And yet no talk of nuclear power. If you actually give a damn about carbon emissions, you would immediately replace coal with positive void coefficient nuclear. None of this bullshit "clean coal" or "clean natural gas". That takes care of your baseload power.

Then build your renewables around that.

Why the fuck is this so difficult?

2015 Hyundai Tucson fuel cell a gem

To clear up lingering confusion, fuel-cell vehicles are electric vehicles. The electricity to run the motor is created by mixing hydrogen from the fuel tank with oxygen from the air in the so-called fuel-cell "stack." The exhaust is water vapor, no pollutants.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/colu…

@1

Baseload can be achieved with renewables, if you store their intermittent power as hydrogen.

Germany is already doing this.

@1 "Why the fuck is this so difficult?"

(1) Chernobyl

(2) Fukashima

(3) Hanford

(4) Yucca Mountain

@4

1. When you purposefully remove every safety feature a powerplant has, then set it to overload, you have a fucking problem. Your water heater will turn into a fucking bomb in much the same way. Also, doesn't have a positive void coefficient.

2. Powerplant was way to fucking old, and backup generators were stored in a bad place. Took massive earthquake and a massive tsunami to take down. Also, not a positive void coefficient powerplant.

3. Hanford was a place to manufacture nuclear weapons, not a place to generate power. Also, not a positive void coefficient powerplant.

4. Are you fucking kidding me? This never even went into service.

So what about the rest of them? If you can't provide an answer for these, I guess you really don't believe that carbon emissions are that big of a deal.

Almaraz
Angra
Arkansas Nuclear One
Ascó
Balakovo
Beaver Valley
Belleville
Blayais
Braidwood
Brokdorf
Browns Ferry
Bruce
Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station
Bugey Nuclear Power Plant
Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant
Byron Nuclear Generating Station
Callaway Plant
Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant
Catawba Nuclear Station
Cattenom Nuclear Power Plant
Cernavodă Nuclear Power Plant
Chin Shan Nuclear Power Plant
Chinon Nuclear Power Plant
Chooz Nuclear Power Plant
Civaux Nuclear Power Plant
Clinton Nuclear Generating Station
Cofrentes Nuclear Power Plant
Columbia Generating Station
Comanche Peak Nuclear Generating Station
Cruas Nuclear Power Plant
Dampierre Nuclear Power Plant
Darlington Nuclear Generating Station
Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant
Diablo Canyon Power Plant
Doel Nuclear Power Station
Donald C. Cook Nuclear Generating Station
Dresden Nuclear Power Plant
Dukovany Nuclear Power Station
Dungeness Nuclear Power Station
Edwin Hatch Nuclear Power Station
Emsland Nuclear Power Plant
Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station
Fessenheim Nuclear Power Plant
Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant
Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant
Fukushima Daini
Genkai Nuclear Power Plant
Goesgen Nuclear Power Plant
Golfech Nuclear Power Plant
Grafenrheinfeld Nuclear Power Plant
Grand Gulf Nuclear Generating Station
Gravelines
Grohnde Nuclear Power Plant
Gundremmingen Nuclear Power Plant
Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant
Hanbit Nuclear Power Station
Hanul Nuclear Power Plant
Hartlepool nuclear power station
Heysham nuclear power station
Higashidōri Nuclear Power Plant
Hinkley Point B Nuclear Power Station
Hongyanhe Nuclear Power Plant
Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station
Hunterston B nuclear power station
Ikata Nuclear Power Plant
Indian Point Energy Center
Isar Nuclear Power Plant
Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Generating Station
Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant
Khmelnitskiy Nuclear Power Plant
Koeberg Nuclear Power Station
Kola Nuclear Power Plant
Kori Nuclear Power Plant
Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant
Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant
Kuosheng Nuclear Power Plant
Kursk Nuclear Power Plant
Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Station
LaSalle County Nuclear Generating Station
Leibstadt Nuclear Power Plant
Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant
Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant
Limerick Nuclear Power Plant
Ling Ao Nuclear Power Plant
Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant
Maanshan Nuclear Power Plant
McGuire Nuclear Station
Mihama Nuclear Power Plant
Millstone Nuclear Power Plant
Neckarwestheim Nuclear Power Plant
Nine Mile Point Nuclear Generating Station
Ningde Nuclear Power Plant
Nogent Nuclear Power Plant
North Anna Nuclear Generating Station
Novovoronezhskaya Nuclear Power Plant
Oconee Nuclear Generating Station
Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant
Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant
Oskarshamn Nuclear Power Plant
Paks Nuclear Power Plant
Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station
Paluel Nuclear Power Plant
Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station
Penly Nuclear Power Plant
Perry Nuclear Generating Station
Philippsburg Nuclear Power Plant
Pickering Nuclear Generating Station
Point Beach Nuclear Plant
Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant
Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant
Quad Cities Nuclear Generating Station
Rajasthan Atomic Power Station
Ringhals Nuclear Power Plant
Rivne Nuclear Power Plant
Rostov Nuclear Power Plant
Saint Lucie Nuclear Power Station
Saint-Alban Nuclear Power Plant
Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Plant
Salem Nuclear Power Plant
Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant
Sendai Nuclear Power Plant
Sequoyah Nuclear Generating Station
Shika Nuclear Power Plant
Shimane Nuclear Power Plant
Shin Kori Nuclear Power Plant
Sizewell-B Nuclear Power Station
Smolensk Nuclear Power Plant
South Texas Nuclear Generating Station
South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant
Surry Nuclear Power Plant
Susquehanna Steam Electric Station
Takahama Nuclear Power Plant
Tarapur Atomic Power Station
Temelin Nuclear Power Station
Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant
Tihange Nuclear Power Station
Tokai Nuclear Power Plant
Tomari Nuclear Power Plant
Torness Nuclear Power Station
Tricastin Nuclear Power Center
Trillo Nuclear Power Plant
Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant
Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station
Vandellòs Nuclear Power Station
Vogtle Electric Generating Plant
Waterford Nuclear Generating Station
Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station
Wolf Creek Generating Station
Wolseong Nuclear Power Plant
Yangjiang Nuclear Power Plant
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
Ōi Nuclear Power Plant

@6

Unclench.

You asked why it was so difficult. I was simply trying to point out some difficulties. Primarily that (1) When nuclear plants fail, they tend to fail spectacularly, and (2) we have yet to figure out what to do with nuclear waste.

I'm not completely anti-nuke. But there are major potential drawbacks to nuclear. It is not a panacea.

@4 I now realize you were just listing things that piss people off for no reason, as opposed to listing them as if they were good reasons - my bad.

@7 As you see, I misread, so again - my bad.

As far as "what to do with the nuclear waste", if we as a society could unclench, breeder reactors would be a great help to that. You're looking at a 99% reduction in waste right there.

Even without them, coal plants produce way, way more radioactive waste (orders of magnitude more) than a similar-sized nuclear plant. All with the added "benefit" of all that waste going straight into the air.

You're right that it's not a perfect solution, but if carbon emissions are the thing to clamp down on right now, then switching from coal to nuclear has to be part of the solution.

Well, the Weather Channel website has this story as the main article on their site right now. Everything else is the typical click-bait bullshit as always, but it's something (even if they do put the number at "more than 300,00").

@9: Coal plants produce radioactive waste?

@11 Yes, they do!

Coal turns out to be very mildly radioactive, but since the typical plant burns a mile-long train's worth every day, that radioactivity really adds up. Not to mention all the other shit in fly ash, like arsenic and mercury.

According to this Sci-Am article (http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl…), ounce for ounce, fly ash is over 100 times more radioactive than shielded nuclear waste. And while nuclear waste is stored in protected areas (dry casks or water shielding) and tracked, ash from the coal plants go straight into the air.

We all know that coal sucks, but it's really, really fucking bad. Directly replacing coal with nuclear would be an incredible net gain on many fronts.

Fukishima is basically the worst nuclear disaster besides Chernobyl, which failed as a result of massive human error and the complete disregard of all safety procedures.

The death toll for the Fukishima disaster is zero. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has stated there is no evidence for inflated cancer risks or other radiation issues in the immediate or outlying areaa.

Meanwhile, burning carbon results in roughly 30,000 deaths per year, and is essentially destroying the planet's ecosystem.

The fear of nuclear power is solely a result of ignorance and the lack of desire to learn about it. Most people's education on nuclear power starts and ends with The Simpsons, so they see images of glowing green rods melting through the earth, and hideous mutations springing up everywhere.

Forget it Solk, it's Chinatown.

@14 I just think it's funny that so many out there would rather have poor people die from fly ash and carbon emissions while claiming they care about carbon emissions.

And by funny, I mean really fucking sad.

The coverage of these protests by the news sites is surreal.

CNN's has one editorial and a link to the HuffingtonPost. NBC thinks the UN monitoring "twitter" is more important climate news. FOX labels it local news. NYTimes doesn't exactly bury it, but relegates it to a video rather than a major headline. WashingtonPost goes with a minor human interest piece about a participant. ABC doesn't find it worth mentioning, at all.

CBS has good coverage! USNews at least covers the Climate Summit which the marches were targeting. And the Seattle Times is pretty good with a headline just below the Seahawks. HuffPost has wall to wall team coverage of the lack of coverage.

In short, hundreds of thousands of people taking to the street is not sufficient to override the money spent by BP et. al. as advertisers in most of our major news outlets.

@8 The appropriate response was:

1) Katrina
2) Sandy
3) California drought
4) Thailand, Pakistan floods
and so on.

The point is, when the environment fails, it fails spectacularly. Nuclear waste is far easier to manage than the entire atmosphere.

@17 Makes a strong point - what is the call to action here?
@18 Not a bad point either.
@19 You can watch NASCAR and care about the planet, this isn't a zero sum game. I watched the F1 race instead where all the cars are hybrids!

Whatever. If hysteria about GLOBAL WARMING IN WHICH WE'LL ALL BE SWIMMING TO WORK BY THANKSGIVING helps people make better decisions about limited resources it's a net good I guess.

It's the inevitably stupid and corrupt public policy accompanying the ignorant hysteria that concerns me.

New nuclear plants can take 20 years to design, build and get online. Solar, wind and other renewables are available now, or in much shorter time frames. And no toxic waste.

We simply don't have enough time to build enough nuclear to replace all fossil fuels sources, nor do we want to generate yet another giant pile of waste that takes thousands of years to break down.

@22

The figure is 8 or 10 years old, but at the time all renewable energy piled together wouldn't get us to a third the energy needed to live.

Sorry, but oil and coal are here to stay for a while. Fortunately, despite the lies of the editorialist, 'big oil' is among the biggest investors in new energy source research. Turns out they can read as well as anyone else and realize fossil fuels aren't inexhaustible. And they'd lime to stay in business.

See, capitalism and reasonable governments (I know, an oxymoron) can do more to promote your goals than any silly marching about can.

@22 That's a load of crap. First off, you need to deal with the issue of base load power. Renewables are great, and they should comprise a significant amount of our power generation (20-30%). But you cannot get away from the fact there are serious problems related to land use, transmission, environmental issues related to a 100% renewable production and lack of control over power generation. You need base load generation, and outside of the mythical fusion, nuclear is miles better for the environment than coal, natural gas or oil power.

Secondly, this isn't a zero sum game, you can do it all just fine if you actually care about the issue. China is putting up nuclear power plants all over the fucking place. The only reason it "takes 20 years" is because previously approved designs cannot be reused and idiot NIMBYs who won't take a fucking physics class and clog everything up in the courts. By the way, you can deal with "thousands of years" of storage by using breeder reactors, or by replacing every last coal plant with a nuclear plant. Instant reduction of waste production right there.

As far as design approval is concerned, it's like building a car, testing and approving it, then taking the next car off the line, and testing it as if the data from the first car never existed. That's fucking stupid. If you know that the design is safe (which is why I keep harping on positive void coefficient plants), and the manufacturing process is constant, you're fine. Look at the list of functioning plants I listed several posts above if you don't believe me.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you need to support nuclear power for base load generation. Anything else simply prolongs our use of coal, and the insane emissions that go with.

Progress is being made at grid-level batteries that can time-shift the electricity from renewable sources. It's new technology since the requirements of the grid are quite different than the requirements of consumer electronics or even building-sized uninterruptible power supplies.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environm…

@25 And maybe if we quit gutting funding for basic research we could be making more gains in these areas. It's a shame that batteries are really difficult, though. I don't understand why we don't have a "new Manhattan Project" for something as important as energy storage or generation.

That, and the biosciences in general, but that's a rant for another day.

@21: How about your hysteria that gay people getting married or writing relationship-advice columns will destroy civilization?
See, states that have Legalized Gay haven't seen any negative effects, and despite more liberal views on sex, indicators of problems like teenage pregnancy and abortion are at a twenty-year low. Compare to climate change ALREADY HAPPENING, what with massive disruptions to weather patterns, a strong multi-year trend of record-breaking heat, agricultural trouble due to strong drought, and an alarming trend of sea level rise.
Splinters and planks, Seattleblues. Your uneducated self needs to stop talking about things you choose not to understand in the slightest.

@23: Oil companies ARE devoting plenty of research to alternative sources of energy. Alternative, in this case, means petroleum other than the typical gas and oil that they're currently drilling for. They're NOT spending much time or money on clean renewables; they'd rather exploit suboptimal forms of fossil fuels.
It IS possible to exploit renewables to the point of powering everything with them. We just need to be willing to. In this 2009 Scientific American article, a plan is laid out to harness mostly the power of wind and waves to do just that. Wave energy is a MASSIVE and almost entirely untapped pool of energy. Alternatively, we could run laddermills into the upper troposphere and make high-altitude winds work for us. The capacity is THERE, regardless of what the nay-sayers like you might think! All we need is the infrastructure. And THAT takes political will, which is perhaps the most depleted resource of all.

In the mean time, I absolutely support the use of nuclear fission as a power source. It's not perfect, but it's better than coal.

"Your water heater will turn into a fucking bomb in much the same way [as a nuclear plant]."

No, it won't. The worst case scenario for a residential sized electric or gas water heater is to level the house (possibly the block for a gas heater) and kill all the people there. However, the site is still habitable and non-toxic. The debris is not toxic, nor will it contaminate other objects and materials (i.e., air, water, solids, you, me). That is not the case with a nuclear accident, as Chernobyl and Fukashima strikingly demonstrate. Nuclear accidents pose a serious risk to living organisms for thousands of years, far longer than the existence of civilization and way longer than any nation-state has ever existed. And then there is the waste (even if there is no accident), highly toxic material that must be isolated from living organisms for 10s of 1000s of years. Talk about hubris. just how do you propose to warn people in 1000 years that an area is poisonous? How about 10,000 or 20,000 years? Think the US will still be around then? Think there will be an unbroken line of civilization until the? LOL.

@28 You clearly don't understand what a simile is, LOL.

But cool, give the same tired talking points in support for our continued use of coal and natural gas. Ignore the massive list of current nuclear power generation facilities and phrases such as "positive void coefficient" and "breeder reactor". Make shit up as you go, while ignoring that Three Mile Island and Fukashima Daini are still producing power safely, efficiently and cleanly.

You worry about shit for 10 or 20 thousand years without understanding the inverse relationship between the danger of radioactive materials and the time it takes for them to cool down. But hey, keep going on and on about future generations while not giving a flying fuck about carbon emissions. It will take hundreds of thousands of years to fix that shit.

LOL

@28: There really is nothing terribly factual in your post. Read about the topic first.

Nuclear fission requires massive subsidies and we still have no safe disposal.

Fun Fact: China, India, and the USA are where almost all Global Warming emissions increases since 2010 have occurred- Period.

Time to end all tax exemptions and exclusions and cheap land and sea leases for fossil fuels.

Serena, Serena, Serena.....the problem is much simpler, and less glamorous than you think. The problem is: mission creep. Its a military concept, which is why you probably are not familiar with it. Let me explain: every protest nowadays attracts every single possible related cause, which dilutes the original reasons for the protest in the first place. So they all meld together into one big generic lefty clusterfuck of people milling about with signs, with messages that haven't changed in decades.

And I especially love how advocates like you quote the attendance numbers of such events, as if each and every protest attendee had the purest of motives for being there, agree with each and every one of your points, and could not POSSIBLY have attended the even just to see what it was all about or out of mere boredom. I suspect half of the people that attend protests just like to be in the middle of things.

Progressives have collectively decided they own the discussion around climate change. Anyone who disagrees with their often inaccurate interpretations of climate science is labeled an anti-science corporate shill. This gets to the heart of why progressives embrace climate science: it lends an air of legitimacy to their singular anti-corporate focus. They don't give a shit about science (nor economics for that matter) when it doesn't support them.

If progressives want to see real action on greenhouse gas emissions, they need to bring all stakeholders into the discussion. Yes, this means engaging oil companies, farmers, people who vote Republican. Regular conservative people don't want to talk about climate change because it is, in their minds, a left-wing issue. Progressives have excluded everyone else from the table and then wonder why nothing is going their way.

The idea that "we're ready to switch off fossil fuels if only those damn Republicans would let us" is just laughable. Just because everyone you know in your progressive Seattle bubble bikes to work and eats organic free-trade gluten-free kale salad for lunch every day doesn't mean that you don't still depend on fossil fuels, and that there aren't over 300 million other people in this country who might not live the same lifestyle you do. For being people who like to brag about how worldly they are, progressives seem to often get tunnel vision about these things.

@34 No evidence and mindless ranting. Register an account and post some damn evidence instead of hiding behind an anonymous account.

@35 The "stakeholders" you talk about care of nothing but their own profits. You make a good point about the actual people - for instance, what do you do in coal country to ensure those folks have a way to make a living? But as far as the large companies are concerned? They won't negotiate, they'll lobby and they'll sue. You're an idiot to believe otherwise.

@36 This is the exact sort of thing that progressives do to sabotage their own issue. "Corporations only care about profits and you're an idiot to believe otherwise." Progressives characterize corporations as some Scrooge McDuck-esque cartoon villain and categorically reject any notion that they might need to include corporate interests when discussing these issues, and anyone who disagrees with this characterization is an idiot. As a left-leaning liberal it's hard for me to watch what was once a decent political alternative fall victim to the same hard-headed fundamentalism that destroyed the American conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s.

Also saw all of the trash you folks left on the streets. Maybe clean up your own act first before telling the rest of us how to live.

@35: I'd be less likely to label climate change "skeptics" as corporate shills or whatever if they displayed a little more intellectual rigor than fucking CREATIONISTS.

I wonder how many people, from out of town, showed up via car or airplane.

Wow, Serena Larkin must be so proud of this comments thread.

Solk512, forgive me for being a little slow on the uptake. But with your comments @1, @6, @8, @9, @12, @15, @20, @24, @26, @29, & @36, are you essentially saying the answer to climate change is nuclear power? Further explication and elaboration may be required. And it would probably be a good idea to focus any further comments on nuclear power, just to keep the eye on the ball, or the prize, or whatever that expression is.

And here I was starting to think the answer to climate change was electric cars, but I could be wrong.

@39 Most self-described "skeptics" are no more familiar with the science than the average Climate March attendee. Both have arrived at their conclusion not by sober analysis of the literature but by ideology and politics, and have their own embarrassing spokespeople who wouldn't know how to convert Kelvin to Celsius. The science is settled, the policy response is not, and for any discussion on that response to be effective we need to get ideology out of the picture.

#33: Well, you're managing to do even less than the protesters, so congratulations I guess?

42: Well, the right isn't going to let you have this without ideology. Unfortunately, the US political culture makes everything into a partisan issue. There is no way around it. The skeptics aren't coming around, and only through a mass movement of non-scientists will you get the numbers necessary to ignore the giant right-wing pile of shit between the science and the policy. It's not important that everyone knows or can parse the evidence. What matters is that enough people are smart enough to defer to the experts who do understand the evidence.

@37 Progressives don't characterize corporations as some Scrooge McDuck villain, Dodge v. Ford Motor Company did, establishing the legal concept of "shareholder value". Quit being such a disingenuous fuck and provide some actual evidence.

@41 No, I'm saying that a significant portion of the answer is nuclear power. It is not, in and of itself going to take care of everything, nor should we try a 100% nuclear route. Personally, I think a strong 20-30% mix of renewables makes a lot of sense, so long as you take into account issues such as intermittent power generation (or the methods to mitigate intermittent generation), actual generation capacity and inefficiencies due to transmission losses - a 5x5 sq. mile array of solar panels won't do shit for Asia or the Americas, for instance.

I focus on nuclear power however because many on my political side of the spectrum refuse to consider the idea, despite the fact that compared to other base load generation methods (Coal, Gas and Oil), the carbon emissions are next to nothing, the safety is much, much higher, and problematic waste is highly contained and tightly regulated.

Electric vehicles aren't a terrible idea, but you need to take into account the environmental costs of making all those batteries, and the source of power used to charge them up.

@43:

#33: Well, you're managing to do even less than the protesters, so congratulations I guess?
*******************
You are more correct than you realize. I've taken a number of those "calculate your carbon footprint" tests; I consistently score anywhere from 50%-60% of the average US citizen's carbon footprint. That's HALF of what the average American produces by some measures. In fact, this might mean that at least HALF of those 400,000 protesters produce more carbon than I do. And I don't consider myself an enviromentalist, global warming scaremonger, or any other such thing, just a person that believes in frugal, simple living. I find it very, very interesting that it takes the threat of complete environmental disaster to get people to examine their lives and how much they buy, waste, or travel - not to mention the impact of replacing numerous digital gadgets every year. Why don't you try peddling your global warming religion the next time lemmings are lined up outside the Apple store, so they can replace their year old phones with the latest thing - see how far you get.

You are right, I AM doing less....using less resources and producing less carbon than half the people out there yammering about the issue. When the REST of U.S. comes down to my carbon production level, when my rate of usage is average, then I'll consider "doing more".

Word up: we in Whatcom County have GOT to get Seth Fleetwood elected to Washington State Senate, and Doug Ericksen OUT--preferably hauled out in an industrial sized garbage bag, and strapped and bound onto a dangerous DOT-111 oil car one-way to Big Coal and Big Oil, where they eat their own.

@49 Holy shit, an actual call to action!

#48: I have a very low carbon footprint (possibly even lower than yours), and reducing that footprint for all people is my goal. And if protests can break through the fog and instill the idea of reducing fossil fuel dependence in our everyday lives, I think that's a good thing. Or I can cynically crow about how awesome I am and how shitty everyone else is, which seems to be your approach.

And climate change isn't a religion; the mechanism for warming is well understood and the temperature increase and human role in it are both supported by reams of evidence. You're the marginal crackpot here. Not the scientists.

How much carbon is one saving by not having a cat, a dog, or children? A dog's carbon footprint is around that of an SUV, right?