Ep. 654: Side Effects of Clean Energy (1)
Fraser Cain: Astronomy Cast episode 654, “The Side Effects of Clean Energy.” Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. I've been a space and astronomy journalist for over 20 years. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmo Quest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay: I am doing well. My doctors have finally figured out how to treat my pinched nerve. Life is good. Ask me anything. I will probably answer it overly honestly, but the show will go on.
Fraser Cain: This is the drug talking.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. The show will go on.
Fraser Cain: And so the question was asked by someone on your team, was where are you hiding aliens?
Dr. Pamela Gay: You know, I personally am not hiding aliens. I don't know anyone else who is hiding aliens. But I, too, would like to know, if the aliens have got here –
Fraser Cain: Where are they hiding?
Dr. Pamela Gay: Where are they being hidden?
Fraser Cain: Yes. All right.
Dr. Pamela Gay: I don't think they've gotten here, though.
Fraser Cain: Well, that was our chance. Conspiracy debunked. To battle climate change, we'll need to rapidly move to carbon-free sources of energy, but this technology isn't a free lunch. They require metals, generate waste, and deplete the environment. What's the best way to balance this shift?
All right, Pamela, we're talking about – last week, we talked about the variables that go into climate change. I think, I hope, everyone was either convinced by your – not necessarily argument, that it's complicated.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: And today we're gonna talk about the solutions, which are complicated.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. Yes, they are.
Fraser Cain: Yes. So, if we don't shift to a carbon-free future, then temperatures will continue to rise and continue to rise as long as we want to keep changing the environment, until we're incapable of changing the environment anymore because we're all dead.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: So, at some point we've got to make this shift, but if we make the shift sooner, we could cause even potentially more impact than if we do it more slowly, but more sustainably. It's a weird paradox.
Dr. Pamela Gay: It's complicated, is going to be the theme of these episodes.
Fraser Cain: It's complicated.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And part of the problem is every mechanism we have for creating the energy that we use, for the lighting that's making me not look terrible, for the cameras and the computers and everything else that allows our modern standard of living, that any mechanism for creating that energy is going to have some sort of an impact on the world, and we're only able to predict what will happen based on the variables we know.
And one of the things that keeps happening is we realize there are unintended consequences for so many of the things that we do.
Fraser Cain: Well, a good example is I live a 100 percent renewable energy lifestyle. No part of my energy comes from fossil fuels. It is 100 percent renewable energy. Water? Dammed. And in order to create the dam that I use to get my power, they flooded a river valley and built a dam and deeply changed the local environment. You can swim in the lake behind the dam, and you see old tree trunks down at the bottom of the lake. It's a very weird thing to swim around in that.
And we see that on a much larger scale, what happened with the Three Gorges Dam.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes.
Fraser Cain: There were entire villages that were flooded.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Archaeological sites.
Fraser Cain: Yes, yes, that are lost. And so even what is arguably the cleanest form of energy still has an impact on the environment.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. It's really difficult to sort out, and with dams, you have all sorts of weird – we have now completely changed the environment issues, and salmon is one of the big issues that we've had to figure out as human beings because in the area of the country you live in, all up and down the Northwest corridor, salmon spend a whole lot of time out in the ocean, but then they come back and swim upriver to their spawning areas. And if there's a dam along the way, they're like not gonna spawn here.
Fraser Cain: Yes. Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, we have to figure out how to get the salmon past the dams so they can go to their spawning areas, and this has meant building what are called salmon ladders, which are essentially staircases with water that –
Fraser Cain: I have them all around me. Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And have you seen the salmon cannons?
Fraser Cain: Yes. Yes. We don't have salmon cannons here, but we definitely had salmon ladders, and it's actually pretty cool. Like you have this ladder that goes around the side of the dam, and you can go out and watch the salmon, and they jump high. Like they'll jump three feet, four feet out of the water into the air and then land back down in the water, and you can actually just watch them jumping up.
I know this is a total diversion here, but we have a salmon hatchery that is really close to where I live, and you can go in there. It's kind of like an aquarium, so they have these big glass windows you go in, and you can watch the salmon as they're moving through the facility on their way up the river.
Dr. Pamela Gay: That's cool.
Fraser Cain: And so some percentage of them, they harvest the eggs and artificially create more salmon, but partly they let a bunch of them through, and you can watch them just swimming past and continuing their way up the river. And we swim in the rivers here when it's salmon spawning season, and it's like you're – well, I mean, you are. You're swimming in a school of fish, these salmon waiting at the bottom of a series of rapids before they can regain their energy, and you're surrounded by 1,000 salmon while you're swimming in the water. You put on your snorkel and mask and swim around all these salmon. It's kind of an amazing experience.
Dr. Pamela Gay: That's amazing.
Fraser Cain: Yes, yes. And it's weird, I never think about it, right? Like it's just my life, is the autumn stink of dead salmon everywhere, is the ambient – that's what October smells like, is dying salmon.
Dr. Pamela Gay: The other thing, the salmon are also – this is a trickle-down effect. We have to get the salmon where the salmon are going because the bears need the salmon, and there are amazing video cameras up in Alaska of bears just awkwardly eating salmon because bears are awkward athletes.
Fraser Cain: Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: And so there's the entire – all the critters that eat the salmon, and so in order for us to get electricity, we have to figure out how not to starve the bears.
Fraser Cain: Right, right. Well, and even like – clearly, as a West Coast Canadian, I know way too much about this, but if they increase the flow for hydroelectricity out of the dam, it washes out the salmon spawning sites, and so they always have to have this balance where they are letting the water out, but they can't let the water out too fast. And so when there's a flood, they will not let the water out too fast, and instead we get flooding downstream because they don't want to wreck the salmon habitats and let the water out.
So, it's this management. It's this constant management, is what you're dealing with. So, anyway –
Dr. Pamela Gay: And the flooding is upstream.
Fraser Cain: Yes, yes, yes. So, they balance the flooding across the entire river to minimize the impact on the salmon stream, on the spawning beds. It's a whole balance.
But yes, so this is one example, right? And this is, I would say, probably the cleanest form of energy that's out there, and yet it has all kinds of consequences that you have to consider.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Down to changing the rotation rate of our planet.
Fraser Cain: But dams change the – I guess so.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, the Three Gorges Dam actually changed the moment of inertia for our planet by causing a massive pile-up of water behind the dam, and by changing the planet's moment of inertia, it changed its rotation rate. And there are a whole lot of students very glad I'm no longer teaching physics because that would be a homework problem.
Fraser Cain: Calculate the moment of inertia. That's awesome. All right. So, let's talk about some of – we've talked about hydroelectric dams, but let's talk about some of the other clean energy possibilities and what their side effects are.
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, the one I think that I literally see the most is wind farms. One of the most amazing things I've seen is flying from London to Amsterdam. That part of the North Sea is filled with wind turbines out in the ocean. They also have them off the coast of Cape Cod. Driving east out of Denver, you hit just like vast swaths of nothing except the occasional rest stop and wind farms as far as the eye can see. And this is a growing way of producing electricity all across the globe. Wind is one of those constants that kind of all of us get a little bit of.
Fraser Cain: And I mean, what are the side effects of producing your energy with the wind?
Dr. Pamela Gay: So, here it's not just the producing it with the wind that we run into. It's the mechanism of producing it with the wind that we run into. So, it turns out that the materials that they make wind turbines out of aren't entirely recyclable, and there's a lot of trouble with, okay, so this wind turbine bit the dust. We need to replace the entire structure. The thing got damaged in a wind storm, got damaged by lightning, got damaged by whatever.
And we don't have a good way of dealing with this waste product, and these things are huge.
Fraser Cain: Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay: Now, this is at least a problem that hopefully will eventually be solvable. It's something that requires creativity and a mechanism to figure out how to ship the turbines in a cost-effective manner. That really is proving to be one of the difficulties of you have this massive piece of trash, and inevitably you're not going to need nearly as many recycling places in this country as there are places with wind turbines in this country, so a lot of them are just gonna end up in the nearest dump. And that is actually a problem that isn't really getting talked about.
Fraser Cain: And you see, I mean, when you buy an iPhone today, the thing is almost entirely recyclable. The guys put a lot of energy into getting their phones to be recyclable to some extent. And so they're just big electronic devices, but also with steel and carbon fiber and things like that, and you can imagine we'll get to a point where these things are cradle-to-grave recycled, as they break. And they might be maybe less efficient in their energy production, but they're more energy efficient over the long term by being able to reuse the components as they break down. It is definitely a challenge.
