The amusing title is from a quote by Huh Jeung-soo, head of the team’s Task Force for Climate Change and Energy Policy, regarding the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and other concerns regarding alternative energy development in South Korea.
Huh’s team will focus on one area of major importance for Korea (and the world) in furthering the development of alternative forms of energy for Korea. Korea has already been working towards alternative energy, for example, beginning in 2009 a new tidal-power plant will come online at Lake Shiwha in Gyeonggi Provence that will will be able to generate 254,000 kW per hour using the flow of seawater into Shihwa Lake. There is also the test-project, solar power farm being built in Haenam that will be used to develop cost-effective solar power. One can only hope Korea stays away from problem sources of energy such as nuclear energy, despite the idea some scientists in the U.S. are floating like using nuclear energy power plants to generate gasoline from airborne carbon dioxide — which is using pollution to create more pollution; a poor idea if one likes to breathe cleaner air.
Currently, there is renewed interest in developing solar energy as a viable means of generating power in the U.S., involving technology obtained from major players in the computer storage industry. Considering the R&D capability of Korean companies and KAIST, this is an area that Korea can and should excel in (IMHO). What remains to be seen is if the government will undergo liberalization in the energy market and will actually set goals for cutting greenhouse emissions — which it should.
Sadly and with some irony, the same Joongang Ilbo article makes mention that “Saemangeum, a reclaimed area in North Jeolla Province, is one of the sites being considered for the alternative energy test center”.
23 Comments
“One can only hope Korea stays away from problem sources of energy such as nuclear energy,”
Some 40% of South Korea’s electricity is from nuclear energy, provided by twenty reactors.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip81.htm
Yes, “user”, Korea does use nuclear energy but more is not necessarily better, especially when one must find a place to dump the waste and you know about the half-life of that stuff. When I think of the DOE back in the states, I think my descendants are going to have a real problem sleeping at night because they glow in the dark.
If I knew I’d be alive to see it, I’d bet $100 that within 200 years people will be digging up nuke waste and putting it to good use. Never underestimate the technological advancement capabilities of man.
Man, that *would* be great and you could be right “wedge”. Mankind is often capable of doing what seems impossible.
I would want my Korean brothers to come up with something extraordinary for a change.
bumfromkorea, you out there? - it’s morning in America, and your thermodynamics courses are a lot more recent than mine. Would you mind explaining to Elgin that you don’t get something for nothing?
Electricity from coal? Accept NOx and SOx pollution. Electricity from dams? Accept huge capital investment and years of construction. Gas from crops? Accept increased fresh water use, and higher food prices. Electricity from nuclear fusion (fission?), accept long-term waste storage problems.
You like wind? Fine, but it’s weak and unreliable, so you need a looooooooot of turbines, large, ugly and expensive, covering land you can’t use for something else. Plus a non-wind backup system that’ll probably become your primary system anyway.
I just realized the NOx and SOx sounds like Dr. Seuss. I’m going to bed.
What needs to happen is a paradigm shift in Nuclear power from Light Water Reactors to Pebble Bed Reactors for Nuclear Power. See water is a neutron mederator but the problem is that it also turns the water radioactive and everything else around it because of neutron capture brought about by all that water. Peeble Bed reactors are safer because Uranium is encapsulated in pyrolytic carbon pellets (it’s own tomb) and uses Helium as it’s coolant (won’t radioactivate). No muss, No fuss, only waste is the pellets and no parasitic radioactivation of containment vessle, primary or secondary structure or power generation gear.
Every energy source is a problem energy source…
Nuclear? Hard to find a place to store the waste, due to environmental scare tactics and people with acute cases of NIMBY.
Coal? Too much pollution, and even with extremely efficient coal plants that capture their waste, you still tear up mountains to get at the fuel.
Oil? Saudi Arabia. ‘Nuff said.
Hydro? Kills fish, displaces (usually poor) ethnic groups.
Solar? Too bloody expensive.
Wind? Kills birds. Not as hard on birds as hydro is on fish, but large wind farms do pose hazards to sensitive bird populations.
LPG/LNG? Pollution… not as much as coal, tho.
Biodiesel and ethanol? HA HAHAHAHAHA!
Whatddya want for nothin’? Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrubber biscut?
#2, okay, but your verb choice (you “can only hope Korea stays away from” things like nuclear energy) sounded like you didn’t know Korea is already heavily involved in nuclear energy. The decision not to “stay away” was made decades ago.
Reality check; unless you want your descendents to live like North Koreans do now, nuclear power it will be. Someday another source will be developed that can create the amounts of power required for modern civilization, but right now no others come even remotely close.
The “problem” you refer to in the NYT article is more to do with regulations and law suits than actual storage issue; apples/oranges.
Taking CO2 it out of the air to produce gasoline doesn’t mean that all that’s extracted has to be sent back into the atmosphere, besides resulting in halting climbing levels, if you’re concerned about that (are you familiar with what “closed cycle” means?). Also, CO2 is not a pollutant (no matter how much some ideologically motivated folks want to redefine it)!
It is morning in America, but I am in a 3 hour long epidemiology lecture at the moment. ^^;
It would be nice if wind power can provide enough electricity output… but no… they really can’t, and if you want a functional, reliable wind ‘farms’, you’re going to have to pick and choose spots… and you’ll need lots.
Haha, yeah… ethanol makes me laugh too. Let’s not eat and burn it to run our SUVs to get some grocer-… oh.
I’m actually hopeful about solar power. In its current form, it is way too expensive and inefficient, but with enough R&R, it can be improved… perhaps enough for it to become the primary form of energy (unless you live in Chicago).
Another source may be bacterial biofuel… Few weeks ago, Dr. Craig Venter succeeded in assembling the entire genome of m. genitalium out of chemically produced DNA cassettes - within our lifespan (well, my lifespan :-P), we may see bacteria that can produce usable fuel.
Yet, Richardson, if you review any number of DOE reports, regarding Hanford, Savannah River, etc., it is very clear that long-term storage of nuclear waste is a BIG problem in the U.S., fraught with hazard, i.e., spills, leaks into local water tables, possible accidents, etc. This “reality” is not something Koreans would want whatsoever.
#12 - I was under the impression that South Korea wasn’t allowed to keep its nuclear waste — that it has to ship it back to America. Problem solved.
Mo Nukes!
I do believe that bumfromkorea has become the Expats’ pet. Now why do Kyopos love being the pet of the Expat on one hand while bashing them on the other?
Solar is a semiconductor industry — its efficiency improvements will probably track Moore’s Law.
@16 if you are expecting efficiency to double every so often, you better pick a time period much longer than the year or so of Moore’s Law. They’ve been working at that one for many many years, and the improvements to economical and practical (commercializable) cells just hasn’t materialized. Not that it can’t, just needs more time.
Hey, nobody wants to chime in on the wonders of fuel cells???
BWA HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
*ROTFLMAO*
Actually, I have to write up a retraction for #13 above… South Korea isn’t required to export spent fuel to the US… they’re just forbidden from reprocessing it in any way. So everything is basically stored on-site at each nuke plant until they finish the national dump, which will probably be on-line about 50 years before Yucca Mountain will be.
“I do believe that bumfromkorea has become the Expats’ pet.”
Lol… yeah, I’ve been wagging my tail hoping that masters won’t forget to feed me. Speaking of, it’s almost lunchtime…
Fine… Fuck expats, they’re all horrible people. Korea rules. Yay Korea. I hate Americans and whities in general.
Good enough?
@18 Probably an appropriate response.
Ironically, where they might have the best chance of working is in the application where they would be implemented for business reasons, and not environmental reasons… mobile devices.
Here is an interesting article on the rapid growth of wind power in Texas — of all places. As per the article:
It seems that it is more than feasible and no end is in sight in regards to this growth. Instead of some *bs* notion of a grand canal, a project of this scope and magnitude could be a real legacy to Korea.
The main problem with wind power is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and sometimes it blows too hard (wind turbines shut down over certain wind speeds for safety reasons). So in order to ensure the stability of the grid, it has to be backed up by something, which is usually coal- or gas-fired power plants, since nuclear plants tend to be difficult to take on and off line on short notice. Which basically means you’re building two power generation sites where you could build one - maybe not bad policy for a country with lots of unused, empty space… Plus, that brings up the issue of where you could put wind turbines in South Korea. Put them up on ridgelines, and geomancers and people with family graves up on the mountains get pissed off because you’re messing with the ‘chi’ of the site. And down in the valleys, you’re probably not going to get much usable wind because SK is so hilly. I guess you could site a wind farm offshore or else on reclaimed land…