Comments President Lindsay has made
Who needs oil?
People don't talk much about oil as a material. It's too good for burning, vital for paint, plastics, medicines, dyes, components of many devices/small products -- light bulbs, hair combs, pens. Reach in any direction, you'll touch oil.
But we don't need it. We can derive synthesis gas from garbage, agricultural waste and industrial waste, and from that we can make all the same products. Even carbon neutral gasoline! Not only that, but we wouldn't even have to separate our garbage, just throw everything into the dumpster: poopy diapers, old drain oil, asbestos, dioxin, old car batteries, nerve gas, whatever. You can read about all this and the other technologies mentioned in Dr. Hansen's paper in my book as soon as it's out, in late August.On Hansen's trip report finds 'sobering degree of self-deception' in Germany, U.K., Japan posted 1 year, 3 months ago 13 Responses
We already have
Graham and I have known each other for years. As for who I really am, just got to my web site and you can read the beginning of my book and my true identity will be revealed!On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Okay, Dr. X, I give up
You've convinced me that you're not serious. Fortunately others here are.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Bad link
Sorry about that link. Fixed now.
As for Graham's speculation about turbine design, while you might take issue with that (I, too, feel like direct burning in the turbine entails problems) it doesn't change the fact of boron's energy density, about quadruple that of hydrocarbons. It could very well be burned in a combustion chamber with a heat exchanger, which could then cleanly and easily power a turbine. In regard to the gravel you spoke about, he was referring more to other energy carriers. There's no reason that a boron/oxygen combustion chamber would have to eject anything at all. Unburned boron and/or oxygen could simply be fed back into the intake, and the boria would collect at the bottom to be unloaded at the boron fueling station.
I went back and looked at that thread where the esteemed Dr. X was so slandered by Graham, and as the latter said it was a Simpsons joke on a thread that started with Simpsons jokes. That was the article by Joe Romm where he threw around numbers like $6-8,000/megawatt as a cost for nuclear power, which is ridiculous unless you assume that any nuclear plant is going to be hamstrung by endless lawsuits and drag on for a decade or more because of it, that they'll be all built as one-off designs in the old style, and other such archaic notions.
If you'd like realistic projections for costs, you need look no further than the experience of GE/Hitachi in Japan with their recent and current construction of the ABWR reactors. Even on first of a kind projects, they were able to go from breaking ground to loading fuel in 39 months, and build them quite economically. Now they're building more for Japan, more in Taiwan, and they hope to build them in the USA where they've got pending orders. At this point they have a considerable data set from which to price them, and they know from very recent and current experience that they can build them for about $1,400/MW. But they also have learned from building the earlier ones (which are running just fine, thank you very much) and feel quite confident that they can reduce that to $1,200/MW. Compare this to Pickens' and North Sea wind farms at about $15,000/MW (if you don't ignore that pesky capacity factor).
The thing is, as economical as the ABWR is, the newer and even safer designs stand to be even cheaper. The AP-1000 by Westinghouse, already being built in China, and the new ESBWR by GE/Hitachi (now in the certification process) will be smaller units that can be built in factories and transported to the sites to be dropped into their excavations, allowing for great quality control and diminished expense. Plus they go even farther than the ABWR in terms of completely passive safety systems (though the ABWR is way ahead of current designs) and thus are able to employ even fewer pumps and valves and other complexities of earlier designs, thus resulting in a smaller footprint and lower costs.
But the S-PRISM reactor is the one we should be waiting for, and impatiently so, for that one can finally solve our entire nuclear "waste" problem, and won't require a speck of uranium to be mined to fuel them--ever. (Well, not for about a thousand years, anyway.) It's a modular system using passive safety features unrivaled in their effectiveness by even the newest plant designs. It's already been designed and could start to be built pronto, but of course most of our policymakers don't even know about it because the DOE is still censoring research reports that mention that naughty word "breeding." While the USA has its collective head in the sand, other countries (India, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, France) are all proceeding with projects to build similar reactors, yet unfortunately we don't seem to be sharing our considerable knowledge about the safest designs with them because we keep pretending they don't exist. It's a great pity, especially as our world heats up and we keep pretending that we can gather enough sunshine to fix it.
So Barack comes out with his much-heralded energy speech calling for clean coal, the ludicrous cap & trade, more drilling, and one sentence about nuclear that show not an iota of knowledge about such technologies. This is what we have to look forward to? The politics is what's killing us.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
No need to snap, Dr. X
Seems I'm getting a bit of transferred rage here, Dr. X. Did you and Graham have some disagreements in the past? No need for venom here, I'm trying to have a reasonable discussion. If Graham has an idea that could work, I'm as ready to look at it as any other idea. And his boron fuel idea for vehicles has plenty of advantages. There are some pretty impressive scientists who are quite convinced it could work.
Ad hominem never advances reasoned discussion. You're better than that, I suspect.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Funding?
Mike Johnston writes: I agree that this story is an unfortunate blur of the reality involved. This is the fault of the scientist who is making the claims more then the author. Check out my rebuttal to the story on the Nature magazine news site for a more complete analysis.
Your rebuttal was spot on, Mike. When I started to describe this "breakthrough" at MIT to my daughter who's in grad school in physics at Cornell, before I even got finished talking she piped up, "It sounds like they're just trying to get more funding." My first clue was the lying about normal methods of electrolysis. The next was their portrayal of it as akin to photosynthesis. The only thing it has in common with photosynthesis is that the original energy comes from sunlight, which is something you could say about a lot of things, including oil. If it looks like hype, walks like hype, and quacks like hype...On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Changing behavior is tough - and unnecessary
You would have to be very wealthy to be able to afford enough solar panels and batteries to be able to live like the average american energy hog.The first thing that you learn before you buy ANY renewable energy source is CONSERVE, CONSERVE, CONSERVE! Then you can invest in renewables.You will still have to have learned how to conserve and not waste energy.
To a great extent energy conservation can be built into the system. Here in California, for instance, long ago twisty light bulbs were subsidized and many people switched to them. Traffic lights were converted to LEDs. Bounties were offered for old inefficient appliances. Building codes were tightened. Now it looks like they're going to ban incandescent bulbs. All these things are fine and could be even improved on, and implemented nationwide. It would help, but it doesn't generate electricity.
When it comes to behavioral modification to conserve more, then it gets problematic. Turn off lights when you leave a room? Lots of people don't pay any attention to that. Turn down/up the thermostat to a less comfortable temperature? Plenty of people will ignore that. Get rid of your old freezer in the garage, turn it in for $100 bounty and buy a new one that's more energy efficient? Few people will do that simply because it's a perceived major cost--never mind that the money would be paid back over time in electricity savings. Plenty of people live pretty much paycheck to paycheck and don't have the extra money to make such upgrades. Nor are many people going to go to the store (via light rail) to buy clothespins instead of using a dryer. And we want to get rid of gas dryers and gas heaters. Yes, I know heat pumps can work for the latter, but here again people have to be willing to pay many thousands of dollars to dig up their yards and buy and install them. Will some people do it? Sure. How many do you know who already have? These systems have been around for a long time. I personally don't know a single person who has a heat pump system. Can the government subsidize them? Sure. But like solar panels, subsidies can work when a very small percentage of people buy them. If you want everybody to do it, then there's no such thing as subsidies. We'd all be paying for all of it, and these things simply aren't cheap. Some of them are very, very expensive.
Can we put regulations into place for all new homes to have heat pump systems. Sure. That's a fight you have to take to your statehouse or D.C. But for many decades older homes won't have them. In other words, the majority of homes--likely the vast majority--won't have such systems even by the middle of the century, even with forced 100% compliance for new homes. Do we have 100 years or more to wait to achieve our GHG-free society? I doubt it.
These are not minor annoyances to thwart the dreams of a super-energy-efficient world. These are hard realities. Can we do better than we're doing now? Certainly. California has shown that. Can we transition quickly and economically to the sort of all heat pump/solar panel society envisioned by many and passionately articulated by some people here? I seriously doubt it.
Behavioral modification is doubly difficult when it comes to having people spend major amounts of money in service to what others (not necessarily they) perceive as the common good. Heck, it's hard enough even when it doesn't cost people a cent. Just take a look at recycling. How many people couldn't care less and just throw everything in the trash can? Plenty. Should we get all draconian on them and try to figure out ways to force them to separate their bottles and paper and plastic? Why not just figure out a way to painlessly recycle everything without anybody--even the virtuous--having to separate anything?
As for vehicles, trying to get people to spend the kind of money it would take to get them to buy new cars that run on fuel cells is going to be mighty tough if those cars are anywhere near as expensive as their current cars, especially if the hydrogen isn't cheap. But offer new cars that use zero-emission fuel that's 100% recyclable and costs just tens of cents for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas, and the automakers won't be able to produce them fast enough. Can we do that? Ask Graham.
As for the electricity that we would wish to produce GHG-free to displace coal and gas and power electric transportation to whatever degree we want, how do you get everybody to sink thousands of dollars into that capital investment in solar cells or wind power (imagining, if you insist, that that would be sufficient). The vast majority of people will blithely keep their connection to the grid and pay their electric bill every month. Without subsidization like we have today (at least in California) for solar panels, very few people would even consider buying them. Even with massive subsidization very few Californians have invested in them, and only at a serious cost even then.
But the good news is that we don't have to rely on people changing their behavior against their will and spending thousands of dollars that they don't have. We don't even have to get them to stop being energy hogs. They don't have to separate their trash because we know how to recycle everything even when it's all tossed in together. And we can provide unlimited amounts of electricity to the grid cheaply, safely, and without fossil fuels.
Why the great antipathy to the grid? It's worked pretty well up to this point, and with new ACCR power lines we could transmit double or triple the current current over existing power corridors without even building any new towers, and without having to blaze any new power corridors. Windies want to upgrade the grid anyway, as do solar afficionados who dream of blanketing Arizona and New Mexico with panels and pumping the juice all over the country.
You'll be a lot more successful in converting to a GHG-free economy if you don't ask everyone to spend thousands of dollars extra for the infrastructure. Instead, it can all be converted behind the scenes without added cost to anyone. In fact, it'll be cheaper than proceeding with business as usual. A lot cheaper, in fact. Here's how.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Pessimism or realism?
Tuscon has quite a bit of solar energy, just when it's needed, and Minnesota pretty windy -- now, hydrogen might not be the big answer, but there are plenty of current technologies around that can get us to a carbon-free economy.
With Tucson I was thinking about cooling, not heating. And no, Minnesota isn't all that windy. I grew up there. I agree, H2 isn't the big answer, it's nothing but an energy carrier, and a pretty finicky one at that. There are plenty of technologies around that can get us to a carbon-free economy, as you say. I'm just saying that there aren't enough unless you include nuclear power.
Dr. X, I couldn't agree with you more about the good sense to use heat pumps all over, though in really extreme climates they'll still need some sort of backup (I'm thinking of Minnesota again). And while I also would gladly concede that lots more energy can be generated if we started putting solar panels all over everything, that doesn't change the fact that it's very diffuse and that creating and maintaining tens of thousands of square miles of solar panels to provide just some of the energy we need is simply not economically and logistically feasible. If the energy that's there to start with isn't enough, then finding new ways to store it that only lessens the amount isn't going to help. It's not a question of being pessimistic. It's a matter of being realistic. Remember, we want to replace all carbon spewing sources, including natural gas. That means electric stoves, electric space heating and water heaters (again, heat pumps would work better here), washers and electric dryers (no, not everybody's going to hang up their clothes), refrigerators and freezers, TVs and computers, lights, and don't forget electric cars. Then think about all the industrial uses of electricity, and the uses of coal and gas and oil in manufacturing that also has to be replaced, including such high-draw needs as smelters.
Can wind and solar do that? If you think they can, how many decades do you think it would take to convert the entire world's energy supplies over? How many decades do you think we can afford? How much do you think it would cost? If you just use Scientific American's solar special's numbers, for our 5% of the world's population we'd need all the hydro and wind we could get plus about 40,000 square miles of solar panels (remember, their 30,000 only provided for about 69% of our electricity needs, and I don't think they were even considering an all-electric society). Now multiply it by 20 to bring the rest of humanity up to speed, remembering that their increase in demand will be greater than ours (assuming we're aiming for global egalitarianism). We're talking about roughly a million square miles of solar panels. Oh, and don't forget the water to keep them clean. And speaking of water, we're going to need a lot more electricity for desalination for our burgeoning population, especially when we're wasting so much of it washing off our solar panels. So we'd better build a lot more solar panels to run the desalination plants. Do you feel like a dog chasing your own tail?
This isn't pessimism. If I thought these were our only options, that would be pessimism. If I thought that people who automatically reject nuclear power would prevail in future energy decisions, that would be pessimism. If I thought that nuclear was too uneconomical, unsafe, and inescapably dangerous to future generations because of the waste, that would be pessimism. But I'm an optimist. I know we can do this, and I have high hopes that reason will prevail over fear and ignorance. I just hope it doesn't take too long.
On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 ResponsesDreaming
my proposal that you could kill all coal plants by letting buildings heat and cool themselves.
This and the rest of your post are quite ungrounded from reality. Have you lived in Minnesota? How about Tucson? If we're going to get away from fossil fuels, we'll not just need some more electricity, we'll need A LOT more. You can dream all you want about wind and solar, but wishing doesn't make it so.
jabailo writes: So, the amount of energy I spend digging for oil is equivalent to the energy in the oil from the ground?
You're not serious, right? Tell me you're not serious.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Land isn't the problem, I'll grant you that
Let's just take a peek at that special edition Scientific American did about our solar future. All we have to do, they blithely maintained, is cover 30,000 square miles with solar panels and build a high-tension DC grid to ship it around the states from the southwest. And this to supply just 69% of America's electrical needs by 2050. That's covering 2 entire square miles with solar panels and their assorted infrastructure every day, 7 days a week, for about 40 years. Oh, and since existing panels in those areas have to be pressure-washed every 6 weeks or so to keep them functioning efficiently, we just have to figure out a way to pressure-wash about 715 square miles of panels every day, forever, in a place that has virtually no water. If we could do that, of course, the water would nourish all sorts of plants that would then grow to shade the panels, so let's not forget 30,000 square miles of herbicide application every few months, AND BE CAREFUL NOT TO GET IT ON THE PANELS!
Seriously, how can people write this stuff? And if they do, how can readers swallow it? It's like there's no concept of what happens when you scale up technologies. If it works in the lab or my backyard, cool! Let's just make a jillion of them. Mission accomplished.
But maybe we just disagree on the meaning of the word "feasible."On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Ah, I get it! Perpetual motion
jabailo, before you knock people down you should understand a thing or two about physics and chemistry instead of assuming you understand it from a newspaper article. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, it's an energy carrier. The amount of energy that you're going to get out of it is always going to amount to less than what you're putting into it to split it off from the oxygen. I realize that plenty of people may think that's not the case and that the amount of energy they'll get out of the H2 will exceed the electricity put in because of the magic catalyst, but just because lots of people believe something that's not true doesn't make it any more true.
If what you're saying were true, then we could shut down our power plants right now and just merrily split water from a few solar panels on our roof. Since the MIT idea is to make the current with the electricity from the sunlight to liberate the hydrogen from water, then create electricity from that hydrogen as it recombines with oxygen to form water again, if it's going to give us more current than what it took to liberate the H2 in the first place you've just overcome the laws of physics. Because now you can just take a portion of that electricity you made in your fuel cell to liberate some more hydrogen from some more water, and you can feed the excess electricity back into the grid. You've got a good thing going there! Congratulations, you've just invented perpetual motion.
So I guess I should be grateful to be lectured about the nature of catalysts from a scientific paragon of your stature. And thanks for clearing it all up with the analogy about the squirrel and the walnut. That put it all into perspective for me. That revealed the depth of your understanding in a nutshell--an appropriate receptacle.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Energy doesn't come from the ether
The hoopla about this all over the internet is on a par with those who write as if energy efficiency creates energy. Energy efficiency uses less for a given task, but doesn't create energy. And this purportedly nearly magical catalyst can't create more energy than the electricity that goes into it. Since regular old electrolysis can be up to 70% effective, how much better can this be? You still have to produce more extra energy than you would need for all the things you want to do when the sun's not shining brightly on your panels, and you still have to convert the energy twice, losing some of it each time. But this sounds so reassuringly utopian to those who don't think rationally about the bottom line: the amount of the sun's energy that falls on a given surface in the best of circumstances and the conversion of that energy into electricity or, in this case, into electricity, then hydrogen, then back into electricity.
This hype from MIT doesn't change this basic fact: the energy of sunlight is extremely diffuse. Thus, capturing it--even in the most efficient manner possibly allowed by the laws of physics, much less with multiple energy-losing conversions in between production and use--would require vast seas of solar panels on the scale of tens of thousands of square miles to supply even only the present electrical needs of the USA (30,000 square miles, according to Scientific American, for just some of the energy we need).
But you can tell from the excitement online that this marriage of two of the most-exaggerated energy panaceas of the unrealistic future has the dreamers' hearts all aflutter. Sunshine is wonderful, but it won't provide all the energy we need. Nor will sunshine and wind. And MIT isn't going to change that. You can't beat the laws of physics.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
Keep the funding flowing
If you read the article from MIT's own site, they talk about the millions in funding they've received to pursue this research. But how is what they've supposedly achieved with this amazing breakthrough different from electrolysis that's normally done in a high school chem lab? When I did it in high school you didn't need to make a very basic solution (which they allege was necessary with normal electrolysis and which wouldn't be a deal-breaker anyway). We just used regular water. All you had to do was add anything as an electrolyte, like ordinary table salt. With that and electricity you could collect oxygen and hydrogen, as they talk about doing here. Putting it back together in a fuel cell is the money part: fuel cells are ridiculously expensive. And who has sufficient roof area and sufficient money to buy that many solar panels to both produce all the electricity people need during the day but enough extra to power everything at night. Any way you slice it you lose energy every time you convert, once when doing the electrolysis and once when converting back to electricity with your wildly expensive fuel cell.
I think part of the reason for excitement here is because they have to keep their money flowing. To me this looks like plain old electrolysis. The bottom line is still this: there's just so much photonic energy that falls on a given square meter of the earth under even the best of conditions, and it's not very much. Even if you can capture it with 100% efficiency (which you can't) it would still take vast amounts of land area to capture enough. Do you know anybody who's not on the grid, who runs their home off solar panels alone? If so, do they have a regular refrigerator? Washer & electric dryer? A/C? Electric stove and oven? TV? Computers? Enough lighting to not make their place feel like a tomb? Can they run any of them any time of the day or night? Can they run them all together? Could they produce even more, enough to power an electric car? If they answer to all these is yes, I would venture to say that you have some very unusual and wealthy friends.
Color me unimpressed. I did this in high school. Even in high school you can do it with 50-70% efficiency, at room temperature, with ordinary saltwater. What's the big deal here? I think I know hype when I see it.On With research breakthrough, solar power could work when the sun don't shine posted 1 year, 3 months ago 49 Responses
They've already been proven
Convince the public that these new S-PRISM reactors were safe, and tested a few production models for 10 years to prove it. Would these be competitive on cost and rapid expansion?
Yes. They're modular, so they would be built in factories and dropped into the excavation. You could hook as many up as you want at each location, all with a central control room. We already know they work, there are over 300 reactor-years of experience with breeders.
The widespread contamination, coverup, and health risk is difficult to overcome in the public mindset.
It's precisely because of the sort of baseless scare-mongering like you continually put out here that it's difficult to overcome the public's fears. Widespread contamination? Where? Health risk? Where? Aside from Chernobyl, which hardly applies to anything that would be built in the future, there's been no widespread contamination nor health risks. You quote Helen Caldicott as a reliable source? My gawd, man, she's the doyenne of antinuclear hysteria. The woman is certifiable when it comes to her pathological freakout over anything with the word "nuclear" in it.
Don't tell me how cheap solar and wind will be. Look at the costs right now (see my earlier post). On a level playing field, PRISM reactors would win out over solar and wind hands down, in both cost and reliability.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Where do you get your numbers
jromm writes in the comments: New nukes are obscenely expensive now, $6000/kw to $8000/kw...Efficiency and wind are already much cheaper, baseload solar is comparable
Where do you get your nuke cost numbers? Westinghouse is building passive safety reactors in China right now that are projected to cost about $1,000/kW. Compare that to the two big wind power projects everybody's talking about now, the North Sea Meerwind project (perhaps aptly named) and of course Pickens' windypalooza. From Pickens and Meerwind's own stated costs, multiplied by the capacity factor (in other words, how much they can actually be expected to produce in the real world, and at this giving them the benefit of the doubt), they're going to cost in the range of $15,000/kW.
As for solar, a friend of mine sent me an article about Spain's tower of power, that amphitheater-type array of mirrors that track the sun and focus it on the top of a tower where it produces heat and turns a turbine. They're going to build several of them, to be completed by 2013. Again, when you figure in a generous capacity factor (assuming it never gets cloudy there) it's easy to figure out how much non-peak (wrong time of day, alas) power they can produce. It makes the wind farm costs look cheap, since it'll run in the neighborhood of $30,000/kW.
Joe, why do you keep up this antinuclear demagogue act? You can do better than this. I'm happy to see from the comments that more and more people are seeing through your act. But really, it's getting kind of tired by now. Cherry-picking and exaggeration can only get you so far. On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
It's already done
We have centuries to develop a breeder reactor, but it could be done in a decade or two if we made a serious effort.
We already did it by 1994, but Congress killed it and the DOE ordered the scientists who worked on it for ten year to NOT publicize it. The commercial version of that one developed at Argonne National Laboratory is called the S-PRISM, and we could start building them any time. The old saws about waste and proliferation and safety and poor economics are all meaningless once we convert to that system.
As for the French accidents, it was so minor as to be rated a zero on the international scale of nuclear accidents that runs from zero to seven. And the accident that released some natural unenriched uranium into the river in an already-diluted state amounted to only twice the amount that is produced in the ash of a normal coal-fired power plant every day! This is fear-mongering by those who know and baseless fear by those who don't.On French independent nuclear commission reports four malfunctions in four plants in 15 days posted 1 year, 3 months ago 43 Responses
Coal miners are a dying breed
Well, in more ways than one. But there are less than 20% as many people employed in the coal industry compared to the Fifties, and most of them today are themselves in their fifties or so and close to retirement. More and more it's been mechanized. So saying we have to keep mining coal because of the jobs issue is a non-issue. It's strictly a matter of money, and lots and lots of it. The industry should be killed before it kills us.
From my upcoming book Prescription for the Planet: A coalition of national environmental groups called Clear the Air commissioned a study from Abt Associates, one of the largest government and business research and consulting firms in the world. This firm has provided the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bush administration with analysis of many of the agency's air quality programs. Knowing the track record of Bush's EPA and its antipathy to alternative energy, one might reasonably suspect that this firm's conclusions would hardly be slanted on the side of environmentalists. Thus their conclusion may surprise you: Some 24,000 people die prematurely in the United States each year just from the effects of soot from coal-fired power plants, by an average of 14 years. The study also pegged the annual total health costs associated with soot from power plants at over 167 billion dollars! Just from soot, mind you, not to say anything about carbon dioxide emissions or any other nasties tossed out in the slag heaps.On Umbra on clean coal posted 1 year, 4 months ago 17 Responses
Old news
FutureGen has been canceled, haven't you heard? Those who derisively called it NeverGen because of its previously distant timeline have been prematurely proven right.
As for clean coal, I don't care if you clean every speck of every noxious substance out of the coal we burn for electricity. There's still a vast amount of methane and other greenhouse gases that start to escape into the atmosphere the moment the diggers strip off the overburden. The mudstone and shale that is just pushed around and left to lie because it's no good as fuel is still loaded with carbon and methane that's escaping or oxidizing from the moment it's exposed. So not only is coal mining screwing up the topography, it's adding scads of GHGs to the atmosphere, and there's no way around that. We have to put an end to coal, period. Clean coal is a hoax, and a deadly one at that.On Umbra on clean coal posted 1 year, 4 months ago 17 Responses
Look for some new guidelines
If the granite purveyors don't take some preemptive action to monitor this themselves now I would expect to see some sort of government oversight being proposed, at least for imports. These articles got me to wondering about local granites too. It would be interesting and revelatory to just wander around a cemetery and check the gravestones.
Got me wondering about my granite desktop too. Maybe someone can figure out how to tap the uranium so I could at least run my laptop off it.
Just kidding...On Your granite countertop may emit radon and radiation posted 1 year, 4 months ago 7 Responses
Now you're gettin' it
Spoken like a man whose favored technology private investors won't touch with a ten foot pole!
Precisely. Did you know that 26% of the electricity people consume in the USA is provided by nonprofit organizations? Who's to say we couldn't make it 100%? Getting the private investors out of it is exactly my point. That 26% get their electricity more reliably and at a discount of about 18%.On Lovins and Sheikh defend definition and record of micropower posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses
Let's go with that analogy
Actually they did cloister in rather spartan environs, working up in Idaho for ten years or so. The IFR is the fine wine they came up with which can quite readily dispose of all the nuclear waste on the planet and provide all the energy humanity needs for the next several hundred years without mining any more uranium to fuel them.
Your analogy of high priests is probably apt, though. Like deep spiritual mysteries, the vast majority of people know not a whit about nuclear fission, and must get their information from those who do (or claim to), and from that they form their opinions, often fanatical ones. So you've got the real nuclear physicists and engineers who could be compared to the mystics, few in number but steeped in the most intimate knowledge of the mysteries. Then you've got the regular clergy, in this case personified by the private utility companies who understand it all pretty well but whose main interest is in keeping the hierarchy stable and making some bucks while they do it. Then you've got the tent show revivalists, TV evangelists, and street corner nutjobs who rant and rave about something they know little or nothing about but who know they can make a buck off the fear and ignorance of the public.
You're free to listen to whoever you like. But I say we should get all the people who are trying to make a buck off it--private utilities and scaremongers alike--out of the picture. Let's take the best of the mystics' knowledge and harness it for the good of humankind. Energy should be a human right just like health care, and neither should have to be profit centers.On Lovins and Sheikh defend definition and record of micropower posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses
It's new technology, David
There was one that was built in the Soviet Union in what is now Kazakhstan back in the day that was used half for electricity and half for desalination. Worked like a charm for years. Russia has one with two more on the drawing board. India is building one, as is China. The problem, of course, is that they're all first of a kind, so of course they don't benefit from standardization yet. But the systems can be simplified, modular units similar to Westinghouse's new AP-1000 that employs passive safety systems similar to what the IFRs will have. It allows a radically simpler design and thus lower costs, building in factories instead of on-site. You can scoff if you like, but if you're into scoffing try saving it for Lovins, who simply pretends that this technology doesn't exist. He's comparing one-off Seventies plants that had stratospheric costs in no small part due to the activities of people just like him. It's simply not valid, because nobody with a brain would ever build a plant like that anymore.
Of course if you have a better way to get rid of spent fuel and use it to generate prodigious amounts of clean energy, I'm sure we'd all love to hear about it.On Lovins and Sheikh defend definition and record of micropower posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses
The point could be moot
If the USA would join with India, China, Russia, Japan, Korea, and France to encourage the construction of Generation IV reactors, specifically integral fast reactors (IFR), the question of mining uranium would be moot. All they'd need for fuel is spent lightwater reactor fuel and depleted uranium. We've already got enough out of the ground to provide all the power (not just electricity) our planet will need for hundreds of years. The only reason we'd have to keep mining uranium would be to fuel the LWRs we've already got until they're at the end of their life spans, and with many new uranium mines opening up around the world in the next few years (five in Kazakhstan alone) we don't need any in the states at all. Bear in mind, too, that there are much more environmentally sound and safer ways to mine uranium than the old methods described above. But the bottom line is that we should move to IFRs and be done with uranium AND coal mining, and oil and gas drilling too. Watch for Prescription for the Planet, due out in late July, for lots more about how this and other radical new technologies can transform our world.On Radioactive deja vu in the American West posted 1 year, 5 months ago 12 Responses
Intellectual dishonesty or rank ignorance?
Thanks to the Find feature I was able to ascertain some facts about The Nuclear Illusion without having to suffer through the entire screed. Lovins' polemic purports to prove why nuclear power is impossible to justify on economic or any other grounds. Yet he makes absolutely no mention of Generation IV reactors, no mention of fast reactors, no mention of pyroprocessing, not even any mention of lightwater reactors (like the AP1000) that use passive safety systems. In short, Lovins completely ignores state-of-the-art nuclear power systems and the reactors that numerous countries are developing (India is building a commercial fast reactor right now, as is China, with other countries planning them).
I can see only two possible explanation for this. Either Lovins is ignorant of these systems and their great advantages (in which case he has no business pretending to be an expert on anything nuclear) or else he is being unconscionably deceitful by omitting evidence that would completely undermine his argument. Or I suppose it could be a little of each, both intellectual dishonesty AND ignorance. Altogether, it makes the rest of his points pretty moot, since any comparison he makes with any other types of energy systems aren't worth the electrons wasted downloading his blather.On Lovins and Sheikh defend definition and record of micropower posted 1 year, 5 months ago 16 Responses
Nuclear designs
Bill writes: Existing nuclear power plants would earn $18 billion per year, enough to build at least one prototype of each new reactor design, and to finance the design and construction of a facility to build floating nuclear power plants.
One of the big problems with costs of nuclear power has been precisely because we never settled on a standard design. It's counterproductive to propose building a smorgasbord, prototypes or not. It's easy enough to study and decide on a design up front. Note that the French have standardization and it's worked very well for them. As for floating plants, why on earth? You have to be connected to the grid. If it's a question of access to cooling water, just run pipes in and out as far as necessary to reach substantial littoral currents, running from the plant on shore.
One point not made anywhere here is that a lot of that R&D money went into a decade-long project to solve all the problems with nuclear power: waste, proliferation, safety, and economics. Not only were the researchers astoundingly successful, but at the end of that success Congress pulled the funding, Clinton ordered the experimental facility (the best in the world) dismantled, and the DOE ordered those who'd worked on it (including about 500 Ph.D.s) to NOT publicize what they'd done. Why? Could it be because they'd proved that we already have enough fuel out of the ground and processed to supply all the energy needs of the entire planet for nearly a thousand years? (That's rhetorical, the answer is yes.) We could completely halt oil and gas drilling as well as coal and uranium mining.
Whatever wind, solar, and hydro can contribute, this Generation IV nuclear technology can supply all the rest with ease, and with a cost less than business as usual. It could, in fact, provide all the energy humanity needs even without ANY contribution from wind and solar. Head in the sand politics is all that's keeping us from making the necessary decisions.
All of this--the technologies, the economics, and the politics--will be available to examine in detail with the publication of Prescription for the Planet in July. OK, shameless plug. But it's very pertinent to these issues. You may want to check it out in a couple months.On Subsidies for wind power pale beside subsidies for nuclear posted 1 year, 6 months ago 23 Responses
They're not serious!
I hate to have to break the news to you, but none of the politicians are serious about taking the steps that have to be taken to really solve the global warming problem. NONE of them! They are more interested in votes and money. I don't care how "bold" their goals are, without providing the means to get there they mean nothing and are meant only to garner votes. And hazy "development of new technologies" is greenwashing BS. We have the technologies to actually HALT emissions worldwide by 2050, and the plan to do so was actually placed into the hands of several candidates. Not one has moved at all to even discuss it, despite the fact that the plan was created with some of the top scientists in the world. Why?
Well, for starters, if you really want to stop emissions that means we have to leave fossil fuels in the ground. The fossil fuel companies are the most powerful corporations on the planet. And they control scads of money and politicians.
Then there's the twisted system that gives Iowa such an undue influence over our political system, and if you hope to win in Iowa you have to cheer for biofuels, which everybody from Oxfam to the OECD has denounced as a costly mistake. But not the presidential candidates. No siree, they're all waving their pom-poms for the "biofuel revolution." You know, that revolution that pays ADM 51¢/gallon for ethanol, while driving up the cost of food so more poor people can starve.
Then there's the other N word. Even though our own national laboratories long ago figured out how to use nuclear power safely and fix all the problems associated with it, that knowledge was effectively buried and no candidate dares utter the N word in any serious way aside from pretending that we might use it if we could solve all the problems with it--the ones we've already solved. And if anybody thinks we can meet the world's doubling of energy demand by 2050 without nuclear power, well, I'm afraid such people are as much a part of the problem as lame politicians.
Unless we get some leadership willing to upset these major applecarts, we will be well and truly screwed, just as the IEA says. On Energy demand, greenhouse-gas emissions expected to soar, says report posted 2 years ago 6 Responses
I'm glad he's open to nuclear power
MillerOfReality writes: "Nuclear power? How about "we have got to see if there are ways for us to store the radioactive material in a safe, environmentally sound way" for oxymoron of the year!"
There actually is a way to use nuclear waste for fuel instead of storing it, which will be covered in my upcoming book. I've been trying like mad to enlighten the Obama campaign on this very subject, but it is like pulling teeth. He seems to already have such an impenetrable bubble in place that fresh ideas from the outside just bounce off. All the candidates seem to be the same in that regard, even Richardson.
When it comes to actually solving global warming, it boils down to politics. The end of global warming necessarily implies the end of the fossil fuel industries. Are any of the candidates prepared to promote the dissolution of the most powerful industries on the planet? I would like to think so, but one must consider the millions of lives that have been sacrificed on the altar of oil, and wonder whether a president who defied them would simply be added to the heap. This is a tough nut to crack.On An interview with Barack Obama about his presidential platform on energy and the environment posted 2 years, 4 months ago 28 Responses
Look at the numbers
It's not racism, it's demographics. Why would California have the highest concentration of non-white residents living near toxic facilities? Because California has the highest concentration of non-white residents PERIOD! Whites are a minority in California, the state has no racial or ethnic majority.
Sometimes there's no conspiracy, just simple statistics. Get a clue!On He Covers the Hotter Front posted 2 years, 7 months ago 2 Responses
Really? Ice?
Pangolin writes The most important [canard] is the assumption that power loads HAVE to grow and that those loads will always reflect the same profiles on daily use that they do now. The truth is that most of Europe lives quite well on 1/2 the per capita energy usage of an American. Obviously an achievable goal.
There's a reason that we use the term "global warming." It's because it's global. Do you believe we can halt the ever-increasing demand for electricity and other energy on a worldwide scale? Not only is our planet's population set to flirt with 10 billion by mid-century, many of the already existing billions are quickly developing and their thirst for energy is immense and growing.
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 when you're seemingly talking about using all solar and wind power for everything. Hey, you can live in a straw bale house and never use an air conditioner or a heater, have at it. As for expecting any more than .0001% of the world's population to do so, just forget about it. The idea that wind and solar can provide all the power our world needs is absolutely ludicrous on any foreseeable time frame. Unless you get considerably more realistic you'll only be standing in the way of real solutions, and global warming will do a number on us all.
I fully agree that geoexchange heat pumps are very sensible and hopefully they'll be much more widely deployed in the future. Likewise CFLs and LEDs (though you should have mentioned cold cathode lighting, better than either of them). Electric cars are great too, IF you use a clean source of energy to make the electricity. That's a big IF.
As for your comment When the Nuclear industry has dealt with it's existing backlog of waste sitting in cooling ponds around the country then they can come talk to us about building new plants; not before. This is not a technical problem with nuclear power, it's a political problem which has come to pass to a great degree as a result of the actions of antinuclear zealots. In point of fact there is a fine technology available, just waiting for the right political decisions, that can use up all that nuclear waste and then some to generate electricity. As for the nuclear industry, of which I am definitely NOT a part (nor am I a conservative either, and I resent the constant lumping of people who promote nuclear power as being somehow automatically Republican), it has to be taken out of the hands of private companies, worldwide. Until it is, proliferation and shoddy practices will be risks for us all.
Look forPrescription for the Planet, coming to a bookstore near you later this year. More light, less heat.On Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses
Spreading radiation
Nuclear power generation is referred to by Zarkov above as an energy source that will spread all the radioactivity that the Earth had locked away in trillions of tons of solid rock and concentrate it and spread it over the surface millimeter of this planet... slowly but surely. And then he goes on to say: Your future energy needs MUST come from a NO FOOTPRINT source. The use of oil must be banned, not the use of coal.
I had to rub my eyes at that last bit. Zarkov maintains that we have to keep using coal? That nuclear plants spread radioactivity all over the earth and we'll all be doomed? Wake up and smell the sulphur, Zarkov. Coal burning power plants spew over a hundred times more radioactive material than nuclear plants ever would in your worst nightmares. Just a few figures for you to munch on:
* A typical coal-fired power plant annually releases 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of fissile U-235, used in both power plants and bombs) and 12.8 tons of thorium.
* Total U.S. releases for 1982 came to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of U-235) and 1971 tons of thorium.
* Worldwide releases totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of U-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.I would defy you to show me a case where ANY uranium or thorium was released and spread over the landscape from a nuclear power plant, with the possible exception of Chernobyl, which was an antiquated and never repeated stupid design with stupid operators and no containment buiding.
You don't know what you're talking about. Next time you want to rant and rave do it into your pillow.On Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses
Hey Graham, long time no see
Fancy running into you here! I'll have a book to send you in a few weeks. That said, the comments below are directed to the writer of this article, not you.
I was just going to point out that Republicans aren't the only people who think nuclear power makes sense. There is so much disinformation and misinformation in this article, though, that I am not even going to bother trying to wade through it all. Anybody who thinks that wind and solar can meet the world's energy needs without resorting to major baseload generation from other sources is delusional. And if you're concerned about GW then nuclear is it. What's stopping us from building the generation 4 plants? Politics only. And people like the writer of this piece are a part of the problem, offering only pie in the sky solutions.
Dude, I'm a dyed in the wool liberal who happens to believe that the percentage of socialism we have in this country should be higher. You diss France for nuclear but they have cut GHG emissions hugely, electricity is one of their biggest exports, and they're continuing now to replace their older generation plants with gen 3 plants. I suppose you figure they're just too stupid to know they're losing money on them, huh? Bullsh*t. Your numbers are totally off the wall. You talk so blithely about new undiscovered technologies taking care of problems like line loss and what have you. Keep fiddling while Rome burns. What a crock!
Nuclear is too expensive, huh? You know what the external costs of coal soot is in this country? $167 billion a year, with 24,000 premature deaths (by an average of 14 years). Know how many modern nuclear plants you could build with $167/year? About 88, if you could keep people like you from driving the cost up with lawsuits and stalling actions. We could shut down all our coal plants in almost no time, and with gen 4 reactors we'd take care of all the nuclear waste to boot. No, I'm not a Republican, I'm an environmentalist and a realist. You are neither.On Just doesn't (or shouldn't) make sense for conservatives posted 2 years, 8 months ago 38 Responses