Why Clean energy means less mining
I spoke to Jim Krane at Rice University, who has just completed a study looking at comparative demands for mining from a gigawatt capacity of coal, vs wind on the Texas Grid.
The findings? After 20 years, you would have to mine 5 times as material to keep the coal plant operating, compared to the wind power, and the ratio keeps improving as long as you run the wind turbines. Newer turbines are rated to last 25 to even 40 years.
In addition, I looked at the issue of lithium vs coal. One trope from the anti-clean energy tribe is that clean energy is not a net gain, because you still have to mine for things like lithium for energy storage. I point out that as of. 2020 we were mining 100,000 times more coal than lithium, and that newer processes will be able to produce significant fractions of global lithium demand with no mining impacts.
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Actually they make every fucking person on the planet breathe the stuff. They've been doing it for years.
I'm used to anti-nukes claiming that they're not anti-nukes, because intellectually and morally it's now clear what they have done to the planet.
Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who carries on about so called "nuclear waste," is an anti-nuke. Period.
If we were likely to be dumb enough to agree with how people describe themselves, we'd be forced to agree that Donald Trump is a very stable genius.
Anti-nukes really don't read very well, and they certainly don't know how to research a subject deeply. They think if they google something, the pass for remotely informed. This is not true.
No where in any publication anywhere at any time is there any record of so called "nuclear waste" killing as many people as the coal belching about which anti-nukes couldn't care less will kill in the next hour.
And of course, there are zero anti-nukes who engage in critical thinking, and zero who show any evidence of having read the stuff they link.
This is the Bateman equation:
Anyone who is competent to discuss the nature of used nuclear fuels will be intimately familiar with it.
Anyone who isn't, will lazily produce links without a fucking wit of comprehension of what is in them.
Again, this kind of laziness and ignorance, kills people, somewhere between 18,000 and 19,000 per day, about 800 an hour, between six and seven million people per year, and that's not counting the climate change about which anti-nukes couldn't give a rat's ass. They'd rather talk about tunnels at Hanford collapsing, and um, get this, "nuclear waste."
Now, it's not like I expect anti-nukes to read; clearly they don't, but I frequently publish a source for the number of people they kill with their ignorance, whining about Hanford and other stupid shit as they do so.
Not a pretty bunch this sort, not very literate.
My usual response to the airheads whose weak efforts at wit might talk about taking baths in precious nuclear fuel, material critical to saving the world that ignorance destroyed:
Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:
(I actually read the papers referenced in the Hanford link above, but then again I'm competent to do so. There are also people competent to deal with used nuclear fuels, but basically anti-nukes won't know that just by lazy Googles to links they are incompetent to read.)
Anti-nukes talking about science, how cute!
You know, Ed Lyman has a Ph.D. in physics, from Cornell, no less. He's a "concerned scientist" who can drag out every anti-nuke scare story in the world to excite stupid people, and let's face it, ignorant people do get excited, everything from jumping up and down about rail cars in Hanford tunnels to well, suggesting that a knowledgeable person is suggesting baths in valuable used nuclear fuel.
Ed likes to write about what would happen if all of Southeastern Pennsylvania caught fire and somehow burned all of Peach Bottom's used nuclear fuel.
He joined the Union of Concerned "Scientists" in 2003. In the 19 years he's been prattling on about putative nuclear accidents, imagining nuclear wars, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum, somewhere between 120,000,000 and 140,000,000 people died from air pollution without a whimper of concern from him or any other asshole in his anti-nuke funded ignorance factory. This is not an exercise in probability. It's a fact.
In those 19 years, the concentration of carbon dioxide rose by 50 ppm in the planetary atmosphere.
Ed of course, in his exercise in Peach Bottom hysteria raised the big boogeyman of Fukushima, like all anti-nukes do. It's not like they can identify the number of deaths caused by radiation comparable to the number of people killed by seawater in the very same event.
What was the death toll from radiation again?
Again, it's cute when anti-nukes try to talk about science or scientists. They don't seem to understand that to do so, one has to be able to think critically.
Numbers don't lie, but people do.
Now I have to go and breathe some coal waste while I sleep. I have no choice. Anti-nuke ignorance won and like every living thing on this planet, I have to pay with my flesh for the dubious victory of ignorance, fear and selective attention.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Look, anti-nukes are not very good with understanding inferences, even what they infer themselves.
Now, they're a pretty generic bunch. They'll tell you shit like they aren't claiming coal is "clean" but they make pretty fucking sure it's being burned.
Then they declare themselves "green."
The poster boys, girls and gender neutral individuals for this mentality is the nation of Germany, where the price of electricity recently hit 1,000 Euros/MWh because the bourgeois brats in Greenpeace like to dress up in monkey suits and lay on the tracks to block trains from carrying used nuclear fuel to France for resource recovery of its valuable components.
Europe’s Benchmark Power Price Breaks 1,000 Euros for First Time
Here's something all the fucking anti-nukes disregard because they can't find anyone killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel; it's called "data:"
Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 5 years:
Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 30 days:
Source: Electricity Map, Germany (Accessed 9/16/22)
For comparison purposes here's France for the last 5 years:
Is this fucking data clear or not?
The type of coal the Gemans are burning, their domestic coal is lignite.
Here from a scientific journal, one of the most prominent medical journals in the world Lancet is a table giving the calculated of mortality rates associated with primary energy sources used to generate electricity:
Here's table 2: 
Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Now, which energy system killed more people in the last 5 years, that of self declared "green" Germany or that of France?
Now, if you ask a German anti-nuke whether they ever said coal is "clean," they'll fucking deny it. They'll deny it, but still they'll burn it while offering disgusting lies that some future generation will do what they refused to do themselves.
I regard them as some of the most dishonest people in the world, because actions have consequences, and it's not like they even understand at a basic level what they are in fact saying by their actions and the consequences of their idiot rhetoric. Anti-nukes whine in denial all fucking day long that they didn't say this or they didn't say that. They're big on denial, tiny on taking a meaningful stand on anything. Basically they're full of shit. All of them, German, American, every fucking one of them in every fucking country in the world.
The German decision to shut their nuclear plants and burn coal - because they're too fucking stupid to understand that nuclear energy, while not perfect, is the most sustainable energy source in the world, particularly when stupid fantasies about solar and wind leads to energy poverty - should disgust any decent human being. It won't, but it should. The people who will literally die from a lack of ability to pay electricity priced at 1000 Euros/MWh wholesale are the poor.
Poverty kills people, just like anti-nuke rhetoric kills people.
Oh, and they'll tell you that they're "going" to phase out coal, someday in some fantasy time that will always come after they die. They're dumping the cost of their ignorance on future generations, about whom they don't give a shit.
Now, anti-nukes have a very strange sense of humor. I'll discuss with them the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and they'll declare the reference "hilarious."
Personally, I'm not amused. I give a shit about the world and nothing about it leaves me giggling. I think the fucking situation is dire and serious.
Anti-nukes make Nero look like a fire fighter. It appears that their moral level is no higher than their intellectual level. With this sort around, it's easy to see why climate change has risen to the level long predicted and now here with all of the predicted results actively observed.
Ignorance, smug ignorance especially, kills people.
Have a very pleasant weekend.
literature, something beyond clown questions, even though there are no fucking anti-nukes who are willing to discuss if they bathe in gasoline or any of the other fossil fuels they defend via selective attention.
It will involve the phase diagram of supercritical water, and I wrote about it at length in a post which is way, way, way over the head of childish brats who want to play Peewee Herman.
I would hope they would skip jerking off in a porno theater. On the other hand, anti-nukes are generally jerk-offs, intellectual and moral Lilliputians.
The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.
Were this program enacted, I note that the water would be free of halogenated compounds, free of mercury, free of lead, and free of microplastics. Only a moron would refuse to take a bath in this water. (Of course, there are lots of morons.)
Of course, this process would involve highly trained engineers, not PeeWee Herman anti-nuke wannbees.
As it happens, I have discussed this technology with my son, an engineer, and, I'm happy to announce that an engineer on DU P-mailed that it would be adding this proposal to his engineering curriculum, because the desalination classes he teaches emphasize energy intensive membrane methods whereas this process involves recovering energy.
Engineers of course, don't give a fuck what childish anti-nukes think.
I note that the destruction of carbon fluorine bonds requires direct exposure to high energy gamma an x-rays from fission products.
Now, speaking of fission products, what dumb people call "nuclear waste," let me know if there's one fucking dumb shit anti-nuke who can answer the question, "How many people have been killed by the 70 year history of the storage of used nuclear fuels?
To stimulate the conversation, here's a picture of all the used nuclear fuel generated at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power plant over its entire operating history:
I don't see any dead bodies there, and the worker looks rather healthy, but I'm sure that someone who reports that so called "nuclear waste" is dirty compared to the coal, gas and petroleum waste that has left the planet in flames, crops failing, rivers drying up can report on where all those dead bodies are. Oh, and don't tell me about the fucking grand "renewable energy" nirvana that was predicted for 2000, 2010, 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050. People are dying from extreme heat now and the German anti-nukes aren't helping; they're making thing worse.
Of course, I certainly hope that my son's generation will have access to the contents of these fuel drums. The world certainly needs what's in them if it is to survive. He was never amused by Pee Wee Herman, but now that I've addressed the childish, "You first..."
Well? Where are the bodies? I assume that the number of dead "discovered" by anti-nukes from the last 70 years of commercial nuclear operations will certainly match the 18,000 people killed today by anti-nuke contempt for humanity, stupidity and sloganeering.
I eagerly await the next insipid excuse for no answer or giggle.
Ignorance kills people.
