President Lindsay’s Recent Comments

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  Who needs oil?

  People don't talk much about oil as a material. It's too good for burning, vital for paint, plastics, medicines, dyes, components of many devices/small products -- light bulbs, hair combs, pens. Reach in any direction, you'll touch oil.

  But we don't need it. We can derive synthesis gas from garbage, agricultural waste and industrial waste, and from that we can make all the same products. Even carbon neutral gasoline! Not only that, but we wouldn't even have to separate our garbage, just throw everything into the dumpster: poopy diapers, old drain oil, asbestos, dioxin, old car batteries, nerve gas, whatever. You can read about all this and the other technologies mentioned in Dr. Hansen's paper in my book as soon as it's out, in late August.On Hansen's trip report finds 'sobering degree of self-deception' in Germany, U.K., Japan posted 1 year, 3 months ago 13 Responses

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  We already have

  Graham and I have known each other for years. As for who I really am, just got to my web site and you can read the beginning of my book and my true identity will be revealed!On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses

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  Okay, Dr. X, I give up

  You've convinced me that you're not serious. Fortunately others here are.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses

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  Bad link

  Sorry about that link. Fixed now.

  As for Graham's speculation about turbine design, while you might take issue with that (I, too, feel like direct burning in the turbine entails problems) it doesn't change the fact of boron's energy density, about quadruple that of hydrocarbons. It could very well be burned in a combustion chamber with a heat exchanger, which could then cleanly and easily power a turbine. In regard to the gravel you spoke about, he was referring more to other energy carriers. There's no reason that a boron/oxygen combustion chamber would have to eject anything at all. Unburned boron and/or oxygen could simply be fed back into the intake, and the boria would collect at the bottom to be unloaded at the boron fueling station.

  I went back and looked at that thread where the esteemed Dr. X was so slandered by Graham, and as the latter said it was a Simpsons joke on a thread that started with Simpsons jokes. That was the article by Joe Romm where he threw around numbers like $6-8,000/megawatt as a cost for nuclear power, which is ridiculous unless you assume that any nuclear plant is going to be hamstrung by endless lawsuits and drag on for a decade or more because of it, that they'll be all built as one-off designs in the old style, and other such archaic notions.

  If you'd like realistic projections for costs, you need look no further than the experience of GE/Hitachi in Japan with their recent and current construction of the ABWR reactors. Even on first of a kind projects, they were able to go from breaking ground to loading fuel in 39 months, and build them quite economically. Now they're building more for Japan, more in Taiwan, and they hope to build them in the USA where they've got pending orders. At this point they have a considerable data set from which to price them, and they know from very recent and current experience that they can build them for about $1,400/MW. But they also have learned from building the earlier ones (which are running just fine, thank you very much) and feel quite confident that they can reduce that to $1,200/MW. Compare this to Pickens' and North Sea wind farms at about $15,000/MW (if you don't ignore that pesky capacity factor).

  The thing is, as economical as the ABWR is, the newer and even safer designs stand to be even cheaper. The AP-1000 by Westinghouse, already being built in China, and the new ESBWR by GE/Hitachi (now in the certification process) will be smaller units that can be built in factories and transported to the sites to be dropped into their excavations, allowing for great quality control and diminished expense. Plus they go even farther than the ABWR in terms of completely passive safety systems (though the ABWR is way ahead of current designs) and thus are able to employ even fewer pumps and valves and other complexities of earlier designs, thus resulting in a smaller footprint and lower costs.

  But the S-PRISM reactor is the one we should be waiting for, and impatiently so, for that one can finally solve our entire nuclear "waste" problem, and won't require a speck of uranium to be mined to fuel them--ever. (Well, not for about a thousand years, anyway.) It's a modular system using passive safety features unrivaled in their effectiveness by even the newest plant designs. It's already been designed and could start to be built pronto, but of course most of our policymakers don't even know about it because the DOE is still censoring research reports that mention that naughty word "breeding." While the USA has its collective head in the sand, other countries (India, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, France) are all proceeding with projects to build similar reactors, yet unfortunately we don't seem to be sharing our considerable knowledge about the safest designs with them because we keep pretending they don't exist. It's a great pity, especially as our world heats up and we keep pretending that we can gather enough sunshine to fix it.

  So Barack comes out with his much-heralded energy speech calling for clean coal, the ludicrous cap & trade, more drilling, and one sentence about nuclear that show not an iota of knowledge about such technologies. This is what we have to look forward to? The politics is what's killing us.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses

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  No need to snap, Dr. X

  Seems I'm getting a bit of transferred rage here, Dr. X. Did you and Graham have some disagreements in the past? No need for venom here, I'm trying to have a reasonable discussion. If Graham has an idea that could work, I'm as ready to look at it as any other idea. And his boron fuel idea for vehicles has plenty of advantages. There are some pretty impressive scientists who are quite convinced it could work.

  Ad hominem never advances reasoned discussion. You're better than that, I suspect.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses