Wind, Water And Sun Beat Biofuels, Nuclear And Coal For Clean Energy

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

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The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

And “clean coal,” which involves capturing carbon emissions and sequestering them in the earth, is not clean at all, he asserts.

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options.

“The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful,” Jacobson said. “Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.” He added that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

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Tags: air pollution, biofuels, carbon emissions, clean coal, energy alternatives, energy security, fossil fuels, Innovation, mark z jacobson, nuclear power plants, wind water

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Red Craig says:
December 14th, 2008
7:03 pm

Like all scientific-looking studies that aim at confirming a pre-determined conclusion, Prof. Jacobson’s paper takes twists and turns to achieve its goal.

All his calculations on nuclear energy assume that the presence of nuclear power plants will lead to atomic wars. That assuredly is not the case.

Here’s what you need to know about reactors and weapons proliferation: Inside the reactor, the uranium isotope U238 is transmuted into Pu239, which is a bomb material. But if the fuel stays in the reactor more than a few weeks some of the Pu239 turns into Pu240. Pu240 prevents the bomb from going off by predetonating before a critical mass is achieved. To make bomb material from plutonium from power reactors requires isotope separation and enrichment. If a country has the capability of doing separation and enrichment, it can make a bomb from uranium, which is an easier material to work with. (DOE )

Hans Blix was head of IAEA, the UN agency responsible for preventing proliferation. Here’s what he has to say:

“A phasing out of nuclear power in some or all states would not lead to the scrapping of a single nuclear bomb.

“States can have nuclear weapons without nuclear power though it is not common today. Israel is a case in point. It has no nuclear power but is assessed to have some 200 nuclear warheads. For a long time China had only the weapons. Indeed, most nuclear weapons states, including the US, had weapons before they had power. ” (Blix )

By inserting political dogma into a supposedly scientific paper, Prof. Jacobson has discredited his own work.

In truth, his paper wasn’t very scientific anyway. Like all wind-power polemicists, he tries to overcome the fundamental problem of intermittency through hand-waving. Here’s an example:

“When 13-19 geographically-disperse wind sites in the Midwest, over a region 850 km x 850 km, were hypothetically interconnected, an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly-averaged wind power was calculated to be usable as baseload electric power at the same reliability as a coal-fired power plant (Archer and Jacobson, 2007).”

Translated into English, what he says is that if wind farms are oversized by a factor of three, on average the entire assemblage spread out over 720,000 square kilometers could be as reliable as a single coal plant. This ignores the fact that coal plants are already interconnected, so if one plant is down there is no effect on the grid’s availability. In contrast, winds can be low over vast areas for months at a time during which the combined power levels will be inadequate.

Prof. Jacobson goes on to cite imaginary technological fixes as though such a citation is all that is required to overcome this inherent limitation to wind energy.

Opponents of nuclear energy gain nothing but confusion by using pseudo-scientific studies like this one to bolster their position.

Ken says:
December 14th, 2008
9:43 pm

Watch this, you might find it interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8&feature=channel_page

btw, wind will never work and solar is not viable for anything but taking individual users off the grid at high cost. Nuclear is far safer and cleaner than everything except geothermal, which if it can be tapped efficiently should be brought much more into the mix. Our current problems with nuclear stem largely from political decisions made in the 1950’s. Watch the video, it does justice to these arguments. Agree with it or not, if you are truly interested in energy issues you will find it informative, even if you are not totally convinced of the prospects of this technology.