The only difference between how you're acting and how I am is I'm not hypocritical about it. You're just as dismissive as I am.
I never claimed I wasn't being dismissive. I've seen enough to convince me to be dismissive of fission as the answer to the energy crisis and all that goes with that. I've seen nothing to convince me it is a viable answer. The documentary was simply a single example that I think sums up the problem quite well.
You claim I am being hypocritical so please show me where I ever claimed to be anything other than what my posts have shown me to be.
You on the other hand are claiming to have an open mind but dismissing out of hand a documentary you have not even bothered to watch.
And, despite your insistence, I do believe that my door is open. It genuinely is. I could be wrong about all of this. I've eaten my words before and I presume that I will do it again. That's just the learning process.
I didn't claim outright that your documentary is inaccurate, I am only claiming that the trend for those types of documentaries to be accurate doesn't play in it's favor. I've been reading about and discussing nuclear power for years now ... casually ... and in that time I've heard many extreme claims about nuclear "problems" that don't hold water when you actually look at the data. I preemptively filed your claims in that category in my understanding until I have more data. It takes way more than an hour to look into the claims of an hour long documentary. Looking at sources, organizations, funding, research, etc, are all things that I do when I am serious about believing something like this.
Actually you claimed you don't have to watch a documentary to "smell a stinker". What makes it a "stinker" if not being inaccurate?
In general, if 30 physicists say it's possible on a global scale and one say it isn't, I'm inclined to believe the 30. If 97 climate scientists say that anthropomorphic global warming is happening, I am inclined to believe them over the 3 dissenters. Dissenting is important, but I am cautious about it.
Plenty more than 1 seem to think fission is not the long term answer.
kW is not a unit that makes sense in that context. kW is an instantaneous unit. kWh is the unit for kW over time. Neither 5kW average per day nor 5kWh per day line up with what the EIA has to say on the matter. To be specific the EIA says 28.9 kWh per day which is the same as ~1.2kW constant throughout the day.
EDITed to add - unless maybe they meant peak demand.
EDIT2 - When you say "Energy used to grow and transport the food you eat, energy to produce the clothes you wear, energy to heat your home, energy to supply water, energy to travel to and from work, etc, etc, etc" perhaps they meant 120kWh/day.
What PDXTab said. Also your numbers don't add up. It doesn't matter how scientific the Brit was if his numbers can't be sanity checked they aren't any good.
For those actually interested the pertinent part of the documentary begins at the 21min40sec point and goes to the 25min40sec point. A total of 4 minutes.
I will admit, I made the assumption the 5Kw number is per day. That is not actually stated. However, from looking into it elsewhere the 11.4Kw average US citizen energy consumption seems to tally with per day requirements of that standard of living.
I do acknowledge if the Britts numbers can't be checked they aren't any good but since there's no desire to even verify if I have expressed those numbers correctly by watching the documentary I don't really see anyone being interested in sanity checking the numbers.
Fusion reactors are still in the experimental phase. Whether they will solve power generation problems is pure speculation.
Absolutely agree. And please note, I never claimed that fusion will be the answer. I only claimed fission isn't. Regarding fusion, I also specifically stated "if we can get it to work".
Just caught this bit. I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding on energy use here. Developing countries don't use more energy than stable 1st world countries do. They have more impact on the global average because they are going from effectively zero consumption to more consumption. They perhaps use dirtier energy (India and China are going through tons of coal). But energy use, in general, increases with standard of living. There is a slight taper over the last couple of decades per capita in some countries as we get more efficient. But developing nations do NOT use more energy than France, even as they're developing.
You are postulating that developing nations have to double France's relative (per capita) production of energy. I'm not sure if it's a misunderstanding or a miscommunication, but that is incorrect.
I am not postulating that at all and never claimed developing countries use more energy than developed worlds. I specifically stated the average is 2.2Kw which would seem to indicate that developing countries use massively less than developed countries per capita. That's how averages work. If the USA uses an average of 11.4Kw per capita and developing countries used more than that the average would have to also be more wouldn't it.
You are correct that energy use generally increases as standards of living increase. At the time of the documentary there were 6 billion people using an average 2.2Kw each. That equates to 13.2 Terawatts. The point of settling on a 5Kw energy usage per capita for the world was to allow developing countries (at the time obviously consuming way less than even the global average, otherwise the avereage would be higher) to raise their standards of living to something approaching a developed world standard. At the same time, 5Kw usage would require citizens in the developed world to get used to consuming less than half what they currently do.
Even with the idea that the developed world would actually reduce energy consumption to half what it was, this hugely optimistic target of 5Kw would still result in a global per capita energy consumption 2.5 times what it was at the time of the documentary. I would argue that it is a massive, massive, under estimation of the need. Then, rather than trying to rely solely on fission reactors the documentary suggested only 1/6 of that energy requirement would need to come from fission with the other 5/6 coming from other renewable sources. The result was still 2.5 full sized reactors built each week for 25 years.
But anyway, I've said my piece. I'm not terribly interested in convincing anyone. So I'll leave it there and let the thread get on with it.