Comments ekillian has made

  • the real problem with nuclear power

    I am not a fan of nuclear power, but I am not opposed to it either.  If it could stop the ice caps from melting, I might be more interested, but it cannot.  Simply adopting California's efficiency standards at the Federal level would be like building 217 nuclear power plants (there are only 104 in the U.S. today).  That is HUGE.  There is no way the U.S. can build this many nuclear power plants, even in 30 years.  And after such a change, nuclear share's of the U.S. grid would be 38% (without ever building a single new plant).

    Right now Southern California Edison is building 500-800 MW of solar generation in the Mojave desert (Victorville) at $1400/kW.  The initial 500MW will generate 1047 GWh annually.  San Diego Gas & Electric is building 300-900 MW using the same Stirling Energy Systems technology in Imperial Valley, CA.  By the time the U.S. builds another nuclear power plant, we could build dozens of these plants.  Indeed, SCE and SDG&E have already purchased much more land than is required.  The initial SCE array is 20,000 37-foot diameter dishes and expected to be built in four years.  Compare that to the time it takes to build a nuclear plant.

    For comparison, a pro-nuclear MIT study estimated the construction cost of a new nuclear plant at $2000/kW (natural gas was $500/kW but of course has a high fuel cost).  So solar is cheaper and faster to build.  It could solve the problem; nuclear cannot get there in time.On Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses

  • Republican Party

    Here are two quotes about the Republican Party from William Greider's book, Who Will Tell the People.  I think they help understand the strange things they do at times.  They seem accurate to me (he also says similar things about the Democrats):

    "The Republican party is not a party of conservative ideology. It is a party of conservative clients.  Whenever possible, the ideology will be invoked as justification for taking care of the clients' needs.  When the two are in conflict, the conservative principles are discarded and the clients are served."

    "To understand the Republican party (or the Democratic party, for that matter), it is most efficient to look directly at the clients -- or as political scientist Thomas Ferguson would call them, the "major investors."  On that level, the ideological contradictions are unimportant.  Political parties do function as mediating institutions, only not for voters."
    On Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses

  • lighting

    Thank you Laurence Aurbach for that reference.

    On another item, "Start a long-term tax shift to reduce payroll taxes and increase taxes on CO2 emissions": People might want to dig up an old monograph by Redefining Progress called "Tax Waste, Not Work".

    http://www.rprogress.org/newpubs/1997/twnw_execsum.html
    On All ten of 'em posted 2 years, 8 months ago 13 Responses

  • visualize the destruction

    One of the most depressing presentations I ever sat through in a conference included the following sub-part:
      http://tinyurl.com/yx3jl4
    Page through it to see year by year the death of the oceans (it becomes a sort of animation if viewed at the right pace).

    This is Japanese fishing fleet records about their catch post WWII.  At first they were confined to the area right around Japan, but then they slowly expanded outward, killing the oceans as they went (note the red areas that turn blue representing a 10 times decline in fish).

    I was shocked that the next day there were tuna sandwiches offered at lunch, and even more incredulous that anyone ate them after seeing the previous day's presentation.

    The presentation was by Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University:
    http://as01.ucis.dal.ca/ramweb/content.php?lang=en&i= ...On Major reductions and a paradigm shift posted 2 years, 8 months ago 12 Responses

  • what don't people get about incandescent bulbs?

    Everyone seems to be making fun of Gore's call for getting rid of incandescent lighting. Why?  According to http://tinyurl.com/4wqka one quarter of U.S. electricity use is for lighting.  If all lighting were incandescent, and was replaced by fluorescent that is 4x the lumens/watt, then we would reduce our electric use by 18%.  If that savings (366 TWh per year -- TWh = million megawatt hours) were selectively used to power down coal burning plants, the savings would be 0.363 gigatons of CO2 per year.  That's a little bit of an overestimate, since some of our lighting is already fluorescent, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude of what is being talked about.
    On All ten of 'em posted 2 years, 8 months ago 13 Responses