Although with our current economic debacle gasoline consumption has dropped slightly below supply, looking at the depletion curves of Mexico, Venezuela and the North Sea, as well as the current low price of oil (which has caused an enormous number of drilling projects to be canceled or postponed,) I’m predicting in the next nine to twelve months we’ll bump up right against the supply curve and have ourselves a nice little gasoline shortage. (Two weeks?) It will do us a world of good.

I have no doubt that forms of nuclear power will play a part in future, but I think it’s a mistake to attribute any single solution a “silver bullet” status.

Fundamentally, we’re not in a technological problem, but a human one – therefore it behooves us all to consider the human dimension carefully. I don’t think there is any part of the Bay Area that would welcome a new liquid-sodium reactor (which is its own serious technical problem). All the safety assurances and waste-management arguments are meaningless to the (Wo)Man in the Street. Moreover, if DOE were to pursue one of their own accord in any of their Bay Area facilities, the political protest would be so sharp as to lead to a moratorium that would only hurt R&D.

Also, I think you miss the larger lesson of Jevon’s Paradox. Besides the increase in consumption efficiency promotes (especially when the given technology is so disconnected from the (Wo)man on the Street*), the response in promoting alternative substitutes to the primary fuel also meant slowing technical development of the legacy fuels. Consider how many ‘grandfathered’ coal plants we have in use because of the larger shift to alternatives. This can be considered good and bad. Locally, it’s been a good thing for Hunters Point residents to remove that 80+ year old power plant. Why it took so long is an interesting question to ponder.

*Finding technologies that connect people directly with the solutions to their problems is a key pillar to our future success. Bicycles, Complete Streets, enriched local communities through gardens and events … these are all very tangible solutions with immediate feedback to the participants. It eliminates whole rafts of technological and non-neighbor mediation between problem and solution. It is both harder and easier to achieve and sustain than a “magical” power supply solution.

http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad11983cohen.pdf

When M. King Hubbert predicted U.S. peak oil in 1956, he named his speech “nuclear energy and the Fossil Fuels.” When you use the uranium 160 times as efficiently, you can use exponentially more abundant low-grade ores. For example, uranium exists in granite at 5ppm. If you use it in the Integral Fast Reactor, granite has 15 times the energy density of coal! It is clear that by using the lower-grade ores in fast reactors, uranium exists in unlimited quantities:

http://www.computare.org/Support%20documents/Fora%20Input/CCC2006/Nuclear%20Paper%2006_05.htm

In fact, uranium can be extracted from seawater for $200 a pound– the energy equivalent of gasoline at $0.01 a gallon. Based upon geologic erosion and uplift, rivers flush 32,000 tons of uranium into seawater a year. The world currently uses 67,000 tons of uranium a year for 16% of its electricity. However, if we used the 32,000 tons a year of renewable uranium in fast reactors, we could power the world many times over for billions of years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

“The Jevons Paradox (sometimes called the Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource”

Which means, that if we start using uranium more efficiently, it will lead to an explosion in our usage of uranium, actually hastening its peak. And then what? This effect has been observed in every form of energy we use.

Ideas around upgrading and switching to the grid to match not only our current transportation needs, but the also the future growth in the consumption of energy and goods which Western societies’ economies are reliant upon, is just another one of those “techno fix” fantasies. It would require enormous financial and material investment, not only in the grid itself, but also the conversion of a huge fleet of vehicles from gas to electric. Besides, the grid is just a way of delivering energy, but does not address the question where our future abundant, cheap energy will come from?

Shifting / reducing our energy use is often described as a project that would be akin to World War II. Since in general the world economy is contracting right now with no end in sight, CA is almost-defaulting, the U.S. government is printing lots of new money to bail out Wall Street and Obama is busy having beer with cops to make a good impression in the MSM (stay tuned for the Susan Boyle story!), I have a hard time seeing how this huge, concerted effort could be done. Our political and civic landscape is much too trivialized, scattered and self-centered. Remember, this is the nation that after 9/11 was told that the best way to help defeat the terrorists is to keep shopping….

Peak Oil theory doesn’t say that we will run out of fossil fuels anytime soon. It says that after the peak, production will increasingly become difficult and that net extraction rates will start to decline. This is true whether we use the grid or oil tankers to deliver the energy to ourselves.

Alternative energy sources will not be able to make up for the gap between demand and supply. This will make energy prices rise, which will inevitably have a huge ripple effect through the world economy causing repeated crashes, since much of it has been based on the assumption of constant growth, after being sold on it by the Greenspans of the world. But this constant growth can’t be maintained without cheap, abundant energy.

So far, no alternative has emerged that can satisfy our hunger for energy, and is not subject to peak theories. Which is why many peak oil experts advocate the return to a simpler (but arguably richer) way of life, one that uses less energy, one that is more locally based, and emphasizes durability of goods over throw-away, marketing-driven, consumer culture and car-based suburban sprawl.

On a parallel issue, there’s an interesting logic to the RV Park as perpetual temporary community. Time to restore the buffalo trail? Time will tell.

One other interesting tidbit, “Bicycle usage is highest among White residents, college graduates, those under 30 and those likely to move out of the City.”

For the source, see page 3-5 at this link:

http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/controller/reports/CITY_SURVEY_2009.pdf

I don’t know if we will ever know if there is one single, limiting factor to bicycling in San Francisco.

-marc

The current U.S. electric grid has spare generation and transmission capacity at night….the current spare capacity could generate and deliver the necessary energy to power the majority of the U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet, if that fleet consisted of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).

The study went on to look at San Diego Gas and Electric, assuming EVERY SINGLE HOUSEHOLD had an electric vehicle which it plugged in at night. Result was no need for new infrastructure. The fact is that the current electric system has huge amounts of capacity available during off-peak hours when most people are asleep. Doesn’t anyone do any fact-checking anymore?

On page 13 of the SFMTA State of Cycling report, you’ll discover:

*Nearly 16% of phone survey respondents reported bicycling an average of two or more days per week for all trip purposes

*Approximately 6% of all trips in San Francisco are completed by bicycle

*It is estimated that there are approximately 128,000 bicycle trips made each day in San Francisco

http://www.sfmta.com/cms/rbikes/documents/2008SFStateofCyclingReport.pdf

If it gets that bad, my theory of getting some arable land, solar panels, solar hot water, solid graywater recycling, propane heat with electric heat backup, won’t do me any good. I’ll need a whole lot of guns.

re- hitting the wall

(I hit send too soon!) Yeah, you’re probably right, but at least it’s a pretty simple matter to push all the derelict cars for collection after the oil’s run out, and paint-stripe the legacy roads for all the alternatives. People are going to want to keep moving, and we’ll just have to live the repurposed life.

Incidentally, a lot of folks here might find this interesting – the analysis the shows how little fuel economy has improved in over 80 years of automotive “innovation.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17506-us-vehicle-efficiency-hardly-changed-since-model-t.html

@Rob Anderson – http://www.sfmta.com/cms/rbikes/documents/2008SFStateofCyclingReport.pdf … which tracks change over time. Also, the 2008 Market St & Van Ness BTWD surveys were validated by SFMTA.

and more here: http://www.sfmta.com/cms/rbikes/3172.html