Re: What "might happen" with the Japanese Nuclear plants?
I wish that were true, but I do not believe it is. Back during the Arab oil embargo the coal companies front group published a full page spread in all of the major magazines and news papers saying that "America is not running out of energy! At the current rate of consumption we have enough coal to last us 600 years!" About 15 years later, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, oil supply problems prompted the coal companies to publish another one page spread claiming that "At the current rate of production we have enough coal energy to last us 400 years!". At the time, I pulled the old "600 years" ad out of my files to refresh my memories and noted that we lost 200 years of coal in just 15 years. Now, as you have cited, estimates are that we have enough coal to last us 100 years.
What has changed to drop the life expectancy of Coal so dramatically you may ask? The answer is: the RATE of consumption. It went up. ALL natural production and consumption behaviors are exponentially based and given certain factors one can compute how long a resource will last. The first factor is the amount of the resource available for use. NO ONE knows exactly how much economically recoverable coal is in the ground and estimates on known reserves and predicted discoveries vary. But, one can take both the most optimistic and the least optimistic amounts of coal avialble and compute the time till exhaustion for both estimates using the rate of consumption factor. That factor can vary too, so both the least and most optimistic factors are used. Using the lowest consumption rate with the highest resource estimate, and the highest consumption rate with the lowest resource estimate, one can compute the years between which the actual time of exhaustion of the resource will most likely occur. As world oil production continues to decline people will naturally want to turn to coal in order to sustain their current living standard (cheap fuel powering SUVs to get cheap food off the shelves). This will increase the rate of coal production and consumption, decreasing the life of coal reserves. Discoveries of new coal resources will increase, but like oil, the low hanging (easily recoverable) coal has been found and/or exploited. The only question remaining for new or yet to be discovered resources is this: is the amount of energy per pound of coal more than the energy consumed to harvest and process that pound? If it is not, then regardless of how much coal remains in the ground it cannot be exploited. You can't spend $2 to earn $1 and remain financially solvent.
Remember, every time you read estimates of 100 or even 200 years of coal left (no one says more than that any more) you ALWAYS see a phrase like "at the present rate of consumption", or "the present rate of production". That's your clue that a coverup is in place, because they are indirectly claiming that the rate of consumption is constant, when it is NOT! That's how the same amount of coal reserves could last 600, then 400, then 200 and now 100 years. If the current rate of coal production is 8% then we have between 10 and 40 years of coal reserves left. Also, all the high energy clean burning Anthracite coal has been nearly exhausted, leaving behind only the dirty, lower energy content bitumen coal and tar sands, which will be expensive to clean up or even too expensive to use.
There are some very interesting videos explaining in layman's terms the effects of exponential growth and consumption by Dr. Alfred Bartlett, retired physics prof from Univ of Colorado.. The Fifth of eight explains oil and coal consumption. There is an interesting discussion and some graphs about coal starting at 2:15 into the video. That video should be must viewing for all those "drill baby drill" advocates out there.
Additon videos in the seriers are:
#6 oil consumption http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3y7UlHdhAU&html5=True
#7 worshiping growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyseLQVpJEI&html5=True
#1 math of exponential growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&html5=True THIS ONE IS A MUST WATCH!!!
#2 examples of exp growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3JI8F9LQQ&html5=True
#3 more examples http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyOw9IgtjY&html5=True
#5 the push for rapid growth is dangerous http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-X6EpvWWu8&html5=True
Don't believe any prediction until you repeat the math behind it. The more optimistic the prediction the more likely it is smoke. The first "drill baby drill" demand was made by William Simon, energy adviser to the president in Aug of 1977. It's amazing to me that we are so far down the exhaustion side of the US bell curve of oil use and yet people still refuse to believe that it applies or that the US can exhaust its own supply of oil, to say nothing of the oil in the rest of the world. Total, willful blindness.
#8 America's problem is here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGPuJHRdUcY&html5=True
"Modern farming is just a way to use land to convert oil into food". Regardless of the amount of resources we have, none will meet our needs as long as the world population continues along its present exponential growth curve. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html
Remember that each time the need for a certain resource doubles we have to find new resources in amounts equal to as much as we had consumed in all of prior history for that resource! Alarmists in the past, using population growth as a political tool, have made false predictions and given ammunition to "drill baby drill", "we'll find all we'll need" utopians to discredit the exponential growth problem in the eyes of many. IF our oil consumption rate is increasing at 2% per year, and it is, even if it doesn't increase from this moment on we will have to find within the next 35 years as much oil as we have previously found since 1858. That much more oil does not remain in the ground in economically recoverable amounts.
IMO, the only reliable, renewable energy resource is the Sun. One of the best methods to harvest its energy so far is the Solar Power Tower: http://lisas.de/projects/alt_energy/...owertower.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...power_stations
The Chinese have plans for a 1 GW wind generator floating on supermagnets, the MEGLEV:
http://www.nuenergytech.com/product-...-wind-turbine/
but most "1GW" wind turbines give that power rating as the annual production, not the Joules/sec production the MEGLEV and other power plants use, so they seem to be supplying more power than they actually are. Currently, the US is generating only 36GW of wind powered energy.
IIRC, the US is currently importing about 4 Billion barrels of the 7 Billion it consumes each year, or about 57%. IF it doesn't rise, we will have to burn more of our own resources, hastening the day they will reach economically unrecoverable levels and throwing us back onto the mercy of the Arabs. If the percentage imports does rise our trade imbalance will only get much worse.
For 60 years the US dollar has been the World Currency Reserve. That has given us the unique advantage of automatically transferring much of our debt to other nations by merely printing more money because up until now they must convert their currency into dollars to do business in the foreign markets. There is a move afoot to replace the dollar with a mix of currencies from China, Russia, the EU and Japan. If that happens, and I suspect that it will, and the US continues to print dollars the way they have been for the last five years, the US will enter an explosive growth of hyper inflation like that which hit the German republic between WWI and WWII. That led to the rise of a maniac dictator who promised the people anything they wanted to hear, blamed everyone else for their troubles, chose one ethic group as the scapegoat, but in the end he brought them only destruction and misery. WARNING! Political comment ahead: THAT is what has me worried more than anything, but I think that we already have elected that leader. There is NO ONE from either party that looks like they have enough brains to replace him and not make matters worse, and the people themselves have been dumbed down enough over the last 30 years of educational "reforms" and "self-esteem enrichment" that they couldn't recognize a Churchill even if they had the patience to listen to him or her speak.
Originally posted by Detonate
What has changed to drop the life expectancy of Coal so dramatically you may ask? The answer is: the RATE of consumption. It went up. ALL natural production and consumption behaviors are exponentially based and given certain factors one can compute how long a resource will last. The first factor is the amount of the resource available for use. NO ONE knows exactly how much economically recoverable coal is in the ground and estimates on known reserves and predicted discoveries vary. But, one can take both the most optimistic and the least optimistic amounts of coal avialble and compute the time till exhaustion for both estimates using the rate of consumption factor. That factor can vary too, so both the least and most optimistic factors are used. Using the lowest consumption rate with the highest resource estimate, and the highest consumption rate with the lowest resource estimate, one can compute the years between which the actual time of exhaustion of the resource will most likely occur. As world oil production continues to decline people will naturally want to turn to coal in order to sustain their current living standard (cheap fuel powering SUVs to get cheap food off the shelves). This will increase the rate of coal production and consumption, decreasing the life of coal reserves. Discoveries of new coal resources will increase, but like oil, the low hanging (easily recoverable) coal has been found and/or exploited. The only question remaining for new or yet to be discovered resources is this: is the amount of energy per pound of coal more than the energy consumed to harvest and process that pound? If it is not, then regardless of how much coal remains in the ground it cannot be exploited. You can't spend $2 to earn $1 and remain financially solvent.
Remember, every time you read estimates of 100 or even 200 years of coal left (no one says more than that any more) you ALWAYS see a phrase like "at the present rate of consumption", or "the present rate of production". That's your clue that a coverup is in place, because they are indirectly claiming that the rate of consumption is constant, when it is NOT! That's how the same amount of coal reserves could last 600, then 400, then 200 and now 100 years. If the current rate of coal production is 8% then we have between 10 and 40 years of coal reserves left. Also, all the high energy clean burning Anthracite coal has been nearly exhausted, leaving behind only the dirty, lower energy content bitumen coal and tar sands, which will be expensive to clean up or even too expensive to use.
There are some very interesting videos explaining in layman's terms the effects of exponential growth and consumption by Dr. Alfred Bartlett, retired physics prof from Univ of Colorado.. The Fifth of eight explains oil and coal consumption. There is an interesting discussion and some graphs about coal starting at 2:15 into the video. That video should be must viewing for all those "drill baby drill" advocates out there.
Additon videos in the seriers are:
#6 oil consumption http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3y7UlHdhAU&html5=True
#7 worshiping growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyseLQVpJEI&html5=True
#1 math of exponential growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&html5=True THIS ONE IS A MUST WATCH!!!
#2 examples of exp growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3JI8F9LQQ&html5=True
#3 more examples http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFyOw9IgtjY&html5=True
#5 the push for rapid growth is dangerous http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-X6EpvWWu8&html5=True
Don't believe any prediction until you repeat the math behind it. The more optimistic the prediction the more likely it is smoke. The first "drill baby drill" demand was made by William Simon, energy adviser to the president in Aug of 1977. It's amazing to me that we are so far down the exhaustion side of the US bell curve of oil use and yet people still refuse to believe that it applies or that the US can exhaust its own supply of oil, to say nothing of the oil in the rest of the world. Total, willful blindness.
#8 America's problem is here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGPuJHRdUcY&html5=True
"Modern farming is just a way to use land to convert oil into food". Regardless of the amount of resources we have, none will meet our needs as long as the world population continues along its present exponential growth curve. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html
Remember that each time the need for a certain resource doubles we have to find new resources in amounts equal to as much as we had consumed in all of prior history for that resource! Alarmists in the past, using population growth as a political tool, have made false predictions and given ammunition to "drill baby drill", "we'll find all we'll need" utopians to discredit the exponential growth problem in the eyes of many. IF our oil consumption rate is increasing at 2% per year, and it is, even if it doesn't increase from this moment on we will have to find within the next 35 years as much oil as we have previously found since 1858. That much more oil does not remain in the ground in economically recoverable amounts.
IMO, the only reliable, renewable energy resource is the Sun. One of the best methods to harvest its energy so far is the Solar Power Tower: http://lisas.de/projects/alt_energy/...owertower.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...power_stations
The Chinese have plans for a 1 GW wind generator floating on supermagnets, the MEGLEV:
http://www.nuenergytech.com/product-...-wind-turbine/
but most "1GW" wind turbines give that power rating as the annual production, not the Joules/sec production the MEGLEV and other power plants use, so they seem to be supplying more power than they actually are. Currently, the US is generating only 36GW of wind powered energy.
IIRC, the US is currently importing about 4 Billion barrels of the 7 Billion it consumes each year, or about 57%. IF it doesn't rise, we will have to burn more of our own resources, hastening the day they will reach economically unrecoverable levels and throwing us back onto the mercy of the Arabs. If the percentage imports does rise our trade imbalance will only get much worse.
For 60 years the US dollar has been the World Currency Reserve. That has given us the unique advantage of automatically transferring much of our debt to other nations by merely printing more money because up until now they must convert their currency into dollars to do business in the foreign markets. There is a move afoot to replace the dollar with a mix of currencies from China, Russia, the EU and Japan. If that happens, and I suspect that it will, and the US continues to print dollars the way they have been for the last five years, the US will enter an explosive growth of hyper inflation like that which hit the German republic between WWI and WWII. That led to the rise of a maniac dictator who promised the people anything they wanted to hear, blamed everyone else for their troubles, chose one ethic group as the scapegoat, but in the end he brought them only destruction and misery. WARNING! Political comment ahead: THAT is what has me worried more than anything, but I think that we already have elected that leader. There is NO ONE from either party that looks like they have enough brains to replace him and not make matters worse, and the people themselves have been dumbed down enough over the last 30 years of educational "reforms" and "self-esteem enrichment" that they couldn't recognize a Churchill even if they had the patience to listen to him or her speak.
They don't even bother to keep their stories straight any more. Just say what is convenient at the time.
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