Triumphs of Renewable Energy in Pakistan: Cooking.

A little known fact is that for quite some time, thousands of years actually, renewable energy has been widely used around the world for cooking foods and heating homes.

In fact, it has been in common use for such a long time, one wonders why, indeed, anyone ever started to dig coal, or drill for petroleum or natural gas.

It must have been some kind of conspiracy by, say, guys at Bechtel or Exxon or something like that.

Anyway. Renewable energy is a major contributor in Pakistan, a country about which many of our resident anti-nukes are concerned, owing the fact that many Pakistanis are Muslim and some of them also understand nuclear science, the science that all decent people want banned, especially our folks here who care a real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real, real lot about the needs of Pakistani customers of the Tesla car company (although not necessarily poor Pakistanis, like the kind who suffer from malnutrition and can't afford swell solar roofed McMansions.)

I was saying...?

Oh yes...

It just so happens that I have been reading a paper about the wonderful renewable energy program in Pakistan, an article in the Wiley Interscience Journal, Indoor Air.

Here's the abstract: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121547947/abstract">Indoor Air Volume 19 Issue 1, Pages 75 - 82



Wow. Just imagine if say, nuclear energy were related to 2.7% of the global burden of disease...

Oh. Let's not be nasty...

Anyway, about all those Pakistanis who will soon be buying solar houses behind the gates of Karachi, site of one of the http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/6/215031/9285">worst dangerous fossil fuel accidents in history - one we hear about over and over and over and over and over and over again here in the DU E&E forum...

...just kidding...

The whiny bastards who wrote this article, not one of whom seem to realize the potential savings of us all having renewably powered wood fired F150 pickup trucks to haul wood we cut using our wood fired chainsaws in our renewable forests have written an extremely biased and vicious conclusion to their article, which is obviously part of the Bechtel conspiracy to keep the renewable energy industry down:



Less educated? Users of renewable energy are less educated? Than whom? T. Boone Pickens?

Fucking name callers!!!!!!!!

Don't these authors know how to use that great renewable energy word could.

All of these women living in mud and straw huts are obviously at fault for not recognizing that they all could buy platinum boudouard catalysts for their renewable stoves in their mud McMansions.

Since they didn't buy catalysts (and thus stimulate the economy and create jobs, jobs jobs!!!!)they kinda deserve it, no?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:


It's hard to imagine just how contemptuous of history a person has to be in order to say that without immediately dying of laughter.

Are you intentionally trying to be ironic, or is the depth of your understanding of issues consist entirely of cutting and pasting smileys?

Where have I seen this sort of thing before?

Where have all the giggly boys gone? Lose their trust funds and have to get, um, jobs, as solar window washers?

Pretty much most of the airheads here - particulate contaminated air being the air in question - have even less knowledge of history than their knowledge of science, and that, I assure you, is saying a lot, since there are zero "renewables will save us" airheads who know any science.

I happen to know why people started digging coal, and in fact, discussed it here some time ago:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x55148">On the British Government Decision to Ban Coal: Biofuels Implications.

Have a nice giggly fundie day.

:rofl:

The Health and deforestation issues are a big problem in the third world that the Rocket Stove tries to solve.

Read this Wikipedia page for a description of this low tech solution to the issues you talked about in your posting.

I think it covers a lot of the issues you brought up.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_stove

:rofl:

you wouldn't know about the mental concentration required to read one.

You know, when I imagine some of the dumb fundie anti-nukes here, I tend to imagine fat guys laying around the edge of the pool staring at the solar pool lights, spreading coppertone on their vast guts chain smoking joints.

It's the only way to account for such deliberate stupidity.

People who work hard, generally don't have time for substance abuse problems.

You are the stupidest most ignorant person I've ever encountered in my whole life. foad

I'll say it to you to your face. I can't believe skinner allows the shit you put on his board.

responses to articles in the scientific literature refering to PM 2.5 particles in the lung tissue of Pakistani women and children.

You have never, not once, ever, given even a modicum of a shred of a mote of a spec of a micron of a miasma of a particle of an ability to understand even the most trivial issue involved in energy and the environment.

You are anti-science, anti-intellectual, whiny and, I think, very, very, very weak.

Thus the chance that you and I will ever meet is the rather close to the chance that you'll give a fuck about real issues involving energy and the environment: Zero.

I don't travel in those circles.

If you can't take the heat, big boy, there is another approach besides wimpering about what the hall monitor should do.

Now, did you have something to say about particulates in the lung tissue, or are you just here to engage in hypocritical complaints about name calling?

You don't have a thing to say about particulates in lung tissue?

I thought so.

Have a nice whiny fundie day.

I knew you'd approve-




My backyard solar cooker -

I prefer to wait until a torrential downpour strikes before sloshing out to the backyard with my pathetic cardboard and foil contraption. As you can see in the photos, the women have been forced to cover up to protect themselves against the gully-washer that is threatening to wash away the village before the evening meal is done.

Except that our summer weather consists almost entirely of hot, dry days. Many tropical and subtropical countries can also count on clear skies and good solar insolation for most of the year. Quetta, Pakistan, for instance, experiences an average insolation of 763 Joules/m²/sec.

Solar cookers like the ones shown are providing tremendous benefits to women of the Third World, not the least being relief from daily ten mile (or more) hikes for firewood or animal dung.

The absence of a "gully washer" in the picture sort of reminds me of those "wind power briefly provides 1 brazillion percent of Spain's electricity" threads, taking the picture on the best day and pretending the worst day doesn't exist.

One wonders, if there are tremendous benefits, why, as late as December 2008, just nine months ago, an article on Indoor Air in Pakistan is still reporting um, problems with carbonized lung tissue. Are the authors missing something?

I've been to Mumbai, where you can see these seas of humanity living in plastic and cardboard huts, burning trash in the alleys. I can't recall seeing a single solar cooker anywhere, or even room to place one. I guess I was missing part of the miracle of the tremendous benefits of solar cookers.

What happens if the bread you're cooking stops heating with a bunch of drifting clouds and the food is ruined waiting for the sunlight to come back? Do they throw the food out and drive the solar powered Tesla to McDonalds? Or do the solar ovens come with satellite links to the weather channel?

Personally, I would like to see deforestration for energy end myself. I'm not very happy about it at all, and wrote about it a long time ago elsewhere, with my particular self serving and cynical spin:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/11/16/10438/196">This Power Plant Produces More Energy Than The Nation Of Cameroon.

A subtext of my writing at that time was how very smug westerners feel when they propose one standard for themselves, and another for poor people in the third world. I think I'll throw up if I read one more whiny post about how China or India needs to do something about their terrible climate change gas emissions. Personally I think everyone should shut their mouthes until they are themselves willing to live at the standards about which they are crowing so loudly.

A temporary loss of direct sunlight doesn't ruin anything. Solar ovens are fully enclosed to retain heat, and the cheaper open reflective cookers will generally rely on pots with lids and/or a plastic oven bag.

Your link concerning clotheslines is noted, yet you revert here to the tiresome "fundie-morons-who-hate-science-and-lemony-fresh-nuclear-power" rhetoric when shown another obvious solution using the same energy source. Do you plug your clothesline into 220V AC when the day turns to clouds and rain?

Your posts tend to reflect those of electric vehicle detractors in general: If it can't transport a family of eight through snow drifts at 120mph over a 500 mile distance, then (the resource in question) is entirely unsuitable for anyone, anywhere, anytime. I am not arguing for the wholesale planet-wide replacement of traditional cooking methods with solar ovens, anymore than I would suggest bicycle commuting for the Northwest Territories in January. Where solar cookers have usefulness, however, the benefits have been tremendous.

Without reducing the equation to global energy expenditures for cooking; expressed in Joules/calorie by source, lovingly charted in Excel, can you deny that those in Zambia, Guatemala, Afghanistan and elsewhere who are now using solar cookers are better off than they were cooking with wood, trash, and dung?

This is a much more complicated issue than just saying indoor air pollution is bad and needs to be replaced. I would certainly agree that it is bad, but it's a complicated issue.

The longest period of time that I cooked in a typical poor rural African home was during the summer of 1981. I was part of a small American volunteer team of college age and recent college graduate kids and we were sent on an education project to a remote part of Liberia. It was kind of a boondoggle in retrospect, more of an education for us than for the villagers.

The village made available several rooms for sleeping, and one woman's kitchen for us to cook in. I won't go into the silly college age dramatics that ensued, but let's just say that the young women in our group who volunteered to cook were hygiene challenged -- hygiene being much more critical in a rural environment like that -- and we got very, very sick. As a result, I along with two different women became the group's cooks. Actually we got a lot of help from the African lady who lent us her kitchen.

The cooking area was basically a raised platform, or hearth, on one side of a hut that was detached from the living quarters. The two most remarkable things I remember were that the village women were incredibly skilled at controlling the fire -- they could control the fire the way you or I control a modern gas range -- and the smokey, back breaking nature of cooking. The hearth was low to the ground, and the women developed a strange (to me) cooking posture, sort of like someone doing the exercise of touching one's toes. In the kitchen, they were constantly bent over. When I cooked, it always felt easier to cook on my knees.

There was no chimney or exhaust vent, which I thought was strange. The cooking hut was, as the OP points out, very smokey, and I'm sure the women suffer long term consequences of breathing that air every day, several times a day.

On the other hand, there was a reason there is no ventilation. The women use the smoke as a form of pest control. Rice and other food is stored in the rafters of the hut where the smoke collects, and this deters insects and rodents from raiding the food stores. This is a common practice across West Africa -- not ventilating the cooking hut as a form of pest control.

Also most of the people who have this kind of kitchen are simply too poor to switch to nuclear generated electricity -- or electricity generated from any other source -- if it were available. It is simply economically naive to think that one is the replacement for the other. Firewood is free in a monetary sense, and most of these villagers were barely connected to the cash economy. They could run electricity into that village and no one would buy it.

Even if they did buy electricity, they would probably continue to burn biomass as a form of pest control, vitiating the environmental benefits of switching to electricity.

Even more depressing, I seriously doubt anyone of those villagers could afford even the "rocket stove" or solar cookers in the posts upthread, unless they were distributed for free, which would have certain other unexpected consequences. The rocket stove is far more complicated than the raised hearth in a cooking hut. Moreover, I think that these technological fixes miss the point -- which is that the use smokiness is not the result of lack knowledge (the hut builders are perfectly capable of making a vented hearth) but the result of an entire food preparation and preservation system.

On the other hand, in a lower middle income country like South Africa where I also lived, coal burning cooking stoves are being replaced by electrical stoves. In urban areas, poorer people cooked on coal braziers that were vented to the outdoors, but in the cold months, the townships would be blanketed with coal smoke. For environmental reasons, the post apartheid government has been trying to get as many people as possible to switch to electrical cooking and heating.

But most of SA's electricity is going to be powered by coal, which is cheap and abundant in SA. The way the government sees it, consolidating all those millions of brazier cooking fires into a few coal powered stations is nevertheless a net reduction in CO2 and particulate pollution and provides opportunities for single point-of-origin pollution controls.

South Africa has nuclear technology and power plants, but considering the crime environment, they don't seem secure enough. You may recall that SA's Pelindaba nuclear plant was attacked by armed gunmen in 2007, leading to a shoot out in the plant's control room. The attack was described as "military style," and incredibly, the attackers returned a week later to try again.

Censorship makes it impossible to know what the attack was about, but speculation is that it was an armed gang trying to steal nuclear material or information about nuclear weapons from plant computers for the black market. Around the same time, a Cape Town woman was indicted for trying to sell nuclear secrets to Pakistan. Ironically, that plant (which I used to pass on an almost weekly basis) was also attacked by the ANC in the 1983, when Pelindaba was the focus of the apartheid regime's research into a nuclear weapon, which shocked the public because it was carried out by the ANC's "white terrorists." The ANC also attacked a nuclear installation near Cape Town, iirc.

In 2006, the government alleged sabotage of a Cape Town nuclear plant, possibly by Muslim terrorists. There have long been rumors of South African nuclear material from Pelindaba and other plants getting onto the black market, including the famous and perhaps apocryphal story of South African black market "mini-nukes."

So Pelindaba and other attacks represent something like a 30 year record of South Africa being unable to secure nuclear plants and materials, regardless of regime. It's highly unlikely that it will meet its energy needs from nuclear plants because of this security constraint, and if South Africa can't, then no other country in Africa is likely to do so either.

There have also been enterprising villagers who have gotten into the business of making them for profit; those of the simple cardboard/foil designs, anyway.

In addition to cooking, these can be used for food drying, pasteurizing water and even cooling food - see: How to Use the Solar Funnel as a Refrigerator/Cooler (yes, solar can have usefulness during darkness).

The value of smoke in keeping pests down is noted. The question is, which is worse: pests, or the inhalation of smoke equivalent to several packs of cigarettes daily? Threats to health and life that go with fuel gathering (attacks on firewood gathering women are common) need to be considered as well.

www.solarovens.org/international.html

then it's not sustainable or replicable. The cooking method and equipment has to be integrated into the economic way of life of the population.

Giving away stuff in Africa, except in emergency conditions, simply doesn't have a good record of success.

Again, they need a sustainable system, not cargo cult gifts.

I don't believe that cheap cardboard and foil cookers such as the one I use would present the same kind of financial burden as the Rocket Stove or other fuel-based stoves. I built mine for under a buck, and there are enterprising people in Third World areas who have taken to making them for profit (though I can't find a good link right now).

I have the documents, not links, sorry.

UNEP Collaborating Centre on Energy and Environment
RISØ
ASSESSMENT OF THE COMMERCIALISATION OF SELECTED SUSTAINABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES, PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: SOLAR COOKERS
Final Report
1 July 2001
Palmer Development Consulting


or

Cooking in the Sunshine
by
Daniel M. Kammen and William F. Lankford

NATURE. VOL 348 November 19 something (for some reason the last digits are missing on my copy.

'Appropriate technology' is touted as a solution to many of the energy needs of developing countries. A pilot project to introduce solar ovens in Central America shows one way forward.

How close, do' ya think, they could get to the fuel rods before receiving a fatal dose of radition? Where, exactly, were their reprocessing plant and metal fabrication plants? What was their plan to contain the Kr-90 signature?

The average capacity utilization of the Koeberg nuclear station as given by Eskom was 83.1% and it generated 13,668 GWh of electricity: http://www.eskom.co.za/live/content.php?Item_ID=173

Eskom has recently cut back on plans to expand nuclear capacity in SA because of financial instability and instability in the Government.

Probably the country can raise money by selling all that coal to Germany to help Germany along with its big nuclear phase out, and then build more coal plants of its own.

Who could possibly object to that?

It appears that South Africa is having problems digging coal however, which means that they will probably need to lower mining safety standards again, to make sure all of those Germans can feel very smug about the success of their nuclear phase out.

http://www.geo.tu-freiberg.de/oberseminar/os07_08/stephan_Schmidt.pdf

I was shocked, shocked I tell you, when zero people here called for a German coal phase out because of the mine explosion at Springlake mine Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) province mine in South Africa last month...

...just kidding...

It is amazing how all the Chernobyl fetishists here seem to never call for a ban on coal every time a few hundred Ukrainian coal miners are killed, something that happens like clockwork on an annual basis...but, um, who am I to judge? I am obviously morally inferior to all our Tesla drivers here with the big solar installations on their roofs.

Why am I not surprised that you addressed almost none of the substance of the post?

I thought that rather than simply snark, I should explain why your post is so bizarre.

Do you really believe that the party that wanted the nuclear material would attempt to steal it themselves? There is a lot of organized crime in southern Africa and the foot soldiers are generally unemployed former combatants in the various murky guerrilla armies, private armies and secret "third force" terrorists who worked for the former apartheid regime. One word for them was askaris. For a while, the best of them were employed by South Africa's version of Blackwater, Executive Options, which was hired to turn wars in Sierre Leone and Angola. But most are uneducated, but highly trained, but ultimately disposable mercenaries, and there are plenty of them -- tens of thousands -- in the region. It's likely that they were the people who actually carried the raids at Pelindaba, and I'm sure that whoever paid them to do it, didn't give a shit about the risk of radiation poisoning, nor did the actual raiders understand what they were doing.

The fabrication and processing plants, therefore, are obviously at the tail end of a series of black market transactions.

Moreover, the idea that the target was the fuel rods in use is absurd -- which is of course why you raised it. Because of censorship it is not possible to confirm what is at Pelindaba, but the press believes that South Africa's dismantled nuclear weapons are stored there, as well as computers containing the data involved in constructing the weapons.


Btw, do you dispute the factual accuracy of the reports of raids and sabotage on South Africa's nuclear facilities going back decades? It would be odd for you to say these reports aren't true, considering the ANC confessed to raiding Pelindaba in 1983 during the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings of the 1990s. After all, your own post confirms that Eskom (which operates SA's nuclear plants) will not expand nuclear production because of "instability in the Government" -- or more accurately, overall political and security instability. If my concern that nuclear power shouldn't be carried out in an unstable environment, and Eskom confirms my view, why are you dismissing or gainsaying the view of South Africa's leading operator of nuclear plants?

Do you know something that Eskom doesn't know? Or are you just smarter than them? Or perhaps the nuclear engineers at Eskom are anti-nuke fundies?

:shrug:

I'm not familiar with SA at all. I appreciate the insight you bring.