Oil industry begging for more deepwater drilling opportunities in 2008

[mattbell]

I was looking over an old issue of Scientific American from 2008, and I found this little gem.

It's an ad from an oil & gas industry consortium, begging for people to persuade their leaders to ease restrictions on deepwater drilling.

My favorite line: "New technological breakthroughs allow us to tap these resources, even in "ultra deep waters", while protecting fragile marine environments."

Comments

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

Ah, man, that'd be a really long post. But to summarise:

1) All nuclear power is subsidised, so why not subsidise something else?
2) All nuclear power inherently brings the risk of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
3) The reliability of nuclear power is pretty sketchy too.
4) Very few people and very few governments are honest about the costs and risks nuclear power.

For NZ, it makes no sense, as we've got lots of cheap renewables. For nations without those options, I can see nuclear power being a better choice than coal, in the same way that drinking water from a puddle is better than drinking water from a puddle that a tramp just pissed in.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just about everything is subsidized here. Oil, coal, wind, solar, nuclear.

As for nuclear bringing the risk of nuclear proliferation... at least in the US, we have so many unused nuclear weapons lying around that nuclear power would probably lead to nuclear deproliferation for us because it would cause us to cannibalize nukes for their uranium. If we could get Russia to sell us their stockpiles, even better.

On reliability, have there been any partial meltdowns of nuclear plants built after 1990? I had heard that breeder reactors tend to be extremely difficult to destabilize.

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

True, but the important question is how much are each subsidised?

The power <=> profliferation question is another one that's pretty byzantine, depending not just on how much fuel is being used, but who's using it and what for. You can downblending bomb-grade Pu into MOX fuel, but then you've got that Pu potentially being used at far more sites and under much looser security conditions. Hell, you can use a partial fuel mix of MOX and low-enriched uranium and end up breeding more Pu than you burn.

And breeder reactors... well, we've been trying to build them since the 1950s, it turns out that they're not hard to build, but they are hard to make reliable or cost-effective. Given that most use liquid sodium coolant under high pressure and high temperature, I'm surprised that more haven't had nasty accidents. Monju wasn't a melt-down, but it did spray hundreds of kilos of molten sodium into their buildings. And the company running the site made a half-arsed attempt to lie about this, as is par for the course with this industry.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Even the amount of subsidy question is hard to answer -- eg what portion of the Iraq War's costs should be attributed to oil? 2 trillion? 1 trillion?

Thanks for the info.

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

Fission stories is a blog about nuclear accidents and near-accidents. It should give you some idea of the complexity of keeping nuclear plants running, and the dire state of regulation that is supposed to keep the industry safe.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

What is the fastest, most effective way to find design errors? When the design contract is awarded to company A instead of companies B, C, and D, a smaller contract could be awarded to company B, C, or D to critique the design. I like that idea.