Cheers and More Cheers! The US is set to add 41 GIGAWATTS of solar power in the next 12 months.

[NNadir]

I heard about it right here at DU, referring to a twitter feed, which should always represent statements of truth.

We're saved!!!!

Of course, personally, I'm a little cranky so my cheering may be mixed with choking.

Here in New Jersey the sunlight is significantly blocked by smoke from fires from a burning precious irreplaceable ecosystem burning because 50 years of (deliberate?) confusion between the scientific unit Watt and the unit of energy, the Joule. Thus I kind of wonder whether the capacity utilization of this solar "gigawatt" miracle, deriving from decades of people who've never opened a science book selling (peak) Watts as if they were Joules, will be the same as it is in California, which can be calculated by loading the data here:

California Energy Commission Electric Generation Capacity and Energy

Let's talk about California and so called "renewable energy."

The link above reports in a (non-standard) unit of energy the Gigawatt-hour the energy production of all of California's sources of electricity, the largest still being the dangerous fossil fuel natural gas, as of 2023, half a century into the "Solar and Wind Will Save Us" rhetoric that has always been popular in California, as it was when I first moved there almost 50 years ago.

Now, figuring out the capacity utilization of solar energy may require doing some math (multiplication and worse, division) which, unlike the "Solar and Wind Will Save Us" rhetoric that has always been popular in California, is not very popular among the growing series of "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who write here on DU, a fine website on a burning planet where people are dying from exposure to extreme heat.

in 2022, California produced from all its solar PV spread all over the State in a huge distribution of future electronic waste, 34,886 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, where the "hours" makes the "Watt talk" referring to power units to units of the more important term, energy, since E = P*t, where E is energy, P is power, and t is time, the time that power is actually available. (I'm very sorry for the use algebra to address the kind of innumerate nonsense that flies around, but it's sort of, um, necessary, understanding the contempt for math.) Now time is important here, because unless a system operates like a nuclear plant and runs pretty much 24 hours a day for more than 365 days a year at full power, the energy produced is less than the rated maximum power which solar cells never actually reach except possibly at noon on a bright cloudless, smokeless day, for a few minutes. This may be mysterious to some people who hype this useless junk, but the sun doesn't shine at midnight and for long stretches of time around midnight, depending on location and season.

The rated peak power of all the solar PV cells operating in 2022 in California was 15,221 MW or 15.221 GW.

It is now possible to calculate the capacity utilization of all the solar cells in California in 2022. In SI units (Joules) 34,886 GWh is 0.125 Exajoules on a planet where, in 2021, the world energy demand was 624 Exajoules.

If we multiply the rated peak power of California's "massive" solar infrastructure, all 15,221 MW, the number of sideral seconds in a year, 31558150 seconds, we find that a reliable power system that operated 100% of the time would produce 0.480 Exajoules.

Thus the capacity utilization in California, a state dominated by deserts, known for fun, fun, fun sun, is 0.125EJ/0.480EJ * 100 = 26.2%

It is worth noting that all the solar cells in California produces, in percent talk, produces 197.9% of the power produced by nuclear power in that State, 17,627 GWh, or 0.0635 EJ, although the nuclear plant, the two reactors at Diablo Canyon, each rated at 1100 MWe unlike all the solar cells in California, operates on a 12 acre footprint and had a capacity utilization in 2022 of 91.4%. This means that California could build two more nuclear reactors and avoid the electronic waste all the solar cells in California will become in the next 25 years.

The dominant source of electricity in California is of course, dangerous natural gas which produced 90,995 GWh of energy on a capacity of 39,479 MW, for a capacity utilization of 26.29%. This is the cost of redundancy. The waste from this dangerous natural gas combustion has been dumped into the planetary atmosphere where it cannot be removed without the expenditure of vast amounts of scalable, reliable, fossil fuel free energy of which there is one, and only one form, and it isn't so called "renewable energy."

Interestingly, the two nuclear reactors at Diablo Canyon on their 12 acre footprint, provided more electrical energy in 2022 than all the wind turbines in California spread over more than 1500 Square Miles. All the wind turbines in California produced 13,968 GWh of electrical energy on a rated (peak) capacity of 6,117 MW, giving a capacity utilization of 26.05%.

So, how much energy will the big, huge, stupendous, tremendous, impressive, earth shattering 41 GIGAWATTS of solar stuff to be added to the US in "the next twelve months." Well of course, this will depend on whether the solar cells perform as well as they do in California. It's hard to say because parts of the United States that is not California is often covered with snow - although less so now that the solar and wind fantasy has failed to address climate change.

Let's assume for a second, however, since discussions of solar and wind energy are always sacred and above criticism and filled with a quasireligious status no matter how many irreplaceable ecosystems burn because our religious fervor for solar and wind has done nothing to address climate change that all of the new 41 GW of solar cells to be installed in the next 12 months and become electronic waste in the next 25 years, will function great despite the smoke drifting across North America from the burning ecosystems, and are untrammeled by any ash that may fall out of the sky. In other words, let's generously assume that they will all have the same capacity utilization as all the solar cells in California, 26.2%.

They will then produce 0.339 Exajoules of energy, again, if we're generous, this on a planet where humanity is consuming well more than 600 EJ of energy per year, at least until they begin to degrade.

All 41 "GIGAWATTS" will need to be backed up by dangerous natural gas plants that will be economic albatrosses, because they'll only operate some of the time, you know, like if the sun goes down, which it's rumored to do nightly.

We're saved?

The unit of energy is the Joule, not the Watt.

Well, we've been hearing how solar and wind energy would save the world for many decades, and have squandered trillions of dollars on the theory.

Nonetheless, the planet is burning, and all over the world, people are dropping dead from extreme heat, but let's not focus on the negative.

There's happy stuff going on at DU: To be sure, my annoying life is being shortened by breathing the consequences of all this wishful thinking, as I'm breathing this filthy air which I cannot escape other than by ceasing breathing, and given my disturbing emphasis on reality and numbers in a world focusing on happy delusions, this may be a good thing if I'm not around to disturb all the cheering and happy soothsaying.

Enjoy the holiday weekend.

[jpak]

1. LOL!

[Think. Again.]

2. I don't agree...

You write: "All 41 "GIGAWATTS" will need to be backed up by dangerous natural gas plants that will be economic albatrosses, because they'll only operate some of the time, you know, like if the sun goes down, which it's rumored to do nightly."


I don't agree with your desire to have new non-CO2 sources of energy backed up by natural gas plants which are CO2 emitting sources of energy.

We must reduce and eliminate CO2 emissions.

Our transition away from fossil fuel burning must include replacing the use of fossil fuels with non-CO2 back-up systems such as hydrogen and batteries.

By storing energy that is produced from non-CO2 sources, using non-CO2 emitting storage methods, we are displacing energy produced from CO2 emitting sources which will move us closer to our goal of eliminating the use of fossil fuels.

I believe your wish to only use natural gas for any back-up system is wrong.

[NNadir]

3. I don't care.

Numbers don't lie; facts are facts; and bullshit is bullshit.

[Think. Again.]

4. Yes, it obvious you don't care...

..about our need to stop using fossil fuels, and it is also obvious you fully understand bullshit.

[NNadir]

5. Bullshit. I and my family are choking because of fossil fuels, because of all the repetitive...

...chanting bullshit slogans over and over and over, this while the planet burns, from "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who think that so called "renewable energy" is an alternative to fossil fuels.

There's zero evidence that so called "renewable energy" is an alternative to fossil fuels. The faith based enthusiasm for it is making things worse, not better.

I've written over 30,000 posts here, many of which are about the elimination of fossil fuels, referring to science, not slogans, only to be met with insipid chanting by clearly uneducated people.

Uneducated people repeating this tiresome junk showing up after my 20 years here don't get to tell me about what I care, particularly if they show no evidence of any ability to read my work or any serious work, and no evidence of an ability to think.

The solar and wind fantasy is filling my lungs with soot, and predictably, we have another of the causes of this disaster telling me I don't care about my own and my family's lung tissue.

The contempt of the many "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes here, and elsewhere, not just for me, but for environmental reality on the whole burning planet is proving deadly.

[Think. Again.]

6. ....

The only way to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to produce energy is to replace the use of fossil fuels with "alternative" energy producing methods. The "alternative" methods we currently have for use are commonly (though not correctly) referred to as "renewable" in comparison to the finite nature of fossil fuels.

These methods are not fantasies, they are up and running and producing energy every day.

We need much, much more of them to displace the fossil fuels we burn to produce the vast amount of energy we use.

Another "alternative" to burning fossil fuels to produce the energy we use would be to decrease the energy we use but that is a different conversation.

The amounts of CO2 we emit into the atmosphere must be reduced and eliminated.

Building non-CO2 emitting energy sources to replace fossil fuels must be done.

[NNadir]

7. Chant away. I have no time for this delusional bullshit.

As I'm choking because of ignorance, my tolerance is low.

This conversation is ended on my part and we'll leave the "last word" for chanted ignorance if we must.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

8. The reason that solar & wind cannot entirely replace our carbon-based energy supply

Is that they are intermittent, and humanities need for electricity is not. It's not always sunny and/or windy everywhere people and businesses live/work/need electricity.

And the practical reality of that situation means, that, IN PRACTICE, even if a given area has
a lot of solar and wind capacity, natural gas plants are still in use to supplement these sources, and in many, many areas, it's still a large degree of supplementation, in fact very often 75% or more of the total energy consumed.

It's not that NNadir doesn't agree with the premise we have to cut fossil fuel use drastically and quickly, it is his highly educated opinion (dude is a serious scholar of this subject) ... that solar and wind effectively perpetuate reliance on fossil fuels because they're not RELIABLE, and coal and/or natural gas is the 'backup supply' nearly everywhere.

And NNadir has argued at length re: why batteries and 'green hydrogen' are highly energy-inefficient replacements for the roles these 'dangerous fossil fuel' plants play in an energy ecosystem based largely on solar and/or wind. I'll let him explain it further if he cares to.

Ergo he states a matter-of-fact manner ... solar/wind require dangerous fossil fuel plants to supplement their production. He doesn't mean it like 'oh, I WANT those plants', he means 'that's what's happening, has always been happening, and is virtually certain to continue happening' if we go forward with this build-out of solar/wind ... and that's (from what I've gathered after years of reading his missives) one of the main reasons he's against doing so.

[Think. Again.]

9. We already have non-CO2 energy storage systems in use...

..that negate the intermittancy argument.

Wind and solar do NOT need fossil fuel back-up systems.

We have only just begun the energy transition, as more non-CO2 sources and storage facilities are built out, NOTHING will "require dangerous fossil fuel plants to supplement their production."

Nnadir's circular logic arguments are intended to promote nuclear power as the ONLY non-CO2 energy source and dismisses storage options. This is a position that will not succeed in eliminating the use of fossil fuels due to nuclear's limited uses. Nnadir's extreme efforts to stop all other forms of non-CO2 emitting energy sources and storage other than nuclear, if successful, would result in continued deaths and ecological destruction due to continued emissions of CO2.

We need more of all of the non-CO2 emitting energy sources and storage because, although you state that non-CO2 emitting energy sources CAN'T replace our carbon-based energy supply, they must if we are going to preserve livability on this particular planet.

(Nnadir rarely states his positions in a "matter-of-fact" manner, his posts are usually verbally abusive and perfect examples of the psychologically manipulative practice known as gaslighting.)

[Hugh_Lebowski]

10. Perhaps you didn't read thru all the calculations he posted

But this part caught my eye, regarding this massive 41GW buildout of renewables, using California's % of energy produced vs peak capacity for solar/wing as a baseline:

"They will then produce 0.339 Exajoules of energy, again, if we're generous, this on a planet where humanity is consuming well more than 600 EJ of energy per year, at least until they begin to degrade."

So we managed to score a giant renewables buildout while we had Dems in control of all three branches ... going to cost many, many billion$ ... and it's set to save the planet by reducing global fossil fuel consumption by ... lets see ... a factor of .000565?

Humanity being technically able to build a bajillion wind mills and solar panels and (very energy-inefficient) giant batteries or (hugely energy-inefficient) plants that convert water to H2 and then burn it when the sun isn't out or the wind is blowing ... doesn't mean it will happen, for a host of reasons (not enough Li being a rather obvious limiting factor re: batteries), nor that it makes the best sense to do so.

[Think. Again.]

11. The other options being...

...to stop building wind and solar because so far, right now, the positive output is too small for some people's taste, and rely instead on increased hydro, gravity, and nuclear by ignoring THEIR inherent drawbacks and limitations, or...

...(and I am a STRONG advocate of this drastically reduce the amount of energy we use to be able to subsist on some random low number of power plants of any kind, or...

...stop trying and just let the world burn from CO2 emissions, or let human society collapse in 50 years when we run out of fossil fuels, which ever come first?

I prefer the idea of continuing on an accelerated pace to keep building-out and improving upon ALL the various non-CO2 energy resources we have and will continue to develop, while (hopefully) also reducing our energy consumption as much a possible.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

12. I'm telling you his arguments as I understand them

(Sorry if I got anything wrong there NNadir).

I agree with your synopsis generally.

To which I'd also add there's literally nothing a person can do to help this problem MORE, even the combined effect a number of the more practical ones ... than not having any children.

At some point, the world is going to have to recognize that the party is over, not everyone gets to make babies, or it's going to kill billions of 'the rest of us', and cause a colossal extinction event in the plant/animal kingdom. I literally think it's time for societies to start shunning people who have >1 child, for it to become very looked down-upon worldwide. ESPECIALLY in 1st world countries.

And I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think the numbers back it up ... people migrating from 2nd and 3rd World countries ... to 1st World countries? Is very bad for the climate problem, because their energy footprint almost inevitably goes up when they do so.

It's nice to want to be nice and accept a ton of refugees and feel good about ourselves for doing so, but we're shooting ourselves in the foot as a species when we do so.

We also, structurally, are going to need to abandon the debt/perpetual growth-based world economic system and figure out something else that works.

And people MUST start living more 'locally'.

And we very likely are going to need a much more powerful international governing body with some real teeth vs the UN in order to enforce compliance.

[Think. Again.]

13. Excellent points!

Contolling the size of the human population is an absolute must if we're going to have any chance at all for a healthy and just world. You're right, it's a VERY unpopular topic (no one even wants to SPEAK about it let it alone discuss the pros and cons), but I really don't think it's unreasonable to limit the number of children each person should have to "replacement" numbers, one child per person, which would quickly bring our overpopulation down when you consider that some folks can't or don't want to have kids.

I also strongly agree with you about the perpetual growth obsession we have. This idea was obviously set up to enable capitalism which would slow and stop at the same rate as economic growth since they are basically one and the same. I never understood why a society, a GROUP of people, would accept capitalism as an economic system for the group when the eventual inevitable outcome of a capitalist system is one person owning everything. How is that a good resource distribution system for a group?

Thank you for a pleasant and respectful conversation.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

17. It's not SO much 'capitalism' I'm 'against', in fact I think it made sense in the past

But we're now seeing ... a lot of its downsides in the absence of intelligent regulation of it.

And maybe the greatest of these IMHO is the amount of debt that's accrued throughout the system.

In very basic terms, you have a restaurant that's doing well. You go to a lender and say I want to open up 3 more restaurants. They know you can't fulfill the terms with only 1 restaurant, but they loan it to you (if they do) based on an expectation that when you have 4 stores, all doing as well as store #1, you'll be able to pay fulfill them, and the lender will earn interest.

But here's the thing ... growth, in just about any business ... depends on fossil fuel availability and low prices on them.

And much of the world is MANY MANY MANY TRILLIONS of dollars in DEBT to other entities in the world. Which means, essentially, SO MUCH of the world has some sort of economic claim against FUTURE production, future growth ... both in terms of consumers, and in terms of production of the goods/services ... which in turn requires cheap energy, and the cheapest is the energy bounty of 100M years of ancient sunlight that was captured and put underground via it's carbon bonds.

It's essentially created a type of death spiral. BUT, it's not INHERENTLY intrinsic to 'capitalism', where you HAVE to have this debt/perpetual-growth relationship in order to leverage many of the positive aspects of a capitalist system.

But in practice, that has become the case, and the growth of debt is a significant part of the issue in play here. We've basically mortgaged our future on the expectation that energy will keep flowing, and the price will be reasonable.

Upset that apple cart, and the whole house of cards crashes down. Not to mix metaphors

[Think. Again.]

18. I'm certainly not an economist...

..by any means! But it does seem very clear to me that constant growth IS actually inherent to capitalism. Of course, I see capitalism as a very different thing than just a currency system, which is basically a system of pre-printed IOU notes.

In any case, it confuses the heck out of me why humanity can't recognize that there's a 'sweet spot' in everything, and once that sweet spot is found, balance achieved, etc, it's probably best to be content with that and NOT try to keep pumping everything up further until it all explodes.

[NNadir]

14. You and I are long term friends here, though we've never met face to face.

I always value your support and comments.

Of course, as a friend, you are always free to not take my advice.

I'll give it anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, you may well as argue with a White Supremacist Racist Christian Nationalist as to whether a zygote is a human being as argue with an "I am not an antinuke" antinuke about energy.

I have no use for I'm not an antinuke" antinukes.

As the name I've given this class of people, generic here, strongly implies they are neither honest brokers or even remotely educated. They're uneducated idiots. For instance, these people complain all the time about so called "nuclear waste," but when you ask them to show that the storage of used nuclear fuel has, in the 70 years of its accumulation, killed as many people as will die in the six hours from air pollution, they either ignore the question, change the subject or just repeat unreferenced pabulum. If you look, you will see every "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke here dragging out every specious object to nuclear power that they apply to nothing else.

They are perfectly to kill the planet in the vain and now clearly nonsensical fantasy that someday they'll be some hydrogen/battery/wind and solar nirvana. This fantasy is destructive in as it wastes resources, money, and frankly the future. We don't have time or resources for airhead fantasies. The planet is on fire.

Again, we are friends, but you have not characterized my views in this post very well. To the extent my views are social, they are merely about the elimination of poverty via access to resources, the chief one being reliable energy, and the population stabilization - one can produce data to show this - that immediately falls out of that comes if and only if we use clean energy, of which there is one and only one form. It's not so called "renewable energy."

Without knowledge of engineering, on a burning planet with 8 billion people on it, the great tragedy now underway will get worse.

An asshole saying "radiation is dangerous" without producing any data for deaths from radiation has no ability to read or think. Nineteen thousand people will die today from air pollution, perhaps more because of the smoke covering the upper quarter of North America. These airheads in my view just don't give a shit. Just as they push someday somewhere somehow rhetoric about clean energy, a subject they know nothing about, they wish to insight fear that someday somewhere somehow some person will die from radiation. They couldn't care less that around 900 people will die in the next hour from fossil fuel waste, air pollution.

The OP contains numbers, by which I stand. Numbers don't lie, but people do. People who drag this shit out endlessly while criticizing nuclear energy without numbers are killing other people.

Nuclear energy saves lives and it is the most effective scalable tool we have for saving the atmosphere.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

It follows that opposing nuclear energy with cheap rote slogans helps to market killing people.

[Mickju]

15. You always make sense to me.

Please keep fighting.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

16. To be clear, everything I said after the first line of the post you replied to was

'what my own opinion is'. Previous posts I was saying what I thought your opinion generally is, just in case you actually never really came back to discuss ... the other poster seemed to misunderstand you, so I was trying to clear it up

And I get your frustration, I get you're not a young man, you're pissed about what's going on, worried about your offspring, and you believe, based on your rigorous scientific analysis that you are right ... and I definitely entertain the idea that you may well be totally be right in most if not all of your assessments.

That said, and I'm not telling you what to do sir, but you might have a better reception if you tone down the condescending attitude just a smidge. I mean, probably many people here would say I'm an alright dude, but I'm pretty condescending a fair bit of the time (and I often realize after the fact ... they're not wrong), so I'm not judging on this account. But you kinda take it to another level my friend. Something to think about is all I'm sayin'.

Hope your weekend is enjoyable

[NNadir]

20. My style has been consistent for many years.

I earned my anger; I certainly didn't come to it passively.

I'm really not looking for a "better reception." I worked my ass off to learn to tell the truth by learning what the truth is. If some one needs me to be nice to them to recognize the truth, I suspect that they are not interested in the truth at all so much as undeserved approval.

We are all aware that there is a certain quality of human being who fixate on dogma and for whom no amount of presented information can change result in them changing their mind. These are not productive human beings. They're dead weights.

They chant here, one after another, year after year, decade after decade, and nothing is done to address it.

By contrast, I have changed my mind on many things at many times, because the work I do is to seek the truth, and it is work, hard work to get at it. I note that 20 years ago, when I showed up here, I was actually positive about solar and wind, but the results of that experiment are in and it's not pretty. In fact, it's bloody awful.

I do have people who write me from time to time to let me know they value what I say, and who, indeed ask intelligent questions or relay intelligent information. I have actually learned a lot here. I am hardly condescending to people who have earned my respect, yourself included. Even one of these people - and there are far more than one - is worth a thousand sloganeering antinukes.

The Covid event actually cemented in my mind the parallelism of the types, antivaxxers and antinukes, and I often refer to it having recognized it. As I point out frequently, antivaxxers have come no where near killing the number of people killed by antinuke rhetoric, since I consider every air pollution death a death resulting from antinuke rhetoric, rhetoric that has been far more successfully marketed than antivax rhetoric ever was, and has killed far more people. On its worst day Covid didn't kill 19,000 people as air pollution does every day, and has been doing so for decades, unremarked.

The skies here have been filled here, on and off over the last weeks, with the smoke of burning irreplaceable ancient forests thousands of kilometers away. I'm running out of the time on the planet, and my life would not have been much if I hadn't communicated that anger, righteous anger, is the only decent response.

There have been roughly 140 million deaths from air pollution in my 20 year tenure here at DU.

One. Hundred. And. Forty. Million. Deaths.

The concentration of carbon dioxide has risen by more than 50 ppm in that time.

The whole time antinukes carried on about how nuclear energy wasn't necessary because solar and wind were so great, having soaked up trillions of dollars on a planet where nearly 2 billion people lack clean drinking water, where hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five die from diarrhea, while doing nothing to address climate change or the use of dangerous fossil fuels. Anything these awful people pushing this junk say about fossil fuels is disingenuous lip service.

And I should listen to dangerous thermodynamic nonsense about hydrogen and batteries for an endless series of demo cars and trucks that has been the subject of stale chanting for half a century, leaving the planet in flames and people dying in extreme heat because the air conditioning goes down or because they never could even dream of affording air conditioning?

You can ask me to do a lot of things, but they must be possible things, and to compromise hard earned principles to show this nonsense any respect is not possible, at least not for me.

Again, I regard you as a good friend, and if you're condescending I certainly haven't noticed it. You may care if people think you're an "alright dude" but I don't really care what anyone thinks of me. As a good friend, I appreciate your effort to advise me, but I could not lie on my deathbed thinking that there was a single bone in my dying body that ever was tolerant of this awful, willful, ignorance. When I die, I want to do so believing that despite my many failings, I struggled to embrace the ethics in which I have come to believe, that I lived to the best of my ability into the service of the truth I worked so hard to uncover and am still working to uncover, right up to the last day.

Thanks, as always, for your comments.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

21. Thanks for the intelligent missive and for calling me a friend, I consider you the same

However I would point out that when you began educating me 5 or so years back, you really didn't have the same tone as the one you have with our relatively new member we've been conversing with on this thread. If you'd have I'd not have been very receptive. I suspect our compatriot here is in a similar place I was 5 years ago is what I'm saying. Sounds a lot like me back then, IOW.

Ultimately I well understand your frustration after all this time, but with new members, new to your 'takes' that haven't read and learned from you for 5 years like me ... you might want to cut them slack and remember they haven't been educated in your detailed analyses this entire time.

At the same time, I feel like you're an educator, and this rather by definition implies that the people you're trying to educate ... are ignorant to what you, the professor, knows.

That's the whole point of education, really, isn't it?

[NNadir]

22. Um...um...um...

I invite you to read this horrible thread where yet another example of the "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes is surprisingly honest about how it feels about the last best hope of humanity:

Householder convicted for conspiracy that resulted in a bailout for two "struggling" nuclear plants

Now, let's be clear on something. There is a lot of truth in this exchange, but the truth involves the reality of who the correspondents in it are and what they really believe but there are also a lot of transparent evasions and outright unsupported lies where the issue is energy.

First let's consider the "bait and switch" hydrogen fossil fuel promoting salesperson's intent in making the post in the first place.

I note that "saving" two "struggling" nuclear plants is presented as an exercise in the logical fallacy "poisoning the well" and "guilt by association"

These fallacies are classics in bad thinking.

The fact that Adolf Hitler directed Ferdinand Porsche to develop the Volkswagen Beetle has no bearing on whether the Volkswagen Beetle was a fuel efficient car that made automobiles accessible to those who could not otherwise afford them.

There is, of course, an alternate spin to the Republican who "saved" the "struggling" nuclear plants from being replaced by dangerous natural gas, not recognized by the hydrogen fool who recently showed up here chanting, and who is trying to stimulate the use of fossil fuels (from which hydrogen is made) by posting delusional hydrogen commercials and is otherwise doing nothing else relevant to environmental issues. (Buying into these commercial advertisements will make things worse, not better. Hydrogen is made from fossil fuels at a thermodynamic loss.)

The real issue is that a Republican had to be bribed to do the right thing, keeping nuclear plants in operation.

Keeping nuclear infrastructure afloat because the external costs of natural gas are being dumped on future generations is the right thing, but asking for bribes is to do the right thing is the wrong thing.

Any operable nuclear plant that is shut is a crime against humanity because the external costs of gas, oil and coal are being dumped on future generations for our convenience. Therefore we should not seek bribes to support nuclear plants, we should simply support them because the atmosphere is collapsing.

And then we have someone jumping right in for the benefit of the hydrogen snake oil salesperson with the lie that the plants were being shut because so called "renewable energy" was so great, this coming from someone saying "I'm not an antinuke."

(In fairness to the appalling fool, it was simply quoting an appalling journalist from the "but her emails" media, journalists being people in general who could not pass a college level science course with a grade of C or better.)

But no matter.

My opinion of the new person in question could not possibly be lower. I have no use for anyone who shouts slogans without a single reference or a single number to support them while muttering with obvious dishonesty, "I'm not an antinuke."

Numbers don't lie, but people lie, in particular about who and what they are. Nevertheless who and what people are comes out eventually.

I owe that rote person nothing, not respect, nothing.

You, my friend, were never that sort.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

23. Fair enough, I blithely stepped into an existing beef here, I get what you're saying

And there's nothing I love more than logic (thus, axiomatically, the avoidance of fallacy).

I appreciate the props.

And I'm not saying I'm any kind of genius, but my stepdad (who raised me since I was 2) and his dad were both Annapolis grads (with masters from other schools) in Engineering. I have a B.S. in Environmental Science from Cal Poly. Both of my two first cousins (I have only two, we're pretty close) have Engineering degrees from Cal Poly.

And both those cousins worked for PG&E, and one of them spent their entire career at DCNPP (even interning there while in college), retiring early due to the closure, as I've mentioned. Hell, HIS wife still works there in fact, in IT.

I'm just sayin' I came into our discussions with a bit more knowledge of this sort of stuff (and affinity for nuclear power in general) than an average person would.

Lastly ... I think if you ponder your objection here " (the NPP's) were being shut because so called "renewable energy" was so great, this coming from someone saying "I'm not an antinuke." you'll see there's a bit of a fallacy involved on your part.

One does not, by rhetorical necessity, have to be hostile to nuclear power in order to believe renewable energy is great. They could, indeed, still both be great things.

Except to someone with your level of knowledge

[NNadir]

25. I recall that you once gently raised the question often asked, "Isn't 'renewable energy' better...

...than nothing?"

(That is not what's going on here with this particular "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke; this person is hostile to nuclear energy but is merely pretending - i.e. lying - that it isn't hostile. There's more context than the Republican bribe thread.)

Another in the interminable series of "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes who write here, phrases the question differently, "Where would we be without the (insert "percent talk" here) of wind and solar energy?"

This is, of course, a counterfactual question, since there are many possibilities that might have taken place if we hadn't squandered more than three trillion dollars on solar and wind energy between 2004 and 2019 only to have the planet in flames and people dying all over the world from exposure to extreme heat.

In response to that very annoying "I'm not an an antinuke" antinuke, who complained insipidly and repeatedly about the cost of the Vogtle reactors that will be operating right up to the dawn of the 22nd century, about 60 years after every solar cell on the planet will have been electronic waste for more than half a century, and when the wilderness destroyed to make wind industrial parks will have rotting in place just as long, I wrote this post: Where would we be with CO2 without our 3.063 trillion dollar solar and wind infrastructure?

(You graciously proofread that work, pointing to errors.)

In that post I used Vogtle prices, prices that reflect the success that antinukes, including "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes, in destroying nuclear manufacturing infrastructure so reactors now need to be effectively hand made, to show that rather than have 12 Exajoule per year wind and solar infrastructure that needs replacement every 20 to 25 years, we could have 20 Exajoule per year nuclear infrastructure that will last between 60 and 80 years. We could have built over 200 Vogtle type reactors at Vogtle costs - which would be lower in the presence of a functioning manufacturing infrastructure - for the same money.

My usual analogy for the "nuclear power plants cost too much" nonsense is to compare the complainants to arsonists complaining about forest fires.

Hyping solar and wind garbage, while speciously attacking nuclear energy using criteria that one applies to nothing else - in terms of the issues of cost, the very real unimaginable economic and moral cost of iclimate change itself - is not a neutral or innocent past time.

We have limited resources on this planet, and we are leaving future generations with a destroyed atmosphere and mine tailings and landfills to pick through having exhausted the best ores. The costs of these minerals is rising, both because of demand and the economic and environmental costs of processing low quality ores.

So called "renewable energy" is destructive in many ways, the destruction of land, much of it wilderness, the heavy reliance on materials and minerals - we're already seeing fights over lithium mines and enduring cobalt slavery and this stuff is still trivial and not on a meaningful scale - but mostly because it generates more complacency than energy.

Every dime squandered on so called "renewable energy" is a dime not spent on stuff that works, consisting largely of our last, best hope, a gift handed to us by the finest minds of the 20th century, from Enrico Fermi on down.

I do provide the numbers. Numbers don't lie. I have a hard time tolerating people who cannot produce numbers to support their slogans and specious selective attention only to hear the slogans repeated mindlessly.

And that's what happens, year after year, decade after decade, from honest-to-God antinukes and their even worse form, "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes. The latter, to extend the analogy, kind of remind me of the assholes who cost humanity a great deal (among other things in wasted resources devoted to repeated clinical trials) by believing, without any evidence, that the horse dewormer Ivermectin was a cure for Covid, Ivermectin being a product of the pharmaceutical industry. These were people who distrusted the same industry, the pharmaceutical industry, to make vaccines that worked and actually did save tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of lives.

The "renewable energy will save us" experiment has been done. Back in the early 2000's I actually supported this experiment, but those days are long passed, since the results are in. We've seen 424 ppm concentrations of carbon dioxide in the plantary atmosphere this year, just under 10 years since we first saw readings of 400 ppm. I now recognize the rhetoric for what it is, a reactionary fantasy.

We've left the planet in flames, and history will not forgive us, nor should it.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

26. So out of curiosity, what is your response to this here video?

As I said from probably our first talk, my opinion was that we need to leverage all available non/low CO2 producing sources of energy, and to be quite honest, I've never been entirely disabused by that notion in all the years we've spoken. I've spoken with Think Again in DM's and s/he's maintained that this in fact their position, that they think 'use nuclear where it makes sense, all that matters is the end goal of less CO2'.

Is it your position that more, clean power could've been produced in S. Australia via the deployment of nuclear power stations than all this 'so-called renewable' junk, at greater efficiency of cost, taking into account things like added costs of compliance, CO2 emissions time-cost re: how much longer an NPP takes to be built vs wind/solar (every day counts IOW), added costs of permitting, buying/transporting fuel, transporting/burial of waste, and all the other costs for both scenarios?

If so I'd be very keen to see your rough breakdown of the numbers for this particular use case where solar+wind+battery has been deployed at large scale on an area that's really not a 'wilderness' especially, apparently gets a lot of sun and wind ... resulting in S. Australia being just behind Denmark at least in some statistic I don't necessarily understand (% VRE, which I've no idea whether is truly important in the overall climate change calculations).

[Think. Again.]

19. ?

You write:

"An asshole saying "radiation is dangerous" without producing any data for deaths from radiation has no ability to read or think."

How can anyone take this seriously?

[hunter]

24. You're just using old math and science, probably a lot of stuff you learned in the stone age...

... back when people rode around on the backs of dinosaurs and there were no cell phones or the internet.

Don't you know that if enough people truly *believe* in something like solar, wind, and fusion power, hydrogen fuel, faster than light space ships, etc., then very nature of the universe will change to accommodate humanity.

After all, we *believed* we could send men to the moon and we did it!