Former TV Weatherclown Leads Charge Against Wind Energy - In Kansas

[NNadir]

9. Again, I can't believe that there are people who think I'm stupid and uninformed so as to talk...

...about mining and so called "renewable energy," to support this useless crap, and, on top of that, to have the moral and intellectual and educational audacity to mention batteries in the same claim.

First of all, every wind turbine on this planet, all of them, without ever having produced 10 exajoules of primary energy out of the roughly 600 exajoules of energy humanity is consuming, will need to be replaced in the next 20 to 30 years, most in less than 20 years.

Danish Master Register of Wind Turbines

Every one of them. And then, according to people repeating ridiculous dogma in support of them, they will have to scale them by a factor of 50 beyond that. Whence is the steel, and land, and diesel fuel, concrete and asphalt supposed to come?

Vaclav Smil's short text, linked above in my previous, on the materials requirements of wind turbines, which have absurdly low energy to mass ratios, and obscene land use requirements, is easy to read. It contains no equations; it is a simple statement of something called "facts." Smil thinks; he doesn't wave his hands with misinformation and spin insipidly. Of course, a wind advocate would refuse to read it. They apparently buy into Trumpian "alternate facts" rhetoric.

Here's the shit for brains, "nuclear is too dangerous," "renewables will save the world" asshole Benjamin Sovacool writing about minerals for what he, and many other delusional call, "low carbon energy:" Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future. (This is, as is the case of almost everything Sovacool writes, derivative, there are thousands of better discussions of this issue in the primary scientific literature.)

Let me open the report - in case it's behind a firewall - and quote what this asshole says about his so called "renewable energy" scheme, enthusiasm for which is delaying real action on climate change:

These extractive and smelting industries have thus left a legacy in many parts of the world of environmental degradation, adverse impacts to public health, marginalized communities and workers, and biodiversity damage. We identify key sustainability challenges with practices used in industries that will supply the metals and minerals—including cobalt, copper, lithium, cadmium, and rare earth elements (REEs)—needed for technologies such as solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle (EV) motors, wind turbines, fuel cells, and nuclear reactors.

He doesn't know, like most "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes - a class to which he also belongs; I once engaged him on a blog whereupon I had the opportunity to express my contempt for his bad thinking - about nuclear reactors. Nothing at all, except he hates them.

Here's his "solution" to the cobalt, copper, lithium, cadmium, and lanthanides (so called "rare earth elements" ) : Mine the shit out of the ocean:

Although mining in terrestrial areas is likely to continue to meet the demands of low-carbon technologies in the nearer term, we need to carefully consider mineral sources beneath the oceans in the longer term. The International Seabed Authority, set up under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea, is in the process of issuing regulations related to oceanic mineral extraction. This process is a rare opportunity to be proactive in setting forth science-based environmental safeguards for mineral extraction. For metals such as cobalt and nickel, ocean minerals hold important prospects on the continental shelf within states' exclusive economic zones as well as the outer continental shelf regions. Within international waters, metallic nodules found in the vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone of the Pacific as well as in cobalt and tellurium crusts, which are found in seamounts worldwide, provide some of the richest deposits of metals for green technologies.

Even Sovacool, a typical weak thinker of the the "renewables will save us" sort, who is willing to tear the entire planet, not only land, but the oceans to chase the useless and destructive faith based "renewable energy" scheme, understands how what he calls (absurdly) "low carbon energy" the implications of mining.

(He's also fond of what he calls "artisanal and smallscale mining (ASM)" - you know, that the cobalt warlords should free their slaves and let them dig cobalt for themselves; a 21st century "forty acres and a mule" redux. Apparently those cobalt slaves are troubling him, not so much that he's willing to change his mind.)

And yet, here and now, I am presented with a claim that so called "renewable energy" advocates give a shit about mining? Am I supposed to laugh or cry?

Let's be clear on something, OK? There is not enough cobalt on this planet to be dug by African defacto slaves in the Congo River region, or nickel at the Russian Norlisk mines, about which I wrote here, Nickel oxide is literally green, which is good for your very "green" electric car that's saving... to address this obscene bourgeois fantasy about electric cars and wind turbine batteries designed to carry over a grid for weeks of Dunkleflaute, when there are wind droughts, periods during which the Germans burn coal and dump the waste on all people now living and on all future generations.

Anyone who says that batteries can "engineer away" the grotesque, expensive, and failed "renewable energy" scheme apparently knows very little about engineering, nothing about materials science, zero chemistry and very little about environmental issues.

However much people want to whine that "NNadir is an idiot" because we can tell him this kind of shit and expect him to accept it, has obviously not spent very much time thinking about energy and the environment.

As for the "better than nothing" excuse I repeatedly hear from people who think that so called "renewable energy" isn't that bad, even that it's a good thing - you know, to paraphrase, "what would the reading be at Mauna Loa if we hadn't spent 3.2633 trillion dollars dominated by wind and solar and to a lesser extent other wilderness destroying schemes" - we should consider what the result would have been if we spent the same money on stuff that works rather than embracing a "renewable energy" cargo cult.

Nuclear power plants are now designed to last 80 years. China, the most coal dependent large economy in the world, has built 54 of them in the last 20 years. How much coal would they burn if they hadn't built them? Even more than Germany's burning right now, to be sure. The Fuquing 6 reactor that reached full power last week, as well as the Hongyanghe reactor now starting up, will be operating when today's toddlers are grandparents.

Historically, using 1960's and 1970's technology, the United States built over 100 of them in a 20 year period, many of which still operate, gifts of an earlier more sensible generation to our ethically challenged generation.

And still we hear the delusional statement "we aren't building 100 reactors." They question is not whether it is feasible to build 100 reactors here - that has already been established in history - but rather, why we aren't building them?
Why not, in God's name, why not?

I know why: People spewing idiot rhetoric have won, and the consequences are upon all of humanity. Basically though, the rest of the world need not embrace the rhetoric in the American provinces.

(The Biden administration has just promoted Kathryn Huff to Assistant Secretary of Energy; she is very much involved in reality. It is a clear sign that our party, led by our President, is waking up.)

My State's coast is about to be industrialized with wind turbines, at a cost of over 5 billion dollars, for shit that will be landfill "by 2040." They will not be as reliable as the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, recently shut, the electricity will be expensive, backed by dangerous natural gas which may or may not be available, and will have to be decommissioned and replaced when my sons are in mid career. Oyster Creek, which came on line in 1969 and shut in 2018 - it could have operated longer. It operated 48 years, designed and built by engineers who mostly relied on slide rules.

Of course, we've heard this endless bullshit about how wind and solar can be built faster than nuclear plants. Really, with the need to be totally replaced every two or three decades? Anyone embracing this popular lie has never opened a single recent issue of the IEA's World Energy Outlook. After 50 years of mindless cheering, the solar and wind energy have never, not once, produced as much energy as primary nuclear energy - even with catcalls from ignorant people who spout ridiculous dogma - has been producing since the early 1990s, around 28 exajoules. Not once. Never. And yet, and yet, and yet, we hear the same lie repeated over and over and over and over, "it takes too long to build a nuclear plant; solar and wind are faster..."

Really?

One can look it up, if one give's a rat's ass about energy and the environment. If one doesn't give a rat's ass, one can continue to spew dogmatic pabulum that conflicts with reality.

Have a nice weekend.