The Green New Deal

[Zambo]

Ok but I still don't understand what you're getting at. That comment was in response to wind and solar being unrealiable because of weather, and now you're talking about coal plants. Help me out, here.

I am saying that coal-fired power plants are also unreliable due to shutdowns (planned and unplanned). This is dealt with by using a power grid. Solar and wind power can both be connected to 132KV, 220KV and 400KV transmission grids which distribute power over long distances. It is possible to use weather data to ensure you will have power where and when it is needed.

 

[Belz...]

the logic is obvious: space flight might be commercial now, but that is due to billions of public funds int he past.
Nuclear power might become commercial again, but it will take billions of investment to make it so.

That's my point, actually.

I am saying that coal-fired power plants are also unreliable due to shutdowns (planned and unplanned). This is dealt with by using a power grid. Solar and wind power can both be connected to 132KV, 220KV and 400KV transmission grids which distribute power over long distances. It is possible to use weather data to ensure you will have power where and when it is needed.

Except that a single plant shutting down can be compensated by another, nearby plant. A single polar vortex can shut down half of your grid, and suddenly you don't have enough power for everyone, and that's assuming you have an excess to begin with.

So far no one's addressed the environmental impact of developing solar to that degree. Why?

 

[Zambo]

That's my point, actually.



Except that a single plant shutting down can be compensated by another, nearby plant. A single polar vortex can shut down half of your grid, and suddenly you don't have enough power for everyone, and that's assuming you have an excess to begin with.

So far no one's addressed the environmental impact of developing solar to that degree. Why?

You always have to have an excess of power generation to achieve the peaks. That is where the smart grid technologies will help by removing the peaks, Tesla powerwall being an example of how to do that for a household. In a larger scale other storage methods are possible.

If coal fired power plants were substituted by solar and wind with internal combustion engines replaced by electric vehicles that would be a good step forward. At that stage you will still have gas which although far from environmemtally perfect is better than oil and coal and for power generstion is easier to switch on and off.

 

[Belz...]

You always have to have an excess of power generation to achieve the peaks. That is where the smart grid technologies will help by removing the peaks, Tesla powerwall being an example of how to do that for a household. In a larger scale other storage methods are possible.

I understand that, but I doubt the excess is in the range of 50%. When you shut down a plant, you lose a small portion of the grid, so excess can compensate. With weather, you can lose a large portion of it, so you need a much larger excess. Can we manage that?

And you still haven't addressed the environmental impact. Solar isn't all green, you know.

 

[jimbob]

Fukishima was

Not as bad as Chernobyl but not a great effort either. I know nuclear can be a lot safer but it's not just because of Chernobyl that nuclear gets a bad name.
​

Indeed, and quoting both you and me from 2012:

TEPCO was not fit to run anything remotely safety critical, and hadn't been for decades:

I would accept a proper state of the company would have been an effective and considered emergency plan. They didn't have one.
I would have expected that they immediately ask for as much outside help, both material and advisory, the moment they knew that the plant was running on batteries with a time to expire of about 12 hours.
I would have expected that after it was found that TEPCO had forged documents about plant maintenance and standards, they would have had the nuclear plants taken off them, or the TEPCO management would have been placed under strict governance, with all safety standards and plans revised.

I would agree with what you say, but object, that we don't hear TEPCO or Japan's side of this conversation; all we are hearing is Americans, and that is what I was responding to.

There is plenty of evidence for TEPCO falsifying safety reports

for example within this article form the Wall Street Journal

We also know that there had been at least one earthquake-induced incident before that greenpeace flagged up as demonstrating the weakness in the cooling system that actually caused the disaster. I don't like linking to greenpeace as it is partisan, but in this case, given the date of 2007, it is valid.

Nobody thought to ask "What if another building falls onto it and it catches fire and the fire is left burning for 6 hours?"

Same thing goes for Fukishima, nobody thought to ask "What if a tsunami hits and it knocks out the pumps"
The anti nuke crowd has it right to point out that no matter how well planned or designed something may be, human error or even nature has a demonstrated ability of finding the flaw and exposing it.

It get even worse when humans with their ingenuity set their minds to finding the flaws and exploiting them.

What the pro nuke crowd has got right is that even when these flaws are exposed we have a demonstrated ability to contain and manage them. 3 mile, Chernobyl, Fukishima, have done relatively little damage.

Long story short it's an acceptable risk. Accidents are going to happen, people are going to die, the land and air will be poisoned, absolutely. That's the price of doing business and that's nothing new.

Actually that issue had been raised:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...years-ago-in-u-s-nuclear-agency-s-report.html

In a 1990 report, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, an independent agency responsible for ensuring the safety of the country’s power plants, identified earthquake-induced diesel generator failure and power outage leading to failure of cooling systems as one of the “most likely causes” of nuclear accidents from an external event.

While the report was cited in a 2004 statement by Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, adequate measures to address the risk were not taken by Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant in Fukushima prefecture, said Jun Tateno, a former researcher at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and professor at Chuo University.

There are PDFs that one can find from googling around that, but that story seems a pretty fair summary.

Or indeed Greenpeace in 2007:

Earthquake, fire and nuclear leak in Japan

It's hard to call the residents of Kashiwazaki lucky. Hundreds were injured by the quake, at least nine have died, thousands are in emergency shelters. But, if any of the four working reactors had lost power to their coolant system, it could have gone much worse. From the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center:

Even after automatic shutdown, the fuel in the reactor core is still extremely hot, so it is necessary to maintain a continual flow of coolant. If it is not maintained, the fuel could melt, leading to the release of highly radioactive material into the environment. Under some circumstances, it could also result in an explosion.

Despite the potential seriousness of this fire, TEPCO failed to announce whether the transformer continued to operate, or whether the emergency generator started up.

According to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, TEPCO admitted its disaster response measures did not function successfully, and that there were only four workers available to extinguish the fire, which burned for almost two hours.

Even in that plant:

The Fukushima Daiichi plant has a black mark on its record from earlier in the last decade, when a scandal involving falsified safety records led to parent company Tepco briefly shutting down its entire nuclear fleet in Japan. In 2002, Tepco admitted to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency that it had falsified the results of safety tests on the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor, which is now one of three reactors that workers are struggling to keep from overheating. The test took place in 1991-1992.

The scandal was the latest in a string of nuclear safety records cover-ups by Tepco, including the revelation that the company's doctoring of safety records concerning reactor shrouds, a part of the reactors themselves, in the 1980s through the early 1990s. Five top executives resigned after the company admitted to having falsified safety.

In 2003, Tepco shut down all of its nuclear reactors for inspections, acknowledging the systematic cover-up of inspection data showing cracks in reactors.

Japanese regulators already have some credibility issues after previous episodes in which the strength of the response was called into question.

In Japan in 1999, an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction at a uranium-reprocessing plant killed two employees and spewed radioactive neutrons over the countryside. Government officials later said safety equipment at the plant was missing and the people involved lacked training, adding that their assessment of the accident's seriousness was "inadequate."

Given that the current mitigation plan for Fukishima involves freezing the groundwater for the indefinite future it's quite possible that that plant will actually end up using more energy than it makes.

I used to be more in favour of nuclear power, but now think that it's rarely the right solution. I am not sure that the lifetime energy costs are adequately calculated, let alone the problem of high-level waste disposal, whilst continent-wide solar, wind, tidal and hydro (including pumped-storage) are all getting cheaper and certainly with solar, will continue to get cheaper even with no additional technological improvements.

 

[Belz...]

I used to be more in favour of nuclear power, but now think that it's rarely the right solution. I am not sure that the lifetime energy costs are adequately calculated, let alone the problem of high-level waste disposal, whilst continent-wide solar, wind, tidal and hydro (including pumped-storage) are all getting cheaper and certainly with solar, will continue to get cheaper even with no additional technological improvements.

Ok, how about you, now? What do you think of the environmental impacts of digging up rare earths for those technologies?

 

[acbytesla]

I agree - but without that cost, we won't get the political will for radical change.

That I agree with.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Perhaps, but the issue with science on the left is about how to use science and technology responsibly, not a denial of scientific facts and theories.

Errrrr.... some of the time. GMO Panic is on the same level as Vaccine Denial as far as I'm concerned, and Nuclear Power scaremongering is only very, very slightly better.

It's rather easy to tell when "We just want to make sure it's being done responsibility" is code for "And we will never actually thing it can be done responsibly."

 

[Zambo]

And you still haven't addressed the environmental impact. Solar isn't all green, you know.

Yes i do realise that solar or wind power and batteries aren't entirely green. But the comparison is with oil and coal.

For oil, apart from well known offshore environmental disasters there are many cases of contamination of acquifiers (fracking is another example) by onshore drilling. Then in the downstream oil industry refineries are more polluting than power plants, Then onto the intetnal combustion engine.

Coal is a healrh hazard from the mining to the transport and then to the use as a fuel. Attempts are made to clean the gas emissions but of course that is far from fully succesful.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Yes currently batteries are the weak spot; both from a technological perspective and a ecological perspective with most "green power" systems that operate to some degree on the whims of natural forces. Days can get cloudy, night happens fairly routinely, and even the tides aren't always exact and, if we're being totally 100% honest here, I do think some sort of battery / energy storage "leap" is probably needed before solar/wind can really achieve the levels it's most ardent supporters want it to.

That's why honestly at this point in time I support a "Renewable Resource + Grid for backup and supplement" more than a "Renewable Resource + Batteries" model for most homes.

 

[acbytesla]

One of the advantages of a one-party state.

Considering that the Chinese can't even make milk without poisoning people, what's the betting at least one of those reactors has a melt-down?

Yep. You pretend that China hasn't been doing some amazing engineering. Or that it has a death wish.

Why should 'we' be investing in anything? Just provide a level playing field and let the market sort it out. And by 'level' I mean make up for the massive subsidies given to the nuclear industry, and make fossil fuels pay for the damage they are doing.

If nuclear can't survive without massive injections of government funding then perhaps it shouldn't survive.

Unlike most renewables, nuclear is a mature technology. The industry has had many decades to produce the things they 'would' build today, so why didn't they? Meanwhile renewable technologies are advancing by leaps and bounds.

I will make a prediction* - by the time any of these 'modern' nuclear plants come online, renewables will already be cheaper and more numerous, and nuclear will never be the 'cornerstone' of power generation.

* not really a prediction, just an acknowledgement of what experts in the nuclear industry itself are saying.

Sorry, you're wrong on all this. With that kind of thinking, computers, the internet and solar energy among other technological breakthroughs wouldn't have happened. And nuclear technology IS not a mature technology.

The "market' doesn't invest much in R&D.

 

[Belz...]

Yes i do realise that solar or wind power and batteries aren't entirely green. But the comparison is with oil and coal.

No, the comparison is between all alternatives, including nuclear and hydro.

And "not entirely green" is still sugarcoating it.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Yep. You pretend that China hasn't been doing some amazing engineering. Or that it has a death wish.

I think there's a pretty reasonable "Acknowledge the advances of China while not sugarcoating that a lot of it has come at the cost of cutting corners with safety, often because they are working backwards by reverse engineering tech they don't fully understand" median in there somewhere.

 

[jimbob]

Ok, how about you, now? What do you think of the environmental impacts of digging up rare earths for those technologies?

I'm not sure you meant rare earth metals in particular. I don't work in the PV industry, but power semiconductor manufacture* is currently a pretty related industry** which is also an enabler for all these technologies and we currently use few rare earths that I am aware of. There are lots of nasties that we do use, some of which are getting phased out, due to legislation (e.g. REACH). There are some promising new approaches that move away from silicon and vastly reduce the inputs per kw of manufacture. One that has been receiving a lot of press recently are perovskite materials.

For Hydro and tidal, I can't see why they'd be any different from any other large power station - you just have water turbines, instead of gas or steam.

For wind - is this much of an issue compared to the rare earth magnets that would be used in electric vehicles and indeed most brushless motors? I genuinely don't know about that.

There are quite a few interesting grid-storage approaches being developed (many of which would be applicable to electric vehicles) which are aimed at replacing rare materials with common ones - there's a lot of noise about supercapacitors, as well as non-lithium battery technology, for example. This is just the impression I get from my industry magazine subscriptions and a very superficial skimming of them.






*fun fact, I saw a claim in about 2010, that if the power supplies to modern PCs used the power MOSFETs available in 1988, the US would need an extra five nuclear power stations to deal with the additional lack of efficiency.

**Solar cells are fundamentally diodes (PN-junctions) - but optimised to generate carriers when exposed to light and reverse biased. Silicon is still the dominant solar cell material and still the dominant material in electronics although in my field and (very high-speed electronics) that's starting to change.

 

[varwoche]

Most certainly not. Dale Carnegie was an American writer and lecturer, and the developer of famous courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills.

Not one damn one of those has anything at all to do with the plight of the American farmer, who tends to very much dislike salesmen, corporate execs, and of course all these mamby pamby libtard self-improvement and interpersonal skills courses!

Note to self: Don't pose rhetorical questions to RBF, sarcastic or otherwise.

And you think this attitude is gratuitous? You driven out to the midwest small town farm communities recently? Have you seen what the libtards, neoliberals and neo-luddite arsewipes have done to the foundation of this great country?

No I haven't. I live in a small farming community incidentally.

Perhaps you should start a new thread for your fact-challenged screed.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Note to self: Don't pose rhetorical questions to RBF, sarcastic or otherwise.

No I haven't. I live in a small farming community incidentally.

Perhaps you should start a new thread for your fact-challenged screed.

As usual I am nearly the only person actually supplying citations on the whole damn thread, yet because the facts don't fit the common paradigm, I get accused of being fact challenged by people who never actually supply any refuting citations.

It gets damn old sometimes. Really.

Never in the history of US politics has anyone ever so thoroughly devastated the constituency they were supposed to protect. Exactly why the USDA can be considered a bureaucracy designed to improve the plight of farmers is beyond comprehension to me. It was DESIGNED to destroy farming communities.

In 1945 27% of farmers in US were forced to work off farm to earn a decent living. By 2002 93% of farmers had off-farm income to make ends meet.

Source: Compiled by Economic
Research Service, USDA, using
data from Census of Agriculture
and Census of the United States

In 2012 the average age of farmers was 58.3 with over 20 times more farmers over age 75 as under 25. This has been growing steadily every year, as income:cost of living ratio has dropped. When new young farmers can’t afford to get in, old farmers can’t retire. 52.2% of those farmers principle income off farm and only 46.1% of farmers with net positive income from farming.

Source: USDA-NASS, Census of Agriculture

In 1950 farmers received 41% of the food dollar spent by consumers. Now it is 17.4% on average. Certain things like commodity grains even as low as 3%.

Source: USDA-ERS

The entire economic foundation of the heartland of this great country completely gutted.

That's the facts! And its not just the farmers themselves, it's the land too.
Land Degradation: An overview

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

And here we are again. The Green New Deal with all its "good intentions" will do the same damn thing the old New Deal did, further destroy the US infrastructure. The road to hell is paved with "good intentions"!

Oh and I better put a citation here too, since for certain there will be someone here that missed I already showed the original new deal agricultural policies that were designed to destroy farming communities were originally used to drive blacks off their land! Then only later were they used to drive small family farmers off their land.

The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement
Needs to Rethink Agricultural History

That's for those libtards out there that actually believe they are "saving the world" with their heavy handed interference. It was progressive Democrats that did more to crush the plight of the African American for generations by driving them into carefully controlled ghettos we humanely called "projects" to save them! What a load of crap. The whole damn New Deal was designed to oppress people, not lift them up, and it gets worse now with the Green New Deal!

Oh and maybe add this to your note to self, "Don't engage with unsupported BS while discussing agriculture with RBF, whether rhetorical or in jest or not" That might help more than your original note.

 

[a_unique_person]

Indeed, and quoting both you and me from 2012:



TEPCO was not fit to run anything remotely safety critical, and hadn't been for decades:

Even in that plant:

​

Given that the current mitigation plan for Fukishima involves freezing the groundwater for the indefinite future it's quite possible that that plant will actually end up using more energy than it makes.



I used to be more in favour of nuclear power, but now think that it's rarely the right solution. I am not sure that the lifetime energy costs are adequately calculated, let alone the problem of high-level waste disposal, whilst continent-wide solar, wind, tidal and hydro (including pumped-storage) are all getting cheaper and certainly with solar, will continue to get cheaper even with no additional technological improvements.

Jesus. I had forgotten how badly run that site was. If that had been a Chernobyl type reactor they probably would have blown that up too.

 

[acbytesla]

As usual I am nearly the only person actually supplying citations on the whole damn thread, yet because the facts don't fit the common paradigm, I get accused of being fact challenged by people who never actually supply any refuting citations.

It gets damn old sometimes. Really.

Never in the history of US politics has anyone ever so thoroughly devastated the constituency they were supposed to protect. Exactly why the USDA can be considered a bureaucracy designed to improve the plight of farmers is beyond comprehension to me. It was DESIGNED to destroy farming communities.

In 1945 27% of farmers in US were forced to work off farm to earn a decent living. By 2002 93% of farmers had off-farm income to make ends meet.

Source: Compiled by Economic
Research Service, USDA, using
data from Census of Agriculture
and Census of the United States

In 2012 the average age of farmers was 58.3 with over 20 times more farmers over age 75 as under 25. This has been growing steadily every year, as income:cost of living ratio has dropped. When new young farmers can’t afford to get in, old farmers can’t retire. 52.2% of those farmers principle income off farm and only 46.1% of farmers with net positive income from farming.

Source: USDA-NASS, Census of Agriculture

In 1950 farmers received 41% of the food dollar spent by consumers. Now it is 17.4% on average. Certain things like commodity grains even as low as 3%.

Source: USDA-ERS

The entire economic foundation of the heartland of this great country completely gutted.

That's the facts! And its not just the farmers themselves, it's the land too.
Land Degradation: An overview

Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues

And here we are again. The Green New Deal with all its "good intentions" will do the same damn thing the old New Deal did, further destroy the US infrastructure. The road to hell is paved with "good intentions"!

Oh and I better put a citation here too, since for certain there will be someone here that missed I already showed the original new deal agricultural policies that were designed to destroy farming communities were originally used to drive blacks off their land! Then only later were they used to drive small family farmers off their land.

The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement
Needs to Rethink Agricultural History

That's for those libtards out there that actually believe they are "saving the world" with their heavy handed interference. It was progressive Democrats that did more to crush the plight of the African American for generations by driving them into carefully controlled ghettos we humanely called "projects" to save them! What a load of crap. The whole damn New Deal was designed to oppress people, not lift them up, and it gets worse now with the Green New Deal!

Oh and maybe add this to your note to self, "Don't engage with unsupported BS while discussing agriculture with RBF, whether rhetorical or in jest or not" That might help more than your original note.

My problem with your citations is the total failure to draw links for the stats to your conclusions. In fact, I see no way you can come to those conclusions from your stats. Yes, you've convinced me that there is a problem with farmers being able to make a living but you seem to be blaming the wrong people. And you certainly didn't demonstrate the problem with FDRs New Deal.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

My problem with your citations is the total failure to draw links for the stats to your conclusions. In fact, I see no way you can come to those conclusions from your stats. Yes, you've convinced me that there is a problem with farmers being able to make a living but you seem to be blaming the wrong people. And you certainly didn't demonstrate the problem with FDRs New Deal.

That's fair actually. The reason for no links to the census data is that for various reasons they frequently have become broken over time, either because they rebuilt the website and didn't redirect the old URLs or they had government shut downs etc etc etc..typical efficient bureaucracy.

If you can't confirm these stats by finding new links through google, I will try for you, just ask.

As for why I didn't go deep into conclusions, rather than unexplained facts, is because it's a reply to varwoche's claim of a fact challenged screed. So in this case I just laid out references to the facts, and discussions can follow if they are too complex for you to arrive at the same conclusions on your own.

But be sure, when a government bureaucrat comes out and says directly, "Get big or get out" and then runs a whole nationwide campaign telling "get big or get out" and then makes changes to policy that destabilizes the small family farm. And then sure enough the farms start going bankrupt like dominoes falling, and then all the local infrastructure starts collapsing. And then even many whole communities. You might want to take that as evidence he actually planned it. It wasn't exactly done in secret.

 

[acbytesla]

That's fair actually. The reason for no links to the census data is that for various reasons they frequently have become broken over time, either because they rebuilt the website and didn't redirect the old URLs or they had government shut downs etc etc etc..typical efficient bureaucracy.

If you can't confirm these stats by finding new links through google, I will try for you, just ask.

As for why I didn't go deep into conclusions, rather than unexplained facts, is because it's a reply to varwoche's claim of a fact challenged screed. So in this case I just laid out references to the facts, and discussions can follow if they are too complex for you to arrive at the same conclusions on your own.

But be sure, when a government bureaucrat comes out and says directly, "Get big or get out" and then makes changes to policy that destabilizes the small family farm. You might want to take that as evidence he actually planned it.

I have no issue with the stats. It's how you draw your conclusions from those stats.

I think that bureaucrat is simply being honest. If you're not expanding, you're dying.
Just as is true in virtually every other type of factory. Efficiency is king. There is no other way around it. If your lucky you're able to boutique your agricultural business somehow. (I've read how some our successful doing this with unique crops giving the farmer an opportunity to sell at premium prices.) But that seems like a long shot for most.

But that isn't the Democrats fault. That's the nature of the corporate industrialized world. Automation has killed the vast majority of factory jobs and its been killing the family farms as well.

Would you rather be lied to like the coal miners in West Virginia who believed that tripe Trump sold about saving coal jobs there? Hillary told them the truth. Coal is uncompetitive and particularly so in Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio where the mines are underground.
They can't compete with the mechanization of thebig strip mines out West or natural gas or even solar now. Not only did more coal power plants closed last year than ever before, twice as many are expected to close next year.

I would love to save the family farm and your way of life. But I don't see how. As someone who is a Democrat and despises the disconnect between urban and rural needs. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.