Must watch: Gillard's Press Club Address today

[DoWhatUWant]

The puppet comment was in reference to her being on the strings of the greens.

I did read your post but unlike you i don't agree with doing something that will have no impact just for the sake of doing something.

Australia unlike japan is huge and sure there are regions of plate movement (seriously though that earthquake you linked was 5.6 magnitude which is pathetic) but unlike japan we have the option to not build anywhere near them which is what i was referring to in terms of us not being in the same situation. They knowingly built in those areas and even then withstood the quakes but it was the tsunami that screwed them.

[rec]

2. The Carbon Tax will be ineffectual at best

Ineffectual at doing what? Reducing emissions when considering the global position? Probably. But you seem to have missed a large chunk of the point I made regarding the future of the world's energy; how quickly we act is going to decide whether we sink or sail (economically speaking) when the world adopts clean energy.

And as mentioned earlier, climate change aside, it's only a matter of time until that happens. Quite simply, we're running out of dirty energy; oil is the world's biggest fuel, and the latest reports say that globally we've got about 40 years of it left. Coal is the second biggest, and in Australia looks to last about 150 years at current estimates.

[Bam Stroker]

The puppet comment was in reference to her being on the strings of the greens.

I beg your pardon, then. I misunderstood what you were getting at.

[rec]

Oh and FYI, just had a quick looksie; Uranium and Natural gas are both around 50 years too? Even if it's quadruple that, that's not long at all.

[DoWhatUWant]

If you don't mind my asking rec where are you getting these 40/50 years numbers from for coal/gas/oil/uranium cause those numbers sound significantly off compared to what I've read.

Regardless though there's no economic advantage in shifting to new technologies until they are economically viable (i.e similar cost to existing ones) and they haven't reached that point yet and you gave no arguments to indicate the basis for your claims that this would benefit us financially speaking. Switching to those energies earliest doesn't give us an advantage but a disadvantage until they are at least on par with other energies. This day will come soon enough anyways with the dirty energies constantly rising in price so i see no reason/benefit in artificially stimulating this transition.

[Bam Stroker]

@ rec & @DoWhatUWant - There's a lot of variance in those "X years of commodity Y left in the ground" figures floating around and before they're quoted you should check to see if:

1. That figure is based upon ongoing use at current levels OR if the projection takes into account a gradual increase in consumption over time based on global population growth and the maturation of developing nations, and:

2. Whether that figure is for ALL the projected reserves of a given resource in the ground or just the "low hanging fruit".

Otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges and one person saying "50 years of uranium left" and another saying "300 years of uranium left" could both technically be right.

@DoWhatUWant, the argument about new technologies being unproven/not economically viable is one of the most dazzingly disingenuous remarks that keep getting rolled out. Of course some of them are unproven or not economically viable - they're new technologies. That's kind of the point. If they were both proven and economically viable we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead we'd be saying "Pfft! 'sif fossil fuels! LULZ!"

And yes, the private sector will probably cotton on at some point and left to their own devices they'll invest in developing renewable technologies themselves, but I think it would just be smarter if we had Plan B ready to go before oil hits $1,000 per barrel. Hell, Radium (for example) wasn't even discovered until around 1900 and figured out pretty quickly it had some unique properties, medical applications and potential as a source of energy but it didn't do a lot for 35 or 40 years until a Government threw a shitload of money at it and in less than a decade we wound up with atomic bombs and nuclear power. And ironically they were then used to fight socialism, but I digress...

Do people actually realise that already 20% of power here in South Australia comes from wind turbines? Stop and read that figure again and think about it. 20%. A fifth. That's actually a lot, and it's from renewable energy. Right now. We have a target to be at 33% by the end of the decade. Fully one third of power generation in this entire state will be from wind power. No, really.

It'll never be 100% from wind power, of course, because you do need a fair bit of space and the wind is variable. But a bit of wind, a bit of solar (currently in the "not economically viable" category) and a bit of geothermal (currently in the "unproven but promising" category) and it's not unreasonable to think we can have all the power we need. That's not starry-eyed hippie, tree-hugging rhetoric, either. It's achievable, but it'll take time and investment.

Saying that many the current types renewables are unproven or not economically viable is actually valid, but dismissing them because of that is just intellectual laziness. Even the most cursory amount of consideration is enough to conclude that if a concerted effort is made those technologies can be iterated, adapted and applied to our needs faster than anyone realises. And when I say "faster" I still mean like 20 - 30 years, it's just a pity when most people hear that you might as well be saying "1 million years".

A revelation that will no doubt come as a shock to millions is that in all likelihood there will still be a world after next week's Dancing with the Stars, the next WoW expansion, the next AFL Grand Final and our eventual deaths from old age. Just because we won't be there to see it ourselves doesn't mean we can't get a start on making sure it's an alright kind of place to live in.

Right now we're in the driver's seat economically in large part due to our abundance of exportable raw materials, including fossil fuels. This carbon tax isn't going to ruin the economy, in fact if anything could go on to underwrite our economy for decades (albeit not for decades, if you catch my meaning). It's just unfortunate we're not used to being able to grasp concepts that far in advance. If we play our cards right we can get right back in the drivers seat when the world changes cars from fossils to renewables because we'll have such a big head start on the technology. Instead of seeing our economy grind to a halt when nobody wants to buy coal anymore we can switch tracks and start selling them our green tech instead.

The sad thing is too many people, like you, say they see no reason in doing it. But it's not like you'll be the one trying to figure out how to make a more compact solar cell or discover a way improve the thermal transfer coefficient of molten salt. That'll be taken care of for you. You just have to part with a couple of bucks every week (and probably get most if not all back in the end anyway).

Seriously... when did we as a people get to the point where doing nothing at all became too hard?

[psyave]

To balance any anti-nuclear talk coming from Japan.



I completely agree with Bams post above. I'm a dick at times, and I'll debate either side to gain a better understanding of whats going on. There is advertisement here in Chicago, in the papers, on TV, on the internet, everywhere, about America's steps for environmental change... I can tell you that everyone cares, but no one is willing to put forward any money, but there is significant investment (Way more than ours) from their government, but federal and local for change, and not only that from industries reinvesting power inefficient processors and investment into new environmental friends processors.

Until we make a change so local investment is higher in new technologies we create... then we wont have the ongoing problem of CSIRO/Australian Universities researching, creating and then selling the technology to the US/britain/china... Who then have the patient and sell units of the stuff back to us. If we dont invest, our profits are going to be insignificant in comparison to what it could have been.

[morge]

I just like pointing out to people that the radiation exposure is greater for a coal fired plant than that generated by a nuclear plant. Damn anti-nuclear hippies I better not catch you eating a banana(although I doubt hippies can afford bananas ATM).

PS love this chart http://xkcd.com/radiation/

[Jay]

Also in regards to nuclear, look up Thorium and MSRs. Also not to mention research in nuclear 'waste' reprocessing is something that's going to be reality soon enough (ie. reuse used nuclear waste).

Major issues with renewables at the moment is power availability and power storage/transmission. eg. 150MW solar plant will only have about 30% available for use. Other problems being great locations for renewables are far away from population density which makes transmission difficult (bring on room-temp superconductors).

^ Hence more research points required. kthx.

That all said, I work in a mining-related company, most of our clients are coal mines.

[Bam Stroker]

Thorium and MSRs.

Definitely. Thorium has amazing potential as an energy source and I name-dropped molten salt in my last post. Both definitely need to be explored. Although I've been harping on about renewable energy in my last posts, the argument I'm trying to make is primarily an economic one and so for that reason I'd also support looking into the further development of Thorium based energy generation even though it's technically not a renewable.

Unfortunately at the moment the nuclear energy industry is Uranium-centric and are loathe to promote the benefits of Thorium because it can't be easily substituted into their current fuel cycle and would require a lot of re-tooling or render a lot of their current generating infrastructure obsolete. At least, that's my understanding of why we haven't done something as apparently sensible and beneficial as switching to Thorium overnight. Someone correct me if I'm wrong by all means.

As an added bonus, Australia is possibly sitting on the second or third largest cache of Thorium in the world. So, you know, money. And stuff.

[Bam Stroker]

Paul Keating on last night's Lateline talking about the carbon tax, the political climate and the state of the media in Australia.

Interesting stuff, but I'm kind of left with a sense of depression from listening to someone talking about what's going on with the level of intelligence and comprehension that Keating has and then comparing that to the level on discourse at ground level. :\

[rec]

Great watch.

[rec]

For those who would rather read than watch, an article on the interview:

Paul Keating ridicules 'nutter' Tony Abbott | The Australian

[cmdr_lynchie]

I am bored, and a day of testing has driven me to drink, so I came to troll this thread with my pro-nuclear random thoughts.

This will be a rambling, barely coherent post with no real structure to it, so... like... whatever.

The thing that pisses me off when people go "what's the point of going from coal to nuclear when uranium only has X years left!" is this: Coal is a fucking organic product. That means it only occurs where there was once massive amounts of organic material. Uranium is a fucking element, and will be, like, fucking everywhere man.

There is uranium and thorium on Mars.

There is uranium on the fucking Moon.

Asteroids, planets, moons. There is an estimated 600 trillion tonnes of uranium in the solar system (and 40 trillion tonnes of that is in the Earth's crust... so get digging, bitches).

Australia has 1.6 million tonnes of identified recoverable uranium deposits. 1.6 million fucking tonnes.

A 1.3 MWe reactor will use about 200 to 250 tonnes per year.

There are plenty of articles and papers floating around, so feel free to look them up, but it would take somewhere between 20 to 30 x 1 MWe reactors to meet our carbon reduction targets.

30 x 250 = 7,500

1,600,000 / 7,500 = 213+ years.

Yeah, sure we will sell some, etc, et-fucking-cetera, but remember somewhere amoungst my swearing how I mentioned the 1.6 million tonnes was identified recoverable uranium?

Well they define recoverable uranium as uranium that can be recovered at <= US$130/kg...

...as mining (and hopefully fucking space) technology improves (which it fucking better in the next 100 years), the amount of recoverable uranium will sky rocket.

Hell, in 2007 it increased by 15%, simply because Al Gore annoyed mining executives enough to get off their fat arses and go exploring.

Remember how I mentioned there is an estimated 40 trillion tonnes of uranium in the Earth's core?

And that's just uranium. As people above mentioned, thorium is where the future's at... and it is more plentiful, both on Earth on in space (dddiiiggggs innnn spaaaaace).

It should also be mentioned that the reason thorium is plausible is fast breeder reactors, which use fissible material more efficiently. Well that also means you get more energy per wad of uranium.

Anyway, I am bored now. So I am going to watch some Craig Ferguson and some Futurama.

[Jay]

Oh wow.

He says, she says in a faux election

''HOW do you measure how much emissions we're using? How would you do that?'' It's a question at the heart of Julia Gillard's campaign to deliver Australia a clean energy future, yet the vast majority of people the Prime Minister is asking to support her price on carbon would have no idea how carbon dioxide emissions are calculated.

It fell to Andrew Cullen, a young cleaner with an inquisitive mind, to ask the question of Tony Abbott when the Opposition Leader stood before a group of workers in their lunch room at a South Dandenong engine factory this week. ''That's a good question!'' Abbott replied, engaging not just Cullen but the entire room.

''It's actually pretty hard to do this because carbon dioxide is invisible and it's weightless and you can't smell it,'' Abbott began, projecting frankness.

''So it's not something that you can just look at and say: 'Yeah, we can quantify that'.''