Strange topic to be your first post, considering the board.

I don't think it's that analysts are afraid, it's just out of the purview of their jobs. The point is to make money and sell products, if their was an alternative which produced a fraction of the short term income that continued oil reliance produces there could be a move in that direction, but energy alternatives have a high R&D cost with a relatively low near term return on that investment.

"But I don't like Spam."

"You... you don't like Spam?"

This section of the forums is suppose to be open for any decent discussion not related to models, ect. If someone wants to talk about oil its okay. If you don't care to that is fine too.

Frankly, I'd love to vent about the gulf spill since I'm in Mississippi. I haven't because I'm sure the crisis alarms every reasonable person where ever they live. Its well reported and what can I say except we are worried that the displacement in the gulf might also trigger the Madrid fault among all the other damage it is causing.

Every time some snippet about the decisions that led to the crisis comes up I get more and more angry. Corner after corner cut, safety precautions disregarded, and the recurring phrase 'this is how it's going to be'.

And then some pundit (I am looking at you Rush!) will defend BP, making me hate the entire world just a little bit more.

I honestly hope that BP goes up in smoke as thoroughly as the rig they created so negligently. Let them burn.

My father was a nautical engineer, and a submariner who earned his dolphins before that - you don't mess wit the tolerances! In any war between man and ocean the deck is stacked in Neptune's favor - he may not win this battle, but soon or late, the greatest ship will go down.

The Auld Grump, my dad had a picture wall of submarines that had gone down. I can still name so many of them... Thresher, Squalus, Scorpion, Thetis, Hunley, Holland....

Pretty much wraps up my thoughts....

even though they cover the whole gammit in the video.... the sentiment is the same.

There will come a day when this planet will shake us off like fleas off a dog. She will heal herself and perhaps pockets of survivors will start all over again ... in a radically changed world ... in a stone age. That is the paradise that will follow the armageddon of our own making.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be so cheerful.

Not really on topic, but Ice reminds me of Einstein's assertion that world war 4 will be fought with clubs and stones...

Amen, Halcy. Well thought, well put.

Y'know what I haven't heard anyone screaming about for a few years? Nuclear power. I know, I know, NIMBY and all that, but who's actually looked at the research lately? With some that could fit into a wide-load semi trailer, entire cities could be powered for next to nothing. If the technology can be successfully scaled down further, it might one day be a viable way to propel our cars. Probably no one will ever be comfortable enough to do that, but what's to stop us from charging EVs from a nuclear grid? Current technology is thousands of times safer than it was in previous decades, and even if a pebble-bed goes crazy and has no human oversight its very structure is self-cooling. NO MELTDOWNS. And, Joule for Joule, nuclear power has *always* been the cleanest, most efficient, least environmentally damaging power source (and yes, that includes solar-although researchers are making promising strides in that area too!).

Just a thought. Feel free to call me crazy, but please do read the article.

Not to rain on your parade, but Nuclear is the most heavily subsidised industry in the world. Period. End of Discussion. It cannot generate a profit and it never has.

The fine print is that the insurance in capped, real low. Its the only industry which can outright destroy a city, hence the insurace cap. In no way can an energy company afford to fix the damage caused from a nuclear accident. (At least BP has deep pockets to try to fix things in the gulf.)

They are looking at building a reactor for the oil sands because most of the oil sands green house emmissions are in the energy used to separate the oil from the tar\sand. Of course that's playing double jepardy with your energy. If the reactor goes, so does 100 years of oil for North America.


Gas I'm afraid is equally going dirty. Right now, there are LNG (Liquid Natual Gas) ports all over the world. What they do is freeze the gas where the cost of production is low, ship it in liquid form to where prices are high. However they use a whopping 60% of the energy to do this. So every Giga Joule your house consumes is in fact, 3 Giga Joules. The ports are also something of a danger. If an LNG tanker were to say catch fire... Kaboom... Its in fact the equivalent of a nuclear strike.


Personally, I think solar is the way to go. Every house should put batteries and solar panels in to supply their own energy. The cost would be something like $20 to $50k per home (prices would go way down if everyone started doing it). Of course the down side is that no one controls such an installation, and certainly there is no money in helping to redistribute the energy (i.e. a Cold snap in canada could draw on Florida's excess supply). If no one controls it, no one will do it. (Same fate as Tesla's free electricity.)

Solar is the way to go. They already make Solar Shingles for houses. You can punch a nail through them and they still work. Place those on your house for electricity and the other kind of solar panels for heating your water.

Fusion energy is also the way to go. I know there are two companies right now in a race to get the first Fusion Energy Plant up and running. One is a French Company and I can't remember who the second one was. I will have to look it up.

You now have Tesla Motors with there two lines of electric cars. A sports car that can do 0-60 mph in just a few seconds and a five seater family car. trunk space in the front and rear of the car.

I think it is a waist of time, money and effort to be producing Hybrid cars (except for Semi Trucks, Large Lorries, or other Large Engine Vehicles) when we obviously have the technology to do electric.

Governments should do what they did in the 70's (banning leaded gasoline) and give a time limit to convert the country to electric by giving home owners incentives to convert their house to solar. The cost is high right now but if millions of people started to order the price would eventually go down.

@UHF: I find that declaring 'end of discussion' is almost never the actual end. You're talking about outdated systems; have you been keeping up with the new technology? Because it seems to me that the newer model reactors, including pebble beds, might require a subsidy for startup. After that, maintenance costs need not be high if the plant is initially constructed well (I.e. not Soviet style). This leaves fuel production and waste disposal. I admit I don't know what kind of funding that takes; maybe this is what you're referring to? As far as waste disposal, new Mexico already has a storage facility carved from a deeeep salt mine. A room gets filled and then packed with salt. Walls, floor &ceiling are also salt. The worst waste leak in history would mean nothing there. And disposal can be had for the price of fuel to transport -plus a storage fee.
So. Is the fuel so expensive to manufacture? I don't know, but I doubt it.

@piper: I agree with most of what you say; I part ways with you on fusion, because it scares the crap outta me. Every fusion project I've seen would work like the first fission reactors(we have to hold the throttle down intead of up), with the slight difference that a catastrophic failure DESTROYS THE WORLD. Can't say I'm a fan.

@grump: you make good points. I'd like to see more wind/tidal energy, but at this point both are seriously hampered by maintenance costs (and greenpeace says they chop up wildlife, but then they shout their curses from a smoke-belching oil tanker, so...). That said, their overall environmental impact is very low (good) while efficiency is nothing compared to petroleum or nuclear (not so good). I guess the question we need to ask is: what kind of compromises are we willing to make for energy?
As far as contamination goes, that will always be a concern with any isotope but it seems that the pebble design makes leakage as unlikely as humanly possible. If, worst case, a pebble leaks in the reactor bed and it goes undetected, all the pebbles are regularly rotated out and inspected for leaks. I know that "what could go wrong?" Is a stupid question, but the odds are more in favor of the Redskins winning the Stanley cup (yes I know) than of any significant leakage.

@everyone: I'm not calling for a reactor in every kitchen here, I'm just saying we should look at all our options. I like the idea of reclamation but don't know anything about it. I hope it's more like recycling plastics than recycling paper...

Theres a bit of a problem with reliance on any form of non-renewable Material for future Energy needs. Oil is certainly valuable now, but there simply won't be enough easily attainable material in 20-60 years to make it a viable energy source. With us at or right below peak oil right now I think even those estimates might be high. Nuclear material will likely take us much further but my understanding is that we'll still reach Peak Nuclear production in less than 200 years, with problems extending from there.

Rather than the big centralized forms of energy production we rely on today I can't see how anything other than the decentralized grid models proposed by the solar and geothermal crowd are really sustainable in the long term.

I'm not against Nuclear production, but it should be understood to be merely a stopgap measure, and politically that doesn't ever seem to work out like that. It tends to turn into a political subtext, like oil is. If it's used that's fine but let's not subsidize it by capping insurance on it. If energy is valuable to people then we need to pay for it, but if Our government is going to subsidize anything let it be a move towards localized power sources and decentralized grids with more sustainable means of energy production.

Ice: sounds like a good situation to me... but I'd have DTs from losing internet access.

UHF: firstly, insurance rates on a new reactor would be totally different from the old ones. An uncle is a metlife actuary and he says that any significant advance in technology forces all the risk tables to be recalculated. Current designs (which don't even need to be anywhere near a city) might not even need a cap. Catastrophic failure only calls for a relatively small (24 HR on call) response team.
Secondly, I wasn't talking about carbon footprints. That's a whole separate rant. I'm talking about energy produced vs disposal of worn out components. I agree with you about subsidies, as I'm a fan of small government and anything that gets subsidized is paid for with either taxpayer dollars or with newly printed money (but again, that's a whole different rant).

Llygh: where did you find your figures on peak production? I'd be interested in reading up on that, as I don't know much in that area of forecasting.