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Open Thread 18

The previous Open Thread has gone past 550 comments, so it’s time for a fresh palette.

The Open Thread is a general discussion forum, where you can talk about whatever you like — there is nothing ‘off topic’ here — within reason. So get up on your soap box! The standard commenting rules of courtesy apply, and at the very least your chat should relate to the general content of this blog.

The sort of things that belong on this thread include general enquiries, soapbox philosophy, meandering trains of argument that move dynamically from one point of contention to another, and so on — as long as the comments adhere to the broad BNC themes of sustainable energy, climate change mitigation and policy, energy security, climate impacts, etc.

You can also find this thread by clicking on the Open Thread category on the cascading menu under the “Home” tab.

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Some possible conversation starters:

  • Here is an interesting lecture on the theory behind nuclear fusion — short, and interesting for a scientifically literate audience
  • A provocative article by John Cameron from University of Wisconsin Madison, entitled: How to ignore data that contradict the LNT hypothesis (on radiation health physics)
  • A comment made on an energy mailing list to which I subscribe, talking about technosolar:

    I am reminded of a Johnny Carson show many, many years ago when he had Dixie Lee Ray as a guest. I think it was around 1973, and she was the new chairman of the US AEC, and Carson engaged her in a discussion about energy. Carson clearly favored solar and wind. She posed a question to him about the value of nuclear energy which went something like this—If you had several hundred freshly cut very tall and heavy trees at the top of a mountain, and you needed to get them down to the river, what would rather have: a couple of bull elephants or several million ants? Which would you chose? He was nonplussed as I recall to say the least. I never forgot that story. For small jobs, the solar/wind sources can be useful. For the really heavy lifting—nuclear is your winner. There simply is nothing else waiting in the wings.

  • The previous quote reminds me of the PBS TV Frontline interview with Dr Charles Till:

    Q: What will be our energy source, then? 

    A: I think that many engineers would agree that there is limited, additional gain to be had from conservation. After all, what does one mean by “conservation?” One simply means using less and using less more efficiently. And there have been considerable gains wrung out of the energy supply and energy usage over the past couple of decades. We can probably go somewhat further. But you’re talking, you know, 10% or 20%. Whereas over the next 50 years, it can be confidently predicted that with the energy growth in this country alone, and much more so around the world, it would be 100%, 200%, or some very large number.

    And so what energy source steps in? There is only one. It’s fossil fuel. It’s coal. It’s oil. It’s natural gas. Some limited additional use of the more exotic forms of things, like solar and wind. But they are, after all, very limited in what they can do. So it will be fossil.

    Now the question, of course, immediately becomes, well, how long can that last? And everyone has a different opinion on that. One thing that is certain, and that is that the increase in the use of fossil fuels will sharply increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Another thing is certain. You will put a lot more pollutants into the atmosphere as well, in addition to carbon dioxide, which one could argue the greenhouse effect exists or doesn’t exist. One can point to natural gas. Well, natural gas has fewer pollutants, and it gives you some considerable factor of perhaps two–more energy for the amount of carbon dioxide put into the air than does coal. But if you’re increasing the amount of fossil fuels by a large number, like five then the use of natural gas is not any long-term answer. It simply somewhat reduces what may be a very serious problem.

    Q: What about Solar and Wind?

    A: No. Small amounts. Small amounts only. The simplest form of pencil calculation will tell you that. But you know, energy has to be produced for modern society on a huge scale. The only way you can do that is with energy sources that have concentrated energy in them: coal, oil, natural gas. And the quintessential example of it is nuclear, where the energy is so concentrated, you have something to work [with]. With solar, your main problem is gathering it. In nuclear, it’s there. It’s been gathered.

    Q: What about the rest of the world? What will it do for energy?

    A: Well, parts of the rest of the world are very much powered by nuclear electricity today. France, of course, is the principal example. But all of the Western European countries. Japan will continue an orderly increase in the amount of nuclear power. There’s no question about that. There will be a tremendous increase in China and in Asia of both the use of coal and the use of nuclear energy. I hope that most of it’s nuclear.

I happen to think Ray and Till are fairly close to the mark, but you may well disagree. Either way, I look forward to the always entertaining conversation that ensues.

By Barry Brook

Barry Brook is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania. He researches global change, ecology and energy.

653 replies on “Open Thread 18”

@Tom Keen refers to a book: “.. have no problem with [economic] growth in itself, as long as it doesn’t rely on the consumption of more and more physical resources”.

I think we are at a point where we can take issue with the economists’ use of the word “consume”. I get the impression that it is a fundamental concept of modern economics that when “goods are consumed”, they cease to exist in any form whatsoever. For example, you buy a house, you use the house, then you burn down the house. They might say, “see? It turns to harmless CO2 and water and the ashes blow away. What waste? There’s nothing left behind. Kaput! Consumption is complete. The price of the house was the price of the resources used to create it.”

Outside of economics there is no problem with the concept of waste as a significant consequence of process. A biologist would tell us that a yeast population grows towards a limiting concentration of its waste product, ethanol. To the yeast, at least, it’s waste.

The erosion of the climate that we used to know is a cost, and is everything to do with the accumulation of waste (CO2, needless to say) and nothing to do with us running out of resources.

Growth? While we can pay with further increases in our burden of waste, there is no resource, not even soil, which we cannot find or recreate given enough ingenuity and power. A longer time horizon for our species might be achieved, however, if the waste price of our power is low.

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Roger Clifton,

Good point, though in the case of a discrete good, such as a house or car, you can include the cost of waste recycling into the individual product. Even with that cost included we will still buy stuff.

The problem we have is we can’t put a value on our planet because we can’t throw it away and ‘recycle’ it or buy a new planet once we’ve used it to destruction. What goes for an individual good does not fly for our planet. If you buy a good you get all the benefits. So you might be willing to pay for recycling and waste disposal. Failure to value this, combined with a mistaken fear of the one technology that is most useful (nuclear) while ironically the accepted technologies are the most dangerous of all options (fossil) is why we are not solving climate change and pollution (and why it they are getting worse).

Economists are totally lost on how to deal with this. Their models put the value of our planet 100 years from now at almost nothing, suggesting we should just buy a new planet 100 years from now and throw our exisiting one in a cosmic garbage bag.

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Can someone with more knowledge let me know whether the following has any basis in fact?

http://angelnexus.com/o/web/29630

It is clearly over-hyped. However, it concerns the wonder properties of beryllium alloys and their potential for improving the efficiency and safety of nuclear plants. Is this old hat or have there really been recent advances?

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Douglas Wise, on 4 October 2011 at 12:19 AM said:

Can someone with more knowledge let me know whether the following has any basis in fact?

There is actually a EPA Toxic Cleanup Superfund site in Concord, Massachusetts that was owned by ‘Nuclear Metals, Inc’., now called Starmet.

http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/npl/nar1605.htm

Mr ‘Great Investment Advisor’ also failed to mention that NMI/Starmet went into bankruptcy in 2002.

Click to access Marcia%20L%20Sims%20&%20MCAD%20vs%20Starmet%20Corporation,%20fdba%20Nclear%20Metals,%20INC%20&%20also%20dba%20Applied%20Techology%20Managment,%20LLC.pdf

They are not the first company to have problems with the EPA, and some companies that go into bankruptcy protection actually work out their problems and end up being quite interesting as an investment.

Beryllium isn’t exactly ‘healthy’ to manufacture as well.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/beryllium/be-sensitization-drds.html

There is also some research going on as to the possibility of using a beryllium/UO2 alloy as a nuclear fuel.
http://nuclearstreet.com/nuclear_power_industry_news/b/nuclear_power_news/archive/2009/02/10/ibc-teams-with-purdue-on-beryllium-oxide-nuclear-fuel.aspx

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harrywr2 raised the subject of beryllium, which interested me and possibly others, so I browsed for some info.

Beryllium can be easily persuaded to liberate a neutron with a gamma, alpha or neutron and was used as a neutron source by Lise Meitner in the discovery of fission.

Clearly a mixture of uranium and beryllium would augment the activity of the fuel. However the rate it burns out would determine where such fuel could be used. If the burnout time is long, it would reduce the need for enrichment in slow neutron reactors or to extend the working life of old fuel. If the burnout time is similar to the rate that 239 accumulates in a fast neutron reactor, it would simplify the process of initiating a closed fuel cycle on site. If the burnout time is short, beryllium could still be used in control rods to augment activity in a variable reactor, when the xenon level is high.

Outside the United States, the main ore is beryl , which is common enough in pegmatites. I couldn’t find a reference for it, but believe that China is the non-US source because current practice is to crush pegmatite then sharp eyed labourers pick the beryl out by hand.

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John Morgan,

Sure does need some work – the front page won’t render at all with Opera or Chrome on Linux and only renders with Firefox with all scripting blocked by the noscript extension.

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Quokka and JM:
On a Windows platform, Firefox 7.0.1 opened it OK but the text is too small to read, apparently because the pages have been reduced to single graphics within a frame.

They could use a feedback button. The email addresses are dead – if needed, they must be retyped manually.

It’s amateurish and uninformative, unfortunately.

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It’s unreal that activists don’t take the time to make a few geeky friends online before doing something like this. Most webhosts have 1 click WordPress installs. WordPress.TV tells people everything they need to know to get an attractive wordpress site, add a header, and most of it can be done without any coding!

Sad.

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A question to resident nuclear/material science experts!

I was talking all things nuclear during a recent visit to another university, and a question was raised about the extent of rare earth metals and other critical materials required in current and envisaged nuclear technologies. Of course, I gave the approximate answer that besides uranium/thorium, zirconium is probably used the most, but I wasn’t able to answer questions about e.g. the extent that specialized nuclear alloys require rare elements in them.

Does anyone have solid info or some sources I could use to track down some answers, e.g.

– materials used in nuclear power plants
– their chemical compositions
– quantities used

?

(We can probably discount standard structural steels etc. from the calculation.)

The person who asked the question had actually researched the use of rare earths in other industries, and concluded that nearly all the industries underestimate their importance or are even unaware of their existence. I personally have a hunch that nuclear would, in any case, represent the most “bang for the buck” should critical materials become scarce, but I’d like to have some numbers to back up my claim.

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One of the mysteries that Mark Duffett pointed out, was that the evacuation was declared within a radius (20 km), instead of from the plume downwind of the wounded nukes. It was as if the evacuation was declared for reasons other than a belief in a fallout pattern at dangerous levels.

ABC TV Lateline on 28 September gave an interview with a historian, Matsumoto, advisor to the Japanese Cabinet at the time. He paints a picture of a group of excited politicians desperate for news of a terrible and unknown threat. It struck me as the sort of mood that you and I might call overblown. To a historian, it must have presented an opportunity to see his own name involved in a dramatic evacuation.

Curiously, he paints the Prime Minister Kan as beleaguered by his Cabinet, and not sharing with them the vindication of their terrible preconception. Then he goes on to say that Tepco was failing to provide terrible news to the Prime Minister, but that Tepco were playing down the severity of what was really happening to Tokyo and eastern Japan.

However a contradiction appears in the story. Tepco had ordered the evacuation of the Fukushima Daiichi site, which no doubt Matsumoto would have considered an instantly lethal environment, however the operator of the site refused to evacuate himself and apparently his staff. You and I would have asked, surely these men had really important technical work to do while their politicians postured. “So Prime Minister Kan was outraged because he wasn’t getting proper information or the truth”. Perhaps Tepco wasn’t playing down the severity at all, just as they later told ABCTV. Perhaps he smelled a rat, that the disaster wasn’t as big as his Cabinet wanted it to be.

Matsumoto glosses over this detail, saying that the government knew right from the start, (that is before they received any technical advice), that large areas of eastern Japan would be uninhabitable and would remain so for 10 or 20 years. Repeated through the interview is the idea of a concealed awful truth. Presumably then, Matsumoto was not alone in his thrilling nightmare.

These people were not interested in following technical advice, it seems. Intrusion by technical concepts, such as the direction the wind took the fallout, must have seemed like technicians trying to belittle their drama. If they could persuade PM Kan that these plants were likely to blow up in a gigantic explosion, then they would have a heroic role in commanding the evacuation from the entire area that would be splattered. That is, from a radius.

For someone who claims intimacy with a disciplined leadership rescuing a threatened people, Matsumoto shows remarkable ignorance about short lived iodine’s very real threat to pregnant women and children in the downwind plume in the first few days. It seems that if health officials attempted to get authorisation to evacuate that group, they were ignored until weeks had passed.

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Roger Clifton, on 5 October 2011 at 7:58 PM said:

One of the mysteries that Mark Duffett pointed out, was that the evacuation was declared within a radius (20 km), instead of from the plume downwind of the wounded nukes.

An emergency planning document prepared for a theoretical accident doesn’t have ‘wind direction’ as the wind direction was unknown when the document was prepared. In a crisis situation decision making for most people becomes stilted and clumsy.

From an article quoting Governor Thornburg about the Three Mile Island Accident
http://www.pennlive.com/specialprojects/index.ssf/2009/03/tmi_stories_gov_dick_thornburg.html
Early on, he said, he and the public were being misled by officials of Metropolitan Edison, the plant’s owner at the time, who seemed most interested in saving face. “Their credibility eroded rather quickly,” Thornburgh said. “We also found out there were plenty of people around who were willing to tell us more than they knew or less than they knew. But there was no one single source that we could rely upon for an accurate assessment of precisely what happening at the plant.” (Emphasis mine)

Generals call the phenomenon ‘the fog of war’ . The person that has the best information, the front line commander, has a motivation to present a ‘rosier then reality’ assessment, or maybe the front line commander can’t ‘see the forest for the trees’. Everyone else has incomplete and conflicting information.

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Thank you,Luke_UK for applying that magic factor of 8760 h/a to Max’s calculations.

To any reader who is daunted by the use of jargon units, I heartily recommend writing the factor 8760 h/a on a sticker for the edge of your computer screen. It instantly converts kWh and any other jargon unit derived from it into SI. Doesn’t this website have a policy that all units should be SI?

In case you didn’t notice, Luke_UK applied the simple, clarifying chain of logic thus:
580 TWh/a = (580 TWh/a)/( 8760 a/h) = 0.066 TWh/h = 66 GW
which is a quantity understood by anyone who passed science at school.

Seeing as all the ammonia etc data in chemical tables are in MJ/kg or MJ/mol and the industrial units for the flow of energy are in GW, why on earth should we have to fumble with this antique unit, kWh? It is no longer the amount of electrical energy that can be gained from a stoker’s shovelful of coal, either.

Its aficionados will no doubt tell you that it was a very tangible unit when grandma used to put a shilling in the meter then huddle around a red glowing thing for a certain number of hours. Well, it ain’t now.

Get with SI, guys, there are readers out here called “intelligent laymen” and you actually, really, would benefit by having us understand what you’re trying to say. And you won’t make mistakes like crashing a spacecraft on the planet you calculated to land it on.

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We could puzzle over this for multiples of 3.6 kiloseconds. UK energy guru David Mackay went with kwh and it seems to have stuck.

In athletics meets wind speed is given in m/s so why not road signs? 60 kph then becomes 17 m/s rounded.

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@DBB points out that the year is not well defined, so errors can arise when converting it.

Yes, however we don’t have to know precisely what the jargon unit is, if the number attached to it has even less precision. Convert the jargon user’s assertion into SI, I say, and only then study what they are trying to convey, lest we too get sucked in to the language of a world too small.

To be fair, I have to admit that the year it is a remarkably convenient unit of time. However if we are to retain that unit of time in our calculations we have to invent a whole range of units based on time for consistency. For instance, a gigawatt-annum is a convenient unit to speak of production by power stations when the scale of the discussion is in lifetimes or a production year.

With the exception of that dear little old lady staggering out into the frost with a shilling to put in the meter, nobody I know thinks in terms of hours often enough to need units based on hours. We really can’t justify using kWh, and using kWh/a is just plain bad practice.

The sloppiness in our units is often a reflection of the sloppiness of our speech. You could have corrected me too, that I should have said, “8760 h/a converts kWh/a into kW, an SI unit”.

I have always urged students, to convert all their inputs into SI before beginning their calculation. In the process of an SI calculation, we develop an insider’s feeling for the useful constants and factors in the units understood by outsiders. Young outsiders, I mean, not just those ageing clients who can only remember the days of shovelling coal into boilers.

Also to stick to prefixes in powers of 1000, so that any error is likely to be noticeably wrong. Letting yourself calculate in centimetres guarantees an eventual error of a factor of only 10, which is likely to go unnoticed.

If the client is wilfully obtuse, and insists on reports in “familiar units” we can convert our answers back into their precious inches, calories, bushels and barrels etc, along with the SI units in brackets, so that intelligent laymen can rescue the process as senility takes the client slowly away.

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Roger Clifton, your zeal for SI purity of units is admirable, but not very realistic. The SI unit of energy amount is actually the joule, which is the energy you need to accelerate 1 kg by 1 m/s in a frictionless environment. Quite small, in other words. “A watt is a joule per second. Therefore you need 3600 x 8760 x 1 x 10^9 = 31.536 petajoules to represent the energy generated by a 1GW power station in a non-leap year at 100% capacity.Why not instead use the unit GW-year for such cases? Horses for courses, and all that.

I strongly suspect that the closer the scale of the units used to the scale of what we’re actually measuring, the less likely we are to make silly errors of magnitude.

Class me with the dear old lady. One kilowatt for one hour seems conceptually convenient for me. Especially as every month I read my meter which clicks over in just those units, and get an energy bill for kWh consumption of both electricity and gas.

I definitely agree, thogh, that non-metric, imperial and US units should always have a metric equivalent alongside.

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The SI unit of energy amount is actually the joule, which is the energy you need to accelerate 1 kg by 1 m/s in a frictionless environment. Quite small, in other words.

Quite ill-defined, because the kinetic energy gained by a kilogram mass when it gains 1 m/s of speed increases as the speed it begins with increases. From a standing start, it takes 0.5 J.

The joule is a newton-metre. Also a pascal-cubic-metre.

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Yes, of course, thank you Mr Cowan. Energy = force x distance is a much more correct definition.

If I push a stationary kilogram floating in free space with a force of one newton over a distance of one metre, then I transfer one joule of energy to the kg, (do one joule of work on it), and give it the same amount of kinetic energy, since it is now in motion. It will then be moving at sqrt(2) m/s. (follows from Ek = 0.5 m.v^2).

A force of 1 newton is the force which, when applied for a period of one second to a mass of one kilogram in a frictionless environment, changes its speed by one m/s.

Is that correct now?

The joule is … a pascal-cubic-metre.

I can see that this is dimensionally correct but what does it mean in practice? That it takes 1 joule of work to pump up a cubic metre by 1 pascal of pressure?

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@turnages argues in favour of the use of gigawatt-annum rather than petajoules, on the basis that this is the scale of production from power stations over the course of a year.

Well, I quite agree that the electricity consumption for Melbourne (pop ~4 M) can be quite tangibly expressed in just a few, perhaps four, GWa per year. However the same quantity could be expressed with similar clarity, as approx 100 PJ per year, albeit using less familiar words.

The SI system allows us a full range of prefixes, so that we can choose a prefix to match the scale of our measurements. Here “petawatt” would allow us to talk of energy extraction, energy transport, energy conversion etc, with similar convenience to “gigawatt-annum”. That is, when the scale of consideration is cities and years.

The problem here is that our scale is still contaminated by the thinking of the past: “years”. Old fogeys can’t handle rates, including all those quantities we should measure in watts, especially when we attach those newfangled prefixes. Instead, they want us to accumulate these rates across the span of a financial year, which they really do understand, along with the power of horses, and the number of shovelfuls of coal that it takes to get a ship across the Atlantic.

We can think much more clearly if we cancel out the “year”. Thus the electricity consumption for Melbourne would be 4 GW. If it really is 4 GW, then we must expect about 12 GW of coal is being extracted to do it.

We can even more tangibly speak in terms of per capita. Converting any developed country’s statistics into per capita terms immediately puts us all in the same ballpark. (~ 1 kW/p elec.) however that also is a “rate”, so fogeys, young and old, would no doubt disapprove.

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Oh dear! What has been unleashed here?

I grew up in feet, fathoms, leagues, chains and links, pounds, stones, bushels, rods, poles, perches and degrees F.

I learned metric units at school.

I was a forced convert to SI half way through uni, by which time I had learned to handle the kip (kilo-pound) and the poundal (pound force).

However, my first job after graduation was as a designer in a Danish firm – in cgs units which I had eschewed several years previously.

None of this explains the horsepower or the kilowatt-year (or was that kilowatt-annum?) at all well.

Then along came somebody with Canadian SI variants.

What next, the American gallon and the Cape Foot?

I vote for the Australian SI suite of terms, including the non-preferred and supplementary ones, since this is an Australian site.

May we all continue to revel in our differences. Speak whatever language you want with me, but please keep it clean and civil.

BTW, when it comes to large electrical units, I believe that Australian generators tend towards using the megawatt for power and the gigawatt-hour for electical energy. Fuel energy is different – MJ. It works, somehow.

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According to
http://www.tititudorancea.com/z/annum.htm
“The Unified Code for Units of Measure disambiguates … by using
ar for are” (unit of area), and a for annum (unit of time).

The same page then goes on to discuss the Latin origins of “annum”.

Another page nearby in my browsing says “annum is not yet in the SI system, but it is nearly there”

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Litres and liters, and the abbreviations, L and l.
From the Australian Commonwealth National Measurement Regulation 1999.
Schedule 1: Australian Legal units of measurement (Regulation 5) provides the following definition.

Part 3.
3.19 volume litre L or l 10e–3 m3

So, Peter L was correct. In Australia it may be either, however no preference for upper or lower case is regulated. The French style spelling is mandated.

Interestingly, there is another table called “Schedule 3 SI Prefixes” which may assist those of you who have difficulty remembering the meaning of femto- and terra- and all those other prefixes. I, for one, cannot tell my yotta from my yocto without assistance.

Here they are.

Item Numerical Value Name Symbol
1 10e24 yotta Y
2 10e21 zetta Z
3 10e18 exa E
4 10e15 peta P
5 10e12 tera T
6 10e9 giga G
7 10e6 mega M
8 10e3 kilo k
9 10e2 hecto h
10 10e1 deka da (!!)
11 10e–1 deci d
12 10e–2 centi c
13 10e–3 milli m
14 10e–6 micro µ
15 10e–9 nano n
16 10e–12 pico p
17 10e–15 femto f
18 10e–18 atto a
19 10e–21 zepto z
20 10e–24 yocto y

My emphasis re deka. It appears to be error prone.

Again, dear overseas visitors… this is current Australian measurement law. There will be foreign variants. My intention is to discombobulate the prefixes, not to expain their etymology.

Ref: download the RTF file from http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_reg/nmr1999331.txt

Many other measurement units are explained there for those unfamiliar with them; otherwise, try Wikipedia or Google. Conversion to and from horsepower is much simpler than observing the work rate of a sweating stoker and his shovel.

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John Bennetts, on 8 October 2011 at 12:35 PM — Thanks. My general rule is just to use the prefixes for the powers which are multiples of three.

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Over the past couple of weeks I pointed to a couple of articles from Germany and the Czech Republic about the former’s problems with decreasing power generation due to legislated vandalism of functioning power plant and the latter’s willingness to help make up the shortfall, if the price is right.

Now it seems that Poland is getting in on the act with several proposals to construct new nuclear power plant close to the German border.

http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20111006-38039.html?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=218

Most comments appear to be pro-nuclear, eg:

” I would suggest that Germany take electrical power from its mythical magical pocket (that comes after it’s closed all of its nuke plants), and give freely to the poor Poles. And when the Dutch threaten to build a nuke plant near the border….give from the mythical magic pocket again. And the same for the French, the Swiss and the Danish. Surely some brilliant German minds considered this when they were busy planning the dismantling of the German nuke plants.”

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JB, interesting link re Poland – of relevance for Australia given Poland’s high coal penetration, and the fact that they have decided nuclear can be competitive even with substantial indigenous coal reserves. The comments in the link regarding Germany are interesting and I wonder whether the German blind spot on energy points to a broader issue in which the traditional respect and reliance on the engineering profession is winding down in favour of a “greenology” philosophy.

The great US corporates of the 1950’s and 60’s saw the engineering executives displaced by MBA bean-counters, leading to the decline of once great companies like Ford, GE and AT&T, in which a focus on product was displaced by a focus on numbers – look at Apple’s Steve Jobs at the difference a creative, product-focused executive makes to a company’s success. I wonder if we will see the winding down of German greats like Mercedes, Liebherr and Siemens. A “Made in Germany” badge allows a price tag that is sometimes 30% higher because Germany sits at the top of the manufacturing pyramid. If the Teutonic attention to detail disappears, to be replaced with green symbolism, what will “Made in Germany” mean then?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18825192.700-theyre-happy-and-they-know-it.html

http://www.adriansca.com.au/announcements/drivenofftheroadbymbas

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Graham P: Any chance of a precis of your second ref? It is a bit dense for me. BTW: I can count but I still don’t trust accountants, unless with a second opinion in my pocket.
MODERATOR
JB – I have cleaned up the whole misunderstanding, between you and RH, re MBA,

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No. 556! Wow! It amazes me that people who are aware of peak oil still think global warming is a concern because of abundant coal & gas. That isn’t at all true. Much hyped “shale gas” is a joke, and conventional gas is going off a cliff. Coal is peaking worldwide now, and in the U.S. peak producible energy from coal occurred in 1998, even though overall tonnage can still slowly rise for maybe 5 or 10 years. All three fossil fuels are in terrible shape, their “unconventional” forms (tar sands, shale, lignite) can only help a very small amount, and renewables can’t be increased hardly at all. It really is nuclear or nothing. Either way, global warming will solve itself, no matter how much nuclear is used.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-05-17/debunking-shale-gale

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29919

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-05-13/peak-coal-year

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The evidence is not inconsistent with looming global peak coal. The Chinese say their reserves will peak nearer 2030 but they are buying up coal mines in Australia. Coal rich countries Poland and South Africa are building new NPP. The Germans however are building new coal plant instead.

Here in the Lucky Country apparently wind and solar is going to replace coal. If that doesn’t pan out I think it is still possible new coal fired power stations will be built if they promise to be carbon capture ready or some other kind ruse. Australia’s total coal exports are less than 10% of Chinese domestic demand. That means we could make a lot of money then suddenly the market could collapse. Then what?

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@ George “It amazes me that people who are aware of peak oil still think global warming is a concern … ”
Business-as-usual snatches at the excuse. “Why should I care a tinker’s cuss about my carbon emissions, if this stuff is gunna run out anyway?”

The very fact that the man in the street can be led to believe that the two problems solve each other, is the very reason that we should have no truck with the concept of “peak” anything at all. We should not let our morally lazy people dodge our collective responsibility to decarbonise.

And we ain’t gunna run out of resources to burn. It’s the waste that is the greater problem.

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JB, I’m just trying to draw a parallel with the longstanding critique of “management by numbers” and the decline of the American manufacturing from the 1970’s, such as articulated by William Hopper,

and the possibility that the ideologically driven shift in German energy policy might lead to a similar decline in the century-long pre-eminence of German manufacturing.

What was your experience with your MBA and what did you get out of it other than promotion opportunities? Having worked in SME’s I haven’t been under pressure to do an MBA, having chosen to do an M.Eng instead.

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@ Graham P:
I returned to uni almost 3 decades after my year 1 of a civil engineering degree. The company put me through a management master’s and then forgot me, which is exactly what I expected would happen. No promotion, same desk.

Revisiting economics and accountancy, subjects that I had taken as electives in my undergrad years, was interesting. It surprised me to find how easy these subjects were second time around and to discover that some basic texts live on, updated and re-issued with their prices much inflated.

Probably the best value courses involved learning that it is normal for organisations not to work the way that they are designed to do and that this is well understood and studied. As the only civil engineer amongst dozens of other engineers, I had long worked outside of the formal heirarchy, across workplaces, both mentoring and being mentored along the way, “borrowing” authority and staff and struggling under multiple concurrent bosses. It was liberating and empowering to find that this can is not only normal/common, but is also can be viewed as an organisational positive that, regardless of how the corporate org chart reads things get done in a flexible and responsive way. The organisation is much smarter than the sum of its parts would suggest.

This freed me to act somewhat independently of the organisation’s structure with a clear conscience. My next 10 years, to retirement, were the happiest and most productive of my career, largely because of this.

The other main take-away was an elective couple of subjects brushing up on hydrology and studying management of contaminated land. They have nothing to do with management, but everything to do with forcing me to do a bit of rigorous book learning after a couple of decades away from it. It was very demanding but enjoyed it greatly in some kind of perverse way. The knowledge gained was also immediately relevant to the organisation.

I certainly recommend accepting the challenge of a mature age MBA. Whether an MBA is a good thing for recent grads is another thing entirely. As one of the oldies, I was often out of step with some of the youngest in class, especially those who viewed themselves as rising stars. I found that they tended to toe the company line and walk the walk when they might have questioned and dug for deeper meanings.

It was really hard work on top of a fulltime workload and with 3 kids at home, 3 hours up the road. I did it face to face over 3 years. Distance learning, as these things tend to be delivered these days, is might be more efficient and probably easier but almost certainly much less rewarding than face to face.

Value for the employer’s money? Perhaps not.

Worthwhile personally? Absolutely.

Would I recommend an MBA to a 25 year old? No way. How about a technical Masters’ in a different discipline or a PhD at that age instead?

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JB, thanks for the feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed my 3.5 years part-time post-grad although the workload with work and 2 kids was demanding. If it wasn’t for the minor issue of actually needing to work for a living I would be quite happy continuing with part-time uni-based research.

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Roger Clifton, on 9 October 2011 at 12:04 PM said:

The very fact that the man in the street can be led to believe that the two problems solve each other, is the very reason that we should have no truck with the concept of “peak” anything at all.

I think it depends on location.

Coal mining productivity has declined nationally in the US from a peak of 6.95 tph(tons per hour) in 2003 to 5.61 tons per hour in 2009 with the decline most pronounced east of the Mississippi River. In addition transportation costs have increased. The combination has resulted in the average ‘delivered’ price of coal increasing at a rate of 6.7% per year for 10 years straight.

There is very little discussion in the Southeast US about ‘climate change’ or for that matter ‘peak anything’. The 12 proposed nuclear nuclear plants are being sold to the public based on the ’10’s of billions they will save in future fuel costs’. No further discussion justification is needed or required. Everyone likes to ‘save their wallet’.

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Why aren’t people with integrity concerned about what is going on with the CO2 Tax legislation and the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s investigation.

They rejected 98% of submissions on the basis of a totally bogus excuse.

Carbon tax in Australia in 2011

They accepted submissions that were late while rejecting 98% of on-time submissions.

Where have we got to? The most serious policy issue of our time – the CO2 tax legislation – is passing through parliament and the Left wants to prevent debate.

Why? Why aren’t people of integrity objecting?

BNC commenting rules say BNC’s focus is on finding solutions.

But the discussion on the Carbon Tax is being ignored here too.

Why?

Surely, engineers (and others with integrity) should be incensed about what has happened.

Carbon tax in Australia in 2011

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Interesting summary article on the typical pro vs anti type arguments surrounding nuclear energy in Australia:

“For Australia, nuclear is the power of last resort”

I believe a few of us voted for this a while ago when someone posted the link to the question here on BNC.

It’s a bit of a back and forth of quotes from Professor George Dracoulis from ANU and Mark Diesendorf.

I think the final paragraph is the best part of the article, and probably sums up where the author lies:

”Nothing can or will happen until it’s shown (as it might be) that … carbon capture, geothermal, solar thermal, wind etc fail to deliver fully,” says Dracoulis. ”The question is then, how long do you give them?”

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@ PL:

Why aren’t people with integrity concerned about what is going on with the CO2 Tax legislation and the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s investigation?

Probably most consider the matter to be a ‘fait accompli’, and aren’t going to waste their time swimming against the tide. It’s a matter of chosing your battles.

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Cross posted from DecarboniseSA in case people don’t visit that site.
.
Apparently the Olympic Dam expansion will be powered by a gas fired power station with a pipeline from Moomba,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-10/eis-mining-olympic-dam-bhp-billiton/3458896
They were talking 690 MW at one stage. I think that means in turn Moomba will have to be connected to Queensland coal seam gas to ensure supplies. Seems concern over the cuttlefish wasn’t enough to stop the choice of Whyalla for the desal plant.

My alternative suggestion is to have a bigger desal (>200 ML/d) powered by NP on open coastline, somewhere like Ceduna, slightly further than Whyalla from OD but with lesser marine habitat issues. Make the desal big enough to supply other mines and to turn off the pipeline from the Murray which supplies the region.

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Finrod,

Probably most consider the matter to be a ‘fait accompli’, and aren’t going to waste their time swimming against the tide. It’s a matter of chosing your battles.

I am sure you are correct that that is the reason some don’t want to discuss CO2 Tax policy. But that doesn’t excuse rational and responsible people for not trying to prevent bad policy; it doesn’t explain why some people try to justify it no matter how obvious it is that it is very bad policy.

The same argument as you make is often made as justification to avoid trying to change other bad policies like nuclear policy, renewable energy policy.

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Barry,

It’s good to see the original symbols for people have returned.

My symbol shows my tongue hanging out the wrong side of my mouth – it should be in the centre to represent where I sit in middle of the political spectrum between right and left. :)

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Point Lowly is the wrong place for a desal. The water pipeline to OD will be 320 km, a huge outlay. A pipe from the open coast like Ceduna would be over 350 km but with salt lakes in the way.

I can’t see the gas pipe from Moomba being built. Moomba is the hub for Cooper Basin gas field which in 2009 had a reserves to production ratio of 12 years. That gas pipeline would be maybe 400 km long at who knows what cost. Then Moomba would have to be connected to coal seam gas fields say around Dalby Qld. More cost. A 700 MW CCGT plant at OD would cost $1.5bn or so plus pumping stations en route.

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Tom K and John N:
Major projects such as this sometimes intentionally base their applications for initial project approval on non-controversial details. That way, the path to approval is smoother. After the dust has settled, re-evaluations, new information and a few old preferences tend to get shuffled through as amendments to the plan. That way, they are not show stoppers. This process is entirely rational and reasonable, provided that it is done in the open; ie, provided that the deal-making does not result in detrimental outcomes.

If what you say re the economics of a gas pipeline from Moomba or a water pipe from the coast is correct, then it is entirely possible that, during the next year or so, they will be dealt with one at a time and in a much less heated negotiating environment.

As I said, this is not a bad thing, provided that we are discussing real improvements. Near where I live, the main highway was the subject of agreements with at least two mining companies whereby as a condition of approval two winding sections were to be straightened out by the proponents. Neither have taken place and both agreements are now history. Fatal accidents have since happened in both places but the original twisting alignments remain unchanged.

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JB I was speaking to an ex Roxby Downs worker who had to move to Hobart to avoid heat related ill health. He told me the idea all along has been to get a nuke to power the OD expansion but it seems they can’t say it out aloud.

Some parallel issues
1) OD’s eventual 19 kt of U308 will be matched by the Whyalla rare earth plant producing 20 ktpa of thorium oxide
2) the solar boost at the Pt Augusta coal plant could be left behind.

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JN:
I’ve said it before – I see value in siting a NPP adjacent to the Adelaide desalination site, forget Playford and Northern in any shape or form, except as a warehoused site for two x 880MW additional NPP’s, beef up the Tx line north to Roxby Downs and install only a standby GT or two at the Olympic Dam end of things, to power essential services when the Tx line is unavailable.

Use the desal for load-shifting. Use surplus low grade heat, if any, to assist the desal or for another industry.

Share the output from the desal with Roxby via a pair of parallel pipelines, to enable one to always be in service when the other is being maintained. 1.5 metres diameter should suffice, buried for most of the route.

This avoids aggravating the saline load problems at the top end of the gulf.

The only downside appears to be the cost of the water pipes, but there would be no need for the big gas main – rail would suffice.

At the end of the day, there are two or 3 x 880MW or better fission power plants, SA has retired all of its fossil plants except for a bit of peaking power, the SA coal industry ceases to exist and the interconnectors to VIC would be nett exporters of nice, clean SA electricity.

Additional benefit: SA’s remaining natural gas could stay in the ground for tomorrow’s high value added purposes, instead of being wasted today for low value baseload.

Any true low grade wastes (not valuable spent fuel) could be destined for long term storage at the bottom of the world’s largest pit and covered by a couple of hundred metres of overburden, if you like. Finding cover material will not be a problem – the proposed 150m high dump site is sized to hold 10 billion cubic metres of fill. That should be enough for starters.

There… that’s fixed. Now, what about that engergy park at Ceduna?

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It would be nice if it wasn’t, but even if the energy for Olympic Dam is coming from gas it’s not really such a big deal, since the mine’s output of clean nuclear fuel is, in terms of energy content, far, far, far larger than all the mine’s energy inputs – even assuming inefficient once-through LWR fuel use.

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JB I’m not sure I understand what you propose about water pipelines. The current pipe from the River Murray goes to Woomera only 70 km from Roxby Downs which has limited groundwater. However RD is about 600 km from Adelaide’s Pt Stanvac desal.which seems too far to pump. I think it was discussed before that reverse osmosis not thermal is the new thinking so the desal could be anywhere on the grid not co-located with thermal plant..

That region will need a lot of clean water. There even appears to be a couple of potential new mines within the Woomera rocket range area. On the coast Ceduna will handle 25% of the world’s zircon when the wharf area is dredged. The proposed Whyalla rare earths plant will produce uranium and thorium byproduct from NT ore. The Brits started it with a few A-bombs out that way post WW2. Even the Green’s beloved geothermal heat is radioactive decay. In radio-isotope terms that whole area has been around the traps.

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@John Bennetts … come again? Surely no one would want to dump waste in an intermediate level of what is arguably the world’s largest copper-gold-uranium deposit …

The bottom of any open pit mine is very often decided by the economics of digging deeper. And although the grade of the ore body varies in space, the economics varies in time. In fifty years, we can expect that many mothballed open pits will become profitable again and be dug deeper. Also what yesterday was classed as “overburden”, is very often today’s profitable ore.

On the other hand, the middle of a large shale deposit (which anneals quickly) would do just fine.

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@John Newlands “reverse osmosis not thermal is the new thinking so the desal could be anywhere on the grid, not co-located with thermal plant..”

Good thinking, that. For all the technical attractions of a gigantic energy park, a decentralised industrial base to the economy would probably be more palatable to a public frightened of Big Things.

On the other hand, while reverse osmosis is considered more efficient (at desalination) than multiple stage flash distillation, I wonder if that comparison is based on the total amount of fuel (such as gas) used? Reverse osmosis uses a lot of electricity for pressure, aided by heating the input water. Multiple stage flash distillation moves a lot of heat, with a modest amount of electricity. Around a nuke, low grade heat is much cheaper than heat derived from a gas power supply.

If the nukes are relatively small, say 100 MWe, and distributed around the country, they could each of them be desalinating for their locality, saving on pipelines and winning friends among the locals.

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@ John Newlands, on 11 October 2011 at 4:34 PM:

Water pipelines. 1. The Murray River is a long way East and east ans is seriously depleted already. How about the value of reduced withdrawal from this distressed system?

Pipelines can be turned around, although they might need a few mods at each end. Woomera is a bit of a nonsense in this context. Get the water, send it where it is needed. That’s an engineering question, not a geography lesson.

Whether Roxby Downs has limited groundwater or not is irrelevant. The need is for usable water. Drawing water from an aquifer for use at Roxby Downs when there is an another option is stupid. Stupid. Full stop.

600 km from Pt Stanvac desal… so what? Tell us what you are thinking. If there is already a pipeline delivering water from the north (?) to Adelaide, then turn it around. This is viewing the world through constraints, rather than through opportunities. 600km has been done before and will be done again.

If Kalgoorlie’s (400km?) water supply could be installed many years ago via a pipeline, why is it suddenly so difficult to contemplate pipelines to deliver water to another mining community?

RO plant is not state of the art. As someone else pointed out, combinations of RO and other technologies have prospects. I am very familiar with a system involving RO plus brine concentration plant which does exactly that, and on scale of tens of gigalitres per annum. Admitted, not all is treated to brine concentrator quality, but that’s a detail.

It is at least worthy of an options study to determine whether or not co-location of nuclear and desal is profitable. I think that it is worth looking at. Some disagree. Let’s do the maths.

Whether or not there are a few more mines coming in the Woomera area is beside the point. No EIS for for the current proposal can be expected to consider all possible future developments by other proponents. The suggestion that other mines might, perhaps, come forward, is a furphy. Irrelevant.

Regarding dredging at Ceduna… been reading about dredging at Gladstone? Followed the argument about dredging of the entry to Port Phillip during the past couple of years? It is not as simple as saying “Let’s dredge the bay”. Environmental issues relating to dredging and sediment transport and pollutant releases during dredging can be huge. Ceduna will have its own issues.

The proposed Whyally/Ceduna rare earths plant and zirconia exports and so forth have nothing at all to do with the current proposal. They are huge “maybe’s”. They certainly cannot be fully factored into the BHP proposal at this stage. Consider the reverse: If BHP-B claimed that their proposal was based on the assumption that several other large projects would go ahead and would yield a new port or two and a NPP, BHP-B would be laughed out of town.

Will the other plants go ahead? I wonder. They must stand on their own two feet.

Whether or not salinity issues are able to be dealt with better by developing desal and power supplies elsewhere is worth thinking about.

My main point is that, during the next year or two, this type of thinking will take place. Alliances might even be formed and economies found. Similarly, some tough questions might be posed (NPP’s anybody?). This type of question is best not posed at the outset. My experience has been, although not in SA, that the risky options must come as post-approval alternatives, argued on their merits, once the project itself has gained approval.

@ Roger Clifton, on 11 October 2011 at 7:23:
Who said that the world’s largest hole only reaches an intermediate depth? This is news to me. If it is true, then forget what I said about disposal of medium level wastes several hundrerd metres down. Wait a few more years and perhaps get rid of them at the bottom of the ore body. So be it.

I don’t know where the idea came from that the bottom of the world’s largest hole is only part way down, but if that is what you think is true, then let’s leave this part out of the equation. It is interesting to contemplate what this infers… the underground mine having been consumed by an open cut, there is still more? This discussion needs more facts, which I do not have.

The floor of the fairly large open cuts of the Hunter Valley is a sandstone belt 300+ metres thick. If the floor of this new super pit is only half way down, why not finish the job?

OK, in the absence of proper data I withdraw my suggestion that low level waste could be buried a couple of hundred metres down. It is flawed, I agree. Let’s leave it in drums on the surface, for our grand-kids to deal with… in an as-yet unnamed shale deposit.

My point remains… expect changes, most of them for the better both commercially and environmentally. Some changes will be necessary because of flaws in the initial assumptions. Use these changes to drive for positive outcomes.

South Australia has been dealt a huge opportunity with this mine. Please, S-australians, don’t let this opportunity descend into a squabble about pet projects or allow it to be limited because of pre-existing assumptions.

It’s all good news. Grab it, while also improving on its weakest parts (salinity, etc).

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JB the main pipeline that takes water is at the major bend in the River Murray at a place called Morgan, well north of Adelaide. It has a capacity of 66 GL/a and serves Pt Augusta, Woomera, Pt Lincoln, Whyalla and Pt Lincoln when local dams are dry. Those with a long memory will recall the bloke who won a gold medal at the LA Olympics drilled a little hole in this pipe for his ‘crop’.

BHP was prepared to construct 320 km of water pipe from a Whyalla desal to Olympic Dam, but there is universal opposition to the site. Not sure if a desal could connect to the existing river water pipe at Pt Augusta though I recall the late climatologist Stephen Schneider endorsed a solar desal facility there. I still like the idea of an energy park (NP, desal, enrichment) at Ceduna. If we want to connect the eastern grid with WA it’s part way. If that is a growth region with mining and aquaculture it could take population pressure off Adelaide which is a crowded oasis of green surrounded by saltbush. Adelaide needs the 66 GL to flow down river not get diverted.

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JN:
66Gl (or 66GL… refer recent discussion re SI units) is not a large number. Not all that long ago, I was project manager on a new 73Gl/a system.

My point remains that approval of a major project such as this is an opportunity, not a setback. If Ceduna is attractive but needs a bit more work, then it only requires fine tuning to get it over the line. I’m attracted to one dream, you have your own dream. This is great news, because I have no doubt that, behind the scenes, these proposals and many others will be reviewed before the construction contracts are let.

We discussed the Port Augusta salinity issues a few months back and I learned from that discussion. At this stage, it appears that this is the preferred approach, but there will be many more engineers and environmental scientists and other interested parties looking at this right now than there were a year or two ago, simply because the project is so close to approval.

My guess is that hundreds of consent conditions will be varied before completion, for a variety of reasons.

Best of luck with Greater Ceduna. If it comes off, it will be, in part, because it is a better solution for BHP-B, perhaps also for the wider community and the environment.

I, for one, don’t texpect a cross Nullarbor HVDC line to be constructed inside 20 years, but I’d be happy to be wrong on this.

Similarly, I don’t really expect 20GW of NPP’s to be constructed in Australia within 20 years, but I’d love to be wrong on this also.

Both are possible.

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My fear is we will spend a lot of money on X then a few years later we will say we shoulda done Y. For example generating enough power to run the mine but not extra desal or the talked about enrichment plant. Thus while infrastructure is piecemeal it could be forward looking to fit together over time.

To be even more pessimistic I can’t really see OD becoming the world’s largest mine or bigger than Pilbara mines. That won’t be due to opposition but cost. Once some half measures have been taken the project will be permanently bottlenecked then high oil prices will do the rest. .

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Am moving this comment here as per moderators instructions re Geodynamics on :

Cutting Australia’s carbon abatement costs with nuclear power

@z on 11 October 2011 at 10:34 PM said:

“The ‘investment decision’ stuff is just standard listed company language.”

Well they seem to use it plenty… 2010 Annual Report p18 timeline:
http://www.geodynamics.com.au/IRM/Company/ShowPage.aspx?CPID=2277&EID=11787609

“The overarching objective of the current work program is to position the Joint Venture to take the investment decision on a 25 MW commercial scale demonstration plant in 2013. The 25 MW plant is planned for construction and commissioning by 2015 proving EGS can deliver commercial scale power generation.”

By your reasoning then, they won’t be making an “investment decision” they’ll just go ahead anyway. In the process probably burning up taxpayer / shareholder dollars regardless of whether its feasible? So if as you assert:

” ‘investment decision’ stuff is just standard listed company language”

Would you care to decipher “investment decision” into plain English for me. Or are you saying it is meaningless?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_decisions

“Investment decisions are made by investors and investment managers. Investors commonly perform investment analysis by making use of fundamental analysis, technical analysis, screeners and gut feel. Investment decisions are often supported by decision tools. The portfolio theory is often applied to help the investor achieve a satisfactory return compared to the risk taken.”

Gut feel is referred to as “intuition” but also notice the crucial use of the word “and” before that word, as opposed to “or”.

Call me old fashioned, but if I was an investor in Geodynamics I would be expecting the words before “and” (i.e. fundamental analysis, technical analysis, screeners) to be given plenty of weight given the state of the technology, and the fact that I don’t want to see my money disappearing into a km’s deep money pit based on “gut feel” or wishful thinking.
MODERATOR
Thank you bryen. Others please follow suit.

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Olympic Dam mineral deposit actually is “open at depth”. Searching on that string of words will give you thousands of hits, for example (see )

Although it may seem mind-boggling that something so big and valuable should just keep on going past the bottom of the mine, it is actually quite common in mining. When a miner drills and proves up a “reserve”, they are only measuring the body of ore which can be profitably mined at current prices. They will spend much less money exploring the “resource”, which quite likely continues into the unprofitable depths.

If you consider that a certain solute has been precipitated into a pre-existing rock by infusing liquids meeting a chance combination of chemistry, it is almost inevitable that the resulting deposit has a fuzzy, intermittent, or inter-fingered boundary in all directions. Subsequent erosion may create a sharp top boundary, to be subsequently buried. In that instance an ore deposit has a physical top boundary, but its bottom boundary is a financial one.

Although rehabilitation can require a miner to fill in the hole and leave the land in the condition that it was before homo sapiens began to change the landscape, other rehabilitation options include making the hole a useful and attractive waterway and recreation area. That is, until the price rises high enough to justify the expense of digging deeper.

BTW – shale is a good permanent host for fission products. The fission products of the Oklo reactor have been trapped for two billion years in the surrounding shales.

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A new open thread could discuss both the OD expansion and Geodynamics, coincindentally both based on the same slab of granite.
MODERATOR
Barry has said he plans to open a new OT soon.

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@John Bennetts

I don’t really expect 20GW of NPP’s to be constructed in Australia within 20 years, but I’d love to be wrong on this also.

Final US NRC hearing on VC Summer #3 and #4 set to begin tomorrow.

http://www.charlestonbusiness.com/news/41287-nrc-sets-hearing-on-sce-amp-g-application-for-nuclear-license

That makes 4 AP1000 reactors to reach ‘final hearing’ stage in less then 2 months.

It’s not getting 20 built that is the challenge, it’s getting 2 built.

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This is an extract from a press release about a CSP plant. Anybody care to guess the year when it was issued?

Sunlight abounds in the tropics and costs nothing. The sun power plant at Meadi shows plainly that it can be used to the greatest advantage. Any number of plants, or larger, like the one at Meadi can be constructed, and mechanical power, for all purposed without limit can be obtained. By means of this power all our irrigation can be done, artificial fertilizers manufactured to any extent from the nitrogen in the air, artificial ice made, electricity generated and in fact all work now done by the steam and petrol engines, can be done directly by the sun. Eventually, the tropics will become the power station of the world through the development of sun power ….

The year was 1913 and the plant was in Egypt. Technology was tracking parabolic trough.

Click to access solar-energy.pdf

There is something of a lesson here when it comes to the likes of EGS and Geodynamics and that is that assumptions about future deployment and rate of deployment are largely meaningless without real world engineering experience on a significant scale. What is significant scale? Probably something in the range of a few GW capacity or more.

Those who cannot take this on board are simply playing a game of chance with the climate and worse, demanding others do likewise.

This does not mean that EGS is not worthy of R&D, but lets leave faith out of the mix for the sake of the future of the biosphere.

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@ bryen

“Would you care to decipher “investment decision” into plain English for me.”

It simply means a prudent and conservative process driven decision that maybe reversed. They HAVE already taken a decision to proceed, but if any parts of the financial or technical underpinnings of such a decision change then the investment won’t ultimately be made.

In other words, the plans are done, the funds are raised, everything is in place but there is a point of no return still. I don’t think it’s a difficult concept.

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@Z –

I understand it, I was just making sure you do.

So why if the investment decision HAS been taken, is it not in their Annual Report 2010 ? I assume you have a sneak peek at Annual Report 2011 where they will announcing the go ahead confirmation then yes ? seeing as how they already “know” through their crystal ball that the 1MW will justify this investment, contrary to what the 2010 report says.

I look forward to reading the announcement that the decision has been taken. Where is this ?

+ you wrote :

“… but if any parts of the financial or technical underpinnings of such a decision change then the investment won’t ultimately be made.”

er, are you sure you understand this? By your logic an investment decision has been made, which might turn out to be either the choice to invest or not invest depending on whether it all works or not .. hmmm.

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@Z ps: can you point me to the plans that are done for the 25MW et al which includes costings and how they expect it to get to the grid?

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Re prudent investment decisions: I suspect that Z has been drinking out of HD’s well.

Remember the Humpty Dumpty to Alice?

“When I use a word…it means what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

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@ bryen and @ John Bennetts

I don’t think you work with investment people.

Back a few years ago General Motors said they were going ahead with the Chevy Volt. They’d done all the work, even prepared plant tooling, placed orders against battery suppliers, advised dealers of delivery etc. The language that appeared was still a cautious “final investment decision expected”.

“[C]an you point me to the plans that are done for the 25MW et al which includes costings and how they expect it to get to the grid?”

What are you on about? It’s a commercial organsition, not a Government Department. Why don’t you just say you want them to fail? It will be clearer where you stand rather than this feign’d concern.

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Z:

“I don’t think you work with investment people.”

Not like those at Geodynamics, no. We can agree about that.

I suggest that Geodynamics and Z are out of step with ASX Listing Rule 3.1, which states:

“Timely disclosure must be made of information which may affect security values or influence investment decisions…”

See: http://www.asxgroup.com.au/media/PDFs/gn08_continuous_disclosure.pdf

With current share prices of 25 cents at a quarter of the issue price and with options on issue at 70 – 102c and unlikely ever to be redeemed, it is clear that this corporation is not a rising star in the energy firmament. Abandoned sites, impaired assets, unreleased “investment decisions” contrary to listing rules, a history of capital losses… the list is a long one.

It seems that the only positive in all of this is a claim to have “developed” a hole at Habanero.

If it wasn’t for Origin Energy’s farm-in, the cash flows would be all red ink.

No, Z, I don’t work with Geodynamics’ “investment people”. Not now. Not ever.

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Z@Z

There is a commercial EGS plant in Germany (Landau). I’ve actually been there too.

As usual you post unsubstantiated statements. No link, and nothing to back up your statement it is commercially viable (no cost to show it is commercially viable without subsidies or other incentives).

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@z: “What are you on about? It’s a commercial organsition, not a Government Department. Why don’t you just say you want them to fail? It will be clearer where you stand rather than this feign’d concern.”

Well done avoiding all the questions…

Given the amount of gov money they have you;d be forgiven for thinking they were tho, hey? I’d be happy for them to succeed if they can provide me with cost effective electricity at some point in the foreseeable future (including transmission cost).

re: Landau EGS, yes all 2.5 to 3.8MW of it (depending what you read)… and what the cost was to build ?

http://www.egs-energy.com/resource/egs-technology-overview/64-commercialisation.html

http://www.google.org/egs/faq.html

According to wiki, the FIT is 25c/kWh ->

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_geothermal_system

“Germany’s 23 cent/kWh Feed-In Tariff (FIT) for geothermal energy, which has been further raised to 25 cent/kWh by legislation in summer of 2011, has led to a surge in geothermal development, despite Germany’s relatively poor geothermal resource. The Landau partial EGS project is profitable today under the FIT.”

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@Z@Z:
Not only is the latest “quote” not a verbatim copy of my words, but we have been treated to yet another uninformative, unsubstantiated, generally worthless comment.
(Deleted personal comment on another.)

I know that its impolite to target the man rather than that which is written, but there is so little substance to this contributor’s offerings that I despair of seeing substantiation.

When first Z@Z came to BNC, I thought that we had here a new contributor with a fresh perspective. Then I realised that all questions remain unanswered or are actively deflected by moving of targets and by statements that are are either quickly stripped bare by others or just left hanging without factual support. Vague references to unpublished technical documentation, eg of field performance of ST, when challenged, have been deflected to Ariva’s supposed internal data, which I have good reason to believe to be inconclusive in at least the case of the installation at Liddell Power Station in NSW.

If Z@Z is determined to avoid being persuasive, I am left wondering what his objectives are.

Meanwhile, I strongly recommend all readers to consider very carefully anything from this source before relying on it.

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@ John Bennetts

“I have good reason to believe to be inconclusive”

You have no reason to believe anything of the sort. You say yourself you have not seen the data.

You simply dislike the fact you are not privy to commercially sensitive internal information. You can pay for the data like we did. You can take a trip to Bakersfield to see Kimberlina like our team did. You can pay for people to be onsite for 3 months like we did.

Their chosen partner for their product critique in Australia is UQ – who are committed to transparency for Kogan Creek and Solar Dawn.
MODERATOR
If the data is not publicly availabe for analysis and comment it is worthless and can’t be quoted. Further violations will be deleted. As per BNC comments policy, repetitious, unsubstatiated claims may result in you being banned.You are now on moderation.

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just came across this interesting book, can download excerpts:

http://www.radiationandreason.com

“A clear and positive scientific account of the effect of radiation on life”

“The case for a complete change in attitude towards radiation safety is unrelated to the effects of climate change. But the realisation that radiation and nuclear energy are much safer than is usually supposed is of extreme importance to the current discussion of alternatives to fossil fuels and their relative costs. Since the book was published the point has been underlined by events in Japan where 25,000 died from the tsunami but nobody died from radiation (nor will they).”

“Of the safety of radiation and nuclear technology, the author says “I have no axe to grind, I have no links with the industry, I just want to see the truth out there. So many people have been under a misapprehension for so long. The book is based on recent scientific data that is now established, and it brings good news – but are the people of the world ready to re-examine past assumptions in the light of current science? It is important that they do, because, without nuclear energy, the future for mankind looks bleak.””

“Professor Wade Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist at theUniversity of Oxford”

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I think it’s useful to look at Akedemik Lomonosov when comparing nuclear and geothermal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

I must say I was a bit puzzled at first by the Russians’ decicion to deploy the first floating NPP to Kamchatka, where geothermal power should be plentiful. In fact, there is at least one geothermal plant currently in operation there.
However, I believe the Russians to be pragmatic enough in their energy policies to only do it if it makes economical sense. Note that there are no cables, power or communications, between Kamchatka and the Russian mainland.

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@bryen –
I have the book, and very good it is too. But it’s out two years now, and here in Germany facts like these just don’t get any airing in the media, which see is as their job to stir up baseless hysteria.

Obviously they had a field day with Fukushima, and the effects on German energy policy will be felt for decades to come.

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Peter Lang wrote:

All the world’s EGS capacity combined adds up to 5 MWe

Where do you get this number? The resource potential for EGS is estimated to be huge. MIT independent technical panel estimates EGS resource potential from 3-10km depth in US at 13,000 zettajoules (200 ZJ extractable and expandable to 2,000 ZJ with technical improvements). 2008 DOE report raises this number by 1000 zettajoules, and suggests mid-range development potential of 20%, or 28,000 times US annual primary energy use in 2005 (of 100 EJ).

In addition (summarizing from my previous comments in another thread) both these research reports anticipate and detail current technical challenges for existing pilot or research plants (with respect to high pressures, flow short-circuiting, connecting injection and production wells, and seismicity): “the panel did not uncover any major barriers or limitations to the technology” (MIT, p. 1-4). There is an operational EGS power plant in Soultz, France, since 2008. Technical obstacles are not seen to be huge (in either of these two reports), although current funding levels for additional research are very low: leading “to the perception that insurmountable technical problems or limitations exist for EGS” (MIT, p. 1-4). Another research report suggests organized interests from coal industry are leading to greater attention given to CCS than EGS, with further development needed in “lower cost drilling techniques, high-temperature electronics, deep fracture and flow monitoring and detection systems, and computer modeling to optimize heat-extraction strategies and increased power plant energy conversion efficiencies” (p. 2023). Duly noted, there appear to have been some serious recent setbacks with seismicity, and connecting injection and production wells in recent field studies (as anticipated in these papers). I’d be interested to know more about this research. Not sure if this means technical issues are now entirely off track, or development company (speculating on EGS in Australia) has no idea what it’s doing in Cooper Basin (other than raising lots of capital securing geothermal licenses for it’s investors and shareholders).

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