March 29, 2022

Energy Content of the US Inventory of Depleted Uranium in Comparison to World Energy Demand.

Recently in this space, I posted data from the 2021 IEA World Energy Outlook (page 294) giving Energy Demand and Sources, the data historical up to 2020, with projections out to 2050 based on "stated policies," said policies being based on "by 2050" rhetoric issued by governments to conceal that they have, after many decades of "by 'such and such' a year" statements by governments in the United States and around the world have all proved meaningless. (They have by and large proved meaningless because they all rely on the destruction of vast land areas and the combustion of mass amounts of dangerous fossil fuels to service so called "renewable energy." )

The table of that data is here:

The comments connected with the post in which I placed this table were, um...um...um..., to be nice, should we say "predictable," and involved someone defending the inexcusable, at least that's my view.

Here is a report on the 1997 inventory of depleted uranium, most of it stored at former enrichment sites, at that time in the form of cylinders of UF6 gas: Availability of Uranium Feed for the Fissile Materials Disposition Program Volume 1 : Depleted Uranium Hexafluoride (White, ORNL/TM-13417, Rev. 1)

Here is a table from that report:



The "assay" column refers to the U-235 content, but for the most part this inventory has much lower fissionable U-235 than natural uranium, although some natural uranium (U-235 content = 0.711%) is present in the inventory. For the purpose of the calculation below I will assume that it is nearly pure U-238.

U-238 is among those actinides for which there is no critical mass; no matter how large an assembly is made, a fission chain reaction cannot occur in it. (Other such nuclides include Th-232 and U-236, the latter which went extinct on Earth but is now available synthetically and as a side product of the use of nuclear power.) U-238 has a small fission cross section in the fast spectrum, (neutron energy in the 1-2 MeV range), but it is dwarfed by the scattering cross section, and as a result of scattering collisions, the neutron energy falls rapidly into the epithermal range, hence no critical mass.

However, U-238 is a fertile nucleus; it can be transmuted with the capture of one neutron and two beta decays into plutonium. This event is routine in all nuclear reactors; all nuclear reactors produce plutonium, but fast reactors produce more plutonium than they fission. These, of course, are breeder reactors.

A happy event in sustainable energy is the development of "breed and burn" reactors by multiple US companies, and, I assume, multiple foreign countries as well. These can use depleted uranium as a fuel by transmuting it and "burning" it largely in situ without refueling for decades.

Thus it is worthwhile to consider what the energy content of depleted uranium is.

I do calculations involving plutonium all the time and have been doing so for many years. Among the spreadsheets I use for this purpose, some include the breakdown of plutonium fission energy by type on an atomic scale. Here is a section of a table in one such sheet:



The source of this data is the BNL Nuclear Data Center's Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) Retrieval & Plotting

Further down in the same table the energy content of a kg of plutonium is calculated:



A kg of Pu-239 (produced from U-238) has an energy content of a little over 80 trillion joules.

From the above, it appears that there is about 500,000 MT of depleted uranium in the form of UF6, a volatile compound having a molecular weight of 352.0193 daltons, with a mass fraction that is 67.618% uranium and 32.382% fluorine. Thus we have about 338,000 tons of uranium already mined and isolated.

338,000 tons of U-238 translates to 338,000,000 kg, already mined and refined, usable as fuel in "breed and burn" reactors with a plutonium "spark," a critical mass of plutonium. Some years back I posted in this space the critical mass of some plutonium isotopes, and for convenience, I reproduce the table from that post here:



Bare Metal Critical Masses of Commonly Available Plutonium Isotopes.

We have plenty of plutonium on hand to act as "sparks" for breed and burn reactors, now, at a time that the concentration of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste as of yesterday reached 421 ppm.

Now.

338,000,000 of plutonium thus, with an energy content of 80 trillion joules/kg is thus equal to 27 Zetajoules of energy.

World Energy consumption in the Covid lockdown year of 2020 fell to 589 Exajoules, but we can assume it will rise at least to 600 Exajoules in 2022, perhaps more; we are about to set a new worldwide record for the consumption of coal. Thus the US alone has about 55 years worth of all the energy in the world, no dangerous natural gas, no coal, no petroleum, no forests trashed for biomass, no wilderness on land or sea trashed to make industrial parks for wind turbines, already mined and isolated. The US of course only has some of the isolated uranium; it possesses less than 1/4 of the world's nuclear reactors. Other countries all around the world enrich uranium, and thus all of them have depleted uranium stores.

The world has foolishly set about to mine vast quantities of lanthanide elements to support the "renewable energy" fantasy which has failed miserably to address climate change at a cost of trillions of dollars. The mine tailings of lanthanide all contain the radioactive element thorium, which is concentrated with respect to the original ores from processing to obtain lanthanides. The inventory of this high grade thorium is less clear, but it is also a fertile nucleus, and it thus would not be absurd to assume that the inventories of "waste" thorium are similar. It is therefore easy to estimate that mining of uranium, oil, natural gas, coal, and for that matter lanthanides, cobalt for batteries, nickel for batteries, lithium for batteries, iron and coal for steel for wind turbines, vast quantities of copper to interconnect diffuse energy energy sources, can be minimized if not wholly eliminated for centuries with the uranium and thorium already mined.

It is important to note that as utilized now, largely in light water reactors, the thermodynamic efficiency of nuclear power plants as Rankine cycle devices is rather low, around 33%. It is easy to consider that VHTRs, "very high temperature reactors" can achieve much higher thermodynamic efficiency - I estimate around 70 - 80% - and thus we can exploit higher efficiency to address human development goals and the elimination of poverty.

Ultimately, as most people who have studied the issue - and let's be clear anti-nukes and "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes besides selective attention, very little real knowledge of nuclear issues; in fact they are functionally illiterate when they try to discuss these issues - recognize that the long term source for inexhaustible uranium is seawater, but the requirement for using this source is centuries away. This said, it is probably the case that the world will ultimately require vast amounts of desalination, which will only be possible using nuclear energy, and thus uranium might well fall out of this process with appropriate resins and/or selective membranes. It is also true that any attempt to remove the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide by the future generations we've so contemptuously screwed, will best proceed via extraction from seawater, and thus we can start collecting uranium from this source any time we want to do so.

(I analyzed geological aqueous flows on a planetary scale here, Is Uranium Exhaustible and in less detail here: On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace)

Recently I've had two "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes whine about mining of all things; in response to them I cited the "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke Benjamin Sovacool's analysis - in a very rare burst of honesty from a "renewables will save us" anti-nuke - about the mining requirements associated with so called "renewable energy." Sovacool's solution is to tear the shit out of the seafloor screwing it up even to a larger extent than even the detestable wind industry is doing all over the world already.

The absurd selective attention of these bourgeois poor thinkers inspired this remark in the case of one of them" thus:

We hit 421 ppm of CO2 concentrations in the planetary atmosphere yesterday. It may be time to think anew and stop spinning our wheels with illiterate fantasies.



Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Have a nice day tomorrow.

March 27, 2022

The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.

Earlier this month, Europe's first EPR reactor, Olkiluoto 3, was connected to the grid.

The reactor took a disappointing 17 years to build, construction having begun in 2005. Some of this might be excusable as the reactor was subject to FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) constraint, and some other delays may have involved communication between the French speaking and Finnish speaking engineers and construction crews; nonetheless, as professor Phyllis Gardner remarked when discussing Theranos founder and convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes, "Excuses are like assholes; everybody has one."

(For contrast, Taishan 1 and Taishan 2, EPR's built in China started construction after Olkiluoto 3, in November 2009, went into commercial operation in 2018 and 2019 respectively.)

Nevertheless, rote anti-nukes and "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes like to claim that "nuclear energy takes too long to build."

Of course, as I never tire of pointing out, the United States built over 100 reactors essentially in 20 to 25 years while providing the lowest priced electricity in the industrial world, with many of these reactors still operating 40 years later, despite endless criticism by people who, in my opinion, care far less about climate change than they do about Fukushima, the latter being a case where close to 20,000 people were killed by seawater and forgotten and almost no one was killed by radiation although radiation is still widely discussed ad nauseum.

And of course, China is about to pass France as the second largest producer of nuclear energy. Last week China connected to the grid the second of a new class of nuclear reactors, first approved in 2015:

Second Fuqing Hualong One enters commercial operation.

As the article notes, its sister reactor, authorized at the same time, came on line in late 2020 and reached full power in January of last year.

China has built 56 reactors in this century. This is not quite the rate that the United States achieved between 1960 and 1980, but it is also nothing at which to sneeze.

Still one can often hear - I hear it all the time - that "nuclear energy takes too long to build; wind and solar can be built faster."

This seems to be a common chant, a mantra, and I wonder whether anyone is inclined to ever bother to look to see, given that the so called "renewable energy" industry is now a trillion dollar industry, if any data supports this notion.

I'm sure that some people may disagree with this, but I hold that data overrules mantras. That's just me of course.

Data...

Before going into the very detailed data provided by the Danish Energy Agency in connection with its wind industry, it is useful to look at less detailed data covering the whole world. A world standard for analysis of the current state of world energy production and use, as well as soothsaying, based on "scenarios," is the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook published annually. There have been some changes in format over the years, one of the happiest in my opinion has been a change of units in the most recent edition from the pixilated unit MTOE (Million Tons Oil Equivalent) to the SI unit Exajoules. I have in my files every copy from 2006 to 2021, with the exception of 2020; I also have copies of the 1995 and 2000 editions. The current edition, 2021, does it's best tabular analysis using the "stated policies" scenario and a portion of the table doing so, Table A1A found on page 294 is reproduced here:



A few comments:

First, let's be clear on something; at the outset of the half a century of cheering for solar and wind industry, going all the way back to the energy clown Amory Lovins' insipid 1976 treatise that made him famous, Energy Strategy: The Road Less Traveled the goal of hyping these forms of energy was never about climate change. Climate change is and was an afterthought. The goal was to attack nuclear energy.

The worldwide result of buying into Lovins' unreferenced soothsaying, which has proved to be as valuable as reading Tarot cards might have been, and was punctuated by criticism of a technology he has never been intellectually capable of understanding at any more than an extremely superficial level, nuclear energy, is clear from the table above and from something far more dire: Climate change.

All the cheering for half a century for wind and solar devoted to "nuclear phaseouts" has neither met its originating goal: Combined, wind and solar produced in 2020 10.4 Exajoules of energy (as opposed to the abused word "capacity" ) compared to nuclear's 29.4 Exajoules. In all of the editions of the World Energy Outlook in my possession, nuclear energy, using reactors, the majority of which were built in the 20th century, has never fallen below 28 Exajoules. After 50 years of mindless cheering, wind and solar are only able to produce 1/3 of the energy produced by nuclear energy operating in a universe of catcalls and vituperation which to my mind exactly parallels the popular, albeit minority, opinion leading to the refusal to be vaccinated for Covid. Both activities kill people, since nuclear energy saves lives.

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Secondly, it's useful to look at the IEA's soothsaying about what the world will look like in 2030, 2040, and 2050, with particular focus on so called "renewable energy." Two of these somewhat rosy predictions depend directly on climate conditions for which so called "renewable energy" has proved incapable of arresting dire change: Hydro and "modern biomass." I assume, without looking too deeply into the matter, that "modern biomass" includes things like the Drax powerplant in the UK which has switched from burning coal to burning wood "harvested" from North American forests and transported, using diesel powered rails and/or trucks to seaports to be loaded on to ships powered by petroleum based bunker oil. This is taking place at the same time that North American forests are spontaneously combusting - far removed from power plants - because of extreme climate changes, or dying because of the failure of cold enough winters to kill parasites, or droughts, or combinations of all three. It is therefore questionable how much wood for "modern biomass" will be available in the next three decades. As for hydro, the Himalayan glaciers on which major Asia hydroelectric facilities depend, are dying and in places like the American West it is becoming clear that facilities like the Glen Canyon dam that created Lake Powell - environmental disaster that it's been since inception notwithstanding - may soon not have enough water to run, calling into question, over the long term, the viability of Lake Mead. Since the approach to climate change has consisted of little else than wishful thinking and denial, the similar situations may be expected to get worse all over the planet.

Thus the soothsaying about 2030, 2040, and 2050 by the IEA may be, in my view, a tad overoptimistic.

Similarly the expectation of the growth in the use of dangerous natural gas and dangerous petroleum blithely predicts that these fuels will even be available as we race, "by 2050" in this soothsaying, toward 3/4 of a billion exajoules of energy each year as human energy demand. As for the predicted decline of coal, 2022 has given lie to that claim, Germany and other countries thinking along the same lines have been burning coal all winter to power their grids because of the politically driven inaccessibility of Russian gas, which is not to say that they aren't still burning Russian gas, they plan to phase it out "by 2027" by building new liquified natural gas terminals. To them, but not to anyone who gives a shit about climate change, dangerous natural gas is "green."

As for the IEA prediction for solar energy; it's possible they may be close to the truth, since the result of the fondness for solar energy is climate change and desertification of once green ecosystems, making plenty of former wilderness available for industrialization. The issue is to find enough coal, oil and gas to continue to reduce silicon dioxide to elemental silicon and then to refine it. We'll see, well not "we" since I'll be dead in 2050 whether or not the planet also is.

Now about wind energy:

The purpose of this post is to produce some deeper data, focusing on the Okiluoto 3 EPR reactor, with a power rating of 1650 MWe electric expected to be reached in the next several months as it reaches full power and all of the wind turbines in that offshore oil and gas drilling nation of Denmark. The reason for choosing Denmark, besides all the hype directed at its wind program over the later parts of the 20th century and the early parts of the 21st, is that the Danes maintain a very detailed readily available database of every wind turbine ever built in their country going back to the late 1970s.

Although I personally abhor their energy policies, in this respect, it's good on them.

This data can be accessed here: Master Register of Wind Turbines on the Danish Energy Agency's website. I downloaded the spreadsheet accessed on the link therein, this one: Data on operating and decommissioned wind turbines (ultimo 01 2022). Uploaded March 17 2022. I accessed it about three days ago and have run a number of calculations using common Excel functions. I last went through this exercise in 2018; it's time for an update.

The spreadsheet has two tabs, one of which is for existing reactors (the Danish word seems to be a sort of double negative, ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned" ) and the other for decommissioned wind turbines (afmeldte). The spreadsheet is labeled in both English and Danish. There is probably a reason for the use of the double negative term "ikke-afmeldte," as opposed for the Danish word for existent, eksisterende. (No, I am never going to try to read Kierkegaard in the original Danish.) As of January 2022, the last data entry for the performance of existent wind turbines in Denmark, 134 of the 6,296 ikke-afmeldte ("non-decommissioned" ) wind turbines in Denmark produced zero electricity. Perhaps there is some hope of repairing some of these: For example, the ikke-afmeldte 11 kW wind turbine connected to the grid in November 1979 produced zero electricity in 2006 and 2007, and 1 kWh in 2008, and nothing since. I assume it's not been decommissioned because it's being allowed to rot in place; it is now 42 years old. It is the second oldest ikke-afmeldte wind turbine in Denmark. The oldest, a 400 kW turbine located at Madum by, Madum is operating, but it's a decrepit old thing. It's capacity utilization in the very windy month of January 2022 was a mere 4.33%. It is almost to the point of rotting in place as much as those producing zero electricity are also rotting in place.

It is well known that wind turbine performance degrades with age; the reason is aerodynamic. The tangential velocity of a rotating wind turbine blade, particularly a large blade, is rather high, on the order of hundreds of meters per second - translating into hundreds of miles per hour - and at these speeds, the polymer coatings on wind turbine blades can be shattered by the momentum of - believe it or not - rain drops, spewing microplastics into the air. (It should be stated that wind turbine related microplastics are almost certainly trivial compared to other microplastic sources in the environment.) These polymer coatings are designed to reduce aerodynamic drag, and their loss degrades turbine performance. These effects are described in an open sourced paper written by Danish engineers here: Extending the life of wind turbine blade leading edges by reducing the tip speed during extreme precipitation events (Jakob Ilsted Bech, Charlotte Bay Hasager, and Christian Bak, Wind Energ. Sci., 3, 729–748, 2018).

Some text from the paper's introduction:

I added the bold.

I note that I often heard in the early days of the scheme to replace nuclear energy with wind turbines the statement that wind turbines would be low maintenance, which panned out as well as the nonsense statement that "cheap" wind energy would obliterate the nuclear industry or the add on nonsense statement that wind energy would help address climate change. These statements have all been experimentally shown to have been glib wishful thinking.

A word on the accuracy of the data: In many cases the total energy - and they are in units of energy, kwh, not in units of power, watts - of an individual turbine is given, but in other cases, they are clearly given as an average for a particular facility. For example, it extremely unlikely that the 10 Bonus wind turbines in the Copenhagen area (København in the spreadsheet) each produced exactly 5,065,907 kwh of electricity in 2002 and then again, each produced exactly 3,356,086 kwh in 2021 as the spreadsheet indicates. Therefore, the average for the facility and type has been applied to each wind turbine. There are many other examples of this in the spreadsheet. I don't have a problem with that, but again, data in most cases seems to refer to distinct turbines.

All this said it is clear that merely reporting the average age of existing wind turbines in the ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," tab in the data base, which as of this writing is 17 years and 18 days, is a bit misleading, since it contains examples of wind turbines that should have been, but haven't been, decommissioned, as well as those whose performance has seriously degraded.

To understand the average lifetime of wind turbines, it is almost certainly better to look at those that have been decommissioned, those listed in the the afmeldte, "decommissioned" tab. Denmark has built 9,740 turbines and decommissioned 3,444 of them, roughly 35% in "percent talk." The average age of decommissioned wind turbines is 17 years and 317 days, slightly longer than the 2018 figure I calculated back then, which was 17 years and 283 days, an improvement of a whopping 34 days.

The total peak capacity of all the wind turbines in Denmark can be determined from the spreadsheet. For ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," wind turbines, is 7035.3 "MW." There are 31556927 seconds in a tropical year. The theoretical energy produced for reliable power that can operate at or close to 100% capacity utilization - nuclear plants are the only power infrastructure that have demonstrated the ability to do this for periods of a year or longer - is thus for all the wind turbines in Denmark to 5 significant figures is 0.22201 Exajoules. In 2021, the last full year for which we have the total energy output of all the wind turbines in Denmark was 0.057962 Exajoules, this on a planet where, as of 2020 - albeit constrained by Covid - was 584 Exajoules. Thus the capacity utilization of all the wind turbines in Denmark (to be fair, including the ikke-afmeldte, "non-decommissioned," turbines that were inoperable or marginally operable) was 26.1%.

I should note at this point that the capacity utilization for the single month of January 2022 for all the wind turbines in Denmark was 44.06%, which is unusually high for wind turbines, but would be considered very, very, very poor performance for a nuclear plant. Apparently January was a windy month in Denmark. I conducted analysis of this similar data in 2018 apparently in May of 2018, and thus monthly figures for capacity utilization were available for the months of January, February and March when I did so. The capacity utilization of all the wind turbines in Denmark operable at that time was respectively, 32.1%, 30.1%, and 30.8%.

The 2022 spreadsheet gives the total energy output for every year for all the wind turbines in Denmark going back to 1977, one year after the energy clown Amory Lovins published his unreferenced soothsaying article to which I referred above, an article that regrettably, particularly with his anti-nuclear rhetoric, helped to set the planet on a course leading to the climate disaster now well under way. From these totals one can calculate the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark with the understanding that this ignores the fact that sometimes they perform at very low capacity utilization and at other times better capacity utilization but never at the 100% capacity utilization that nuclear plants can achieve on a fairly regular basis.

In 1977, the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark for that year was 0.0138 MW. Ten years later, in 1987, the average continuous power power output of all the wind turbines in Denmark, which had excited the imagination of and was trumpeted by all of the world's anti-nukes, a class to which I belonged until Chernobyl established what remains the worst case for nuclear plant failure, had reached 45.7 MW.

The issue of climate change was well understood in scientific circles in 1987, but it had not reached general public attention, if I remember correctly, until the 2000 election, where Al Gore presented it as an issue in the Presidential election. Up until that time it had no political dimension, although the anti-nuclear movement was well developed by that time, and was, in fact, a key component of the 1988 Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Between 1987 and 1988 the wind industry - which at that time I was personally so ill informed as to support at that time - in Denmark had increased its average continuous power by 155% to 71.2 MW. This led to the rise of what I now mock as "percent talk," which has characterized much of the discussion of so called "renewable energy" for well over three decades. It is relatively easy to raise the amount of cash one has on hand by 155% if one has $100, but a massive effort is required to raise $1,000,000,000 by 155%.

Now it behooves me to note, once again, that the newly completed EPR in Finland is going to produce 1650 MW of average continuous power, reliably and constantly. The average continuous power of all the wind turbines in the entire nation of Denmark, both on land and at sea, first reached a number greater than 1650 MW in 2015 when it produced 1666.1 MW of average continuous power, but it is important to note that Denmark needed to burn fossil fuels whenever the instantaneous power - far different than the average continuous power - was much lower than 1666.1 MW, with much of the environmental cost obscured by the fact that one has to waste a certain amount of power, particularly in a coal plant, just to restart the plant. And let's be clear, the Danes burn coal. As of this writing, 22:44 (10:44 PM) Copenhagen time 3/27/22, dangerous coal energy is providing 19.54% of Danish electricity, (West Denmark) wind 30.61% (with a capacity utilization of 25.61%), while also burning dangerous natural gas (6.71% of the Danish electricity) while importing electricity from Norway and Sweden. The carbon intensity is 239 g CO2/kwh, more than double that of France, 107 g CO2/kwh, in "percent talk," 233.3% higher.

It is useful to note how much average continuous power Denmark was producing in 2005, when the problematic and often delayed construction of Olkiluoto-3 began. In 2005, the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark was 856.8 MW. By 2021 it had reached 1836.3 MW (slightly lower than the 1866.5 MW in 2020). Thus the wind industry in Denmark - backed by continuous access to dangerous fossil fuels - was able to grow in terms of continuous average power by 979.9 MW, in "percent talk," 59.4% as fast as Finland could grow nuclear power.

So much for that anti-nuke myth.

It is worth noting that for a nuclear plant, as opposed to wind plants scattered across an entire nation, average continuous power is pretty much the same as continuous power. Nuclear power plants are reliable, predictable and clean.

The EPR reactor has what I personally regard as overkill for safety, multiple heat loops, extra layers of concrete, overly thick steel, etc. If one considers the number of lives lost from radiation released as a result of the Sendai earthquake that destroyed the Fukushima reactors - the number of people killed by seawater dwarfs the number of lives lost (if any) from radiation in the event - one may wonder which might save more lives, preventing the leak of any radiation at an EPR by spending a few extra billion Euros, or spending the same number of Euros to provide Covid vaccines to Africa.

Finland, like Denmark and Germany, still burns coal. As of this writing, it is producing 714 MW of coal fired electricity, less than half the power the Olkiluoto-3 reactor will provide. The lives saved by not burning coal at all, will dwarf, by orders of magnitude, all of the premature deaths that may result from radiation releases at Fukushima, the second worst nuclear disaster of all time.

Facts matter.

Have a nice evening.

March 27, 2022

Great men and great women are made by their times.

March 25, 2022

Belgium decides to extend the lives of two nuclear reactors.

Belgium is another one of those European nations that drank the "nuclear phaseout" koolaid, which is effectively - despite the marketing to the contrary - a decision to announce, in defiance of reality - that "nuclear energy is 'too dangerous'" and "fossil fuels are not 'too dangerous." This is despite the fact that dangerous fossil fuel waste kills people continuously at well known rates, whereas commercial so called "nuclear waste" has demonstrated, in well over a half a century, a record of killing very few people, if indeed, any people.

Go figure.

The main supplier of dangerous fossil fuels - which are assumed to be "not too dangerous" - is a prominent Eurasian nation led by an autocrat whose country gets 60% of its funds from the sale of dangerous fossil fuels. All the money sent to this person to support nuclear phase outs apparently has proved "too dangerous" for a prominent wheat exporting Southeastern nation inhabited by a highly cultured and very brave people known as Ukranians.

In light of this even, Belgium, which planned to shut its reactors three years from now in order take up dumping dangerous natural gas waste into the planetary atmosphere has decided to think, um, a little more carefully:

Extended operation of two Belgian reactors approved.

The carbon intensity of Belgium as of this writing (19:47 (7:47 PM) Brussels time) is 150 g CO2/kwh. 63.98% of the emissions come from its internal combustion of dangerous natural gas and 15.25% of the emissions of the anti-nuke country Germany, where the carbon intensity is as of this writing, 449 g CO2/kwh.

The carbon intensity of France is 85 g CO2/kwh as of this writing.

March 24, 2022

Finnish Wind Turbines Briefly Operate at 90.83% Capacity Utilization.

I am monitoring Finland's electrical energy production on the Electricity Map.

I'm entering data for three forms of energy utilized to produce Finnish electricity, coal, wind and nuclear, and doing so at random times, usually before bed or during bouts of insomnia EST (US).

Finland doesn't produce all that much electricity; it's a small country with a population of about 5.5 million people. For the data points I've collected, the nation's demand seems to be roughly 4.5 MW, but I'm generally looking at off hours.

Finland's largest source of electricity is nuclear energy, involving 5 operating reactors. I am monitoring Finland because a large reactor Olkiluoto 3 is powering up, having been connected to the grid at low power (100 MWe last I looked). When it's up to full power it should produce around 1600 MWe.

The following information can be found by downloading a spreadsheet here, from the Finnish Wind Association:
Operating and dismantled wind turbines

One can easily do calculations about some of the properties of wind turbines in Finland using Excel functions.

Finland has installed 1003 wind turbines, of which 962 are still operating, 40 have been decommissioned and 1 has unknown status.

The average age of operating wind turbines in Finland is 6.4 years. The average lifetime of the 40 decommissioned wind turbines is 13.8 years.

The number of wind turbines in the country that have lasted more than 20 years is 36. The longest lived is a 300 MW unit near Pori, on the Southwestern Finnish coast. It has lasted 29 years.

At 7:45 AM Helsinki time 3/24/22, wind power briefly operated at 90.54% capacity utilization. This is the highest capacity utilization I have ever seen in many years of looking at figures from all over the United States, Germany, and other countries.

I have never, ever, not once, seen wind power operating anywhere at anytime at 100% capacity utilization, even though the big lie often told in connection with the the so called "renewable energy," industry is to report capacity and not energy or capacity utilization.

Of course, this remarkable Finnish capacity - parts of Finland are under high wind warnings - only lasted a short time, and as of this writing, has fallen to 66.14% capacity, still very high for this generally useless and unreliable form of energy.

As of this writing 4:36 US EST time, 9:36 Berlin time, the capacity utilization of all the wind turbines in Germany is 1.31%, and the total power available from it is 0.841 GW. Germany's three remaining nuclear reactors, the last ones not to be shut in an orgy of outrageous fear and ignorance, are producing in three relatively small buildings 4.09 GW of electricity. In the "percent talk" used to hype the so called "renewable energy" industry, nuclear power is producing 486% more energy than wind, in Germany, anti-nuke ignorance capital of the world. The German carbon intensity is 494 g CO2/kwh, more than double that of Finland and almost 5 times as large as that of France. The largest source of electricity as of this writing in Germany is coal, now producing 25.1 GW of electricity.

Facts matter.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

March 23, 2022

A Chumash tribe and conservationists fight offshore wind turbines

LA Times: Nobody Seems to Like This Offshore Wind Project.

Our media has a nasty habit of repeating the dubious statement that wind power has something to do with fighting climate change.

This is a nonsense statement.

Vast worldwide enthusiasm for wind power, backed by trillions of dollars thrown at it, has done nothing, zero, zilch, to address climate change. Indeed with the rising popularity of converting places like the Gaviota beach into industrial parks, climate change is accelerating.

This of course is not the only dubious area that our media has a contentious struggle with the truth, but it is rather typical.

I am pleased to see for the first time in a long time that there are real conservationists, as opposed to say the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in his losing battle to prevent the industrialization of the Hetch Hetchy valley, and now run by people who have a hard time finding a wilderness that they don't want to lace with access roads, wires, and grease ball, microplastic spitting, wind turbines.

March 20, 2022

I saw a revival of Weber's "Cats" last night. I had a few words for my cat when I got home.

I told my cat that the other cats not only talked about mice and rats - when we have mice my cat regards them as play friends - but they also sang and danced, really, really, really well.

The cat just looked at me, offered me a weak "meow" - the "feed me" meow - and went over to her dish. After being fed, she ran over to her favorite petting spot and began rolling around which is they way she communicates "pet me now!"

Definitely not one of T.S. Eliot's/Weber's cats.

My wife surprised our family with the tickets on a whim, pricey but well worth it. (My life has been made worth living because of my wife's whims; including the whim of becoming my friend and later my lover.)

We saw it at the NJ State Theater; it's a traveling tour with incredibly talented young people. The choreography, the singing and most impressively, the set design and lighting, were remarkable.

This was the resumption of a tour that was cancelled because of Covid. I really felt for those very talented actor and actresses, so early in their careers, who had a career interruption for a plague.

This is the production: Cats at the NJ State Theater.

The production was preceded by a brief talk by a professor at the New Jersey School of Arts, Mason Gross, theater department, (my oldest son is a graduate of that school's visual arts program and now works there) and two of her undergraduate students. My son went with us and brought a friend to use my other son's ticket, as he was unable to join us because of other commitments.

The brief lecture referred to the poems of T.S. Eliot and when I got home, I took the time to recall "The Hollow Men," and call it up.

Life is so beautiful, and then you die, and in the midst of all this beauty, I was reminded of how many times I reflected on Eliot's most famous lines:

March 20, 2022

Life Fights Back: Detection of Oxygenation of Petroleum Contamination by Microbes.

As my life winds down, I worry all the time about the destruction to the planet my generation has wrought and whether or not the planet will ever be healed.

There isn't much good news on stopping the destruction; indeed, the preferred "solution" for the energy and environmental disaster is to destroy more wilderness with huge industrial facilities we misname "renewable energy." (It's dependent on vast land use changes as well as vast mining - there's nothing "renewable" about it.)

The petroleum industry was driven by the rise of the automobile, the automobile being proposed early in its history as a means to address an environmental problem of the 19th and early 20th century: The accumulation of horse manure in cites.

That worked out well, didn't it?

I wonder what the legacy pollution of the automobile, which I expect will not go away for tens of millions of years, if ever.

I'm used to pessimism I guess, but here, for what it's worth is a little bit of good news, involving the damage done by the operations of a petroleum refinery that seems to be somewhere in Colorado, as reported in the following paper:

Discovery of Oxygenated Hydrocarbon Biodegradation Products at a Late-Stage Petroleum Release Site Olivia K. Bojan, Maria Irianni-Renno, Andrea J. Hanson, Huan Chen, Robert B. Young, Susan K. De Long, Thomas Borch, Thomas C. Sale, Amy M. McKenna, and Jens Blotevogel, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (20), 16713-16723.

Some text from the introduction of the paper:

Benzene. Recently at DU there was a hullaballoo about the detection of benzene in cosmetic products. The attention paid is something of a cruel joke to anyone who is familiar with chemistry of petroleum. If someone is really concerned about benzene, they should be working on banning petroleum, and not with wind turbines and solar cells, but with something that works on scale.

Won't happen.

The oxidation of petroleum to CO2 is not without some intermediate risks according to the authors, further on:



The authors found a place to study this, an abandoned petroleum refinery which is not named, probably to prevent the owners from facing lawsuits and bad publicity, and use some novel techniques, cryogenic coring, via the injection of liquid nitrogen, followed by the use of the ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry available at the National High Magnetic Field facilities in the State that recently seceded from human decency and democracy with Baby Putin Desantis, Floridistan.



By the way, the effects on ground water from an abandoned petroleum refinery will pale when compared to the effects on ground water obtained from fracking while we all wait, breathlessly - our breath becoming more dangerous by the hour - for the grand electric car/wind/solar nirvana that has not come, is not here, and will not come.

Anyway, the petroleum is being metabolized, which over tens of thousands of years may prove to be a good thing, immediate effects on ground water notwithstanding.

Organisms in the petroleum contaminated soil:



The caption:



Counts of the hetero atoms in molecules associated with the metabolism of petroleum:





It's problematic that in the absence of oxygen, methanogenic organisms release the potent greenhouse gas methane, but letting water flow into the petroleum avoids this problem.

An excerpt of the conclusion:



I'm not quite sure how well humanity will survive, but it's comforting to note that probably life itself will.

I trust you're having as pleasant a Sunday as one can have in a time of tragedy.

March 19, 2022

A Very Nice Graphic on Thermochemical Hydrogen Production.

This is it:



The caption:

It's from this publication: Rami S. El-Emam, Hasan Ozcan, Calin Zamfirescu, Updates on promising thermochemical cycles for clean hydrogen production using nuclear energy, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 262, 2020, 121424,

I found it as a reference in this publication while catching up on my reading: Hydrogen Production Technologies: From Fossil Fuels toward Renewable Sources. A Mini Review Pedro J. Megía, Arturo J. Vizcaíno, José A. Calles, and Alicia Carrero Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (20), 16403-16415

Hydrogen from so called "renewable energy" - about which much has been written for no result - is, like so called "renewable energy" itself, a nonstarter.

Nevertheless as my son starts his Ph.D research this summer in nuclear engineering, particularly as his BS and MS are in materials science, I am encouraging him, for thermodynamic reasons - high efficiency - to think in terms of very high temperature nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen in and of itself is not a safe consumer fuel, but as a captive intermediate it can do a great deal.

March 19, 2022

OPEN LETTER FROM ENAMINE FOUNDER AND CEO DR. ANDREY TOLMACHOV in Kyiv.

Enamine is a company that produces building blocks for modern small molecule drug development. I have not done business with them, but I have met some of the team members here in New Jersey.

Apparently 50% of the worlds building block core structures are synthesized in Ukraine, and important drug discovery efforts around the world are supported by Ukrainian organic chemists. I have been wondering about the safety of Enamine's chemical libraries - well over a million compounds - ever since the war broke out.

Dr. Tolmachov's letter is here: OPEN LETTER FROM ENAMINE FOUNDER AND CEO DR. ANDREY TOLMACHOV

I produce it here in its entirety:

I'll excerpt another letter on the Enamine webiste, from earlier in the war, from Dr. Tolmachov:



There is a cost to this savagery beyond the lives lost directly by war.

This is a modern equivalent of the burning of the Library of Alexandria more than 1000 years ago, a tragedy for all humanity.