Comments GRLCowan has made

Fossil fuel subsidies are loathsome, stupid and wrong. But it's fantasy to think that eliminating them would make renewables and efficiency considerably more competitive.

Oh, I was supposed to disparage the guy? I guess I should have figured.

(<em><a href="http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/">How fire can be domesticated</a></em>)

It's not as if the past eight years had seen no progress in hydrogen cars, though. Just look at these numbers:

The Honda Clarity goes 310 km to 320 km on a tankful.

This is fully 10-20 km more than what the BMW 520h was doing, 30 years ago, on hydrogen internal combustion!

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen energy fan until ~1996
(How fire can be domesticated)

... and by the way, Klaus Lackner, where is this brick wall, and why don't we just build a footbridge over it?

(How fire can be domesticated)

Perhaps they fear fossil fuel cash flows ...

will not be spent in ways that choke off fossil cash flows; that they will be spent in ways that can be spun as having that intention, but do not.

Is there anything missing from your suggested remedies that might give that impression?

(How fire can be domesticated)On What's the alternative? posted 9 months ago 5 Responses

So who's doing it right? (nt)

(How fire can be domesticated)On Dear public advocates for addressing climate change, posted 9 months, 1 week ago 7 Responses

Ask not for a tax, rather, ask to defossilize gov

A carbon tax is the way to go, but government should not become more financially interested in the survival of the fossil fuel industries.

So the revenue must not stay in government hands. The best alternative is dividing it out equally to each citizen. (Or, in a cap-and-trade system, issuing an equal emission permit to each citizen.)

But government ALREADY has many billions in annual fossil fuel revenue in its hands. The first step, therefore, is to divide out EXISTING coal, oil, and gas income.

When this is done, and only then, we'll know that all-important return of the revenue has, at least in the first, easiest step, come real.

(How fire can be domesticated)On Memo to tax sirens: Both a carbon cap and a tax can be implemented well posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 20 Responses

Churchill and Old Scratch

Strange alliances.

I hope he hates to link up with those people as much as I hate agreeing with Romm.

Why can't we cool the globe by letting the cold black slime out of Greenpeacers' circulatory systems?

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On James Hansen wants you to join in civil disobedience at the U.S. Capitol coal-fired power plant posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 11 Responses

Someday, everyone will agree with me

It's amazing how long people like this ...

(People who write articles that end with a request that carbon tax be considered. Not dividend-of-existing-C-tax-first, just C tax. Dividend is mentioned but not the necessity, both strategic and moral, of putting it at the top of the bill.)

... have ruled our national discourse.

(How fire can be domesticated)On WaPo lets Will off, lectures Boxer on climate change posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 1 Response

Renewables is a code word for natgas

Greenpeace workers have demonstrated that no-one doesn't like nuclear plants in his own vicinity. Failure to mention them in this of all contexts is symptomatic of being sustained by natural gas income.

(How fire can be domesticated)On Superb NYT story captures both coal's peril and the barriers to its elimination posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago 38 Responses

CSP will defund fossil fuel industry, tax man

Well, maybe someday. Long before then, the tax man, seeing the coming danger, will cease to support it, and may even -- imagine this if you can -- pepper net-fora with astroturf comments against it.

Iron oxides can smooth solar power over the whole temperate-zone year.

(How fire can be domesticated)On Biggest California utility contracts for world's biggest solar power deal posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 12 Responses

If he doesn't see it, it's not there

From the linked article:

To get really ambitious, we imagine storing energy as elemental aluminum or elemental lithium. Those two highly electro-positive elements yield a theoretical energy density--when oxidized in air--of 32 and 43 mega-joules per kilogram.

More here.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated
On Energy density is not an immutable requirement posted 10 months ago 44 Responses

Heat can be lossily converted to work ...

... or to hydrocarbons-plus-oxygen. And the oxygen can then be stored in the atmosphere.

So if hydrocarbons were unbeatable for energy storage, this would not imply they had to continue to be our primary energy source.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Energy density is not an immutable requirement posted 10 months ago 44 Responses

Money into the bottom half's hands

... or anyway, the bottom half in terms of carbon emission.

Paraphrasing snedunuri,

net-zero taxes? couldn't the newly empowered left do something on the framing front that? Everyone gets a rebate check back from the gumt, since the point of this ...

... is to compensate those doing less-than-average harm to the common atmosphere at the expense of those doing more harm than average, thus directing the top half away from carbon-intensive activity.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, (How fire can be tamed)On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

Make them live next to the pipelines

"look for costs to fall like a rock"

Hey, the fastest way to cut costs would be to deregulate.

Definitely not.

Get all those obstructionist federal officials out the way.

A cleverer approach is to look at why they are obstructionist, and remove the underlying cause. I think that underlying cause is oil and gas tax and royalty revenue.

No-one is concerned about nuclear power safety because the relevant authorities clearly are not: they are posted at nuclear power stations as resident inspectors. Requiring them to reside alongside the gas pipelines that bring in so much of their income would be a much tougher sell.

However, when carbon dividend-and-tax goes through, and government no longer is the main fossil fuel profiteer, it will change government employees' and dependents' points of view.

(How fire can be domesticated)On Turkey's only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour posted 10 months ago 34 Responses

Argh

Nobody's proposing lighting the revenue on fire. Where does he think investments in renewable energy and efficiency go? Mars?

I doubt he thinks they go to Mars. He could quite sensibly think they go respectively to losers and to free riders, so as not to cancel the revenue source.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, (How fire can be tamed)On Sen. Bob Corker wants a carbon tax posted 10 months, 1 week ago 5 Responses

Refunded C tax has unmentioned backing

It has the backing of James Hansen, who is mentioned, but his agreement on the matter of refund with the noted "worst columnist" is not.

Do the refund first, and the public is immediately on side.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months, 1 week ago 37 Responses

If you believe in many close calls ...

and, bafflingly, no hits, you were never pronuclear, nor genuinely pro-renewable-energy.

Similarly, a belief that nuclear power plant waste presents unsolved problems, despite its management so far having been completely successful in preventing harm to anyone, is never found in anyone who isn't trying to direct attention away from carbon monoxide injuries and deaths that are lucrative for him or her. (Usually through fossil fuel taxation. You really only have to fool one person.)

Pronuclear people believe nuclear energy is an optional good, not a necessary evil.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On An open letter to the president and first lady from the nation's top climate scientist posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 48 Responses

Are you all impaired in some way?

You underestimate the success that the Republican Party has had in absolutely demonizing taxation.  That success has done great harm, but it's real, we're stuck with it, and I do not believe a carbon tax could pass Congress.  Nor do I believe the public would support it.

The public will support Dividend First. It's a tax reduction.

It will do so much good that increases in fuel-carbon tax, also to be immediately divided out, will not necessarily be a tough sell, but they also may not be necessary. When government no longer profits from fossil fuels, it will have no problem turning up at a householder's leaky house, local contractors in tow, and inviting him to stay in a hotel for a day or two, gratis, while they fix it.

Compare the present case, where discussions of such assistance in making houses efficient sometimes mention the free-rider factor -- those householders who take the people's money to do fixes they would have done anyway. It's almost as if finding those people, and funding them preferentially, were on the program managers' minds for some reason.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On An open letter to the president and first lady from the nation's top climate scientist posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 48 Responses

That would also justify ...

a tax on reading glasses whose proceeds are earmarked for public libraries.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Before we debate gas taxes vs. mileage taxes, Oregonians must pay for roads with those taxes posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 5 Responses

They're gas suppliers, too

RealClimate would appreciate your help, if you think it's the best science blog of 2008, in voting that thought.

It's a good thing net emissions don't have to rise as fast as gross. And for sure, there are ways to reduce the gross, while letting those who want to become motorists become motorists. As occasionally said here, cars are awfully handy.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Oil giant forecasts continued rise in emissions through 2050 posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 1 Response

How could anyone consider that study pessimistic?

A pessimistic nuclear cost projection from Severance would be one that found low costs.

Concerning poster-bots, RealClimate would like you to outvote them in the year-end blog contest thing.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Responding to Heritage's staggeringly confused 'rebuttal' posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago 30 Responses

Dividend first

I'd like to see a strong grassroots push for a carbon tax as Hansen proposes. Who will join me in this effort?

Hansen wants new fossil fuel revenue to be equally divided out. It would be very bad to forget that.

To have real grassroots (rather than just grossrats) support, the dividend has to be done first.

Existing very large subsidies from fossil fuel users to government should be paid out as equal dividends out first. That will do so much good that taking more money, to divide right back out, may not be necessary.

Dividend first. Dividend first. What was that rule again? Dividend first.

Also, gasoline and diesel fuel taxes, and natural gas royalties and retail taxes, should be returned on a per-head basis before any new fossil fuel taxes are enacted -- and when that happens, the revenues therefrom should be paid back to the citizens as equal dividends.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (Read my new paper. If you can't, please let me know how far you got)On An open letter to the president and first lady from the nation's top climate scientist posted 11 months ago 48 Responses

Polonium-210 is natural

In the aftermath of the Litvinenko story, journalists found persons they considered expert to tell them the polonium must have come from a nuclear reactor. However,

• Radon is a daughter of radium.
  
• About a century ago, many grams of radium were purified.
  Some were put onto instrument faces, but there probably still are many bottles in the world, each containing a quantity of purified radium in a 0.1-g to 1-g-ish range.
  
• Radon's inert gaseous nature means it spreads throughout such a containment.
  
• Its daughters are not gaseous and not inert.
  
• They therefore tend to plate out on the walls of any vessel that contains radium.
  
• Heating the walls of such a vessel could volatilize polonium that could then be captured on something cool, such as a sugar cube.
  

In short, the materials used in Litvinenko's assassination are very unlikely to have had any acquaintance with any reactor.

Polonium-210 also accumulates* on the walls of vessels used to contain or carry natural gas or LPG. When the synagogue in Algeria was bombed with an LPG tanker, that was a dirty bomb attack.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)

* actually its parent lead-210 accumulates, but the result is a 210-Po activity that continues for longer than the 138-day half-life would indicate. Lead-210 has a 22-year half-life.On An open letter to the president and first lady from the nation's top climate scientist posted 11 months ago 48 Responses

Lots of ideas

Lots of ideas were tossed into the ring, like ... raising the federal gas tax ... and raising fuel-economy standards to 100 miles per hour by 2020.

Ex-cellent. Any progress on banning parking brakes that completely release?

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Brookings and RMI bring energy stakeholders together to forge areas of agreement posted 11 months, 1 week ago 7 Responses

US car sales in general down about 30 % IIRC ...

Way down, but not quite as far down as hybrid sales.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be domesticated)On Sales of popular hybrid vehicles plunged in November posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago 6 Responses

So it should say Logical but totally socratic

unless it's insane to expect anyone to read a whole page of stuff.

--- G.R.L. Cowan ('How fire can be tamed')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowanOn Summers receieves flack for his tactless pollution-control memo as VP of World Bank in 1991 posted 1 year ago 15 Responses

The large-forge capacity can change quickly

The current plants need highly pressurized chambers, which can be built at only one facility in the world ! For this reason (and also for the problem of nuclear waste), 2nd or 3rd generation reactors cannot make a significant dent in the energy sector. But 4th generation reactors are revolutionary, and this is precisely the reason the fossil-fuel establishment fears them so much.

Actually, I think that's why they fear 2nd and 3rd generation reactor types.

I don't know what generation CANDU counts as, but it does not depend on large forged pressure vessels.

Linked below, my isotope-separation-free proposal.

--- G.R.L. Cowan ('How fire can be tamed')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowanOn Carbon is forever posted 1 year ago 35 Responses

Hmmm

Like France, Japan heavily subsidizes their power industry.

I can do that too: 'Tasermons partner' is heavily subsidized by the Grays. He's an extraterrestrial fifth columnist.

Proof by boldface!

The subsidy mantra is particularly comical in those countries that have undertaken to shut down their nukes, and somehow don't get around to it, despite the oodles of subsidy cash that ought to be just waiting to be freed up when they do.

Still, what government department wants to be stuck with a bunch of money.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Three nuke-dependent communities vote for a nuclear phase-out posted 1 year ago 17 Responses

Let honest doctors speak up

... although they should recognize that unlike Epstein's natgas-friendly missive, theirs had better be under 100 words.

Replacing carbon waste with radioactive waste is not healthy

Not healthy!? He is a traitor to his own profession as well as to the human race.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On The Epstein alternative posted 1 year ago 3 Responses

Unlike wind turbine and natural gas mishaps ...

no nuclear reactor meltdown has harmed anyone.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Fermi who? posted 1 year, 1 month ago 7 Responses

Just take CH_n out of the eqn, why don't we

I feel very funny about this technology.  Probably not logical.  Part of me thinks the whole thing is simply hopeless if U.S./Europe builds one CCS plant while China builds 5 regular ones.

"Let's build a boat."

"Well, the technology gives me a funny feeling. Won't we have to wear hollowed-out watermelons as head protection? What if the eye holes don't line up?"

The whole thing is not hopeless, although discussions of CCS as if it were an attribute of a plant -- implying that only when all existing plants are replaced with CCS ones will those existing plants' emissions be reduced to zero -- are useful if you wish to avoid hope.

I think Beyer can add two and two. Let him therefore examine his idea about CCS becoming more expensive over time by determining the thickness of the dust layer 500 gigatonnes of CO2 would make, on the Sahara desert say, if it were precipitated there as MgCO3.

Or hey, don't bother with the arithmetic, Jim, just jump directly to the apology.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Solar industry aims for grid parity in eight years posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

The UCS thing is being discussed,

tangentially, here.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn UCS on CCS posted 1 year, 1 month ago 1 Response

How soon we forget ...

But people like Obama could at least take positions against horrors like coal, nuclear, and oil by graphically showing people how destructive these industries are.

How soon we forget we're supposed to pretend to oppose natural gas as we would any fossil fuel.

Failing to oppose a "horror" like nuclear energy does not endear Obama to a venal, gas-loving part of his civil service base, but they, and the environmentally unconcerned cohort among the publically funded in general, are a minority within a minority.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Obama cannot politically afford to take the kind of bold green stances enviros are hungry for posted 1 year, 1 month ago 19 Responses

My guesses

200 percent, 30 tonnes, 6, 10-1-and-80, no idea, 2 percent.

Actually, for the last, -5 was my first guess, but then I thought, first half, that won't be so down.

You ignore nuclear uprates due to turbine replacements, etc.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Take a fun quiz on energy posted 1 year, 1 month ago 3 Responses

Electricity-like combustion is how I see it going

Batteries contain oxygen and fuel when charged, and when discharged they contain chemicals that, had their production from the oxygen and the fuel been via combustion, would be ash.

The difficulty of fitting much oxygen into a battery is why they don't yield much energy. So I would have them pull in air oxygen, burn something with it, and -- like a battery -- keep the ash on board. Except at refuelling time, it would be swapped for new fuel. The ash bin is much smaller than an equivalent hydrogen tank. More at my web page.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Tesla ousts second CEO in two years and plans to cut staff posted 1 year, 1 month ago 5 Responses

I think I can make that coherent

Requiring nuclear power to be safe is not extreme. Pretending that it isn't shows an extreme commitment -- a commitment at the cost of dignity -- to environmentalism, as McCain sees environmentalism.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Safety is for extremists posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

Oh yeah, that was the problem

How must the carbon tax increase/income tax reduction have polled for the Liberals when they tried it on people around the office?

Perhaps they were entirely appreciative of the need for more carbon money to be in their paycheques, because of the way this would affect the behaviour of those who would pay it. A very witty proposal: take from those who will be affected by the taking, give to philosopher-kings whom money, additional fossil carbon money, cannot affect.

Also, no need to present the two things in this order -- income tax reduction/carbon tax increase -- because nobody doesn't like income tax. Putting it second on the bill gave voters the hope that it might be forgotten when the time for implementation came around.

With that hope in their breast, they must have liked the green shift, insofar as they were able to understand it. Better voter education was all that was lacking.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Canadian elections strengthen Conservatives, drinkers posted 1 year, 1 month ago 3 Responses

The subhead is a misunderstanding, I think

I don't see how McCain's remark could be seen as having any connection to anti-troopism on anyone's part. He's saying, ask someone who, because they choose to spend their working lives near nuclear power, should know.

Obama's call for making nuclear power and its waste storage safe, as if safety had not long been established, is deceptive. He has to pander to his base, who covet oil and gas tax revenue and wish to deny their own understanding that the associated deaths are unnecessary.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On McCain spins concerns about nuclear safety as anti-troops posted 1 year, 1 month ago 10 Responses

You will not always caricature your opponents

because you won't forever remain opposed. Not that you ever were, of course! Not antinuclear, just independent-minded.

Yes, yes,

everyone with concerns about nuclear is twitterpated and emotional and irrational, ...

Moral cowards with an eye to the main chance ... goers-along to get along ... coldly rational reducers-to-practice of the theory that they won't be taking it with them because neither they nor anyone will be going, but in the here-and-now, baby needs shoes ...

And yes, yes, Very Special Future Pony Nuclear will have none of the problems of today's Actually Existing Nuclear. Those who raise issues with Actually Existing Nuclear simply lack the proper PonyVision.

That is indeed a kind of pro-nuclear argument that bothers me too. Don't they understand that the problems with existing nuclear energy are neither serious, nor believed to be serious by most who claim that belief?

Haven't they noticed Greenpeace researchers quietly scooting up the gangway of a nuclear-powered ship?

We've been over all this many times.

Then you should have no problem travestying some of my previous arguments.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn McCain mystified by Obama's concerns over nuclear posted 1 year, 1 month ago 28 Responses

Look at it this way ...

... set aside the preposterous notion that nuclear power is going to "fix" climate change

Look at it this way. Anything that fixes climate change by replacing fossil fuels is going to ruffle a lot of feathers, a lot of very plush feathers.

Nuclear energy is already replacing billions of dollars' worth of fossil fuel per week.

It may seem preposterous that anything that ruffles as many feathers as nuclear energy can be ramped up to make industrial civilization carbon-neutral, and in fact carbon-negative for as long as necessary, but there is nothing technically preposterous about this, and the political difficulties are exactly what anything that can really do the job will encounter.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn McCain mystified by Obama's concerns over nuclear posted 1 year, 1 month ago 28 Responses

Be-all and end-all

If the be-all and end-all of your existence is to opposes nuclear power, then I can't argue with you .

If the be-all and end-all of their existence is to protect governments' CO2 emission revenues, then they'll be amenable to varieties of nuclear power that have no history of effectiveness in preventing those emissions and revenues, and do not appear to threaten the money in the future.

--- G.R.L. Cowan (How fire can be tamed)On The Biden-Obama position on 'clean coal' is not a mistake posted 1 year, 1 month ago 50 Responses

For us, no untruth is convenient

We would have to bury ... 30,600 pounds of CO2 into the ground each year for each person

Why would any such measure be required to make an all-coal electricity system carbon-neutral, Bill?

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 24 Responses

India has a civil service class too ...

and they're as determined to preserve their oil and gas revenue privilege as any such class anywhere. That is why India has a "shortage" of uranium. (!) They have mines they won't let start.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Palin's climate skepticism is irrelevant posted 1 year, 2 months ago 39 Responses

FTM

Both the LFTR and the IFR share several common aspects in their designs : they are both very resistant to proliferation,  they are both passively safe, and they both have very high burnup ratio of fuel (this means that they obtain 100 times more energy from the same amount of fuel as current nuclear reactors).

'Vakibs', hasn't Gen II nuclear power been entirely resistant to proliferation? In oil-equivalent terms, haven't uranium prices briefly exceeding three dollars a barrel driven a rate of prospecting exceeding 100 million barrels per day?

Progressives' concern about nuclear energy is that it will cut into the oil and gas tax component of their public funding. If they could be assured that that tax revenue is gone anyway, they would have no further objections to future nuclear energy, nor to present-day nuclear energy. They don't mind personally riding nuclear boats, and the majorities of those who live near nuclear power stations who favour their enlargement must include many progressives.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, author of How fire can be tamedOn Palin's climate skepticism is irrelevant posted 1 year, 2 months ago 39 Responses

Ranked by completeness,

it does look like the penultimate meltdown so far, and I could care less.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Despite cooler weather, Arctic ice retreat just misses last year's mark posted 1 year, 2 months ago 11 Responses

I don't see how that's a disagreement

I don't see how Casten's comment disagrees with mine.

The title is "A greenhouse-gas syllogism for policy-makers", emphasis mine. If they're publically appointed policymakers, a quite influential subset, then they're probably publically paid policymakers. Let's hope they don't institute a 'p' tax.

... you need fossil fuel to make steel, and in that sense, fossil fuel helps the steel industry make money, but the ratio of fossil fuel:steel (or any other manufactured good) is neither fixed nor optimal, ...

Strong enough light can toast magnetite to such effect that it loses some of its oxygen:

Fe3O4(l) ---> 3 FeO(l) + (1/2) O2

The FeO can then freeze, and if the solid is slowly cooled, when it gets below, IIRC, 575°C, it will disproportionate:

3 FeO ---> (3/4) Fe3O4 + (3/4) Fe

These two solids cannot be separated magnetically, as Fe3O4's mineral name, "magnetite", suggests. But carbon monoxide can hoist out the iron at room temperature and deposit as pure iron -- "carbonyl iron" -- at 200°C or so.

So nuclear/solar steelmaking, or anyway ironmaking, is certainly possible.

If it were tried and proved to be economically superior to carbothermic iron reduction, steel makers would be the richer, and carbon suppliers the poorer.

But -- returning to the title subject -- publically paid policymakers would lose more tax revenue due to the carbon suppliers' misfortune than they would gain due to the iron makers good fortune. Or anyway, they would if natural gas had been the reductant. I don't know of any dog-waggingly revenues from coal or coke.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, nuclear ironmongerOn Do we want an economy that's a bit more Belgian or Belgian Congo? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 25 Responses

How I expect it to happen ...

is told at the end of my IJNHPA piece, link below.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On The automotive revolution: how fast? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 5 Responses

My best effort

eliminate the middleman ...

why go from nuclear to hydrogen, when we can just have nuclear cars? popular science told me 50 years ago that we'd be driving them now, and we're so much more advanced now that they must be just around the corner.

The oil and gas interests, including civil servants, would not like that, but neither, it turns out, would the laws of physics.

Fission's docility seems mismatched with hydrogen's extreme combustibility and fuel-air detonation tendency. If a car is indirectly nuclear-powered, shouldn't the onboard energy release be fission-like in its forgivingness? That thought is what led me eventually to become a tame-combustion fan. Some nuclear people have been persuaded to give my thoughts on this some shelf space, link below. See what you think.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
On The Economist agrees with me on hydrogen posted 1 year, 2 months ago 21 Responses

Grrr

The molten Sodium coolant reacts violently with water, and this coolant was leaking all the team.

You'd think they'd have appointed one member to take the hit.

It was wrecking the nerves of the administration, and the plant was shut down quite often to fix the leaks. (The IFR developed at the Argonne laboratory in USA fixes the molten Sodium problem by having an additional coolant loop. So this problem is solved.

Actually all sodium-cooled reactors have had that additional coolant loop. It ensures that if sodium and water get at each other, at least the sodium is sodium that has not been near the reactor.

Finally, an eco-pacifist group (!) based in Switzerland obtained missiles from Jackal the arms dealer and fired it at the reactor, partially destroying the core but without radiation damage.

That's all correct, except it wasn't finally, it was initially, before the plant started; the core was not destroyed, nor in any way affected, rather, a shallow divot was made in the outer containment shell; and the plant subsequently was completed and operated.

Vakibs' account is sufficiently error-ridden that I wonder if there were actually sodium leaks during this phase. Elsewhere, at Monju for instance, yes there were. But maybe not at Superphenix.

The technical conservatism part is true. Since it set in, several much nicer-seeming ideas have been advanced, e.g., cooling with lead rather than sodium. Lead cannot react with water, nor support combustion, although it does oxidize superficially.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On McCain's nuclear plan would cost $315 billion, with taxpayers risking over $100 billion posted 1 year, 2 months ago 21 Responses

Oil can be leapfrogged

... we really need to put more effort into CO2 "washing" to remove CO2 that is already in the atmosphere.

So far, the only large-scale permanent CO2 removal that has been happening, has been happening as a side effect of mining. More here, including numerous comments by me up and down thread.

These two actions could go a long way towards cooling the climate and achieving equilibrium, but I don't hear climate scientists beating the drums for them. Why not?

They tend to think once CO2 has dispersed in the atmosphere, condensing it to a solid must be very difficult, because its entropy in the solid will be less. Fortunately, they are wrong, because the heat released by the condensation increases total entropy more. So grains of pulverized alkaline earth silicate minerals are consumed by, and consume, atmospheric CO2 over a period of one to five years. Here's Schuiling again saying one year (but he wants it to happen in warm places, where it's quicker).

Truth be told, even if the west reduces its greenhouse gases, the Developing world is just going to take our place in  outputs. The oil is giong to be used until it's gone.

Western governments are already taking enough special revenues on oil and gas to pay for removing CO2 by the above-mentioned methods at a greater rate than it is being injected from all fossil fuels worldwide. We could carry the developing world.

Also, in some markets, we know oil can be beaten, because it has been. Natural gas is next, as soon as its wind-power figleaf can be stripped away.On Is the IPCC so wrong their theories contradict a basic laws of physics? posted 1 year, 2 months ago 23 Responses

Not just any dust

Volcanic dust plumes can block sunlight, but this does not counteract all the effects of CO2. The oceans are still less alkaline than they were, so deliberately imitating volcanos is a SACTCAR measure.

If the dust is derived from alkaline earth silicate rocks, it doesn't matter whether it blocks sunlight or not, because it accelerates the natural mineralization of CO2, and is a BTRO solution. The USA could indeed reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide globally by this means.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Brookings calls for action on climate change in WaPo op-ed posted 1 year, 3 months ago 9 Responses

They get you riled up, don't they

'vakibs', it occurs to me you did doubtful arithmetic because you were talking to people who will say anything in defense of natural gas. It is better not to talk to the astro crew at all.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On A choice of primary energies: renewable electrons win the gold posted 1 year, 3 months ago 58 Responses

Mother sous-peerage undergone

Concentrated solar power (CSP) is worse than PV.

True if by "worse" you mean "better".

You will lose a lot of solar power, as it gets repeatedly reflected by mirrors. The energy denstity ...

power density ...

of CSP is 18 W/m^2.

Use this number and not 1000 W/m^2 to calculate how much land we require for obtaining our energy needs. You will be in for some surprise.

We need an area of 1000 X 1000 sq-kilometres...

To make 18,000 GW (electric), according to your 18-W/m^2 estimate of year-round average production. What do you consider the world's present electrical wattage needs to be, 'vakibs'?

--- G.R.L. Cowan
How the car gains nuclear cachetOn A choice of primary energies: renewable electrons win the gold posted 1 year, 3 months ago 58 Responses

Destiny rides again

could the failures of the Chernobyl design be entirely foreseen by the nuclear science of the time?

They were in ~1950.

That is probably a long argument ...

anywhere where financial security depends on oil and gas revenue ...

within the nuclear engineering community

no controversy there that I've seen.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan
On A choice of primary energies: nuclear power takes the silver posted 1 year, 3 months ago 23 Responses

He loves him his straw men

Burying CO2 is not the essence of CCS.

Also, for someone who likes looking far back, how does he manage to remain ignorant of the West's learning the lessons of Chernobyl in 1950?

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Carbon sequestration is a GM solution; we need a Honda solution posted 1 year, 3 months ago 7 Responses

Bad greens drive out good

"... I know reporting it annoys the deniers, and I am trying to enjoy my vacation."

This language shows a lack of respect for people who have a differing viewpoint from yours - which is why I do not label myself and environmentalist; they are far too intolerant.

There's some truth in that, and it makes the argument that has been used here that because nuclear energy hasn't converted many greenies-of-record, it must have been bad, and still be so, stupid. That they ever opposed it at all shows they were part of the problem while still young, and that's a condition that age rarely reverses.

The people whom Romm disrespects, and I do too, are those with no point of view, just a will to inflame debate, often with character assassinations of honorable men, and then claim victory, and perhaps some kind of reward, because they have made their targets angry and, putatively, proved that the debate is ongoing. Got their targets off message. Maybe Romm hasn't actually annoyed them, just rung their dinner bell.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On NOAA says July 08 was fifth warmest on record posted 1 year, 3 months ago 15 Responses

Private versus public wealth

There's no telling, because no-one's paying pollsters to ask, how many of the following relevant facts were known to the respondents, but a gigawatt-year of natural gas-fired electricity production, the dominant form recently allowed to be built, uses $0.53 billion worth of natural gas. Of this, government gets $0.06 billion to $0.07 billion. A gigawatt-year of nuclear electricity production cancels that royalty income by replacing the half-billion in gas with uranium that now-a-days sells for less than $0.04 billion. So City Hall doesn't like nuclear power. Maybe women are more inclined than men to trust, or seek profitable accommodation with, City Hall.

If that's so, and one could somehow compare men and women selected for equal left-wing-ness, the sex differential should vanish.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Why is nuclear energy what 'real men' support? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 26 Responses

*MAD MAC

You make more points than I can respond to right now, but maybe just the following one.

Without Googling or otherwise doing any research, what ten-or-fewer words would best convey your present knowledge of the Alberta tar patch?

Similarly, what ten-or-fewer words sum up, for you right this moment, the McArthur River mine?

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Why do more men than women support nuclear power? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 31 Responses

How LONG, you say?

We can only wonder how long it will be before car companies and governments accept that hydrogen is a pipe dream  ...

I believe it's about minus-seven years for the latter. The car companies just go along with the charade. They don't get the gasoline revenue.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
On Department of Energy flushes $15 million down the hydrogen toilet posted 1 year, 3 months ago 18 Responses

Last I heard ...

Is it really true that

He filled them with gaseous hydrogen using a hydrogen generator powered by his solar panels ...

Last I heard, the solar panels were expected to make up for depletion of the initial load, which was due to Praxair or some such entity.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Fleet of hydrogen concept vehicles crosses U.S. as part of Hydrogen Road Tour posted 1 year, 3 months ago 28 Responses

I don't think that's a quote of Hansen

... those dang "extreme environmentalists" prevented us from building ...

This Hansen PDF tells the story, as he relays it from Tom Blees. It links the breeder-with-integrated-reprocessing thing's stoppage with fossil fuel interests, as I would think anyone would. Calling them extreme environmentalists is exactly like calling tobacco scientists extreme health advocates.

The fifth element makes an appearance.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Jim Hansen on Charlie Rose posted 1 year, 3 months ago 5 Responses

209746 O2 + 280 CO2 + 100 C -->

Actually, to get ~380 molecules of atmospheric CO2 where formerly there were 280, more than 100 atoms of carbon have had to be burned because of absorption by the sea. But as best I recall, less than twice more. Supposing it did take just twice as many, this, in ppm, would be approximately the deal so far:

209746 O2 + 280 CO2 + 200 C  --->
209546 O2 + 380 CO2 + 100 marine CO2

Ideally one would account also for the oxygen that ended up in water when the hydrogen in fossil fuels was burned. That might knock the right-side 0.210 dioxygen fraction down to 0.209.

Tatchell needed to begin his column, "I am not a scientist ..." and then stop. Perhaps some others of his columns have been less abusive of privilege.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Oh good grief posted 1 year, 3 months ago 6 Responses

Technology Review and Tyler Hamilton ...

may be "hardcore" compared to David Roberts, but that's a relative measure.

The idea of "disruptive technology" is that it disrupts existing suppliers' supply privilege, not that it disrupts car, driver, and pavement. A many-kWh capacitor that would not cause a car to drag its sheet metal would have a cascade failure mechanism that would indeed make it killer technology. It would be quintessentially green.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On EEStor founder says things are on track for commercial production in 2009 posted 1 year, 3 months ago 13 Responses

The Italian navigator has entered the new world

"The Italian navigator has entered the new world" was the code phrase, I'm told, for the first man-made fission reactor's first turning on and off. The person responding asked something like, "How were the natives", and the answer was, "Very friendly".

Now, we're not sure, or anyway I'm not sure, exactly what meaning had been beforehand agreed upon for that third phrase. But everyone now understands that today's power reactors, like CP-1 and like the natural ones at Oklo, are thermally choked: by heating themselves up a little, they slow themselves a little. That is indeed friendly. It is why fission has a reputation for docility, and why it is seldom remarked that Al Gore took a nuclear submarine ride, and Greenpeace researchers  Eric Larsen and Lonnie Dupre repeatedly took Russian nuclear icebreaker rides. Why wouldn't they? More contained radioactivity than would be in a waste-filled Yucca Mountain? They're not stupid; they know the waste has never been a genuine concern.

That docility is not entirely good news for beneficiaries of the revenue, especially the tax revenue, attendant on events like these and these -- all of which could have been much worse. That is why they, some of them, do their damnedest to insinuate that nuclear energy is not a lifesaver.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On How much of a subsidy is the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industry Indemnity Act? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 11 Responses

No-one *personally* dislikes nuclear power

It's always the vicinity of your back fence, not their own, that they want to keep it out of, because it cuts into their oil and gas tax revenue. McCain has an advantage in understanding that.

Witness the contemptible claim by the article that the plant McCain visited had a less than ideal safety history. Like every plant in the USA, it has never hurt anyone -- except the oil and gas interests.On McCain tours nuke plant, renews call for nuclear power expansion in U.S. posted 1 year, 3 months ago 19 Responses

It's a testament to modern medicine ...

There is certainly a need for education here. Jabailo seems to be an interesting specimen.

It's amazing they were able to keep him alive:

The energy is in the H2 inside the H20 molecule.   The catalyst helps separate the H2 from the 0.   But -- the energy holding the H2 to the 0 is not proportional to the energy available in the H2!

(Actually, it is.)On 'Major discovery' from MIT unpractical, and ignores present advances in solar baseload posted 1 year, 3 months ago 22 Responses

Just boron, no hydrogen

B2O3 can flow. I've seen it do so.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses

PL, I's seeing some weird foreign talk

at the URL you gave above --

Main content

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Praesent aliquam, justo convallis luctus rutrum, erat nulla fermentum diam, at nonummy quam ante ac quam ...

Is that what's supposed to be there?On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses

Wonks who thrill to the word electrolyzer

are illiterate. Anything that does any kind of lysis is a lyser, not a lyzer, loser.

Nocebo, I mean Nocera's enthusiasm seems desperate. A marginal increase in the efficiency of water electrolysis doesn't get you around doing something with the hydrogen once you've got it. I suppose flaring it would be easy and straightforward.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
How solar power can work through winterOn With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 4 months ago 49 Responses

Energy spent shrinking stored energy is not wasted

"Nuclear is better, but solar could work. The very large sunlight collection areas needed to produce millions of barrels of synthetic liquid hydrocarbon per day would find opposition from the "deep greens" here."

The most effective opposition is likely to come from the people who have money to invest.

Why bother using electricity ...

Electricity? The S-I process is not electrical.

... to create liquid fuel when we can simply pump it into batteries and use it, thus avoiding the conversion loss?  Doesn't make economical sense.

If converting water and CO2 to fuel and oxygen did require electricity, these masses per unit motor output energy would be relevant:

     96 kg      ·   Gasoline
  7,880 kg      ·   GM EV1 NiMH battery pack
 12,700 kg      ·   GM EV1 lead-acid battery pack
  2,100 kg      ·   AC Propulsion T-zero Li-ion battery*

Saving electricity onshore by charging a NiMH battery that is 40 percent of a ship's mass rather  than, on a similar but non-electrical ship, filling a fuel tank until its mass is 0.5 percent of the ship's mass might not be a good trade.

Interesting that you seem to think that being a "deep green" is a bad thing.

Does that mean that you value environmental destruction?

No.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996

* http://www.acpropulsion.com/EAASV_101803.pdf , p. 17 of 42On Low doses of radiation can cause harm; coal plants worse than nuclear plants posted 1 year, 4 months ago 67 Responses

How could anyone cover up granite radioactivity?!

Even the idiot Steve (?) Milloy has, IIRC, mentioned it in the timeworn Grand Central Station context. In any circles where radioactivity is discussed, it must get mentioned at least once a season.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
How solar power stations can work all winter
On Your granite countertop may emit radon and radiation posted 1 year, 4 months ago 7 Responses

No, no-one cares about reducing nuclear waste

A recently blogged about scientific american article complains that building fast breeder reactors for burning all the nuclear waste costs 1-2 billion dollars more than a conventional nuclear reactor.

Do you guys care about reducing nuclear waste ?

Well, then let's build those reactors.

Nuclear waste is more radioactive than the mined UO2 it is derived from, but so is the dilute, unmined UO2, because there is so much more of it than will ever be mined: in all the continents, there is ten million tonnes per centimetre of depth. (I seem to recall this makes non-no-till agriculture one of the top two or three artificial exposers of the public to nuclear radiation: uranium makes radon, and tilling helps it into the air. Seems plausible but I don't have a source.)

So burying nuclear waste a hundred thousand centimetres deep guarantees that it is unable to radioactively contaminate the land, no matter what happens to it down there, in the same way the saltshakers in the Edmund Fitzgerald are guaranteed not to salt Lake Superior. (Which is naturally, after all, very, very slightly saline. There's only a billion tonnes of salt in it.)

So the coprocephalics here -- for example anyone who talks about the waste being radioactive for thousands of years without acknowledging its harmlessness in all the years we've seen, despite being much more radioactive in those past years than it will be, long hence -- don't care for any solution to the nuclear waste problem because their assertion that it is a problem is how they justify profiting, usually through taxation, from analogous alternative harms that actually occur. And the rest of us won't get enthusiastic about unduly fancy measures to solve a problem that can be simply and for sure solved by burial or dry-cask encapsulation.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
How solar power plants can work all winterOn ExxonMobil rakes in record cash, spends only 1 percent on alternative energy posted 1 year, 4 months ago 11 Responses

No-one here respects Caldicott

but big oil and gas money finds her useful.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
How solar plants can work all winterOn French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 4 months ago 43 Responses

Reprocessing can be part of the equation ...

but unless it's designed into the operation of individual power plants, not done as a separate step, it is best if the various parts of the equation have weighting coefficients, and the coefficient for reprocessing is zero.

For you nuclear pushers...

It's not a nuclear vs. coal choice.

True. It is nuclear versus gas. Follow the money. Natural gas currently costs about $9 per mmBTU, or $5 million per tonne-uranium-equivalent; that includes royalties on the order of half a million dollars per tonne-uranium-equivalent.

To government, therefore, the price of a tonne of the real thing, $0.23 million, is unpleasantly low.

If government footdrags nuclear expansion because it doesn't want to lose fossil fuel income, shouldn't there be a market where this conflict of interest doesn't exist, and therefore government is happy to let nuclear power be built? What market might that be?

Hint: learn from the example of Greenpeace arctic researchers Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen. It will lead you to a busy business, so to speak, that is building new nuclear power plants in the USA right this moment.

Also, with regard to leaked natural uranium from the French plant, and the supposed similar leakage from American mines, the concerns being expressed here are fair and balanced concern, if you know what I mean. This is the same stuff as is in granite countertops, a recent nine days' fuss, and also is the same stuff, and very much less in amount, as what coal burners broadcast.

For more on that uranium dispersal, Google "CEGB released about 300 kg", with the quotation marks.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 4 months ago 43 Responses

It can be plenty reliable at several $ per kWh

lighthouses, at leas up here in new england, are now automated and running off solar power. so, how unreliable can it be? "i'm sorry your ship ran aground, but it was cloudy to day so we didn't have enough charge to power the lighthouse"?

Don't play dumb, fossil boy. It would serve you right if you froze that way.

There may be a way a solar power plant can store up enough energy in local summer to carry it through the winter, without the attempted scamming that has been seen in these pages of confusing a day's storage with a winter's. It involves stuff heaped up outdoors. Not boron, for the B2O3 heap at winter's end would be too costly, regardless of how cheap the B2O3-to-B process might be developed to be; other stuff; see below.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On The media's central arguments for and against Gore's challenge to the nation posted 1 year, 4 months ago 18 Responses

Capture from air

G.R.L. Cowan, we are all tetrapods now.  Even the snakes.

"Carbon" is indeed derived from the Latin word for "coal," carbo, carbonis.  But modern chemists have apparently given the word a significantly different meaning, which by no means restricts the element to coal.  If "carbon sequestration" is nowadays uniquely applied to the combustion of coal, and of no other fossil fuel, rendering my uneducated prissy precision "for coal" redundant, then I am most grateful for your correction ...

I was aiming to educate in a non-philological way.

Some carbon dioxide sequestration methods are, hypothetically, attached to particular combustors' exhaust pipes; since coal burners make more CO2 per unit of energy than any other burners, if any burners were logical candidates to have CO2 catchers attached, they would be.

And so, in the hypothetical case of attachments to burners, CCS applies specifically to coal. One cannot, even hypothetically, go around attaching CCS equipment to every new car in China.

Another CO2 sequestration method does not attach to any particular flue ...

We have documented active sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in chrysotile mine tailings at Clinton Creek, Yukon and Cassiar, British Columbia...

(http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005AGUFM.B33A1014W)

... and is not hypothetical.

I have seen snakes; when I was young and foolish, I even handled a green mamba that had been killed recently enough to be still wriggling. There weren't any feet.

Not a mambo. I am reminded of Michael Caine's explanation of the difference, in, I think it was, "Without a Clue".

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Al Gore on Meet the Press posted 1 year, 4 months ago 30 Responses

That did seem rather unlikely ...

I saw the claim, as a link, somewhere and it seemed unlikely enough not to be worth following.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Physicists reaffirm that human-induced GHGs affect the atmosphere posted 1 year, 4 months ago 14 Responses

Argument from authority seems to work

I get your point, and see you make it all the time.  But is anyone actually doing it?  Has anyone run the economics?

Here, R.D. Schuiling projects costs of $35-55 per tonne C, and says "A large field test with olivine has started this week [of May 18, 2008] in the Netherlands".

I accept the fact that CO2 can be absorbed into rocks, at least on geologic time scales.  But if this is going to be done as a near term fix on the environment, I'd sure like to see someone putting projects in, and proving that there is an economic case to be made.  

In other words... if it's such a good idea, what's keeping people from doing it?

It's garbage collection, a thing that long has been known not to happen without public funding. Government is taking the money it would cost from fossil fuel consumers, but spending it otherwise.

At least one recent article that appeared in a British web journal called "The Engineer" discussed CCS without acknowledging that it could be done centrally. I think there have been several others. Also there was Zarembo in the L.A. Times acknowledging the lame Klaus Lackner version and ignoring the non-lame R.D. Schuiling one.

Authoritative sources that knock over legions of straw men and don't acknowledge that a real one, to which their arguments don't apply, exists seem to be effective in persuading people that it must not. To me the question isn't, why do I bang on about this, rather, why don't more people do so.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn CCS: Environmental whack-a-mole posted 1 year, 4 months ago 21 Responses

Is anyone here curious about marine oil prospects?

The radio is saying 2600 km^2 of California has burned. Has recently burned. Isn't that, like, 1 percent of the whole state? Perhaps it's parts where no-one lives. Well, it's definitely that now, but perhaps before, too.

Oil mining is bad, but I wonder about the wisdom of projecting that American oil prospecting in the ocean will be so much less effective than Brazil's has seemed to be. Are there geological reasons for this expectation?

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Some Democrats in Congress bending on drilling debate posted 1 year, 4 months ago 8 Responses

It is illegal to waste gasoline by speeding ...

and it is illegal, when walking past a police car in the donut shop parking lot, and noticing a policeman sitting in it, to whip out one's car key and scratch said car's paint with it.

If the price of petroleum rises enough that government finds it necessary to begin subsidizing fuels derived from it, just so people can continue to get to work and pay income tax, these two crimes' degrees of illegality, now very different, will instantly become, from highway patrolmen's point of view, the same.

That is to say, price rising beyond a certain point will find a step change, downward, in demand.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Congress scrambles for short-term solutions to counter oil prices posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses

CC from dilution in air turns out to be easier

... and has the pleasant attribute of not requiring a CO2 emitter to be built so that a CO2 catcher can have something to catch. It takes advantage of the installed base of emitters, and allows emitters in China to have their garbage collected by a strewing of olivine in, perhaps, New Mexico.

A relevant abstract. Elsewhere in that comment string, some discussion of the energy needed to compensate for the legacy CO2 from a joule of coal fire long ago.

"Whack-a-mole" implies falsehood, implies that when a tonnage of CO2 is sequestered -- ideally as mineral dust lying on large fractions of the Earth's surface-- an equal tonnage of additional emission results. Very large nuclear-powered olivine dispersal plants would certainly make this untrue, but even coal-fired olivine broadcasters would make it about 90 percent untrue.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On CCS: Environmental whack-a-mole posted 1 year, 4 months ago 21 Responses

Rebates! Yes!

An excellent way to get government out of the fossil fuel conservation prevention business.

Rebate first. Then the public you are trying to sell it to knows you won't forget the rebate. We know the tax will not be forgotten.

What did I just say? "Debate Frist"? Something crazy? Better figure it out.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htmlOn How to reduce California auto emissions faster than Pavley posted 1 year, 5 months ago 2 Responses

OK, go ahead with raising CAFE standards ...

I'll allow it. But that means reducing your take from the various gasoline taxes. You probably should go ahead and reduce that take to zero, just so it will be done, rather than having to fight all levels of government for every barrel-per-day of conservation.

a somewhat cutesy but still quite illustrative comparison: the barrels of oil per day we could get by 2027 through offshore drilling (when production rate will max out) vs. the oil savings we would have gotten per day if we'd continued ramping up the CAFE standard at roughly the 1980-1985 rate.

By "illustrative" you must mean "hopeful". Hopeful that no-one will notice the comparison is between a would-have-gotten and a could-get. A non-stupid comparison would be between what CAFE might have done if things had been different, and what offshore drilling might have done if, similarly, things had been different.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htmlOn Drilling offshore vs. fuel efficiency posted 1 year, 5 months ago 12 Responses

They should use a photo like this ...

<img src="http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/maple_core_cerenkov.jpg">

If that doesn't work, the URL is http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/maple_core_cerenkov.jpg.

Elsewhere an engineer was telling me the best picture to use would be one of McCain with a tiny black pellet in hand. It seemed to me viewers might suspect it was a licorice; but nothing else looks like gamma rays heating water.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn McCain touts energy plan in another new ad posted 1 year, 5 months ago 7 Responses

Joffan,

Jabailo is ... special.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn House blocks uranium mining near Grand Canyon National Park posted 1 year, 5 months ago 3 Responses

President Lindsay isn't as attuned ...

to the fossil-taxing-governments-hate-nukes meme as I would like. His favoured 'mystics' tend to be nuclear technologists whom government has long favoured, with steady employment, precisely because the technologies they like to work on, or are willing to work on, solve problems that don't exist. Reprocessing, transmutation, breeder reactors ... none of them is at all offensive to civil servants. To those civil servants on whose mind always, and on whose lips never, oil and gas tax revenues are.

He likes public enterprise. That might be fine, but not when the public's hired help is the biggest oil and gas rentier, and behaves, in re nuclear energy, exactly as would an oil/gas company with law-making powers would.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htmlOn Lovins and Sheikh defend definition and record of micropower posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses

Cutting gross GHG emissions must substantially ...

change the lives of many who now rely on tax revenues from GHG-emitting fuels for much of their financial maintenance.

Without present-day nuclear energy, GHG emissions would be gigatonnes per year higher, and those oil and gas rentiers would be gigabucks per week richer. That is why out-and-out lies such as in the tissue above are so rewarding to produce.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Radioactive deja vu in the American West posted 1 year, 5 months ago 12 Responses

As a former hydrogen fan ...

I have to say again what I said at greencarcongress.com/2008/06/geeco-developin.html:

Li-ion is more efficient ... but with that higher efficiency duly accounted for, 500 kg of lH2 tank, even though it includes only ~30 kg of hydrogen, still yields about as much driveshaft work as two tonnes of Li-ion battery. Or anyway, with the lH2 tanks BMW is using, that is true.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Honda fuel-cell vehicle: Not marketable, practical, or environmental posted 1 year, 5 months ago 10 Responses

Existing US commercial power reactors ...

have always been just as unweaponizable.

The only way nuclear energy could conceivably have been a political winner in the last three decades of the first millennium would have been to be nonthreatening to government oil and gas revenue, i.e., to be green.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Lovins and Sheikh defend their work in 'The Nuclear Illusion' posted 1 year, 5 months ago 23 Responses

As yet no states with nuclear portfolio standards

But if any power source deserves this privilege, it does. Unlike wind turbines it hasn't had several fatal accidents in the last three years; indeed, none. And the mines have not been making their workers or neighbours sick.

A few things I haven't seen any remark of in this blog: Angela Merkel's recent remark that Germany's plan to phase out nuclear energy is "absolutely wrong", Italy's similar proclamation, my province's determination, today, to go forward with new nuclear plant. Suck on that, Astro Boy.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn RPS distribution posted 1 year, 5 months ago 12 Responses

A $35-$55-per-tonne-C ceiling ...

should be imposed by this.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn The goal of climate policy is not high GHG prices posted 1 year, 5 months ago 69 Responses

Lamps in daylight

... What about the Earth?  The immense harms done by mining, and specifically by uranium mining?  By "enriching" uranium, i.e. by making it into the most toxic substance known?  And by further polluting our planet with more radioactivity?

These are the real issues.

No, I don't think they are. Enriched uranium dioxide isn't noticeably more toxic than natural uranium dioxide, which some reactors run on. The people who promote fear of radioactive pollution tend to strain at gnats, if they're oil-and-gas-threatening gnats, and swallow camels if the camels do not pose any threat to those interests.

If all the uranium mines, nuclear waste caches, nuclear fuel plants, and nuclear reactors were moved to a low-background-radiation region, the total radiation levels there would still be low; the industrial contribution would be to the total as a street lamp that stays on in daylight is to its and the day's summed brightness.

'Wolverine', I predict, doesn't know or care whether he is in a naturally high-background or low-background region, even though the difference be millions of neighbourhood reactors' worth.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Nuclear power is expensive posted 1 year, 5 months ago 39 Responses

Which lie is least tired?

... on a couple of competing lists of "the first reason we oppose nukes," one of the two I assumed was most obvious was mentioned--the accumulating piles of horribly dangerous waste which still have no acceptable repository. But still nbobody has mentioned how handy nuclear power plants, and uranium refineries, and spent fuel, and nuclear materials in transit, are to terrorists.

If either of these concerns were genuine, the other would be unnecessary.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power posted 1 year, 5 months ago 43 Responses

The reason

The reason the green movement hates nuclear is the concern about safety and waste. Fair concerns ...

They are definitely not fair concerns. The appear to be rationalizations of a hatred that is actually based on fossil fuel interest. When it's their own posteriors on the line, green movers seem to understand that nuclear energy is safe and clean; so for instance Greenpeace contractors quietly get about the Arctic on a nuclear icebreaker when they could insist on a diesel.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Arizona senator says no to Boxer-L-W without giga-subsidies for nukes posted 1 year, 6 months ago 6 Responses

Enough to limit population to a gorgojillion ...

... on Earth.

From http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_10884.html

A gallon of gasoline yields about 2500 kilocalories of energy when it is combusted. The CO2 that comes from that gallon, added up over the lifetime of its climate impact, ultimately traps about 100,000,000,000 kilocalories of unusable and unwanted waste greenhouse heat.

I don't think we are going to leave the CO2 up for the whole time it would stay up if we had no effective way of removing it. But the one-to-100-million ratio of the thermal effect of non-CO2-emitting energy versus CO2-emitting is instructive.

Also, a terawatt from space solar plant is just a terawatt, just a 0.001-percent rise in Earth's heat budget; a terawatt from thermal plant on Earth is of course a 0.003-percent rise.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Can we shoot concentrated solar power down from space? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 18 Responses

What he said

What 'GreenEngineer' said, plus one thing: the birds were in fact thought of.

The plan was for the microwave beams to be about half as dense (in terms of watts per square metre) as zenithal sunlight, so that birds would not be inconvenienced. If it were winter, they might congregate. I don't know if anyone worried about that.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Can we shoot concentrated solar power down from space? posted 1 year, 6 months ago 18 Responses

So that's ...

Sen. Babara Boxer ...

She must be the elephant in the room I've been hearing so much about.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
On Boxer gives Democratic radio address to rally support for Climate Security Act posted 1 year, 6 months ago 1 Response

Fuel prep

What also bothers me about nuclear is the energy costs involved in refining uranium. How is it refined? Usually by burning enormous amounts of coal.

And these refining plants are allowed to emit radioactivity, according to Helen Caldicott.

Well, so is she; and she is allowed to lie. Encouraged to, in fact.

The whole thing is reminiscent of a coal-fired ethanol plant. Not too bright.

You commit a fallacy of equivocation. If coal-fired plant were the only source of electricity for a gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant, it could support 50 or a little more times its capacity in nuclear plants; if enormous amounts of coal are burned, the amounts that would be burned directly, were the 50 plants coal-fired, would be 50 times more enormous.

Also, we in Canada use natural-uranium fuelled plants, and for these, fuel preparation takes ~0.00 percent of its energy.

Read up on the MTOE production figures in various countries and think again about your comparison to coal-fired ethanol plants. The USA's cumulative nuclear electricity production exceeds that which 4 billion tonnes of oil could have produced. That would be, like, six gigatonnes of ethanol.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
On The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power posted 1 year, 6 months ago 43 Responses

False premise

Surely the main arguments are (a) safety and (b) safety of waste storage. After this comes cost, etc. Isn't this why environmentalists have always been against nuclear??

Environmentalists have not always been against nuclear energy. The shift seemed to happen, for those for whom it happened, when nuclear energy lost its subsidies and still kept taking market share from fossil fuels in the early 70s.

Safety and waste were never anything but excuses. Environmentalists who wish to get around the Arctic, and have the choice of diesel or nuclear icebreakers, quietly choose nuclear.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power posted 1 year, 6 months ago 43 Responses

Inadvertence

Aboveground CO2 has already been inadvertently begun ...

I meant to say, aboveground CO2 storage has already been inadvertently begun.On Humanity's fate is not tied to coal's posted 1 year, 6 months ago 7 Responses

Possibly, eh?

It is like the problem with nuclear waste, possibly even worse.

"Possibly", eh? Gas shill.

Zeroing or making slightly negative the CO2 emissions by burying them, with no fear of leakage at any time in the future, on the surface will take enormous revenues. Fortunately, these revenues are not enormous in comparison with the value of the fuels that emit them, and are already being taken.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Interview with solar champion Hermann Scheer posted 1 year, 6 months ago 1 Response

McCain needs to be better advised ...

with regard to the likelihood that spent nuclear fuel will ever be "reprocessed to acquire bomb-grade materials". No group seems ever to have accomplished nuclear proliferation by this means.

It would have been a long way around for them, for it is much easier to build a small isotope production reactor than a power reactor and easier to extract plutonium from uranium irradiated to low burnup in such a reactor than to extract it from spent fuel, which is necessarily high-burnup.

Spent fuel plutonium is, in theory, much harder to  make into bombs than plutonium from uranium irradiated to low-burnup. The above-mentioned increased difficulty of getting it in the first place, compared to getting plutonium from small low-temperature low-burnup reactors, seems to have ensured that no-one has tried to overcome the theoretical difficulties.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn John McCain talks nuclear security, promises to promote 'civilian' nukes posted 1 year, 6 months ago 3 Responses

What sort of conversion efficiency?

"Air cooling can go a long way" implies the fraction of mined heat that cannot be converted to work is small. In fact it must be large both in absolute terms and in comparison to engines running on higher-grade heat.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996On Geothermal power: a core climate solution posted 1 year, 6 months ago 16 Responses

You should be more curious about your own ...

possible conflict of interest. Naturally you don't post anything like, "I wonder if I'm on the take" because enough information to determine that is available to you; you know, for instance, how much of your maintenance is funded by government cheque or direct deposit.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Subsidies for wind power pale beside subsidies for nuclear posted 1 year, 6 months ago 23 Responses

What counts is special tax revenue, net of subsidy

Persons offended by nuclear energy's cutting into government's fossil fuel earnings seem convinced they can prove PA is a subsidy because nuclear is dangerous, and nuclear is dangerous because PA is a subsidy. As the late Isaac Asimov said, reasoning in a circle is the chief delight of the intellectually feeble.

Or, in this case, of 'zoomers'.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Grist asks McCain about contradictory messages on nuclear subsidies posted 1 year, 6 months ago 8 Responses

Hoffner's anger management issues

...the public, too, would be very encouraged by a steep increase in the safety ...

Wouldn't they be similarly encouraged if Hoffner would get some professional help to stop him from physically 'acting out'?

Loan guarantees make sense as a way to keep government honest. If it allows another 100 GW of nuclear capacity to go online, additional uranium will be required that at present prices would cost $3 billion a year. Natural gas used in its place would cost about $60 billion, including royalties that must substantially exceed $3 billion.

In the past, footdragging on nuclear has been very lucrative for City Hall; that has to stop. Loan guarantees mean their ill-gotten gains are taken from them and given to the lenders, and the prospect that this will happen makes them inclined not to bother to ill-get them in the first place.

Thus, gross-rats groups are likely to find their "interventions" becoming their own reward.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Grist asks McCain about contradictory messages on nuclear subsidies posted 1 year, 6 months ago 8 Responses

Donovan is a common or garden TD bluffer ...

Although he doesn't actually use the word "thermodynamic".

If we quit adding carbon to the atmosphere, it won't stop global warming any time soon. That's why people are hoping there are ways to get the extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and that we can put billions of tons of it somewhere safe.

That is not a hope but a fact.

... extracting carbon dioxide from the air -- takes work. Work means energy. It's the reverse of combustion. There's a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do the work.

It's a common saying that you can't unscramble an egg. Once scrambled, the egg proteins won't go back to their raw configuration when they cool ...

Similarly, atmospherically dumped CO2 molecules will not herd themselves back to the high concentration they had when they emerged from a pipe. That would be an entropy-reducing process, like an egg's unscrambling itself.

They do, however, concentrate themselves in newborn mineral grains at the surface of grains of mineral silicates such as serpentine (mentioned in the above-linked abstract) and olivine (Google it together with Schuiling), and in so doing, they increase entropy further.

That means the product grains can be stored in a thin layer all over the Earth's surface, or over large parts of it, just like any other inert mineral. They won't let the CO2 go because that would reduce entropy.

Also, the work of pulling the CO2 out of air is done by the CO2 and the mineral themselves. The work of increasing the silicate mineral's surface area, we must do, but it is small compared to the energy we had earlier when we released the CO2: about five percent.

How shall motoring gain nuclear cachet?On Thinking beyond technology to mitigate climate change posted 1 year, 6 months ago 13 Responses

One thing you frequently hear from nuke proponents

is exactly what you want to hear. It's like you were in a cartoon of your own, or something.

Similarly, one thing fossil fuel revenue fanciers frequently say is, we don't mind nukes over our back fence, but you would prefer to have gas pipelines and coal plants and coal rail lines over yours, because hey, you don't mind if we make a living.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On And I would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids! posted 1 year, 6 months ago 6 Responses

Barnes? Is he the cap-and-dividend promoter?

Cap-and-dividend is good. Although I'd prefer to call it dividend-and-cap, lest the time it takes to utter two syllables be too long, for people who earnestly intend to give back to the people billions in C money, to remember that intention.

There are already carbon revenues, aren't there? Maybe the dividing-out could get started right away.

One man's price on carbon is another's carbon revenue. Or more to the point, many people's price on carbon is a few public exchequer-connected people's carbon revenue.

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On Carbon trading creates perverse incentives posted 1 year, 6 months ago 14 Responses

Types that don't depend on large forging plants

are mentioned in the article. They also don't depend on uranium enrichment plants. Two went into service in 2007.

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On Industry bottlenecks will delay any reactors for years, maybe longer posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

Perhaps I should add

The same powdered olivine falling on a few tens of millions of km^2 of land, over a decade or two, in sufficient quantity to form a 1-cm layer if it arrived all at once would also remove 100 Gt of legacy CO2 from the atmosphere and cancel its ocean-acidifying effect. It doesn't matter where it is strewn as long as it is exposed to air.

Who got the acronyms first?

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On Greenpeace report calls carbon capture and sequestration 'false hope' posted 1 year, 7 months ago 15 Responses

One-trick ponies

CCS has been observed happening spontaneously in such a way that one can understand, if one wishes to, that the CO2 that, years ago, was dispersed in the atmosphere during the coal-fired production of 1 electrical kWh can be captured through the use of the very abundant mineral olivine, at an energy cost that would not exceed 0.1 kWh(e).

0.05 kWh(e) would be for the pulverization of the mineral. Another 0.05 kWh(e) might be necessary to strew it widely. More here.

One also has the option of understanding that a handful of large olivine puffers can retroactively make thousands of coal-fired plants that were spewing CO2 in the 80s and 90s carbon-neutral. No-one is going to make special new C-neutral individual coal-burners, because however easy this might be, retrofitting many of them with a single remote CO2 trap is easier.

How the car gets decarbonizedOn Greenpeace report calls carbon capture and sequestration 'false hope' posted 1 year, 7 months ago 15 Responses

Tax? Fee?

The problem is with the word tax. It is a fee on the dumping of toxic harmful waste into the atmosphere.

Bribe is a good word.

One person's stick is another's carrot.

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On Empirical data and theory both show that emissions taxes get passed to consumers posted 1 year, 7 months ago 6 Responses

Pulling a few 100 Gt CO2 out of air is doable

Mine tailings have shown the way. Transformed into enough magnesite or hydromagnesite dust to make a worldwide 1-mm layer if it fell all at once, but falling in fact over a period of years, our CO2 problem would be no longer a problem.

Energetically this approach -- pulverizing a suitable mineral and dispersing it -- is the least expensive option I know of. I don't see why it wouldn't also require the least political effort.

Perhaps, though, we should not take this relatively easy, very effective route. Beyond CO2 and global warming, what if we run into future problems for which there aren't such neat solutions? Won't we want the CO2 problem still to be with us then, still being addressed ineffectively, so we'll have our hand in?

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On What is the impact of peak oil and peak coal? posted 1 year, 7 months ago 10 Responses

Interesting

The only things that will solve human-caused ecological problems is lowering human population and lowering human consumption, the latter beginning with things humans shouldn't be consuming in the first place like oil, coal, and uranium.

Notice the absence of natural gas from the list of prohibited fuels. It is, of course, inimical to people and climate alike, but it's not inimical to all people, because at $11 per mmBTU, it's extremely lucrative for government.

Royalties on the order of $1/mmBTU for all uses largely exceed, by themselves, uranium's present $0.30/mmBTU price, and in many of the above-linked disasters the gas users were also paying special large consumption taxes. Unfortunately I don't know much about these taxes. (Who does?)

Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!On Are fixing the climate and the ozone layer mutually exclusive? posted 1 year, 7 months ago 15 Responses

The sequestration wedge is important

It turns out to be fairly easy, in energetic terms, to remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as was put there years earlier by a coal-fired power station in the process of producing 1 electrical kWh. It takes about 0.05 kWh(e) to pulverize the necessary olivine, and another 0.05 kWh(e), if necessary, to lift the powder 10 km into the atmosphere. The idea would not be that it stay up there -- it would not -- but that it disperse itself widely before coming down. More here.

So in calling for a price on the pollutant CO2, beware of the danger of negative ingenuity. So far this century, governments have already collected trillions in CO2 fees. Reducing net emissions below zero with nothing but olivine sequestration won't cost that much. So we must suspect those who seem intent, first thing, on increasing the fees of hoping to make the problem a perpetual cash cow.

I think I am like everyone who hasn't received many thousands of natgas-derived dollars in wanting at least two wedges' worth of nukes built, and not minding in the least if each one has its own on-site miniature Yucca Mountain, as they all do today. Proliferation, uranium scarcity -- that's just gas-shill talk.

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On The 14 wedges needed to stabilize emissions posted 1 year, 7 months ago 28 Responses

How does a road get to be more of a public good

and more pleasing to public servants, the more gasoline or diesel fuel is burned on it? Why is a road filled with speeders and jackrabbit starters and stoppers more pleasing to them? The first question concerns EV fans and boron internal combustion fans; the second should concern anyone who has to be on or near a road that is so governed.

McCain's idea is good, but it should not be temporary. That tax is evil. Put a stake in it to make sure it doesn't come back to life.

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On McCain reveals cynicism, hypocrisy with call for summer gas-tax holiday, energy budget freeze posted 1 year, 7 months ago 7 Responses

Tar sands are being extracted on a large-ish ...

scale, almost as big in terms of primary watts as the McArthur River mine. If, when the decision to do this was made, it was true that the choice could not be "left to the discretion of industry moguls", who else had a say?

Well, obviously, government moguls. Government profits more from oil than private interests do. Dr. Hansen, do you understand that carbon already is heavily taxed, and this makes conservation and substitution more difficult than they otherwise would be?

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?On Fossil fuel moguls inflate reserve estimates to prevent efforts to move beyond their products posted 1 year, 7 months ago 10 Responses

More fossil fuel money for you is not the answer

My prescription: removal special consumption taxes from oil and gas, and disperse pulverized magnesium silicates in the troposphere. The energy cost of this pulverization and dispersal is small compared to the energy previously gained by putting up the CO2 the dustmotes take down. Without a special interest in continued fossil fuel burning, governments will no longer footdrag on conservation and substitutes.

--- G.R.L. Cowan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!On U.K.'s Labor Party embraces nuclear but is slow to move on the big climate challenge posted 1 year, 7 months ago 3 Responses

More wood than that at which a stick can be shaken

No member of the public has ever been injured by an accident in 50 years at any nuclear plant in the West, including Three Mile Island. 1.2 million people die in car accidents EVERY YEAR.

Not really alternatives, or not yet, anyway. When we have nuclear motor fuel plants, and cars that are thus indirectly nuclear-powered, there's a chance the fuel will (1) be safer, as I propose in my sig line, and (2) not be sin-taxed, so governments won't be so hellbent on getting people to drive fast, far, and with frequent hard stops. That will be another safety gain.

The anti-nuclear movement is politically opportunistic and is based on manufactured fear. Get a life.

But why do the dark forces manufacture dissent? Because they tax fossil fuel. They tax it at a rate equivalent to thousands of dollars per pound U3O8. Do you know a low-level civil servant who is strongly pro-nuclear? Chances are he'll soon be looking for a private-sector gig. How will he get a life then? He'll have lost the one he had.

Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!On Déjà nuke posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

Maybe it's not global warming after all,

just a slight summer glau ... I mean, the seventh of nine warm years ...On ECO:nomics: More evidence of Exxon's evil genius posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

To the extent AGW concern is genuine ...

techno-crackpot quick fixes like lofting billions of Mylar umbrellas into geostationary orbit

will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas by technofixes that are not crackpot.

The principal non-crackpot technical fix for our past CO2 emissions, and such future ones as we cannot prevent, is dispersal of alkaline silicate minerals in out-of-the-way places to adjust the atmosphere's CO2 back down to where it was in the late 19th century. More here.

Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!On Why this is the last election, and another look at McCain posted 1 year, 8 months ago 48 Responses

The U-will-run-out-some-century-soon lie ...

seems to be taking some time off, along with the nuke-neighbours-are-uneasy one.

Let the baby light matches in the fuel storage room!On Campaign energy wonks clarify candidates' differences on climate change posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

Another option is strewing of pulverized MgSiO3

This actually removes the CO2 rather than merely counteracting one of its effects.

-- G.R.L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
How individual mobility gains nuclear cachetOn Geo-engineering: cooking up solutions just like nature used to make posted 1 year, 8 months ago 9 Responses

A Li-ion car did in fact go 300 km on a charge

in 2004, IIRC. About as far as liquid-hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion cars have gone, back in the mid-1970s when multiple serious efforts produced hydrogen cars much more capable than the FCEV things of recent years; they were so capable that it was said, I seem to recall, that they were within five years of mass rollout, or at most ten.

Look up the Hydrogen Car Timeline. This stuff isn't new.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Years after everyone else, GM and Toyota execs skeptical about hydrogen cars posted 1 year, 9 months ago 7 Responses

The word has often been heard,

but is simply a lie. Nuclear plants' energy inputs are quite small, even as a fraction of their first year's output. Anyone who says otherwise, and knows what he or she is saying, is lying like a flatfish.

A little detail in an earlier comment of mine.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Building faster to get the power to build faster posted 1 year, 9 months ago 10 Responses

Nuclear gasoline

A quarter of the carbon in the Earth's atmosphere is of recent arrival, having exited a chimney or tailpipe. We energy geeks have long been wont to talk about the possibility of taking some of it back out to make nuclear gasoline with, especially those of us who are aware that uranium costs $2 per thermal barrel-of-oil-equivalent, and even if four or five units of nuclear heat are used in making gasoline that will yield one unit, the uranium bill is not burdensome.

There's also progress in pulverizing very abundant varieties of rock -- http://www.eos.ubc.ca/research/dipple/UBC_Carbonation/ind ... -- that naturally capture atmospheric CO2 as rock so that they do it faster.

Let the baby play with matches in the fuel storage roomOn Scientists suggest transforming atmospheric CO2 into gasoline posted 1 year, 9 months ago 6 Responses

If Negre truly is Grist's kind of guy,

that's an indictment of Grist.

As Matt says, this is a zombie story. In the recycling spirit, my comment from 43 months ago.

How will the car really gain nuclear cachet?On Engineer plans to sell compressed-air car in India within a year posted 1 year, 9 months ago 5 Responses

"if ", indeed.

The Senator manages not to say anything on the matter. Perhaps he's been around the block before, or at least, halfway around and then back the same way.

Let the baby play with matches in the fuel storage roomOn Big Oil suppressing biofuels? Obama thinks so. posted 1 year, 9 months ago 5 Responses

And then he wonders why no-one pays attention

when he is truthful, e.g. on biofuels. Ten percent sewage, 1 percent, 50 percent -- it's all sewage.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Clean, safe nuclear power posted 1 year, 9 months ago 14 Responses

$0.2 million per tonne uranium; $4 million ...

per uranium-tonne-equivalent in natural gas.

Before taxes, except royalties. The taxes on natural gas can hardly be less than five times the total revenue on uranium. So someone whose best job ever was a civil service one might understandably, although not excusably, proceed as if the way to defeat global warming is to replace coal with natural gas, cutting carbon emissions in half, unless perhaps several billion Asians find similar amounts of gas per person and start burning it.

An unpleasant graphic.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Why John McCain isn't the candidate to stop global warming posted 1 year, 9 months ago 9 Responses

Inexhaustible, petrodollar-cancelling nuke ...

is a more cogent rundown of what this debate is really about. No-one doubts its cleanliness or safety.

The recent price history of uranium can be seen in the graph at the top left corner here.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Clean, safe nuclear power posted 1 year, 9 months ago 14 Responses

They know nuclear is quickest and cheapest ...

That is why they, gas shills, say the opposite.

It is an error to imagine uranium mining can't readily be both ramped up rapidly and sustained at rates much higher than today's in the very long term, many times 200 years, without breeders and without the reprocessing plants they require.

To see this, consider Kazakhstan, whose uranium production was 16 percent of Saudi Arabia's oil production in 2006 and 20 percent in 2007. In both years its nuclear fuel export income was less than 0.005 of Saudi Arabia's chemical fuel export income. In terms of heat, it was a greater fraction than it was in financial terms. Go figure.

Also consider uraniferous marine shales. The USA has many cubic miles of them. Deffeyes and MacGregor show 50,000 cubic miles of them worldwide, maybe not so easy to process as seawater, but ~20,000 times richer in uranium, so rich that a cubic metre of this shale can provide more energy to a CANDU reactor than a cubic metre of petroleum can provide to an oil-burning power plant. That is, the shale is worth more than its own volume in oil.

("World Uranium Resources", Deffeyes and MacGregor, Scientific American January 1980, plus 164 MW(t)/kg U datum from AECL.)

People who benefit from natural gas royalties and consumption taxes that add up to a dollar or two per million BTU ("mmBTU")* often seem not to understand that the tremendous rate of discovery of economical uranium deposits in recent years has been driven by prices that peaked last year at 64 cents per mmBTU. They have since slipped back to 35 cents.

They don't seem to understand, but they understand that on a day when the US nuclear fleet is boasting of 92 percent production last year, the dignified thing to do is denounce it on the basis of slight drought-related production losses it might suffer from later this year.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

* Inclusive of royalties but not of consumption taxes, the recent NYM price is $8/mmBTU.On Nuclear power and fossil fuels face water crises and other problems posted 1 year, 9 months ago 40 Responses

Minor detail correction

... somehow been marginalized as treehuggers and flat-earthers, ...

You should be so lucky. You have been marginalized as gas shills.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn British government embraces a nuclear-powered future posted 1 year, 10 months ago 13 Responses

Kazakh uranium production increases 26%

... says http://www.uic.com.au/wns0125.htm. In thermal megawatts, from 98,500 to 124,000. (Saudi Arabia produces, IIRC, 600,000, but at a very much higher unit cost.)

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Former prez helped a rich guy get uranium-mining rights in Kazakhstan posted 1 year, 10 months ago 4 Responses

Didn't miss that

Please not that I did not say, "RTG." I said, "REG." I think that, as REG fuels, beta-emitters might hold more promise than alpha-emitters.

Beta-emitters emit electrons that always have a range of initial energies, and this range always extends down to zero. Usually the average energy is about one-third of the maximum. Some alpha-emitters emit monoenergetic helium nuclei, and many emit on only a few narrow bands, all near the maximum. So clearly the effort to harness beta-decay is misconceived.

If this were not true, what would be your preferred way of getting a triton?

If the heat released as a byproduct were partially captured through motor fuel synthesis, how many million cars could run on that byproduct per car running on tritium energy?

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Nukes don't replace oil posted 1 year, 10 months ago 39 Responses

Surely no-one believes that

...Typical windmills will cover the energy costs for their production within 6 months (in other words, within 6 months, they create enough renewable energy to equate to the energy needed to produce, transport, and assemble 'em).

Though nuclear plants create more power, the amount of materials needed to make 'em (particularly concrete ans steel), as well as the energy needed for construction, mean that nuclear plants typically take years to cover the energy used for their production/construction.

Actually they're a little better than wind turbines in that respect.

I had thought 'Tasermons Partner' was one of the smarter ones.

How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On Severe drought in the Southeast impacts nuclear power production posted 1 year, 10 months ago 38 Responses

Taxes affect the behaviour of those who spend them

The ease of getting regulators' consent for new natural gas combustion turbines suggests that natural gas, at least, is allowing more regulators to draw salaries, or for those salaries to be larger, or some combination. If natural gas were subsidized the opposite effect would occur: fewer and/or poorer regulators -- and long, difficult licensing processes.

Petroleum and natural gas revenues subsidize all government spending -- including the wind power PTC.

This shows, I think, the harm that existing carbon taxes do. Some of the revenue from high-carbon energy is given to token low-carbon sources to make them look like competitors. None goes to you-know-what, and it still faces a long paper chase because its fuel isn't expensive enough.

So that's one thing to do now: stop pretending the slope of the playing field isn't already strongly in renewable energies' favour, precisely because even given that advantage, they still are only token competitors. The pretence is stupid and undignified.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Deep thought of the day posted 1 year, 10 months ago 14 Responses

Nuclear production of motor fuel

What could be more environmentally friendly than nuclear waste, uranium mining, cement kilns, and the risk of nuclear 'accidents'?

And what's more economic(al) than billions of dollars spent on construction, security, insurance, and waste storage?

Not quite sure what an 'efficient source of energy' is, since I thought efficiency was about energy usage, but we all know how efficient it is to push electrons through hundreds of miles of cable from a centralized source, right?

I just can't wait to buy my own nuclear powered automobile, complete with stylish concrete and lead sheilding. I'm sure that will be efficient.

You should buy yourself some straw, with which to make a companion/adversary.

Nuclear powered automobiles will be, of course, indirectly powered by nuclear motor fuel plants.

It is unlikely that more than a small fraction of those here know or care how efficiently electricity travels hundreds of miles, but that efficiency is in fact in the mid-90s percent, as I recall.

Nothing is currently more environmentally friendly than nuclear waste, etcetera. Nature has given us a lead by stuffing the earth, within oil-drill range, with millions of nuclear power plants' worth of radioactivity.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Nukes don't replace oil posted 1 year, 10 months ago 39 Responses

Oops

buried about a kilometre deep

I meant, buried at depths ranging from zero to 1 km.On Draft EIS for Nantucket Sound wind project is positive posted 1 year, 10 months ago 35 Responses

Uranium costs about $2 per lifetime watt

I see some rather naive questions about the "real cost" of nuclear energy and the enrichment and transport costs of nuclear fuel. The real energy, environmental, and money cost is, to fossil fuel interests, threateningly low, and there is no intergenerational waste legacy with nuclear energy. (As I have said here before, the CO2 legacy of past fossil fuel-fired electricity production can be made harmless for a bearable extra cost, but it will be extra.)

The cost of mining and transport for the nuclear fuel are respectively $2,000 per electrical kilowatt, if said kilowatt is maintained for 48 years -- a 60-year plant lifetime times 0.8 load factor -- and ~0. Transport costs are infinitesimal because uranium for 48 electrical kilowatt-years, for CANDU systems like the ones powering this computer, weighs 7.77 grams. For these systems, the enrichment cost is zero.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Draft EIS for Nantucket Sound wind project is positive posted 1 year, 10 months ago 35 Responses

The 200 kilowatt number is not for real

Rod Adams has covered this.

Nuclear power reactors include the part where the fission happens, the core, and around that,  neutron and gamma-ray shields. These shields, or you could call them mufflers, conceivably could be as light as 200 tonnes, IIRC, but then two operators leaning on the outside of the shield might get more radiation from the core, through the shield, than from each other's radiopotassium.

A belt-and-braces approach is almost always preferred: a thick enough shield that two operators standing on the same side irradiate each other 100 times more than the reactor irradiates either one, and then another six feet of concrete for good measure.

So you can have a reactor with a small, lightweight core but you cannot have a small, lightweight reactor.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Toshiba said to have developed mini nuclear reactor posted 1 year, 11 months ago 3 Responses

Building a road and/or a subdivision

means allowing new income to be created, and that means a new income tax revenue stream comes into being.

It also means new fossil fuel tax revenue from fuelling the vehicles that will run on that road, and new natural gas tax revenue from the gas distribution network that always instantly vasculates -- I don't think that's quite the word. Vascularizes? -- new subdivisions.

It is pernicious that so much of rule-makers' payoff from new roads and subdivisions depends on those developments' dependency on fossil fuels.

Ideally that fossil fuel revenue would not exceed what the government might earn on other means by which the citizens might propel the vehicles and have fires in the buildings.

We are far from that ideal now, but if fossil fuel prices stay high, perhaps government, eager not to choke off the income tax revenue stream, will perceive that it must take less from fossil fuel users, or perhaps even begin to subsidize them.

The instant fossil fuels begin to be subsidized, governments' effectiveness at inducing people to conserve them and substitute for them will undergo a step change from minus to plus.

Instantly it will begin effectively enforcing speed limits. Instantly it will find ways new nuclear plant construction can begin ~40 months in advance of the ~42-month approval process. Instantly it will learn to take the initiative in seeking out householders who would not, without help, insulate their leaky old houses: the day such a householder agrees to have this done, he will see people with tools doing it.

Several more things can be done -- including, of course, powerplants making boron for cars, and cars that can use it -- and when government no longer profits by preventing them from being done, many or all of them will take off.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On One-hundred-dollar oil posted 1 year, 11 months ago 17 Responses

The guy cannot be emailed ...

Tried and got a bounce message that included this:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at cohiba.eagle.ca.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message ...
38.101.200.49 does not like recipient.

This is what I tried to send:

Dear Mr. Allen,

I see you saying,

My biggest argument against putting the primary blame on humans for climate change is that it completely takes God out of the picture...

It does not.

... It must have slipped these people's minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over what's going on...

Obviously one way He can control what's going on is through what we do.

His servants include people who, through fossil fuel taxation, live partly off petroleum and natural gas revenues, and in some states coal revenues, yet still warn us that the CO2 from these is already altering the climate and will do so much more severely if their rate of use greatly increases, or if it continues at the present rate for many more decades.

I share your concern that some of these people advocate increased taxes on fossil fuels.

That's exactly the wrong thing to do. Those who make the laws must profit LESS from fossil fuel burning. That is to say, fossil fuel taxes must come down, to as low as taxes on other basic commodities such as salt or gypsum.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Today: Chris Allen posted 1 year, 11 months ago 19 Responses

By the prickling of my thumbs ...

I see Technology Review reporting cellulosic ethanol's vaporousness in the most favorable possible terms. A megatonne reality, possibly mere months away! I see Wired's list of geoengineering approaches not including the one that is simplest and most rat-regurgitating*, that of pulverizing and strewing silicates.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

* as opposed to swallowing a cat to catch the ratOn Plenty of reading to occupy you over the holidays posted 1 year, 11 months ago 7 Responses

Both

Hopeful in that while the world burns petroleum at the rate of 300,000 uranium-tonne-equivalents (UTEs) per year, and each UTE brings in millions of fossil fuel tax dollars, Australia has this year been discovering tonnes of the real thing at the rate of 270,000 per year.

Depressed because, like drug addicts who will try snorting every powder in the house, lovers of fossil fuel money will talk up almost any fossil fuel replacement scheme that promises to be ineffective.

Unless we all have been tricked by mind-control rays into forgetting that we each have a 50,000-bird chicken farm*, no chicken derivative will be taking over for our present use of fossil fuel.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

* I suppose that would explain the missing hours in the day that we now more fancifully explain away as "time spent on the internet" ...On Don't tell Canis! posted 1 year, 11 months ago 2 Responses

Shippingport 50th anniversary tomorrow

... as Rod Adams points out --

... help the world remember that it was once possible in the United States to build a good sized nuclear plant from scratch in about 3 years.

... the original plant is nowhere to be found. In our haste to figure out what to do with nuclear power plants that may have used up their initial design life, the pioneering Shippingport reactor was destroyed twenty years ago and its site turned back into a greenfield.

People here have disgraced themselves by saying or suggesting Shippingport's heirs need protection from the market. They do still need protection from government, however, for government is a fossil fuel interest.

Each new one that government allows to be built will consume about $40 million worth of uranium per year, but if government red-tapes it to death, the natural gas that is burned instead of uranium is about $650 million per year, barring natural gas price rises.

If government guarantees the construction loans, it can't profit by betraying the environment; the natural gas revenue it would gain is offset by its having to pay off the loans.

So the very act of forcing government to guarantee the loans much reduces the risk to the citizens; not just the citizens who invest, but the ones who would have to live near gas pipelines if fossil fuel money had its way.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On The terrible omnibus bill posted 1 year, 11 months ago 4 Responses

The good guys ...

are those who want "massive nuclear subsidies", so to speak. Each new reactor will need about $40 million worth of uranium per year, but if government blocks them, natural gas will be burned instead: about $650 million worth of it per plant per year.

If government guarantees the loans, the billions in natural gas revenue it might win by derailing the new nuclear construction projects will be cancelled by its having to pay off the loans. If it doesn't derail them, its having guaranteed the loans costs it nothing.

The New Mexico pipeline disaster suggests government SHOULD NOT block nuclear, but if it can't profit by doing so, that moral consideration will have more weight.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Sen. John Kerry defends Dem decision not to force a filibuster on the energy bill posted 1 year, 11 months ago 22 Responses

Expensive enough ...

to be nonthreatening to oil and gas interests. Especially when wind lulls translate so nicely into gas demand spikes.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Offshore wind posted 1 year, 11 months ago 18 Responses

You could be advocating ...

the building now of sequestration-only plants.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Why clean coal is so darn appealing posted 1 year, 11 months ago 37 Responses

As a private citizen ...

one doesn't really have two or three thousand words to work with, when buttonholing heads of state. If one expects to be able to get that many words in, one is relying on the reputation one has earned as a professional public servant.

One should perhaps not be so firm in saying,

once [power plants'] CO2 is released to the air, it is impractical to recover it.

Reacting pulverized silicates quickly with concentrated CO2 in a pot is expensive, but using the troposphere as the pot and using years to tens of years as the reaction timescale looks very practical to me, as I've been saying here recently.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On A letter from James Hansen pleads for action on coal-fired power plants posted 1 year, 11 months ago 13 Responses

No pipes, or two

Has anybody examined whether the hot carbon dioxide which has to transported for many miles from CCS plants in some cases can be used in industrial process and building heat?  As long as the pipes are there.  Just wondering.

First off, the pipes are not there and never will be; as above said, CO2 capture from diluteness in air is too easy. It's jumping up and demonstrating itself.

Secondly, if they were there, they would transport cool CO2, for only when it is cool can it have good density without a lot of stress on the pipes.

If waste heat from carbon-burning heat engines had to be transported, water would be the heat transfer fluid. Essentially nothing has more heat capacity per litre than water. If the CO2 also had to be transported, the most sensible solution would be two pipes: one for hot liquid water, the other for cool liquid CO2.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Why clean coal is so darn appealing posted 1 year, 12 months ago 37 Responses

CO2 sequestration and clean coal are different

If anyone thinks clean coal is a solution then they need to consider the numbers.

Sure, if they can.

Carbon dioxide sequestration requires us to move and "bury" 11 cubic kilometres of liquid CO2 a year.

Correction, 0 km^3.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Why clean coal is so darn appealing posted 1 year, 12 months ago 37 Responses

Perhaps not appealing but demonstrably true

The idea that we can just invent a new widget, stick it on coal plants, ...

It does not have to be stuck on coal plants. It can be anywhere.

One can build just the CO2 catcher without the bother of building an emitter to go with; one can take the building of the emitter as an already solved problem.

... and break the if-then connection between coal and climate destruction is immensely appealing. It flatters our self-image as a resourceful country that can innovate its way out of any jam. It's a neat, clean solution that requires no extraordinary political effort or substantial reordering of our markets or way of life.

Be all that as it may, the idea is also true.

As I told the 'Know_nukes' group, who were uninterested because they want to change all the coal plants to nukes, I'll tell this group: the same silicates that lie with asbestos are abundant elsewhere. A nuclear power plant built next to them and dedicated to grinding them and putting their dust onto a wind that will suitably strew it will cancel the emissions of seven coal-fired powerplants of the same capacity, according to a boron advocate's calculation at RealClimate.

If it were to take 20 years, and long before then all the coal plants were to retire, or have their carbon emissions made net-zero through conversion to biofuel by means of window gardens in their cafeterias, silicate grains might still be out and about, capturing CO2, when it was no longer useful for them to do so.

However, to me, visible crust formation in 20 years on mine tailings suggests air-suspensible grains will be all crust much sooner than that, and anyway, even if they did take 20 years, there still will be coal plants working 20 years from now; there may even still be a backlog of CO2, above the natural 280-ppm level, in the atmosphere.

This doesn't yet show the crusts themselves, but was linked from the previously mentioned blog post : http://www.eos.ubc.ca/research/dipple/UBC_Carbonation/ind ...

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Why clean coal is so darn appealing posted 1 year, 12 months ago 37 Responses

It won't be like that ...

but if I told you what it'll be like, I'd then have to post the string of characters that causes literate observers to think, "Are those characters random?" and then fall over dead.

There is no genuine concern over weapons proliferation by misuse of today's nuclear power systems; everyone has noticed that in 50-plus years, no such proliferation has occurred. The wicked spend much effort, often successfully, in setting up a strawman -- that such misuse must be impossible -- when all that it has to be, for nuclear power systems' perfect weapons-nonproliferation record to make sense, is more difficult than working from scratch.

It is certainly possible to weaponize thorium with the aid of a fission power reactor, even a thorium-fuelled one; a soft thermal neutron spectrum prevents the formation of the 232-U that is touted as making 233-U show-stoppingly hard for a clandestine bomb-maker to handle, and thorium doesn't fission much at all in such a spectrum. It may, like weaponizing uranium by that means, be a long way around that no-one has ever taken or would take, but then again it may not.

Schumacher falls into a trap whose occupants know that it is unethical but lucrative to oppose fission power, but by supporting varieties of reactor that are not now depriving governments of fossil fuel revenue on spurious grounds that if true would disfavour those that are depriving them of that, they can stay friends with the money, and with its friends, but not defile themselves, because they're still supporting fission!

Hydrocarbons made from air and water would preserve this. What do you so dislike about my B2O3-boron proposal that keeping this is better, Mr. Schumacher?

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn America's climate and energy future posted 1 year, 12 months ago 15 Responses

A lot of work for a little molecule

Creating deeper binding targets, create new rules, incentives, and institutions, create new global mechanisms ... what fun. How pedestrian it would be the putative objective of all that fun hardhat-free activity were accomplished by physically removing a suitable amount of CO2 from the atmosphere.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On Winning the battle in Bali, and then winning the war posted 1 year, 12 months ago 6 Responses

It's remedial

It deals with CO2 from past coal-burning, and such future coal-burning as we are powerless to prevent, and in that respect it is complementary, not alternative, to future non-fossil energy.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On A strong and realistic energy policy is not dependent on any one fuel, technology, or supplier posted 2 years ago 22 Responses

Depends how it's done

even if [CO2 sequestration] costs very little each year, over the thousands of years required to keep it underground, the cost would be...well, not infinite, but certainly astronomical ...

Google (serpentinite carbon sequestration). Too many hits, but I liked this one.

It can require further research and funding, and then require further funding and research, or it can be happening already, unfundedly, with no-one's permission, and with post-capture costs of nothing a year.

This forum will not continue to prefer the former sort of approach, and will not express that preference through loud, devoutly maintained ignorance of the latter kind.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn A strong and realistic energy policy is not dependent on any one fuel, technology, or supplier posted 2 years ago 22 Responses

This is encouraging

In this interesting blog entry, news that CO2 has been seen sequestering itself in mine tailings on a few-years timescale.

This is encouraging to me because it suggests intentional dispersal of suitable calcium and magnesium silicates will just work. Until today I was worried, as discussed in this comment thread, that high-surface-area silicate dustmotes would not become carbonate quick enough.

If you read much of that thread you may come to share my hope that future iterations of the internet protocol will include wilful ignorance detection and punishment. Oh, [flutter eyelids cleverly], why not just plant treeee -- zap! Thud.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On CCS: Always almost ready, but never quite posted 2 years ago 11 Responses

Yes, both are decreasing

so this talk about the antarctic ice INCREASING while the artic is decreasing is bunk, right?

Yes. Whatever the Antarctic ice sheet may have been doing, area-wise, its volume has been decreasing: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/mar/HQ_06085_arctic_ ...

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Must-see ice-sheet TV posted 2 years ago 6 Responses

Ah, but coal costs only about $2 per million BTU

(Is that an accurate coal price? I know it has been rising.)

Anyway, it's near there. What does uranium cost, something like $50 per million BTU? Neglecting enrichment, of course, since not all reactors require enriched fuel.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On A strong and realistic energy policy is not dependent on any one fuel, technology, or supplier posted 2 years ago 22 Responses

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired

plants, those coal trains will not be death trains.

A holocaust allusion is not a holocaust reference. I worried whether, in my first comment, I had fallen into the trap of not noticing that ... well, in fact, I had so fallen, but the wording I chose concealed this.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
On Is the analogy between climate change and Hitler's atrocities appropriate? posted 2 years ago 49 Responses

If necessary, we will clean up others' CO2

GRL - that's the whole point - "dirty" coal plants aren't designed to capture CO2. If we have to add it on as an afterthought, it's going to be very expensive. Why not put that money into renewables and efficiency investments instead?

The case I think Roberts is addressing, and I certainly am, is where we don't control what the energy-supply-and-management money is put into; it goes into coal despite us. By doing centralized CO2 capture, we add it on as an afterthought to all CO2 emitters on the planet at once.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On Developing nations will not remain immune to the need for sustainable development posted 2 years ago 6 Responses

No we're not. Not even then are we screwed

If that's a true and immutable fact, we're screwed. Period.

If China and India build as many dirty coal plants as they're now on track to build in the next 10, 20 years -- if they develop along the same fossil-intensive path of the West, only faster -- global average temperature will rise between 2 and 6 degrees C this century ...

Roberts is neglecting, as almost everyone here almost always does, the less unpleasant path we would take in that case of centrally capturing the CO2. Look up my many previous mentions of silicate-to-carbonate capture. Man, am I tired of typing catprue and having to fix it.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Developing nations will not remain immune to the need for sustainable development posted 2 years ago 6 Responses

Hydrogen's problems as car fuel can all be solved

... Volkswagon is making concept hydrogen cars, and it sounds like they regard problems as solvable?  

http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/la_auto_show_2007/311

   I always thought they were pretty good at cars, the Germans and Japanese.  Why do they think that hydrogen could be a real possibility?

It is a real possibility. If our only options were electrified shared transport, gasoline cars, and liquid hydrogen cars, liquid hydrogen cars would be a reasonable choice. For at least 20 years it has been known that if a car were long-term parked with its lH2 tank full, the evaporation rate would not exceed 2 percent per day. The first liquid hydrogen car existed more than 30 years ago.

More recent designs don't let any fuel at all boil off for the first week or so of being parked; instead they let the pressure in the lH2 tank rise from ~1 bar to, IIRC, 4.5 bar. If, before then, the driver drives the car, the temperature and pressure go back down and the several days' countdown, before boiloff begins, resets.

Problems that can be solved, even ones that repeatedly have been solved, are not necessarily worth solving. Throughout these decades of prototypes, no-one ever buys one and drives it home.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, hydrogen-boron convert
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On Full-cell company bought by Daimler and Ford posted 2 years ago 55 Responses

Bozo under the volcano

If I am a shill who could I possible be working for? I say it is all free and you don't need an oil company or energy company anywhere in the loop.

You could be lying, or lucratively mistaken, about its all being free. If it's not all free then an oil company might indeed be needed somewhere in the loop, and an oil-taxing government too; perhaps the funding for the undermountain lab/secret headquarters in your South Pacific island fortress comes in the form of social assistance cheques.

Hey, you asked.

The Hindenburg photo is a ray-tracing, I believe. If I'm right it was borrowed from http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/H/ke ...

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Full-cell company bought by Daimler and Ford posted 2 years ago 55 Responses

He makes a persuasive case

... we could transport said gas to the nearest mountain range of asbestos bearing serpantine rock ...

... Humans: too stupid to survive.

(The above in critique of
http://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/carbonates.pdf )

I'm not convinced that pulverizing the silicate rock and suspending it in air, upwind of desolate places, or in near-surface seawater, wouldn't work. Or both, of course, if it first were suspended in air and then fell on a big piece of sea.

In general carbonate sequestration schemes do not require transport of CO2. They let it come to them on the wind.

This means they also do not require a carbon dioxide emitter to be built so as to give them something to sequester. They use existing CO2 emitters for that.

As such, they are not specifically a clean-coal scheme; they are a retrofit on all CO2 emitters everywhere on the planet.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas:
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htmlOn A guest essay from Peter Montague raises questions about the rush to sequestration posted 2 years ago 12 Responses

It could hardly be otherwise

There are a lot of worthy energy programs that are underfunded

This is to be expected from a government and a government department that is largely funded from petroleum and natural gas taxation. They are exactly as motivated to fund worthy energy programs that would reduce their paymaster's petrodollar profits as would be a group of private Exxon-Mobil coupon clippers.

That is why the US government hasn't built an experimental nuclear power reactor in decades.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Hound your representative to add an RPS to the energy bill posted 2 years ago 2 Responses

Thanks for that, B. Hannahan

It's not hopeless. Lipow makes tendentious errors, but has been known to accept correction.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Is wind worth it? posted 2 years ago 72 Responses

The cost of retailed hydrogen ...

is principally shipping and handling.

Introduction. For the past half century, most cities of population over 100,000 in industrialized nations have had dozens of industrial and research users regularly purchasing pressurized hydrogen gas in heavy steel cylinders containing about 0.5 kg H2 per cylinder. The price of this hydrogen has been reasonably stable at about $100/kg plus cylinder rental...

(http://www.dotynmr.com/PDF/Doty_H2Price.pdf)

That's enough of an existing hydrogen infrastructure to be very hard for a new, different one to beat on price, even if the stuff cost nothing at its points of production.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Your chance to get in on the hydrogen action posted 2 years, 1 month ago 11 Responses

If you have played with a big Fresnel lens ...

you'll know that the focus it brings the sun to is very small, not likely to burn your hand because you won't hold it still enough, but able to bleach spots in your retinas if you don't master the trick of looking a little off to the side. And not always off in the same lateral direction, or the image will still make a blind spot -- a temporary one, as far as I know, although presumably that's a function of how old the retinas are -- at the unvarying non-central place on the retina.

It is very unlikely that anyone has been burned by the focused sun at a place like the Kramer Junction plant, but possible that when the mirrors are made, and their glass is hot, someone was. (When focusing the sun, they are not in the focus. They don't get hot.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn All along the watch tower, opposition to wind is growing posted 2 years, 1 month ago 10 Responses

710.2 billion kWh in 1996 USA, 828.7 in 2006

says BP (Excel file). Since Roberts is not antinuclear, it will no doubt be happy news to him that although no new power reactor has started up in 2007 in the USA*, its operating total has nonetheless increased from 103 to 104.

... Nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build; they have long lead times and a history of cost overruns ... Politicians, environmentalists and business still can't decide how to dispose of radioactive waste.

... To ease financial concerns, the nuclear power industry has turned to Congress.

Uranium's recent pullback has put it near 49 cents per million BTU, natgas is near $7, which includes some royalties, so the ratio is about 14. There may be additional taxes on natural gas.

By going to congress for loan guarantees, builders of new nukes ensure if something happens that derails their plans, government loses money.

But if nothing derails them and they start producing electricity that would otherwise have been produced by burning natural gas, the uranium that 30 plants burn is cheaper than natural gas by about US$14 billion a year at recent prices.

This means if the plants go ahead, government still loses money; the citizens gain it. The people's representatives, by forcing government to give these guarantees, correct a conflict of interest it otherwise would have -- and did have, in the 70s, when "grass-roots groups" figured so largely in those long lead times, cost overruns, and cancellations.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, boron internal combustion car fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

* No new power reactor on land. Ship propulsion reactors often start up, maybe there have been some this year. No loss of fuel tax revenue there, so no fuss.On Nuclear still on the verge of its comeback posted 2 years, 1 month ago 4 Responses

That is why I said nothing is *more* renewable

I knew what you were going to say, although not who would say it. Token renewables can have downsides that would be very severe indeed if they were called upon to supply hundreds of millions of tonnes-of-oil-equivalent per year. Hydro has real problems, but they are, of course, much smaller in proportion to output.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron car fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Techno-obsession posted 2 years, 2 months ago 18 Responses

Government loses either way

What if there are no "bundles of free money from Uncle Sam" for developers of new nuclear power plants, and they go ahead ahead anyway?

Nuclear power skeptics occasionally refer to the IAEA "Red Book" uranium reserve estimate in 2003 of about three million tonnes. They are less likely to follow the example of Martin Sevior and look at the same authority's report two years later:

As of the beginning of 2003 World Uranium reserves were:

* Reasonable Assured Reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 3.10 - 3.28 million tonnes.

* Additional reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 10.690 million tonnes.

As of the beginning of 2005 World Uranium reserves were:

* Reasonable Assured Reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kgU (or $US50/lb U3O8) = 4.7 million tonnes.

* Additional recoverable Uranium is estimated to be 35 million tonnes

The substantial increase (almost 50%) from 2003 shows the results of the world-wide renewed exploration effort ...

The recent $85-a-pound price translates into $220/kg, significantly higher than the price at which 10 million tonnes was known to be on hand in 2003, so prospectors have been finding the stuff at a much greater rate than the world's reactors have been burning it. No-one really expects this to change until the price goes way down again. It's already fallen about a third from its peak earlier this year.

And what is the connection to the supposed billions in freebies? Well, to produce a billion watts of electricity by burning natural gas, one must now-a-days pay a gas bill near $0.4 billion a year. This includes substantial royalties for government. The uranium bill for a billion watts from nuclear plants like the Darlington one near me is $0.036 billion a year.

That's a lot less than $0.4 billion; it is less than a tenth. So if those investors build tens of gigawatts, tens of billions of watts, of new nuclear plants, they'll be depriving government of billions of natural gas dollars each year.

If there were no "billions in freebies" --

(Actually, loan guarantees, worth much less than the billions they cover, just as mortgage insurance for a housebuyer costs much less than the house)

- then regulators would be in a conflict of interest. They could protect billions a year in future income for themselves and other public servants by betraying the public: red-taping the new nuclear plants to death, and cranking up the pipelines that carry gas to plants that burn it,  money to regulators, and, occasionally, death to citizens.

But with the loan guarantees, they lose billions either way, and if they let the nuclear plants go ahead, they, personally, will know that those nukes are a comforting presence over their back fence, rather than a gas pipeline or a railway line carrying coal.

Government loses either way, but with the loan guarantees, its supposed bosses,the People, win.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron internal combustion car fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On A guest essay from Peter Montague analyzes the nuclear 'renaissance' posted 2 years, 2 months ago 6 Responses

Pulverizing and dispersing silicates

might work. Or the reaction between air and a silicate grain surface might be too slow. If it can be quick enough, it will be the answer. Look up serpentinite or serpentine sequestration.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Editorial questions the sequestration promise posted 2 years, 2 months ago 6 Responses

"I am not an engineer"

That doesn't really let you out of doing proper calculations if you're going to talk like one. If spherical geometry is too hard, please at least review your 500-by-500-by-100-foot slab calculation.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Solar thermal company says its generation/storage combo can power the nation posted 2 years, 2 months ago 22 Responses

CSP pays back setup energy in weeks, like nukes

I worked out a crude upper bound, plus a little farther along in that discussion managed to set down plainly how EROEI almost never matters:

How high could the EROEI have been of something that fossil fuel energy undercut on price shortly after 1912? The fact of the undercutting does not imply any limit. It could have been a million, and if gross energy from fossil fuels had to be, just to pick a number randomly, 13 percent ploughed back into getting them -- EROEI 7.7 -- fossil fuel could still shut down the solar industry if that gross energy were cheap enough. In fact to beat a source with infinite EROEI, if all other costs are equal, a source with 7.7 EROEI just has to use gross energy that is 13 percent cheaper. Since all other costs are never equal, and lots of things are scarce besides energy, even that isn't guaranteed.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Internal combustion without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Solar thermal company says its generation/storage combo can power the nation posted 2 years, 2 months ago 22 Responses

Disliking spin from amateurs as you seem to...

and having in mind that there are people here who "trust you implicitly", when you say,

In a large system, one year high-temperature deep ground storage is possible...

by "high-temperature" how high do you mean, and by "deep" how deep, for, say, an electrical megawatt-month? I suppose that would have to be five or six or seven thermal gigawatt-days in the underground cache.

Collecting interstellar material to construct a 24-kt full-scale gold replica of the earth is "possible"; it just takes a long time, and the surface gravity is awkward for pedestrians, but it could be done.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Solar thermal company says its generation/storage combo can power the nation posted 2 years, 2 months ago 22 Responses

Whitman couldn't endorse nuclear energy ...

while heading the EPA, despite its environmental cleanliness, because as a government employee she would have been harming her employer's natural gas income prospects. Uranium is currently 7.2 percent as costly per unit of heat as is natural gas.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron car fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On BusinessWeek allows Whitman to lobby for nukes under the guise of an op-ed posted 2 years, 2 months ago 16 Responses

Can do it with ...

I think there will be big scaleups in nuclear unit size. Also, we may get publically funded central CO2 capture. This is different from CCS at coal plants in that one does not built CO2 emitters at the same time as one builds the sequesterer; rather, one sequesters CO2 emissions from elsewhere.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Strict safety guidelines cause construction delays at nuclear plants in Finland and Taiwan posted 2 years, 2 months ago 14 Responses

That's incredible

Brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) data in grams of gasoline per shaft kWh can be converted to efficiencies by dividing 79 into them, e.g. 250 g/kWh corresponds to 79/250 efficiency, 0.316, a typical peak efficiency for a V6. What is the evidence for alcohol-burning car engines peaking at 0.316/0.61, i.e. 51.8 percent, efficiency?

The biggest marine diesels hit ~44 percent.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn A closer look at producing ethanol from poplar trees posted 2 years, 2 months ago 39 Responses

I always say ...

Cars that did [run on boron], being safer, could bring a motorist-chosen End of Oil.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn A gaggle of URLs posted 2 years, 3 months ago 24 Responses

Closed photobioreactors

in fluid-filled tubes, feeds those nitrogen-rich emissions into a pond where it feeds algae...

The algae are supposed to be hungry for CO2, although perhaps they take some nitrogen too. There are reasonable doubts their remains could make enough biodiesel in a thousand years to manufacture those tubes; or as the expert Rapier quotes puts it,

... The use of closed photobioreactors (>$100+/m2) for such applications is totally absurd.

Energy means money. The theme that Lewis notes with the propane tank of all possible fossil fuel replacements, as long as they're ineffective, is clearly not departed from at Burning Man.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, boron car fan
How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?On Lessons from Burning Man 2007 posted 2 years, 3 months ago 5 Responses

The cow is so big because it is Polarized

Now we have an unprecedented outbreak of fire in Greece, and once again some are quick to insist that no connection can be made between drought, wind, record-breaking heat -- and devastating fires.

The wicked flee when no man pursueth ...

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Fires in Greece encouraged by global warming, developers posted 2 years, 3 months ago 7 Responses

Also Andrew Dessler posted it here

The Hall-Heroult process uses both electrical energy and carbon energy. Inert anodes have been studied, and if they were to be put into commercial service, the oxygen liberated at them would not eat them, and all the energy required to separate Al and O would be supplied electrically.

If hydrogen were not involved, and the aluminum were burned in one step, it would begin to make sense.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Interesting hydrogen-generating technology from Purdue posted 2 years, 3 months ago 14 Responses

Zero net emissions

But is it practical? Can it be done? Obviously that's unknowable to some degree. Me, I believe it's possible.

Yes, yes, no, I also believe so.

But by zero emissions do you mean zero net, or actually emitting no carbon? It's easy enough to snatch back more than is put -- will someone repost the link or links I've posted on this before -- but not putting any is very hard and, I think, not as good as negative net emissions.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
How shall motoring gain nuclear cachet?On How much should we aim to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 10 Responses

Petroleum already strategically important in 1923

I stand corrected, or anyway better informed.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
On BLM offers yet another plan for drilling on Alaska's sensitive North Slope posted 2 years, 3 months ago 5 Responses

Not wacky ...

It's a sensible way that has been worked out in detail for efficient solar power plants to accommodate a winter demand peak. I don't agree that it depends on reusable rockets. Saturn V successors that only lift, don't bring things down, would have established it in the 70s, had they not been cancelled.

It's always waiting in the wings, for whenever low cost per tonne to orbit comes. Consider that the kinetic energy difference between a tonne of freight on the ground and in high orbit is about the same as the chemical energy difference between a tonne of silicon in silica, and uncombined. Well, closer to a tonne and a half.

Rerun previous comment

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Feds look into space solar posted 2 years, 3 months ago 3 Responses

Nuclear-generated hydrocarbon ...

could fuel internal combustion engines for very much longer than mined hydrocarbon. Nuclear-generated dimethyl ether, an oxohydrocarbon, has its fans, although unfortunately for it they don't include me. Carbonaceous fuel, however acquired, has the problem of emitting oxides of carbon; that is why I argue for the development of internal boron combustion.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Would the biosphere care? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 41 Responses

A big deal, eh?

I suppose that must mean more than one percent of the power reactors in the United States were forced offline by canicule -- a nice word derived from the idiotic (*) Roman idea that Sirius (the Dog Star) and the Sun, by shining on the same side of the earth, made the time of year when they do this exceptionally hot; hence, also, "dog days" -- for more than one percent of the year.

If perchance it doesn't mean that, then perhaps JMG is just momentarily lacking in judgment. He hasn't conspicuously ignored any recent hot spell  of a week or more when all 104 power reactors in the USA were working, has he?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

* The solar constant is 1,367 W/m^2, the Sirian one, 0.00000012 W/m^2, and anyway, Sirius is shining on some side of the Earth more, I guess, than 99.9 percent of the time. As is the Sun. Their effects always add, they don't have to be lined up.On And that's not cool, man posted 2 years, 3 months ago 10 Responses

Rawlins commits a common error

in the "Nuclear Power Primer" sidebar on the linked page --

In all operating reactors in the U.S., as well as in most of the world, the fuel coolant is water. Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

When a fast neutron born in the fission process collides with a hydrogen atom (a proton with an electron),

Emphasis mine ...

the neutron will, on average, lose half its energy in the scattering reaction with the proton ...

After a number of such scattering events, a neutron will have its energy reduced to a very small percentage of its original energy. It then gets the title "thermal" neutron.

(What thermalness is, is not smallness of the particle's energy of motion compared to the original energy, but its being in the same range as the kinetic energies of the water molecules the particle is bouncing off, so that in future collisions with them it is as likely to be sped up as slowed down. But that's not the error.)

These thermal (slow) neutrons have a very high probability of causing fission in U-235 nuclei -- quite a bit higher probability than for fast neutrons. Reactor physicists therefore refer to today's commercial reactors as "thermal" reactors. Thermal reactors require enriching the uranium fissile fuel content up to 3-5 percent U-235.

That is the error. In some thermal reactors the hydrogen nuclei include both a proton and a neutron, and these do not require any enrichment of the uranium; they run on natural -- 0.7 percent rich -- uranium.

This primer, by an astronomer who was never in the business, is better.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn And he should know what he's talking about posted 2 years, 3 months ago 4 Responses

Civil servants will do anything for money

But the bigger problem I see with carbon taxes is this -- if things go according to plan and carbon use goes down, revenues for the government go down.  Has anyone thought of this?

I have thought of it, and concluded that it would cause everyone on a public payroll who had influence over anything that could encourage or discourage thrift in carbon-burning -- thrift meaning either conservation or substitution -- to do everything he deniably could to discourage it.

That, and present government carbon revenues, are how I explain present government behaviour. I would expect, e.g., carbon revenues supposedly earmarked for alternative energy R&D to be intentionally wasted.

There's a shortcut: ask yourself what an oil company would do if it had the same power.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn One economist says no posted 2 years, 3 months ago 58 Responses

What was illegal about selling the EV1?

Nothing, I suspect, but maybe 'theBike45' will surprise me.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn The green cartopia ain't likely to happen posted 2 years, 3 months ago 12 Responses

No such thing as a stupid question ...

Well, maybe on the internet such a thing can exist.

Why is it you never read, "Wind Farm Damage Worse Than Reported"?

There would have to be some payoff to a newspaper in reporting that a wind turbine or wind farm had been damaged, and the payoff would have to be nice enough that they then wanted to run the story again, but not just repeat that still no-one had been hurt. They'd have to spin it that somehow something new had happened.

Unlike damage to nuclear plants, damage to wind turbines routinely involves dead people even that doesn't get a double-barreled, phony-buildup treatment. (What, they're going to get deader?)

It is likely that the K-K station, when working again, will produce more electricity than all the wind turbines in the world. If I'm wrong about all the turbines' recent years' production, I'm sure someone will tell me. That kind of oil-interest-defunding -- the nuclear kind -- establishes a market for a lot of hostile press coverage. (Duh.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Shocking posted 2 years, 4 months ago 2 Responses

The them-as-has-GETS tax, eh?

No comment.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn Very interesting posted 2 years, 4 months ago 9 Responses

Proceeding without government involvement is fine

If government net-subsidized the dirtier stuff, they would be eager to reduce it, but since in fact they net-tax it, they are eager to "put off carbon reduction because of some goofy economic theories", or rather, a particular theory: fossil fuel money received by government personnel is gooood. Witness the recent mendacity by the Orwellianly named German "ministry of the environment".

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Don't let your ambition limit your reality posted 2 years, 4 months ago 12 Responses

If giving reading assignments ...

it would be only fair to carry out the arithmetic I assigned you. It applies not just to molten-salt 100-kW reactors but to any 100-kW power reactor.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn So much good stuff, so little time to blather about it posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

A thorium blanket that snags 0.99 of neutrons

still leaves you wanting another five or six successive 99-percent mufflers. Government personnel armed with neutron detectors should not be able to tell from them whether it's running or not, right?

Here's how you begin the calculation: take the cube of the outer radius (where the shield ends, as seen by one of the neutrons it fails to stop), and subtract the cube of the inner radius (where the shield begins). OK so far?

Concrete is good for sopping up the tiny, but still quite important, fringes of the neutron distribution. Water is also good, but it's less than half as dense, so if it starts at the same inner radius, it has to end more than twice as far out from there as a concrete shield would.

How many tonnes per kilowatt of reinforced concrete do you consider acceptable?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
How shall cars gain nuclear cachet?On So much good stuff, so little time to blather about it posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

100 kW?

Try and do some calculations. Simple ones: spherical geometry, 3 m inner radius, 5.5 m outer radius. Suppose the concrete density is 3,000 kg/m^3 ... or let's say 4,000, averaging concrete and rebar. What tonnage of reinforced concrete per kW do you find you have been talking about?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn So much good stuff, so little time to blather about it posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

Indeed they would not so argue ...

because there would be no money in it. Isn't the Oxford Research Group one of those that fiddles figures to hide nuclear power plants' very high net-energy fraction? I seem to recall they are; that would make them obviously on the take.

I don't say renewables can never significantly threaten fossil fuel interests. All they would have to do, to make of themselves such a threat, is produce on-demand energy in abundance that fossil fuels can't match. But that would mean the potential to produce ... what did he say? "Humanity-ending weapons"? Well not much can do that, if the noun is all-inclusive. Easier to kill every last cockroach in New York. But fossil fuels powered WWII, so renewables that beat fossil fuels can obviously beat that performance. SPS is known for its lack of direct weaponizability, but its electricity could always be used to make explosives on the ground, if that were what one was into. If that were that into which one was.

It may well be true that no-one believes breeder reactors and reprocessing would incur any security nightmares, any more than they already have in various countries' long experimentation with them, but it wouldn't matter if they did, because nuclear power's very long-term sustainability does not depend on breeder reactors and reprocessing. And scaling-up is likely to involve the same for individual units, e.g. where today reactors to boil water for turbogenerators top out around 4,500 thermal MW, an oil-from-air one might give 100,000 thermal MW to chemical plant that would make 300,000 barrels per day.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.htmlOn So much good stuff, so little time to blather about it posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

Or lead with equal dividends of existing C tax $

and print the news of this, yes, but not on on the gas-pump receipts; print it on the cheques.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion, nuclear cachet --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.htmlOn Picking apart an argument against carbon taxes posted 2 years, 5 months ago 22 Responses

... unless those perverse revenue signals ...

are cancelled by the equally divided rebating scheme. But that's a cure so much better than the disease that it's reasonable to ask, why not just have the rebates, and proceed from there to raise the taxes only if the rebates themselves do not prove to be tremendously beneficial -- as I think they would be.

(Speed limits would suddenly be considered enforceable. Public funding to alternate-energy R&D would no longer be deliberately given to initiatives expected to fail. Help for persons wishing to insulate their houses would actually be given, and given to people who otherwise wouldn't do it. Public-transit operators would come to realize that unpleasantness and lack of performance sufficient to lose customers is not how one pays the bills. Antinuclearism would suddenly have to be its own reward.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Picking apart an argument against carbon taxes posted 2 years, 5 months ago 22 Responses

Fossil fuel profits, whether public or private,

concentrate in a relatively few hands. If they are guaranteed public profits, which is what carbon taxes are, then they concentrate in the same hands that can make and interpret the rules governing public transit and urban layout. They can zone businesses and residences far apart, laxly enforce speed limits, etc. -- in short, arrange to maximize their long-term expected fossil fuel revenue. Just as private oil profiteers do, but much more influentially.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Picking apart an argument against carbon taxes posted 2 years, 5 months ago 22 Responses

Look on the bright side

... the bad news that an amendment to levy around $30 billion in taxes on the oil industry, with the funds devoted to renewable energy, fell three votes short ...

isn't really all that bad, right? Because this way the oil industry will have that money to devote to renewable energy itself.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn One small step forward, one step, uh, sideways posted 2 years, 5 months ago 5 Responses

Of course it wasn't enviros ...

and of course it wasn't an ignorant or irrational public. It was government. They converted once respectable environmental groups into astroturf.

I think the US stopped building nukes because they became, quite suddenly, a major oil tax revenue canceller in 1974, the year when, according to Charles E. Till, there were about 40 reactor orders in the USA. It wasn't 'enviros', and it wasn't utility managers, ratepayers, and shareholders; it was government.

Where else are you going to hear that interpretation? Just being able to make it heard is somehow pleasing to me. I don't know if industry people understand it, nor if any post here.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Turns out we don't know how much there is posted 2 years, 5 months ago 40 Responses

They fly through cold water ...

Without several distributed heaters, or maybe forced circulation of heated air, that chill would leak through the hull and make for uncomfortable sailing. Do they use electric heaters?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn The chair of the Select Committee on Global Warming weighs in posted 2 years, 5 months ago 40 Responses

The threnody of the red button is muted ...

The right-revolving circular arrow, frozen in time, is evocative of the eternal recurrence of archetypes. "Replay", cries the poet.

The five stars to the left appear to represent a self-assessment that, while inarguably ambitious, is perhaps not undue.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html --
oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Greatest video of the century? posted 2 years, 5 months ago 3 Responses

"Exploration languished" means ...

the guys just could not get their funding together that year, where "that year" is any of the recent ones when uranium prices were so low that finding more did not seem worthwhile.On Always keep the bait dangling just out of reach posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

Lackner, Dubey, and others

I've mentioned them a time or two.

"Prickly"? I recall 'caniscandida' saying something like, I'm not just sure I can understand this hydrogen-economy stuff, and I said something like, try. I do not see myself as prickly, or anyway, not based on that occasion.

One of the nastiest kinds of net troll is the apparently eager student who responds serially to repeated attempts at exposition with, "Can you dumb it down a little, doc?", until you realize you are being played with. Elsewhere -- not here! -- I've had the suspicion they weren't about to understand for the reason Upton Sinclair mentions. That's why I tried to help Canis call upon the principle that the quickest way to understand something is to try to explain it.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Always keep the bait dangling just out of reach posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

With CO2 there is a centralized capture option ...

that doesn't work well with SO2.

I get it that coal has a carbon content of 70-80% but when CO2 is captured and sequestered, in an imagined CO2 capture and sequestration scheme, it isn't just the carbon that is sequestered, it is also the oxygen that the carbon has bonded with, thus the CO2 - can someone with a stronger understanding of science help me understand what volumes are being talked about for sequestration in relationship to the coal burned?  Thank you

The numbers sound about right. What's different is how the two dioxides behave if they get out into the atmosphere. CO2 stays for centuries or millennia and affects the climate but, at levels below, IIRC, half a percent, 5000 ppm, doesn't bother us air-breathers. The 500 ppm that would severely affect climate would not choke those of us who weren't washed or blown away.

SO2, aka brimstone -- why a gas has a name ending in "stone" I'm not sure -- would definitely bother us. It finds ways of forming sulphate and dropping out of the air quickly; as sulphuric acid, in rain, it is the acid in acid rain.

So the hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 we have added to the atmosphere and the hundreds of billions more we will add, because of its persistence, spreads through all the air and covers the whole planet. This means we can, when we get around to it, adjust the concentration back down by extracting CO2 at a single point or a few points. Can't do that with SO2: if let out at many points, it attacks the environment near each point, promptly spending itself in so doing.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Always keep the bait dangling just out of reach posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses

No Yucca mountains are needed ...

Experience suggests the waste that the Yucca Mountain project is meant eventually to take has, over decades and hundreds of storage sites, been entirely harmless. Fossil fuel taxation means career civil servants profit from carbon monoxide deaths; these have no nuclear analogue. Or to speak more precisely, they have, in nuclear waste-related injuries or deaths, a theoretically possible analogue whose real-world occurrences so far number zero.

I gather the Keystone Institute is fuel-tax-funded.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn So says a new report posted 2 years, 5 months ago 44 Responses

Air tank plus air is extremely heavy energy store

Some earlier discussion here. No-one has seen one of these things go 10 km.

Also see BBC  24 October 2000.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Compressed air, not hot air posted 2 years, 5 months ago 4 Responses

Kill the tax

As long as everyone on a public payroll has a stake in the failure of each and every point on JMG's list, they'll find ways to make each and every one of them, if attempted, fail, perhaps despite sincere-seeming effort.

If fossil fuel consumption taxes are zeroed or made negative -- actual subsidies, as are often dishonestly or foolishly asserted already to exist in these pages -- then City Hall will genuinely have its heart in fossil fuel conservation.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn What rules would you impose to address global heating if you were posted 2 years, 5 months ago 7 Responses

Nice guys post sense.

When Lipow responds to a question about how deep the water would need to be with nonsense -- "you can store 420 watts per cubic feet" -- I'm a nice guy for pointing it out, and he's a not-nice guy for putting it, and the original area-only evasiveness, up there in the first place. Let's be clear on that.

420 watt-hours per cubic foot of water would imply an elevation change of 5,445 metres.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn If renewables are to work, we need good storage posted 2 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

Quantifying pumped storage in mi^2 sounds evasive

... water being a three-dimensional substance.

The spreadsheet says 8,590,000,000 kWh of storage is enough. Supposing that to be true, how high is that high-up water stacked, supposing its average head is 100 metres?

8.59 million MWh times 3700 tonnes per MWh makes ... but I see he says 800 feet average head. OK, that reduces the water requirement per MWh to 1,520 tonnes, so 13 billion tonnes must be elevated, and on 50 mi^2 that works out to a vertical extent of 101 metres.

Is this correct, then: the 50 square miles, 130 square kilometres, of high-up reservoir would have average depth 101 m, i.e. 330 feet, if their sides were vertical? Somewhat more for more typically round-bottomed dips in high terrain?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn If renewables are to work, we need good storage posted 2 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

The ecologically soundest electricity storage ...

is upstream of the heat engine and the dynamo in a nuclear reactor core. Someone spoke of building excess capacity and using a shunt; that would work really well with nuclear power plants and amount to one complete solution to their often-mentioned problem of of slow power raising.

Here's what I said on EnergyPulse 13 months ago:

Is a megawatt-hour a lot of energy to store?

It's less than some American cars have in their tanks. A megawatt-hour's worth of boron, in two equal lumps with good handles, you could probably lift. But to store the megawatt-hour in high-up water takes huge masses, far up: 370 kilotonne-metres. That could be 370,000 tonnes elevated one metre, or 3700 tonnes, which would fill a 20-m spherical tank, elevated 100 metres.

That's a lot of stuff that doesn't care about you.

It should not be surprising that our Canadian hydropower experience includes some minor fatalities. I think here in Ontario we tend intuitively to think of nuclear power stations as the same sort of thing as dams -- massive concrete dreaming in the sun -- but nuclear reactions cannot shrug aside or bypass the concrete the way water can. Thus, that one slipup in one province killed more neighbours than all the uranium mines, uranium enrichment plants, nuclear fuel fabrication plants, nuclear power plants, and spent fuel storage sites in the whole world in the past 20 years. I don't know if Banks is looking for some more statistical kind of evidence, but in this case, a single incident captures the truth.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn If renewables are to work, we need good storage posted 2 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

Inefficient but highly transportable storage ...

is what I've been advocating for some time, linke below.

The inefficiency would exist if electricity were used to make it, and at the destination it were used to make electricity. Electricity could conceivably be eased out of the deal at both ends.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn How can renewable energy 'power up'? posted 2 years, 5 months ago 45 Responses

The issue with nuke waste is not transit

Thorium reactors can produce bomb-grade uranium-233, or they can be tweaked not to. My impression of this complex matter is that this is the reverse of the case with today's uranium-burning ones, which produce plutonium that is not weapons-grade unless one goes out of one's power-producing way to make it so.

The issue with nuclear waste, or nuclear anything, is not transit. The issue is oil and gas revenue, especially tax revenue, that never was. That is why there are so many, many "issues".

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
On Lovins v. Richter posted 2 years, 5 months ago 45 Responses

Correction, 15.3 MW year-round average ...

not 14.1 MW. So only US$13 per watt. It's rapidly improving!

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Lovins v. Richter posted 2 years, 5 months ago 45 Responses

The fourth line looks easy to fix ...

Too easy. Could its wrongness be part of the theme.

'picoallen' puts these words in Howard's mouth,

... this means we'll need to build lots of nuclear power stations, and export loads more Uranium - cutting back CO2 is gonna hurt ...

but the point of nuclear power stations is that cutting back CO2 with them does not hurt, so the implied connection is a petrodollar lie. Maybe it is one Howard would tell, but I suspect  the ventriloquist in this case.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Australia tries to distract from Kyoto posted 2 years, 5 months ago 8 Responses

DU hexafluoride drums can be dumped in the sea

Since there is 4 billion tonnes of undepleted uranium already there, and fluorine is even more abundant, this will not unduly alter the uranium concentration or radioactivity or F- levels, even if the drums totally give up their contents. I would have thought only an oil shill would say or suggest otherwise. Also, of course, ceasing to enrich uranium would not imply ceasing to use it for power production.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A concise introduction posted 2 years, 6 months ago 38 Responses

How big does it need to be in December?

By calling an assertion that ten billion square metres of solar power plant could power the US economy "oft-cited" McGrath seems to be trying to suggest it has already survived criticism somewhere and need not be examined now. My CRC handbook's "Total Monthly Solar Radiation in a Cloudless Sky" says at 30 degrees north the US gets 11,500 calories per square centimetre per December.

Times 10^14 cm^2 times 4.184 J/cal times ten percent conversion divided by 31 days, that makes 180 GW.

Far from powering the US economy, this would not cover even all of of its electricity needs, plus, there might be clouds.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Why we gotta knock solar? posted 2 years, 6 months ago 35 Responses

Metal-to-hydrogen follies

... are, I suspect, long-term hydrogen fans' attempt to deal with the fact that on board a car, metals don't weigh as much per unit oxidation energy as hydrogen. There are boron-to-hydrogen follyists ... follicles? Enthusiasts.

Dessler asked, "... how do you carry the hydrogen around in your car? ", and that's where the lightness of hydrogen becomes difficult to bear. If one wished to carry combustible hydrogen around (as opposed to one's own personal already-oxidized hydrogen), one wishes to carry it as cold low-pressure liquid. This is the lightest and compactest form. The tank Magna-Steyr makes for BMW was a few years ago reported to mass 145 kg empty, and when full contain 9.5 kg hydrogen.

That's a really good mass ratio. Ambient-temperature tanks for pressurized hydrogen typically outmass their contents by a factor of 37.5 -- that's the value for the ones in the GM Hy-wire -- because they are a lot bigger than cryotanks for the same load.

Do you really want to be driving around on top of a tank full of compressed hydrogen?

No, but as above shown, that's to some extent a strawman.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A new idea for how to transport the stuff in cars posted 2 years, 6 months ago 28 Responses

I wish it would be more often acknowledged ...

that silicates-to-carbonates is not a long shot. And it's not really geoengineering in the bad, stupid, "Swallow a cat to catch a swallowed rat" sense; it's more like pulling the rat out by the tail.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A new solution from a plasma physicist posted 2 years, 6 months ago 15 Responses

It is better to be left with a bin laden with B2O3

... which will be recycled back into boron (using, of course, nuclear energy) at a recycling facility.

It would also be better to burn the aluminum, if it had to be aluminum, directly in oxygen. Burning it in water yields 0.567 of its total enthalpy of oxidation in the aluminum/water reactor, and only the remaining 0.433 in the hydrogen engine.

Plus if large amounts of hydrogen are created, even with the intention of limiting the amount in existence on board the car at any one time to a very small amount, this intention may not be realized.

Odo, if you read the paper, it may convey to you the notion that an infrastructure for hundreds of pounds of not-too-combustible solid per month isn't that big of a deal. The physical paper.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A new idea for how to transport the stuff in cars posted 2 years, 6 months ago 28 Responses

Ah, the petrolist bait-and-switch

Where geothermal resources are "low grade" solar thermal systems in existence are more than sufficient to boost them up to commercial power standards.  

Commercial nuclear power plants are simply unnecessary.

Indeed, when activists have shut them down, fossil fuel energy has invariably taken up the load.

Please explain how the current surface reactors, cooled by steam or helium are in any way analogous to a nuclear reaction that happened sealed in a core of fused, solid rock.

The question could impart two misunderstandings. Current surface reactors are mostly cooled by liquid water, and in this respect are very similar to the Oklo phenomena, which did not happen in solid rock but in wet sand or mud; water was necessary as a catalyst then as now. By boiling away its water, making the catalysis diminish as power increased,  an Oklo reactor is believed to have levelled its power just as manmade BWRs do now.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A new report posted 2 years, 6 months ago 39 Responses

Only 17576 TLAs are currently available ,,,

although there is some hope that supply restrictions will ease late in the 3rd quarter.

NEI isn't just the (American) Nuclear Energy Institute, it's also the British trade mag "Nuclear Engineering International", of which the last word should be a clue.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A new report posted 2 years, 6 months ago 39 Responses

NiMH versions of the GM EV1 were a fact

it was a fact. Real-world ranges for the NiMH version were ~100 km, as evidenced by this EVWORLD story --

"... We ended up fighting over what to do and eventually riding with the tow truck driver who hauled the decrepit car back to LAX. Along the way he told us he had often had to tow EV-1s back to Budget..."

Emphasis mine. I think the problem wasn't decrepitude, but the fact that the car was a GM EV1 with, as mandated by the state of California in and after 1999, a NiMH battery pack. The pack weighed 520 kg.*

The car had 20 mechanical kWh available at the driveshaft, as much as a gasoline tank that weighs 6.3 kg, full, affords. A typical riding lawnmower has more.

Batteries contain their own ash and turn it back into fuel when current is forced through them the "wrong" way, so to speak.

There is another option: burn fuel, hold onto ash -- zero emissions -- until refuelling time, and then send it away for conversion back to fuel.

This doesn't promise to eliminate the zero-local-emission weight penalty, but on the scale where a full gas tank weighs 6.3 kg and a NiMH battery pack weighs 520 kg, it might weigh as little as 22 kg.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas

* Before that order came down, a much cheaper 594-kg lead-acid battery was preferred -- heavier than the 1914 Tin Lizzie. The NiMH battery was lighter than one, by 24 kg.On Looks like the plug-in might actually happen posted 2 years, 6 months ago 55 Responses

Interesting to note ...

Although the tops of the tanks in the photo are curved in one direction, they are straight in the other, so there is a long patch a decimetre or two wide that is nearly level; on just one of the tanks, this close-enough-to-level zone could support boron powder that would contain as much energy as all the hydrogen that could be stored in all the tanks.

If anyone has followed the advice of the doctor, were they amused? B2O3 flow is the part of the deal I have actually seen; I melted boric acid, the water came off, and I saw the B2O3 flow.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes.On All about hydrogen posted 2 years, 6 months ago 17 Responses

If burned directly ...

aluminum plus both bins, the one it resides in before burning and the ash bin, works out 3.4 times heavier, at its maximum weight, than equivalent gasoline plus its tank at their maximum weight.

If burned in water, yielding hydrogen that is then burned elsewhere, its energy is less efficiently used, so more is needed, plus you have the very considerable hazards attending the production of large amounts of hydrogen. Not quite as bad as storing large amounts of combustible hydrogen, since ideally only a little would exist at a given moment, but that ideal might not always be attained.

We have all seen people ride an aluminum internal combustion engine, usually without incident.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Continuing the debate posted 2 years, 6 months ago 78 Responses

Why anybody bothers to read

I can't claim ever to have changed my mind on the matter, but there are those who have.

In that other, very long thread I thought it would not go unnoticed -- by lurkers -- that the question I asked three times was evaded. ("Just off the top of your head, estimate how much oil ..." The USA used to burn a lot of oil for electricity production.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Nuclear power is too risky posted 2 years, 6 months ago 12 Responses

Nuclear is unsubsidized.

Does everyone have so much stock in GE, Bechtel, Halliburton, Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Auto that it hampers and constrains our choices?

A great many people have an interest in Big Oil that determines what they can think.

... how to finance the re-opening of millions of square feet of unused floorspace in factories across the country, plus the transportation, and installation of distributed PV and wind systems--OH, wait, nukes, Big Coal and Big Oil get Billions upon Billions upon Billions of dollars in Federal subsidies--another POLITICAL problem!

Nukes get no subsidy. Big Oil and Gas collects tens of billions in fuel consumption tax. A little of that is given to the producers as subsidies. Much of the rest goes to large-mouthed advocates of PV and wind.

Any effective replacement of fossil fuels' energy without their carbon emissions is likely also to cancel the associated revenue, both private revenue and tax revenue. If that revenue loss isn't a sore point with you, you should be willing to estimate how much oil it would have taken to make the electricity nukes made, worldwide, last year and the year before.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Using high gas prices to push for a rebirth posted 2 years, 6 months ago 74 Responses

How can it come back if it won't go away?

Just off the top of your head, what megabarrels-of-oil equivalency would you estimate the worldwide nuclear power industry scored last year and in 2005?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Using high gas prices to push for a rebirth posted 2 years, 6 months ago 74 Responses

False attribution

GRL envisions boron "gravel' accumulating at intersections from his version of the metal powered economy.

That is incorrect, apparently a misreading of my short paper --

... Burning regenerates the oxides as fine particles that would not be as inoffensive to dump as the original minerals. If they were first consolidated into gravel, then they might not be too much of a nuisance. A large urban intersection thronged with cars powered by oxidation of metal or silicon would see the accumulation of approximately one cubic metre per day.

("Metal or silicon" excludes boron. Maybe I should have said "aluminum or magnesium or silicon" but that would have been two more words.)

Hot-pressing equipment to make that gravel on board cars would be expensive. Perhaps some kind of glue could be used, or bags. In any case, these energy carriers would either accumulate after use as large heaps of oxide, or go back to the power station to be deoxidized again.

But if they go back then conceivably they can be used many times, and more expensive, lighter varieties of atom can work.

That's where boron comes in: a lighter variety of atom, expensive to just about the right degree, so that it will go back to power stations many times without spending any time on the streets. Except as motorists' property, in cars' ash bins, i.e., not right on any street but a foot or two above them.

Perhaps some of the more reliable Gristers remembered my hydrogen-free power transmission proposal in reading this hydrogen-energy dismissal thread and couldn't think of anything dismissive to say about it, so just kept quiet?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn All about hydrogen posted 2 years, 6 months ago 17 Responses

Heat engines are not big water consumers ...

not even if they are evaporatively cooled; the bit about inland nuclear power plants being a "major threat" to water supplies was a lie or error of the genuine-but-insignificant-cause variety. The attempt to mislead that Romm perpetuates has had a previous go-round.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn The two don't mix well posted 2 years, 6 months ago 4 Responses

Burn all the oil, then use CTL to make more

Man, if we can't get a sensible plan from the guy who screams while that cop's silhouette looms in the opening credits of that TV show, who the heck can we get one from?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn I'm not sure if a rock concert is the answer ... posted 2 years, 6 months ago 2 Responses

A little less

How does tarsand CO2 emmisions compare to CTL emmisions?

A little less. Tar, aka bitumen, is already a fluid hydrocarbon, after all. It just needs to be made a little more fluid.

As I recall, roughly three-quarters of the CO2 emissions from tar use is from the vehicle's tailpipe, one-quarter is from the upgrading operation. For CTL, it's one and one, or maybe four at the tailpipe, five at the CTL plant.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Patrick Moore proves to be -- gasp -- a nuclear shill posted 2 years, 6 months ago 13 Responses

Caricaturing opponents' arguments is dishonest

"Chernobyl is so 1980s --"

You wish. It was before 1950 when Dr. Teller and the Reactor Safety Commission set out to learn the lessons of Chernobyl in advance, and ensure the chance of one was never taken outside the former Soviet Union.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Patrick Moore proves to be -- gasp -- a nuclear shill posted 2 years, 6 months ago 13 Responses

A billion tonnes per vertical metre

It is an interesting fact about the Earth's continents that the average uranium concentration in the parts of them immediately underfoot, 2.2-to-2.8-ppm, times a density of 2,700 kg/m^3, times their surface area of 148 trillion m^2, works out to 1 trillion kg/m. Deeper down the concentration is less; in the sea floor, many times less. But the most accessible parts are as rich in 235-U fission energy as the Alberta tarsands are in combustion energy.

If the concentration did not decline with depth, I'd be sitting here typing to you a dead man. Or a magma man, perhaps, since not much of the planet could yet have frozen.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn A good argument posted 2 years, 7 months ago 13 Responses

The comment about the wind turbine ...

does not take into account that with a radius of 82 m, total insolation 29 MW, the very low-efficiency heat engine that creates the wind for that turbine ... well, maybe it's not too little.

The very low escape velocity for a 184-m rock makes it hard not to think, what's the driveway for, if not for a space vehicle with which to visit other, as yet untenanted rocks, and use materials from them to make outbuildings a few tens or hundreds of metres from the world's surface. (12.7 million tonnes of rock and iron can be a lot more useful it is isn't in the compactest possible spherical lump.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Your share of the world posted 2 years, 7 months ago 16 Responses

The falcon stoops on shadows

And without FBRs, LWR and PWRs are are just as unsustainable as ... Oil.

If this were true, it would have to be true that not just northern Alberta, but every square inch of land, everywhere on the planet, was paved with tarsand that was six mass percent tar, equivalent to rock that is 0.0004 mass percent uranium if the tar is burned and the uranium is extracted and run once through a PWR, a BWR, or a CANDU reactor. Either way the thermal yield would be 700 kWh per tonne. This is the grade that, in tar's case, is being extracted and upgraded today at a rate of a million barrels per day.

Moreover, the six-percent tarsand would have to exist not just at the surface, but solidly down ~30 km depth. "Bedrock" would have to mean "tarsand"; the continents wouldn't be made of anything else.

Read this now and remember it forever: nuclear power's very long-term sustainability does not depend on breeder reactors and reprocessing. Nor does it depend on crushing large fractions of the continents in any given 10,000-year period. Both breeder reactor enthusiasts and fans of the lying Dutchman tend to be stupid on this subject; you don't have to be.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Shenanigans everywhere posted 2 years, 7 months ago 23 Responses

rrrr

Nowhere in the "plan" do the words "peak oil" appear, or do the "planners" even state their assumptions about the costs of gas or the effect of carbon taxes.

They acknowledge the effects of carbon taxes by doing all they can to increase the size of the carbon tax revenue pie by making it easy for more people to drive farther, and awkward for them to avoid doing so.

They may not understand that this is what they are doing, but clearly this is what they are doing. They understand carbon tax the way a baby understands milk.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn The seductive lure of toys that promise solutions without change posted 2 years, 7 months ago 39 Responses

Nuclear is safe

And I'm not part of any lobby. The obscurity of the Brown's Ferry fire story, of which I nonetheless have heard somewhat from pronuclear sources, is, I think, simply a case of if it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead. Endless stories of narrowly averted disaster, and the understanding that the installations that supposedly were in peril were large-scale defunders of the oil interests, have got to become tiresome to journalists who, if not unpurchasable, at least like to think of themselves thus. It must occur to them that maybe the narrowness of the miss wasn't all that narrow.

I understand why it safe. I think I understand why proof-by-assertion that it has "a horrendous safety record" is associated with defensiveness about fossil fuels' routine death-dealing to all and sundry: US$100 worth of fossil fuel, on which some tens of additional dollars go to the tax man and from him to the publically funded, is typically replaced with less than $5 worth of uranium. (The recent dramatic 18-dollar-a-pound uptick in the uranium price is, in oil-equivalent units, about equal to a dollar a barrel.)

Another reader compares Oil and Gas to things that aren't even industries or even exist, such as boron - oxygen motors.

Right. I'm trying to make the case that they should be brought into existence.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Roughnecks have it really rough posted 2 years, 7 months ago 23 Responses

http://ncsp.tamu.edu/reports/CCOHS/record1469.htm

The hydrogen fuel-cell car is a sham; so much so they're winking at the world in general as they "promote" it.

A semi-open-air escape of a few kg H2 from 600-psi containment, much less than it would be at if contained as ambient-temperature gas in a car, but about as much as such a car would contain just after being refuelled: http://ncsp.tamu.edu/reports/CCOHS/record1469.htm

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Our prez nearly made a slip of the plug posted 2 years, 7 months ago 21 Responses

50 trillion terawatts ...

can't be disposed of after use except with radiators whose surface area adds up to many times that of the Earth.

If the people of 2507 find it advantageous to use all these radiators*, they will certainly have no option but to distribute them, at least, through a spherical region whose diameter will be 16 million km, 1,250 times Earth's, and it will be that small only if they crowd it so thickly that it becomes completely opaque.

It would be more reasonable to distribute them through a sun-enclosing shell whose inner and outer surface radii are respectively near those of the Earth's and Mars' orbits. From Jupiter they will be an invisibly thin fog; the sun out there will seem as bright as ever. That's true even if the power they use starts as focused sunlight, so  Lipow's assertion in re renewable energy is correct out to 500 years, although he mentions nonrenewables (geothermal) and asserts tremendous potential for renewables that do not in fact have it (seawater turbines). For 20-fold increase per century using focused sunlight, the sun does start to get noticeably fog-darkened, as seen from Jupiter, 925 years from now, and, of course, completely hidden after 1,000 to 1,050 years.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

* "Salary" once had something to do with being paid in salt, I'm told. If that's true, Romans noticing a good year with increasing salaries might have projected that we, in this era, would consume millions of solar masses per day of salt, each. Simple geometric projections of the next thousand years' power consumption may make more sense, then again, they may not.
On A new report could change the entire energy picture posted 2 years, 8 months ago 37 Responses

One is well advised to read the article

McGrath is clearly of the belief that by saying the oil industry is subsidized he can prove that it doesn't subsidize him by enabling consumption tax revenues greatly in excess of subsidies -- of which the Financial Post article says nothing. It is from an industry viewpoint and is all about allegedly costly rules that heavily oil-taxing governments say they intend to enforce, and increasing royalty charges.

"Costly" meaning "nickels and dimes ... a barrel"; the same barrel that brings in tens of dollars of consumption tax when made into retailed fuel.

In a free market where petroleum or upgraded tar were taxed no more than salt or movies, they would be much more competitive economically -- but less so politically. They would not have so many false enemies.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Without subsidies, they're just not profitable posted 2 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses

Ice city, ice mountain

Burg=city, berg=mountain. On Griles: tip of a slimy iceburg posted 2 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses

Ice storage

Do you understand that converting one type of energy (wind or solar, in your examples) to another (ice?!?) entails a considerable energy hit, hardly something that can be tolerated ...

Actually it makes good sense when ice itself is what is going to be wanted within a few hours or days, and energy with which to make it is available now, but not guaranteed for then.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses

Cannot be spread?

Nuclear cannot be spread to all nations around the world

Could you please provide a list of the countries that currently have nuclear power stations, 'GreyFlcn'?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goesOn Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses

Exhaust gas really warms the planet ...

but it is right to be sus