Plastic bags, climate change, renewable energy,
- Thread starter John U
- Start date
hifiandmtb
Sphincter beanie
And yet...
http://theconversation.com/the-othe...llution-that-kills-thousands-every-year-78874
How many people have died from uranium ore production or nuclear accidents again?
Nuclear exists today as a viable option. I still don't think we could implement it in scale & in time in Australia though.
Oddjob
Merry fucking Xmas to you assholes
This is the thing that gets me. I used to help manage Macquarie Generation and Delta. Coal kills lots of people every year. From the industrial accidents, to black lung, to birth defects. Even the ash and coal dust is highly radioactive because coal has a few hundred ppm of radio isotopes and we burn many millions of tonnes of the stuff a year. So we're happy to be actively radiated by coal fired baseload but we don't want a nuclear power plant where the radio isotopes are actively contained and managed?
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Nambra
Definitely should have gone to specsavers
Ok, time to chime in...
Pumped hydro sounds good, but it plays on the economics of the privatised electricity market - pump when demand is low and power prices are cheap, generate when demand and prices are high. The current electricity market makes it viable because you can make money from it, but it's still a process that needs a net energy input to work. The Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project addresses this by combining pumped hydro with a large scale solar array. This seems like a very viable solution using contemporary technologies, although from a purist 'zero emissions' perspective, I'd argue that our electricity market needs to be more regulated to put the planet first: the temptation for the owner of Kidston is for them to sell solar and hydro power during the day when prices are good, and buy cheap fossil fuel power at night to re-lift the water.
Ignoring long term waste issues, nuclear is obviously cleaner than coal. However, building large power stations away from consumers is old school thinking. In Australia of all places (tyranny of distance), building big base load generation sites hundreds of kilometres from urban centres, with long transmission lines is a legacy approach; it was only done because the power stations needed to be built near the source of energy ie. coal fields, or water in the case of hydro. Now that the generators and transmission networks are largely privatised, the corporate owner puts profits and shareholder returns ahead of reliability and we end up with ageing and failing infrastructure. The future is more decentralised generation, 'micro grids' and the like, where towns and regional communities are self reliant on local generation (be it solar, wind, pumped hydro, gas etc.) but with interconnections to adjacent communities for reliability. Unless you can build small scale nuclear (retask US nuclear warship tech perhaps?), it has no place in the future - big reactors are part of the old grid structure.
Wind is problematic - it's not always windy, turbines impact visual amenity and clobber birds, and there is evidence to support claims there are negative health impacts from living near wind farms. Hydro seems more innocuous, but flooding river valleys and restricting natural flow in water courses doesn't sit well with me. We're also a flat, dry continent for the most part, so there are only a handful of places where hydro is even possible.
That leaves solar, but it's hardly the least attractive option. The sun is the ultimate solution in nuclear generation (no waste although if she blows we're all fucked); there is enough solar energy coming from the sun to power the planet for the next 5 billion years. In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in a year. We receive roughly 1kW of solar radiation per square metre of surface area under ideal conditions, and PV panels are efficient to the tune of about 20% so we only use a fraction of that energy with current technology. The obvious issue with solar derived electricity is that you need to be able to store it effectively for it to be a viable substitute for CO2 producing generation. The innovation is happening though - residential battery storage, commercial scale molten salt and solar pumped hydro are obvious ones. You can also use solar electricity to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be produced and collected during the day and then run through gas turbines at night - 24/7 solar power in effect. Regardless of the method of storage and delivery, the source is clean and green.
Reducing demand is another way too, but that's a whole other topic that includes overpopulation, deforestation, basic greed and the artificial notion that world economies must continue to grow for us to prosper as a society. And this thread has been hijacked enough.
So... apparently reusable shopping bags are making us sick now: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...k/news-story/e994b4ca811a0c9af4c9948c50b37a26
Calvin27
Eats Squid
Is this an energy problem? Resource problem? Litter problem?
Because each will lend itself to other solutions. I highly doubt the bag 'solution' will even do anything to the first two, but might reduce litter as the lightweight single use bags do tend to fly around a lot in landfill areas.
Flow-Rider
Burner
Used uranium is a lot more potent in radio activity than the virgin stuff. You don't want to go near the stuff at all, the animals that lived around the mine site were not in good health. I wouldn't have taken on the work there if I was near the radioactive parts of the mine, my exposure to those areas were very minimal.
The problem with coal mining is that there is money hungry cocksuckers in the industry, it's cost companies money to implement safety requirements like the proper respiratory gear around it, you had people get fake medicals and some knowing that they had something wrong with them. You can't access a coal mine in Australia without an induction that explains about black lung, so they can't say they didn't know about it.
Flow-Rider
Burner
This is part of the problem of getting rid of the ones we already have, where are they going to hide all the highly cancerous left over materials.
hifiandmtb
Sphincter beanie
Coal mines are right on Sydney's doorstep:
https://www.illawarramercury.com.au...ropolitan-colliery-marks-130-years-of-mining/
Generations of happy people.
https://www.illawarramercury.com.au...ropolitan-colliery-marks-130-years-of-mining/
Generations of happy people.
John U
MTB Precision
Apparently Australia produced 50% of the worlds lithium last year and will produce a greater % this year.
Less humans, more dogs! Dogs are the best thing on the planet.
droenn
Fat Man's XC President
That article is just a beat up to rile up the unwashed who are struggling with remembering to put a bag in the car.
How the fuck can you be an adult and not know to separate meat from bread and vegetables? Do they only have one chopping board as well?
p.s. good run down of the power options.
Slightly good news, and interesting that even with an inept Government hellbent on trashing renewables, we're tracking above target
https://reneweconomy.com.au/how-australia-will-get-to-33-renewable-electricity-by-2020-2030/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-...ply-one-third-of-market-needs-by-2020/9912342
Calvin27
Eats Squid
The amazing part is the inherent conflicts in their ideology. I mean we have a liberal government that about free markets making policy about a monopoly market situation where they effectively want to pick the source of power by increasing the price signal to consumer so that they look elsewhere for cheaper power. Insanity. That's almost as bag as the plastic bag policy!
DMan
shawly the least hangeriest guy on rotorburn
I will not stand for it Sir. Don't lay into people who only have one chopping board please!
hifiandmtb
Sphincter beanie
Humans. Disgusting littering piles of shit. One wonders though, would Australia be in this state if we weren't a developed country with a bin service? It's bad enough that people throw any sort of rubbish anywhere other than a damn bin but far out, this video makes me so sad and angry and is more in your face than most media I see about us destroying the planet.
Binaural
Eats Squid
A few responses on this segment specifically:
1. It's almost always windy in the wider region. The strategy with wind is to normally to keep generation well physically separated to ensure continuity of supply and work around intermittency. A lot of people don't realise that our electricity market is built around supply getting switched in and out of the grid based on price anyway.
2. Visual amenity is not unreasonable. Wind turbines are not everyone's cup of tea. This is one reason why offshore wind is popular in the EU and UK and taking off in the USA, and why planning restrictions normally require farms to be at some distance from nearby habitation.
3. Bird deaths from turbines is absolutely minuscule compared to other human activities. Billions of birds die each year due to humans, cats and structures such as windows. Not to mention the death toll that would result from continuing to ignore or slow-pedal low emissions energy sources.
4. Evidence to support negative health effects is, to put it bluntly, junk science. I've read a few of these pieces and technical studies. Speaking as someone who's both worked on wind turbines and been involved in environmental noise impact preparation and measurement in a previous career, the scientific standard is absolutely woeful. I can't read your link, but here's one from a scientific source rather than filtered through some regular journalist https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ir-are-wind-farms-really-bad-for-your-health/
TLDR: Wind is probably the least problematic, environmentally speaking, of the available renewable energy sources.
cokeonspecialtwodollars
Fartes of Portingale
Whilst our per capita record is deplorable (4th worst globally in 2015) overall Australians still only contribute 1.24% of global carbon emissions, so even if you completely removed all 24 million Australians from the equation we still wouldn't reach the -3% target for zero emissions from energy by 2050. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, as I've mentioned before I will not advocate for inaction nor support apathy on the topic but it's a pretty sombre reminder that no matter how big an effort you make to reduce your personal carbon emissions you will not have a direct impact on global climate change. Discussions like this and support to the few people influencing global policy are quite possibly the best use of our efforts.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
Calvin27
Eats Squid
Yep. Just bits of steel and gears. No special processes or anything, just good olde construction.