Here's an uncomfortable question.

[Surgo]

Peak oil comes. How fucked are we?

[tzor]

Not really all that fucked. I mean it's going to hurt, we're going to be sore for a long time, and we will feel really shitty, but other than that, we won't be all that fucked, compared to the rest of the world.

Power generation comes from coal. (The same is true for China)

Transportation returns to the old days. Truckers are screwed, trains rule. (Diesel trains are so fuel efficient compared to trucks it's almost insane.)

Farming is going to take the biggest hit.

McDonalds will probably be the biggest fuel supplier for short distance trucking.

The NYT will hail the successor to dry cleaning as the greatest invention of the 21st century. (Then again, it's the NYT, what do you expect?)

Oh and with all the FRACKING, expect the east coast to have more earthquakes than Califorina.

[Juton]

The thing with peak oil is that it doesn't happen on Monday then Mad Max happens on Tuesday. After peak oil, petroleum supply will diminish while presumably demand will continue to increase.

If we can reduce demand faster than our supply shrinks, we'll probably hardly notice it. We'd end up getting our electricity from other sources, more electric cars and a lot more public transit. Costs of living would go up a lot though. All in all not a horrible outcome, might actually end up helping the environment.

Which isn't that crazy a scenario. Our demand for oil can't stay much above the supply for long though, since its such a necessity people will naturally look for alternatives.

[tussock]

Peak oil's here now, 2005+ for the traditional oils and all the dirtier options are barely keeping production flat no matter what prices do. It's all much more pollution and steadily less power from here on out for fossil fuels. We've been getting better GDP per unit energy for a couple decades now, but as energy falls, GDP will almost certainly fall with it.

In general, price signals cannot increase energy production any more, so unless your government has planned your renewable energy production for the next century already, you'll just have to live with wildly high prices and intermittent supply issues, as will everyone's business.

So we are not fucked, it's just not happy infinite growth parties with future hopefulness paying the bills any more. Probably can't feed the peak expected 10 billion population when fertilisers are running down and the climate's turning to shit, but disease outbreaks will halve (or worse) any hungry populations in no time.

Your savings are not real. They've been loaned to people who can only pay it back on the infinite growth party, which is over, so they're gone. Governments are printing money (or growing poverty, either way) to hide that, but all such solutions destroy abstract wealth like money and stocks anyway. Your property is as secure as everyone else agrees it is.

The loss of coastal lands and cities to sea level rise over the next century or two will be so slow people probably won't notice it; but the cost to fortify or shift all that infrastructure will be impossible to meet now that energy isn't free any more. Most of the world's nuclear plants will end up pouring their radiation into the oceans, which means fish will be giving your great-great-grandchildren cancer.

Some governments are building renewable energy supplies. Some aren't. Realistically, if you're not at 30% in 5 years and still building quickly, you're not going to make it, because the EROEI on that shit isn't suited to bootstrapping. Countries that don't make the transition very quickly will have to do without steady electricity supplies in about 30 years, and may not catch up thereafter for centuries.

Expect life expectancy to plummet in nations that don't transit. Local smogs, once you get into burning the dirtier coal deposits, will be killers; not just people but whole ecosystems. Deep ocean drilling is insane in terms of long-term payoffs vs risks, but there's only going to be more of it.



The North-African solar thing (covering up to 0.5% of the Sahara, eventually) is taking shape, so Europe/Nth Africa's probably safe with primary Wind/Solar and pumped-storage batteries, if they can stay politically stable and avoid separatist wars across their future massive power grid. Fourth Reich, eh. Massively efficient already, compared to most, and working hard to improve.

China's got plans, and have stored enough high-temperature coal to get them done. Their partially-command economy can move very quickly, so their late start won't hurt as much as others. Their local ores are pretty much shit though, so unless they buy (or invade) Australia, they'll remain a bit-player in industrial strength. At least they get their population falling early.

India's probably screwed, they're trying to go nuclear, and that's a hopelessly short-term solution. They're surprisingly efficient though, and mostly accustomed to the sort of hardship that may allow a later transition.

The NAFTA? Trivial if they put their mind to it, good solar potential, but seem politically and socially mired by corruption and propaganda. Infrastructure is woefully behind in efficiency. Probably a basket-case, but has a lot of "friends" to pay its bills for a while yet.

Russia's going to get rich when the permafrost ends. The methane that releases will do unthinkable things to the climate though. Like make the poles tropical in summer and melt East Antarctica (w00t, +65m sea level, baby, all up in my hizouse). Not good for planning, hard on the renewable power schemes. Until then, nothing important, except all those old nukes.

[Koumei]

Oh and with all the FRACKING, expect the east coast to have more earthquakes than Califorina.

FRACKING is the way of the future! We have all these FRACKING plants set up... and we'll be well and truly fracked.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Most of the world's nuclear plants will end up pouring their radiation into the oceans, which means fish will be giving your great-great-grandchildren cancer.

I really wish you didn't put that in there. It completely undermined the credibility of your post.

[Stahlseele]

*shrugs*
i would not count out china too soon, remember the 3 river dam they built?
if they can crank out some more of those, they could get quite a boost from that.
Same for the Hoover Dam in America, it will probably be able to supply most of it's immediate surroundings with enough energy for quite some time.
at least, untill the water that powers those damns is needed in agriculture or for drinking . .

Water-Power is, sadly, not a really big contributor to clean energy over here in europe it seems . . at least i don't know about all that many water power plants in germany . . much less any notable ones like the hover dam and the 3 river damn.

[Josh_Kablack]

Transportation returns to the old days. Truckers are screwed, trains rule. (Diesel trains are so fuel efficient compared to trucks it's almost insane.)

What's truly insane is that cargo transport by riverboat and canal is another order of magnitude more fuel-efficient than transport by diesel train. It's somewhat limited in speed and highly limited in destinations, but the biggest limiting factor here in the nation's busiest inland port is actually crumbling infrastructure and lack of maintenance on the locks and dam.

[tussock]

Most of the world's nuclear plants will end up pouring their radiation into the oceans, which means fish will be giving your great-great-grandchildren cancer.

I really wish you didn't put that in there. It completely undermined the credibility of your post.

Hey, no fair making me read stuff. Nonsense is much easier to post.

OK, Chernobyl case studies say ... about 9000 extra deaths from cancer, plus an unknown but likely much higher number from increased social malaise through traumatic displacement. That's 3-4% increased cancer rates in the hot zones, and 0.6% increase in the much larger lightly contaminated zones. Many additional thyroid tumours removed from initial Iodine contamination, but those people almost all survive.

Data is clouded by local alcoholism and chain-smoking, low life expectancy, but should be good enough as it lines up with other studies well.

Cancer risks from early high dose exposures have no fall-off for the first 30 years, and are still elevated for at least 40 years, based on data from Chernobyl and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Low dose exposures basically add up the risk across at least that time period. Half lives don't matter too much then.

That's across an affected population of 5.5 million or so, so a maximum of 0.25% of the total population affected by radiation across a ~60,000 km^2 area (concentrated mostly in the hotter areas), and about 0.05% of the worlds land area.

440 operational reactors (all near population centres and productive land) could thus account for a similar radiation dose across perhaps 20% of the worlds land area, with enough radiation dose to thereby affect about 0.05% of the world's population (assuming everyone avoids the hottest fallout).

So a maximum of maybe 3 million extra deaths per generation given expected population peak near 10 billion. Almost imperceptible, given that ~10 billion naturally die each generation then, ~2 billion of them from cancer.

Slightly higher amongst fish eaters if it all ends up in the oceans, as the food web there generally filters all our crap out and feeds it back to us, even things like inert plastic micro-fragments.


tl;dr: 1 in 1000 of your great-great grandchildren, not to worry.

[Juton]

I'm not sure how or why you segued from talking about most nuclear reactors to Chernobyl. I would imagine most reactors will get retired in a non-spectacular manner.

[Kaelik]

OK, Chernobyl case studies say ... about 9000 extra deaths from cancer,

This is also false. The actual numbers are widely fucking nonsense ranging from 4,000 by the IAEA/WHO, and that as maybe too high, as in, people who will ever die ever. Or, you can be Belarus, and say that 93,000 have already died from cancer caused by Chernobyl.

So 9000 is not that actual number of anyone, nor do studies bear that out.

[tussock]

Oh, sorry Kaelik, did you want links and shit for my quick read up on the upper limits of bad outcomes?

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factshee ... index.html

4000 from the hotspots (including first responders, cleaning crews, and evacuees), plus 5000 from some assumptions in the wider population that can't be disproved by the data (which is rather fuzzy, +-lots and lots), plus 5000 thyroid removals from a tight age group that were in their teens at the time. The first page of google seems to agree with that, so I don't really care what Belarus says.


@Juton: It would be nice if all reactors were neatly retired, and all their waste moved out of the near-sea-level holding ponds that it almost all sits in today. Most countries have some plan for that which starts at some indefinite point in the future when someone else is in government, because it's an extremely unpopular thing to do.

But for 1 in 1000? It would also be nice if the world stopped building new coal burning power plants and factories in the next five years to avoid a certainty of greater than 2C warming before the end of this century. Here, in the real world, that's not going to happen, even though that means some really fucking nasty climate tipping points come in range. Way worse, and also not happening, because it's politically difficult in some nations.

[tzor]

Most of the world's nuclear plants will end up pouring their radiation into the oceans, which means fish will be giving your great-great-grandchildren cancer.

I really wish you didn't put that in there. It completely undermined the credibility of your post.

Good point Lago, the biggest threat to ocean fish is actually mercury. Although it is a heavy metal it doesn't need to be irradiated to fuck us up. "Human-generated sources such as coal plants emit approximately half of atmospheric mercury, with natural sources such as volcanoes responsible for the remainder. An estimated two-thirds of human-generated mercury comes from stationary combustion, mostly of coal. Other important human-generated sources include gold production, non-ferrous metal production, cement production, waste disposal, human crematoria, caustic soda production, pig iron and steel production, mercury production (mostly for batteries), and biomass burning."

[tzor]

What's truly insane is that cargo transport by riverboat and canal is another order of magnitude more fuel-efficient than transport by diesel train.

I wonder if that includes the energy costs of maintaining lock systems.

There are a lot of reasons why rivers are very good energy wise. To make a long fluid dynamic argument short, liquids hate to travel at an angle. They either travel horizonally, or vertically(falls) and anything else is an annoyance that, for water at least, is only a matter of time.

Thus, for example, the Hudson river at Albany is only a few feet above "Sea" level. Tidal effects from the Atlantic Ocean go as far up the river as Albany and the only reason it doesn't go any higher is that someone had the bright idea of building a damn. Therefore all natural waterways are either flat or they have waterfalls whcih generally means that they aren't used at all. (Unless locks are put in place to solve the problem.)

Unfortunately the Erie Canal is mostly filled in. The notion of rebuilding something of that scale would require emminent domain and government subsities that would turn off even the most ardent RINO Republican. On the other hand, low tech solutions generally tend to turn off the most ardent Democrat. So it ain't going to happen.

[Kaelik]

4000 from the hotspots (including first responders, cleaning crews, and evacuees), plus 5000 from some assumptions in the wider population that can't be disproved by the data (which is rather fuzzy, +-lots and lots), plus 5000 thyroid removals from a tight age group that were in their teens at the time.

Nope, that's 5000 from people in specific areas of Belarus/Ukraine. It's 27,000 overall including the last predictions of all those areas that are too hard to predict.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Look, I'm not a nuclear apologetic or anything. I'll be very happy when fission power finally bites the dust except for an increasingly narrow range of experimental and military applications and if solar keeps chugging along at the rate we're at I might live to see a day when France gets a three-to-one ratio of renewables to nuclear power.

However, I'm also against people overstating the danger of nuclear power. Not because it isn't some dangerous shit that's really expensive to keep safe (because it is) but because it masks the dangers posed to the environment and worker safety compared to fossil fuels. People are watching the Fukushima like a hawk but a mine disaster in South America where dozens of people barely got out of there with their lives? No one even thinks about retiring coal power.

[hyzmarca]

But for 1 in 1000? It would also be nice if the world stopped building new coal burning power plants and factories in the next five years to avoid a certainty of greater than 2C warming before the end of this century. Here, in the real world, that's not going to happen, even though that means some really fucking nasty climate tipping points come in range. Way worse, and also not happening, because it's politically difficult in some nations.

It would also be really nice if people stopped using electricity altogether and went back to a sustainable hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Listen, w're never going to have a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl ever again, because Chernobyl was just a total clusterfuck of incompetence all around. That sort of disaster simply can't happen today.

Even Fukashima didn't come close, and it was hit by a fucking magnitude 9 Earthquake.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Listen, w're never going to have a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl ever again, because Chernobyl was just a total clusterfuck of incompetence all around. That sort of disaster simply can't happen today.

Actually, from what I've heard, if they hadn't turned off and ignored the alarms, Chernobyl couldn't have happened then either; I'm not a nuclear engineer, though.

[Hadanelith]

It wasn't just turning off the alarms, though they did that too. The main problem at Chernobyl goes like this:

1. running a systems test.
2. with the night crew (instead of their best engineers)
3. who didn't know enough to recover from a catastrophic failure of everything. They were good enough to deal with standard procedure, but not anything else.
4. deliberately turning off the safety systems, which meant that any failure would be outside of standard procedure.

End result: turn off safeties, start test, test goes outside parameters, safeties do nothing, failure happens, no one knows what to do, BOOM. (well, not boom, much more horrible radioactive fire.)

Even with all of that, it would have been a small problem if it weren't for the fact that the reactor wasn't even actually built to soviet spec, which was itself not that great. There were serious structural problems in the reactor, which by themselves weren't a big deal, but when you set the whole thing on fire, well...the building lets out a giant plume of radioactive smoke. Someone, I believe it was in Switzerland, notes increased local radiation levels and starts checking around, and the Soviets can't even hide it anymore.

All in all, a clusterfuck from start to finish. Bad idea, limited training, poor construction. Any one wouldn't have been so bad, but throw it all together and bad stuff happens.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So, I came across this, and thought it might be relevant to the nuclear discussion...

[fectin]

Remember, oil isn't just fuel. It's also lube and plastics, and that's the big deal.

Overall though, "sucks short term" is probably the best answer, depending what the price jerk looks like (did you know that "jerk" is the derivative of acceleration? You do now!).

[tussock]

It would also be really nice if people stopped using electricity altogether and went back to a sustainable hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Fuck right the fuck off, by the way. Sustainable isn't about hunter-gatherer, it's about making the world our bitch without poisoning ourselves along the way.

Fukushima's already put out far more radiation than Chernobyl, mostly into the Pacific were we can pretend it doesn't exist quite easily, but there's no real energy to be had from nuclear regardless.

There is potential for a thousand fold increase in electric generation available to the world in just in the sunlight that falls on the world's major deserts though, with just today's tech and HVDC transmission losses.

That sort of power? Want more water in the Caspian Sea? Pump it there. Want to irrigate central Australia? Desalinate the sea water and pump away! What's energy even worth once people get around to collecting that much of it? Want plastics? Make them out of the carbon in the air, it just takes energy.

[hyzmarca]

Yes, if you want to destroy desert ecosystems by filling them with solar power plants that's possible. It's not environmentally friendly in the slightest, but it's possible.

[Kaelik]

Wait... WTF? There's no power in nuclear?

Are you extra retarded? Energy we are not using that we can use is real energy when we use it.

Having lots more Iron in the ground doesn't mean we don't have more iron in every possible useful sense when we dig it up, just because it was on earth, and is still on earth.

[Stahlseele]

Well, putting Solar Panels on top of every building roof that gets sun would be a start at least . . no need to glass entire countries with them though . .
Also, a water power plant with attached solar power plant somehow comes to mind . . probably will not work the way i think it would, but using solar power to pump more water into the holding area for the water power plant to make the pressure increase and thus increase the power output of the water power plant is probably not viable right?