NOT.

...how many jobs have been lost in the manufacture and use of the nuclear powered mining equipment out there which is used to support the nuclear power industry. Because as everyone has been unfailingly informed on how absolutely perfect and clean nuclear power is and how completely untainted it is by dangerous™ coal, oil and natural gas, in contrast to any other energy technology that might be even slightly dependent upon dangerous™ coal, oil and natural gas and therefore are just as bad if not the worst...evil...ever.


( off)

It makes me nuts when I see young guys up there with uncovered skin and inadequate or no safety harnessing. They think they are invincible.

When they are my age, they'll be worrying about skin cancer, waiting for pathology reports... I'm a white guy who got far too much sun when I was young. Ultraviolet radiation is dangerous, even though it's natural. I also did some significant long term damage to myself believing I was superman in jobs requiring heavy labor.

Certain solar panels, especially those manufactured in places with poor or non-existent environmental and labor regulation, create large amounts of toxic waste. So does the manufacture of power control circuitry; inverters and such.

Kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, the hazards of nuclear power may very well be less than solar.

...or does this apply to roofers in general?

Also, are you suggesting that individuals who construct nuclear power facilities are never exposed to sunlight?

And, is every component of a Nuclear Power facility manufactured by companies abiding by US Standards of environmental and labor regulations (or better) or without the generation of toxic waste?

My original point was sarcastically attempting to highlight that there are no Nuclear Powered mining jobs. Nuclear is dependent on fossil fuels for the extraction and processing of its fuel which, just like organic fossil fuel (e.g. coal, gas and petroleum) is a finite resource.

Our high energy industrial consumer economy depends on fossil fuels.

An economy powered entirely by solar, wind, and other "renewable" energy sources would look nothing like the economy many of us who post here in E/E now enjoy. Neither would an economy that was entirely nuclear powered.

I'm deeply critical of anyone who believes solar, wind, or nuclear power are drop-in replacements for fossil fuels.

I also believe human work ethics will be the end of us. I don't see job growth and increases in "productivity" as a good thing. Economic productivity as we now define it is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

The evolutionary advantage of human work ethics is that they are advantageous in war. Now that a single economic cult has conquered the world, human populations will continue to grow, resource extraction will increase, fossil fuel use will increase, and eventually there will be a catastrophic systems failure.

We humans are not the first innovative species on this planet to experience exponential growth followed by collapse, and we won't be the last.

...so, on that score nuclear and renewable are just as "bad". But given current conditions, by that metric, everything we do is "bad".

I agree, and would suggest that this is the elephant in the room that no one is acknowledging, i.e. that our energy future will necessarily be much different than our energy present or our energy past. We will not be able to sustain the way we live, the inherited way we live, in the future. Improvements in efficiency and conservation will be required and that will mean using less (much less per capita and in the aggregate) and/or maybe (gasp) periodically going without.

Nuclear, whether we like it or not, will be around for awhile as a legacy of past energy production choices, but it is not likely to increase (i.e. no new production). Coal is already on the way out (and in some areas very quickly: New York has decommissioned or idled approximately 1700 MW of coal production since 2011 and added approximately 1000 MW of wind) and it can be postulated that as (decentralized) solar/wind/hydro continue to grow they will eventually replace (centralized) petroleum/gas/coal and nuclear. Decentralization intrinsically helps with future efficiencies thru reduced distribution losses and improves resiliency (i.e. not reliant on one major plant/facility or subject to price fluctuations of a particular fuel).

I've been listening to these bullshit predictions - prediction after prediction after prediction - about how solar and wind will replace everything for my whole damned adult life, and I'm not young.

Coal is not dead, especially not because of the so called "renewable energy" scam, which has proved incapable of producing enough energy to run all the computers dedicated to saying how great it is.

Here's the graph from the EIA, not necessarily for the benefit of the delusional who wish to throw trillions of dollars at a scheme that has not worked, is not working and will not work:

EIA energy browser.

Coal, in 2017, is tied with dangerous natural gas for the leading source of electricity in this country. Wind and solar are so close to the abscissa (next to zero) that they can't even be visualized on this graph.

It's 2017, and Amory Lovins was handing out exactly the same bullshit predictions in 1976 which is 41 fucking years ago.

You know what the concentration of carbon dioxide was in 1976? I do. In the first week of November 1976 the concentration was 328.97 ppm.

You what it is 41 years after that dumb ass uneducated anti-nuke (who never tired of predicting nuclear wars) wrote his very, very, very, very stupid and unreferenced line of bullshit about the grand "renewable energy future?" It's, um 404.17 ppm.

Here's what the dumbass anti-nuke wrote in 1976:

Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?

A quad is roughly equal to an exajoule. In 2017 the planet as a whole was using about 580 exajoules of energy. The big deal loud solar fantasy doesn't produce 3 of them on the whole damned planet, never mind 16 in the United States.

In the 20th century, average week to week comparisons from year to year averaged 1.54 ppm per year growth in dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere. In the 21st century, during which we squandered trillions of dollars on the useless wind and solar industry which is not even remotely "renewable" since it depends on redundant gas powered plants even to exist, not to mention toxic metals, that same figure is 2.12 ppm per year. In 2017, thus far, it's 2.39 ppm per year.

Since our anti-nukes got themselves in an idiot snit over Fukushima, that figure is 2.41 ppm per year.

I don't know what the people selling this "renewable jobs" horseshit are, but one thing that they are not is environmentally aware.

They think that cheering on wind and solar is the same as giving a shit about climate change. It's not because, again, solar and wind did not work, they are not working, and they will not work.

The fact is, that the planetary atmosphere is collapsing because of denial, and the denial on the left is equivalent to the denial on the right; it's a "do nothing, because doing something is unpleasant."

The solar and wind industries are trivial failures. They don't matter, and never will matter. They could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice.

... how are you defining "innovative" when you write:

?

Please provide a list of prior "innovative" species (i.e. prior to humans) on this planet to have experienced "exponential growth followed by collapse"? I'm curious to know what you meant.

Photosynthetic organisms had finally put enough oxygen into earth's atmosphere that methane was depleted. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and the sun wasn't as hot those days. The earth froze over, another so-called snowball earth, which was certainly a mass extinction event, especially for the photosynthetic species now trapped in the dark under deep ice rather than open water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huronian_glaciation

Humans are accomplishing the opposite of that. We are filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. It's likely that high wet-bulb temperatures, or drought, or storms, or rising seas will make many places now inhabited by humans, a billion or more, uninhabitable. Refugees from these places will not always be welcomed by other humans occupying more habitable places. These refugees will not thrive. ("Okie" was not a term of endearment in 1930's California. My own California ancestors, landed here a few decades before the Dust Bowl, considered themselves superior, which really makes no sense because my wife has ancestors who landed here in the western U.S.A. thousands of years ago, people my dear grandma who really didn't have a mean bone in her body, called Old California "Spanish" as a term of respect.)

There are many examples of introduced species experiencing exponential population growth and collapse, and many experimental models demonstrating the same. Similar events occur in the course of evolution, especially well studied in the epidemiology of parasites and disease. The most "successful" newly evolved parasites and diseases smolder in the background, not greatly inconveniencing their hosts. Others flame out, too virulent to maintain a stable population.

It seems very likely to me we humans are one of those flame-out species. Those humans who survive the inevitable catastrophe will be less virulent.

...it still doesn't answer my original and basic question: how are you defining "innovative"?

And for what it is worth, I'm more of a Quaternary/Pleistocene glaciation person, it has greater pertinence in my day to day experience. The Huronian is so...I don't know... Paleoproterozoic. You could claim "but Oxygen!" with great enthusiasm, but it wouldn't change my preference.

Written language was an innovation built upon that. These innovations are biological in their origins, directly related to structures in the human brain. Further human innovations arise from language.

In the case of the original oxygen producers, a particular sort of photosynthesis was the evolutionary innovation .

The capture and incorporation of previously free-living chloroplast and mitochondria ancestors by eukaryotes was an evolutionary innovation.

...what you are saying is that Humans were the prior 'innovative' species before there were Humans...?

No lines to be drawn.

All your ancestors lived to reproduce, going back to the beginning of life on earth.

The root causes of humanity's exponential population growth are biological.

I attribute that exponential population growth to language.

Or Brava... Don't mean to assume.

The technology we use to harvest, store and transport this renewable energy are all impossible to engineer, build, deploy and maintain without vast amounts of coal, oil and natural gas.

So, in a very direct way, the production of coal, oil and natural gas is driving almost ALL of this job creation in renewable energy.

Additionally, most of the calories eaten by the people having the added jobs are also there because fossil fuel is so energy dense.

Energy is only as renewable as the technology used to gather it. Solar panels and wind turbines are unsustainable given that they can't be built in the required quantities without fossil fuels.

Your, "NOT," is quite misplaced in my opinion.

Nineteenth century shit.