This is a parody gone mad. Green advocates howl about the issues of nuclear waste storage, arguing that nuclear energy becomes impractical due to the need for long term safe storage, in some cases tens of thousands to millions of years, or as the EPA puts it “25,000 generations”. The Yucca Mountain project was shut down in April 2010 because nobody seems to have the will to actually store nuclear waste below ground. Meanwhile, the nuclear industry stockpiles used fuel rods near major cities in holding pools, and they are running out of room. Are we safer this way? I think not. Thanks Obama.
It seems that ‘Carbon storage’ faces the same dilemma. Can it be safely stored for thousands of years? Or will it turn into a tree killing zone like this one below?
Tree Kill Zone, near Mammoth Mountain CA
More here from USGS on the Mammoth Lakes CO2 leak.
CO2 sequestration illustrated below, relies upon putting CO2 directly into underground storage. Ironically, using salt domes, just like Yucca mountain, and even less secure coal mines.
‘Carbon storage’ faces leak dilemma: Study
CCS supporters say the sequestered carbon would slow the pace of man-made warming. It would buy time for politicians to forge an effective treaty on greenhouse gases and wean the global economy off cheap but dirty fossil fuels.
Critics say CCS could be dangerous if the stored gas returns to the atmosphere. They also argue that its financial cost, still unknown, could be far greater than tackling the source of the problem itself.
The new research, published by the journal Nature Geoscience, wades into the debate with an estimate of capturing enough carbon to help limit warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the figure set in last December’s Copenhagen Accord.
…
The gas will have to be stored for tens of thousands of years to avoid becoming a threat to future generations, a scenario similar to that for nuclear waste, it says.
This means less than one percent of the stored volume can be allowed to leak from the chamber per 1,000 years.
===============================
Gee, where have we heard this before?
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1. CO2 has a resident life of 15 years in the atmosphere, hence CO2 should not be a worrisome item on the agenda. All the CO2 we are emmitting now will be turned into trees, insects, birds, grass, cows and fish in 15 years time.
2. The more there is, the higher the rate of its natural sequestration by global vegetation. Vegetation grows at a faster rate with increased CO2 levels, so there is a POSITIVE FEEDBACK there. (Global warmists’ favourite phrase)
3. The planet is not warming but cooling down a bit for the last 15 years or so and no sign of warming up, even if CO2 is on the increase.
4. Capturing CO2 gas underround is madness of the first order, both financially and technologically. It will one day escape and create a very dangerous CO2 mega-bubble that would kill people, animals.
5. Most probably the increase in atmospheric CO2 we are seeing originates from the oceans and not anthropogenically. We are only guilty for 3% of atmospheric CO2.
6. If we have to sequester CO2 gas, than the best and cheapest way is to plant trees, trees and trees. It is the greenest way, pun intended, to sequester CO2. But then, who will be losing the billions of dosh in Carbon Capture research if we do it the natural way?
7. IT’S JUST MONEY ALL THE WAY-FORGET SAVING THE PLANET-HYPOCRISY RULES OK
Eric Gisin says:
June 27, 2010 at 8:32 pm
We won’t have fossil fuels to burn 200+ years from now
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
You sure? I’m not.
…..Gold suggested that coal and crude oil deposits have their origins in natural gas flows which feed bacteria living at extreme depths under the surface of the Earth; in other words, oil and coal are produced through tectonic forces, rather than from the decomposition of fossils.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold#The_Deep_Hot_Biosphere
Freeman Dyson on Tommy Gold:
I find it hard to believe that some people are so carbonophobic that they are actually thinking of extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it into the ground. This is the same kind of induced fear that might lead to the development of a self-reproducing biological CO2 removal agent that could get out of hand and cause a runaway global plant CO2 starvation event.
Another Lake Nyos perhaps? In 1986 a sudden degassing of that lake released 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 killing some 1800 people and 3500 livestock.
Dimethyl ether (DME) is a wonderful substitute for both propane (a direct replacementwithout even modifying your tanks or burners) and diesel fuel. Best of all it’s easily made from clean, abundant coal. (Yes, I live in Kentucky – but only because resources here are clean and abundant). (Sigh. Yes, I smoke but only because I enjoy fine tobacco aroma on a suprisingly predictable, frequent, repetitive basis that has nothing to do with nicotine levels in my blood.) (Rolls eyes. No, I’m not level headed just because I have tobacco juice running out both sides of my mouth).
The real problem with CO2 sequestration is the perception of the need for it. Powerplants would do far more good if they’d scrub every bit of mercury out of their exhaust and pump the CO2 directly onto crops. Everyone likes crops.
The CO2 could also be turned into dry ice to store ice cream. Everyone likes ice cream.
Or the CO2 could be temporarily stored by using it to grow barley, which would then be later fermented to release the CO2 – but producing beer as a by-product. Everyone likes beer.
But pumping a non-reactive gas undergound and assuming it will just stay there for thousands of years? This seems a bit suspect, with a risk of failure far more probable than the prospect of our distant offspring rubbing themselves with a radioactive skin cream. The consequences could be as bad as having a neighbor who grills out with charcoal every night for a thousand years.
Ack. I think I just threw up a little – in my mouth.
It was that pathetic fool Jimmy Carter that outlawed spent fuel reprocessing with an executive order. He said that it was to keep “terrorists” from getting the materials to make a nuclear bomb. Then he arranged a deal for North Korea to get nuclear reactors. What a putz!
He also wrote an executive order to ban super sonic transports. Because they would lead to Global Cooling. What a putz!
If the French (not to mention the Japanese, Iranians, and North Koreans) are smart enough to reprocess spent fuel, why aren’t we???
Guess what Bunkie: We are! These United States have been reprocessing spent fuel for the Navy nuclear power program since the 50’s. They have been doing it with the Expended Core Facility dismembering the fuel assemblies and the fuel being processed at the Chemical Processing Plant at the Idaho National Engineering Lab for years. (It’s been a while since I was involved, so I may be out of date. If anyone is current, please let me know.) The technology is there.
Sometimes, you just want to cry!
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
We won’t have fossil fuels to burn 200+ years from now
We have over 200 years “reserves” of fossil fuel. In two hundred years, I’d be very surprised if we had under 1000 years’ reserves. More likely, over 2000 year’s reserves. If we are even using fossil fuels for most current purposes, which I doubt.
As for world temperatures, in 200 years we’ll probably be able to completely regulate world and local climate. If we bother to, that is. (Eventually, we will bother — when the Milankovitch cycles end our comfy optimum and our toesies get nippy.)
Things don’t stand still anymore!
It is said that Co2 is outgassed from the oceans at 8ppmv per one degree temperature rise thereby making little difference to atmospheric concentrations as oceanic temperatures have limited variation.
Does anyone know if Co2 outgasing from fresh water bodies is at the same rate as from the Oceans? Also how much Co2 in total is contained in all the freshwater bodies on earth?
Just trying to get some sort of picture as to the importance of lakes/reservoirs etc in the great scheme of things as their temperature is likely to fluctuate much more than the oceans.
tonyb
Duncan 8:51, Mike Borgelf 9:42, George Turner 12:09:
“DME being a miracle chemical that can replace gasolene…….”
Also cures warts, I understand. No, really!
Nick Stokes appears to be labouring under the impresion that CO2 is a problem!!
There are few universal laws in the universe that have the potential to cause humanity so many problems as the law of ‘unintended consequences’ and when coupled with the good intentions of utterly stupid people it has all the potential of an epic disaster in the making.
The cretinous campaign against atmospheric carbon dioxide will either destroy our civilisation or it will be a clear historical lesson for our descendents to wonder at. Those in the future might marvel at our gross ignorance, our lack of common sense, our ability to lie and cheat ourselves into believing the unbelievable and our unwillingness to engage in any degree of critical analysis and self examination.
It is even now stunningly obvious that atmospheric carbon dioxide poses the same threat to the planet as goblins and dragons and giant invading tripods from mars. Even now at this time when our leaders are engaging in economic suicide and chasing fairies and fantasy figments the evidence that carbon dioxide is a harmless and indeed essential ingredient to life on earth is ignored.
There was once a time when we burned or drowned women to death if the cows gave sour milk or the wife of a local bigwig went mad/set the house on fire/commited adultery.
These days we invent snake oil cures to non existent mythical dragons instead and we are no more advanced than when doctors prescribed bleeding a patient to death to save them, aaah it must be the malignant humours that cause illness and typhoid/plague is spread by bad smells or so the consensus once believed.
I wonder at the staggering ignorance I see on a daily basis and wonder still more at the incredible fact that I can so clearly see it all and so many so called brilliant people cannot.
The biosphere is perfectly capable (and has been) sequestering C02 all on it’s own, with no help from man.
What’s up with the re-invention of the wheel here?
As for Mammoth area, since when did volcanoes ever do anything but create kill zones?
Charles Wilson says:
June 27, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“PS the AGW explantion for 1500 AD: EVIL COLUMBUS the PLAGUE CARRIER, is bunk: New World Populations did NOT fall: Parish records show populations repeatedly reach the same point, set by what the Land can support, then drop, then rise again. Any Larg pre-Modern Life Loss – – simply reduced the number of people who Starved. ”
Given the huge amount of both archaeological, ecological, and historical evidence to the contrary, please post some evidence or identify these “parish records” that “New World Populations did NOT fall.”
What a rich vein of outstanding comments.
I just love this blog.
Duncan says:
June 27, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Duncan, I didn’t know about DME. Something else for me to get acquainted with. I was aware of the nonsense regarding reprocessing nuclear fuel, as I will commented later on them.
Thank you very much.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
June 27, 2010 at 8:55 pm
Storing nuclear wastes in a populated area over a Yucca Flats type place simply has to be the operative definition of cultural insanity.
Yes, carbon sequestration carries very high risk. I was just going to comment on those lakes in Africa when…
Robert says:
June 27, 2010 at 11:59 pm
Here’s the story: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/mhalb/nyos/nyos.htm
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
June 27, 2010 at 11:35 pm
Oh I just love Dr. Gold. And Freeman Dyson, a man too smart for a PHD. Both heretics and both usually right.
Of course Dr. Gold had a good point on the formation of hydrocarbons in the mantle. There is even more evidence today as we are finding natural gas all over the place. All we need to do is some fracturing, and there you are. See http://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml.
Lots of folks here jumped on the issue of recycling nuclear fuel. The French, you know, those people so many Americans like to make fun of, have been recycling their fuel for decades. Have you read of any incidents of leakage or diverted fuel for bombs or anything like that? Of course not. It doesn’t fit in with the PC view of nuclear energy. Nor do they like to talk about France getting 90% of their electricity of fast breeder reactors. Nor about the fact they are quietly supplying electricity to Germany and England, to make up for their silly embracing of alternate energies.
Read all about it in the excellent book http://www.terrestrialenergy.org/.
England is going to be in a big mess when they run out of reliable electricity. France will be in a position to save their collective hind ends with safe and reliable nuclear energy. Partly repaying the debt of England saving their collective hind ends during WW II?
Just got to love this blog.
Thank you Anthony
Pardon me for asking, but what was the “Quote of the Week”? For me it was the sign DANGER : CO2 HAZARD AREA AHEAD, for it so neatly encapsulates the madness, the utter insanity, of the alarmist mantra of catastrophic climate change. Of the 33 responses so far, it seems that only 20% (Eric Gisin, FatBigot, CRS Dr.P.H., evanmjones, James, Alex Ellul, and Spector) may agree. As FatBigot (June 27, 2010 at 10:04 pm) says
“My fear is that the picture will further the fanciful notion of CO2 being a pollutant. People will look at the picture, read the sign and conclude that “excessive” CO2 in the air has poisoned the trees. They will infer that CO2 is a herbicide. This is one of the most effective lies the warmists have told because people are naturally concerned about air quality. But a lie it most certainly is, and one that needs to be nailed.”
Please, people, come on board. Nail the scam!
I worked on the Yucca Mountain Project 2001-2007. It was mugged in slow motion by the Democrats, who always underfunded it to slow it down; the original planned completion date was 1999 — when I got there they were looking at around 2015.
The plan was to store the waste in tunnels, about a quarter mile underground and at least another quarter mile above any aquifers; the aquifers in that area went essentially nowhere anyway. It’s in the middle of a WW2 bombing range, so access was already restricted due to unexploded ordnance. The site would be “temporarily” sealed for 300 years, to allow removal for reprocessing if possible, then permanently sealed. An area was tentatively set aside for a possible reprocessing plant on-site.
There were howls that it was less than 100 miles from Las Vegas. It was never mentioned that the top-secret (still) underground test sites, much more radioactive, are less than 80 miles from Vegas.
There’s a fund of by now more than $60 billion from utility fees specifically dedicated to building a waste storage facility; it’s probably now just another political slush fund, like Social Security. That fund would have finished Yucca easily if the politics had allowed. [Sigh…]
gallopingcamel says:
June 27, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Carbon sequestration is a great idea as long as one does it according to Hammurabi. Instead of building stocks of perishables such as the EECs “Butter Mountain” and “Wine Lake”, you store non-perishable food during the years of plenty.
When the lean years come, the stocks of grain and other foods mitigate the famines that would otherwise occur. Imagine what would happen to a planet with 7 billion people if there was another 1816, “The Year Without a Summer”.
There will be another 1816 so if our leaders were as able as Hammurabi they would be sequestering carbon in the form of food rather than rocks!
________________________________________________________________________
Unfortunately our leaders in the USA (Clinton) listened to the grain traders and did away with the stock piling of grain in the 1996 with the “Freedom to Farm” Act. When the USA ran out of stored grain in 2008 the Grain Trader Association wrote a letter to Bush asking that grain storage not be resumed by the USA since it mucks up “the free market” Grain trading giant Cargill as well as seed giant Monsanto posted record earnings in 2008 while food riots were happening in third world countries and the world economy started crashing.
Isn’t it nice to know we are in such good hands with our intelligent and honest politicians?
In the usual propaganda about exciting CO2 sequestration projects i never read something about the efficiency. How much of the energy produced by a coal- or gas fired plant is expected to be used up for the filtering and sequestration? Anybody got some percentages?
No alarmism follows, just the “facts” as currently agreed by reproducible experiments.
CO2 is a long-lasting gas which appears to have been in the air for as long as we can measure. Radioactive materials have always coexisted with humans also, but they decay by definition, some with short half lives, some with long. The ones with short half lives are generally the most hazardous because a given weight produces more radiation in a given time. The physics are understood extremely well and have been for 50 years.
There is no chemical way to estimate the term of containment of CO2 that is safe. The best that we can do is to establish what we think is an unsafe concentration, and try to avoid that.
There is a chemical way to estimate the safe containment of radioactive material. In short, it needs management for a time that through decay or dilution or reprocessing, reduces its emission to below the levels that existed prior to its use to make energy. For many separated isotopes in reactor waste, a week is enough time for them to decay to very safe levels. Overall, the way a reactor is operated, plus its design, determine how long waste should be stored before it decays to the level of radioactivity in the mine where it originated. Of course, mine grades vary too; some are high enough to require robot mining, others are safe enough for humans to work a lifetime in them with no adverse effects.
Working these variables into a general statement, without reprocessing, nuclear waste decays to the level of its ore in a few hundred to a few thousand years. Naturally, if you dilute it 10:1 by encasing it in glass (a well-studied process) these figure reduce to a few decades to a few hundred years. We started making rad waste a half century ago and to my knowledge, it has harmed nobody. It would be fair to say that we can do the same for several more half-centuries.
The oft-repeated mantra that rad waste needs to be managed for 25,000 years, or sometimes 250,000 years, is completely without foundation. It is alarmism in the category of the discredited hockey stick, except that the observations are far more reliable for nuclear.
In theory, rad waste is dangerous only if people approach it too closely. If you keep more than a mile away most of the time, you don’t have much to fear. It is prudent to process it and store it, because it is a valuable resource for the future.
Back to CO2, it need not be managed at all either. It is dangerous only if it passes beyond bounds of safe levels, but people cannot agree on the definition of the safe levels, be they lowest or highest. In the meantime, I await reproducible experimental evidence that it is causing significant harm. If it is shown to be causing harm, then it is of theoretical greater danger than radioactive materials, because the latter decay away to near-nothingness in time. CO2 seems to hang around forever. If you wish to make apple to apple analogies, compare it to the poison arsenic, which also hangs around forever, not to radiactive material, giving oranges and apples.
At this point, we depart from the facts.
Safety concepts are not entirely based on maths and physics and chemistries. There are social implications as well. Someone above mentioned that flouridation of water supplies should not be enforced on populations. But then, if you said the same about chlorination, you would know that a large death rate would be inevitable through spreadings of disease vectors currently killed by chlorination.
The effects of chlorination and flouridation are known well enough to do benefit:cost calculations. They are known well also for nuclear material. Science is still grappling with CO2, largely because of the social implications that people keep making guesses about – the science of CO2 is not yet reproducible in experiments, to a useful level for policy making.
That is why we have blogs like this one.
Ok, this one
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CO2-Sequestrierung#Kosten
says
“Die IEA schätzt, dass die Kosten gegenwärtig bei 50 bis 100 US-Dollar pro Tonne abgeschiedenes CO2 liegen” – 50 to 100 USD per ton extracted CO2.
And from here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Cost
i get this snippet “based on typical coal fired power plant emissions of 2.13 pounds CO2 per kWh”
so that’s 5 to 10 US cent cost / kWh for Carbon sequestration.
So it will double to triple energy costs; in other words, 50% to 66% of the power output of a fossil fuel plant will be used to extract the CO2 it produces; IOW we will need twice to thrice the number of power plants.
I gotta come up with a hare-brained scheme like that on my own sometime in the future, there seems to be a lot of money in there…
DirkH says:
June 28, 2010 at 3:56 am
“[…]
So it will double to triple energy costs;[…]”
Addendum: working with producer prizes, not retail prizes.
Green advocates don’t want viable solutions. They want intractable problems that can be used as a pretext to impose their ideology on everyone else. So they need to make the use of “carbon storage” politically unacceptable just in case it does actually work.
Alex Allul says above “6. If we have to sequester CO2 gas, than the best and cheapest way is to plant trees, trees and trees.”
Not quite. The new trees have to carry more carbon than the pre-existing vegetation; and they have to be maintained as renewing forests in perpetuity.
Merely planting some trees on grassland and walking away does noting for the long-term sequestration of carbon when you start talking in centuries or more. Stable CO2 sits near the bottom of the decay chain.
Most of these techno-weenies who are frightened of things nuclear seem happy enough to stash several micro-curies of Americium-241 (half-life ~460 years) about their house. How weird is that?
“Ironically, using salt domes, just like Yucca mountain, and even less secure coal mines.”
FWIW, no salt domes near Yucca Mountain. It is all volcanic layers of various sorts. The formations of interest are volcanic tuff. See the Wiki account:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain