind turbines, which shows them to have a mean energy return of about 20 [TWENTY] times:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S096014810900055X
I do read people who disagree with me, not least on this blog (see my jousts with Bayard etc). I also don’t think that neo-Malthusians, such as yourself and most of the people you cite, are the enemy – I just think they are misinformed and misguided.
Most of your links are to a neo-Malthusian blog called ‘Energy Skeptics’. However, you did provide one to the late Prof David Mackay’s ‘Sustainability without the Hot Air’, which I’ve read in full and think is a bit of a tour de force. So what were the professor’s conclusions? Did he think it was all hopeless and we should either resign ourselves to either keep burning fossil fuels and letting global temperatures keep rising and rising, or be prepared to reduce our Western lifestyles to something close that of peasants in the Middle Ages? Or did he think that it was genuinely possible to maintain our current lifestyles and still get to net zero carbon, both in the UK and the wider world? Pretty much the latter as far as I could make out. You can do it in many different ways – as he stated, all you need is a plan that adds up.
P.S. In case you haven’t already seen it, I’ve replied to your reply to my comment about the land areas required for crops on the first page of comments on the ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ blogpost, and included a link to a YouTube video from George Monbiot which you may find interesting.
heat generated by electric arc welding equipment,
Hmmmm. Arc welding creates a high temperature, highly localised, not a lot of heat. This sentence jarred me as much as people claiming million degree lasers are the answer (to anything).
Thanks for your reply Mr mcLaserface. Apologies for not clarifying the exact difference between heat and temperature for what I would imagine is a largely non-scientific readership (assuming anyone apart from Bayard & Natasha actually does read this shit). I was trying to think of a reasonably familiar example for Natasha of electricity being used to make things very hot. Perhaps I should have written: ‘think of the heat generated by an electric arc furnace’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace
Hope you are feeling less jarred now.
Lapsed Agnostic, Thanks for the opportunity to help other readers here understand this vitally important issue. And thanks for the opportunity to review my position on a “plan that adds up”. But you cast as a straw man David Mackay’s ‘Hot Air’ book, and you are completely wrong about his intended message.
Mackay does NOT ask us to
“…. resign ourselves to either keep burning fossil fuels and letting global temperatures keep rising and rising, or be prepared to reduce our Western lifestyles to something close that of peasants in the Middle Ages?”
Nor
“as far as [you] could make out […] did he think that it was genuinely possible to maintain our current lifestyles and still get to net zero carbon, both in the UK and the wider world.”
First off, fossil fuels are fast running out – TODAY – they are rapidly getting too energy expensive to bother extracting i.e. global warming is self-limiting.
Second, the single link (to a mealy mouthed one paragraph abstract with the text behind a pay-wall) to support the low-energy-density-wind-water-solar-energy-will-save-us ‘fairy tale’ you (and many others) appear attached to, but which admits that the authors’ have simply written a “review” of recent work based upon “viewing the EROI as function of power rating”.
In other words analysing “power rating[s]” is context free, and thus utterly useless, something David Mackay’s ‘Hot Air’ book was entirely aimed at pointing out. Power stations don’t operate outside of their supporting environments, which by (political / ideological / financial / psychopathic) design or ignorance are ignored by such (so called scientific) papers. For example Mackay calculated we would need about twice the land area of the UK just to power the UK with solar or wind electricity. Even more for bio-fuels (whatever George Monbiot may say).
The types of analysis in the link you give ignores too many externalities, such as the entire raw materials supply chain needed to build the power supply infrastructure itself, land thereby taken out of other uses (e.g. growing food etc.) nor roads, bridges, workers’ overheads, transport, their education, etc. etc…. to the sites, then connect it to a grid and power balance / seasonal storage (when the sun and wind ‘aint shining or blowing) to maintain and decommission at end of life (remembering that all the rare materials require too much HEAT energy to recover), and/or also mistakenly believes that supply & demand market forces on $£ prices will yield all the materials / inputs needed.
Is it not clear to everyone, that ignoring externalities is fatal, rendering (for example) the analysis in the link you give useless, as the following homework reading (none from your bête noire ‘Energy Skeptics’) clearly and repeatedly demonstrates ?
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-100-renewables-the-jacobson-et-al-2018-study/
http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/12/review-of-masrk-z-jacobsons-review.html
Meanwhile, such obfuscation (as highlighted in the abstract you linked to and torn to shreds in the multiple links I provide here) is rampant amongst those still in love with the idea that since the total energy from the sun hitting the earth is so large surely we must be able to harness it and carry on with 8 billion people and growing until it goes supernova? Sorry but thermodynamics prevent this.
And labelling me and those I cite (such as ‘Energy Skeptics’ Alice Friedemann’s blog and several of her books too, in which EVERY post since it began in 2010 includes multiple reference to books and papers) as “neo-Malthusians” (as far as physics goes but NOT the politics or policy implications) is a BIG complement (not the ridicule you perhaps intended) since it is axiomatic we live on a finite planet, and human population growth has undeniably been in a rapid exponential growth spurt since coal and oil began to be burned c250 or so years ago e.g. population has doubled since I was born 60 odd years ago. If you think such populations and future growth is even remotely sustainable, please pass on whatever it is you are imbibing, so I too can enjoy the delusions so produced!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism
If such people genuinely want to learn about energy supply technology they would have noticed these glaring omissions in their ‘pet’ analysis’. So here’s some (more) basic homework for all those here genuinely interested in learning about Energy Returned on Energy (not £$) Invested.
http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/175-the-surplus-energy-economy/
Enjoy!
(PS please excuse my inclusion of this ‘authority’ logical fallacy but as a retired industrial electro magnetics designer / physics / maths / 3D design practitioner project manager and teacher, I have some experience in ‘whole-system’ analysis.)
Natasha, a little (hopefully) hopeful fact for you. You wrote:
– “human population growth has undeniably been in a rapid exponential growth spurt since coal and oil began to be burned c250 or so years ago e.g. population has doubled since I was born 60 odd years ago”
Exponential population growth stopped some decades ago; humanity has already passed peak births on every continent but Africa, which is also heading in the same direction. Many of the richest countries already have birth rates below the replacement rate. Population is still increasing, but primarily due to people living longer.
I’m not suggesting that there is no problem; eight billion people, topping out somewhere between ten and twenty billion people is still a massive challenge. But it does make the problem potentially tractable.
Lapsed Agnostic told us that David Mackay “stated, all you need is a plan that adds up”. That would be nice, but making a plan is the easy part, and we haven’t even tried making one yet. We would then need to implement the plan, and this is the stage at which we would discover multiple practical difficulties.
Natasha, I strongly agree that humanity is in deep shit. It looks to me possible to climb out, but I’m just not seeing nearly enough of the activities necessary to achieve it. Instead I’m seeing excessive and increasing activity that’s digging us ever deeper in, so the odds are getting worse every day.
In early September I’ll be London with Extinction Rebellion, making a nuisance of myself, because we need Citizens’ Assemblies practising deliberative democracy to address this; the politics we already have is clearly dysfunctional, to put it politely. Extinction Rebellion doesn’t have an energy policy; energy policy is for the people to decide, not a bunch of activists. Extinction rebellion are just teeth and claws, but our demand is for a functional brain:
Thanks for your reply Natasha. I see that after veering off-topic, we’ve been moved onto the forums to continue our exchange – fair enough. I doubt that I’m completely wrong about Prof Mackay’s intended message – if he’d have thought we were all doomed, it’s unlikely he’d have spent much of his short time left on Earth writing a book about it. You, however, are wrong about him calculating that we’d need twice the area of the UK to generate enough wind or solar energy to meet our requirements. For example, he states that we’d need to cover 5% of the UK with cheap 10% efficient solar PV panels to generate on average 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity per person per day:
https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_41.shtml
Later on, he explains that, by making a few efficiencies, we can obtain a situation where each person in the UK only requires on average 68 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy per day:
https://www.withouthotair.com/c27/page_204.shtml
Therefore we’d only need about 7% of the UK’s land area to be covered with solar panels (even with no wind turbines), not 200% – and remember the UK is one of the dullest countries in the world.
Sorry that the link I cited is behind a pay-wall – academic publishers like making money*, even though most of what they publish is paid for by taxpayers. I haven’t got time to read all the references you cited, but I did read this one:
http://euanmearns.com/eroei-for-beginners/
If you look at Figure 4, you will see that the EROI figure quoted for wind turbines is 18, which is fairly similar to that stated in the reference in my previous comment. The figure quoted for solar panels is 6-12. For comparison, the average EROI for oil at the present time is around 10 and has been for several years. Yes, these figures will be reduced slightly by the ‘externalities’ you mentioned, but not to anywhere near 1.
The materials in solar panels and wind turbines don’t require too much heat to recover – in fact it requires less energy than extracting them from their respective ores – it’s just not deemed economical to do it at the moment because it can’t be carried out on a sufficiently large scale yet.
Fossil fuels are not fast running out – far from it. According to several sources, there are 1.5-1.7 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves remaining (that’s reserves that have a 90% chance of economic recovery at today’s prices with today’s technology):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil_reserves
At the moment, we get through around 28 billion barrels of oil a year globally, so that’s enough for 50 years at today’s rates of consumption (and this doesn’t include probable reserves with a 50% chance of recovery, or shale / tight oil reserves in the US). Then there’s coal and natural gas reserves, which in energy terms are far bigger. What do you think would happen if you approached James Hansen and told him not to worry about AGW as fossil fuels will soon become too expensive to extract, so it will be ‘self-limiting’? Would he accuse you of believing in ‘tooth fairy tales’?
Glad you appreciate being called a neo-Malthusian. Of course the human population can’t keep doubling every few decades, that’s not sustainable – no exponential is – but that’s almost certainly not going to happen since the population is predicted to peak at between 10 and 11 billion around 2050.
There is no law of thermodynamics that means that we can’t harness a fraction of the Sun’s energy for our requirements, since it generously provides us with about as much energy in an hour as humans use in a year. By the way, the Sun is not predicted to eventually become a supernova, since it would need to be at least nine times as massive for that to happen – instead in about five billion years it should just become a red giant and then a white dwarf, like most stars.
If we’re engaging in credentialism, I should tell you that I have a PhD in chemistry from a Russell Group university (though it was 1994 Group in my day – that dates it) and a first class BSc partially in physics prior to that. Finally, if I may be permitted to offer a little advice: if I was you, I wouldn’t waste your remaining years worrying about AGW, and even less about fossil fuels running out. If you need something to worry about, try all-out thermonuclear war between NATO and Russia and/or China, which should be far more concerning to anyone in the Western world.
* Many moons ago, I was paid a flat fee of around 700 euros (with no royalties) after being cajoled into writing roughly half of a hefty tome about some fairly arcane chemistry that in its first print run was changing hands for 3000 euros a copy. I won’t be doing anything like that again in a hurry.
Lapsed Agnostic, I agree that thermonuclear war is a worry, though the US is unlikely to have intended that or they wouldn’t have provoked the Russian government so much. But why wouldn’t you worry about AGW? Do you go as far as not worrying about its context, the ecological crisis, the apparent onset of mass extinction?
As to hydrocarbons not running out, I suppose I’ve come to think of this in a different way – hydrocarbons are forever running out, in one place after another. The US “lower 48 states” oil peaked and went into decline in the mid 1970s, and the North Sea in the late 1990s, I think. But the “proven reserves” you linked to came as a surprise to me.
So maybe US military aggression is about having effective control of production, ie. liquid fuel can only be produced at a rate determined by existing development and infrastructure, so whichever empire controls the most of existing production can fight the most vigorously in war.
EROEI seems a decent “running out” gauge, and it has already fallen to 10:1. To help assess hydrocarbon availability and depletion, should we look at graphs of EROEI against time, consumption against time, and EROEI against consumption?
Lot of stuff to read through and mull over. I like Prof McKay’s use of energy produced per metre squared. Is there a way to merge EROEI.
For interest’s sake, here is an article on Finland’s heroic efforts a in dealing with nuclear waste.
Solving the rock-hard problem of nuclear waste disposal .@Clark The 10:1 figure is for new oil developments, that is drilling, extraction, transportation, processing etc and the supporting infrastructure for that project. Existing or legacy oil producers can stil produce oil from existing fields, using existing infrastructure at a much higher ERoEI. Oil exploitation started when the ERoEI was *much* higher than today, with 100s:1 returns.
Existing infrastructure makes quite a difference to the viability of oil extraction, and this extends to society at large. There’s also non-energy uses for oil, a substantial portion of the heaviest oil, asphalt, is used for road surfaces, just replacing this use, with for example concrete is not without consequences.
Our entire system has been built on fossil fuel exploitation, and substitution would require additional expenditure of energy and resources, so it’s difficult to compare different sources 1:1.
I mostly agree with what @Natasha wrote above, except all the evidence is that AGW is self sustaining at this point. Major tipping points have already been crossed, and even if that wasn’t the case, I find it extremely likely momentum and ignorance will lead us to pursue net negative strategies which will produce exponentially more emissions before we lose the capability to do so. In fact we’ve already begun.
ET, we’d produce a fraction as much spent nuclear fuel if only we didn’t put uranium 238 in our reactors. Our “fuel” is 97% U238, an impurity which contributes very little energy. Nearly all the U238 that does anything at all (about 20% of it I think) just transmutes into problematic transuranics. The U238 is included for political rather than engineering reasons.
Steven Newbury, thanks.
My feelings about humanity’s future can vary from wild optimism, through numbness or curiosity, to wild pessimism, the pessimism being a lot more prevalent than the optimism. Things look to be going pretty badly, but there are some great technologies that could support a comfortable standard of living for all. But we need to get on and build them before we squander the resources we have, and we’re not.
Regarding the climate and the Earth system, I think it’s very hard to predict. It’s an organic, biological system and they’re inherently unpredictable; as it says in Murphy’s Law (Arthur Bloch), “under the most rigorously controlled conditions of temperature, pressure, humidity and all other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases”. The partial success of climate modelling so far is because the system hasn’t yet been pushed far from its familiar stable state; the system has massive resilience . But climate modelling beyond the melting of the Arctic sea ice, for instance, seems speculative to me.
We have to stop the harm.
Thanks everyone for your contributions. To address people’s points:
From a personal point of view, I’m not overly worried about AGW because I live in a developed country and it will most severely affect people in developing world countries – whereas thermonuclear war will mostly severely affect people in developed world countries, and according to the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk there’s a 1 in 80 chance of it happening in a given year. Based on figures of the number of people currently dying in natural disasters per year, I would roughly estimate that the maximum number of deaths caused by AGW of 2-3 degrees versus pre-industrial levels would be around 300,000 per year, whereas as all-out thermonuclear war would leave at least 500 million dead within a year.
As regards mass extinctions, even if their habitats change completely, most plant species won’t go extinct because their seeds are being collected and stored in low-temperature seedbanks, such as the one on Spitzbergen. It will be harder to revive animal species, but should be possible in the not-too-distant future provided a few cells from the animal have been kept frozen in suspended animation.
This analysis of 30 large oil companies, including Saudi Aramco, Rosneft & the National Iranian Oil Co, shows that the average EROEI for oil is around 10, and over the last 20 years it has been roughly constant against time:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-021-00095-6#Abs1
Natural uranium is 99.3% U-238 – separating out the U-235 takes a lot of energy. The problem with radioactive waste isn’t the transuranic elements though, which aren’t really that radioactive – it’s the long-lived fission products like caesium-137 and strontium-90.
Lapsed Agnostic, good to hear back from you.
Caesium-137 and strontium-90 are medium-lived fission products, not long-lived. They have half lives of about 30 and 29 years respectively. The rule-of-thumb is that radioactive isotopes decay to background levels of radioactivity in about ten half lives, so caesium-137 and strontium-90 are not responsible for the multi-millennium storage problem.
There is a summary of long-lived fission products here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_products
– “After [caesium-137 and strontium-90] have decayed to low levels, the bulk of radioactivity from spent fuel come not from fission products but actinides, notably plutonium-239 (half-life 24 ka), plutonium-240 (6.56 ka), americium-241 (432 years), americium-243 (7.37 ka), curium-245 (8.50 ka), and curium-246 (4.73 ka).”
I can’t remember the slight technical difference between the meanings of “actinides” and “transuranics”, but both refer to isotopes of higher atomic number / atomic mass than uranium, and they do mostly descend from U-238, simply because there is around 30 times more of it in fresh fuel rods than there is U-235. Yes, they can be reprocessed out, resulting in a smaller long-term storage problem at the expense of greater immediate risk.
I’ll have to get back to you about your climate change comments.
Natasha is 100% correct.
Our entire culture and way of life is based on cheap energy, which is becoming less cheap as the easy resources are (naturally) used up first, leaving only the more difficult and more expensive ones (e.g. oil extracted from beneath the sea bed is more expensive (in terms of energy) to extract than onshore oil).Why is this so hard for people to grasp, as it seems pretty obvious, given even just the slightest bit of thought?
Is it just a refusal to accept the truth?After all the debates it really doesn’t matter what anyone believes, the result (end of cheap energy / way of life built on it) will be the same anyway. That is not a political statement – it’s just physics.
Lapsed Agnostic, thanks for the interesting link to the paper “Deriving EROI for Thirty Large Oil Companies Using the CO2 Proxy from 1999 to 2018″, which I will have to read in full. For now I’ll just draw attention to figure 10, the Euan Mearns diagram; with EROI near 10 we look perilously close to sliding off the “energy cliff”.
And oil’s EROEI is bound to fall. I really don’t like the look of that steepening gradient on the right-hand side of that graph.
Bob, it does matter what people believe because what people believe determines how people behave, and the future is not yet written. With EROEI of oil already lower than that of wind turbines, the cheapest energy (by physical rather than monetary measures) has already transitioned to being renewables; the supposedly all-seeing market is just frustratingly (and dangerously) slow on the uptake.
Clark, it’s not quite true to say the cheapest energy has transitioned to being renewables because, as someone referred to earlier, renewables are dependent on fossil fuels. Their construction requires high temperature process heat, which can only be delivered by fossil fuels. This is due to their incredible energy density.
The reality is we’ve squandered this limited resource due to our short-term perspective (perhaps understandable, given our long evolutionary history and short lifespans).
Countless tons of disposable plastic crap ‘products’ have been / are being made, all in the name of economic growth. Such folly will be judged harshly by any surviving future historians.The best way forward would be to end the pursuit of economic growth, consume far, far less (energy and products) and use our remaining fossil fuels to create durable and easily maintainable renewables.
Even if this happens the world population will probably shrink due to the end of fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen fertilisers used in our current intensive farming practices.I just want to add that if my previous post sounded a bit like the WEF’s agenda (global depopulation, owning “nothing” etc.) I in no way whatsoever endorse the WEF or any of its criminal gang of psycopaths.
It’s a safe bet that if the world were to make a transition to a very low-energy, low-consumption existence, the oligarchs and global cult will not be living like that. They only intend it for the masses (a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’).Bob, I almost entirely agree, and the two aspects of your comment about the WEF are, together, amusing and highly refreshing.
But I continue to argue that renewables are already the cheapest (in physical terms) because fossil fuel production itself is dependent upon fossil fuels – we’d get more bang by spending our fossil fuel bucks on renewables than on dwindling fossil fuels. Law of diminishing returns.
Did you look up the electric arc furnace that Lapsed Agnostic linked to? Several times as energy efficient as smelting with combustion, particularly well suited to recycling scrap, and it can be started and stopped at short notice, without significant efficiency loss, thus helping to balance a grid powered by intermittent renewables. One of those great technologies that gives me hope.
That said, I find Lapsed Agnostic’s position overly optimistic – which I must get around to posting some comments about…
Clark, I agree we need to at least attempt some kind of transition over to renewables (together with a vast reduction in energy use) and we should be using the remaining fossil fuels for that purpose. Whether that can be done without society collapsing first, I don’t know (but you’re right, we must have some hope).
I will look into the electric arc furnace mentioned by you and LA, cheers.
