First in the World 100% Hydrogen-fueled ferry stops in Newport, Oregon on route to SF BAY
The tugboat Seaboard is tied up last week to the International Terminal on Yaquina Bay while en route to San Francisco, towing a hydrogen-power passenger ferry (pictured alongside the tugboat). After spending several days in Newport waiting for ocean conditions to calm down, the four-person crew was expected to depart on Tuesday of this week. (Photo by Steve Card)
Newport News | Steve Card | Mar 10, 2023
A passenger ferry moored in Newport’s Yaquina Bay is a very uncommon sight, but one such vessel was tied up at the Port of Newport’s International Terminal last week. And there’s something about it that made it even more unusual — it’s the first ever, all hydrogen-fueled commercial vessel in the U.S., if not the world...
More: https://www.newportnewstimes.com/news/hydrogen-fueled-ferry-stops-in-newport/article_f83a002a-beb8-11ed-a89d-ff67a202fd7b.html
Soon: No more diesel ferry exhaust polluting SF BAY - Thanks to Hydrogen - the biggest thing to happen to Energy in at least 100 years. NO MORE PETRODOLLAR. Fortunately the H2 Revolution is much bigger than a few irrelevant naysayers.
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If one were to open a science book, one could easily learn about transmission losses, including those associated with destroying vast stretches of wilderness to connect wind turbine junk, all of which will be landfill sixty years before Vogtle reaches the end of its life, if it ever does, if it's simply not refurbished one or two times a century.
We hear anti-nuke assholes talking about transporting wind energy from North Dakota to Los Angeles, but suddenly the same assholes handing out this crap, the same assholes who cheered stringing wires all over California to connect wind and solar garbage, lines that sparked and caused huge fires, complaining about the transmission of electricity across Georgia.
Now, this is unsurprising. The same anti-nukes who cheered for killing people by shutting Indian Point, carried on about how much electricity they could get from Quebec, assuming the rivers there aren't killed by climate change, not that anti-nukes give a rat's ass about climate change.
As for wishful thinking about a fantasy "tomorrow," I rather agree with Albert Einstein's claim that the laws of thermodynamics (even though he himself is responsible for a major refinement of them) are inviolable.
I think I've made myself perfectly clear that my contempt for soothsaying and wishful thinking knows no bounds.
Who knows? Anyone who's familiar with all the bullshit that's been written about hydrogen for the last half a century knows, that's who.
It's not a source of primary energy, any more than all the batteries that people also hype here are primary energy. Batteries and hydrogen are devices that waste energy; energy increasingly obtained from dangerous fossil fuels; batteries and hydrogen (in the electrolysis case) take electricity, an already thermodynamically degraded form of energy, and degrade it further.
The second law of thermodynamics will apply in the future. It's not going away. All of the contempt for science shown by anti-nukes with their specious bullshit and tiresome objections and wasteful fantasies will not change that.
The scientific literature is filled with information on the environmental costs of uranium mining. I'm certainly not going to list it to waste time on anti-nuke specious bull.
A "renewables will save us" anti-nuke complaining about mining is like Donald Trump complaining about racism and corruption.
I have argued that uranium mining is unnecessary, for example here, on a website maintained by an Australian academic: Is Uranium Exhaustible?
The United States has about 85,000 tons of used nuclear fuel collected over about 70 years of commercial nuclear operations. The same people who don't give a rat's ass about the fact that dangerous fossil fuel waste (air pollution) kills nearly 7 million people a year, carry on with their idiot complaints about this fuel, but if you ask one to show a number of deaths related to its storage as air pollution will kill in the next hour, 750 people, they don't fucking answer, because they lack the moral integrity to care about anything but their selective attention to nuclear objections, every one of which is far worse for all the shit they do support than it is for nuclear energy.
About 95% of the contents of that used nuclear contained in the United States fuel is unreacted uranium.
The fission of a single kg of plutonium results in the production (neutrino free) 80 trillion joules:
The source of the calculations - they're mine - are here: ENDF Fission E Yield. Anyone who can do math is invited to check my calculations.
One kg of plutonium is the equivalent of 2500 tons of the coal the German anti-nukes have no problem burning, depositing the waste on all future generations, and the equivalent of over 2 million liters (730,000) gallons of the crude oil that all our bourgeois anti-nukes want to be cheap so they can drive to anti-nuke demonstrations and celebrate their stupidity and contempt for humanity openly.
I leave it as an exercise for anyone who can take time out of soothsaying and wishful thinking to calculate how much of the world energy supply could be provided by just converting the unreacted uranium in US used nuclear fuel to plutonium might provide.
We also have million ton quantities of "depleted uranium" which might be converted to plutonium. And then we have all the thorium in lanthanide mining tailings from mines dug so that anti-nukes could run diesel trucks carrying wind turbines through once virgin wilderness. We could eliminate all energy mining, and all wilderness destruction for industrial parks for wind and solar garbage for centuries with what has already been mined.
The soothsaying and specious whining of anti-nukes about shit like Vogtle, which will be operating at the dawn of the 22nd century doesn't mean a fucking thing to anyone with a whiff of ethics, and a whiff of concern for future generations.
As for thermal efficiency, I note that the Germans starting and stopping their coal plants several times a day because the wind is blowing or it isn't, reduces the thermal efficiency further. Like most nuclear plants, they're Rankine devices. Shutting a Rankine device and restarting it also wastes energy. This is why nuclear plants typically run continuously, exhibiting the highest capacity utilization of any device for producing primary energy.
My son is a budding nuclear engineer; and we talk all the time about thermal efficiency and process intensification. Anti-nukes don't read; they don't think; and they don't know a damned thing about engineering. Because they despise thinking they want to insist that the 1970's technology by which the nuclear reactors still operating today can't be redesigned. The engineers are not sunk in a shred of respect for asinine chanting by people who don't think, who don't bother to learn anything, who are so fucking conservative that they think that it's still 1980. Now that anti-nukism, and all the damage it's done, is finally being kicked aside, and with modern developments in materials science, we will build reactors designed for process intensification, move beyond the original goal of plants (with measurable success) of displacing coal to replacing petroleum and natural gas, as well as the junk that serves as a marketing front for them, so called "renewable energy."
These kids are at the cutting edge. They know what to do. That's my boy, among them. My son and I always have a good laugh when I tell him about the shit I read here.
Everyone else can sit on their asses and complain about the cost of gasoline, and mutter inane wishful thinking about how hydrogen could be clean. It's isn't clean now. It's a filthy fuel, and the deadly fossil fuel 3 card Monte game being played to support it is a dire representation of why we are now looking at carbon dioxide concentrations in the planetary atmosphere of 421 ppm.
Of course, from continuous exposure to this mentality, the selective attention coupled with inattention, I know for a fact that anti-nukes don't give a shit about climate change and aren't willing to spend a dime of their precious cash to do a damned thing about it.
It's disgusting; but it's reality.
I however do care about climate change. I do care about the future of humanity, the generations who will live after I die, which will be soon enough.
At the end of my days, I don't give a fuck about the price of gasoline. I want gasoline to be history, an item that elementary school students in the 22nd or 23rd century will find to have been unbelievably stupid and unbelievably selfish.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
