Trees may be better rain gauges than they are thermometers. From a press release of:
Killer’ Southeast Drought Low on Scale, Says Study
Others Were Far Worse; Population, Planning Are the Real Problems
Lake Allatoona, Ga., November 2007
A 2005-2007 dry spell in the southeastern United States destroyed billions of dollars of crops, drained municipal reservoirs and sparked legal wars among a half-dozen states—but the havoc came not from exceptional dryness but booming population and bad planning, says a new study. Researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory defied conventional wisdom about the drought by showing that it was mild compared to many others, and in fact no worse than one just a decade ago. According to the study, climate change has so far played no detectable role in the frequency or severity of droughts in the region, and its future effects there are uncertain; but droughts there are essentially unpredictable, and could strike again at any time. The study appears in the October edition of the Journal of Climate.
“The drought that caused so much trouble was pathetically normal and short, far less than what the climate system is capable of generating,” said lead author Richard Seager, a climate modeler at Lamont. “People were saying that this was a 100-year drought, but it was pretty run-of-the-mill. The problem is, in the last 10 years population has grown phenomenally, and hardly anyone, including the politicians, has been paying any attention.”
Region wide, the drought ran from late 2005 to winter 2007-2008, though many areas in the south were still dry until last week, when the weather turned conclusively, and flooding killed at least eight people. During the height of the dry period, Atlanta’s main reservoir sank more than 14 feet, usage restrictions were declared in many areas, and states became embroiled in lawsuits among themselves and with the federal government over use of water in rivers and reservoirs.
Seager and his coauthors Alexandrina Tzanova and Jennifer Nakamura put the period in context by comparing it with instrumental weather records from the last century and studies of tree-growth rings, which vary according to rainfall, for the last 1,000 years. These records show that far more severe, extended region-wide events came in 1555-1574, 1798-1826 and 1834-1861, with certain areas suffering beyond those times. The 1500s drought, which ran into the 1600s in some areas, has been linked by other studies to the destruction of early Spanish and English New World colonies, including Jamestown, Va., where 80 percent of settlers died in a short time. The 20th century turned out relatively wet, but the study showed that even a 1998-2002 drought was worse than that in 2005-2007.
The factor that has changed in the meantime is population. In 1990, Georgia, which uses a quarter of the region’s water, had 6.5 million people. By 2007, there were 9.5 million—up almost 50 percent in 17 years. The population is still ascending, driven largely by migration. However, little has been done to increase water storage or reduce consumption. There has been increased sewage discharge near water supplies, and vast tracts of land have been covered with impermeable roofs, roads and parking lots, which drain rainfall away rapidly instead of storing it.
Previous studies by Seager and colleagues have shown that droughts in the American Southwest and Great Plains states are controlled by cyclic changes in tropical Pacific Ocean sea-surface temperatures –the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. This means that dry weather, which goes along with the cold phase of the cycle, can be predicted to some extent. However, in the current study, the scientists found only a weak correlation between Southeast weather and the tropical Pacific. Instead, says Seager, dry spells appear to be generated by random changes in regional atmospheric circulation. This means weather could dry up at any time.
Seager’s studies also suggest that manmade warming is beginning to perturb precipitation patterns across the globe. As a result, he says, the Southwest may have already entered a period of long-term aridity. In contrast, global warming does not appear to have yet affected rainfall one way or the other in the Southeast. Most climate models project that higher temperatures will actually increase rainfall there—but as temperature rises, evaporation will also increase. At best, says Seager, the two effects may balance each other out; at worst, evaporation will prove stronger, and result in drier soils and reduced river flows in the long term. “Climate change should not be counted on to solve the Southeast’s water woes, and is, in fact, as likely to make things worse as it is better,” says the paper.
“It was a lot drier in the 19th century than it has been recently, but there were so few people around, it didn’t harm anyone,” said Seager. “Now, we are building big urban centers that make us vulnerable to even slight downturns.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimated that national losses due to drought ran around $8 billion a year in the 1990s, but they are probably higher now. Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska who was not involved in the research, said of the study’s results: “This should be a wake-up call. If this is not the worst case scenario, what are we going to do when the worst-case scenario arrives?”
David Stahle, a tree-ring scientist at the University of Arkansas who made the link between 1500s-1600s droughts and the struggles of early Southeast colonies, said settlers then were particularly vulnerable because they had just arrived and lacked sufficient infrastructure or backup supplies. He called the Lamont study “a bedtime story with a moral for modern times.”
“Are we returning to a period of sensitivity and danger like the colonists experienced?” said Stahle. “In a way, yes, it looks like we are.”
Keith Minto (18:13:25) :
wsbriggs (09:07:07)
Do you have a link to that energy saving Reverse Osmosis technology that you mentioned?
I think he is talking about this:
http://www.energyrecovery.com/px_technology/how_it_works.php4
That’s the one I point to in the water section of:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
I’m also of the opinion that cheap nukes are doable, but only if you get the legal, union, greens, and other political pressure groups out of the way. It’s just not a technical problem.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
OTOH, trying to rebuild transmissions for cars in California is becoming too hard thanks to our brain dead government. My mechanic can no longer get the degreaser / cleaner that works so instead of a simple spray / drain it takes spray, scrub, repeat 10 times… He demo’ed it with his last can of “the good stuff”. Startling. One just runs off taking all the gunk with it, the other one just does nothing. So prices go up and folks leave the state. As near as I can tell it is a ketone that is banned. Propanone or propan2dione? Don’t remember quite… The ‘approved’ stuff uses acetone and just does not work.
Good luck trying to build a nuke plant with no working degreasers and solvents. And good luck trying to keep prices down if you must ship machinery interstate for repairs… (And don’t even think about the “lead mitigation” requirements and what that does to soldering anything…)
Sidebar: Sub nukes use fuel as highly enriched metal plates. This gives a much smaller reactor. The plates can be turned toward / away from the center to throttle the reactor rapidly. One One Small Problem. Having a very highly enriched metal fuel plate puts you very much closer to making a bomb… IIRC, light water reactor fuel is enriched to something like 5% while the subs are nearer to 60% or so. To be ‘proliferation resistant’ you need a different design than the sub type. But they are fairly simple and easy to build compared to the current crop of land power units.
Here is a paper, published in the highly influential UK ‘Beano’ publication (widely circulated among the next generation of environmentalists ) and rigorously peer-group reviewed by their resident subject-matter experts Biffo-The-Bear, Rupert-Bear, and that world-famous ursine coprologist, Winnie-the-Pooh.
The paper puts forward the scientific reason for the inclusion of outliers in the analysis of tree-ring data, in order to descry past climatic conditions.
The hypothesis is based on the postulate that bears*** is deposited in woodlands. As it is rich in nutrients, it ought to give any nearby tree a growth boost for a season or so.
So, records of tree-ring thickness variations may contain information on the fluctuations in the bear population, and so could act as proxy for past climatic conditions.
Now as Bears are creatures of habit, they tend to ‘go’ in the same places. So there will be a need to pick tree cores that have anomalous growth-spurts …. aka ‘outliers’ …..
http://www.daysgonebyshop.co.uk/883_1970-the-beano-biffo-the-bear-canvas-print.html
“Not enough Nitrogen? Bear Poo to the rescue! (Yes, salmon runs eaten by bears doing what bears do in the woods is a major or the major source of Nitrogen to the forests. Salmon fishing and bear reductions also are measure by tree rings… )” –E M Smith
There is also lightning. It is a nitrogen fixer. N2 breaks apart, forms NO and NO2, which runs down in to the soil in the rain water. So increased electrical storms in an area would make your trees happy.
Less likely than bears going to the loo after a good salmon run of course, but still goes to the question of whether tree ring data would hold up in an actual court of law to prove rising temps. Too many other suspects.
In fact, it would be pretty easy to have been feeding trees in a remote Yamal somewhere, to fix a story, wouldn’t it?
You might want to recognize a few facts about the US nuclear power industry’s abysmal record of building power plants on schedule and on-budget. Cost overruns of 5 or even 6
There has not been a single nuclear plant started in the US that I know of since 1979. Your figures are sheer propaganda and not related to any reality. Today’s plants are MUCH simpler to build than those plants were. China has ordered 200 of the AP series plants from Westinghouse.
With so many of these plants currently being built worldwide, the construction has been modularized and the process refined so that they go in quickly. The plant design has eliminated much of the complexity of older designs. Passive emergency systems means they work without having to be activated by a computer or a person and can not be accidentally deactivated by a computer or a person.
To greatly simplify, it works like this:
If the pool surrounding the reactor core begins to heat, water evaporates. It condenses on the inside of the containment vessel and the water returns to a reservoir. When the water level in the pool drops to a certain level, float valves operate allowing water from the reservoir to flow and replace the water lost in the pool due to evaporation. Basically the same technology that makes toilets work. This can continue for two weeks worst case (longer in winter when the containment dome can shed heat to the outside air) without any pumps, external power, HVAC, anything. At the end of that period, cooling water sprayed on the containment vessel (fire hose) will allow operation indefinitely.
But in any case, you cost overrun argument is silly as there is not a single modern plant to which that argument can be applied in the US.
Also, much of the additional cost is due to “lawfare” applied by misguided, uneducated, fear mongering groups who would want to scare the living crap out of people about nuclear power. They have convinced a great portion of California that nuclear plants are unsafe in seismic areas, for example. We have reactors capable of surviving greater seismic loads than Earth can dish out. What is the equivalent seismic load of a depth charge going off next to a submarine hull?
The anti-nuclear movement is based on ignorance and works by stoking irrational fear in people. The only legitimate concern is spent fuel. If you reprocess that fuel on-site, that concern is gone, too. That is why China is doing it, India is doing it, France is doing it, Japan is doing it, and Germany will now likely be doing it. The entire world EXCEPT the US will be generating carbon-free power in huge quantity while we base our energy policy on rainbows, unicorns, and technology that might be here someday.
It is idiotic.
Crosspatch, and Mike Borgelt,
Those are the same tired (and untrue, ultimately) arguments the nuclear industry made 40 years ago — and look where we ended up. “We have a good design,” and “these plants are inherently safe,” and “we know how to build these plants.”
Sure you have, and sure they are, and sure you do. [sarc off] You cannot kid me, crosspatch, because I have worked all across this globe building and running process plants, refineries, chemical plants, and power plants. You can probably sell that propaganda to the gullible, non-technical public, but not to me nor any of my colleagues. We know better.
But the arguments at this point are futile. I will be accepting the apologies of all the nuclear nuts, after a so-called Generation III nuclear power plant is built here, in the US, not in other countries. The cost overruns and schedule delays will be public record. The higher cost of electricity will be common knowledge. (on second thought, nuclear nuts will likely not apologize, but instead will make perpetual excuses how it was not their fault, if only the environmentalists and their lawyers had stepped aside none of the cost overruns would have happened).
The nuclear power industry has always had rose-colored glasses, in a hopeless dream to build the most expensive, toxic legacy-creating, misguided form of power man has ever devised. The retail power price increases due to massive cost overruns will harm the poor and those on fixed incomes, and it will be those people who share your misguided optimism who are squarely to blame.
One last point, and that is end-of-life-cycle increased accidents. The existing nuclear power plants are entering the final phase of their operating lives, and they will (because they must) experience increased system failures and radiation emissions. This has already begun as pressures exist to maintain or increase operating rates, systems and pipes corrode, tritium leaks into groundwater, and other systems slowly fail over time.
With at least 50 nuclear power plants older than the average (in the US), the odds are increasing with every passing day that an accident that releases deadly radioactivity will happen. This is not good for your cause.
crosspatch, I respect your writings on WUWT, as you usually have interesting and (mostly) accurate things to say. But this time, IMHO, you fell quite a bit short of that mark.
Do you really want to hinge your argument for nuclear power plant safety on float valves, the “technology that makes toilets work?” I suppose toilet float valves work with close to 100 percent success somewhere in the universe, but not on this planet. Even a 99.9 percent success rate is not good enough for a nuclear power plant. That missing 0.1 percent represents 0.36 days, or roughly 8 hours of each year when the float valve will not work. Not nearly good enough.
I have spent too many hours fixing faulty float valve systems on toilets for that to be a convincing argument. I suppose next you will tell us that these are nuclear-grade float valves, not the cheap junk that are installed in actual toilets. Still, a float valve is one of the LEAST reliable of all instrumented control systems, and I have seen thousands of these in industrial (e.g.non-toilet) applications in my career. Their failure rates are legendary.
For just a partial list of float valve failure mechanisms, consider that float valves stick open, stick closed, stick partially closed, they corrode, they rust, they bend, they spring a leak and fill with fluid (water), the hinges freeze, and many, many others.
Thanks for the laugh on that one, I will be sure to include it in my presentations in the future! I think a bumper sticker is also in order.
“Don’t worry folks! These new nuclear plants are SAFE!!! We use the same float valve technology that makes your toilets work!!”
Wow, Roger,
I glad you came out and admitted you are just another irrational anti-nuke kook.
Unfortunately you are a lawyer also (that’s two strikes) and will no doubt offer your services to any group of idiots wanting to obstruct the next new nuclear plant in the US.
crosspatch, unfortunately we’ve got lots of Roger’s kind here in Australia and they’ve been quite successful (the present governing party is resolutely anti-nuke) so we’ll be with the US in that we’ll “base our energy policy on rainbows, unicorns, and technology that might be here someday.”
E.M Smith : I think proliferation is a red herring. Any *government* which wants a nuclear weapon will get one regardless of civilian nuclear technologies in use. Israel has nukes and South Africa had them.
And I would yet *again* encourage people to download and read the article “smarter use of nuclear waste”. A fast neutron reactor in the US where the product never leaves the site does not in any way encourage nuclear proliferation in another place in the world. And yes, it produces plutonium, but not the isotope used in weapons. And since the plutonium never leaves the site, there isn’t a problem with it being hijacked, involved in an accident, getting lost, etc.
All that aside, us not building them does not in any way prevent others from building them, and they are. India has recently announced a program to build several of them for reprocessing fuel. Japan reprocesses their fuel, in fact, their reactors are plutonium fired, not uranium fired.
The arguments the anti-nuclear crowd use sound good until you actually think for a moment about what they are saying. They seem to want you to believe that if you build a fuel reprocessing plant in Indiana, Burma will suddenly appear with a nuclear weapon. It is simply insane.
Lawyers make a lot of money by blocking things and engaging in litigation. They are a major part of the problem. Win or lose the lawyer gets paid. They have an economic incentive to litigate, it is what they do for a living. They are a scourge on our society and a leach on the wealth of the nation when they engage in that kind of behavior. Basically they do not make the world a better place, quite the opposite, they cause a lot of unproductive work to be done that benefits nobody but themselves.
Hah! No one has come up with the right answer! The phrase and word, “Excuse my nudiditity” (I misspelled/misspoke my first offering but my bf has just corrected me) was offered by the character Radar in the M.A.S.H. episode where he first meets the new (Harry Potter) Colonel. He raises his hand in a salute while sunning and covers his armpit, whereupon he utters the apology.
Right now I am in my house, a roaring fire is in the bedroom, it is snowing cats and dogs (5 to 9 inches expected by tomorrow night above 4500 ft), and I am in my bathrobe.
So till morning, please excuse my nudiditity. Signing off.
Lets talk a bit about energy production and consumption in the US and most of the developed world. Consumption is not constant. It peaks in the late afternoon / early evening and reaches a low just before dawn. The demand is met by a mix of power production.
Nuclear is not throttled up and down with demand. The notion is to operate the plant at peak output around the clock. This handles what is called “base load”. These plants are on line 24×7. If there is not enough nuclear generation to satisfy minimum load, hydro may be used to augment base load but has become unreliable lately due to litigation where water levels are deemed more important than power production. So where hydro can not meet the remaining base load, coal will fill the gap.
Now as demand ramps up during the day, coal units are brought on line. There might be some wind and or solar available but that can not be relied upon. It might be cloudy today or the wind might not be blowing. Besides, wind and solar can vary much more in a short period of time than power plants can be adjusted to compensate for the change in load. Once all the coal capacity is on line, if demand exceeds supply, you are faced with two choices, either attempt to purchase power from the grid from a neighboring power district with excess capacity or bring up the oil and gas turbine “peaker” plants. Once all of those are online, if demand continues to increase you are again faced with two choices, you can try to purchase more power from the grid or you begin a process of “rolling blackouts” to cut demand.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for solar and wind power but it must be done in a way that makes sense. It is touted by its supports as something you just install and it magically generates more power than you are ever going to use and you sell it back to the power company and never have to buy electricity again. That isn’t true BUT there are some interesting things that can be done with the same infrastructure required for wind and solar that can make conventional power more efficient.
Imagine a system like this: You have a battery bank that runs a sine wave AC inverter that provides the AC power your home requires. You have battery capacity for 12 hours of consumption. You have a controller and a grid charger so that you can charge the batteries off the grid. Now imagine you configure the system so that it draws a constant supply of power from the grid. You use the battery bank as a reservoir. During times of peak demand, you draw down the batteries but your grid charging current remains level. At night when your demand decreases, you refill the reservoir from the grid, again at a constant rate.
What you are doing is “load shifting”. You aren’t using any less energy but you are removing the peaks and filling in the valleys. This means that during the day you are using a higher percentage of power that was generated at night using nuclear or hydro power when it was put into your battery bank. Your overall “carbon footprint” is lower.
Now, lets say you add some solar panels. You can place them across your battery bank with a controller and so during the day you draw even less from the grid when the sun is shining. You can do the same with a wind generator. You don’t want to send this to the power company unless your battery bank is completely full.
If every home in the country did this it could potentially save maybe 5 percent of our energy consumption.
But what is the environmental cost of that? What if every residential and commercial building installed such a system. How many batteries is that? How environmentally friendly is it to produce and ship that many batteries? And what about replacement cycle? I would guess all of those batteries would need to be replaced at least within 10 years with some failing immediately, failure rate dropping for a while and then starting to climb. Sure, they *can* be recycled but we don’t have the recycling capacity at that scale and what is the environmental impact of a battery recycling plant? Want one in your neighborhood? And so far we have only addressed about 30% of our electric consumption. General rule of thumb is that 30% goes to domestic and commercial general distribution, 30% to industrial distribution (an electric steel mill uses more electricity than a small city), and about 30% for the pumping, storing, distributing, treating, and disposing of water. Now if you want to convert the country to electric transportation, you need to double the grid load.
China recently decided to destroy 25 square miles of Mongolian habitat to build a 1000 megawatt solar installation. You could produce 1000 megawatts with nuclear energy in a much more environmentally friendly manner. Solar energy on a large scale is NOT environmentally friendly. There is nothing “green” about semiconductor manufacturing. Where do those raw materials come from? How are they refined? Have you witnessed the manufacturing process in a semiconductor fab (I have)? It can be deadly if you don’t know what you are doing and we would be talking about expanding production a million fold.
There isn’t enough land to place enough panels to make a difference. And it would destroy habitat on a huge scale. How many solar panels and windmills would it take to power America’s steel industry which at this point is mostly electric blast furnaces? How about steel and aluminum? It is impossible to build enough capacity to reliably support just those two industries with power.
Solar and wind are nice for small scale niche applications such as off grid or maybe domestic lighting but it doesn’t scale to the power needs of an industrial society. We have the technology right now to stop burning coal for power. The only thing preventing the replacement of all of our carbon energy production for electricity are lawyers and idiots.
Probably the worst peak load problem in the world occurred in the UK in the 1970’s. The then Central Electricity Generating Board had coal and nuclear stations and an excellent grid but suffered the curse of the electric kettle. For the country had only three TV stations two of which had high audiences and whose major shows ended at much the same time.
This meant that in the late evening, when some popular programme ended, several million housewives put on their 3KW kettles to brew a cuppa before bed.
No wonder the central control room used to scan the the TV schedules with much anxiety and call stations onto line as the expected surge in demand approached.
The CEGB’s answer was the Snowdonia pumped storage scheme, a reversible hydroelectric station, combined with small, 25 MW gas turbine sets using natural gas which could run up in around two minutes.
As I have said before, apart from political ones, I cannot see what problem the USA has. It has coal aplenty and is awash in natural gas.
Natural gas/steam plant has several advantages provided the gas is available.
1. It is about 50% efficient and can be built economically in quite small units so excess heat is available for district heating if wanted: that heat can also be turned into district cooling of course in summer.
2. The overall efficiency of a combined gas/steam plant with district heating/refrigeration is around 70% as as opposed to the best coal fired steam plant at 40% for electric only or 55% for combined heat and power.
3. Gas/steam turbine is cheap in terms of capital cost, roughly half that of coal fired steam plant: although over a station life of 30 years the total capital and maintenance costs come out as much the same.
4. To meet peak loads gas is easily stored as liquified gas using well tested peak shaving plant.
So for the next hundred years at last the USA has no need for nuclear, it can do it better and cheaper with natural gas and coal.
And given its enormous gas reserves which can be synthesised into liquid hydrocarbons backed up with its proven oil reserves it would not need to import a drop of oil, let alone gas or coal, for the next hundred years either.
And at an overall energy price much the same or rather less than today. So whats the problem?
Kindest Regards.
crosspatch,
“Once all the coal capacity is on line, if demand exceeds supply, you are faced with two choices, either attempt to purchase power from the grid from a neighboring power district with excess capacity or bring up the oil and gas turbine “peaker” plants. Once all of those are online, if demand continues to increase you are again faced with two choices, you can try to purchase more power from the grid or you begin a process of “rolling blackouts” to cut demand.”
Actually, the power dispatching function is based on the available generating resources. Most states have base load CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) plants that also follow the load, and are far more efficient than gas turbine peaker plants. Also, hydroelectric dispatching depends on many factors, such as holding the water for later agricultural use. California also eliminated rolling blackouts by offering price discounts to customers who are willing to have their power cut off during an emergency – these are mostly government buildings.
“This means that during the day you are using a higher percentage of power that was generated at night using nuclear or hydro power.”
Actually, by definition base load does not change. The incremental demand at night is filled by something else, but not by baseload. Also, batteries are not the only means to store power for household use.
“General rule of thumb is that 30% goes to domestic and commercial general distribution, 30% to industrial distribution (an electric steel mill uses more electricity than a small city), and about 30% for the pumping, storing, distributing, treating, and disposing of water.
This very much depends on the state, its population and industrial makeup.
“Win or lose the lawyer gets paid. They have an economic incentive to litigate, it is what they do for a living.”
Actually, only a small percent of lawyers are litigators. Most are not. And of those who do litigate, much of their work is taken on a contingency, not an hourly fee basis. Therefore, the plaintiff’s lawyers who lose on a contingency case get nothing. It happens. Of the non-litigator lawyers, some are paid hourly, and some take work on a contingency basis. And as it turns out, the environmental lawyers, as a group, are among the lowest paid of all attorneys.
” Solar and wind are nice for small scale niche applications such as off grid or maybe domestic lighting but it doesn’t scale to the power needs of an industrial society.”
Actually, wind and solar are grid-scale as the evidence in both Texas and California clearly demonstrate. Wind in Texas is grid-connected, as I wrote on in my blog (see below). Solar is more prevalent in California, and has both grid and home/commercial applications. But wind is also a big factor in California. There are no longer any coal-fired power plants in California, and the two nukes from the 60’s are baseloaded, so the swing power is provided by natural gas combined cycle gas turbine power plants, with peakers only brought online during extremely hot days and then only for a few hours.
The entire Texas power grid can be viewed at the link below, with my comments. The wind provides, by my observations, around 8 percent of the state’s power at peak wind. This is much more than “small scale niche applications.”
see http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/07/texas-wind-power-generation.html
Sorry, WUWT, for being OT.
Roger Sowell, the present state of nuclear power development is similar to objective climate research — they have been and are presently mostly dead-in-the-water in the US. Environmentalism and litigation have done their jobs very well over the decades.
If the US had maintained its can-do attitude, we would already have safe and proliferation-proof nuclear plants reprocessing their own fuel. The US is now falling behind the progressive (non-European) countries in science and technology development in general. Space exploration has been the exception, but now even that is at risk.
Sorry, but “renewable” energy sources are and will always be bit players in the big view. It’s a basic thermodynamic thing — low-density energy sources (wind, solar, even hydro) can never replace high-density sources like fossil fuels and especially nuclear (very high density). Unless we want to return to an 18th century society.
beng,
What a pessimistic viewpoint!
The reality is that renewable energy sources are now major players, as designed. The incubation and encouragement of innovation via government assistance has provided economically viable renewable power generation plants. Although the Road Not Taken argument makes it impossible to know where we would be today if not for the government assistance, the fact is that we do have viable solar power, viable wind power, viable geothermal power, and very promising wave power. Ocean current power is the next big thing, and it needs zero storage.
For California, only because I live here and am familiar with these numbers, in 2008 (source and percent of total state power generation):
Natural Gas 46.5%
Nuclear 14.9%
Large Hydro 9.6%
Coal (out of state) 15.5%
Renewable 13.5%
Renewables provided more than large hydro, and almost as much as nuclear in that year. As renewables continue to grow, and coal is eliminated, it will soon be the second largest power source. That is hardly a “bit player.”
The horrible realities of nuclear energy (outrageous cost, toxic byproducts that endure for centuries, among others) spurred development of renewables also.
The US government has very recently increased emphasis on offshore renewables development in wind, wave, and ocean current. Other countries also are developing their offshore renewable resources.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/renewables-in-outer-continental-shelf.html
The thermodynamic argument is laughable! A dilute resource is just as viable as a concentrated resource. By your argument, sunshine is not viable because it is so dilute. Yet billions of plant leaves silently refute your argument every day, and have done so for billions of years. By extension, water vapor is not a viable energy source because it is spread out across the entire atmosphere. Yet thousands of hydroelectric plants give mute testimony that such a dilute resource (in the form of rainfall) is perfectly capable of providing economic energy. And, before hydroelectric plants were built, waterwheels provided power for centuries.
Thermodynamics has a place in the debate, but not where you seek to place it. A far better argument is one of economics. If I can build a windmill (taking advantage of that highly dilute resource, wind) and provide power at a lower cost than the highest alternative resource (e.g. a new nuclear power plant or a gas-fired peaker plant), then that is all that matters. Perhaps I tie the windmill to a water source, and use the windmill to pump water uphill into a hydroelectric plant, rather than direct generation of power. In this manner, I obtain a time-shifting of the power in the wind, and I do not care that the wind blows mostly at night while my electric demand is during the day. Thermodynamics has absolutely nothing to do with that aspect, simply economics does.
As to the US and its can-do attitude, it of course still exists. What we learned in the 60s and later the 70s is that radioactivity is too deadly to ever be widely implemented except under very carefully regulated and monitored conditions. There is a reason that children should not play with firearms, and there is a similar reason why nuclear fission processes are heavily regulated. If that increases the cost of building a power plant, and the time required to build it according to the laws, then so be it.
As I have stated before, if you do not like the existing laws, you are welcome to change them. This is the USA. We have in place procedures to do exactly that. Good luck to you.