To answer John, I think that cap-and-trade legislation would be a great idea as the first chapter in a more meaningful bill. As a stand-alone proposal that Democrats will consider their great contribution to the climate issue before 2011, it strikes me as a band aid on a compound fracture. If you think that something more significant might come down the pike, well, hoping that Democrats will write and pass a blockbuster climate bill in an election year is generally about as rewarding as hoping to win the lottery without buying a ticket.
For the generation of people who didn’t think much about activism before George Bush and An Inconvenient Truth, let me explain how this works. Some time in the 80’s most of the world collectively agreed that climate was a pressing issue that would soon pass an irreversible threshold if we did not act fast. It doesn’t reflect badly on the UN that the problem wasn’t fixed right away, in fact just the reverse. It shows real determination that member nations kept pressing until they had a minimum workable plan, and the idea of starting with a foot-in-the-door treaty that would give major countries a nominal baby step towards carbon limits at the international level looked pretty good on paper. The UN would then use the placeholder treaty as a mechanism to ratchet up carbon limits as needed without having to pass a new framework each time.
The placeholder treaty was the Kyoto Protocol. The UN proposed it in 1992 and finalized the details in 1997. America finally ratified Kyoto in 2005. That means that for at least thirteen years (and running) Kyoto tied up useful action because the elusive promise of a mostly empty treaty gave governments a handy reason to do bubkis.
As a scientist with relevant credentials and as an experienced activist I should probably have more productive things to say, but at this point I don’t really see the use. As long as power and resources are still cheap we could prepare ourselves for shortages of both. We could get ready for food supply dropping off due to oil shocks and climate-caused loss of viable farm land (climate stability promotes civilization by allowing us to predictably grow crops). We could plan for huge migrations away from coastal cities, island nations and equatorial soon-to-be deserts. We can ready ourselves for commercially important species going extinct.
Alternatively, we could stop dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere almost completely, although by now even that may not do much good. Global warming has a built-in time lag of between ten and a hundred years, depending on input from feedback effects such as ice-water albedo and the loss of marine plant life to ocean acidification. Even granting that cutting carbon would still do some good, cap and trade and other solutions that drop our emissions from a crapload to a slightly smaller crapload will not save the day.
That said, technically speaking I think that we could cut emissions more severely than most people think. My rough calculations/informed guesswork says that lavish first-world countries could keep our quality of life and cut our energy use by at least half. Given relatively minor compromises and smart planning (e.g. land use design along the lines Atrios often writes about, drastically reducing meat in our diet, rethinking building design, reducing unnecessary travel) I am confident that we could drop our energy use by ninety percent. To see where some of my thinking comes from, look up the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Practical or not, meaningful carbon cuts will never beat politics. Of America’s two political parties, one won’t do anything useful and the other can’t. Even setting domestic politics aside it seems silly to think that the world can collectively let that oil and coal just sit in the ground.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that the governments of Earth (GOE) collectively agree to let that oil just sit there for fifty years. Yeah, I know. That’s like asking a starving four year old to hold on to a marshmallow for six hours. Sounds credible? Now let’s say that our collective will holds out for another fifty years, adding up to a total of one hundred years. I understand that in modern political terms that is longer than the age of the Earth, but bear with me. Now let’s imagine that something terrible (or one could say, inevitable and predictable) happens and the GOE drill and burn what’s left over the next hundred years. In political terms the GOE just overcame human nature to a degree that would get a new writer laughed out of a spec fic conference, yet in geological terms we might as well burn the whole lot between April and May of next year.
So to answer John’s question, I’m pleased in an abstract sense that Democrats are willing to piss off Republicans with any climate legislation at all. In a concrete sense, feh. Here’s a kitten on a Roomba.
Xanthippas
I can think of worse ways to end a post.
r€nato
Makes me want to buy a Roomba… and a cat.
Zifnab
Weeeeeeeeee! My worries are assuaged.
Seriously, though. To a degree, I can’t swallow the “gloom and doom” outlook, if only because human innovation has had a fairly decent track record of beating environmental catastrophe. The Dutch should be living like mermaids, but their levee system keeps them high and dry. Irrigation projects made Los Vegas bloom – surely we can tackle even large scale regional droughts. Even (Especially?) if we see price spikes in natural resources, we are on the cusp of a renewable energy boom.
This isn’t a question of “the survival of the human race!!!” so much as it is a question of how much pain we want to spare ourselves in the long run by preparing a few decades in advance. But it’s not the end of the world.
Brian J
Allow me to put a positive, if even pretty unrealistic, spin on what’s happening.
Like you suggested, Waxman-Markey seems to have the reputation as pretty weak tea–not awful, but not really great, either. It’s a good first step, but little else. But perhaps that’s part of the plan. If we slowly but surely get people on board with the idea of schemes like cap and trade or an increased gas tax, to the point of where they barely notice, it could become less and less difficult to enact stricter regulations or taxes. Essentially, it’s like getting someone to do anything they don’t want to do–getting adults to give up harmful substances, getting people to save more money, getting kids to each their vegetables.
Of course, even if this is true, if any steps towards increasingly stringent requirements are outpaced by negative changes in climate, it probably won’t matter. So maybe it doesn’t make a difference anyway.
Adam C
A few points:
1) The US has never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. In February it became the only remaining country to sign the agreement but fail to ratify it.
2) The rate of consumption really does matter. We don’t need to eliminate the use of oil and coal, we need to slow it down (admittedly by quite a lot). We don’t need to resist temptation forever.
3) Pat of that temptation is a result of unrealistically low prices – it’s a market failure. If the price of coal reflected the real cost to society (Tragedy of the Commons, etc., etc.) its consumption would drop. Think of cap and trade (or better, a carbon tax) as a correction to the market, rather than a distortion.
None of this means that you won’t turn out to be substantially correct. I’d just hate to give in to pessimism…
gex
That some use the “science” creatively underwritten by corporations that have obvious conflicts of interest to keep us on the “is it even a problem” page instead of the “what do we do about it page” is the part that pisses me off.
That many of those people call themselves “conservatives” is all the more outrage, as was underscored in John’s previous thread.
passerby
It’s the 21st Century and we’re having this discussion about burning fossil fuels.
Madness.
I sure hope there are industrious entrepreneurs who are, behind the scenes, developing ways to roll out Free Energy technology to the masses.
Thanx for the kitty on a Roomba. I adored that. In fact, after I hit “submit”, I’m gonna watch it again.
furry charismatic megafauna
Don’t ever take me to Japan. Srsly
John Hamilton Farr
Hoping for salvation from any party or participants in our essentially doomed system is a waste of time. I keep falling into the trap myself, but this isn’t the path: when enough individual consciousnesses evolve, the world will reflect it.
I’m not sure why political bloggers are even in business. I started reading and blogging ferociously during the last adminsitration, because nothing was more important than getting rid of Bush the Killer of Worlds. Now he’s gone, and we will have the hope of universal health care killed by a centrist black president whose election had me crying tears of joy.
One would do better to fine-tune one’s affinity to the animating spirit of the universe, study ancient mystics, plant a garden, play a musical instrument, or spend time in the wilderness without speaking. The “system” isn’t evil, it’s just inert. Trying to make sense of it is akin to making dinner by cooking a brick in a frying pan.
Zifnab
@Brian J:
I always thought Obama was just planning to leverage the deplorably corrupt financial markets to put the screws to the deplorably corrupt energy industry. When carbon credits start skyrocketing in price due to rampant Wall Street speculation, it could collapse all sorts of messy industries.
Davis X. Machina
The ice-melt won’t be higher than knee-deep when Jesus returns.
Ok. Thigh deep. But no deeper.
Brian J
@Zinfab:
Elaborate, if you will.
r€nato
@John Hamilton Farr:
I don’t at all share your fatalism, not about the political system and not about Obama and health care reform.
It is the height of narcissism to expect politicians to meet your every expectation of them, and the height of immaturity to throw in the towel and give up when they don’t do so. Believe it or not, you’re not the most important person in the country. Politics is all about compromise. Instead of throwing in the towel, you should be doing what you can to push the system towards what you would like to see.
P.S. I’m really, really tired of this “OMG Obama hasn’t created a progressive utopia in his first 5 months in office!” tantrum-throwing.
Really tired of it.
Really.
r€nato
@Davis X. Machina:
and think of the economy-boosting opportunities of global climate change! Someone’s going to have to build and sell all those new houses for those who can’t live on their beachfront property any longer! All those slums in Miami will suddenly be beachfront property, making those poor folks instantly wealthy!
Betcha didn’t think of that you dirty fucking socialist hippies, huh?
r€nato
goddamn you and your soc ialist spam filter, John.
Zifnab
@Brian J: We already saw it in the oil markets. Someone finally sold the concept of “Peak Oil” to investors, and they started buying up oil contracts like every well was going to run out tomorrow. So you had investors artificially inflating the price of oil by projecting its price some 10 or 20 years in the future.
Imagine the same game occurring with the carbon credits. Someone crunches the numbers and projects a shortfall of credits by the end of the year. Low demand and stagnant supply means higher prices. So he starts scooping up carbon credits and securitizing them. The trend catches on and pretty soon you’ve got Wall Streeters bidding up the price of credits to an astronomical degree. Suddenly, when a firm like BP has a plant leak or some other emergency situation, requiring them to buy up credits to cover their increased output, they’re spending ten times the price that a sane market would peg the credits at.
The high price of credits could even start leaning on a firm’s business model. If you’re making more money on resold credits than you are on the coal/oil/whatever you’re selling, perhaps you are running a carbon credit clearinghouse and you didn’t even know it. So dirty industries start scaling back production because it’s better to underproduce energy and resell the excess credits.
So the price of coal-produced electricity goes up. But solar and wind – as carbon free alternatives – don’t. You could even start seeing plants building their own private carbon-free power stations, because it’s cheaper to use solar to power the petrol plants than it is to burn petrol to do it. And just resell the credits on the open market.
:-p That sort of thing.
Drive By Wisdom
As I have said since the early 80’s, every month that the liberal greenies protest against nuclear energy, another coal plant comes online. Presuming there is any truth to global warming, and coal is a part of that, these coal stack huggers have only themselves to blame.
jenniebee
@Zifnab:
Those examples aren’t exactly technological responses to catastrophe, they’re more like “do what beavers do, but with concrete.” And they aren’t catastrophes, they’re just examples of the extra effort it takes for humans to live in places that are better suited to either fish or cactii.
I’ve been trying to find an example of a time when humans were confronted with a predictable catastrophe and found a technological solution that headed off that catastrophe. So far, the closest things I’ve come up with are the funny masks doctors wore during the black plague and Scotty’s Deus Ex Machinas on Star Trek.
Incidentally, there’s a reason we still call last-second technological interventions Deus Ex Machinas. It’s pretty much the same reason that the device is considered to be a cop-out way for a writer to resolve a conflict. It’s just not the sort of thing that happens in real life.
Graeme
I don’t think much of anything is going to happen with climate change soon. Anything that passes will get watered down by big money. If you need further proof, check out this geothermal drilling project in CA as profiled in the NYT. It’s funded by Google and the VCs, but they’re basically gambling on a huge profit by ignoring the quakes a similar project in Switzerland set off. It’s the same type of short-sighted gamble that put us in the hole we’re in now.
It also seems to me to be class warfare: corporate interests run roughshod over safety issues. Of course, it also includes the government scientists cashing in and getting hired by the VCs to run the drilling operations.
Nothing is going to change, no matter how many Democrats get elected. If CA is the canary in the coal mine, we’re all screwed.
gex
@jenniebee: Agreed.
Plus, I don’t think we are talking about the same scale of catastrophe. Katrina is a small-scale catastrophe if you can believe it. The volcano under Yellowstone is a wipe-out humans in North America kind of catastrophe. That’s the scale of catastrophe that we need to worry about.
And I think that misplaced confidence in technology can be really dangerous. There have been civilizations in the past that destroyed their immediate environment to the point that their societies collapsed. I guess taking comfort in the fact that humanity will likely survive, even though millions maybe billions may suffer horribly and die off, seems like a strange silver lining to be looking at.
scav
@Zifnab: you’re not dead yet either. please read the fine print about past performance.
Xecky Gilchrist
although by now even that may not do much good.
I totally agree – we should all just curl up and die.
mcd410x
“Here’s a kitten on a Roomba.”
May be the line of the day.
Interrobang
As I have said since the early 80’s, every month that the liberal greenies protest against nuclear energy, another coal plant comes online.
Figure out what to do with the nuclear waste that nuke plants leave behind, and maybe people will stop protesting them. As I recall, that’s not exactly a settled question; nobody wants the stuff in their backyards. Nor does anyone want a nuke plant in their backyard either (and everywhere is someone’s backyard).
In your world, is it possible to be both anti-nuke and anti-coal? I mean, I live in the country with the safest nuclear reactors in the world (hint: not the US) and I don’t like the current technology at all, mostly because of the problem of what you do with concentrated amounts of radioactive material after you’ve finished generating power from it. I also should point out at this juncture in the narrative that coal sludge is also radioactive waste, which sucks like an Electrolux.
Me, I like small-scale local wind power, small-scale local hydroelectricity, and other suchlike things.
Brachiator
The part about redesigning buildings sounds promising. But drastically reducing meat in our diet? Sorry. And I’m not sure how you would define unnecessary travel. This is where a reasonable concern about climate change morphs into a kind of social puritanism.
Why? What would be the point? Isn’t the real issue coming up with ways to effectively mitigate the impact of global climate change, or to come up with viable alternative energy sources?
passerby – It’s the 21st Century and we’re having this discussion about burning fossil fuels.
Yeah, and where are my flying cars and my monorails!
Tim F.
Whether or not you meant to do it, this comment perfectly illustrates the political reasons why meaningful change will not happen. Like I already said. We could do it but for reasons that include yourself we will not.
As Wash said to Mal, that part will happen most definitely.
sparky
@John Hamilton Farr: Yes. I would add, for those of you who are in the “OMG shut up Obama just got in office” camp, if not now, when?
Is there something wrong with pretending a band-aid is great? I think so, but then I don’t have much truck with religion, either. It seems that we are in the midst of creating a poorer planet, in that we will be left with a place with dead seas, insects and some small mammals. Most humans will survive the transition, and those humans will not care about it one way or the other. A true (speciesist) utilitarian would perhaps say that’s for the best–the more humans the better. I guess I don’t have the courage of that belief.
@Tim F.: Exactly. Incidentally, I would not equate realism with cynicism or pessimism despite the apparently permanent American affinity for conflating them all.
Tim H.
What Tim F. said. With the addition that a 20-30% reduction in energy usage is baked into the cake over the next 10 years whether we do it voluntarily or not. Unfortunately if we just let it happen without preparation we’ll never get it back.
It’s becoming pretty obvious that capitalism sucks at providing infrastructure. There’s just not enough quick money in it.
Evinfuilt
@Interrobang:
That’s not a science question, its political. The science solved it decades ago.
Its not waste, its future fuel that we’re not legally allowed to recycle in the US. The total quantity left afterwards would fit in a server closet and is actually easy to store (radioactivity of final waste is miniscule.)
The actual “waste” (ie machines shut down that were in contact) is the only thing you have to worry about. But that stuff is easy to handle (its weak, radiation is easily blocked, though long lasting. the harder to block radiation dies out super fast but is also really fuel in the waiting.)
The saddest thing is this has been known for decades but most anti-Nuclear people keep purposefully forgetting that its politics, not science that’s left the waste as an issue.
and yes, I want a Nuclear Reactor in my backyard. Please! its cleaner and quieter than any other choice. I’d take it over the dozens of coal plants near my home. I’m happy we have one only 50 miles from home, just wish it gave me power. I’m also proud that they’ll be expanding.
Nuclear reactors are safe, no other system of energy kills fewer people (yes, including solar and wind, solar power is nasty in the hidden costs in China.) The only way people can say Nuclear is dangerous is by lying, by conflating nuclear weapons to reactors.
Prometheus Shrugged
The “band aid on a fracture” aspect of cap and trade (and other incentives to increase efficiency) is the reason that many climate scientists view active carbon sequestration–literally sucking CO2 out of the air–as the only realistic solution to the problem. This prospect is not as far-fetched as it sounds, but it would of course impose substantial costs.
Cap and trade at least introduces the concept of establishing a price on carbon–a prerequisite for any energy solution. However, the bureaucracy (and technology) required for bookkeeping and monitoring of the global emissions under this system is not trivial. Widespread cheating is likely to be the norm.
I’ve never understood why someone in DC can’t spell out the logic of a carbon tax more clearly: tax the “bads” (e.g. carbon, cigarettes, booze), not the “goods” (e.g. labor, industry). This approach is so much more direct. And it could break the current stalemate of the “per capita emissions” argument that is currently hindering any international cooperation, because developing countries could enter on a graduated scale–in effect, there could be carbon “tax brackets”. Too bad that Chris Dodd had to be the national spokesperson for the carbon tax–people tend to fall asleep seconds after he opens his mouth.
By the way, not to be pedantic Tim F. (because I agree with the basic thrust of your post), but albedo feedback does not, by itself, necessarily induce a lagged response. The lag arises from the storage (and mixing) of heat in the ocean. Nor does the acidification of the ocean have anything to do with the timing or magnitude of climate response (in fact, its effect on marine life is even debatable at this point, given that it won’t actually make the oceans acidic). OK, that was pretty pedantic…
passerby
@Brachiator:
Well, given your average driver, I’ll pass on the flying cars but fully behind the idea of MagLev trains from sea to shining sea and all parts in between…and, I think we should all be wearing silver jumpsuits, also.
Tim F.
The only way that albedo will not have a delayed effect is if all of the ice that will melt due to CO2 emissions melts right away. If instead ice melts gradually over time, the amount of open sea will also increase gradually over time, as will the acreage of coastal land that becomes coastal seafloor.
If we released ten years of CO2 in one huge dose this year, the feedback of ice melt feeding warming feeding more ice melt would take at least ten years to manifest, and likely much more than that.
See also surface water in the permafrost zone.
If it disrupts coccolithophores and other calcite-based marine algae then yes, surface acidification could strongly impact climate by reducing the drawdown of atmospheric CO2. Diatom growth could compensate, but then we would lose the relative benefit of carbon drawdown through calcite sedimentation. Again, this effect would take a long time to manifest if we dumped all of our carbon tomorrow.
Tim F.
…also, acidification would shoal the calcite compensation depth (CCD). Protected calcite sediment would be dissolved, but would most likely migrate with thermohaline circulation rather than surface water, thus creating the mother of all delayed feedbacks. That said, the effect might or might not balance the deepening influence that surface warming would have on the CCD.
Prometheus Shrugged
Tim F. –Regarding ice albedo: you’re talking about the melting of the permanent ice and snow fields, which, as you say, do have some thermal inertia (though it’s debatable exactly how dynamic they can be). However, a substantial part of the high latitude amplification of greenhouse warming in climate models results from the melting (or, rather, lack of formation) of seasonal sea ice. Most people wouldn’t view sea ice as a lagging or slowly-responding aspect of the climate system.
Regarding acidification: in the short term, the precipitation of calcium carbonate by marine calcifiers actually raises the pCO2 of surface waters, because it reduces alkalinity twice as much as it reduces the dissolved inorganic carbon. So the reduction of the rate of calcification (which is really what we’re talking about when discussing acidification) would actually help the ocean to take up more CO2 temporarily. But, anyway, it’s really the ocean mixing that matters most for carbon uptake, not the biology.
I guess I should win geek of the day award for this post.
Brachiator
@Tim F.:
To the contrary, the problem is that some people incorrectly believe that accepting the fact of global climate change automatically entails consensus with respect to proposed solutions.
Proposed solutions which are really an appeal to luddite primitivism are non-starters, as far as I am concerned. What you might see as meaningful change (reduction of meat eating, restriction of travel) to me is just someone disguising their personal preferences as an answer to climate change.
I prefer things that are more like the development of the catalytic converter as an answer to auto emissions. Free market wingnuts opposed imposing pollution regulations on the auto industry and predicted dire consequences to the auto market if pollution-control requirements were mandated. But in the end, catalytic converters did what they were supposed to do, but also did not affect auto sales or auto performance or put a burden on drivers.
media browski
I’m seeing confusion here about what Capt. Trade (my shorthand) accomplishes.
Two points:
1. Capt. Trade *is* essentially a carbon tax, but lacks the inefficient features of a tax (market distortions). It replaces those features with
2. A market for the rights to pollute that, when set below current levels, stimulates efficiency AND innovation (which is the key thing). A tax simply eats profits, which are the source ofr R and D funds, while capt. Trade rewards innovation with profits.
I’m watching this actually h@pen in the “corrupt” (and heavily regulated) energy generation industry in response to the threat of capt. Trade.
Gryn
The point isn’t leaving the oil in the ground. We can actually put that oil to much better (and more profitable) use than burning it up and converting it to carbon dioxide gas. We have plenty of better and more sustainable solutions for our energy needs.
Plastics, drugs, etc. Most of these secondary uses don’t affect our global climate (landfill use being a different matter…). If cap & trade or carbon tax reflected how the oil is used then the incentives should work out to everyone’s benefit in the long run.
Wile E. Quixote
@Interrobang
Well, you could dig a big fucking hole somewhere and bury the stuff. I find the people who shit themselves blind over what to do about the problem of nuclear waste to be a bunch of ignorant fucking retards. Guess what, every form of energy has some waste associated with it. Coal produces millions of tons of fly ash, which is nasty, horrible, toxic radioactive shit and right now they just dump that stuff into storage ponds, sometimes with disastrous consequences when the ponds break. Those windmills that environmentalists love to gush about. Well let’s see, they require a large amount of concrete for the base, producing cement for concrete is a huge producer of greenhouse gases, then you need steel for the tower, which means that you have to go dig holes and mine iron ore and then turn that iron into steel, which produces more carbon dioxide. Oh, and the blades, aluminum or carbon fiber, neither of which grows on trees. The dead bird problem however is overrated. But you still have an amazing amount of NIMBYism when it comes to windmills, just ask anyone living in Cape Cod or Central Washington property owners.
Solar has its own set of problems, you have to cover a lot of area with solar collectors in order to get usable amounts of power. You can reduce some of this by putting solar collectors on the roofs of buildings, but your performance will be less than ideal. So you get to cover a lot of land with solar collectors or solar cells. The production of silicon for solar cells is a horribly nasty and polluting process, good thing we’ve outsourced it to China so that we can enjoy clean skies and be all self-righteous about how much we care about the environment while they get to deal with the pollution.
My favorite source of “green” power is hydroelectric. Seattle environmentalists, a bunch of useless, walking crapsacks who could give any Orange County conservative a run for his money in terms of smug ignorance and sheer self-righteousness, love to talk about how green Seattle is because we get most of our power from hydroelectric dams. Of course this leaves out the method of construction for a dam, which is that the government comes in and tells a bunch of people “Hi, you have to move because your house is going to be underwater soon. Here’s some token compensation. Have a nice day”. Fortunately a lot of the people who the government grabbed the land from to build the BPA were native Americans, and who gives a fuck about them? Then you build a huge dam that uses tons and tons of steel and concrete, the production of which generates greenhouse gases, then you block the natural flow of the river, which fucks things up for a variety of reasons and kill most of the fish that used to be in that river and you fuck up your salmon harvests forever because those salmon used to go up the river to spawn. Oh, and there’s a whole bunch of rotting vegetation at the bottom of your new reservoir, which as it decays will release truly astounding amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. Yeah, that’s some mighty “green” power you’ve got there.
So nuclear waste is pretty small beer compared to the environmental degradation of coal or hydroelectric power. But it’s nookular and therefore scary to people who are too fucking stupid to learn some basic physics and do some basic research. Yeah, the stuff is nasty, toxic and radioactive as Hell, and it stays nasty, toxic and radioactive for a long time. On the other hand mine tailings and fly ash are nasty and toxic too, and fly ash should be regulated as low-level nuclear waste, but despite this they don’t generate the same shit your pants fear and outrage that nuclear waste does, even though the volume of waste from a coal burning power plant is enormous compared to that from a nuclear plant.
So you’ve got a bunch of toxic and radioactive shit. You can reprocess the toxic and radioactive shit and recover a lot of fuel content, but the problem with that is that it uses a process, PUREX, that uses pretty much every nasty, toxic horrible chemical in the book, oh, and it produces plutonium, which is convenient for the production of nuclear weapons. So PUREX sucks, other countries use it, we don’t because Jimmy Carter banned it back in the 1970s.
Fine, you can build other reactor types that burn the waste from the pressurized water reactors the US uses and reduce the radioactive half-life of the waste. Some of these are incredibly complex and would require years of research and the development of new reactor types and a whole bunch of engineering so we could learn how to do things like handle large quantities of molten sodium. Others would be cheaper, such as burning spent PWR fuel in CANDU reactors. But even if you say “fuck it, let’s just bury the stuff”, so what? Dig a big fucking hole somewhere and dump the stuff in and then cover it with lots and lots of concrete. Make it even harder to reprocess the stuff for plutonium by mixing the waste with old uranium tailings and then dump it in the BFH and start pouring the concrete. The Egyptians somehow managed to, 4,000 years ago, build these huge structures called “pyramids” and they’re still standing.
4,000 years is equivalent to 130 half-lives of strontium 90 and cesium 137, the most prolific and radioactive components of nuclear waste. Grab a used fuel rod from a reactor and it’s the radiation from the decay of these two elements, and a handful of others, that will kill you, not from the plutonium or uranium. Now these elements lose half of their radioactivity every thirty years, so in say, 1000 years, 33 half lives, these elements will be giving off 1/2^33rd or 8 billionths as much radiation as they are today. At this point what you have left is mostly uranium and plutonium. The plutonium has a half life of about 24,000 years, it will take about a million years for it to decay into something less lethal, unfortunately what it decays to is Uranium 235, which is still useful for bombs and has a half life of around 700 million years. On the other hand if you bury it deep enough and dilute it enough after 1000 years the waste isn’t going to be all that radioactive and anyone who’s trying to get plutonium or uranium for building a bomb can find easier ways to do so than digging down through a few thousand feet of rock or concrete. So, yeah, why not just dig a big hole and dump the stuff?
Now, the environmental movement really hasn’t managed to contribute anything of substance to this debate, this is because most people who consider themselves “environmentalists” are every bit as stupid as the people who consider themselves “Republicans” or “conservatives”. Environmentalists don’t want a solution to the problem of disposing of nuclear waste because any such solution might mean that more nuclear plants would be built and they will come right out and admit to this. Building more nuclear plants will make baby eco-Jesus cry, and we can’t have that, can we? Of course the environmentalists are being dishonest, self-serving, short-sighted and downright stupid here, but hey, why should those qualities be limited to corporate America?
Don’t believe me? Well let’s try a little gedankenexperiment here. Let’s suppose that tomorrow at noon every nation on earth decides to stop building nuclear power plants, and further, while we’re going into ecotopia land, which is a place as divorced from reality as “free-market fantasy land”, let’s suppose that every nation on earth decides to scram their reactors and permanently shut them down at the same time and to destroy their nuclear stockpiles. Great, we’re in ecotopia. Yay, windmills, solar cells and Toyota Priuses for everyone. Amory Lovins and Al Gore are greeted as liberators. Yay! Except that whoops, we’ve still got a shitload of nuclear waste to dispose of. See, even if we shut those plants down tomorrow and promise not to build any more of them we still need to figure out how to deal with the nuclear waste they’ve been generating for the last six decades, which, just because we’ve entered ecotopia, isn’t going to suddenly become non-toxic and non-radioactive just because our hearts are now ecologically pure. Oh, and if every nation on earth relinquishes its nuclear weapons you’re going to have lots and lots and lots and lots of weapons grade plutonium to deal with.
None of this is going away, so even if the environmental movement manages to kill nuclear power by preventing any waste disposal method or location from being approved all of that nasty stuff is still going to be there, and there will be just as much of a NIMBY problem in dealing with it as there is today. Not that you’ll ever hear an environmentalist admit to that, most of them haven’t even thought it through.
uila
I can’t let that be the last word.
Tim, nice post, looking forward to your assessment of why securing loose nukes is a fool’s errand. (They’re bound to go off someday, why delay the inevitable?) Who knows, perhaps the combination of global warming and nuclear winter will yield perfectly temperate climes.
Comrade Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“So the reduction of the rate of calcification (which is really what we’re talking about when discussing acidification) would actually help the ocean to take up more CO2 temporarily. But, anyway, it’s really the ocean mixing that matters most for carbon uptake, not the biology.”
Yeah, but the acidification also affects the carbonate=hydrogencarbonate balance, which more than compensates for the effect of increased CO2 might have in raising carbonate ion concentrations.
[I’m geekier than you, nyah nyah na nyah na]