NNadir
NNadir's JournalOf course, we're all going to live in an EV nirvana so there's no need to read this paper.
The paper is: Uncertain Future of American Lithium: A Perspective until 2050 (Alessio Miatto, Paul Wolfram, Barbara K. Reck, and Thomas E. Graedel Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (23), 16184-16194)
The paper has four lithium supply scenarios, the two of which sound like something I know being these:
The Adaptation Challenges scenario is developed upon SSP4, in which affluent countries invest in environmental protection programs but international cooperation is minimal, leaving each country to solve its own problems. Countries like the United States have enough expenditure capacity to support the adoption of EVs and clean energy grids, but on a global scale, the adoption of low-carbon solutions is inconsistent and insufficient to meet the climate change goals. Lithium use and associated new technologies grow in wealthy countries, but lithium recycling is not sought after because mining and associated environmental impacts occur in other countries.
2.1.4. Lithium Scenario 4: Fossil Fuel Everything
This scenario is built upon SSP5, in which nonrenewable energy sources dominate future demand. There are little to no incentives to promote the adoption of electric vehicles. Lithium use grows moderately, pushed by affluent environmentally conscious citizens rather than public policies. Lithium recycling is neglected because of the modest sales numbers of EVs and PVs with energy storage systems.
Don't worry, be happy. They'll be plenty of lithium and plenty of cobalt and nickel too, not only to build billions of Tesla cars to drive to Space X platforms for trips to the moon as well as to build that pile of batteries the size of Mount Whitney in California in order to cover those periods, of which many have occurred in recent weeks, where all the wind turbines in California spread over thousands of square miles can't produce as much energy as Diablo Canyon produces on 12 acres of land.
Enjoy the workweek.
Technical bookshelves seem to have vanished in Princeton, NJ.
When I first moved to the Princeton area in the early 1990's one of the most magnificent places in the whole town, for me at least, was the university bookstore, then on University place. One could go in there at lunch and just browse walls of books on higher mathematics, advanced chemistry, concentrations of the punctilios in physics, computer science.
I always found myself like a kid in a candy shop, although the candies were very expensive. However I often asked "Santa," in this case my wife, for books from that store. It was magnificent.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but the age of the university bookstore, across the country, is over, and certainly this includes Princeton University. Most university bookstores have been outsourced to Barnes and Nobel, with the result that most university bookstores are uninteresting over all, and feature books like "Killing so and so," by the racist moron Bill O'Reilly.
Sigh...
Princeton designated Labyrinth books on Nassau Street as its bookstore, and overall, Labyrinth is decidedly not Barnes and Nobel. It's still a fine, rich, bookstore, but...
Last I was in there, before Covid, their Chemistry section was withered, but they still had a decent number of math and engineering texts. Two years ago I was able to buy several technical engineering works for my son for Christmas.
I went in and downstairs yesterday. It's all gone now.
Sigh...
One can still buy technical books, of course, on line, direct from the publishers, but there's nothing like being able to browse and in so doing, expand your mind...
Saad Amer describes what it was like to work on a report produced by the IPCC.
It...was...the...junior...high...school...TEACHER...who made him.
The career section of the journal Nature featured this article, which is probably open sourced: An IPCC reviewer shares his thoughts on the climate debate
I’ve always been very passionate about environmental justice. When I was 13 years old, with guidance from my now-retired biology teacher Patrick Murray, I did my first carbon-sequestration assessment on Long Island, near New York City in the United States, where I grew up.
I wanted to save a 40-hectare piece of land called the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, near the town of Brookhaven, from industrial development by proving that it acted as a natural sink for carbon dioxide emissions. By measuring the circumference of a tree’s trunk, I worked out its average sequestration rate, and then multiplied that number by the quantity of trees on the preserve to get an estimated total. We succeeded in saving the land.
Patrick is still one of my best friends. He was the one who encouraged me to join my school’s science-research programme. It was a supervised, independent class held during lunch periods, where around 10 kids would spend time looking into whatever ideas mattered to them. For me, that was always environmental issues...
...After my work at the Fish Thicket Land Preserve, I was invited to present my research at a conference at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy lab on Long Island. I was then invited to conduct research there and began working with Keith Jones, a physicist and climate scientist. I worked with him over the summer holiday, and would come in after school or at weekends once school started...
...After that, I applied to Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study environmental science and public policy. I come from a low-income, immigrant family. When I was accepted, I became part of the first generation in my family to go to university...
...Young people feel immense climate anxiety. We have a sense of existential doom, particularly in the face of overwhelmingly insignificant action on local, national and global levels. I think people typically underestimate what young people understand. But even when I was doing all that work on that preserve, explaining environmental concepts to eight-year-olds, they totally got it...
I also grew up on Long Island, albeit a very long time ago, and like Dr. Amer, I had a teacher, in my case a high school English teacher who changed my life for the better.
We shit on teachers at the expense of the future.
Reading banned books: An important remedy for America's backsliding democracy
A link came to me this morning in an email from the Cornell University Institute of Politics and Global Affairs to whose mailing list I subscribe, under the heading of "Democracy Dispatches." It's this one: Reading banned books: An important remedy for America’s backsliding democracy
An excerpt:
But let’s step back for a moment from the edge of the frothing torrent of current events and take a wider view. There is so much at stake. Everything that makes us.
A new report, which for the first time labels the United States as a “backsliding democracy,” provides context for the existential terror we’re now feeling. Released by International IDEA, a European think tank that supports democracy, the report describes the Jan. 6 insurrection as a turning point.
“Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building,” the report said.
Disputes about electoral elections are on the rise around the world, responsible for a bloody coup in Myanmar, a political crisis in Peru, and electoral chaos in Brazil and Belarus.
Globally, according to IDEA, the number of democracies has shrunk, and the pandemic has worsened government repression of dissidents and journalists. In Poland, the government “resorted to xenophobic, homophobic and antisemitic rhetoric,” LGBTQ activists have faced harassment and arrests, and “restrictive abortion legislation has been passed despite public outcry.”
Sound familiar? ...
I thought some here might find this interesting.
The Nature Conservancy Wrote Me Back.
I was going through an issue of Science - I'm an AAAS member - when an ad popped up asking me to donate and join the organization Nature Conservancy. It showed wind turbines in a forested area.
So, being cranky about these sort of things, rather than donate, I sent them an email.
It read:
While I applaud the goal of conserving nature, and normally would be inclined to donate, and I am very concerned about climate change, your ad published as a Pop Up in my Science Magazine subscription is a real turn off.
It shows wind turbines in a wilderness area.
I fully realize that wind turbines have become a kind of unfortunate meme for "green;" they are no such thing. Lacing the wilderness with access roads, in effect, converting virgin ecosystems into industrial parks is not even close to being "green."
The so called "renewable energy" scheme, which is entirely dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels, has failed miserably at addressing climate change. In this century over 3 trillion dollars has been spent on wind and solar energy, with the result that the degradation of the atmosphere is increasing, not decreasing. For huge stretches of the last few months, the single reactor at Diablo Canyon was producing more power, on a 12 acre footprint than all the wind turbines in California, spread over thousands of square miles of degraded wilderness laced with access roads for diesel trucks to service wind "farms," industrial parks, also laced with wires.
Nuclear power is not perfect; nor is it without risk. But experimentally overall, after half a century, it is the lowest risk of all other options, including the mass and land intensive so called "renewable energy.".
Opposing nuclear energy when we have reached 420 ppm of carbon dioxide as we did in April of this year, is insane. Representing wind turbines as an answer to climate change is absurd. They didn't work to address climate change.. They aren't working climate change. It won't work to address climate change. It will simply drive an important component of climate change, land use changes, destroying pristine ecosystems. These are simple facts.
I know you advertise with fashion in mind, but if you are serious about the wilderness, this is an ill advised ad, and I wouldn't dream of responding to it, since clearly you don't "get it."
Best regards...
They wrote me back:
Thank you so much for taking the time to write to The Nature Conservancy and for sharing your thoughts and feedback.
We will share your feedback with the appropriate teams.
The Nature Conservancy agrees than renewable energy should not be developed on ecologically sensitive lands. We invite you to read more in this article published earlier this year on this important topic.
Sincerely,
yyyyy
Unsurprisingly, it shows vast stretches of land laced with temporary industrial junk, so called "renewable energy."
The article did contain one bit of lip service to true environmentalism:
But we cannot simply carve out a piece of land that large and call it a day. Some places should clearly be avoided when developing and siting renewable energy.
So called "renewable energy" is not sustainable; it's not even renewable. Land use changes are a very significant contributor to climate change. Lacing the wilderness with access roads and wires is a very, very, very, very, very bad idea.
The Sierra Club was founded to save wilderness from an early form of so called "renewable energy," specifically the Hetch Hetchy dam. Later the organization was taken over by my generation, the Baby Boomers, with the result it's become an organization devoted to the idea transforming all remaining wilderness into industrial parks.
It's hard to find an "environmental organization" that actually respects the environment.
A Cleaner Route to Hydrogen from Dangerous Natural Gas?
In my reading, I came across this paper: Economic Optimization of Local Australian Ammonia Production Using Plasma Technologies with Green/Turquoise Hydrogen (Nam Nghiep Tran, Jose Osorio Tejada, Mahdieh Razi Asrami, Animesh Srivastava, Ambar Laad, Marian Mihailescu, Andre Costa, Evgeny Rebrov, Vy Thi Tuong Lai, Phuc Nguyen Ky Phan, Gregory Dean Butler, and Volker Hessel ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2021 9 (48), 16304-16315).
People often think of hydrogen as "green." My wife informed me that even at this late date, the final month of 2021, with the atmosphere rapidly collapsing, she heard a report on NPR handing out balderdash about a "hydrogen economy."
Hydrogen is not "green." It's stored energy, and the storage of energy wastes energy. Indeed, hydrogen as a fuel is often more difficult to handle than the source of energy from which it is produced.
Nevertheless captive hydrogen - hydrogen produced industrially and used to make other products - is an essential component of industry.
Almost all of the hydrogen in the world is made from the reformation of dangerous natural gas, effectively the summed reaction being 2H2O + CH4 -> 2 H2 + CO2. The world food supply depends intimately on this reaction, because much of this hydrogen is used to synthesize ammonia in the high temperature high pressure Haber Bosch process. About 3% of the world energy supply, if I recall correctly from some reading some years ago is devoted to the production of ammonia.
The paper cited above includes as a reference a link to this existing industrial plant in California that uses the following reaction to produce hydrogen utilizing dangerous natural gas: CH4 -> C + 2 H2. The C here is carbon black, widely utilized to make tires and a number of other things. In this case it is industrially profitably sequestered carbon, the only type of carbon sequestration which will ever happen, despite loud bullshit pronounced by dangerous fossil fuel companies, and companies like the "green" Drax power plant in England which is burning American forests while claiming to be carbon neutral.
The link is here: Monolith. As usual for this sort of thing, the company declares itself "green" without specifying the source of the primary energy to effect the pyrolysis of methane, apparently using a thermal plasma. I can assure you it's not nuclear and therefore it is not "green." It may use electricity; I don't know.
The mining of methane, dangerous natural gas, is environmentally unacceptable. It is a crime against all future humanity. Small amounts of biogenic methane are available, but they are never going to be at a scale that will make an environmental difference.
(Recently I've been discussing with my son a path to the removal of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere.)
Sustainable hydrogen can be made from the thermochemical splitting of water using nuclear energy. The Chinese are building a pilot plant to do this. Captive hydrogen can be, in turn, be utilized to go beyond ammonia to produce the wonder fuel dimethyl ether.
However the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to produce dimethyl ether often produces methane as a minor side product. I have always thought that the combustion or reformation of this methane would ameliorate or eliminate this problem, but this plasma process suggests an interesting alternative, the reduction to carbon black. To the extent carbon dioxide is captured from seawater or even direct air capture, this is a path to reversing climate change if and only if clean energy is available.
There is one, and only one, form of clean energy available to humanity in the 21st century, nuclear energy, and slowly, too slowly, the world, perhaps too late, seems to be waking up from an awful slumber to realize that, since we let it get to the point that the entire planet is literally burning up.
Enjoy the weekend.
World's First Fast Spectrum Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor To Be Built at Idaho National Laboratory.
Our government is getting very serious about climate change:
Fast-spectrum salt reactor to be built at INL
...Mark Berry, Southern Company's vice president of R&D described the MCRE as "groundbreaking". Advancing next-generation nuclear is part of Southern's comprehensive strategy to deliver clean, safe, reliable, affordable energy, he said, adding: "The Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment will support the commercialisation of a revolutionary technology on a timescale that addresses climate change benchmarks and delivers on Southern Company's goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050."
TerraPower's MCFR technology uses molten chloride salt as both reactor coolant and fuel, allowing for so-called fast spectrum operation which the company says makes the fission reaction more efficient. It operates at higher temperatures than conventional reactors, generating electricity more efficiently, and also offers potential for process heat applications and thermal storage...
Chloride is definitely not an anion I would have chosen for a fast MSR, but look, I'm sure it will work. The extent to which Terrapower moves away from sodium metal, the better the reactors will be in my opinion.
This is excellent news from my perspective; albeit not so much for uranium mining, since it offers the possibility of conversion all the depleted uranium in the world into fuel, thus rendering all fuel mining unnecessary for many centuries.
Molten systems offer the prospect of in line fuel processing, a very powerful component for sustainable nuclear energy.
First contract signed for Cernavoda completion
First contract signed for Cernavoda completion"The potential to develop two new-build nuclear reactors demonstrates that the Romanian government, along with several other of our public sector clients around the world, recognise that safe, reliable, affordable, low-carbon nuclear energy is how we will combat and ultimately, win the battle against climate change,’’ said Ian Edwards, president and CEO of SNC-Lavalin, which owns Candu Energy. The deal was signed with EnergoNuclear, the project company set up to complete Cernavoda.
The contract was described as the first in a 24-month 'prepatory stage' towards completing the partially-built Candu-6 units Cernavoda 3 and 4, on which work stopped in 1991...
...Although this contract is focused on Canadian contribution, the USA is a major partner for Romania in this project. US Charge d’Affaires in Romania David Muniz said, “The United States is working to provide Romanians with clean, safe, reliable, and affordable energy while ensuring trusted partners contribute to Romania’s vital national and energy security needs."
Kathryn Huff, the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, called the signing "a major milestone" adding that it supports the goals of the intergovernmental agreement between the USA and Romania and "continues the strong relationship between our countries in the field of nuclear energy."
In addition, Nuclearelectrica's announcement included a statement from Thomas White, the CEO of US engineering firm Sargent & Lundy, which has previously worked on Candu projects in Canada and Romania. He said, "We’re thrilled to continue our business relationship with Candu Energy and Romania," but details of the company's involvement were not immediately available...
...Nuclearelectrica CEO Cosmin Ghita noted that completion of Cernavoda 3 and 4 will bring up to 19,000 indirectly generated jobs while raising nuclear to 36% of electricity supply and 66% of Romania's clean energy total. When all four units are in operation, Cernavoda will avoid a total of 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year, he said.
Dr. Huff is one of the Biden administration's finest appointments to the DOE and undoes some of the damage done to the environment by the unfortunate appointment of Gregory Jaczko to the NRC in a previous administration.
Dr. Jaczko regrettably was a fool who worked actively to see that climate change and the vast number of deaths from air pollution were ignored, possibly because he perceived that nuclear energy was "too dangerous." It follows that he thought that climate change and air pollution weren't "too dangerous." About 7 million people die each year from air pollution, more than six orders of magnitude more than die from radiation. Jaczko couldn't care less.
The CANDU (aka HWR) is my favorite thermal spectrum reactor, since it can run on the DUPIC cycle using "once through" uranium, which makes up the bulk of used nuclear fuel. In the process, it consumes additional reactor grade plutonium. Plutonium/thorium/uranium fuels in HWR can achieve very high burn ups, making up for the loss of precious plutonium and consuming depleted uranium but more commonly they achieve low burn ups using natural (unenriched) uranium.
Heavy Water Reactors operate in Canada, Romania, India, and Korea. I wish we had some in the United States, but they have never been licensed here.
Wyoming Coal Plant Site Unveiled for 500-MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Pilot
From the online trade journal Power:
Coal Plant Site Unveiled for 500-MW Natrium Advanced Nuclear Pilot
Project stakeholders on Nov. 16 unveiled the site for the federally backed demonstration, which will validate Terrapower and GE-Hitachi’s advanced nuclear technology design, construction, and operation. But the project—which the Natrium consortium will build but Rocky Mountain Power, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s PacifiCorp, will own—has also been much-watched because it promises to demonstrate how advanced nuclear can leverage existing infrastructure to replace fossil power and provide regional flexibility.
While the preferred site at the Naughton plant still needs finalized “definitive agreements on the site and applicable permitting, licensing, and support,” stakeholders said they plan to submit the demonstration project’s construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in mid-2023. The plant is expected to be operational within the next seven years—by 2028—aligning with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) schedule, as mandated by Congress.
“This will be the first [reactor] built, but it will be a commercial asset that will provide at least 60 years of power to people in Wyoming and surrounding regions,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque told reporters on Tuesday...
...For PacifiCorp, the demonstration would mean revitalizing a productive plant site and leveraging its existing infrastructure to provide much-needed flexibility and reliability to the region. In 2019, as part of a bid to phase out coal-fired generation, Pacificorp announced it would shutter the 1968-completed Naughton 1 and 2, a combined 357 MW, in 2025, four years earlier than planned. Last year, it completed a planned conversion of the 1971-built Naughton 3 coal unit into a 247-MW natural gas–fired peaker facility. However, as the company’s September 2021–issued integrated resource plan (IRP) suggests, the utility plans to retire Naughton 3 at the end of 2029...
... Hoogeveen, however, also highlighted the project’s distinct potential to provide crucial service to the region, which is heavily reliant on intermittent power. “Wyoming is a tremendous wind resource state, and we have built, through Energy Vision 2020, and work before that, 2,000 MW of wind capacity. We expect to build many more thousand megawatts of wind capacity in the state—there’s that much available,” he noted...
It is worth noting that 2,000 MW of "wind capacity" will never actually produce 2000 MWe, even for a few minutes. One of the big lies about so called "renewable energy" is to represent a theoretical peak power as if it were continuous power. The capacity utilization of wind plants is typically on the order of 30% (if they're lucky), meaning that the wind plant is actually the equivalent of a 600 MW reliable plant, at best, with the caveat that no guarantee that the electricity from the wind facilities, spread over vast areas of land, will produce power when it's needed. Wind plants often make electricity essentially worthless, since they produce power randomly, sometimes when the grid doesn't need it. This factor accounts in large measure why that offshore oil and drill gas drilling hellhole Denmark features the highest electricity prices in the OECD, followed closely by Germany.
We often hear the bald faced lie that wind power and solar energy replace coal capacity. This is nonsense. Coal is dirty but it is also reliable. Wind power is dirty, destructive to wilderness and unreliable.
For the record the naturium breed and burn reactor is sodium cooled. I'm not fond of sodium coolants personally. I discussed this my son last evening during a discussion of his graduate school plans: other coolant options for fast reactors. This said, the worst nuclear plant is better than the best coal plant and the best gas plant, and for that matter, the best wind plant.
The reactor is designed to operate for sixty years, and, as a "breed and burn" system, to not need refueling.
The average lifetime of a wind turbine is typically less than 20 years.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
EIA predicts 22% higher coal electricity generation in 2021; Coal stocks lowest since 1978.
This is from the trade news, Power Mag, to which I've subscribed: EIA: U.S. Coal Stockpiles Lowest Since 1978
The agency on Tuesday said coal-fired generation this year has been buoyed by mostly stable prices for coal, while the price of natural gas moved higher. The EIA reported coal stockpiles at U.S. plants totaled about 80 million tons at the end of September (Figure 1), the lowest level since March 1978. The agency said that while the increased use of coal this year is a factor, it also said stockpiles have fallen over the past several years as more U.S. coal-fired plants have been retired, and remaining coal plants are operated less often, reducing the need for larger inventories.
The EIA in its report published Tuesday said that U.S. coal-fired power plants usually stockpile “much more coal than they consume in a month,” and acknowledged that “physical delivery constraints in the supply chain limit how quickly coal plants can increase their stockpiles.” The group said coal consumption by power plants is usually higher in summer and winter when temperatures are warmer or colder, and lessens during spring and fall when milder temperatures are present.
Maybe we should consider making the sun stay up all night so we can go solar, and, in addition, passing a law to make the wind blow constantly.
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