NNadir
NNadir's JournalMaterial Intensity of Various Forms of Energy, a Nice Graphic.
I don't have time to discuss this paper in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology in any detail, but I'll reference it:
Closing the Infrastructure Gap for Decarbonization: The Case for an Integrated Mineral Supply Agreement Saleem H. Ali, Sophia Kalantzakos, Roderick Eggert, Roland Gauss, Constantine Karayannopoulos, Julie Klinger, Xiaoyu Pu, Kristin Vekasi, and Robert K. Perrons Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (22), 15280-15289
Here's figure 3 from the paper:
The caption:
The figure pretty much speaks for itself.
Using the data found in the Danish Energy Agency's Master Register of Wind Turbines I have calculated that the average lifetime for a wind turbine before it becomes landfill is under 20 years.
Solar cells become electronic waste is 20 to 25 years.
We are not going to mine our way out of climate change, and the longer we believe that we can, the worse it's going to be. Making steel, concrete and glass is all highly carbon dependent, concrete being worse than steel, steel being worse than glass, but all of them environmentally problematic.
Energy efficiency is important; I argue regularly for process intensification via heat exchanger networks, but mass efficiency and land efficiency are also important if we want to get serious about climate change. We're not serious, but if we want to be, these things need to be considered.
I trust you're enjoying the run up to the Thanksgiving holidays.
Ethanol and unspecified alkenes via the hydrogenation of CO2 with earth abundant catalysts.
I came across a paper this evening which while somewhat sketchy - in the sense that one would like more details - caught my eye inasmuch as I'm always attracted to systems that use readily available elements as opposed to those that rely on exotic and/or expensive elements. I won't spend much time with the paper, but I just thought it worth mentioning it, since the catalyst is a mixed catalyst with three very common elements, copper, iron, and sodium.
It's this paper:
Synthesis of Alkene and Ethanol in CO2 Hydrogenation on a Highly Active Sputtering CuNaFe Catalyst Zhiyan Si, Linkai Wang, Yu Han, Jiafeng Yu, Qingjie Ge, Chunyang Zeng, and Jian Sun ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (45), 14972-14979.
The language of the paper shows some artifacts of having been translated from the Chinese by a non-native English speaker, but it's intriguing in any case.
From the introduction to the paper:
For the above chemicals, olefin and ethanol are both high-value intermediates or chemicals for modern society. The synthesis of olefin via CO2 hydrogenation generally requires a tandem reaction of C–O activation, as well as subsequent C–C coupling. (38?41) The representative catalyst is composed of an oxides/zeolite composite with methanol as an intermediate, and an iron-based catalyst with CO as an intermediate. In comparison, producing ethanol is more challenging to achieve from CO2 hydrogenation due to the complexity in various reaction pathways and the uncontrollability on C–O insertion in parallel with C–C coupling from untamed surface sites. To date, a series of noble metal catalysts, modified Co-based catalysts, Cu-based catalysts, and Mo-based catalysts with or without promoters have been successfully developed in fixed-bed or tank reactors. (12,42?44) However, the common problem for both synthesizing olefin and ethanol lies in the lower efficiency in a single pass process, especially in terms of a low carbon utilization rate under a high space velocity on catalysts, which severely limits the value in potential industrial application. Considering the state-of-the-art process, the coproduction of olefin and ethanol is meaningful and favorable to the chemical industry in view of the facile separation between gas (mainly C2–C4 lower olefin) and liquid (ethanol) product. But unfortunately, simultaneous synthesis of the above two high-value products from CO2 and H2 in one efficient step is very challenging owing to the requirement of precisely designing active sites. It generally requires a synergistic process including C–O activation, C–C coupling, and C–O insertion on a well-defined catalyst.
The physical sputtering apparatus designed by Abe, Tsubaki, et al. and our group was recently employed for synthesizing heterogeneous catalysts by means of the unique properties of sputtered metal nanoparticles. The various sputtered metals on supports show obvious merits, such as high activity, feasibility without high-temperature reduction, and noble-metal-like properties in the classic F-T synthesis, ester hydrogenation, methanation, and reverse water gas shift reaction. (45?48) It provides potential for the precise design of active sites in heterogeneous catalysis.
Herein, we report a well-defined ternary catalyst comprising highly active Cu nanoparticles sputtered on a Na modified Fe3O4 support (sp-CuNaFe), which is prepared by a self-made physical sputtering apparatus (Supporting Information, Figure S1). In CO2 hydrogenation, it shows a remarkable promotion in simultaneously synthesizing olefins and ethanol compared to other conventional Fe and CuFe series catalysts. The total space time yield (STY) rate of high-value olefin and ethanol can reach as high as 833 mg·g–1·h–1 at a mild condition of 310 °C and 3 MPa, which ranked as one of the best performances among related studies. The key to success is the creation of the coordination of well-dispersed sputtered Cu nanoparticles with surrounding NaFe, providing a suitable distance for C–C coupling and C–O insertion...
Unfortunately the generic popular term "olefin" (the proper term is "alkene" ) doesn't specify which alkenes are produced; it is one thing if it's ethene (ethylene), another if it a mixture of higher alkenes. Nevertheless all alkenes can be polymerized, and in this sense they represent fixed carbon.
The authors do not seem to use - perhaps because it's not available in their labs - GC/MS or GC/MS/MS; they rely on GC-FID, which perhaps accounts for their failure to identify the components of the mixture better.
Here's a figure from the text:
The caption:
The yield is low, and the product distribution is, again, unclear. But this is potentially a very cheap and very sustainable catalyst.
Still, one hopes the paper gets some attention and the work is subject to efforts at optimization.
While I have no use for the idea of hydrogen as a consumer fuel - a dumb idea that happily goes nowhere - it is a very useful captive intermediate and may be produced either by the thermochemical splitting of water using thermochemical cycles, or by carbon dioxide splitting followed by the water gas reaction, in which case carbon dioxide is the catalyst used for splitting water. Such a procedure offers the possibility of high efficiency and the recovery of exergy from high temperature systems, an effort that should be the focus of engineering at a breakneck speed. We are out of time.
Enjoy the workweek as it winds down.
Sigh...
The nation's ant-nuke paper of record again proves that you can't get a degree in journalism if you've passed a college level science course: The Coldhearted Carbon Math.
Now we have barely literate journalists citing one another, in this case Bill McKibben, who thinks driving a Prius will fix everything.
Maybe if they hadn't spent so much time at the NY Times prattling on about Fukushima while around 80 million people died from air pollution, while the world's rivers dried up, while major ecosystems collapsed, things might be different, but they're not different.
Handing out more clueless bullshit with a chorus of whining about how we need to trash more wilderness for so called "renewable energy" isn't going to do doodle squat to address climate change. That ship has sailed, at a cost of trillions of dollars with nothing to show for it.
Radiochemical reveals cholesterol metabolism in the brain to understand neurodegenerative diseases.
I came across this article in Chemical and Engineering News: Radiochemical reveals cholesterol metabolism in the brain
Subtitle:
I'm pretty sure this short news item is only available to ACS members, but it's brief, and here's the relevant excerpt:
CYP46A1 oxidizes cholesterol in the brain, making a cholesterol derivative that can go through the blood-brain barrier so that it can be transported out of the central nervous system. Scientists have suspected that neurodegenerative diseases can be linked to CYP46A1 gone awry, but they haven’t had a way to study the enzyme in living brains.
Seeking a way to do just that, a team led by Emory University’s Steven H. Liang developed 18F-Cholestify to bind to CYP46A1. In PET scans in mice, nonhuman primates, and people, the tracer illuminates areas of the brain where CYP46A1 is expressed. The chemical probe “can give us real-time information,” Liang says. 18F-Cholestify can also help drugmakers test how well drug candidates engage CYP46A1 in the brain, he adds.
Comparing the enzyme’s expression in brains of healthy people with its expression in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases could reveal CYP46A1’s role in those conditions. Observing how CYP46A1 is expressed in the brains of people of different ages could also shed light on how the enzyme changes as people age.
Liang’s team found 18F-Cholestify showed a stronger signal in mice engineered to have Alzheimer’s disease compared with control mice. In a study of eight healthy people, 18F-Cholestify revealed that women had a greater expression of CYP46A1 than men of the same age...
Here's the structure of the molecule:
The full paper to which the article refers is here: Haider, Ahmed, Zhao, Chunyu, Wang, Lu, Xiao, Zhiwei, Rong, Jian, Xia, Xiaotian, Chen, Zhen, Pfister, Stefanie K., Mast, Natalia, Yutuc, Eylan, Chen, Jiahui, Li, Yinlong, Shao, Tuo, Warnock, Geoffrey I., Dawoud, Alyaa, Connors, Theresa R., Oakley, Derek H., Wei, Huiyi, Wang, Jinghao, Zheng, Zhihua, Xu, Hao, Davenport, April T., Daunais, James B., Van, Richard S., Shao, Yihan, Wang, Yuqin, Zhang, Ming-Rong, Gebhard, Catherine, Pikuleva, Irina, Levey, Allan I., Griffiths, William J., Liang, Steven H Assessment of cholesterol homeostasis in the living human brain 2022 Science Translational Medicine 14 665 eadc9967
It's behind a firewall though and regrettably I won't have time to discuss it at any length, but I've downloaded it.
Here however, is a nice open sourced overview of 18F radiopharmaceuticals and diagnostic agents: Fluorine-18 Radiochemistry, Labeling Strategies and Synthetic Routes, Orit Jacobson, Dale O. Kiesewetter, and Xiaoyuan Chen Bioconjugate Chemistry 2015 26 (1), 1-18.
It has a nice description of how 18F, which as a 109.8 minute half-life, is synthesized from oxygen's heaviest stable isotope, 18O, for the benefit of anyone who may wish to know.
I trust you had a pleasant weekend. I know I did, contemplating that we kept the Senate and still have hopes for keeping the House.
I just ordered this book from the library after seeing the author speak on CSPAN Book TV.
How to Win the War on TruthSubtitle:
From what I heard in the lecture, it certainly explains how the Republican Party even exists.
NAE Perspective: Eliminating Poverty for a Cooler Planet
This perspective, from the National Academy of Engineering, came in on my National Academy of Science News Feed:
Eliminating Poverty for a Cooler Planet
It's worth a read and consideration; I don't think we in the bourgeois world appreciate the role poverty plays in the destruction of the planetary ecosystem, now well advanced.
One of the reasons I'm a Democrat is that I believe poverty is unacceptable, not just in the United States, but everywhere on the planet.
I believe the article is open sourced, no paywall, but here's a few excerpts:
by Robin Podmore (NAE) is president, Incremental Systems Corp. (IncSys). Anjan Bose (NAE) is Regents Professor, School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Washington State University.
Climate change, the provision of electric power, sustainable food cultivation, and poverty are massive, complex, and interconnected global problems. Given their scope and complexity, they defy solution by a single approach or country. The best chance of attempting to address them is through a system of systems approach. We examine the challenges of each area of concern and propose just such an approach.
We make the case that engineers and businesspeople working or volunteering for professional associations and other organizations can have a significant impact on alleviating global poverty while creating a cooler planet.[1] The goal is to empower small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) to grow into a new generation of just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive corporations.
A System of Systems Approach
System of systems methods are a branch of systems engineering that address complex problems spanning multiple domains or sectors, vast geographies, high-stakes consequences, various disciplines, numerous players, and conflicting objectives all with limited resources (IEEE 2019).
For example, managing the mini- and macrogrid power systems across the six continents is a huge problem in a single domain. In contrast, funding, building, and operating the systems of roads, pipelines, telecommunications, rails, shipping, water, gas, sewer, housing, and electricity across continents is a huge problem covering multiple domains.
The system of systems approach has the following advantages:
By using object-oriented modeling methods, designers create a common language for defining the problem.
This common language can be used to develop frames of reference, thought processes, quantitative analysis, tools, and design methods.
Computer models and digital twins (i.e., simulation models) can reveal mistakes before real-world implementation.
Mistakes made in simulations are not expensive to repair. They do not damage equipment, cause loss of life or limbs, or entail significant economic losses.
The Multidimensional Poverty Index
A system of systems approach needs to have an objective function that is measurable and meaningful at the village, state, national, continental, and global levels.
The UN Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), presented at the NAE 2020 annual meeting by Dr. Sabina Alkire,[2] measures the acute deprivations in health, education, and living standards that a low-income person faces simultaneously. It is designed to accurately assess experiences and impacts of poverty in order to enable measurement of the impacts of community interventions. To that end the index also allows an encompassing view of private and public investments across government departments.
The MPI is an ideal objective function for computer simulations that can effectively inform efforts to alleviate global poverty. A new generation of agent-based modeling software is proposed by IEEE Smart Village and Rotary Smart Village to reduce MPI scores across villages, states, and nations for a range of economic development and investment scenarios...
...Digital twins with simulations provide a powerful means of converting implicit knowledge to explicit knowledge with models and scenarios. One very effective model of knowledge creation explains how both tacit and explicit knowledge are converted into organizational knowledge. Called the SECI model (or the Nonaka-Takeuchi model; Nonaka 2007), it distinguishes four knowledge dimensions: socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (figure 1). Socialization is one-on-one informal mentoring. Tacit knowledge of the mentor is absorbed as tacit knowledge by the apprentice. Externalization is the conversion of tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge that can be replicated, for example through narrated videos of experts performing a task. Combination involves the collection of lessons across different villages, documenting failures and lessons learned as well as successes. Internalization occurs when apprentices apply explicit knowledge to their own problem and build their own intuition. A simulation or model accelerates the entire looped process...
...The recognition-primed decision model (Klein 1993) has been developed by decision makers in mission-critical real-time environments. As businesses become more dynamic and need to respond to real-time events such as cyberattacks, firestorms, and blackouts, the tools of cognitive task analysis and the recognition-primed decision model become more valuable. Many of the tasks performed by villagers—e.g., beekeeping, harvesting honey, processing and/or cooking cassava, installing high-voltage circuits, charging batteries—have a safety and real-time decision-making element. It takes McGyver skills to survive in the villages. The recognition-primed decision model is a way to document these skills (figure 2)
Global Electrification
Large-scale generation and transmission systems (macrogrids) will continue to play a vital role in global electrification. Macrogrids with long-distance AC and DC interties can greatly increase system reliability with high penetrations of renewables since there is still a greater variability of wind and solar over a large geographic region. The latest generation of minigrids with grid-forming and grid-following inverters are being built to standards such that they can connect with macrogrids with a 20-year life.
But there are significant challenges. The World Bank (2019) has projected that 490 million people could be served by 210,000 minigrids by 2030 with almost $200 billion in investment. However, the rate of financing for minigrids is only a fraction of what is needed. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA 2021) estimates that in 2030, 660 million people will still be without access to electricity...
While there are some particulars in this perspective with which I would quibble, I think the general point is clear, by allowing poverty to exist, we impoverish all of humanity.
I am not really into depending on soothsaying. Soothsaying about so called "renewable energy..."
...brought us here, with a climate collapsing, our forests afire, people dying in the streets from extreme heat, crops failing, glaciers disappearing, major river systems drying up, major ecosystems facing massive destruction.
I have been very, very, very, very clear that if the "stated policies" of the IEA are accurate, and nuclear energy is producing only 46 Exajoules of energy in 2050, rather than many hundreds of Exajoules, the planet will be unlivable.
I'm now well into the two decades on this site listening to "doubling" soothsaying for solar and wind energy. The illiterates at Greenpeace have been handing out "by 1990," "by 2000," "by 2010," "by 2020," "by 2030," "by 2040..." bullshit crystal ball readings that they mislabel as "studies" for my whole damned adult life, this when they take time out from putting on other kinds of clown shows and carnival events,
In fact, to return to this dishonesty of using "percent talk," looking at the IEA data in the table - really the only intersecting part - I note that between 2010 and 2020, the solar industry managed to grow by 500%, but remained useless nonetheless.
Again, I use the analogy that it is a different thing to double the money one spends on video games, and doubling one's annual salary, the money spent on food, shelter, health etc.
The solar industry can double because the solar industry is trivial. Period.
The unit of energy is the Joule, not the peak Watt, and not "percent." The prefix "Exa" refers to 10^18.
If antinuke shitheads paid attention to scale - they routinely don't and haven't in my experience of them for decades - they would not have been able to bring us here with their pernicious marketing, bring us to a planet afire.
The "stated policies" of governments right now are reflection of worldwide public stupidity; the situation in Germany is the absolute reification consequences of this deadly rhetoric.
Just yesterday, I posted this news item from the scientific journal Nature that the cost of climate change is far higher than the trillions we squandered on solar and wind to address a reactionary fantasy in this century: Climate change is costing trillions -- and low-income countries are paying the price.
Of course, I fully understand that the solar and wind anti-nuke types here couldn't give a shit about the poor countries. As far as they're concerned, Africa, for instance, is merely a place where their hero Elon Musk can buy slaves to dig cobalt for the Powerwalls about which they like to prattle while the world burns.
Or they'd rather prattle about the "cost" about things storing water with traces of tritium collected over 11 years at Fukushima because most of the world's noxious idiots have no idea how next to harmless traces of tritium are. Indeed there are assholes who caused for the destruction of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant because they don't understand a fucking thing about tritium, or for that matter, the health costs "renewable" combustion of wood, which kills more people in Vermont every winter than tritium from Vermont Yankee ever did during its entire operation.
Rather than spend hundreds of millions of dollars to store weakly tritiated seawater at Fukushima to address the fears of morons, if we'd instead used the money to store harmless seawater to install sewage treatment plants those places in Africa where there are no improved sanitary facilities, how many met lives would have been saved? Let's phrase this differently, how many lives will the release of the tritiated Fukushima water cost?
Are there any bean counting anti-nukes who have a scientifically verifiable number?
I am going to pass out of my lifetime soon enough. I fully realize that I was spending my life screaming at a hurricane. It's true that the blowhards responsible for driving this hurricane of mass destruction still persist, but I have hopes for a smarter, younger generation, one that can see through dangerous soothsaying predictions and change the course of the world.
As the truism sometime attributed to Lincoln goes, "the best way to predict the future is to make it."
My generation, we fucked up. We never stopped spewing reactionary nonsense, that they were halcyon days when our lives depended wholly on the weather. We treated assholes like those in Greenpeace - the people now running Germany - as if they were something other than illiterate clowns. We had people calling them, in defiance of reality, "environmentalists." We not only embraced this fucking nonsense, but we did everything in our bourgeois power to completely destabilize the weather with bullshit "percent talk" - a clear and obvious obfuscation.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Have a great Sunday!
Climate change is costing trillions -- and low-income countries are paying the price.
From my Nature News Briefing email feed:
Climate change is costing trillions — and low-income countries are paying the price
Subtitle:
Some excerpts:
The research, published on 28 October in Science Advances1, estimates that the global economy lost between US$5 trillion and $29 trillion from 1992 to 2013, as a result of human-driven global warming. But the effect was worst in low-income tropical nations, leading to a 6.7% reduction in their national income on average, whereas high-income countries experienced only a 1.5% average decrease...
A graphic draws it out starkly:
Their models found that low-income regions that tend to have warm weather suffer the most from increased temperatures, despite their emissions often being much lower than those of wealthier regions (see ‘Unequal burden’). Countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Mali were among the worst hit, with per capita gross domestic product (GDP) reduced by around 5% annually compared with what it would have been without human-driven heatwaves. By contrast, the GDP reduction in countries such as Canada and Finland is only around 1%...
The full research article to which this news item refers is open sourced and is here: Callahan, Christopher W., Mankin, Justin S., Globally unequal effect of extreme heat on economic growth Science Advances 2022, Vol 8 Issue 43 eadd3726.
In spite of this data, I often hear from people, often "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes, who think that nuclear energy is "too expensive."
Compared to what? Climate change? The total destruction of ecosystems world wide?
These costs will hit the "first" world. They already are.
I trust you're enjoying the weekend.
Carbon emissions hit new high: warning from COP27
This came in on my Nature News Brief feed:
Carbon emissions hit new high: warning from COP27
Subtitle:
Some excerpts:
“Nine years is not very long,” says Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, and a member of the Global Carbon Project, which conducted the analysis. There is clearly no sign of the kind of decrease that is needed to meet international goals, she says, and even with aggressive action, climate models suggest the world is likely to at least temporarily cross the 1.5 °C threshold sometime in the 2030s...
...The emissions increase comes as the world grapples with an energy crisis spurred by the war in Ukraine, while also continuing to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. One contributing factor, scientists say, is a spike in coal consumption, driven in part by European efforts to make up for the loss of natural-gas shipments from Russia. Oil consumption has also increased owing to renewed air travel as governments lift restrictions. Although substantially lower than the 3% annual increases in total fossil CO2 emissions experienced during the early 2000s, this year’s projected 1% increase is more than double the average growth rate of the past decade.
The fastest emissions growth comes from India, where rising coal and oil consumption are driving an estimated 6% increase compared with 2021 (see ‘Emissions update’). Notably, emissions from China — the world’s largest emitter — are projected to fall by nearly 1%; the country’s coal use is projected to remain flat this year owing to strict COVID-19 lockdowns that have curtailed economic growth. Overall, though, scientists estimate that emissions from coal burning will increase by around 1% and could set a new record, driven mostly by a renewed reliance on coal-fired power plants in India and Europe...
A graphic from the article:
Note that this graphic only refers to carbon emissions as dangerous fossil fuel waste and does not largely account for land use changes, thought to contribute about another ten billion tons of CO2 per year.
Actually, as in the case in that anti-nuke hellhole, Germany, and other places the so called "Energy crisis" has actually caused people to substitute coal for gas after substituting gas (and now coal) for nuclear.
If someone with an alcohol problem substitutes beer for scotch, and shaves or puts on make up before heading out to the bar that person isn't "cured" of alcoholism.
Similarly the de facto substitution of gas for coal with some added wind and solar lipstick and other "prettying up" renewable makeup didn't address climate change, nor is it addressing climate change.
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