NNadir
NNadir's JournalDominion Energy Going "Renewable" and Therefore Is Building 8 New Gas Plants.
This comes from the Electricity Trade Publication Power: More Gas, Renewables in Dominion’s Future
The company also said its future plans focus on regulations on carbon emissions in part because Virginia is considering joining the cap-and-trade Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which currently includes nine states in the Northeast. Dominion in a statement Tuesday said new carbon emissions rules are “virtually assured in the future” and laid out what it thinks joining the RGGI would cost customers in its service territory.
“Dominion Energy Virginia remains committed to its longstanding goal of responsible operations; a diverse, balanced generation fleet that avoids over-reliance on a single fuel type or technology; and providing reliable and affordable energy to its customers,” said Paul Koonce, CEO of Dominion Energy Power Generation Group, in a May 1 news release. “These goals guided development of the 2018 Plan and will guide the company in the future.” The IRP represents the company’s forecast of power generation to meet customer demand, and comply with expected regulations, in the next 15 years.
Dominion said its four nuclear units will remain in service even as it adds more gas-fired and renewable power generation. Though the utility’s IRP said its solar fleet “could expand by at least 4,720 megawatts of capacity in the next 15 years,” environmental groups quickly criticized the plan, particularly the addition of new gas plants.
Now, there are zero competent electrical engineers who don't know that 4,720 "megawatts" of "capacity" of solar energy is the equivalent of a continuously operating plant operating at less than 500 MW, since at best, the capacity utilization of the solar crap is lucky if its at 10% in Virginia, unless climate change changes the region into a desert, in which case the solar capacity might reach 20%.
Hence the gas plants.
However, as is the case all over the world with this kind of marketing the gas industry with "lipstick on the pig" rhetoric, I'm sure the MBAs in Dominion want to represent they are going "green."
Both the gas industry and its marketing arm, the so called "renewable energy" industry, benefit from the unchallenged right to dump 100% of the external costs on all future generations, in the gas case, the radioactive and chemical laced flowback water from the Marcellus Shale gas plants, and for the solar case, the toxic metals when the stuff is transformed in 20 to 30 years into highly toxic electronic waste.
At least Dominion is keeping its 4 nuclear reactors operating.
The Surry Nuclear Station, owned by Dominion, containing two nuclear reactors was built in four years, between 1968 and 1972 for a cost of 1.8 billion dollars (2007 currency). In 2018 currency, this transforms into about 2.2 billion dollars. Each reactor is rated to produce 800 MW.
The EIA reports on the output of every operating nuclear reactor in the United States and one can click on the provisional data for 2018, which is current up to February of this year. By use of simple arithmetic, accounting for 86,400 seconds in a day, 3600 seconds in an hour, 31 days in January and 28 in February, that the two reactors at Surry were operating respectively for unit 1 and unit two at 110% capacity for unit 1 (877 MW) and 108% (867 MW) capacity for unit two. The total is 1,743 MW.
The number of people killed by the plants in operation since the 1970's is zero, which is considerably different than the number of people killed by air pollution, which now stands at about 7 million people per year, about half from "renewable" biomass combustion and the other half from dangerous fossil fuel combustion.
The Danes maintain a database, the "Master Register of Wind Turbines" of every single wind turbine they have ever built, including the 6,138 that still are operating, and the 3,232 that have been decommissioned and are now rotting somewhere.
These tables also include the energy output of each operating turbine, with the data for January and February of 2018 included, as well as March 2018 which we cannot compare to the nuclear reactors at Surry.
Again using the fact that the Danish Database reports kWh for each turbine, and using the fact, again, of their being 59 days in February and January combined and 86,400 seconds in a day, we see that the total output of more than 6,000 wind turbines in Denmark was 1,785 MW. Thus it took 6,138 turbines scattered over an entire nation to produce 42 MW more than the Surry nuclear station produced in two buildings.
The Surry nuclear station is licensed up until 2053, but stupid people are sure to shut it down well before then, thus killing people because nuclear power plants save lives, not that the shit for brains types give a shit about human lives, because in their morally twisted universe, the nuclear power plants are "too dangerous," even though they have a spectacular record for saving human lives.
I encountered such a shit for brains recently, at what was billed as the "New Jersey March for Science" which proved to be the "New Jersey March for So Called 'Renewable Energy.'" This asshole, who clearly has no scientific training whatsoever and therefore muttered all during a presentation there about "Navajo" (Dine) miners who were "killed" by uranium mining in the 1950s.
As it turns out, elsewhere, I appealed to a 2009 paper which evaluated the health of all of the 779 "non-white" uranium miners who apparently the only human beings he cares about who have died as a result of energy technology: Radon Exposure and Mortality Among White and American Indian Uranium Miners: An Update of the Colorado Plateau Cohort. (Schubauer-Berigan, Am J Epidemiol 2009 ;169
18–730)
Quoth I then:
Let’s ignore the “white” people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.
Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991 and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Let’s be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an “object.” Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The “Standard Mortality Ratio,” or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11. The “Standard Mortality Ratio” is the ratio, of course, the ratio between the number of deaths observed in the study population (in this case Native American Uranium Miners) to the number of deaths that would have been expected in a control population. At an SMR of 0.85, thus 54 deaths is (54/.085) – 54 = -10. Ten fewer Native American uranium miners died from “cancers other than lung cancer” than would have been expected in a population of that size. At the lower 95% confidence limit SMR, 0.64, the number would be 31 fewer deaths from “cancers other than lung cancer,” whereas at the higher limit SMR, 1.11, 5 additional deaths would have been recorded, compared with the general population.
Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 – (20 +9) = 63.
By the way, in the period between 1950 and the present day, according to statistics from the US Department of Labor, 10,914 coal miners died.
One of the big industrial uses for coal - and one which has nothing to do with power plants - is to make steel. According to a commentary published in Nature Geoscience solar and wind facilities require 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminum, and 50 times more iron, copper and glass than equivalent scale nuclear or dangerous fossil fuel facilities.
Every ton of concrete manufactured is responsible for the release of 0.9 tons of carbon dioxide; aluminum production consumes about 3% of the world's electricity, and iron is reduced by coal, not that 10,000 coal deaths would matter as much as 63 "Navajo" (Dine) uranium miners from the 1950's.
Of course, you can get lots of shit for brains types who will come here to announce that what took place over a four year period between 1968 to 1972 is now impossible.
Therefore we must now pour concrete on the continental shelf and send dangerous fossil fuel powered ships carrying coal based steel and God knows what else out to destroyed benthic ecosystems to serve the wind God, with the real purpose being nothing more than to make the gas industry continue until the last molecule of methane is crunched out of the earth, burned and converted into atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Nuclear power plants are "too expensive." We are too stupid, too ignorant, too - well, I wish I knew - something or other to build nuclear plants at the same cost with which we built more than 100 of them in this country while providing the cheapest electricity in the world. We are dead sure that what has already happened is impossible.
I once heard from an ignoramus here who called up one of my old posts to note that a tunnel collapsed at the Hanford nuclear reservation and thus proved, at least to his tiny mind, that nuclear power is "unsafe."
I used to confront ignorance like that. No more. I'm too old to waste time on ignorance and stupidity.
I suspect the real reason that nuclear power plants are "too expensive" is this kind of thinking, the thinking that is perfectly OK to kill any number of tens of thousands, tens of millions people because someone somewhere might die from something involving a nuclear power plant.
Maybe its thinking like that, the thinking that 63 uranium related lung cancer deaths among miners - many of whom actually lived to be old men anyway - matters more than 70 million air pollution deaths every decade, 10,000 coal mining deaths - and that a collapsed tunnel at an old weapons plant "proves" something.
If we're going to calculate costs so assiduously we might include the cost of deaths from lung cancer and heart disease caused by air pollution. In this country, every year we spend 80 billion dollars on cancer alone, never mind COPD and heart disease, to both of which air pollution is a also contributor. And let's be clear on something, OK, the number of people who have died from cancers related to air pollution outstrips the number of people who have died from radiation related cancers by many orders of magnitude. It's not even close.
Someone though, somewhere, should look into the question of why what has already happened - the citizens of 1968-1972 provided life saving infrastructure that is still operating at peak performance in 2018 - is now impossible. Why are nuclear power plants "too expensive" now when it was possible to build more than 100 in this country in 25 years while providing the lowest cost electricity in the world?
When the gas runs out - and it will - and all that's left is the chemicals and toxic materials leached from the abandoned gas fields, our generation will not be forgiven by history, nor should it be. And when that gas runs out, and it will, we are going to find out what it's like to live in those parts of the world where the power gets turned on - if your lucky - two or three hours a day. That's our "gift" to future generations, very much unlike the gift given to our generation by the people who built the Surrey nuclear plant.
Have a great weekend.
ERCOT hoping the wind blows this summer in Texas to prevent rolling power outages.
This comes from Power, a trade publication for the electric power industry.
Power Magazine 4/30/18 ERCOT Summer Rotating Outages In Texas Still a Possibility.
In its final Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report for the upcoming summer season, which spans June to September, the grid entity said it expects to have sufficient generation—78,184 MW—to meet a summer peak load forecast of 72,756 MW based on “normal weather conditions.” That forecast, it noted however, is expected to soar 1,600 MW higher than the all-time peak demand record set in August 2016.
The projected reserve margin is below ERCOT’s target of 13.75%. Still, the report presents a more optimistic assessment of ERCOT’s total generation resources than it predicted in its preliminary summer seasonal assessment of resource adequacy (SARA) report released in March. The preliminary report projected a higher summer peak load forecast of 72,974 MW, which ERCOT anticipated it would barely meet with a total resource capacity of 77,658 MW...
...The SARA outlines five potential risk scenarios. The first is modeled on extreme weather conditions based on a long heat wave and devastating drought during the summer of 2011, an event that forced the grid operator to cut power to large industrial users to avoid rolling blackouts. An extreme summer forecast could boost summer demand to 75,958 MW, outstripping available generation resources. The other scenarios anticipate maintenance outages, forced outages, and low wind output.
“Since we do have more resources, that risk is probably reduced a little bit. But again, really, the focus for ERCOT is to make sure that we can quickly respond to those situations—and appropriately—to any type of change in system condition,” Warnken said.
ERCOT has been preparing for tight operating reserves owing to a spate of recent plant retirements—including of major coal baseload generators—and delays in some planned resources.
The bold, of course, is mine.
Don't worry; be happy. Unbearably hot days with stagnant air are surely unknown in Texas.
Wind power is cheap, at least if you don't have to pay for replacing all your food because your refrigerator goes down because of a rolling blackout because, um, the wind isn't blowing on a 100F afternoon.
That of course, won't happen, because, well, because it won't.
Analysis of Failure Modes in Kesterite Solar Cells.
The paper with the title above in the primary scientific literature comes from a new journal, ACS Applied Energy Materials and it appears in the "Editor's Choice" section on the ACS Publications page, which means that it is open sourced. I came across it while I was on my way to something else.
The full paper may be accessed here. Analysis of Failure Modes in Kesterite Solar Cells (Grenet et al ACS Applied Energy Materials ASAP, May 5, 2018)
I'm not big on reading solar "breakthrough" papers - after having sat through expositions of tens of thousands of them over half a century, half a century in which the solar industry has proved entirely useless at addressing serious environmental problems relating to dangerous fossil fuels. Mostly I poke into them with the limited interest of understanding exactly how toxic and unsustainable they are, popular "wisdom" notwithstanding.
The solar industry has not worked, is not working, and will not work to arrest the use of dangerous fossil fuels.
Not so long ago, a dumb guy, responding to my continual references to the "problem" of indium supply piped in to inform me that he had called up the web page of the Geological Survey to disprove my contention that the solar industry is not sustainable because the metals used in it are decidedly not, "renewable."
One never knows how to react to these sorts of people.
The toxic cheerleading consisted entirely of him spending 15 seconds googling "Indium" to get to the Geological Survey page that told him everything is fine, and anyway "'We'll' just recycle it" where, as usual, the "we'll" in question is not him but rather some third world person who's job it is to clean up our "green" stuff.
We don't give a shit about poor people, especially the people who will be later subjects for discussion in medical journals like this one:
Serial evaluations at an indium‐tin oxide production facility (Cummings et al Am. J. Ind. Med. 56:300–307, 2013):
previous studies, exposure assessments have been lacking, and the role of serial medical testing in disease detection and prevention has not been evaluated.
Don't worry. Be happy. Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) solar cells are "green," because, um, we live in the first world, and anyway, even if these people can't breathe because of indium, I can't live without my ITO (Indium tin oxide) cell phone.
I can't live without it. I can't.
Dumb guys aside who launch into tirades about my repeated claim that the neither the solar nor the wind nor any of the other industries called by the oxymoron "renewable energy" will ever be as safe or as sustainable or as clean as the nuclear industry, the paper cited above shows that even if the general public can't catch its breath from cheering for solar and cursing nuclear, scientists have been questioning whether the solar industry is, in fact, green.
I'll take the luxury of citing the opening paragraph of the title paper even though its open sourced and you can read it yourself:
Among the thin-film solar cell technologies, Cu(In,Ga)(S,Se)2 (CIGS) and CdTe have already demonstrated power conversion efficiency (PCE) values above 22% at laboratory scale and above 15% for large modules.(1) Industrialization of these technologies is already ongoing, with cumulative production over 4 GWp in 2016.(2) However, both of these technologies contain elements that have been listed by the European Commission as Critical Raw Materials (CRM) for the energy sector,(3,4) namely gallium, indium, and tellurium because of their scarcity in the Earth’s crust(5) and their use in other markets. Additionally, progressive implementation worldwide of regulations similar to Restriction on the Use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) will limit or prevent the use of cadmium in these technologies,(6) both in the absorber layer (CdTe) and in the buffer layer (CdS).
Kesterite semiconductors Cu2ZnSn(S,Se)4 (CZTSSe) have been identified as promising candidates for thin-film photovoltaic (PV) applications due to their similarities to CIGS materials without containing CRM. To date, a record efficiency of 12.7% has been obtained for a CZTSSe solar cell with a CdS/In2S3 buffer layer(7) and 9.0% for a Cd and CRM-free (i.e., without Cd, In, or any CRM) kesterite solar cell.(8)
I hope it's obvious the bold is mine.
The "4GWp" expands to "4 gigawatts peak" which - given that the capacity utilization of solar cells even in deserts seldom rises above 10 - 15% - means that the entire installed solar industry in 2016, in terms of average continuous power output is the equivalent of building one 400 MW gas plant on the entire planet in 2016. (The power conversion efficiency is not the same as capacity utilization; the former refers to the percent recovery of the energy of incident light.)
Don't worry; be happy. A dumb guy can probably put their minds to rest about "CRM's" by googling his way to the USGS website on "Indium."
Returning to the paper, despite reference to "cadmium free" there's a lot of reference to Kesterite on a cadmium selenide layer, since kesterite on cadmium selenide works better than pure kesterite solar cells:
The caption:
Note that all the best performing cells using the Schockley-Queisser efficiency limit all contain cadmium.
The Schockley-Queisser limit refers to the theoretical limit of power conversion efficiency and was discovered by the famously racist Nobel Laureate William Schockley who, when he wasn't studying semiconductors claimed expertise in racist genetic theories even though he knew as little about genetics as Helen Caldicott, MD, knows about nuclear power, or as much as Albert_Olszewski MD, who is running for the Republican Senate nomination in Montana knows about climate change, even though (as noted in another post here):
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I was very susceptible to Appeal to Authority arguments.
...as an old man, not so much.
Anyway it appears that there are lots of ways for kesterite cells to fail, and the authors give us a nice chart to show us the ways:
Oh, and in case you're laboring under the illusion that only kesterite solar cells have failure modes, I assure you that you are wrong. Every damn solar cell on this planet, pretty much, will be transformed into electronic waste within the next thirty years, especially in hot deserts.
But don't worry; be happy. Probably someone else will have to clean it up, not you, especially if you're "green."
Have a pleasant evening.
Wow. This is different. CNN actually notices there might be an ethical problem with your Tesla.
Is there such a thing as an ethical electric car?Dirty Energy
As long as we're all "green" in the United States - our electric cars, our solar cells, our wind turbines - well - as long as we're "green" who gives a rat's ass about poor people, child slavery, any of that unpleasant stuff?
We're "green..."
Or maybe not. Despite all of us who have broken our arms patting ourselves on the back for being "green," last week we were at 411.68 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 in the atmosphere, as opposed to 387.45 ten years ago.
I wonder how much of the two trillion bucks we just spent in the last ten years on "green" wind turbines and "green" solar cells went to educate the third world children who work our metal mines.
A lot, ya think?
I'm sure Elon Musk is all over it, since he's a goddamned hero, as I hear every time is holy name is mentioned.
We may be amused about public lying by the orange nightmare, but we're less interested in how we lie to ourselves. And that my friends, is a problem.
Have a nice "hump day" tomorrow.
I just stumbled into a very old paper by "Lord Rayleigh" contemplating water boiling in a pot.
John William Strutt, the 3rd Baron Rayleigh, commonly known as "Lord Rayleigh," was the winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the gas Argon, which is now a very important gas with tremendous industrial application. (It is about 1% of air, by mass, but since it is non-reactive and colorless, no one before Rayleigh realized it was there. His discovery was actually incredible and relied on appreciation of very small differences in highly precise measurements of the density of nitrogen.)
"Lord Rayleigh" also discovered why the sky is blue, an effect to this day known as "Rayleigh scattering."
Recently I have been considering, in connection with understanding the physics of liquid plutonium, the physics of bubbles, a subject about which I know very little, when I came across a paper in one of my favorite journals. The paper is this one: New Modeling Strategies Evaluate Bubble Growth in Systems of Finite Extent: Energy and Environment Implications (Chatzis et al, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2018, 57 (16), pp 5680–5689)
While this paper was partially about a subject I rather despise but still study (since one must know the enemy), the chemistry and physics of dangerous fossil fuels, I was inspired to go to the references and encountered a paper from the early 20th century, one by Lord Rayleigh.
Lord Rayleigh, O. M. F. R. S., VIII. On the Pressure Developed in a Liquid During the Collapse of a Spherical Cavity. London Edinb. Dubl. Philos. Mag. 1917, 34, 94– 98, DOI: 10.1080/14786440808635681
I quote:
How beautiful is that?!!!
One of the world's greatest scientists stopping, at the height of his fame, to wonder about what happens to bubbles when water boils.
Of course that's probably very much connected with why he was a great scientist, because even bubbles and the sounds they made interested him.
This struck me as very wonderful, and I thought I'd write it down.
I hope you're having a pleasant weekend. This little find has made mine.
These shibboleths are additional cases of selective attention, and frankly they're nonsense.
Let's look at the artificial criteria set for nuclear energy, which is that at no point in the next 1,000 or next million years depending on the rhetoric of the people who hate it without knowing anything at all about it, the industry prove that no one will be harmed by it.
This is a standard that no form of energy - were any other form of energy subject to it - can meet.
In a rational and morally reasonable world, the external costs of energy need to be included in the price, but they are not. Fossil fuels and biomass are allowed to kill tens of millions of lives - roughly 70 million every ten years - without being required to pay a penny of medical costs, never mind the costs of lost productivity is not charged either to the users or the producers of dangerous fossil fuel. It's charged to all future generations.
The leaking wells, the mountains whose tops have been removed, the mercury pollution, the completely ignored radioactive pollution from gas hydraulic fragmentation work (fracking) or the destruction of the planetary atmosphere, damage that will remain essentially forever.
"Renewable energy" is not at all actually "renewable," nor is the criteria for "pricing coming down" at all honest.
The first statement is true because the elements utilized in this technology can easily be depleted and in fact, their mining his highly fossil fuel dependent. I recently posted a set of graphics from a recent paper in the primary scientific literature showing this fact, because there are more and more scientists who are questioning this cockamamie scheme to destroy the planet.
Some life cycle graphics on so called "rare earth elements," i.e. the lanthanides.
Predictably this post had no response because the ingrained mythology with these "nuclear is expensive," "renewables are cheap" shit one never stops hearing consists now entirely of people sticking cotton in their ears and chanting - without a shred of thought - these same delusional slogans. But the result is clear enough. Without high density liquid fuels and extractants the useless and very expensive wind industry would collapse entirely like a turbine in Diller.
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But it's not the fact that wind turbines seldom work for more than 20-25 years, as I've pointed out with many appeals to the Danish Database of its more than 6000 turbines that are incapable of producing as much energy as one large nuclear plant can produce in a single building, never mind that Denmark has already decommissioned more than 3000 of these disgusting hulks of wasted metal, the coal used to refine that metal, the gas and coal to make the misused concrete and marine and land based diesel fueled ships and trucks.
This database is here: Danish Energy Agency Master Register of Wind Turbines
I've analyzed this database at various points in various blogs, here's text from a post I offered on another website:
Of the 5,275 turbines still operating there are 13 that lasted longer than 34 years and 210 days, the longest, having operated (as of March 31, 2015) for 36 years and 303 days. The mean age of operating Danish wind turbines is 15.25 years, 15 years and 92 days.
In March of 2015, the entire Danish wind industry produced 1,137,405,953 kWh (or 1.13 TWh) of electricity, which is the equivalent of 4.0967 petajoules (0.0041 exajoules). Thus for the 31 days of March 2015, the average continuous power output of the 5,275 operating wind turbines was 1529 MW. Since the rated (peak) capacity of the wind turbines operating in March of 2015 was 4096 MW, it follows that the capacity utilization of wind turbines in Denmark was 31.2%. These figures should make it clear that two average sized nuclear power plants, which would not have required thousands of trucks and cranes to travel all over Denmark trashing the landscape nor barges in the parts North Sea that the Danes have not yet trashed with oil and gas rigs as well as wind turbines, could have easily out produced all of the Danish wind turbines. Further there is no reason, other than appeals to stupidity and selective attention on the part of vociferous anti-nukes crying over a few atoms of tritium or some other such nonsense, that two hypothetical nuclear reactors could not be designed to last 60 or even 80 years. Even further, the nuclear power plants would not need redundant infrastructure to back them up.
Sustaining the Wind, Part I
The last sentence in the reproduced text brings me to the big, giant, obviously fraudulent lie that one hears over and over and over and over: "Renewable prices are falling."
If I buy a car that runs only 30% of the time that gets 40 miles per gallon when it does, but also require another car that runs the other 70% of the time, and both cars cost the same and both cars need insurance, maintenance, etc, am I being honest or am I being a freaking liar if I point to the one that gets 40 miles per gallon, isolate its cost from others and announce loudly that "driving is cheap!"?
Or am paying selective attention if I ignore the cost of the other car that I must have if I want to drive at will, particularly if I have little control or insight when the "cheap" car will be available to run?
Without access to dangerous natural gas and or coal, the renewable industry is useless. Moreover both systems are redundant and it dishonest and entirely misleading to cite the cost of one without acknowledging the cost of the other.
The inherent requirement for redundancy is wasted resources, and wasted money. I note that if I stick a neodymium iron boride magnet on a wind turbine, and another in a gas plant, the return on the external costs of manufacturing the magnet per MWh for the gas plant goes up, not down.
Moreover the external costs of each, destruction to the environment and to human and ecosystem health, accrues to the other.
Finally, it can be shown by appeal to the fact that a power plant boiler fueled by dangerous fossil fuels cannot, by definition be an adiabatic system, i.e. that it must exchange heat with the environment to work at all, it follows that shutting a gas or coal or oil powered plant actually requires that energy be wasted. If I have a pot of boiling water on my burner, and I turn it off for an hour, come back and decide I need boiling water and turn the burner back on, the water will not boil instantly. I will waste gas heating it to the boiling point all over. Even 1st graders know that. How is that so called "renewable energy" advocates never think of that issue? Is it related to the fact that they're not big on "thinking?"
Is that wise for what is already a trivial form of energy, so called "renewable energy?"
In this country, the United States, we built more than 100 nuclear reactors in less than 25 years while providing some of the cheapest electricity on earth. Why are we here to announce that what has already happened is impossible? Could it be that we listened to people with very, very, very, very poor minds, assholes like the anti-nuke Amory Lovins, Helen Caldicott, Joe Romm, Harvey Wasserman, bourgoeis shit for brains people who worked like arsonists complaining about forest fires as they worked to destroy the manufacturing infrastructure, the intellectual infrastructure, the engineering schools of the only truly new form of energy discovered in the last 100 years, a form of energy discovered and developed by some of the finest minds the world has ever known?
Can it be that picayune selective attention, emphasizing Fukushima over 7 million air pollution deaths every damn year has caused a reign of stupidity that is destroying the future?
How come we can't do what we've already done? What's the reason? Any idea?
Right now, that "cheap renewable energy" has lead to the countries in Europe having the highest electricity rates being, Denmark (where electricity is almost double the price in France) and Germany. The Danes can't drill for oil and gas in the North Sea fast enough, and the Germans have no plan to stop digging (and importing) coal.
Eurostat Energy Prices
Finally, we squandered more than 2 trillion dollars on wind and gas in the last ten years, with the result that this hyped crap doesn't even produce 10 of the 576 exajoules of energy we use each year on this planet.
This information is here, in the UNEP Frankfurt School Report, issued each year: GLOBAL TRENDS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT 2017
and here:
IEA 2017 World Energy Outlook, Table 2.2 page 79 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)
The so called "renewable energy" industry is not at all cheap because it soaks money for almost no result. It hasn't worked to solve environmental problems, it isn't working to do so, and it won't work to do so.
The whole damn so called "renewable energy" enterprise is a huge international effort for people to lie to themselves, and to destroy the future.
There was, after all, a reason that humanity largely abandoned so called "renewable energy" in the 19th century, when the population was less than 1/7th of what it is now. The reason is that then - even more than today - most human beings lived short miserable lives in dire poverty.
And that's what we're offering our children and their children and their children and their great-great-great grandchildren, short miserable lives of dire poverty albeit, unlike the unfortunate bulk of the world population in the 19th century, lives in a severely degraded environment.
They will look at those rotting wind turbines on land and in the sea, be drinking water with the leaky toxins of land filled solar cells, perhaps billion of them, and think of us with hatred and contempt. From my perspective they will be totally justified.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Thanks for asking. Have a nice evening.
In a sensible world, this plutonium would be highly valued.
Metallic plutonium, of which all warheads are composed, albeit as a gallium alloy used to stabilize the delta phase, has unique properties, the most important of which is its very low melting point.
Its metallic forms a binary eutectic with iron, and a well characterized ternary eutectic with cobalt and cerium.
More intriguing is its eutectic with neptunium, suggesting that weapons grade could almost instantaneously rendered entirely unsuitable for nuclear weapons by applying the "Kessler Solution".
By the use of the neptunium/plutonium eutectic, it would be relatively straight forward to completely and totally phase out nuclear weapons.
These properties - the properties of plutonium eutectics - were explored in a marvelous reactor type that ran at Los Alamos for about two years in a very small reactor operating at about 1 MW of power in the early 1960s, before stupid journalists began holding forth on subjects about which they know nothing. The reactor could be easily contained in a small garage.
Because the phase system of plutonium includes the insolubility of the fission products strontium and cesium. This means that the use of liquid plutonium fuels allows for spontaneous separation - without appeal to any kind of chemical reprocessing - of fission products from fuel. Since cesium boils at a relatively low temperature, this means that a continuous separation via distillation is possible, allowing for the recovery of pure radiocesium for use to irradiate pollutants such as the alkyl halides, in particular those that are extremely intractable, PCBs and PFOS.
Liquid plutonium has the highest known value of eta, the neutron yield per fission, meaning it is quite simply, the world's best breeding fuel. It has a breeding ratio of 1.5, unprecedented, suggesting a doubling time of 7 years.
(Whitman, Fast Breeder Reactors, Proceedings of the London Conference on Fast Breeder Reactors, Pergamon Press 1966 pg 286.)
At a specific power of 1MW/kg of liquid plutonium this means that the 54 metric tons that the idiot reporter thinks of in terms of "nuclear explosions" even though he clearly has no idea how nuclear weapons work, is sufficient to produce about 54000 megawatts of power.
In order to produce this power level, each second 671 milligrams would need to fission.
In January of 2018, according to the EIA, the consumption of electricity (accessed 4/23/18) was 373,213 thousand MWh, which translates to an average continuous power of 502000 MW.
Thus the surplus plutonium is enough produce more than 10% of US electricity. Moreover, since it has a high breeding ratio and a short doubling time none of it need be consumed; after 7 years it would be sufficient (particularly in a "breed and burn" reactor that is designed to not be refueled over periods of decades) to provide more than 100000 MW, after 14 years, 200,000 MW.
The EIA figures for January 2018 show that 64,455,000 tons of coal were burned to generate electricity in January 2018, which is up 1.8% over January of 2017, or 24 tons per second.
In order to save some of the 19,000 lives lost from air pollution every damn day, 365 days a year, 366 in leap years, we would need to completely eliminate this 24 tons a second of coal, not that we have any stupid journalists anywhere on this planet who give a shit about the 7 million people who die each year from air pollution while they prattle on ignorantly about putative "nuclear explosions.
As for "thousands of nuclear explosions" this is a remark from a scientifically illiterate shithead journalist who doesn't know shit from shinola about plutonium and doesn't apparently know what a fucking "disaster" is. A disaster is those 7 million people, not the 54 metric tons of plutonium. A "disaster" is not something that resides in his imagination to the exclusion of everything else. A disaster is what's happening.
As for "slips of the hand" one of those occurred in 1946 and killed Louis Slotin. It didn't cause a "nuclear explosion." Of the 8 people in the room, 3 lived for more than 40 years after the accident, several died in accidents, and one seems to have died from a radiation related cancer.
I know more about plutonium than the reporter at Reuters will ever know, especially since he's clearly starting somewhere close to zero.
We live in times that exalt stupidity, fear and ignorance. Journalists are a big part of the problem.
In recent years I've come to know many young men and women, people in their late teens and early twenties who are nowhere near as stupid as we are. In fact, it's been my pleasure to know many who are clearly brilliant, unbelievably so.
The plutonium described here was prepared by a race of people in a race to assure they would be known as the most absurd generation ever to have lived. These young people are vastly smarter than that generation was.
We are leaving these young people with a planet with depleted resources and a severely degraded environment, but at least, being much smarter than we are, at least they will have this plutonium and plenty of available and already mined depleted uranium in order to make more of it.
Regrettably, this, it seems to me, to be their last best hope. Thank God they have it, even if we're way to unintelligent to have understood it ourselves.
Because we ended as lovers...
Some life cycle graphics on so called "rare earth elements," i.e. the lanthanides.
Source: Behind the Scenes of Clean Energy: The Environmental Footprint of Rare Earth Products (Zhao et alACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2018, 6 (3), pp 3311–3320)
No comment from me, just some pictures, all referring to the preparation of 1 kg of the various indicated materials:
Table 1. Life Cycle Impacts of 1 kg REO Common to Bayan Obo Mines and Ion-Adsorption Clays
Table 2. Life Cycle Impacts of 1 kg Phosphor
Table 3. Life Cycle Impacts of 1 kg NdFeB Magnets Produced by Two Facilities Using Two REE Sources
Have a nice evening.
Recovery of Phosphate from Human Waste.
Many large areas of the planet have been sacrificed for so called "renewable energy," including places like Glen Canyon sacrificed by an "environmentalist" named David Brower from the Sierra club in a kind of cynical trade he had no moral right to make, something to somewhat dubious credit he regretted, not that the Canyon was ever restored, anymore than the Colorado River Delta's destroyed habitat was ever restored.
(The current Sierra Club is no better: Right now they are engaged in a completely destructive attempt to sacrifice huge swathes of the continental shelf off the coast of New Jersey for idiotic unsustainable wind turbines that will be leaky navigation hazards 20 years after they're built as well a huge environmental insult to the benthic ecosystem, not that these airheads give a shit about science. Apparently the illiterate adviser to the government here from the Sierra club hates nuclear energy and is willing to send thousands of ships to sea loaded with coal based steel and coal derived concrete, because, he says, of a few uranium Navajo miners he heard about from the 1950's. What an asshole...all the wind turbines in Denmark, more than 5000 of them, can't produce as much energy as one of the two Salem Creek nuclear power plants does in one single building.)
Among the most egregious destroyed ecosystems sacrificed on the altar of so called "renewable energy" - in this case owing to run off from the agricultural land in Iowa devoted to "renewable" ethanol for cars - is the delta of North America's largest river, the Mississippi.
Hypoxia in the northern Gulf of Mexico: Does the science support the Plan to Reduce, Mitigate, and Control Hypoxia?
However not all of the destruction of the Mississippi delta and similarly surface bodies, both fresh and saline, threatened by nitrate and phosphate driven hypoxia, "eutrophication," is tied to agricultural runoff either for putative "renewable automobile fuel" or for food. Some of it derives from run-off from cities and large towns and is tied to wastewater treatment.
Fecal matter is rich in phosphorous, and many wastewater treatment systems are not equipped to remove very much of it, and it ends up in rivers, lakes, creeks, ponds, bays and seas where it taxes the ecosystems.
Phosphorous remains an essential element for maintaining the "green revolution" of the 1950's - specifically the agricultural revolution that allows us to feed a large, if stressed, human population, now exceeding seven billion people.
It is thus with interest that I came across a paper in the scientific literature today written by scientists at Cal Tech that offers an interesting approach to addressing this problem, by electrolyzing waste water: Phosphate Recovery from Human Waste via the Formation of Hydroxyapatite during Electrochemical Wastewater Treatment (Hoffman et al, ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2018, 6 (3), pp 3135–3142).
From the opening text:
Enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) may provide effective phosphorus recovery in centralized wastewater treatment processes,(8) but in rural communities, small onsite sanitation systems (e.g., septic tanks, latrines, or cesspools) make this technology challenging without engineered processes to maintain the correct microbial population.(9) Phosphorus recovery in rural communities can be accomplished via forced precipitation as struvite (NH4MgPO4·6H2O) or hydroxyapatite (Ca5(PO4)3OH), but these strategies typically require separation of urine and feces, addition of chemicals, or use of sacrificial electrodes that further complicates and increases the cost of existing wastewater treatment strategies.(10?12)
Electrochemical systems have previously been suggested for phosphorus removal from wastewater. Electrochemical coagulation of phosphate from synthetic wastewater has been achieved using sacrificial aluminum or iron anodes,(13,14) as well as magnesium anodes, which allowed for struvite recovery from ammonium-containing solutions.(15) However, this type of electrode is depleted by oxidation and needs to be replaced on a regular basis...
The authors have developed a new series of electrodes (albeit electrodes containing the rare elements tantalum (a conflict metal) and iridium, although the main material seems to be the wonder material titanium dioxide (rutile), one of the more common minerals on earth.
During a process utilizing these electrodes the authors report the precipitation of a phosphate mineral, hydroxyapatite, after describing their goals thusly:
They use synthetic and real toilet water in their experiments, and recover calcium, phosphate and the eutrophic participant ammonium as well. A graphic from one set of experiments:
The caption:
They do considerable analysis of their phosphate material, x-ray crystallography, all that good stuff, and then produce more results relevant here with real toilet water:
The caption:
The authors find a limitation, the concentration of calcium needs to be relatively high to obtain nearly complete precipitation of the phosphate, although they note that urine usually contains significant calcium.
Here is a theory vs. experimentt graph of recovery of phosphate:
The caption:
They write:
Equations 1 and 3 are ordinary equilibrium equations one might find in an introductory chemistry course:
They have a nice 3D theoretical prediction graph on the relationship between calcium concentration and phosphate removal:
The caption:
Discussion of toilet water might be inclined to induce giggles, but it is a very serious matter.
As it happens the number of people who [Idie from a lack of toilets or even more primitive waste treatment facilities numbers about 361,000 human beings a year, children under the age of 5.
This amounts to roughly 1000 children a day.
Toilets and the water in them are serious issues, very serious issues.
But in this country, we're not at all into seriousness.
It's a little off topic as I consider the proposed destruction of the coastal benthic zone of New Jersey for a literally quixotic adventure in providing rotting steel at sea for future generations to clean up, but...but...
By contrast to the thousand children people who die each day because of trivializing selective attention, it can be shown by appeal to the scientific literature that over a period of a half a century, the number of excess deaths attributed to uranium mining by Navajos owing to cancer was less than 100.
Still, according to the asshole at the New Jersey Sierra Club, a fetish over the miners justifies destroying the benthic zone of the New Jersey coastal shelf.
The asshole notwithstanding, if we're going to bring electricity to the third world to provide toilets that are safe for the environment, that electricity needs to be nuclear electricity.
If you want to be a real environmentalist, as opposed to an ersatz environmentalist spewing 50 year old slogans about uranium miners, you need to read and think about what you read.
Have a nice Sunday evening.
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