Can a country provide electricity with a high percentage of renewable energy: wind, solar, and biofuels? By Eric Jelinski Nuclear, Mechanical, Chemical Engineer Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto President, Environmentalists for Nuclear – Canada Toronto, Ontario, Canada For me the argument is simple. Humans were initially hunter gatherers, and the population density was low. Then came agriculture when most everybody grew their own food, and farming became a specialist occupation beginning in the middle ages when the growing of food was for the purpose of sustaining feudal kingdoms and small cities. Still there was literally no industrialization. While bronze and iron were discovered, most things were made of wood, animal skins, and yarn spun by hand, and the main source of heat was wood. Wood does not burn hot enough to turn iron into the much stronger and useful steel. While carbon or char provided hotter temperatures that could be made from wood through incomplete combustion, it wasn’t until coal was discovered for its energy density to make steel and then furthermore alloy the steel for even greater strength and corrosion resistance. Along the way, oil was discovered, but crude oil while being warm and fluid because it comes from deep underground, once crude oil cools on the surface of the earth, it becomes a relatively useless sticky tar. Processes were invented for breaking down the long chain molecules (hydro-cracking and fluidized bed catalytic cracking) of the tar using again energy from coal initially to produce the heat for refineries. Oil products, gasoline, and steel provided the basic ingredients for automobiles. Oil, steel, coal, and also electricity provided for many other ways in improving both quality of life and longevity of life. Life as a hunter gatherer without medical facilities of today was a struggle and populations tended to be in balance relative to the dangers that caused death. Example: Not having refrigeration for food, not having clean water. But, in those days all energy was based on renewable. In thermodynamics, ideal processes are reversible, but real processes are not reversible. Therefore we cannot live our lives today without the steel, coal, oil, nuclear reactors, or even manufacture hydraulic turbines or wind turbine towers without the use of these advanced resources. Case in point, take any major city today, we can guess quite easily that probably around ½ of the people live in high rise apartments, condos; and the rest may live in houses
Page 1