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Q: How about a REAL solution for China's air pollution and stop the lip service?
We know that from the APEC conference and other global events that China has hosted that the government has the MEANS to stop the air pollution. They also have the BUCKS. But do they have the WILL?
Actions speak louder than words yes? Forget the band aids - we need a cure! The Chinese government needs to do the following if they want us to think they even care about breathing toxins:
1) Shut down the coal plants (Gas turbines and Thorium green nuclear plants are the way to go)
2) Give some serious 10,000 rmb rebates to people who buy electric cars.
3) Factories should pay a $10,000 fine per every minute of emission discharge.
4) Every university student should find a place to plant a tree
5) The price of gasoline should be doubled.
This will above solve the air pollution problem fairly quick - maybe 2-3 years.
That's a tad more complex than "they just have to do X and Y". Short version : China is stuck in its smog for a decade at least, if they start to put massive resource and will into it right now. That would be more like 20 to 30 years, if something is done. It will be a massive expense, solely for the welfare of Chinese people.
1) Shutting coal plants, replace by <trendy power solution of the day>
You can't replace them overnight. You have to use something else. Thorium plants are not very different from uranium ones, thorium is just 4x more abundant than uranium and you can't make plutonium with it (ie. convenient path to atomic fission bomb material). Nuclear plants are massive investment (you want something secure), they are long to build (several years), they need a lot of expensive-to-train personel, and the construction site have to meet precise conditions. Such as a nearby river with predictable flow (to cool the reactors), no earthquakes, etc. It's a lot of money to spend, and a lot of money have been spent in the 2009 stimulus already : to build energy-hungry infrastructure. What's left in the Chinese state coffers ? I don't know, you don't know.
Also, you can't replace all plants at the same time, or you gonna cut your electric production capacity by 70% for a few years. Way to kill your manufacture-based economy. You have to build the new plants first, and cut little by little the coal plants. It will take more than a decade... Gaz-fired plants are faster and simpler to build, but the same problem exist, and you have the gaz supply problem.
2) Electric cars are as clean as your electric power. If you make electricity with coal, your electric car is equivalent to coal-powered car with a poor efficiency. Transportation losses, battery losses, you get an overall efficiency lower than directly burning petrol in an engine. Thus, you need to burn more fossile fuels... You have to have clean electricity to get clean electric vehicles.
10 000 RMB rebate, did you look at the price of a good electric car, and the income of your average Wang ? Average Wang already have to pay for his flat and the school for his kid. Look how much the state invest in average Wang's education and health, that will give you an idea of the kind of investment they are ready to do for Wang...
3) There already plenty of fines. When the administration have to answer to nobody, they can sell rule of law and leniency. Won't work without rule of law. Rule of law can't happen due to how gouvernment work. Read this http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/environment/chinas-polluters-hit-biggest-ever-fines
4) Planting tree can be a bad idea : where you gonna find the water to keep growing in those cities already lacking water, like ... Bejing, for example. Trees are good if the area is humid. Ho, and good luck with polluted soils.
5) Amen to that, but pollution from cars is just a part of the problem. Coal power is far bigger one. Homes are badly, or not insulated. Making the industry more efficient in its power usage would do much more, but it means rebuilding that fairly new industry. Where the money for that, when the economy is slowing down ? The time to invest massively in R&D and better infrastructure is gone. Too late.
Torino:
Thanks for the interesting link. Actually China has almost no Thorium at all to mine. They would have to import from Australia, USA, or India/Pakistan. China already is building a Thorium reactor, as is India and Norway - the only safe and green nuclear energy. A 10,000 rmb rebate is better than a stick in the eye and even better than what they rebate now - squat.
DrMonkey:
@Torino China have lots of rare earth deposits, and such deposit usually have thorium in it. There might be deposits the Chinese gouvernements is discrete about. Typically, in Xingjiang, Tibet, and Xining. That's one of the motivation to develop thorium in China : they got some. Thorium is safer and cleaner than uranium, but it's still radioactive and dangerous. You need uranium to turn the thorium into proper fuel.
The thorium power plants currently under construction are for R&D, not industrial scale production. No country have a fully developed thorium processing industry. You need to transmute it to uranium 233, it's not that simple : bombard it with neutrons, which is typically done with a breeding nuclear reactor, and the you need refining, which is some serious engineering. Thorium reactors already ran in the past (in 60's and 70's), but it was research. The plants under development are of a fairly new type, like molten salt one. The Chinese Academy Science give itself 10 years to come with an industry-ready design, and to their own words, it's a very tight schedule. Add a few more years for the industrial development and the construction. Not gonna happen before 15, 20 years. What will be Chinese economy at that time ?
The market is what guarantees social stability in China for tomorrow and next week. Not breathable air.
Actually, breathable air has one huge flaw: it's a free commodity.
A problem that's getting fixed.
And then the anonymous function was replaced with hundreds of new accounts spouting tripe.
DrMonkey:
I give him brownie points for mentioning thorium-based nuclear plants. It's cool stuff (still need R&D to be ready), China got plenty of thorium to mine, and the Chinese Academy of Science already threw R&D at it since a couple of years.
No real solution, only mouth speak solution for great China economy and make harmonious society!
That's a tad more complex than "they just have to do X and Y". Short version : China is stuck in its smog for a decade at least, if they start to put massive resource and will into it right now. That would be more like 20 to 30 years, if something is done. It will be a massive expense, solely for the welfare of Chinese people.
1) Shutting coal plants, replace by <trendy power solution of the day>
You can't replace them overnight. You have to use something else. Thorium plants are not very different from uranium ones, thorium is just 4x more abundant than uranium and you can't make plutonium with it (ie. convenient path to atomic fission bomb material). Nuclear plants are massive investment (you want something secure), they are long to build (several years), they need a lot of expensive-to-train personel, and the construction site have to meet precise conditions. Such as a nearby river with predictable flow (to cool the reactors), no earthquakes, etc. It's a lot of money to spend, and a lot of money have been spent in the 2009 stimulus already : to build energy-hungry infrastructure. What's left in the Chinese state coffers ? I don't know, you don't know.
Also, you can't replace all plants at the same time, or you gonna cut your electric production capacity by 70% for a few years. Way to kill your manufacture-based economy. You have to build the new plants first, and cut little by little the coal plants. It will take more than a decade... Gaz-fired plants are faster and simpler to build, but the same problem exist, and you have the gaz supply problem.
2) Electric cars are as clean as your electric power. If you make electricity with coal, your electric car is equivalent to coal-powered car with a poor efficiency. Transportation losses, battery losses, you get an overall efficiency lower than directly burning petrol in an engine. Thus, you need to burn more fossile fuels... You have to have clean electricity to get clean electric vehicles.
10 000 RMB rebate, did you look at the price of a good electric car, and the income of your average Wang ? Average Wang already have to pay for his flat and the school for his kid. Look how much the state invest in average Wang's education and health, that will give you an idea of the kind of investment they are ready to do for Wang...
3) There already plenty of fines. When the administration have to answer to nobody, they can sell rule of law and leniency. Won't work without rule of law. Rule of law can't happen due to how gouvernment work. Read this http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/environment/chinas-polluters-hit-biggest-ever-fines
4) Planting tree can be a bad idea : where you gonna find the water to keep growing in those cities already lacking water, like ... Bejing, for example. Trees are good if the area is humid. Ho, and good luck with polluted soils.
5) Amen to that, but pollution from cars is just a part of the problem. Coal power is far bigger one. Homes are badly, or not insulated. Making the industry more efficient in its power usage would do much more, but it means rebuilding that fairly new industry. Where the money for that, when the economy is slowing down ? The time to invest massively in R&D and better infrastructure is gone. Too late.
Torino:
Thanks for the interesting link. Actually China has almost no Thorium at all to mine. They would have to import from Australia, USA, or India/Pakistan. China already is building a Thorium reactor, as is India and Norway - the only safe and green nuclear energy. A 10,000 rmb rebate is better than a stick in the eye and even better than what they rebate now - squat.
DrMonkey:
@Torino China have lots of rare earth deposits, and such deposit usually have thorium in it. There might be deposits the Chinese gouvernements is discrete about. Typically, in Xingjiang, Tibet, and Xining. That's one of the motivation to develop thorium in China : they got some. Thorium is safer and cleaner than uranium, but it's still radioactive and dangerous. You need uranium to turn the thorium into proper fuel.
The thorium power plants currently under construction are for R&D, not industrial scale production. No country have a fully developed thorium processing industry. You need to transmute it to uranium 233, it's not that simple : bombard it with neutrons, which is typically done with a breeding nuclear reactor, and the you need refining, which is some serious engineering. Thorium reactors already ran in the past (in 60's and 70's), but it was research. The plants under development are of a fairly new type, like molten salt one. The Chinese Academy Science give itself 10 years to come with an industry-ready design, and to their own words, it's a very tight schedule. Add a few more years for the industrial development and the construction. Not gonna happen before 15, 20 years. What will be Chinese economy at that time ?
FYI:
1) Shut down the coal plants: good suggestion. I read from 'lip service" days ago that some local government planned to close the smaller scale mines in 2015. We'll see.
DrMonkey:
70% of China electric power is made through coal power plants. You can't shutdown 70% of the country power source : electric trains, factories, etc. They might shut a few down when new power plants are put online, but building power plants takes time, and every alternative to coal is more expensive than coal... so factories will be more expensive to run, trains will be more expensive, etc.
A first step that is doable is to use desulfuration in coal plants, it makes the plants a bit less polluting. There are laws about this, there are not enforced. It's easy to check : air monitoring always show high level of sulfur compound in the air of all major cities. Desulfuration makes the plant more expensive to run, one can only guess why it's not enforced...
October1st:
The reason why existent laws are not enforced is the permeated corruption. A position with tiny power is rented for one's own benefit and money. I hate this kind of Chinese culture. It can ruin anything, anything!
Yeh sounds good in theory. But one of the biggest polluters is ...cars!
And we all know Beijing is the most polluted city in the world (& the worst traffic jams) but did you know that 17% of cars on its roads are Govt. vehicles? Driving the fat cats around..
Talk about 'lip service'...
Filters for the coal plants. I've read that they've been using them in Europe since the early 70s.
Seems they work a treat. But they cost money.
It would make sense to create a surplus of overall energy by adding tons of clean energy before you start shutting and closing "dirty energy". You can't expect to sacrifice, say heat in Beijing simply because the methods they use to produce it are not clean. They've been erecting wind turbines everywhere around me and we're still getting power outages.
I think we should start with less consumption (even though China does a lot better than the US at that), replacing energy wasteful appliances with newer ones. Finding ways to maintain the country's energy consumption while building new infrastructure for clean energy. Once a bit of clean energy is ready to run online, swap it with the existing system and then go head hunting.
Of course!!!
Solve the airapocalypse...call the Spellcaster!...why didn't people think of this before.
Spamming this site will get you absolutely nowhere.
Why waste your time?
Push off will ya!
Hahaha closing down coal plants. Right.
China is not going to close down a cheap and reliable source of energy-especially considering that it has its own huge reserves.
As DrMonkey says electric cars are only as clean as where the energy comes from.
No body should just jump to new technologies because they seem promising. What i think needs to happen... taking into account that they're clearly going to be sticking with coal tech... (As is the US, Australia, & several other countries that have large reserves of it) Is to invest more in 'clean-coal' technology
And planting trees. Very nice & simple idea, but yes, lack of water... or how about we combat that with desalination plants... and provide power for that with clean energy?
Considering China (CCP- & the ones to make any real change) only started caring about the air quality when the american embassy made it painfully obvious to them when that scandal broke out.. .... how long do you think it is going to be for any meaningful change to happen?
Petrol will not be doubled for the same reason why coal will not be stopped, because china is only slightly less capitalistic than america.. And it's loving it.
Plus i wonder how much ch. is benefiting from the unclean air, or potentially at least?. It can blame foreign companies in the future... or as one rather pathetic general noted "it provides us an advantage because US satellite systems can't see their targets"
