August 4, 2021

Silver Hollow

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August 4, 2021

An epistomenological question has been troubling me and seems to have no resolution.

It's this:

Is Stevie Nicks the only thing you need to prove that cocaine is bad for you?

August 1, 2021

Mortality Associated With Carbon Releases Traced to Sources, Per Capita Releases and Deaths Caused.

The paper to which I'll refer is this one: Bressler, R.D. The mortality cost of carbon. Nat Commun 12, 4467 (2021).

I believe that Nature Communications is the open sourced journal of the Springer/Nature publishers, so anyone can read it and there is no need for me to quote it extensively.

Nevertheless, I'll offer a few excerpts after desultory editorial comments of my own. Feel absolutely free to ignore my comments (particularly if you find them uncivil) and proceed to the paper directly to find out how many humans are purported to die, per American living an average lifestyle, by the per capita carbon releases associated with that (our) life style. It's always a good idea to go the the original source, unfiltered. I do my best to do that myself, go to original sources. Doing so informs my thinking.

My comments:

I am sometimes confronted by some person who thinks the can mutter the word "Fukushima" or otherwise tell me that they once lived near a nuclear plant and - even though, they're apparently still alive and quite healthy enough to be able to mutter insipidly about the appalling ignorance driving their fear - their personal anecdotes how they were scared shitless all the time that something nuclear related would happen to prevent their otherwise certain immortality, this to "prove," for my benefit, that nuclear energy is "too dangerous."

Of course, there are people who are scared shitless by vaccines too, and rational people here and elsewhere around the world find their ignorance and their toxic indifference to reality appalling.

I believe that the position of the overwhelming number of members of DU is that antivaxxers are a scourge on humanity.

If so, I agree, both as a DUer and a human being.

Appalling indifference...

Recently I attended a webinar presented by Andrew Shaw of Imperial College in London on the subject of utilizing modern technology to monitor the polio virus, this one: New, Rapid Sequencing Tools for Poliovirus Surveillance. It contains and references this graphic:



Source: Polio by Sophie Ochmann and Max Roser, Our World In Data.

At the link just provided, one can download that actual data behind this graphic a spreadsheet, and find that in Africa in 1980 there were 35,888 Polio cases and 2016, six.

(I certainly mean no insult to any overly sensitive but oblivious person by providing data, this as I've recently interacted with people who find data insulting.)

There are two polio vaccines, the injectable Inactivated Polio Vaccine (IPV (the Salk vaccine) and the Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV, the Sabin Vaccine). The former is a dead virus; the latter an attenuated, but live, virus.

The latter, being a live virus, is capable of mutation, and, according to Dr. Shaw's lecture, in areas where vaccination rates are very low, and thus the attenuated virus can circulate in fecal matter, the serological type 2 attenuated virus can mutate into a virulent form. For this reason, as of 2016, this vaccine is no longer utilized in Africa, where vaccination rates are low. Dr. Shaw had a slide showing a map of observed cases of vaccine derived polio, all in Africa. I paused on the slide, and crudely counted, by entering the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, the number of such cases. The number of cases of people who have contracted vaccine derived serological type 2 vaccines according to my count is 374. Dr. Shaw went on to say in his lecture, 70% of infections detected are asymptomatic, 30% show signs of illness but recover without paralysis, and less than 1% have paralytic infections. That works out to roughly 3 people in all of Africa who have contracted polio in a paralytic form from Sabin vaccine mutants.

The Sabin Polio vaccine is not risk free, but it should be clear to anyone who's not a pernicious ignoramus of the Tucker Carlson/Robert F. Kennedy type, that risk of being receiving a vaccine in Africa is vastly lower than the risk of not being vaccinated in Africa. According to Dr. Shaw's map, Uganda had the highest number of cases of vaccine related virus, 59. In 2016, the population of Uganda was 39.65 million, suggesting a risk of 1 in 39,650,000/59 = 1 in 672,000. In 1980, even though presumably some, if not most Africans were already vaccinated, and the population of the continent was 476.4 million (it's more than doubled since then), the risk of contracting polio of a more virulent version than Dr. Shaw described for the vaccine derived form, was 1 in 35,882/476,400,000 = 1 in 13,877. This is 187 times larger than the worst case in Africa, Uganda. Thus, if only the Sabin vaccine were available in Africa, and, if and only if an ignorant and irrationally terrified and self absorbed portion of the population refused to get the vaccine, one would need to a moron or an ignoramus in the irrationally terrified class itself to not be vaccinated.

Fukushima...

Speaking of irrationally terrified people - may I use the word "morons" or perhaps "ignoramuses?" - in which I include the people who tell me how terrible nuclear power plants are because they lived near one and were afraid it would kill them, I often hear from people who want to tell me, "nuclear power is too dangerous."

In response, I often post a link to the Global Burden of Disease Survey, using text I've stored in a Word document for convenience, as follows:

Recently I was informed by a correspondent that posts containing references like this are lacking in civility.

One never knows what to say to remarks like that, but, um, well, whatever...

It should be pellucidly clear and obvious that this summer that a season of tragedy is before us, a preventable tragedy, and although many people may be inspired to think of the "season of tragedy" being about the very real tragedy being inflicted on our medical infrastructure by persistent anti-vax rhetoric, I am referring not referring to that but rather to rather the tragedy to the fires and the extreme weather all over the planet.

I live in New Jersey, and have lived in my house for a quarter of a century. Two days ago, F3 tornados were observed in Eastern Pennsylvania, near where I live. After tearing up people's homes and businesses on the Pennsylvania side of the river, one crossed the Delaware River in the exact spot where Washington famously crossed the Delaware in 1776, tearing up the lovely parks dedicated to this historical event. Washington's successful attack on Trenton was actually a rather small and trivial event on a world wide scale at the time, but it was not without vast long term implications. In a quarter of century of living here, until Thursday, the number of F3 tornados passing within miles of where I live was zero. Without engaging in a single Bayesian calculation, I feel fairly secure in attributing it, in the context of a large number of unprecedented weather events all around the world this summer, to climate change. Similar to Washington's jaunt on the icy Delaware, if this "small" F3 tornado in the same spot on the same river is a "small" event, it may have worldwide implications.

I'm not sure how "civil" one should be when discussing unnecessary wholesale deaths , deaths which I attribute to people making the absurd statement that "nuclear power is too dangerous" without making any statement comparing the death toll from air pollution to that associated with the more than half a century of experience with commercial nuclear power.

The paper cited at the outset, which people who find me uncivil may or may not have viewed, extends the death toll beyond air pollution, to heat related deaths.

My working figure from the above for air pollution is between six and seven million air pollution deaths per year, but being "uncivil" I use the higher figure, 7 million, which works out to roughly 19,000 people per day. If the death toll is "only" 6 million, that works out to 16,500 people per day.

What's 2,500 deaths per day between friends?

How many people died from radiation in the big bogeyman event at Fukushima again? Do tell. How many people died from seawater in the same event? Do tell.

What's "too dangerous," nuclear power plants or living in coastal cities where seawater is present? Speaking only for myself, and certainly not for "civil" people, given climate change and sea level rise, I'd go with coastal cities, but that's just me. Perhaps I'm "uncivil" since I'm really, really, really, really not willing to accept - may I use the word "horseshit?" - that horseshit that nuclear power is more dangerous than fossil fuels.

I can count.

If someone, by contrast, can't count, or worse, refuses to count, it pisses me off royally, and erodes any desire I might have to be civil. In my opinion, people who kill other people by the application of ignorance deserve no civility.

By the way, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not only anti-vax; he's anti-nuclear as well. He's also anti-wind, if, and only if, someone is putting wind turbines off the coast of the Kennedy family compound in which he has an interest, derived not from any wisdom or intellectually respectable work he did to earn it, but by "virtue" of birth. To steal a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, "He had been born into that cockamamie proprietorship."

Fuck you Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

(See, I lack in civility.)

I'm a very lazy person, and I haven't updated the above cited text to include the latest Global Burden of Disease Survey, that of 2019, published in 2020. It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

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:



The bold is mine, of course, uncivilly so.

Let's do math! Females (2.92 million deaths) + males (3.75 million deaths) = 6.67 million human deaths, "only" around 18,250 deaths per day.

Really, it's uncivil for me to exaggerate. What's 750 deaths per day among friends?

Well, there are confidence limits, more about that later. Most good measurement science will include an estimation of the probability of accuracy, based on estimates of precision.

These are epidemiological estimates, and rely on statistical interpretations, and are therefore subject to limitations.

Here's a paper that takes issue with the Global Burden of Disease Survey with respect to the largest single component of air pollution deaths, PM 2.5: Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem (Karn Vohra, Alina Vodonos, Joel Schwartz, Eloise A. Marais, Melissa P. Sulprizio, Loretta J. Mickley, Environmental Research 195 (2021) 110754)

Here's some text from the paper:



Note that this statement refers to only one component of air pollution, PM2.5. (Particulate mater 2.5 microns or smaller.) It excludes sulfates, ozone, etc...and thus is not the only component of air pollution.

10.2 million deaths from just one component of air pollution works out to around 28,000 deaths per day. What's 9,000 deaths per day among friends?

Not all that long ago, in this space, I was asked about what I thought the death toll from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl might be, the correspondent having heard a figure as low as "50 people" and I referred to a rather famous nuclear accident liquidator, former President Jimmy Carter, to explain the difficulty of obtaining precision and accuracy of these kinds of estimates.

To wit:

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."



The problem with claiming by pointing to Jimmy Carter to prove that liquidating nuclear reactor accidents prevents developing pancreatic cancer is sample size.

It is now believed that the genetic predisposition to pancreatic cancer involves a mutation in the CDKN2A-p16 protein (Cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2A), wherein a dominant mutation resulting from the substitution of a deoxyguanosine by thymidine at codon 47, resulting in the substitution of a leucine residue by an arginine residue.

Both of Jimmy Carter's parents died from pancreatic cancer, Lillian at an old age, 85, and Jimmy Carter's father at the age of 58. I note that if both of Jimmy Carter's parents were both heterozygous for the dominant cancer gene, that we would expect the highest probability would be that for 4 children, three would inherit the dominant oncogene, and one would not, precisely the ratio observed among the 4 Carter siblings, one of whom became President of the United States and lived to his late 90's and three of whom died from pancreatic cancer.

So there is at least one completely rational, and even likely, explanation for Jimmy Carter having nothing to do with cleaning up the NRX meltdown and flying in, as President, to tour the reactor building of the melted Three Mile Reactor. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter did not die of any form of cancer, although in the last decade he recovered, after radiation treatments, from a brain tumor.

Go figure.

If we wanted to know whether engaging in nuclear clean ups has an effect leading to surviving a predisposition to pancreatic cancer related to the L16R mutant CDKNA2A-p16 protein, we would need to locate among the 350,000 Chernobyl liquidators a subset who possessed this mutation, and compare them to a subset of non-liquidators also possessing this gene. Note that President Carter might not meet the inclusion criteria for such a study, were he to prove homozygous for the recessive normal gene, which again, given the number of siblings he had, does have a 1 in 4 probability.

The statistical power of the study would be improved the larger the number of liquidators genetically mapped whose health outcome was known. A sample of 100 sequenced liquidators with the L16R mutant CDKNA2A-p16 protein would give more evidence than 10 such liquidators, and a sample size of 1000 would be even better. The larger the sample size, the narrower the range producing a 95% confidence limit.

No one is likely to conduct such a study to find out why Jimmy Carter lived so long; it won't happen.

Recently a correspondent in this space informed me that nuclear energy was "too dangerous" because...um...uranium mines. Perhaps she or he assumed I knew as little as he or she did about uranium as she or he obviously did. As it turns out I wrote about the subject of uranium mining elsewhere, with reference to the scientific literature some years ago: Sustaining the Wind Part 3 about my experience of wandering around Princeton's Firestone Library to read about uranium miners.

To wit:



Later on in the same work, I referred to this paper: Radon Exposure and Mortality Among White and American Indian Uranium Miners: An Update of the Colorado Plateau Cohort (Mary K. Schubauer-Berigan, Robert D. Daniels, and Lynne E. Pinkerton, Am J Epidemiol 2009; 169: 718–730)

I continued:



Later I went on to point out that 7 million people would die from air pollution in the year I wrote that piece, 2015, but as noted above, it could have been "only" 6 million people. What's a million deaths per year among friends? Since 2015 through 2021, the death toll could have been (2021-2015) years X 6 million deaths per year = 36 million deaths, or it could have been (2021-2015) years X 7 million deaths per year = 49 million deaths. What's 13 million deaths among friends?

Fukushima...

But I'm being uncivil in attempting to discuss air pollution deaths with people who are only interested in uranium miner deaths, aren't I? Where's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when you need him? Playing "river keeper" on the "White Nile" in Uganda perhaps, trying to "save" people from the scourge of vaccines?

I can count, even if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his fellow anti-nukes can't.

Counting...

Epidemiological reports like those contained in the Lancet Global Burden of Disease Surveys, three of which are in my files, rely on correlations, that is, reports of concentrations of air pollutants in a particular region and the rates of death of known respiratory diseases and coronary diseases in that same region to produce statistical associations. As is the case with Jimmy Carter, other nuclear meltdown liquidators, people with the CDKNA2A-p16 mutant oncogene, and for that matter, uranium miners, there are many other ways to die besides exposure to a particular risk status, and it is quite possible that other confounding issues may play a role, things like access to health care, nutrition, the ethnic make up of a region, cultural factors, etc...

Still, these studies, managed by highly trained and highly competent statisticians have merit, and, accordingly all attempt to quantify the "error bars," that is the confidence limits.

Another point: There is a difference between people who were killed instantly by seawater in the same tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima reactors, than someone who may live 20 or 30 years before dying from what may be a radiation release related cause. A man who drowned on the day of the tsunami at the age of 30, were his life expectancy 80, will have lost 50 years, whereas a subject exposed to radiation leaks at the age of 30 who lives to be 60 will have lost only 20. This is the rationale one sees behind measurements that take this into account by calculating risk in terms of "DALYs" or "Disability Adjusted Life Years," which combines the statistical concepts of "YLL" "Years Life Lost" and "YLD" which reflects years of healthy life lost to disability.

In 2014, an explosion at a plant in Japan for producing trichlorosilane, a highly toxic chemical when inhaled which is used to make, um, solar cells, killing 5 people instantly and injuring 12 others. This was reported, in a rare burst on honesty, by the "solar will save us" press. PV Tech: Explosion at Mitsubishi polysilicon plant in Japan causes deaths

Fukushima...

There is no confirmed evidence that five or more people have died from radiation exposures at Fukushima, although, again, lots of people about whom we couldn't care less died from seawater. Unless they the radiation exposed people were killed instantly, the DALYs would be different even if five radiation exposed people died tomorrow, since it is ten years after the explosion at the nuclear reactors were destroyed by a natural disaster. If 20 years from now, radiation exposed people, unlike former President Carter, got cancer and were disabled by it, the DALYs would also be different than they would be for the 12 people injured in the trichlorosilane explosion.

The world is risky, which is why everyone, me included, has a 100% chance of dying. But the things we buy and the lives we live affect how long other people will live healthy lives, and we should do our best, if we are ethical, we will do our best to minimize - we cannot eliminate - the risks with which we burden our fellow human beings.

I recently had a CAT scan, involving a high burst of radiation. I'm an old, cynical man, embittered by the head up the ass stupidity of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tucker Carlson and their fellow trust fund kids, and in fact, my own dependence on my American life style which, to quote Joni Mitchell, "brings me things I really can't give up just yet."

Being old, I don't have many DALYs left to give if my CAT scan, designed to monitor my health, kills me by inducing cancer. I guess Jimmy Carter, who was exposed to large amounts of radiation as a young man, made the same calculation when he had radiation treatments for the brain tumor he developed as a very old man. I accepted the lower risk to understand and address a higher possible higher risk. I don't have many DALYs left to give, but as cynical as I am, I do have fucks left to give. I will never give up caring about the future, even if the future will not contain me.

This involves something called "ethics," even if my ethics do not include being civil to people who don't deserve civility.

We are screwing future generations with our lifestyle, which for many people, involves announcing that "nuclear power is too dangerous" as being something we know all about because we put solar cells on our suburban roofs and as a result are collecting subsidies and saving money. We are mining all the world's best ores chasing after a so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come. We are living in fear of something that most of us, myself excluded since I have made the effort to understand it, are incompetent to understand, nuclear energy.

From Madam Curie: I rather like this quote.

Nuclear energy is not risk free, nor does it need to be risk free to vastly superior to everything else. The tautology I often repeat is that "To be vastly superior to everything else, nuclear energy only needs to be superior to everything else, which it is."

Opposing nuclear energy is thus in my unshakable view is as immoral as if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., idiot trust fund kid, would be marching along the banks of the White Nile as a "river keeper" in Uganda announcing polio vaccines were "too dangerous."

Our lifestyle...

Waiting endlessly, with all kinds of tiresome hype, for solar energy to save us, an affectation little different than an ancient Sumerian praying to some invented Sun God to save him, is entrenching the use of dangerous fossil fuels, the use of which is growing, not falling despite half a century of cheering for how solar energy would save us.

It hasn't saved us; it isn't saving us; it won't save us, and it has done nothing, since it is ineffective at addressing climate change, other than to entrench the use of dangerous fossil fuels, notably dangerous natural gas.

Our lifestyle:

It is clear that air pollution kills people in vast numbers, numbers exceeding those killed by the Covid virus. We pay attention to the virus, but not to air pollution, and now we are being forced, kicking and screaming and whining to confront the death toll associated with climate change. Deaths from heat exposure are not new of course, deaths at the outset of this anti-nuke century were discussed previously:

The 2003 European heatwave is said to have killed 70,000 people, upon analysis.

Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003 (Plus de 70 000 décès en Europe au cours de l'été 2003) (Robine et al Comptes Rendus Biologies Volume 331, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 171-178.)

We couldn't care less.

Fukushima...

Maybe we'll care now, with forests all around the world in flames because of excessive heat, and people dying when the evaporation of sweat can't save them from extreme temperatures. I can't say.

Ignorance kills, but ignorance persists.

Our lifestyle...

From the introductory text of the paper cited at the outset, which is open sourced:



A graphic from the paper, reflecting the deaths caused, per capita, by the lifestyles of people in various countries, including that so called "renewable energy" nirvana, Germany, and of course, the US, "us:"



The caption:



A lot of us here complain about China's emissions, because they didn't agree to remain impoverished so we could all prattle on about how "green" we are. Nevertheless, their position on the graphic is ethically superior to ours, even if they chose to pull themselves out of poverty by using the same tool to build their industrial infrastructure that we historically used to produce ours: Burning coal.

Please don't deign to tell me about the solar cells on your suburban roof if you have them. Don't tell me about your solar powered electric car. Just as we, collectively, couldn't care less about 70,000 people killed by heat in Europe in 2003, and people dying this year from heat, I. Couldn't. Care. Less. about your self-declared solar nobility.

I'm not, given my extreme anger at what we have done, inclined to respond civilly.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

July 29, 2021

The Growth of Solar Capacity In California, Capacity Utilization, and Solar Energy Production.

This post, about solar energy in California, is rather similar to the one I wrote yesterday about Wind Energy in California, with some differences. The remarks on nuclear energy capacity utilization are repeated verbatim here, but as California is one of the rare places where solar energy produces more energy than wind energy, I will compare the total energy produced by solar means in California, with the total energy demand of the State, using the figures from 2019, since these are the most recent available.

Accessed today (7/28/21), the amount of energy consumed by California in 2019, for all purposes, was 7082 trillion BTU according to the EIA Web Page devoted to California. I will use SI units throughout the rest of this post. The SI unit of energy is the Joule (J), and the prefix "Peta" (P) refers to 10 raised to the 15th power, and "Exa" (E) to 10 raised to the 18th power.

A BTU = 1055 J. Thus California's Energy Consumption in 2019 was 7.472 EJ.

In 2019, total US energy consumption was 106 EJ

As of this writing, 17:02 (5:02) PDT 7/28/21, California is under an electrical energy alert:

California's energy demand peak will occur just about at the time the sun is going down. At that time, solar energy will be essentially useless.

The data in the table in post comes from a web page of the California Energy Commission in table to which one can scroll down on this page: Solar PV and Solar Thermal Electricity Production (Annual Totals; Includes Imports)

I have imported the table into Excel, and then did some calculations using this data. Solar plant power ratings, which are often cited by advocates of this form of energy which has failed spectacularly to address climate change after half a century of cheering, are cited as peak power, which is the maximal power the turbine would manage under perfect windy conditions, which in practice are never observed.

It is dishonest - not that anyone cares anymore about dishonesty - to represent a solar plant, which is dependent on whims of weather as well as the time of day as a plant that can, in theory run continuously at full power, such as a gas plant or a coal plant, or even a plant of a type that has been observed to run at 100% (or better) of capacity, something observed only in nuclear plants.

For example, one can find the capacity utilization of all of the nuclear reactors operating in the United States as of 2020 here: EIA Nuclear Energy Page by clicking on the 2020P Excel File in the table on the right. Of 94 nuclear reactors operating the in the United States in 2020, 70 operated at 90% capacity utilization or better, and of these, 24 operated at 100% of capacity or more. Five operated at capacity utilization of less than 80%. One of these was Diablo Canyon reactor #2, which operated at 74.8% of capacity, apparently for refueling and maintenance. It produced 7,348,123 MWh of electricity, or 26.5 PetaJoules of electricity (0.0265 EJ) in one small building. Diablo Canyon #2 operated at 90.4% capacity utilization, producing 8,910,575 MWh of electricity, or 32.1 PetaJoules, or (0.0321 EJ).

In the table below, I have included a theoretical amount of energy that solar plants would produce if they operated at 100% of capacity utilization, using the SI unit of energy, the Joule. I have also converted the power actually produced from MWh to Joule in order to calculate the ratio of the latter to the former to give capacity utilization. I have then calculated the average continuous power of all the solar plants in California, by the number of seconds in a sidereal year, 86400 seconds/day*365.24 days/year = 31,556,736 seconds. This gives the average power in Watts, but the spreadsheet divides this number by 1,000,000 to give a MW. Theoretically, ignoring the inherent lumpiness in wind power which produces what it produces without respect to demand, this gives a feel for the capacity of a nuclear powerplant that could produce more energy than all the solar plants in California. The next two columns give the growth or decline in name plate capacity compared to the previous year, as well the growth or decline in actual energy produced by all the solar plants in California.

I have also included a column for the size of a putative plant, operating at 100% capacity utilization, that would represent the growth in solar energy output, which has increased monotonically since 2007. For example, building a small 100 MW power plant of any type, would match the increase in solar power output from 2019 to 2020. This too, is misleading, since solar plants do not produce energy - in fact the wires connected to them draw power out of the grid, at night. Thus solar plants always require a redundant system to back it up. The fantasy - and it is certainly not a clean fantasy since battery production is neither environmentally benign nor sustainable - is that batteries can deal with this issue. As a practical matter, however, it is dangerous natural gas combustion, with the waste dumped directly into the waste dump, the planetary atmosphere, that is the redundant system.

The table of California's Solar Energy performance in the 21st century:



Comparison of the total production of all of the solar installations in the State of California with the State's overall energy demand, as well as the sum of all solar energy produced in the 21st century by this popular form of energy:



In this entire century, from 2001 to 2020, all of the solar facilities in California, the state having the largest solar capacity in the United States, have not produced even one exajoule of energy, this on a planet where humanity is consuming each year about 600 exajoules of energy.

By the way, I moved to California three times in my life, the first being in 1974. I left the State for good in 1993. The whole time I lived there, everyone was cheering, myself included, for an expected solar energy nirvana. It's not like California was producing just 1.58% of its energy by solar means when people began cheering for it. On the contrary, it's after half a century of cheering.

Some people, myself included, think that the outbreak of massive fires on the West Coast of the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world, Siberia, Sardinia, Australia, etc...etc...etc... ad nauseum are related from climate change.

This should - although it won't - produce some dose of reality about how effective all this cheering, endless cheering, for a putative solar nirvana has been at addressing climate change.

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant, due to shut because of appeals to fear and ignorance, has been producing today, in California, between 2,262 and 2,267 MW of electricity reliably all day long in two small buildings, the footprint of which, including its parking lot, is about 12 acres of land, located on a 700 acre plot of land that is mostly undisturbed marine chaparral. In terms of average continuous power, two such plants could produce more energy, more reliably, and more predictably, than all of the solar energy facilities in the State of California as well as solar plants in neighboring states that export electricity to California.

The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant is something of an antique, having been designed around 1970's technology. Its thermodynamic efficiency is around 33%.

I was telling my son, who visited briefly yesterday, about a path, via heat networks, by which the thermal efficiency of a nuclear plant with a slightly larger foot print, might achieve or approach efficiencies of approximately 80%, via a network of Brayton, reverse Allam, thermochemical hydrogen production, supercritical water, and rankine cycles, all run off the same heat stream, albeit not necessarily in this order. The little brat engineer found this argument credible.

By the way, if one spends a lot of time reading the primary scientific literature about displacing the chemicals obtained by using fossil fuels utilizing putative solar thermal plants, like the one at Ivanpah in California, which fries birds in flight, about 6,000 per year. There are thousands upon thousands of papers about solar furnace liquid fuel production published, too many in fact to count. The only chemical energy produced by Ivanpah is the chemical energy available from the combustion of charred birds.

The poor performance of the Ivanpah plant, which sometimes ends up burning dangerous natural gas to improve it's poor performance, may account for the years in which California's solar capacity utilization fell below 20%.

These papers are not, however, useless. They are probably structured the way they are to appeal to popular enthusiasm, insipid popular enthusiasm, but nonetheless real popular enthusiasm, for solar energy to get research grants. The heat source need not be solar however. Nuclear heat is more reliable, and more environmentally sustainable, since it is continuously and reliably available. Continuous processes are almost always economically and environmentally superior to batch or discontinuous processes.

I regard opposition to nuclear energy as morally and intellectually equivalent to opposition to Covid vaccines. Both kill people by appeal to popular ignorance.

Solar energy has not addressed or even slowed climate change; it is not addressing or slowing climate change; it will not address or slow climate change. It may be time to wake up.

The rate of climate change is climbing not falling. It is worse than ever. People are literally dying in the streets from excessive heat.

That's a fact. Facts matter.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

July 27, 2021

Capacity Changes, Capacity Utilization, Energy Production: Wind Power in California 2001-2020.

The source data from the table below can be found by scrolling down this page from the California Energy Commissions Web Page:

Electricity From Wind Energy Statistics and Data

It is the table labeled, Total Wind Production (Annual Totals; Excludes Imports)

I have imported the table into Excel, and then did some calculations using this data. Wind turbine power ratings, which are often cited by advocates of this form of energy which has failed spectacularly to address climate change after half a century of cheering, are cited as peak power, which is the maximal power the turbine would manage under perfect windy conditions, which in practice are never observed.

It is dishonest - not that anyone cares anymore about dishonesty - to represent a wind turbine, which is dependent on whims of weather as a plant that can, in theory run continuously at full power, such as a gas plant or a coal plant, or even a plant of a type that has been observed to run at 100% (or better) of capacity, something observed only in nuclear plants.

For example, one can find the capacity utilization of all of the nuclear reactors operating in the United States as of 2020 here: EIA Nuclear Energy Page by clicking on the 2020P Excel File in the table on the right. Of 94 nuclear reactors operating the in the United States in 2020, 70 operated at 90% capacity utilization or better, and of these, 24 operated at 100% of capacity or more. Five operated at capacity utilization of less than 80%. One of these was Diablo Canyon reactor #2, which operated at 74.8% of capacity, apparently for refueling and maintenance. It produced 7,348,123 MWh of electricity, or 26.5 PetaJoules of electricity (0.0265 EJ) in one small building. Diablo Canyon #2 operated at 90.4% capacity utilization, producing 8,910,575 MWh of electricity, or 32.1 PetaJoules, or (0.0321 EJ).

In the table below, I have included a theoretical amount of energy that wind turbines would produce if they operated at 100% of capacity utilization, using the SI unit of energy, the Joule. I have also converted the power actually produced from MWh to Joule in order to calculate the ratio of the latter to the former to give capacity utilization. I have then calculated the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in California, by the number of seconds in a sidereal year, 86400 seconds/day*365.24 days/year = 31,556,736 seconds. This gives the average power in Watts, but the spreadsheet divides this number by 1,000,000 to give a MW. Theoretically, ignoring the inherent lumpiness in wind power which produces what it produces without respect to demand, this gives a feel for the capacity of a nuclear powerplant that could produce more energy than all the wind turbines in California. The next two columns give the growth or decline in name plate capacity compared to the previous year, as well the growth or decline in actual energy produced by all the wind turbines in California. Where declines occur, this reflects the short life time of wind turbines and the failure to replace those decommissioned. Renewable energy advocates love "percent talk" and so, since I'm so familiar with their patois, I've put in "percent."

The table:




There you have it folks, the total energy, produced in two small buildings, in 2020 with a total in use footprint of about 12 acres, on a 700 acre plot of largely undisturbed marine chaparral, produced 16,258,698 MWh of electricity, or 58.5 petajoules of electrical energy, more than all of wind plants in California, distributed over thousands of square km.

For reference, as of 2019, humanity was producing and consuming on the entire planet was consuming about 600 ExaJoules (EJ) of energy, dominated by an increasing share of dangerous fossil fuels.

If there's any sense to shutting the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, this when the entire West Coast is laced with fires, droughts, and extreme temperatures, I'm missing it.

From where I sit, anti-nukes are the exact equivalent of anti-vaxxers, inasmuch both assert arrogant ignorance to do harm.

Have a nice evening.

July 26, 2021

Even in Sacremento, Sacramento of all places, they're waking up.

While Nuclear Energy has proved to be, beginning in the 1990's, the cleanest reliable form of energy, and is the only one that can be scaled to eliminate dangerous fossil fuel use, there were a number of nuclear power plants that were operated poorly. Probably the worst operated nuclear reactor in the United States outside of Three Mile Island - which has long served as an inspiration for people to ignore the routine and massive death toll associated with fossil fuels - was the Rancho Seco Nuclear Reactor, operated by SMUD (Sacramento Municipal Utility District.) The performance of this reactor was so bad, that its reliability was only slightly better than the very best wind parks in the world. In the period which it operated, from April 1975 to June 1989, when it was shut by public referendum, it's capacity utilization was less than 40%.

A former head of SMUD, David Freeman referred to nuclear energy as the "most expensive and dangerous source of energy on Earth."

This may be an indication of why Rancho Seco was so poorly run. Apparently SMUD was incapable of hiring senior engineering staff that could do math. It's rather absurd to call nuclear power the "most dangerous source of energy on Earth" when between six and seven million people die each year from air pollution, caused by combustion of dangerous fossil fuels. It appears that SMUD engineering supervisors can't count.

Freeman "replaced" the 913 MWe nuclear reactor with an 11 MWe solar farm that probably at best, meets recent solar capacity utilization in California, about 24%, meaning it's really, in terms of average continuous power, 3 MW at best. Then quietly, SMUD built a 600 MWe dangerous natural gas plant Cosumnes Power Plant, which has now operated for 17 years, spewing, without restriction the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere, where it causes droughts, fires, heat deaths, extreme weather, what have you and so on...

Given the hostility to nuclear power in California, and Sacramento in particular, it was somewhat surprising to read this editorial in the Sacremento Bee:

To fulfill promises of Diablo Canyon closure, California ignores fossil fuel emissions

Excerpts:

Don't worry, be happy, batteries, batteries, batteries.

Screw those cobalt digging slave children in the "Democratic" "Republic" of Congo, and don't pay attention to the source of all those ketones, or all those lithium mines. Screw the laws of thermodynamics.

It's a shame that the people at SMUD never hired competent engineers, since they helped give nuclear energy a largely undeserved bad name, giving anti-nukes, masters not of engineering, but masters of selective attention, all the more power to dig more dangerous natural gas, more wires to connect unreliable so called "renewable energy" facilities in order to cause more fires, more heat deaths, and faster climate change, all the time, in Trumpian scale mendacity, declaring themselves "green."

July 25, 2021

Astronomers push for global debate on giant satellite swarms

This is a news item in Nature: Astronomers push for global debate on giant satellite swarms (Alexandra Witze, Nature, News, July 16, 2021.)

I believe it may be open sourced and not behind a fire wall.

A rather disturbing, and in my ethical purview, obscene picture from the text:



Some excerpts from the text:

If anyone is familiar with my writings, I never hold back on my contempt for that ethical Lilliputian Elon Musk, who reminds me of characters in that paean to moral indifference, the appallingly dull book by that very dull woman Ayn Rand, in the dry and barely readable novel/treatise Atlas Shrugged.

He just throws his money around to do whatever the fuck he wants at the expense of the rest of humanity and wants to be worshipped for doing so.

I note that the same people who worship the hedonistic errant intellectual homunculus Donald Trump are also prone to worship the dullard narrow minded Ayn Rand.

This kind of disregard for the future of human vision has got to stop.

July 24, 2021

I was somehow inspired to get "The Big Lebowski" out of the library. I never saw it. Should...

...I actually watch it?

People have told me I should.

Would time spent otherwise be better used?

July 24, 2021

A racist scientist built a collection of human skulls. Should we still study them?

This a news item from a recent issue of Science: A racist scientist built a collection of human skulls. Should we still study them? (Lizzie Wade, Science July 8, 2018).

I'm not sure if it's open sourced. A pop up appeared, and I just logged in using my AAAS membership.

Some excerpts:

The article contains a quote from one of the three great Americans who started the all too slow process, obviously still uncompleted, of freeing the United States from virulent racism, at that time, in it's most vicious form, human slavery, Frederick Douglass. (The other two would be Lincoln and Grant, who defined their contributions in the political and military/political field, whereas Douglass defined it in the moral sphere.)



Interesting article, I think.

Have a nice weekend.

July 23, 2021

Hydrogen Production by Reforming of Sodium Alginate in the Liquid Phase over Pt/C Catalysts

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Hydrogen Production by Reforming of Sodium Alginate in the Liquid Phase over Pt/C Catalyst (Vinayak N. Kalekar and Prakash D. Vaidya Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2021 60 (27), 9755-9763)

We have, as people paying attention have noted, a real problem with algae overgrowth, much of it connected with run off from agricultural and landscaping fertilizers, as well as climate change.

Whether at sea, as in the case of the now dead offshore Mississippi Delta region, once a rich source of seafood, the Red Tides of Florida, where rotting fish are piling up on the beaches or the the famous cases of microcystin in Lake Erie area which rendered the water supply of major cities toxic, these algae blooms kill by the following mechanism: The photosynthetic algae experience a burst of growth so thick that lower layers of the algae mats lose access to light and die. The dead algae sinks or rots in place. As a result bacteria multiply to feed on the dead algae, consuming oxygen at a level which makes it impossible for large organisms, like fish, or shellfish to survive. Everything then dies, pretty much.

In theory, this process might be stopped by removing the algae before it gets thick enough to kill lower layers, either by filtration, skimming, or similar mechanisms.

If this is done in a timely or continuous fashion, it can actually be a carbon negative approach, in particular when the carbon is recovered and put to use in carbon based materials such as alloys, certain polymers, carbon fibers, nanotubes, etc. Such use may allow for the displacement of the use of dangerous fossil fuels to the extent that they, notably dangerous petroleum and dangerous natural gas, but also albeit more limited, dangerous coal, are used to produce industrial chemicals.

This particular paper describes the utilization of water as an oxidant; however carbon dioxide oxidants may offer certain advantages in situations that I call "the reverse Allam cycle." A problem with biomass reforming is that it is wet, but if the drying is conducted at high temperatures, such as might be produced with nuclear energy, with a mixture of steam and carbon dioxide, "syn gas" - from which any petroleum commodity chemical (or its equivalent) can be made - with adjustable hydrogen to carbon oxide ratios reflecting the ultimate target for synthesis.

From the paper's introductory text:

The authors report the work of others using different approaches. In their work, they use a platinum catalyst supported on carbon. Platinum is an expensive and relatively rare element falling into the critical element category. Notably, they also discuss ruthenium and palladium catalysts. These elements may be more readily available to future generations inasmuch as they are constituents of used nuclear fuel, and thus access to them may not be strictly limited to ores.

From my perspective, a carbon support in a reforming system is less than ideal, and they do report some associated difficulty with catalyst degradation, but anyway, some pictures from the text:



The caption:



Characterization of the catalyst included the use of a scanning electron micscrope:



The caption:



The catalyst was noted to have significant porosity by use of imaging and BET (Brunauer–Emmett–Teller) nitrogen adsorption device, and the active sites characterized by ammonia desorption experiments.

Two tables from the paper touch on the efficacy of two elements other than platinum:



While the ruthenium and palladium experiments gave lower hydrogen yields, they were explored only at one temperature. Modern materials science gives access to higher temperatures. This would justify exploring the use of more readily available - over many generations - palladium and ruthenium catalysts, albeit on different supports than porous carbon.

As it is, the platinum catalyst loses activity, and various analytical techniques show the changes to unused catalysts by use:



The caption:



IR:



The caption:



X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy:



The caption:





The caption:



Ammonia desorption (TPD = "temperature programmed desorption) shows the loss of acidic sites on the catalyst upon use:



The caption:



Finally, reaction pathways leading to the products, mostly by decarboxylation reactions.:



The caption:



This is just one of many thousands, tens of thousands, of papers along these lines, the reforming of biomass. I mention it only as a signpost along the way for the reversing of climate change, turning a pollutant, algae, into a resource. The added benefit is the recovery of phosphate, which is decidedly not a renewable resource.

The paper's conclusion:



A fun little paper, not necessarily the best paper on this subject, but worth reading if one has the chance.

Have a pleasant Friday.