A bimonthly open thread on climate solutions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is always the most contentious comment thread on the site, but please try and be constructive and avoid going off on wild tangents.
Most of the spent fuel [from weapons production, such as at the Hanford N reactor] consisted of relatively small, metallic elements with a low burnup (usually less than 2,000 megawatt-days per metric ton of heavy metal (MWD/MTHM).
Typical burnup in LWR fuel is 35,000 to 45,000 MW-d/MTHM. To get that down to 2000 MW-d/MTHM you’d have to shut down and completely refuel after 3 months or less of operation, and the refueling takes about a month itself. You can’t run a power plant that way. So no, the current US power reactor fleet CANNOT be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.
A CANDU reactor is refueled on-line and could be used for weapons-material production; just devote a few fuel channels to breeding material and push it through quickly enough that you get nearly pure Pu-239. An RBMK, ditto. That’s probably what China intends to do. But it requires that the reactor be specifically designed to allow this.
Piotrsays
David B. Benson (495) The basic fact is that weapons Plutonium is mostly Pu239 and these fast reactors produce to much Pu240 for an implosion device. Maybe Engineer-Poet would care to provide more detail.”
“A new generation of nuclear power facilities that China is developing could produce large amounts of plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons, Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command warned lawmakers this week.
With a fast breeder reactor, you now have a very large source of weapons grade plutonium available to you, that will change the upper bounds of what China could choose to do if they wanted to, in terms of further expansion of their nuclear capabilities,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. STRATCOM oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
There is no evidence that China intends to divert its potential plutonium stockpile to weapons use, but concern has grown as Beijing is expected to at least double its number of nuclear warheads over the next decade from the low 200s.
China says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. ”
If only the U.S. Strategic Command and US Senate listened to David B. “Actinide” Benson, and his friend, Engineer “The Fast Neutron” Poet, that they have NOTHING to worry, because:
“ For all readers, a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium ”
David B. Benson
Piotrsays
Richard the Weaver (466) “ Killian: Let me see… Richard…
RtW: …really appreciates that you chose him to bat cleanup.It is a great honor to be roasted last.
I wouldn’t read too much into the order of Killian’s multi-enemy answer. As many of his arguments, it is probably chaotic.
And wasn’t that aimed at Richard _Caldwell_?
Piotrsays
jgnfld(405): “You are specifically equating building what was essentially a welded barge with an obsolescent triple expansion steam engine to a modular nuclear reactor?
A poet you perhaps are. Can’t say I’ve seen any worth reading. An engineer you are NOT.
Engineer Poet (421) “If you cannot appreciate Sappho, Lewis Carroll or Ogden Nash, there is no hope for you.”
jgnfld(461): “That provides precisely zero evidence whatsoever as to whether you are, or are not, a ‘poet’.”
Richard Caldwell @486 , regarding your enthusiasm for district scale nuclear power for electricity and home heating. There are some big problems with this concept. Imagine trying to install this in existing cities or suburban areas. You would have to install pipes to every building meaning digging up every road, digging up every garden, and trying to install pipes within houses, pulling the walls apart, and then installing radiant water heater panels in almost every room in the house. The costs would almost certainly be prohibitive, and the work would cause chaos.
Now consider installing the system in new cities. This would work ok, and China is doing this in a couple of places, but there might not be all that many new cities globally. Many countries have static populations or low population growth so no need of completely new stand alone cities. At most suburbs expand a little bit at the edges and probably not enough to justify a nuclear heating project. Even in places with high population growth existing cities just tend to expand. And in the future populations might actually SHRINK. So at best this district nuclear power idea definitely looks like a bit player in things.
nigeljsays
Reality Check @491, so you are a defeatist with no alternative plan. Remember while the current proposals to mitigate climate change are moving slowly you have to be able to demonstrate why your own proposals (if such things exist) would move more quickly and would be better. Pass the popcorn.
The critical mass of Plutonium-240 is 40 kilograms, compared to 10 for Pu-239. Therefore, although it’s more difficult to make a bomb with Plutonium-240, it is not impossible by any means. Q.E.D.
michael Sweetsays
DBbenson at495:
You originally stated at 401 “a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium.” Now you are attempting to show that only one type of power reactor cannot be made to produce plutonium. Presumably you concede that all remaining power reactors can produce bomb grade plutonium.
As I stated at 424, the Pu240 is produced from the Pu239 by longer residence of the fuel in the reactor. By simply cycling the fuel rapidly, as is done in weapons reactors, any reactor can be made to produce bomb grade Pu239.
Your claim “a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium” is deliberately false and you are defending a deliberate lie. This does not make your case supporting nuclear power stronger.
michael Sweetsays
DBBenson at 497:
Your original claim at 377 was “Most thoughtful commenters on the future of the grid anticipate a continued support of 20% from nuclear power plants”
I have cited 3 peer reviewed papers on a future grid that use no nuclear power. I can cite an additional 20 papers if needed. Williams et al 2021 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020AV000284 state that they are the last group of researchers to conceed that nuclear power is too expensive to use in future power systems. Since you have provided no examples I will now claim that all academic researchers of future energy systems use no nuclear at all.
You have referred to a puff piece in a nuclear energy newspaper to support your position. There is no mention of 20% of power in your puff piece. Since electrical consumption will dramatically increase in the future, in order for 20% of power in 2050 to be nuclear approximately 300 new nuclear power plants will have to be built in the USA by 2050. I note that there are exactly zero commercial nuclear power plants scheduled or proposed to be started in the next 10 years in the USA. Starting in 2030 they will have to commission 15 reactors per year. You are dreaming that that could be attempted.
I suppose that if we limit our references to nuclear industry rags that your claim might be accurate. Other readers will have to decide if they believe the peer reviewed literature or nuclear industry rags.
Your deliberate lies do not make your case for nuclear power stronger.
Killiansays
496:
Labor intensive? Lower yields? Hmmm… I guess the recent paper on food forests in the PNW showing greater yields… and requiring virtually ZERO work once established…
Stop braying like an ignorant donkey, denier.
Killiansays
Just another bit of knowledge that perfectly aligns with #RegenerativeGovernance as our most comprehensive, universal model for governance.
RtW: if only there were a witticism in your touch of labeling.
Eh, my fault. Bundy, Caldwell, or the Weaver, I’m just too plain and median to evoke a joke.
Richard the Weaversays
Nigel,
Yes, retrofitting is extremely difficult, expensive, inefficient, and failure-prone.
I would disagree with a policy that installs solar at any time other than when a roof is installed or replaced.
Similarly, I wouldn’t change the heating system of ANY existing subdivision until NO new subdivisions are built the old way.
Killiansays
Reminder for those spending a majority of the bandwidth of this thread on nuclear:
1. It’s unsustainable.
2. It is FAR from zero waste.
3. It contaminates large areas when it fails in any serious way.
4. YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY BUILD IT OUT IN THE TIME FRAMES THAT ARE FINALLY BECOMING EXCEEDINGLY CLEAR. Unless, of course, you want to ignore all the truly horrid climate news this year…
Why are you wasting everyone’s time?
Killiansays
506 nigelj says:
24 Jun 2021 at 9:24 PM
Reality Check @491, so you are a defeatist with no alternative plan
The absurdity of Mr. DoNothingItMightBotherSomebodyWhat?RunFromTheTsunami,AreYouCrazy?!WeMustWalkSedatelyFromTheBeach calling out a “defeatist” is truly astounding.
If _that_ makes you a peer to Lewis Carroll and Sappho, then I guess I am a Poet too
Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Imagine trying to install this in existing cities or suburban areas. You would have to install pipes to every building meaning digging up every road, digging up every garden, and trying to install pipes within houses, pulling the walls apart, and then installing radiant water heater panels in almost every room in the house. The costs would almost certainly be prohibitive, and the work would cause chaos.
I’m outside the nearest water district, but a year or two ago EXACTLY that kind of work was going on there, installing new municipal water piping. It wasn’t done by trenching and backfilling, it was done by drilling. Only minimal amounts of pavement were disturbed.
This sort of infrastructure can be put in far more easily, cheaply and quickly than you think.
As for retrofits to buildings, ordinary heat pumps use existing ducts. In the case of a district heating system, the heat source is at a considerably higher temperature than the outdoors so the electric power requirements are much smaller. Renovations and new construction can do better, of course.
The critical mass of Plutonium-240 is 40 kilograms, compared to 10 for Pu-239. Therefore, although it’s more difficult to make a bomb with Plutonium-240, it is not impossible by any means.
There’s a lot more to it than merely assembling a critical mass. You have to make it not just critical, but supercritical on prompt neutrons. This requires that the mass not begin a chain reaction too soon, because it will dis-assemble itself with great speed as soon as it does. The mass needs to STAY supercritical long enough to get the desired energy out of it.
The whole point of implosion devices is to put a prompt-supercritical mass together fast enough that no chain reaction gets going until maximum compression is achieved. Pu-240 has such a high spontaneous fission rate that this is nearly impossible; even as a contaminant in Pu-239, it is prone to cause premature chain reactions resulting in sub-kiloton yields. If you can get a bigger bang with a pallet-load of TNT, there isn’t much point in using a nuclear weapon.
David B. Bensonsays
michael Sweet @511 — There is a group of academics who peer-review each others’ articles. These are not power engineers and have deficient knowledge of what’s required for grid reliability.
Consider, for example, last winter in ERCOT Texas.
Piotrsays
“ As opposed to what Piotr claimed. He is only interested in scoring points, not learning something” said David B. Benson shooting himself in the foot from a high horse.
From DBB’s own source:
“In the UK, the Magnox reactors were designed for the dual use of generating commercial electricity as well as being able to produce plutonium for the country’s defence programme. A report released by the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) says that both the Calder Hall and the Chapelcross power stations, which started up in 1956 and 1958 respectively, were operated on this basis”
Ergo, David B. Benson have just unwittingly confirmed that his earlier paternalistic lecturing the rest of us: “ For all readers, a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium ” – was a bald-faced lie. But, please, do lecture me on how it is me who “is only interested in scoring points, not learning something”.
And don’t forget to let the US Senate Armed Services Committee to know that
Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, LIED TO THEM during their hearings:
“A new generation of nuclear power facilities that China is developing could produce large amounts of plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons, Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command warned lawmakers this week.
With a fast breeder reactor, you now have a very large source of weapons grade plutonium available to you, that will change the upper bounds of what China could choose to do if they wanted to, in terms of further expansion of their nuclear capabilities,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. STRATCOM oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.”
And to think that NOBODY, but the brave David B. “Actinide” Benson, had the guts and the knowledge to challenge that lying Adm. Charles Richard on it!
“For all readers, power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium” – David B. Benson
michael Sweetsays
Engineer poet at 501:
Your reference states:
“In practical terms, there are two different kinds of plutonium to be considered: reactor-grade and weapons-grade. The first is recovered as a by-product of typical used fuel from a nuclear reactor, after the fuel has been irradiated (‘burned’) for about three years. The second is made specially for the military purpose, and is recovered from uranium fuel that has been irradiated for only 2-3 months in a plutonium production reactor. The two kinds differ in their isotopic composition but must both be regarded as a potential proliferation risk, and managed accordingly.” my emphasis. Power reactor plutonium can be fashioned into weapons.
It also says that any reactor can simply be run for 2-3 months and then refueled. The fuel that has only been run for 3 months can then be purified into bomb grade material. If you think that the scientists in North Korea, Iran and Iraq do not know this you are mistaken. Your insisting that power reactors must be run for years before refueling is simply a deliberate lie. Obviously, if I leave my house with a full gas tank capable of going 400 miles I can stop the car after going only 40 miles. The same applies to a power reactor if the user wants to make weapons grade plutonium.
As I stated upthread, it is now easier to use centrifuges to make bomb grade uranium. Everyone knows that uranium bombs are much easier to build than plutonium bombs. You and DBBenson are trying to distract the discussion from the problems of nuclear proliferation.
In any case, nuclear power is not economic. No-one world wide is building new reactors without immense subsidies from the government. In fact, no-one has ever built a nuclear power plant without government subsidies. It currently costs more for operation and maintenance for many nuclear power plants than the total costs, including a mortgage, for wind and solar installations. When nuclear plants require extensive maintenance they will be shut down because it is not economic to upgrade them. Your favorite country Sweden now has only 6 nuclear plants left. They have shut down 4 reactors in the past 4 years. As they build out wind the remaining nuclear plants will be shut down in the near future.
Your claims that power reactors cannot produce bomb grade plutonium are deliberate lies. If this site was moderated you and DBBenson would be banned for deliberately false posts.
Plutonium-240 is the second most common isotope, formed by neutron capture by Pu-239 in about one-third of impacts. Its concentration in nuclear fuel builds up steadily, since it does not undergo fission to produce energy in the same way as Pu-239… While of a different order of magnitude to the fission occurring within a nuclear reactor, Pu-240 has a relatively high rate of spontaneous fission with consequent neutron emissions. This makes reactor-grade plutonium entirely unsuitable for use in a bomb… Reactor-grade plutonium is defined as that with 19% or more of Pu-240. This is also called ‘civil plutonium’
E-P 499: I’m from Missouri. SHOW ME it’s not true.
BPL: The burden of proof is on the affirmative. You asserted something. Prove it.
Richard the Weaversays
Killian: Labor intensive? Lower yields? Hmmm… I guess the recent paper on food forests in the PNW showing greater yields… and requiring virtually ZERO work once established…
Stop braying like an ignorant donkey, denier.
RtW: “Stop braying”. Sigh. If only, eh, guys?
I’m reminded of Nigel’s calculation (as I remember it):
Current industrial agriculture is designed to convert sunlight into the simplest and most stable calories possible, given that oil and mined water are both currently cheap. You can’t touch that. Heck, it’s so efficient upgrading the “grain” through a cow still works, economically.
But fattening up and sickening humanity in service of providing the most calories per acre? And degrading the biosphere, too?
When we were speaking of food my cousin Mary taught me, “It is better to throw something away on the outside than the inside”.
I don’t care that McCorporate with a generous dash of dino juice can produce ever so many toxic calories (you think wheat resembles what nature would call a “grain”?)
You guys hear that the techno-wizzards in China tried to get a Three Child policy off the ground?
Lots of thoughts and fears in demographics, in how to shape the Anthropocene.
Getting from here to ‘there’ is either a heavy lift or a huge fall. Which is more likely?
It also says that any reactor can simply be run for 2-3 months and then refueled. The fuel that has only been run for 3 months can then be purified into bomb grade material.
Except this is (a) blazingly obvious to all non-proliferation interests, and (b) means heavy thermal cycling of the plant itself which risks problems like fatigue cracking.
If you think anyone is going to build a multi-billion dollar PWR, hook it to the grid and then abuse the hell out of it trying to run it on a weapons-production cycle, you’re out of your mind. It would be like painting 100-foot high letters on the ground reading “NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION EFFORTS HERE!”
(OTOH, if Japan had wanted to quietly build up a stockpile of WGPu, then the brief operating runs of some of the restarted reactors before legal challenges shut them down again would have been ideal, no? The Japanese are smart enough to do this.)
If you think that the scientists in North Korea, Iran and Iraq do not know this you are mistaken.
You ARE aware that N. Korea has a reseach reactor, but no nuclear power reactors? You are aware that research reactors are DESIGNED to allow precise amounts of irradiation of samples? India made its bomb materials that way too.
Your insisting that power reactors must be run for years before refueling is simply a deliberate lie.
To be economic and achieve their design lifetimes, they do.
Your reference states:
“In practical terms, there are two different kinds of plutonium to be considered: reactor-grade and weapons-grade…. The two kinds differ in their isotopic composition but must both be regarded as a potential proliferation risk, and managed accordingly.” my emphasis.
Yet nobody builds weapons using reactor-grade Pu. In practice, my quote @527 is correct based on real-world evidence.
Power reactor plutonium can be fashioned into weapons.
Even N. Korea knows better. The first N. Korean nuke test apparently used uranium which had been irradiated too long to boost the Pu content so that less material would have to be reprocessed. However, this also boosted the fraction of Pu-240. It fizzled.
As I stated upthread, it is now easier to use centrifuges to make bomb grade uranium.
Even Kim Jong Un figured that out. Making a bomb from weapons-grade Pu is hard enough; making one from even somewhat off-spec Pu defeated the best minds Pyongyang had. It’s claimed that reactor-grade Pu requires non-proliferation safeguards too, but the desire of some political forces to handicap nuclear energy is sufficient to explain this. In practice, nobody has ever TRIED to build a weapon out of reactor-grade Pu, and with the ease of uranium enrichment it’s vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will.
David B. Bensonsays
Piotr @524 — As already pointed out, the one attempt to use Magnox plutonium as a bomb fizzled.
As for the Admiral, a fast breeder reactor could, in principle, be used in an attempt to recover weapons Plutonium. Only certain designs would work, maybe. The Admiral errs on the side of caution.
Piotrsays
Re:Engineer-Poet (519)
Piotr: If you were half the Poet you imagine yourself to be, you would have known that the form has to fit the function (i.e. goal). Therefore, if my goal were to impress others on how a truly Renaissance Man I am (both Engineer AND Poet!) I would have written the best damn poem I could write . But, instead, my goal was the sarcasm – toward those accusing Gavin of being elitist and pretentious for using word “elide“, hence the most-fitting form to my goal was mockery:
the MORE low-brow and MORE strained the verse I attributed to the opponents of the elitist Gavin – THE BETTER. This was the reason for my choosing the ironic template: “There once was a man from Nantucket“, a North American STANDARD for poor poetry: meaningless content used as a vehicle for its poor puns (puns, incidentally, being the poetic form of our Poet on RC – see his famous discrediting of the renewables by calling them, wait for it, “the ruinables”! ;-)))). And this was the reason for my DELIBERATE straining of the rhyme and scansion to push the square cogs of personal jibes into circular holes of the rhyming and scansion demanded by the format.
So your contempt:
Engineer-Poet: “Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
shoots you in the foot and from a high horse at that!
And here is the original, so everybody can decide for themselves – who of us two made a fool of oneself:
=== Piotr(37) a.k.a. “the so-called limerick” [(c) Engineer-Poet] ====
Paul Pukite (25)[about Gavin for using an e-word] “The word “elide” is a long-known pretension indicator.”
Steven Sullivan (36) “‘Elision’ and ‘elide’ aren’t peculiar or pretentious words to literate people”
Piotr: Hear, hear!
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept his elides in a bucket.
But his old reviewee, X. Chen,
traded them for a hockey stick with Mann
And as for the bucket, Paul Pukite!
==================
So even if you were unfamiliar with the link between the form and function, and with concepts of “irony” and “sarcasm“, you still could have saved yourself from that egg on your face, if only you had read the next post (Paul Pukite, 38) and and Piotr(40) where I explained to Paul the deliberate nature for the poor rhymes and format. (BTW – that explanation for those who needed it, was the reason why I gave the link to the original thread, instead of just quoting my “poem”.)
But, obviously, the possibility of you being wrong does not cross your mind too often, so you went, both barreled, at me:
Engineer-Poet (519): “Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Nobody Ever Expects the … Dunning-Kruger to apply to them? ;-)
Note the weasel-words: coordinated,continental low-carbon grid.
Not independent and thus resilient.
The precise opposite of local (meaning LOTS of expensive and controversial new transmission, infrastructure with both embodied energy and inherent losses).
And only “low-carbon” (80% reduction):
Thermal generation (nuclear, gas, and coal) contributes significantly to the future power system’s ability to balance supply and demand in all scenarios, even when most of the energy generation comes from wind and solar.
Zero-carbon or carbon-negative isn’t an option. This just isn’t good enough.
You can’t get 1740.7 MW(e) peak out of 1 km² of PV panels even when they are laid flat on the ground at the equator at local noon under cloudless skies. You’ll get more like 200 MW(e), at a capacity factor of maybe 20% for an average of 40 MW(e). So you’d need more than 40x as much area covered with PV farm, where trees and most oher plants could not grow, to equal Indian Point’s output; you’d need many times that to handle winter peak demand.
I’ll let you do the calculations for biomass if you think you can refute me, but the catchphrase here is “proof by examination”; biomass energy capture is far less efficient than PV, and you have conversion losses on top of that.
Michael Sweetsays
Hey Mr. KIA:
Hot enough for you this week? Can you describe a cold wave in the last 50 years in your area as cold as the present heat wave is hot? Lots of all time records already set. And it extends way up into Canada.
Some of the 10 coal-fired power plants being scraped are brand-new. Amazing for such a poor country.
nigeljsays
Richard the Weaver @529,
“I’m reminded of Nigel’s calculation (as I remember it):Current industrial agriculture is designed to convert sunlight into the simplest and most stable calories possible, given that oil and mined water are both currently cheap. You can’t touch that. Heck, it’s so efficient upgrading the “grain” through a cow still works, economically.”
That is not what I said. I’ve never said what industrial agriculture ‘does’. The description sounds partly right, but its not clear how you can claim industrial agriculture produces “the simplest most stable calories”. It looks like it produces the same foods as traditional methods to me. Industrial agriculture just increases yields per acre by supercharging the soils with fertilisers, reducing insect infestations with pesticides, use of mono cropping, and improves productivity with mechanical harvesting, genetic engineering etc, etc. The foods produced are the same basic composition. At most I concede it might reduce trace nutrients like vitamins slightly – but show me proper scientific evidence please. Since you are making these sorts of claims.
You say “wheat is not what nature would call a grain”.
What does this really mean? Wheat started out as a natural grain. Do you mean the fact natural grains have been selectively bred to improve things is somehow evil? Why? If we used completely natural grains with low yields millions of people would die. Humanity with its massive population has become dependent on its own ingenuity with plant breeding and industrial agriculture. You cant wind this back quickly without serious problems.
“But fattening up and sickening humanity in service of providing the most calories per acre? And degrading the biosphere, too?”
And its not clear that providing the most calories per hectare fattens up and sickens humanity. Many millions of people now depend on industrial agriculture for survival, and certainly a decent basic diet, free from the famines you get with traditional third world farming. Not everyone is obese. There’s no no hard evidence things like pesticide residues on foods cause cancers. Refer:
BUT industrial agriculture is certainly degrading the environment. There are global problems with soil erosion from the use of mechanical tilling and industrial agriculture kills life in the soils, and the use of industrial pesticides has been linked to the decline in insect populations ,and excessive use of nitrate fertilisers causes algal blooms in rivers, and intensive dairy farming causes high levels of nitrates and bacteria in rivers.
So what is the solution? Regenerative agriculture sounds like a good solution to many of these problems. It reduces or eliminates tilling of the soils, and this has minimal affects on yields. It uses natural fertilisers that improves the life of soils and has many other environmental benefits. BUT I believe it would reduce yields. Its fairly obvious because you are subtracting some of the very things that make industrial agriculture very productive. I haven’t seen any peer reviewed science to the contrary. “Permaculture weekly” is not peer reviewed science. It would be as objective as fossil fuels weekly. I don’t see that regenerative agriculture adds some mysterious magic juice that makes potential problems vanish.
So what is the solution to this problem? Personally I think the world SHOULD change over to this regenerative farming, because several elements of it make sense, BUT it might be found necessary to keep using some limited use of industrial fertilisers and pesticides to maintain decent yields. That would mean a “trade off” between environmental sustainability and adequate yields. And perhaps other ways may be found to improve yields and reduce food waste. BUT the end result looks like it would still be a big improvement on business as usual industrial agriculture.
Mikesays
from Manning’s article: The Oil We Eat
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts–the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”
Manning’s story about human power/agriculture feels right to me. Suggestions about revolutionary changes in human agriculture are going to run into the buzzsaw that George Kennan described as “straight power concepts.”
Here is a bit of Kennan from 1948, talking about the position of the US in the post WWII global power scrum: ““We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
I think that US power politics since WWII has really followed Kennan’s suggestions and it looks/feels like an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Some of us think about global diversity and possible rights to life and other possible rights of nature and if we do that, we are likely to be looking at agricultural systems and practices that might be described as regenerative where the dominant agricultural system might be described as extractive.
Complicated stuff.
Cheers
Mike
Killiansays
529:
nigelKIA thinks chem monocilture = hugh productivity because… ignorant. In his world, in my Detroit garden rather than organically growing over 40 different plants and/or varieties, this a wide range of nutrients, vitamins, gut biota, etc., on my 900 sq. ft., I should have been growing densely packed, chem-soaked, insecticide-ridden corn.
nigelKIA also thinks that no plowing, very little weeding, no spreading of chemicals because you use natural insectorials/anti-insectorials, focusing on perennial plants so you seed and plant once, grow a food forest to get food for decades for a TOTAL of maybe one month of work over 5 years, etc., is labor-intensive.
@529 Richard the Weaver,
Thanks for the post Richard. But you need to understand that the battles climate scientists have had with “The Merchants of Doubt” are nothing compared to the much longer and better funded denialist campaign against organic agriculture.
So long long long before I ever had to wade through the hundreds of AGW deniers false arguments and flawed biased so called “studies” on climate by Monkeyton et al, I was studying how the same forces were attacking organic.
So when you said, “a heavy lift or a huge fail” it struck a nerve. There is no heavy lift. Organic can produce MUCH more food per acre than the industrialized “green revolution” methods. Those methods are optimized for yields per man hour, not yields per acre. Further, to distract and obfuscate the loss of yields per acre, almost universally all the fields so degraded they no longer can even produce ANY crop at all, are dropped off. They are not even included in the stats!
In any other field of science this sort of thing would be instantly caught. Lets say for example medical science, if a study “dropped off” all patients that died, and only included the health stats of those still present at the end of the study, it probably wouldn’t be published at all. In fact they might even be forced to stop the study before it even finished!
“Arable land refers to land under temporary crops (doublecropped areas are counted only once), temporary meadows
for mowing or pasture, land under market and kitchen
gardens and land temporarily fallow (less than five years).
The ABANDONED land resulting from shifting cultivation is NOT
included.” http://www.fao.org/ag/agn/nutrition/Indicatorsfiles/Agriculture.pdf Emphasis mine.
For some reason agricultural science has allowed these denialists to continue and bought the merchants of doubts lies hook line and sinker.
The more carbon in the soil in the form of humus both labile and especially stable, the greater the potential yields. Not only that but it is one of the biggest indicators of profit potential too! There is no burden to lift! Just the opposite in fact! It removes so much burden away from the farmer! Their land gets MORE fertile over time, instead of degrading away! Inputs decrease. Yields go up. Costs go down, while profits go up.
And yes, public health benefits as well, but that one is harder to prove. What can be proved is that the food is higher quality and more nutritious. So even if the yields did go down a little, the nutritional value of those foods would still more than compensate. But in fact yields wouldn’t even go down if the transition was properly managed.
Look around. We are surrounded by the new starving obese! Because the food system is glutted with empty calories! Entire populations of people have been fooled into destroying the public health to support the illusion of plentiful cheap food.
All the while new land gets cleared for agriculture, while total arable land drops AS MUCH AS ADDED! Look at the curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#/media/File:Agricultural_area_over_the_long-term,_OWID.svg See how while industrialization may have increased the food supply, they did it mostly by opening up new cleared ground, combined by some creative math that show increased productivity per man hour and total yields, rather than actual yields per acre.
Yes better plant and animal breeding does improve yields, but those same genetics in organic systems improve yields even more! The “Green Revolution” methods themselves actually give a temporary yield boost follow by a slow decline due to reductions in soil health.
This is of course masked by the fact even more new genetics and even more inputs are used to cover up the declining soil fertility water infiltration and holding capacity, etc etc etc…
We have peaked, and the curve has no other possibility but to start going down if standard “green revolution” practices are allowed to continue! It’s something at least as important or more than AGW!
Mikesays
Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably
“Most cropland in the United States is characterized by large monocultures, whose productivity is maintained through a strong reliance on costly tillage, external fertilizers, and pesticides (Schipanski et al., 2016). Despite this, farmers have developed a regenerative model of farm production that promotes soil health and biodiversity, while producing nutrient-dense farm products profitably. Little work has focused on the relative costs and benefits of novel regenerative farming operations, which necessitates studying in situ, farmer-defined best management practices. Here, we evaluate the relative effects of regenerative and conventional corn production systems on pest management services, soil conservation, and farmer profitability and productivity throughout the Northern Plains of the United States. Regenerative farming systems provided greater ecosystem services and profitability for farmers than an input-intensive model of corn production. Pests were 10-fold more abundant in insecticide-treated corn fields than on insecticide-free regenerative farms, indicating that farmers who proactively design pest-resilient food systems outperform farmers that react to pests chemically. Regenerative fields had 29% lower grain production but 78% higher profits over traditional corn production systems. Profit was positively correlated with the particulate organic matter of the soil, not yield.”
the problem with thinking that we might be able to straddle the fence and do a bit of regenerative farming with a splash of traditional farming seems to me to be that it is akin to being a little bit pregnant. If you decide you want to engage in regenerative farming, your interest shifts from yield to the health of the soil and the soil’s inhabitants. A splash of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in combination with an understory of regenerative agriculture looks like an unlikely recipe for success to me.
I understand that a lot of folks like to straddle the fence for a number of reasons. It makes a person sound reasonable because they have something good to say about the situation on either side of the fence. It allows a person to say after the fact, see I was right about that, because fence-straddling is a powerful way to avoid taking a real position that might turn out to be wrong. I am sure there are more reasons why fence-straddling seems like a good idea, but sometimes, like with pregnancy and maybe regenerative agriculture, you have to decide which side of the fence makes sense to you, then commit to it and give it your best shot. It may not allow a person to pursue a wishy-washy path, to hew to a centrist view by saying nice things about a new approach while arguing that traditional methods must be employed in combination with the new. That sort of thing just seems silly to me. Think it through and decide what makes sense to you, then implement and evaluate. Or fence-straddle endlessly if you think that’s a good look. That fence-straddling thing is a spectator sport, I think. In practice, I think a practitioner often needs to commit to one path or another.
I think the studies like the one cited above suggest that a farmer can commit to regenerative agriculture and increase their profits even though yields may fall. Is that a win win for the world? I am not sure, but if I was a farmer, I would choose regenerative farming as the path. I think it’s not just about profit, it’s also about chemical exposure and the livelihood and culture of farming. I think family farming looks a lot better to me than agribusiness. You may choose otherwise, but if you are going to be a farmer, you are probably going to have to choose, you probably can’t have it both ways and do a bit of regenerative farming here and a bit of traditional chemical farming there.
Cheers
Mike
Killiansays
538:
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question
This requires a little nuance. I assume he is assuming 10k ybp as the “recent” time? However, we know humans have actually been farming for closer to at least 65k years. When you are preferentially letting/planting certain trees, you are farming. When you have a little plot where you plant things, you are farming. The difference? That’s healthy farming. Then we started doing crap farming – though not as crap as the so-called Green Revolution, which should be renamed the Chem Desolation.
We should think of most H-G’s as H-G-Farmers because it is far more accurate to say they hunted, gathered and had both long-term (food forests) and short-term (garden plots) farming going on in likely every part of the globe.
Also, he may be misreading villages with a few larger houses and a granary. That sounds an awful lot like what Helga Vierich describes from her field studies in Africa. She found H-G/H-G-F “camping groups” typically had a little inequality in wealth, but it was so small as to be pretty meaningless at least in part because of gifting, etc. However, village leaders *do* keep granaries, but they are not part of the “big man’s” wealth, but was the 7- or 8-year emergency supply for the camping party for which the leader was both trusted and had a heavy responsibility.
It is my opinion that complexity drove farming more than farming drove complexity – but that’s just my view, likely shared by none – and, yes, eventually permanent settlements arose and with them came hierarchy and wealth and… poverty.
nigeljsays
From @538
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts–the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”
Read something similar about why early humans persisted with farming a few years back in an introductory anthropology text “The Human Past” by Chris Scarre, although it related more to the production and accumulation of utensils like clay pots, and the wealth and status these things gave people.
However this doesn’t really explain why people started farming. They probably didnt think “we might build houses and accumulate wealth”. This study has some plausible explanations why people first choose to cultivate crops, including climate change:
“One theory posits that in times of plenty there may have been more time to start dabbling in the domestication of plants like squash and sunflowers, the latter of which were domesticated by the native peoples of Tennessee around 4,500 years ago….”
“The other theory argues that domestication may have happened out of need to supplement diets when times were not as good. As the human population grew, perhaps resources shifted due to reasons such as over-exploitation of resources or a changing climate. “Was there some imbalance between resources and the human populations that lead to domestication?”
They did some modelling to figure out the most likely of these….
I also found the following, which has some other interesting ideas on why people persisted with farming, even although scaling up early farming culture was quite hard work compared to hunter gatherer culture:
Very briefly its a result of 1) owning things and the liking for private property rights and 2) it enabled early farmers to have more children because they didnt have to carry them around so much like hunter gatherers did.
But whatever the reasons humans took up farming, we are now utterly dependent on farming given size of human population and just have to make it work the best way possible considering both outputs and sustainability.
Piotrsays
Killian 539): “ nigelKIA thinks chem monocilture = hugh productivity because… ignorant […] nigelKIA also thinks that no plowing, very little weeding, no spreading of chemicals because you use natural insectorials/anti-insectorials, focusing on perennial plants so you seed and plant once, grow a food forest to get food for decades for a TOTAL of maybe one month of work over 5 years, etc., is labor-intensive”
I don’t care about KIA, but Nigel probably thinks that you perhaps can have ONE, but you can’t have BOTH.
Because if you could have BOTH: the HIGHER yields and AT THE FRACTION of the cost (no need to buy artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and much less use of the machinery and fuel) and of work (one month of work over 5 years) – Why ALL agriculture is not regenerative ALREADY ?
Who in they right mind would have moved from traditional agriculture into MUCH more expensive, many times more labour-intensive industrial agriculture, if it didn’t produce MORE crops?
Why would anyone plant rice or wheat, if they could have planted … “ perennials and food forests” and for the same yield while working only 1 month in 5 years INSTEAD? “Trumpy ignorance at it’s best” among …. billions of farmers?
Piotrsays
Scott E Strough (540) “The more carbon in the soil in the form of humus both labile and especially stable, the greater the potential yields.”
could you elaborate? To be more specific:
If the plants USED the dead matter directly or indirectly for their growth, then the higher crops would come at the price of reduced C storage in the soil (which would be a problem in this group).
Or do you mean some form of a biological catalysis in which the very presence of soil carbon in the soil helps the plant grow better without that soil carbon actually being used up?
If the latter – what is the physiological or geochemical nature of such catalysis?
SES(540) industrialization may have increased the food supply, they did it mostly by opening up new cleared ground, combined by some creative math that show increased productivity per man hour and total yields, rather than actual yields per acre.”
Wikipedia: “In the 1960s, rice yields in India were about two tons per hectare; by the mid-1990s, they had risen to 6 tons per hectare.” And
“The Green Revolution increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010.”[Gollin et al. (2021)] in “kg/ha”.
E-P 530: If you think anyone is going to build a multi-billion dollar PWR, hook it to the grid and then abuse the hell out of it trying to run it on a weapons-production cycle, you’re out of your mind. It would be like painting 100-foot high letters on the ground reading “NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION EFFORTS HERE!”
BPL: There are plenty of regimes who would be willing to do that. What makes you think they wouldn’t?
E-P 534: You can’t get 1740.7 MW(e) peak out of 1 km² of PV panels even when they are laid flat on the ground at the equator at local noon under cloudless skies. You’ll get more like 200 MW(e), at a capacity factor of maybe 20% for an average of 40 MW(e).
BPL: The globally-averaged 24 hour irradiance at Earth’s surface from sunlight is 188 watts per square meter (Stephens et al. 2012). Therefore 1 square kilometer would yield 188 MWe, not 40 MWe, and would yield more further south than the dividing point and less above it. But you’d have to go pretty far north to get only 40. Which could be corrected by angling the panels.
Oops! I forget to account for the efficiency of the panels. E-P was right and I was wrong. [Gilda Radner voice:] Never mind!
Reality Checksays
Kudos to Michael Mann in tackling the big issues publicly and head on.
Wed 30 Jun 2021 Australia is at the climate crossroads. The choice is yours, mates
Michael Mann
As a climate scientist who has spent decades studying the impact of carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, the case against fossil fuels is clear. We must, with utmost urgency, cease using these destructive energy sources and make the shift to a cleaner, greener energy economy.
As I argue in The New Climate War, the most important action we must take is at the systemic level. We must transform our energy infrastructure from polluting fossil fuels to renewables with urgency and dispatch. […]
Meanwhile, history seems to be repeating itself in Australian domestic politics as Barnaby Joyce, an individual with whom I exchanged heated words at the height of the Australian 2019-20 bushfires, once again takes the reins as deputy prime minister, threatening to drag the country’s climate policy backward further still.
This theatre-show, turning crucial climate progress into a divisive tool for political point-scoring, does not serve the interests of the Australian people, and your unique continent with the awesome diversity of life and culture it sustains. The clock is ticking but it’s not too late for Australia to step up and do its part in tackling the global climate challenge that faces us all.
There are some good comments and mind bending ones too. The issues are politics, principles, values, ethics and morality imo. Not science anymore.
example comments >>>>
ErikFrederiksen
30 Jun 2021 14:49
Guardian Pick
49
Recently from David Griggs, former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Science Working Group Secretariat, in a conversation with four Australian climate scientists frankly discussing what it is like to live with their knowledge and where they are relocating their families to to minimize coming impacts:
I think Australia is the most vulnerable developed country in the world to climate change. . . . I think we are heading to a future with considerably greater warming than 2 degrees [centigrade].
What that means for Australians is that a lot of people will suffer, a lot of people will die . . . and when the world doesn’t do something about it it brings a whole range of emotions into play, depression is clearly something.
You get days you are down, because what you know, and what you can see coming, is not good.
ErikFrederiksen
ErikFrederiksen
ErikFrederiksen
30 Jun 2021 14:51
20
One of the other climate scientists in discussions with Griggs is young and pregnant and said that “there are so many things wrong with climate, so many things we cannot change, it is going to be bad, it’s almost like why would you inflict that on someone?”
A_real_Jezzing
A_real_Jezzing
ErikFrederiksen
6 hours ago
2
Anyone still having kids must have a screw loose. It seemed bonkers to me 10 years ago when I was discussing how I see this unfolding. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly it would unfold.
From Barnaby Joyce to the Great Barrier Reef, Coalition climate inadequacy is on parade
Greg Jericho
Greg Jericho
Australia’s government is still in denial, caught unawares by the tide of global opinion moving against it
“At no point has this government done anything to make net-zero emissions achievable, let alone acknowledge that 2050 will be too late to limit temperatures to rising 2C above pre-industrial levels.
To be fair, there is no pressure on them to acknowledge this, given the Labor party is stuck on 2050, and most of the media also think it is some magical time frame that will solve all climate change ills.
It’s rather apt, given the past 30 years, that governments around the world have finally settled on an emissions target that is sold as being wonderful and yet is manifestly inadequate.
I guess this is “the good” that should not be the enemy of the perfect.
Even more apt is that this inadequate target remains well beyond the scope of the Morrison government, especially now Joyce is back.
@489:
Here you can have it from the horse’s mouth:
Typical burnup in LWR fuel is 35,000 to 45,000 MW-d/MTHM. To get that down to 2000 MW-d/MTHM you’d have to shut down and completely refuel after 3 months or less of operation, and the refueling takes about a month itself. You can’t run a power plant that way. So no, the current US power reactor fleet CANNOT be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.
A CANDU reactor is refueled on-line and could be used for weapons-material production; just devote a few fuel channels to breeding material and push it through quickly enough that you get nearly pure Pu-239. An RBMK, ditto. That’s probably what China intends to do. But it requires that the reactor be specifically designed to allow this.
David B. Benson (495) The basic fact is that weapons Plutonium is mostly Pu239 and these fast reactors produce to much Pu240 for an implosion device. Maybe Engineer-Poet would care to provide more detail.”
“A new generation of nuclear power facilities that China is developing could produce large amounts of plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons, Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command warned lawmakers this week.
With a fast breeder reactor, you now have a very large source of weapons grade plutonium available to you, that will change the upper bounds of what China could choose to do if they wanted to, in terms of further expansion of their nuclear capabilities,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. STRATCOM oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
There is no evidence that China intends to divert its potential plutonium stockpile to weapons use, but concern has grown as Beijing is expected to at least double its number of nuclear warheads over the next decade from the low 200s.
China says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. ”
If only the U.S. Strategic Command and US Senate listened to David B. “Actinide” Benson, and his friend, Engineer “The Fast Neutron” Poet, that they have NOTHING to worry, because:
“ For all readers, a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium ”
David B. Benson
Richard the Weaver (466) “ Killian: Let me see… Richard…
RtW: …really appreciates that you chose him to bat cleanup.It is a great honor to be roasted last.
I wouldn’t read too much into the order of Killian’s multi-enemy answer. As many of his arguments, it is probably chaotic.
And wasn’t that aimed at Richard _Caldwell_?
jgnfld(405): “You are specifically equating building what was essentially a welded barge with an obsolescent triple expansion steam engine to a modular nuclear reactor?
A poet you perhaps are. Can’t say I’ve seen any worth reading. An engineer you are NOT.
Engineer Poet (421) “If you cannot appreciate Sappho, Lewis Carroll or Ogden Nash, there is no hope for you.”
jgnfld(461): “That provides precisely zero evidence whatsoever as to whether you are, or are not, a ‘poet’.”
Nuclear Poet (478): For actual song lyrics: http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2004/11/entropy-blues.html
Piotr: If _that_ makes you a peer to Lewis Carroll and Sappho, then I guess I am a Poet too – Piotr (37) in:
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/01/flyer-tipping/ – Piotr(37)
Richard Caldwell @486 , regarding your enthusiasm for district scale nuclear power for electricity and home heating. There are some big problems with this concept. Imagine trying to install this in existing cities or suburban areas. You would have to install pipes to every building meaning digging up every road, digging up every garden, and trying to install pipes within houses, pulling the walls apart, and then installing radiant water heater panels in almost every room in the house. The costs would almost certainly be prohibitive, and the work would cause chaos.
Now consider installing the system in new cities. This would work ok, and China is doing this in a couple of places, but there might not be all that many new cities globally. Many countries have static populations or low population growth so no need of completely new stand alone cities. At most suburbs expand a little bit at the edges and probably not enough to justify a nuclear heating project. Even in places with high population growth existing cities just tend to expand. And in the future populations might actually SHRINK. So at best this district nuclear power idea definitely looks like a bit player in things.
Reality Check @491, so you are a defeatist with no alternative plan. Remember while the current proposals to mitigate climate change are moving slowly you have to be able to demonstrate why your own proposals (if such things exist) would move more quickly and would be better. Pass the popcorn.
World Nuclear Association on weapons plutonium:
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/plutonium.aspx#:~:text=Plutonium%2C%20both%20that%20routinely%20made,million%20kilowatt%2Dhours%20of%20electricity.
As opposed to what Piotr claimed. He is only interested in scoring points, not learning something.
Re: “Xcel Energy, an operating company, states that they require nuclear power plants”
Whereas First Energy, much more profitably, invested in legislators:
“got $1.3 billion in subsidies, free payments … so what do they care about putting $20 million a year for this thing, they don’t give a sh*t,”
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/state/2020/07/22/investigators-firstenergy-bankrolled-alleged-ohio-bribery-scheme/42105073/
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2021/04/23/firstenergy-talks-federal-prosecutors-deferred-prosecution-house-bill-6-bribery-probe/7348985002/
But it was all legal ! “there was no explicit agreement between the company and Householder and his associates “to commit an unlawful act.” ”
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/ohio/articles/2021-05-26/parties-in-ohio-bribery-probe-concede-cash-deny-wrongdoing
Dangerous business, it seems:
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/lobbyist-charged-firstenergy-bribery-investigation-is-found-dead/
sidd
The critical mass of Plutonium-240 is 40 kilograms, compared to 10 for Pu-239. Therefore, although it’s more difficult to make a bomb with Plutonium-240, it is not impossible by any means. Q.E.D.
DBbenson at495:
You originally stated at 401 “a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium.” Now you are attempting to show that only one type of power reactor cannot be made to produce plutonium. Presumably you concede that all remaining power reactors can produce bomb grade plutonium.
As I stated at 424, the Pu240 is produced from the Pu239 by longer residence of the fuel in the reactor. By simply cycling the fuel rapidly, as is done in weapons reactors, any reactor can be made to produce bomb grade Pu239.
Your claim “a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium” is deliberately false and you are defending a deliberate lie. This does not make your case supporting nuclear power stronger.
DBBenson at 497:
Your original claim at 377 was “Most thoughtful commenters on the future of the grid anticipate a continued support of 20% from nuclear power plants”
I have cited 3 peer reviewed papers on a future grid that use no nuclear power. I can cite an additional 20 papers if needed. Williams et al 2021 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020AV000284 state that they are the last group of researchers to conceed that nuclear power is too expensive to use in future power systems. Since you have provided no examples I will now claim that all academic researchers of future energy systems use no nuclear at all.
You have referred to a puff piece in a nuclear energy newspaper to support your position. There is no mention of 20% of power in your puff piece. Since electrical consumption will dramatically increase in the future, in order for 20% of power in 2050 to be nuclear approximately 300 new nuclear power plants will have to be built in the USA by 2050. I note that there are exactly zero commercial nuclear power plants scheduled or proposed to be started in the next 10 years in the USA. Starting in 2030 they will have to commission 15 reactors per year. You are dreaming that that could be attempted.
I suppose that if we limit our references to nuclear industry rags that your claim might be accurate. Other readers will have to decide if they believe the peer reviewed literature or nuclear industry rags.
Your deliberate lies do not make your case for nuclear power stronger.
496:
Labor intensive? Lower yields? Hmmm… I guess the recent paper on food forests in the PNW showing greater yields… and requiring virtually ZERO work once established…
Stop braying like an ignorant donkey, denier.
Just another bit of knowledge that perfectly aligns with #RegenerativeGovernance as our most comprehensive, universal model for governance.
African Palaver
http://innovafrica.org/en/project/the-palaver-tree-and-social-connection/
https://twitter.com/FundAgroecology/status/1408430474360504323?s=20
Importance of nuclear power plants from an insider:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/qa-acting-assistant-secretary-dr-kathryn-huff-shares-her-vision-future-nuclear-energy
Piotr: And wasn’t that aimed at
RtW: if only there were a witticism in your touch of labeling.
Eh, my fault. Bundy, Caldwell, or the Weaver, I’m just too plain and median to evoke a joke.
Nigel,
Yes, retrofitting is extremely difficult, expensive, inefficient, and failure-prone.
I would disagree with a policy that installs solar at any time other than when a roof is installed or replaced.
Similarly, I wouldn’t change the heating system of ANY existing subdivision until NO new subdivisions are built the old way.
Reminder for those spending a majority of the bandwidth of this thread on nuclear:
1. It’s unsustainable.
2. It is FAR from zero waste.
3. It contaminates large areas when it fails in any serious way.
4. YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY BUILD IT OUT IN THE TIME FRAMES THAT ARE FINALLY BECOMING EXCEEDINGLY CLEAR. Unless, of course, you want to ignore all the truly horrid climate news this year…
Why are you wasting everyone’s time?
506 nigelj says:
24 Jun 2021 at 9:24 PM
Reality Check @491, so you are a defeatist with no alternative plan
The absurdity of Mr. DoNothingItMightBotherSomebodyWhat?RunFromTheTsunami,AreYouCrazy?!WeMustWalkSedatelyFromTheBeach calling out a “defeatist” is truly astounding.
@504:
Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I’ll have to file that for future reference.
@505:
I’m outside the nearest water district, but a year or two ago EXACTLY that kind of work was going on there, installing new municipal water piping. It wasn’t done by trenching and backfilling, it was done by drilling. Only minimal amounts of pavement were disturbed.
This sort of infrastructure can be put in far more easily, cheaply and quickly than you think.
As for retrofits to buildings, ordinary heat pumps use existing ducts. In the case of a district heating system, the heat source is at a considerably higher temperature than the outdoors so the electric power requirements are much smaller. Renovations and new construction can do better, of course.
Barton Paul Levenson @509 —
Nope. Read the Applications section of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
@509:
There’s a lot more to it than merely assembling a critical mass. You have to make it not just critical, but supercritical on prompt neutrons. This requires that the mass not begin a chain reaction too soon, because it will dis-assemble itself with great speed as soon as it does. The mass needs to STAY supercritical long enough to get the desired energy out of it.
The whole point of implosion devices is to put a prompt-supercritical mass together fast enough that no chain reaction gets going until maximum compression is achieved. Pu-240 has such a high spontaneous fission rate that this is nearly impossible; even as a contaminant in Pu-239, it is prone to cause premature chain reactions resulting in sub-kiloton yields. If you can get a bigger bang with a pallet-load of TNT, there isn’t much point in using a nuclear weapon.
michael Sweet @511 — There is a group of academics who peer-review each others’ articles. These are not power engineers and have deficient knowledge of what’s required for grid reliability.
Consider, for example, last winter in ERCOT Texas.
“ As opposed to what Piotr claimed. He is only interested in scoring points, not learning something” said David B. Benson shooting himself in the foot from a high horse.
From DBB’s own source:
“In the UK, the Magnox reactors were designed for the dual use of generating commercial electricity as well as being able to produce plutonium for the country’s defence programme. A report released by the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) says that both the Calder Hall and the Chapelcross power stations, which started up in 1956 and 1958 respectively, were operated on this basis”
Ergo, David B. Benson have just unwittingly confirmed that his earlier paternalistic lecturing the rest of us:
“ For all readers, a power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium ” – was a bald-faced lie. But, please, do lecture me on how it is me who “is only interested in scoring points, not learning something”.
And don’t forget to let the US Senate Armed Services Committee to know that
Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, LIED TO THEM during their hearings:
“A new generation of nuclear power facilities that China is developing could produce large amounts of plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons, Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command warned lawmakers this week.
With a fast breeder reactor, you now have a very large source of weapons grade plutonium available to you, that will change the upper bounds of what China could choose to do if they wanted to, in terms of further expansion of their nuclear capabilities,” Navy Admiral Charles Richard, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. STRATCOM oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.”
And to think that NOBODY, but the brave David B. “Actinide” Benson, had the guts and the knowledge to challenge that lying Adm. Charles Richard on it!
“For all readers, power reactor cannot be used to make weapons plutonium” – David B. Benson
Engineer poet at 501:
Your reference states:
“In practical terms, there are two different kinds of plutonium to be considered: reactor-grade and weapons-grade. The first is recovered as a by-product of typical used fuel from a nuclear reactor, after the fuel has been irradiated (‘burned’) for about three years. The second is made specially for the military purpose, and is recovered from uranium fuel that has been irradiated for only 2-3 months in a plutonium production reactor. The two kinds differ in their isotopic composition but must both be regarded as a potential proliferation risk, and managed accordingly.” my emphasis. Power reactor plutonium can be fashioned into weapons.
It also says that any reactor can simply be run for 2-3 months and then refueled. The fuel that has only been run for 3 months can then be purified into bomb grade material. If you think that the scientists in North Korea, Iran and Iraq do not know this you are mistaken. Your insisting that power reactors must be run for years before refueling is simply a deliberate lie. Obviously, if I leave my house with a full gas tank capable of going 400 miles I can stop the car after going only 40 miles. The same applies to a power reactor if the user wants to make weapons grade plutonium.
As I stated upthread, it is now easier to use centrifuges to make bomb grade uranium. Everyone knows that uranium bombs are much easier to build than plutonium bombs. You and DBBenson are trying to distract the discussion from the problems of nuclear proliferation.
In any case, nuclear power is not economic. No-one world wide is building new reactors without immense subsidies from the government. In fact, no-one has ever built a nuclear power plant without government subsidies. It currently costs more for operation and maintenance for many nuclear power plants than the total costs, including a mortgage, for wind and solar installations. When nuclear plants require extensive maintenance they will be shut down because it is not economic to upgrade them. Your favorite country Sweden now has only 6 nuclear plants left. They have shut down 4 reactors in the past 4 years. As they build out wind the remaining nuclear plants will be shut down in the near future.
Your claims that power reactors cannot produce bomb grade plutonium are deliberate lies. If this site was moderated you and DBBenson would be banned for deliberately false posts.
NREL/DOE study indicates up to 80% so-called renewables is feasible:
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/06/25/north-american-renewable-integration-study-highlights-opportunities-for-a-coordinated-continental-low-carbon-grid/
OBTW, here’s the money quote from https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/fuel-recycling/plutonium.aspx:
E-P 499: I’m from Missouri. SHOW ME it’s not true.
BPL: The burden of proof is on the affirmative. You asserted something. Prove it.
Killian: Labor intensive? Lower yields? Hmmm… I guess the recent paper on food forests in the PNW showing greater yields… and requiring virtually ZERO work once established…
Stop braying like an ignorant donkey, denier.
RtW: “Stop braying”. Sigh. If only, eh, guys?
I’m reminded of Nigel’s calculation (as I remember it):
Current industrial agriculture is designed to convert sunlight into the simplest and most stable calories possible, given that oil and mined water are both currently cheap. You can’t touch that. Heck, it’s so efficient upgrading the “grain” through a cow still works, economically.
But fattening up and sickening humanity in service of providing the most calories per acre? And degrading the biosphere, too?
When we were speaking of food my cousin Mary taught me, “It is better to throw something away on the outside than the inside”.
I don’t care that McCorporate with a generous dash of dino juice can produce ever so many toxic calories (you think wheat resembles what nature would call a “grain”?)
You guys hear that the techno-wizzards in China tried to get a Three Child policy off the ground?
Lots of thoughts and fears in demographics, in how to shape the Anthropocene.
Getting from here to ‘there’ is either a heavy lift or a huge fall. Which is more likely?
@525:
Except this is (a) blazingly obvious to all non-proliferation interests, and (b) means heavy thermal cycling of the plant itself which risks problems like fatigue cracking.
If you think anyone is going to build a multi-billion dollar PWR, hook it to the grid and then abuse the hell out of it trying to run it on a weapons-production cycle, you’re out of your mind. It would be like painting 100-foot high letters on the ground reading “NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION EFFORTS HERE!”
(OTOH, if Japan had wanted to quietly build up a stockpile of WGPu, then the brief operating runs of some of the restarted reactors before legal challenges shut them down again would have been ideal, no? The Japanese are smart enough to do this.)
You ARE aware that N. Korea has a reseach reactor, but no nuclear power reactors? You are aware that research reactors are DESIGNED to allow precise amounts of irradiation of samples? India made its bomb materials that way too.
To be economic and achieve their design lifetimes, they do.
Yet nobody builds weapons using reactor-grade Pu. In practice, my quote @527 is correct based on real-world evidence.
Even N. Korea knows better. The first N. Korean nuke test apparently used uranium which had been irradiated too long to boost the Pu content so that less material would have to be reprocessed. However, this also boosted the fraction of Pu-240. It fizzled.
Even Kim Jong Un figured that out. Making a bomb from weapons-grade Pu is hard enough; making one from even somewhat off-spec Pu defeated the best minds Pyongyang had. It’s claimed that reactor-grade Pu requires non-proliferation safeguards too, but the desire of some political forces to handicap nuclear energy is sufficient to explain this. In practice, nobody has ever TRIED to build a weapon out of reactor-grade Pu, and with the ease of uranium enrichment it’s vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will.
Piotr @524 — As already pointed out, the one attempt to use Magnox plutonium as a bomb fizzled.
As for the Admiral, a fast breeder reactor could, in principle, be used in an attempt to recover weapons Plutonium. Only certain designs would work, maybe. The Admiral errs on the side of caution.
Re:Engineer-Poet (519)
Piotr: If you were half the Poet you imagine yourself to be, you would have known that the form has to fit the function (i.e. goal). Therefore, if my goal were to impress others on how a truly Renaissance Man I am (both Engineer AND Poet!) I would have written the best damn poem I could write . But, instead, my goal was the sarcasm – toward those accusing Gavin of being elitist and pretentious for using word “elide“, hence the most-fitting form to my goal was mockery:
the MORE low-brow and MORE strained the verse I attributed to the opponents of the elitist Gavin – THE BETTER. This was the reason for my choosing the ironic template: “There once was a man from Nantucket“, a North American STANDARD for poor poetry: meaningless content used as a vehicle for its poor puns (puns, incidentally, being the poetic form of our Poet on RC – see his famous discrediting of the renewables by calling them, wait for it, “the ruinables”! ;-)))). And this was the reason for my DELIBERATE straining of the rhyme and scansion to push the square cogs of personal jibes into circular holes of the rhyming and scansion demanded by the format.
So your contempt:
Engineer-Poet: “Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
shoots you in the foot and from a high horse at that!
And here is the original, so everybody can decide for themselves – who of us two made a fool of oneself:
=== Piotr(37) a.k.a. “the so-called limerick” [(c) Engineer-Poet] ====
Paul Pukite (25)[about Gavin for using an e-word] “The word “elide” is a long-known pretension indicator.”
Steven Sullivan (36) “‘Elision’ and ‘elide’ aren’t peculiar or pretentious words to literate people”
Piotr: Hear, hear!
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept his elides in a bucket.
But his old reviewee, X. Chen,
traded them for a hockey stick with Mann
And as for the bucket, Paul Pukite!
==================
So even if you were unfamiliar with the link between the form and function, and with concepts of “irony” and “sarcasm“, you still could have saved yourself from that egg on your face, if only you had read the next post (Paul Pukite, 38) and and Piotr(40) where I explained to Paul the deliberate nature for the poor rhymes and format. (BTW – that explanation for those who needed it, was the reason why I gave the link to the original thread, instead of just quoting my “poem”.)
But, obviously, the possibility of you being wrong does not cross your mind too often, so you went, both barreled, at me:
Engineer-Poet (519): “Your so-called “limerick” neither rhymes nor scans. Further, this was not even apparent to you. I guess that makes you an exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Nobody Ever Expects the … Dunning-Kruger to apply to them? ;-)
@526:
Note the weasel-words: coordinated, continental low-carbon grid.
Not independent and thus resilient.
The precise opposite of local (meaning LOTS of expensive and controversial new transmission, infrastructure with both embodied energy and inherent losses).
And only “low-carbon” (80% reduction):
Zero-carbon or carbon-negative isn’t an option. This just isn’t good enough.
@528:
You asserted that my claim wasn’t true, when it is obvious by inspection. But if you really need to be beaten over the head with it:
Indian Point occupies a plot of roughly 250 acres. (100 hectares, 1 km²) and generated 2060 MW(e) at 84.5% capacity factor. That’s an average of 1740.7 MW(e).
You can’t get 1740.7 MW(e) peak out of 1 km² of PV panels even when they are laid flat on the ground at the equator at local noon under cloudless skies. You’ll get more like 200 MW(e), at a capacity factor of maybe 20% for an average of 40 MW(e). So you’d need more than 40x as much area covered with PV farm, where trees and most oher plants could not grow, to equal Indian Point’s output; you’d need many times that to handle winter peak demand.
I’ll let you do the calculations for biomass if you think you can refute me, but the catchphrase here is “proof by examination”; biomass energy capture is far less efficient than PV, and you have conversion losses on top of that.
Hey Mr. KIA:
Hot enough for you this week? Can you describe a cold wave in the last 50 years in your area as cold as the present heat wave is hot? Lots of all time records already set. And it extends way up into Canada.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-bangladesh-scraps-coal-fired-power.html
Some of the 10 coal-fired power plants being scraped are brand-new. Amazing for such a poor country.
Richard the Weaver @529,
“I’m reminded of Nigel’s calculation (as I remember it):Current industrial agriculture is designed to convert sunlight into the simplest and most stable calories possible, given that oil and mined water are both currently cheap. You can’t touch that. Heck, it’s so efficient upgrading the “grain” through a cow still works, economically.”
That is not what I said. I’ve never said what industrial agriculture ‘does’. The description sounds partly right, but its not clear how you can claim industrial agriculture produces “the simplest most stable calories”. It looks like it produces the same foods as traditional methods to me. Industrial agriculture just increases yields per acre by supercharging the soils with fertilisers, reducing insect infestations with pesticides, use of mono cropping, and improves productivity with mechanical harvesting, genetic engineering etc, etc. The foods produced are the same basic composition. At most I concede it might reduce trace nutrients like vitamins slightly – but show me proper scientific evidence please. Since you are making these sorts of claims.
You say “wheat is not what nature would call a grain”.
What does this really mean? Wheat started out as a natural grain. Do you mean the fact natural grains have been selectively bred to improve things is somehow evil? Why? If we used completely natural grains with low yields millions of people would die. Humanity with its massive population has become dependent on its own ingenuity with plant breeding and industrial agriculture. You cant wind this back quickly without serious problems.
“But fattening up and sickening humanity in service of providing the most calories per acre? And degrading the biosphere, too?”
And its not clear that providing the most calories per hectare fattens up and sickens humanity. Many millions of people now depend on industrial agriculture for survival, and certainly a decent basic diet, free from the famines you get with traditional third world farming. Not everyone is obese. There’s no no hard evidence things like pesticide residues on foods cause cancers. Refer:
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/cancer-controversies/can-pesticides-or-herbicides-cause-cancer
BUT industrial agriculture is certainly degrading the environment. There are global problems with soil erosion from the use of mechanical tilling and industrial agriculture kills life in the soils, and the use of industrial pesticides has been linked to the decline in insect populations ,and excessive use of nitrate fertilisers causes algal blooms in rivers, and intensive dairy farming causes high levels of nitrates and bacteria in rivers.
So what is the solution? Regenerative agriculture sounds like a good solution to many of these problems. It reduces or eliminates tilling of the soils, and this has minimal affects on yields. It uses natural fertilisers that improves the life of soils and has many other environmental benefits. BUT I believe it would reduce yields. Its fairly obvious because you are subtracting some of the very things that make industrial agriculture very productive. I haven’t seen any peer reviewed science to the contrary. “Permaculture weekly” is not peer reviewed science. It would be as objective as fossil fuels weekly. I don’t see that regenerative agriculture adds some mysterious magic juice that makes potential problems vanish.
So what is the solution to this problem? Personally I think the world SHOULD change over to this regenerative farming, because several elements of it make sense, BUT it might be found necessary to keep using some limited use of industrial fertilisers and pesticides to maintain decent yields. That would mean a “trade off” between environmental sustainability and adequate yields. And perhaps other ways may be found to improve yields and reduce food waste. BUT the end result looks like it would still be a big improvement on business as usual industrial agriculture.
from Manning’s article: The Oil We Eat
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts–the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2004-05-23/oil-we-eat-following-food-chain-back-iraq/
Manning’s story about human power/agriculture feels right to me. Suggestions about revolutionary changes in human agriculture are going to run into the buzzsaw that George Kennan described as “straight power concepts.”
Here is a bit of Kennan from 1948, talking about the position of the US in the post WWII global power scrum: ““We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
I think that US power politics since WWII has really followed Kennan’s suggestions and it looks/feels like an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Some of us think about global diversity and possible rights to life and other possible rights of nature and if we do that, we are likely to be looking at agricultural systems and practices that might be described as regenerative where the dominant agricultural system might be described as extractive.
Complicated stuff.
Cheers
Mike
529:
nigelKIA thinks chem monocilture = hugh productivity because… ignorant. In his world, in my Detroit garden rather than organically growing over 40 different plants and/or varieties, this a wide range of nutrients, vitamins, gut biota, etc., on my 900 sq. ft., I should have been growing densely packed, chem-soaked, insecticide-ridden corn.
nigelKIA also thinks that no plowing, very little weeding, no spreading of chemicals because you use natural insectorials/anti-insectorials, focusing on perennial plants so you seed and plant once, grow a food forest to get food for decades for a TOTAL of maybe one month of work over 5 years, etc., is labor-intensive.
Trumpy ignorance at it’s best.
@529 Richard the Weaver,
Thanks for the post Richard. But you need to understand that the battles climate scientists have had with “The Merchants of Doubt” are nothing compared to the much longer and better funded denialist campaign against organic agriculture.
So long long long before I ever had to wade through the hundreds of AGW deniers false arguments and flawed biased so called “studies” on climate by Monkeyton et al, I was studying how the same forces were attacking organic.
So when you said, “a heavy lift or a huge fail” it struck a nerve. There is no heavy lift. Organic can produce MUCH more food per acre than the industrialized “green revolution” methods. Those methods are optimized for yields per man hour, not yields per acre. Further, to distract and obfuscate the loss of yields per acre, almost universally all the fields so degraded they no longer can even produce ANY crop at all, are dropped off. They are not even included in the stats!
In any other field of science this sort of thing would be instantly caught. Lets say for example medical science, if a study “dropped off” all patients that died, and only included the health stats of those still present at the end of the study, it probably wouldn’t be published at all. In fact they might even be forced to stop the study before it even finished!
“Arable land refers to land under temporary crops (doublecropped areas are counted only once), temporary meadows
for mowing or pasture, land under market and kitchen
gardens and land temporarily fallow (less than five years).
The ABANDONED land resulting from shifting cultivation is NOT
included.” http://www.fao.org/ag/agn/nutrition/Indicatorsfiles/Agriculture.pdf Emphasis mine.
For some reason agricultural science has allowed these denialists to continue and bought the merchants of doubts lies hook line and sinker.
The more carbon in the soil in the form of humus both labile and especially stable, the greater the potential yields. Not only that but it is one of the biggest indicators of profit potential too! There is no burden to lift! Just the opposite in fact! It removes so much burden away from the farmer! Their land gets MORE fertile over time, instead of degrading away! Inputs decrease. Yields go up. Costs go down, while profits go up.
And yes, public health benefits as well, but that one is harder to prove. What can be proved is that the food is higher quality and more nutritious. So even if the yields did go down a little, the nutritional value of those foods would still more than compensate. But in fact yields wouldn’t even go down if the transition was properly managed.
Look around. We are surrounded by the new starving obese! Because the food system is glutted with empty calories! Entire populations of people have been fooled into destroying the public health to support the illusion of plentiful cheap food.
All the while new land gets cleared for agriculture, while total arable land drops AS MUCH AS ADDED! Look at the curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land#/media/File:Agricultural_area_over_the_long-term,_OWID.svg See how while industrialization may have increased the food supply, they did it mostly by opening up new cleared ground, combined by some creative math that show increased productivity per man hour and total yields, rather than actual yields per acre.
Yes better plant and animal breeding does improve yields, but those same genetics in organic systems improve yields even more! The “Green Revolution” methods themselves actually give a temporary yield boost follow by a slow decline due to reductions in soil health.
This is of course masked by the fact even more new genetics and even more inputs are used to cover up the declining soil fertility water infiltration and holding capacity, etc etc etc…
We have peaked, and the curve has no other possibility but to start going down if standard “green revolution” practices are allowed to continue! It’s something at least as important or more than AGW!
Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably
“Most cropland in the United States is characterized by large monocultures, whose productivity is maintained through a strong reliance on costly tillage, external fertilizers, and pesticides (Schipanski et al., 2016). Despite this, farmers have developed a regenerative model of farm production that promotes soil health and biodiversity, while producing nutrient-dense farm products profitably. Little work has focused on the relative costs and benefits of novel regenerative farming operations, which necessitates studying in situ, farmer-defined best management practices. Here, we evaluate the relative effects of regenerative and conventional corn production systems on pest management services, soil conservation, and farmer profitability and productivity throughout the Northern Plains of the United States. Regenerative farming systems provided greater ecosystem services and profitability for farmers than an input-intensive model of corn production. Pests were 10-fold more abundant in insecticide-treated corn fields than on insecticide-free regenerative farms, indicating that farmers who proactively design pest-resilient food systems outperform farmers that react to pests chemically. Regenerative fields had 29% lower grain production but 78% higher profits over traditional corn production systems. Profit was positively correlated with the particulate organic matter of the soil, not yield.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5831153/
the problem with thinking that we might be able to straddle the fence and do a bit of regenerative farming with a splash of traditional farming seems to me to be that it is akin to being a little bit pregnant. If you decide you want to engage in regenerative farming, your interest shifts from yield to the health of the soil and the soil’s inhabitants. A splash of pesticides and chemical fertilizers in combination with an understory of regenerative agriculture looks like an unlikely recipe for success to me.
I understand that a lot of folks like to straddle the fence for a number of reasons. It makes a person sound reasonable because they have something good to say about the situation on either side of the fence. It allows a person to say after the fact, see I was right about that, because fence-straddling is a powerful way to avoid taking a real position that might turn out to be wrong. I am sure there are more reasons why fence-straddling seems like a good idea, but sometimes, like with pregnancy and maybe regenerative agriculture, you have to decide which side of the fence makes sense to you, then commit to it and give it your best shot. It may not allow a person to pursue a wishy-washy path, to hew to a centrist view by saying nice things about a new approach while arguing that traditional methods must be employed in combination with the new. That sort of thing just seems silly to me. Think it through and decide what makes sense to you, then implement and evaluate. Or fence-straddle endlessly if you think that’s a good look. That fence-straddling thing is a spectator sport, I think. In practice, I think a practitioner often needs to commit to one path or another.
I think the studies like the one cited above suggest that a farmer can commit to regenerative agriculture and increase their profits even though yields may fall. Is that a win win for the world? I am not sure, but if I was a farmer, I would choose regenerative farming as the path. I think it’s not just about profit, it’s also about chemical exposure and the livelihood and culture of farming. I think family farming looks a lot better to me than agribusiness. You may choose otherwise, but if you are going to be a farmer, you are probably going to have to choose, you probably can’t have it both ways and do a bit of regenerative farming here and a bit of traditional chemical farming there.
Cheers
Mike
538:
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question
This requires a little nuance. I assume he is assuming 10k ybp as the “recent” time? However, we know humans have actually been farming for closer to at least 65k years. When you are preferentially letting/planting certain trees, you are farming. When you have a little plot where you plant things, you are farming. The difference? That’s healthy farming. Then we started doing crap farming – though not as crap as the so-called Green Revolution, which should be renamed the Chem Desolation.
We should think of most H-G’s as H-G-Farmers because it is far more accurate to say they hunted, gathered and had both long-term (food forests) and short-term (garden plots) farming going on in likely every part of the globe.
Also, he may be misreading villages with a few larger houses and a granary. That sounds an awful lot like what Helga Vierich describes from her field studies in Africa. She found H-G/H-G-F “camping groups” typically had a little inequality in wealth, but it was so small as to be pretty meaningless at least in part because of gifting, etc. However, village leaders *do* keep granaries, but they are not part of the “big man’s” wealth, but was the 7- or 8-year emergency supply for the camping party for which the leader was both trusted and had a heavy responsibility.
It is my opinion that complexity drove farming more than farming drove complexity – but that’s just my view, likely shared by none – and, yes, eventually permanent settlements arose and with them came hierarchy and wealth and… poverty.
From @538
“Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts–the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.”
Read something similar about why early humans persisted with farming a few years back in an introductory anthropology text “The Human Past” by Chris Scarre, although it related more to the production and accumulation of utensils like clay pots, and the wealth and status these things gave people.
However this doesn’t really explain why people started farming. They probably didnt think “we might build houses and accumulate wealth”. This study has some plausible explanations why people first choose to cultivate crops, including climate change:
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-food-thought-farming.html
“One theory posits that in times of plenty there may have been more time to start dabbling in the domestication of plants like squash and sunflowers, the latter of which were domesticated by the native peoples of Tennessee around 4,500 years ago….”
“The other theory argues that domestication may have happened out of need to supplement diets when times were not as good. As the human population grew, perhaps resources shifted due to reasons such as over-exploitation of resources or a changing climate. “Was there some imbalance between resources and the human populations that lead to domestication?”
They did some modelling to figure out the most likely of these….
I also found the following, which has some other interesting ideas on why people persisted with farming, even although scaling up early farming culture was quite hard work compared to hunter gatherer culture:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/13/183710778/why-humans-took-up-farming-they-like-to-own-stuff
Very briefly its a result of 1) owning things and the liking for private property rights and 2) it enabled early farmers to have more children because they didnt have to carry them around so much like hunter gatherers did.
But whatever the reasons humans took up farming, we are now utterly dependent on farming given size of human population and just have to make it work the best way possible considering both outputs and sustainability.
Killian 539): “ nigelKIA thinks chem monocilture = hugh productivity because… ignorant […] nigelKIA also thinks that no plowing, very little weeding, no spreading of chemicals because you use natural insectorials/anti-insectorials, focusing on perennial plants so you seed and plant once, grow a food forest to get food for decades for a TOTAL of maybe one month of work over 5 years, etc., is labor-intensive”
I don’t care about KIA, but Nigel probably thinks that you perhaps can have ONE, but you can’t have BOTH.
Because if you could have BOTH: the HIGHER yields and AT THE FRACTION of the cost (no need to buy artificial fertilizers, pesticides, and much less use of the machinery and fuel) and of work (one month of work over 5 years) – Why ALL agriculture is not regenerative ALREADY ?
Who in they right mind would have moved from traditional agriculture into MUCH more expensive, many times more labour-intensive industrial agriculture, if it didn’t produce MORE crops?
Why would anyone plant rice or wheat, if they could have planted … “ perennials and food forests” and for the same yield while working only 1 month in 5 years INSTEAD? “Trumpy ignorance at it’s best” among …. billions of farmers?
Scott E Strough (540) “The more carbon in the soil in the form of humus both labile and especially stable, the greater the potential yields.”
could you elaborate? To be more specific:
If the plants USED the dead matter directly or indirectly for their growth, then the higher crops would come at the price of reduced C storage in the soil (which would be a problem in this group).
Or do you mean some form of a biological catalysis in which the very presence of soil carbon in the soil helps the plant grow better without that soil carbon actually being used up?
If the latter – what is the physiological or geochemical nature of such catalysis?
SES(540) industrialization may have increased the food supply, they did it mostly by opening up new cleared ground, combined by some creative math that show increased productivity per man hour and total yields, rather than actual yields per acre.”
Wikipedia: “In the 1960s, rice yields in India were about two tons per hectare; by the mid-1990s, they had risen to 6 tons per hectare.” And
“The Green Revolution increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010.”[Gollin et al. (2021)] in “kg/ha”.
E-P 530: If you think anyone is going to build a multi-billion dollar PWR, hook it to the grid and then abuse the hell out of it trying to run it on a weapons-production cycle, you’re out of your mind. It would be like painting 100-foot high letters on the ground reading “NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION EFFORTS HERE!”
BPL: There are plenty of regimes who would be willing to do that. What makes you think they wouldn’t?
E-P 534: You can’t get 1740.7 MW(e) peak out of 1 km² of PV panels even when they are laid flat on the ground at the equator at local noon under cloudless skies. You’ll get more like 200 MW(e), at a capacity factor of maybe 20% for an average of 40 MW(e).
BPL: The globally-averaged 24 hour irradiance at Earth’s surface from sunlight is 188 watts per square meter (Stephens et al. 2012). Therefore 1 square kilometer would yield 188 MWe, not 40 MWe, and would yield more further south than the dividing point and less above it. But you’d have to go pretty far north to get only 40. Which could be corrected by angling the panels.
Q.E.D.
Oops! I forget to account for the efficiency of the panels. E-P was right and I was wrong. [Gilda Radner voice:] Never mind!
Kudos to Michael Mann in tackling the big issues publicly and head on.
Wed 30 Jun 2021
Australia is at the climate crossroads. The choice is yours, mates
Michael Mann
As a climate scientist who has spent decades studying the impact of carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, the case against fossil fuels is clear. We must, with utmost urgency, cease using these destructive energy sources and make the shift to a cleaner, greener energy economy.
As I argue in The New Climate War, the most important action we must take is at the systemic level. We must transform our energy infrastructure from polluting fossil fuels to renewables with urgency and dispatch. […]
Meanwhile, history seems to be repeating itself in Australian domestic politics as Barnaby Joyce, an individual with whom I exchanged heated words at the height of the Australian 2019-20 bushfires, once again takes the reins as deputy prime minister, threatening to drag the country’s climate policy backward further still.
This theatre-show, turning crucial climate progress into a divisive tool for political point-scoring, does not serve the interests of the Australian people, and your unique continent with the awesome diversity of life and culture it sustains. The clock is ticking but it’s not too late for Australia to step up and do its part in tackling the global climate challenge that faces us all.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/30/australia-is-at-the-climate-crossroads-the-choice-is-yours-mates
There are some good comments and mind bending ones too. The issues are politics, principles, values, ethics and morality imo. Not science anymore.
example comments >>>>
ErikFrederiksen
30 Jun 2021 14:49
Guardian Pick
49
Recently from David Griggs, former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Science Working Group Secretariat, in a conversation with four Australian climate scientists frankly discussing what it is like to live with their knowledge and where they are relocating their families to to minimize coming impacts:
I think Australia is the most vulnerable developed country in the world to climate change. . . . I think we are heading to a future with considerably greater warming than 2 degrees [centigrade].
What that means for Australians is that a lot of people will suffer, a lot of people will die . . . and when the world doesn’t do something about it it brings a whole range of emotions into play, depression is clearly something.
You get days you are down, because what you know, and what you can see coming, is not good.
ErikFrederiksen
ErikFrederiksen
ErikFrederiksen
30 Jun 2021 14:51
20
One of the other climate scientists in discussions with Griggs is young and pregnant and said that “there are so many things wrong with climate, so many things we cannot change, it is going to be bad, it’s almost like why would you inflict that on someone?”
A_real_Jezzing
A_real_Jezzing
ErikFrederiksen
6 hours ago
2
Anyone still having kids must have a screw loose. It seemed bonkers to me 10 years ago when I was discussing how I see this unfolding. What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly it would unfold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/30/australia-is-at-the-climate-crossroads-the-choice-is-yours-mates#comment-150314052
and along the same lines comes this summary …
From Barnaby Joyce to the Great Barrier Reef, Coalition climate inadequacy is on parade
Greg Jericho
Greg Jericho
Australia’s government is still in denial, caught unawares by the tide of global opinion moving against it
“At no point has this government done anything to make net-zero emissions achievable, let alone acknowledge that 2050 will be too late to limit temperatures to rising 2C above pre-industrial levels.
To be fair, there is no pressure on them to acknowledge this, given the Labor party is stuck on 2050, and most of the media also think it is some magical time frame that will solve all climate change ills.
It’s rather apt, given the past 30 years, that governments around the world have finally settled on an emissions target that is sold as being wonderful and yet is manifestly inadequate.
I guess this is “the good” that should not be the enemy of the perfect.
Even more apt is that this inadequate target remains well beyond the scope of the Morrison government, especially now Joyce is back.
Inadequate is not enough.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2021/jun/27/from-barnaby-joyce-to-the-great-barrier-reef-coalition-climate-inadequacy-is-on-parade
Australia maybe one of the worst govts at present, but the rest are more than inadequate too. That’s reality and Cést la vie.