The last Open Thread has screamed past 1000 comments, so time for a new one… (And for those who are wondering why there have been so few posts on BNC recently, well… there are reasons. I will post again soon[ish] to explain more, and discuss the future directions of this blog/website. Meanwhile, on with the productive discussion!)
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.
Brave New Climate 
1,057 replies on “Open Thread 24”
In reply to Gene Preston, who pointed out: “a play on words problem”. If I have written an ambiguity, the error is entirely mine! There has been a lot of noise on this thread, so forgive me if I restate my summary more clearly.
I was trying to point out that across the world, the people who have studied their grid also know the maximum intermittent generation that it can take. Most recently, it is the Germans who have acknowledged that 40% is the maximum nameplate capacity of wind and solar that their part of the European grid can accommodate. As the power injected by the intermittent generators varies between 0% and 40% of demand, the other generators (mostly fossil gas) must vary as fast to compensate for the mismatch between supply and demand. I know that the Australians have said 40% recently, and the Danes said 40% many years before. Certainly other grid operators have said something similar in other countries.
I am using the term, nameplate capacity of a wind system as the power that it could generate if the wind is everywhere running at perfect speed and turbulence, which can happen only rarely. At other times it generates less than the nameplate power, but over a year or so it averages that value down by a capacity factor determined by local weather and each unit’s response to turbulence and wind speeds that are higher and lower than optimum. In discussions elsewhere on BNC, the capacity factor for the (long N-S and thin E-W) Eastern Australian grid has been estimated at 25%. Consequently the maximum power contributed to that grid by wind, averaged over the seasons, can only be 40% multiplied by 25%. Only 10% of the average power used by the most environmentally conscious consumers can come from wind.
If the rest of the grid was supplied only by fossil carbon, it would seem that carbon emissions have been cut back from 100% to 90%. However the improvement would not even be that good. Thermal (steam driven) generators cannot vary as fast as the wind varies, so less efficient open cycle gas turbines must be pulled into operation. The extra gas they use compared to a combined cycle gas turbine must bring the emissions back up above 90%. If the fuel inefficiency is greater than the capacity factor, the emissions will rise above 100%. That is, the use of renewables has not avoided any greenhouse emissions at all.
We should not be surprised if renewables fanatics shout loudly to distract us from the fraud being committed.
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Roger Clifton: 40% X 25% = 10% is too mathematical for most citizens. They can’t handle it. You would be amazed at the level of stupidity that is achieved by the average citizen. Any sign or hint of mathematics is a “stop reading here” sign.
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Roger Clifton — The term ordinarily used is
nameplate rating.
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What is “LOLE”? LOLEMW, etc? Never heard of these terms.
David
AVERAGE VALUES:
PEAK DEM = 2850.000 MW
LOAD ENGY = 15297. GWh
VRBL ENGY = 0. GWh
LOAD FACT = 61.440 %
LOLE = 1.368863 d/y
LOLEMW = 125. MW
LOLH = 9.394175 h/y
LOLH/day = 6.862758 h/d
EUE MWh = 1176. MWh
EUE % = 0.007690 %
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Thanks DBB, but a rating only refers to a single unit. As I see it, the problem is that people can be misled into believing that if 40% of capacity on their grid is wind generators, then 40% of their power bill is generated by wind. We need to be able to quickly disillusion them, with a short, clear assertion like “ah, but that’s only nameplate capacity, the emissions hardly change“. Is there a descriptor that would be more easily understood by honest folk, innocent of jargon ?
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Roger the term 40% wind capacity is misused and misleading. If wind is given a 20% ELCC does your 40% mean that the amount of wind nameplate capacity is five times 40% or 200% of the peak demand? Usually when percentages of wind and capacity factors are used we are only talking about energy and not capacity at all.
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I think “honest folk” is a misnomer. To know what the word “truth” actually means, you have to have taken the prob&stat course. You mean “uneducated folk.” Nothing will ever be understood by them.
I think I have realized why certain persons who are not here cannot be communicated with. I was reading a book on another subject that we will ignore, and came upon this: In Swahili, a sentence can be 2 nouns with no verb and no other words and no special endings. It is like a sermon that I tried to diagram the sentences of. I was 10 years old at the time. I soon realized that the preacher was not speaking in English sentences. I didn’t know the correct word for it at that time, but the correct label is “word salad.” Yet the adults all thought it was a wonderful sermon and I would understand it when I got older. I got older.
Since there are a lot of people who speak nothing but word salad, they can’t imagine that grammar or word order mean anything to you either. So whatever you say they interpret as whatever they already thought. There is no way to communicate with them.
If you want to hear lots of word salad, wander around in a mental hospital. The patients are there because what they say can’t be interpreted by anyone.
Since there is no point in trying to communicate with speakers of word salad, the only thing to do is to wait for evolution to happen. All you have to do is survive the Population Crash. Good luck with that.
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Gene, I don’t use that term, as it is, as you say, misleading. Above, I have been writing under the impression that a grid can only balance a maximum of wind generation that peaks out at 40% of the demand. If those three authorities are saying something else, then please correct me. Otherwise, we ought to disillusion mislead citizens with words to the effect: “ah, but that’s only nameplate capacity, the emissions hardly change”
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Max wind capacity being 40% of the peak demand may be a rule of thumb. That is a lot of wind. I’m not sure ERCOT could sustain that much wind in its system.
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… misled citizens
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The LOLE is loss of load expectation, the sum of daily max LOLP loss of load probability. The average MW loss of load is the LOLEMW and is 125 MW. The individual MW shortages probably go higher than double that value.
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Those numbers are for the 24 bus ieee RTS reliability test system. A made up set of data.
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Gene: “That is a lot of wind”
Yeah, it’s a whole lot of wind for a negligible reduction of emissions…
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This thread, like so many other discussions, has been sidetracked into consideration only of CO2e emissions from electricity generation.
We need to remember that well over half and probably three quarters of the world’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions are from other activities, principally transport and industry.
I despair at the fun and nonsense that is ever-present in discussions of meaningless “renewables” and of unattainable nuclear power and their role in CO2 reduction (or not), but what about the rest?
Where is the good news about emissions from cement and steel production and of the other major non-electricity major emitters?
Where is the good news about emissions from air travel? About heavy road transport? About shipping?
About deforestation or that marvellous acronym LULUCF?
I’m fed up with the quality of glitzy news about battery vehicles, which can be summarised as “too much noise about stuff that is happening too slowly, is costing far too much and which is too resource-constrained”.
What hope is there that the First World will get cracking on these fronts? And how long after the First World gets going will it be before the Third World sees as normal low CO2e approaches to these same issues?
I really think that most of the “progress” that we read of (eg from some of our more prolific contributors on this thread) is mere future vision stuff, crystal ball gazing, and that serious, game-changing progress hasn’t started and shows no sign of starting any day soon.
Meanwhile, the world’s coral reefs are disappearing and all we seem to be able to do is to write stories about how pretty they once were and how sad we are about their passing. Nothing about action to address root causes, just sadness, whatever that might mean.
It’s all window dressing.
So, the current challenge is to demonstrate that I am wrong when I say that we, all 6 or 7 or (soon) 10 billion of us, are doing nothing that will slow the environmental calamity that is in front of us, let alone to reverse the processes that are inexorably changing the climate of our planet and which, just as certainly, will lead to crises of food, energy, water and to social upheaval on a grand scale?
Not Brave New Climate, but wrecked climate and dead oceans.
In the long run, is nuclear power just a distraction? What is the key to this conundrum that we all face?
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It is true that CO2 emitted from electricity generation is only part of the problem. However, generating huge amounts of electricity without CO2 will help to reduce CO2 emissions from other sources. Eliminating CO2 from electricity generation is only the first step.
Huge amounts of CO2-free electricity can be the first step in getting CO2-free transportation. Battery electric vehicles could then be recharged with CO2-free electricity. Or, CO2-free electricity could be used to manufacture a liquid or gaseous fuel to be used for transportation by road vehicles, air planes, or ships.
Powering farm tractors with a CO2-free manufactured fuel could reduce CO2 emissions from agriculture. Electric heating could replace the use of gas for home heating.
I, for one, do not see discussions about making electricity CO2 free as a distraction. I see it as a necessary first step.
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Everybody keeps on keeping on. I have to work to make ends meet and so the emissions Continue. Therefore, i agree that we absolutely must put as much focus on clean transport as in clean eleCtricity and or heat. Either it’s cheaper to charge more expensive batteries because they are like 95% efficient, or it’s cheaper to make liquid fuels from nuclear even though they require more energy input (at only “once through”) and that their end use is only like 30% efficient. It seems the process of making liquid fuels would be more industrial and cost efficient than the process of printing the 2d surfaces of yet to be developed solid state batteries.
But that efficiency thing should really temp people to develop that kind of battery process.
If solar and wind, then batteries are a physical must (because of Eroei issues). But if from nuclear and it’s high Eroei (from MSR or FR types) then liquid fuels, No problem.
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It would be risky at this point to predict what power systems future vehicles will use. There may be a mix of power systems.
The problem with battery electric vehicles is range. In situations where a long range is not needed, perhaps battery electric vehicles will be the most common type. But where range is important, perhaps vehicles running on an artificial fuel, such as ammonia, will prevail. Ultimately both would get their power from nuclear sources.
Airplanes are another matter because it is unlikely that, because of their size and weight, battery electric airplanes would be practical except for some very limited uses. Probably they will have to be run on an artificially manufactured liquid fuel, possibly even hydrogen.
It has been proposed that ocean vessels could have their own nuclear power plants. Because ocean vessel do sink from time to time and because of the possibility of radioactive contamination, it remains to be seen whether nuclear powered ocean vessel will ever be acceptable.
So now we’ve covered transportation that does not emit CO2; time for manufacturing. Some manufacturing processes can use only electricity just fine but smelting iron and and manufacturing concrete are another matter. It may be that iron oxides could be reduced with H2 liberated with nuclear power, but I don’t know enough about iron to know whether that would be practical. H2 can change the properties of metal and that could be a problem.
Whether a way could be found to manufacture concrete without emitting CO2 I don’t know; others will have to address that.
No doubt more emphasis will be put on the above matters AFTER we have abundant, clean, and CO2 free energy available.
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freggersjr: Sunken Nuclear ships are perfectly fine as long as scuba divers don’t try to recover them. The oceans have always contained billions of tons of uranium anyway. A sunken nuclear ship changes nothing. We have a method of extracting [mining] uranium from sea water. The bottom of the ocean was where we put spent fuel before we realized how valuable it is.
There are other ways to make concrete that don’t make CO2. My memory is a bit vague on that. Maybe substitute magnesium for calcium?
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Some of these ideas rely on virtually everybody doing it. What tends to happen in reality is that most corporations will do what’s cheapest, or they will stay with the technology that they’ve already heavily invested in.
With regard to arc furnaces for steel, these will immeasurably assist with recycling of steel but they use won’r obviate the need for carbon reduction of iron ore.
So… the nice maths don’t generally add up, unless we take these technologies as not only viable and available but universally applied, through goodwill or political enforcement. The sums amount to a ‘best case’ scenario with every likely scenario fitting in somewhere beneath that ideal.
But it’s all good grist to the mill. Keep it coming!
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I agree singletonengineer. What do you suggest is the solution and how do we get there?
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Well, one solution at a time.
Cement production does not need to use the horribly inefficient rotating furnaces, if the material is melted in an electric furnace rather than sintered. Even the carbon component from lime-making can be eliminated by recycling the fines from crushed concrete (old concrete is itself a massive waste problem yet to be addressed).
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L.A. fights to become the greenest city in the U.S.
Oil Price
2016 Jun 10
explains how electric car charging stations arose from changing to move efficient street lights. Also mentions other changes to lessen the monopoly of automobiles in transportation.
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Why build skyscrapers out of concrete anyway? Why not use wood which produces carbon negative buildings storing carbon for centuries?
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Steel has ten times the Young’s Modulus of typical timber. Concrete is in-between. Joints in timber are generally much less efficient and more demanding than those in steel or concrete. Deflections such as sway and sag are much more difficult to minimise in timber structures.
I have designed timber structures which are fire rated. One, in particular, had an interesting and short life. It didn’t burn down. Because it was in a hospital, the local fire authorities displayed their ignorance by declaring that it was a safety hazard, so without consulting me, the designer, the hospital’s owners did as directed and demolished an innovative and safe structure and replaced it with a light steel structure which would not perform as well in a fire – it would transmit heat too quickly to the other side, while the dense, thick hardwood timber would char but not burn and would offer safe access and egress for the required couple of hours.
EN, I read what you have written on your site. It is interesting, but not amazing. The 30-floor timber structure has a “concrete core” – as do almost all skyscrapers. Notably, the World Trade Centre towers did not, and this was a factor in the mode of collapse, but that is a discussion for another day.
The core provides stiffness, shear strength and safe fire-resistant spaces for services such as elevators and staircases.
Timber is generally unsuited to construction of more than a few floors. Demonstrations of rare examples are good fun, but are they the future? For what it is worth, my opinion is that ever-taller skyscrapers are yesterday’s fashion rather than tomorrow’s future.
My invalid wife’s experience during a power failure really shocked and scared me. She could not evacuate from the 7th floor. Imagine if we needed to evacuate from the 50th floor via the stairs. She would have been a danger to those behind her.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for concrete and steel to be replaced by timber. It will remain a niche dream in multi-storey construction for generations to come, skyscrapers or no skyscrapers.
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What about termites? Could they be a problem for multi-story wood buildings? In some climates, termites are a serious problem for conventional one and two story houses.
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Termites and borers and rot and fire and … all can be countered, but at a cost and, to a large extent, use of chemical poisons and introduction of a cascade of risks.
High efficiency joints in timber require modern techniques and skilled labour.
Unless pre-treated very specifically, expansion, shrinkage (including drying shrinkage) and weather sealing also require different techniques in timber. They aren’t impossible, but they are different and just as demanding as for double or triple glazed concrete and steel structures. So… learning curve and training.
Maintenance is also very different, but manageable.
But why bother? What is the payoff? Are the embodied CO2 emissions in high rise timber really all that different from the alternatives? If so, where are the figures that support this?
Are well-designed timber structures more or less earthquake resistant than well-designed buildings constructed from conventional materials? It seems to me that design for specified accelerations and displacements can be accommodated quite satisfactorily in various materials.
The question is whether timber high rise construction is more sustainable than alternatives, which must include considering options other than high rise.
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Singleton wrote:
“Are well-designed timber structures more or less earthquake resistant than well-designed buildings constructed from conventional materials?”
It sounds like you might need to check out my page again, and listen to what the architects in wood are actually saying. EG: “Wood weighs half as much as concrete which improves the strength of the building in an earthquake”
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An architect who does not know the difference between weight, mass and strength is not to be trusted. That’s why they engage structural and civil engineers to do the maths.
Thanks for the pretty pictures.
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Thanks for the positive responses to my plea.
We need to think strategically – a strategic plan.
There is no need for electricity to come first as someone said above. Many initiatives can and will run in parallel, with always the focus on reduced global harm.
Equal urgency applies to reduction of industrial emissions? To population issues? To each branch of transport emissions?
The goal must be stated and repeated as clearly as possible: the goal isn’t elimination of coal, or nuclear power, or anything else – it is saving the planet from mankind’s actions. That takes the spotlight off the German trillion euro experiment and the anti-nuke and anti-coal movements and all of the rest, the pro-battery and other single issue discussions.
But how?
I recall a very carefully written piece from Barry a couple of years back that explained why population reduction can have only minimal effect for, say, 100 years. By which time the single goal will have to be substantially achieved. So, population issues are relevant but only longer term. BUT that doesn’t say that a start right now isn’t appropriate – only that substantial positive outcomes will not be seen for generations.
Was there a hint of sentiment-driven “anti nuke” opinion in the comment regarding powering large ships? Rephrase that to “satisfy all safety standards” and proper comparisons become possible.
DBB’s supporting comment about the emergence of energy economics as a separate discipline is a step towards ensuring that we communicate in the same language.
So, in response to Gene’s “How do we get there?”, I suggest:
1. Expand the TCASE series to collect discussions of pathways other than energy. Broaden the focus from
Thinking Critically About Sustainable Energy to
Thinking Critically About a Sustainable Future.
Compare outcomes rather than techniques. Worry less about steps along the way. Avoid “Cheap batteries in 5 years’ time”, “nuclear power is bad”, “public transport is good”, etc, which are rallying cries, not goals.
Find ways to be positive about opportunities, rather than negative about obstructions. I admit that I am guilty of doing this – it can be difficult to avoid rebutting a suggestion point by point when the real objective is to steer towards a sustainable, practical, achievable global future… which must itself be defined in measurable terms that describe limits to sea level rise, ocean acidification and climate change.
Examples: Comparisons of safety, cost and sustainability and each of the other second tier goals must be measured in consistent terms and against consistent standards. Outcomes must be measurable, objective and verifiable.
That boils down to periodic reappraisal of goals and finding ways to periodically review and adjust the means of attainment of those goals.
What is needed most is a strategic plan.
Alternatively, I might be dreaming.
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By “we”, singletonengineer must mean everybody on the surface of the planet, including today’s children who will be alive when the calendar strikes 2100, as well as the yet unborn. A much harder question is to ask, who has enough prominence to stand up and say “we”?
This seems to be a job for a political party, or at least, an independent senator. Both are approachable. However they will inevitably have to use the “rallying calls” as the respective moments arise.
However any spokesman who uses the terms put up by singletonengineer will only get the necessary credibility and audience when a per chance series of climatic disasters hammers a wake-up call into the global public consciousness.
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Singleton, it’s a good thing those architects are not working on their own then!
A recent study by SOM architects and engineers has meanwhile indicated that a 42-storey concrete and glass apartment building the firm completed in its native Chicago in the early 1960s could now be recreated using a timber/concrete hybrid form of construction.
https://theconversation.com/the-skyscrapers-of-the-future-will-be-made-of-wood-42132
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I’m with Roger on this one.
How does a timber/concrete hybrid, at unknown cost, get us measurably closer to a goal?
Thanks, Roger.
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As Roger said above, “Well, one solution at a time.” He contributed the wonderful solution of electric arc furnaces, which I of course heartily endorse. (Whatever that’s worth: I’m the arts / humanities guy here.) I was just contributing another potential solution to another problem listed above: concrete. This reduces concrete used in residential and commercial construction, and improves the CO2 balance of the building by 90%. (nearly 2 minutes in).
We need to house 3 billion people over the next 20 years, which is about 100,000 homes every day.
An average Canadian house, if made from wood, would store 28 tonnes of carbon. But we’re talking smaller eco-apartments here, probably with a concrete core to the apartment, so let’s halve it, just for illustration. 100,000 * 14 tonnes per apartment is 1.4 million tonnes of carbon sequestered per day, or 511 million tonnes per year.
511 million tonnes per year.
Isn’t that worth talking about?
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Singletonengineer has asked us (above) to focus on the big picture and not be distracted by minor issues. A key measure for avoiding distractions would be to ensure that we expend fewer words in riposte than compose the red herring.
Immediately after SE’s call to steer straight, Eclipse then used only 23 of his own words, plus quotes, to distract him. He fell immediately into the trap and expended 34 words in a reply that was full of hooks for further conversation that would divert him from the course of the thread. I have to laugh. I don’t know how many times I have fallen into that trap, myself.
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PS: We emit 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, and that’s what, about 9 billion tons carbon? So depending on the assumptions around the carbon sequestered per apartment, at an assumption of 14 tons per apartment (being conservative) being about 511 million tons of carbon sequestered per year, isn’t that around around 5% of emissions? Or at least the airline industry sequestered?
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Eclipse, wood cannot keep carbon out of the greenhouse for the 10,000 years required. All claims to adequate sequestration are false, and should be called out as such lest the word “sequestration” be used to excuse our emissions.
Above, SE called for a strategy. I had a go. What do you have on the way of strategy ?
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All forms of sequestration are under consideration. Sequestration is a necessary supliment to ceasing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and natural gas. This follows directly from the fact that there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the surficial oceans.
Photosynthesis, together with the proper treatment of the mature plants, principally trees, is one means of sequestration. To repeat myself, when the tree is mature, cut it down. Sure, some of the wood can be used for buildings but when done using the wood, convert it to biochar. Biochar is a good soil amendment and lasts in the ground for a long time. Some of the biochar can be compressed into artificial anthracite, useful for coking and otherwise simply buried deep underground.
I don’t claim that this is inexpensive, just much less so than attempting to adjust to climate change.
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They must not find such hope. The message must be – emit and die.
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DBB says, “sequestration is a necessary supplement to ceasing carbon dioxide emissions”. This despite the numbers not adding up.
Well, let’s consider it after we have managed to cease emissions. Because in the meantime, while the concept retains any practice, no matter how trivial its mass, nor how transient its residence, it will be seized on world-wide with the desperate hope of people who do not want their familiar world to die.
They must not find such hope. The message must be – emit and die.
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Emit and die. Yes, but even with zero emissions still die. Removing the historical excess emissions is a requirement to lowering ocean acidification and substantial sea level rise.
How much of Australia is left after the sea level rise with just the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
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After all this discussion we are no closer to solving this problem. Actually we are farther away from solving it because valuable time has been wasted.
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Okay Gene, do you know of a solution? Do you see a strategy, as Singletonengineer challenged?
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Yes I have a solution. Switch to nuclear power as quickly as possible in all industries. For the Texas grid implement case 8 http://www.egpreston.com/case8.txt which is by far the lowest cost plan even when the highest nuclear plant cost estimates are used. Battery storage is not needed. The plan also fits beautifully with home solar and home microgrids see http://egpreston.com/PrestonFeb2016.pdf and go to the last page. People drive EVs exclusively. As far as heavy shipping goes switch ships to nuclear power. Arm all ships with self defense weapons to fight off terrorists. For airplanes, manufacture a CO2 neutral fuel such as the Navy is planning to do for their carriers, i.e. make jet fuel from sea water. They extract CO2 from sea water and use H to remove the O2 and make a hydrocarbon fuel. This is being tested now and is believed to be more economical than fuel carrier ships that have to deliver jet fuel out in the middle of the ocean. Just make your jet fuel on board the nuclear powered aircraft carrier. For small islands like Hawaii and even possibly the UK, contract with the Russians for a small 70 MW ship to reside in your harbor and provide round the clock power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_floating_nuclear_power_station and there are many other links. The IFR should be revived. New molten salt thorium reactors should be developed. Safe handling and disposal of nuclear waste needs to proceed. And most importantly a world wide agreement by all countries using nuclear power needs to be implemented and that agreement needs to have inspections and have economic and possibly military consequences. Continue research on clean nuclear such as the boron nuclear that Tri Alpha is working on in which there are no waste products and the fuel is simply the borax used in your kitchen. With advanced nuclear we will be ready to solve all out problems with energy and food (population continues to be a problem) and solving the Earth’s climate change problem as well as have the energy to deal with rising oceans and furthermore will now be in a good position to begin thinking about a lot more human travel in our solar system and even beyond. That’s my vision.
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New Energy [Electricity] Outlook 2016 from Bloomberg New Energy Finance
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/we-ve-almost-reached-peak-fossil-fuels-for-electricity
The bad news is that, despite a BNEF forecast of $10tr investment in low-carbon electricity to 2040, another $5tr will still be required to meet the target of keeping temperature rises below 2 degrees C. The good news is that the BNEF projections are based on existing government policies and technology trends without any significant technological breakthroughs. So there is still time and opportunity to make it happen.
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There are a number of sunken nuclear submarines. The reactors do not leak.
The direct electrolytic reduction of iron, like aluminum, is quite feasible. It’s just not as cheap as reduction using carbon.
We have to get through the next 100 years first. Turning cities into large standing inventories of carbon certainly can’t hurt.
The grid of even the island of Oahu is too small to support a conventional NPP, but NuScales would be just about perfect. The cost of power would probably drop by half, all zero-emission.
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Smelting iron = use hydrogen as reductant, not carbon.
Wood skyscrapers can be recycled into biogas / jet fuel after their useful lifetime = carbon neutral jet fuel.
Other solutions discussed at The Breakthrough Institute under issues.
http://thebreakthrough.org/issues
General principles (that can be met by multiple existing and or developing technologies without getting too specific) are presented under the EcoModernist Manifesto.
http://www.ecomodernism.org/
IF worst comes to worst, we’ll dump sulfur into the upper atmosphere and put some giant sunglasses on this planet, bleaching the sky white for who knows how many generations? We’re heading in that direction, because the average Aussie is still anti nuclear.
Not everyone blogs. Not everyone cares. Not everyone will do the hard work to understand nuclear power. But they might be subjectively influenced if they see the message enough. If they hear other people saying “Nuclear waste = fuel”. If they hear nuclear power is safe. If they see posters up on their local workplace notice board, or Facebook memes that are funny and trendy and well designed.
We need to get meme’s out there, simple soundbytes that the average Aussie can understand. Posters with tear off tabs that guide them to a central layman’s guide to nuclear power acting as a basic Q&A website. It should also have trendy, copyable Facebook memes at the top of every Answer page. Funny stuff. Cool stuff. Basic stuff.
It should have cool posters we can download, printout, and stick up in the real world, at work, in libraries, anywhere there are public notice boards.
We need to change public opinion on nuclear power now, and trust that the marketplace will come up with some of the other solutions through clever technology and their own memes & solutions getting out there. But the biggest is shutting down coal, and that requires nuclear, the very thing most Aussies I talk to say is too dangerous, too expensive, too unnecessary because “Aren’t we just going to use wind and solar?”
We need to be contributing to how to explain this stuff to the average Aussie. Or, we can all repeatedly lecture Peter Davies on this thread while the world burns.
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Eclipse,
At one time I had very strong reservations about nuclear power although I was never 100% opposed to it. I was especially concerned about nuclear waste and accidents. Then, I took a 5500 mile motorcycle trip. I noticed wind farms with stationary blades. Then I belatedly began to wonder whether the intermittent nature of wind and solar power had been given adequate consideration. After countless hours of study I decided that it had not been. I should have realized that years sooner since I have learned that public opinion and “experts” are not infrequently wrong.
Next, I spent countless hours studying nuclear power and discovered the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) and the integral fast reactor (IFR). Although I’m not too happy with our pressurized water reactors (they are inherently dangerous, require multiple levels of safety devices to make them safe, and use the nuclear fuel very inefficiently), surely they are better than global warming. However, I think that with adequate R & D, better nuclear technologies can be prepared for implementation.
I suppose the reason I changed my mind is that I am very eccentric. I make a point of learning both sides of issues, including sides with which I expect to disagree. It appears that most people don’t do that and once they have made up their minds they strongly resist changing them.
Repetition seems to be an effective way to change people’s minds. I’d swear that if people heard 10,000 times that the moon is made of green cheese that they’d believe it. It might help to get some states to commit themselves to using only wind and solar power then let the lights go out.
At this time, I think that finding effective ways to change public opinion about nuclear power may actually be more important than doing more nuclear R & D. Experts at influencing public opinion, including advertising experts and psychologists, should become involved. Focus groups should be used to test the effectiveness of different arguments which then can be used.
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Eclipse you are on the right track. Its those gaps in wind production that are a huge problem. The rest of the comments are on track for nuclear power. Processing waste is an already solved engineering problem if you get the politicians and lawyers out of the way.
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Gene Preston,
About a year ago I was dismayed when PBS asserted that there was no solution for nuclear waste. I sent them a letter stating that I would not contribute to them unless they were honest and corrected that statement. In addition, I told them that most nuclear waste was not really waste but rather was unused fuel resulting from the inefficiency of our current nuclear reactor technology and fuel cycle. I also found their web site and learned that many other viewers had also called that error to their attention.
Although there is much I like about PBS, there are subjects on which they show clear bias and they are clearly biased against nuclear power. Perhaps more letters would correct that.
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I must have missed that show. Maybe it didn’t show here. I agree we must keep correcting mis information which seems to be rampant these days.
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According to the Wikipedia article on Pliocene climate during the mid-Pliocene atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were about the same as this year’s and the sea level was 25 meters higher.
Much of Sydney will need houseboats.
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Fred Eggers — The Westinghouse AP1000 is walk away safe for 72 hours. The forthcoming Nuscale modules are designed to be walk away safe indefinitely.
Some of the proposed molten salt designs are to be that safe as well.
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David Benson,
I am familiar with the passive emergency cooling of the Westinghouse AP1000 and the safer nature of molten salt reactors, including the LFTR. I’m inclined to favor molten salt reactors because they don’t need an emergency cooling system. However, we are, at least temporarily, stuck with pressurized water reactors at least in part because of bad decisions made a few decades ago.
The fact that a technology is inherently dangerous does not necessarily make it dangerous in practice. For example, air travel is inherently dangerous yet in practice, because of numerous safeguards, it has been made very safe. The same is true with pressurized water reactors. However, I would prefer nuclear technologies which do not depend on elaborate and expensive precautions to be safe and which would not become unsafe because of a human failing. I think that metallic salt reactors qualify.
The most reasonable approach seems to be to expand our current safest nuclear technology as rapidly as possible while doing R & D to prepare better nuclear technologies for implementation. Then, eventually better nuclear technologies would replace older nuclear technologies as they reach the end of their lives.
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freggersjr: Generation 2 nuclear is inherently safe. We have made it way too safe, so safe that it is much more expensive than it should be. See:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter8.html
Being alive is inherently dangerous. Some math is necessary. If you can’t handle a little math, that is a problem. If you want to be really safe, you will have to be dead. There is no more risk once you are dead.
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Edward Greisch,
You may be surprised to learn that I have studied risk management and the calculations associated with it. I also have studied mathematics through integral calculus, and statistics. Although I am not a scientist or engineer, at the college level I’ve had 2 years of physics, 1 year of chemistry, and 1 year of zoology. So, I really do think that I am prepared to understand such things. Moreover, without an understanding of such subjects, one cannot claim to have a liberal education. They are just as important as history, philosophy, economics, psychology, etc.
I don’t see something as INHERENTLY safe if it requires an emergency cooling system, especially if that emergency cooling system requires power to operate it. To get the public to accept nuclear power will be much easier if it is walk-away safe. And, without the public’s acceptance, a rapid expansion of nuclear power is unlikely to occur before it is too late. Actually, it may already be too late. Probably all we can do now is minimize the damage to some degree.
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Emergency cooling system is nice for keeping the core intact, but at 3 mile island, the core melted and nobody died and nobody was even injured. That is inherently safe. The containment building did its job. Gen 2 reactors have a negative void coefficient.
Soviet reactors were Gen 1 and not inherently safe. They had a positive void coefficient and no containment building. That means the operators could do something that caused damage outside of the reactor.
I repeat: Gen 2 reactors are too safe. Zero people have died from commercial nuclear power in the US. There needs to be at least a few hundred deaths to take the price down to a competitive level. Remember, coal kills 26000 Americans every year and 3 million worldwide per year. The safety level is right when the deaths from each are equal. Wind kills in the neighborhood of 100 per year.
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk
Coal is the one that is too dangerous.
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Edward Kreisch,
You wrote, “The safety level is right when the deaths from each are equal.”
Not really; that is not the way the public sees it. The public is more concerned with HOW people die than with how many die. The nightclub incident in Florida was a real tragedy of course, but far more people are killed in road accidents so rationally, people would see that as a greater tragedy.
Of course coal is dangerous, but people become far more upset when a large number of people are killed at one time than when the deaths occur gradually.
If my information is correct, and I’m not sure that it is, 3 mile island would have been worse if they had not been able to get the cooling system to work at all. As it was, there was only a partial melt down because they did get the cooling system working, but late, so the disaster was only to the investors. Whether a generation II pressurized water reactor could act the way the Fukushima boiling water reactors acted I’m not sure. That sort of information is not covered by the media and ferreting it out is not an easy thing to do.
The Chernobyl accident is irrelevant for a number of reasons which are obvious to anyone who understands it.
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““Not really; that is not the way the public sees it. The public is more concerned with HOW people die than with how many die”
Yes, I am well aware that the public is just plain stupid. It is math IQ that they lack. The public schools have a national scandal: a lot of the teachers cannot do all of the math courses taught in high school.
OK, coal kills a hundred to 400 times as many people with radiation as nuclear does. Few people know that coal contains uranium.
The same regulations applied to both coal and nuclear would force coal to shut down immediately with no hope of recovery. These rules would also lower the price of nuclear because nuclear is over-regulated now.
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Edward Kreisch,
The way math is taught is often incompetent. I remember a calculus course I took at the University of Minnesota in the late 1950s. There were two methods of calculating the volume enclosed by a rotated curve. The instructor was unable to explain why one method was the one to use; he simply said “Do it this way.”. The calculus text book was not written to be understood as a stand-alone source. The chairman of the math department also taught and he would ridicule students for asking questions, sometimes by saying, “You should have learned that in the previous course.”. Probably it would no longer be possible for an instructor to get away with that. Whether math is taught in a more competent manner now I don’t know.
A teacher who is highly competent at understanding math is not necessarily competent at teaching it. Considering how long math has been around one would think that by now good teaching methods would have been developed.
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“Considering how long math has been around one would think that by now good teaching methods would have been developed.”
https://www.khanacademy.org/
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Addressing climate change could be more costly than thought
Oil Price
no date
states that a Cambridge University Professor Kelly puts the cost at about US $16 trillion. He then, naively in my opinion, questions whether it is worth it. Clearly he has not read “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas.
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Fred Eggers — Look into the Nuscale unit. It is a PWR without a emergency cooling system, just a big bathtub of water. Clever, I think.
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David Benson,
I’ll have to read more about it but just from glancing at the information on the company’s website it looks clever and may have possibilities. It could be especially useful where small amounts of power are required in areas where connecting to the grid would not be practical. Of course it is too soon to know whether it will pan out but it does look promising.
Frank Eggers
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Fred Eggers — Nuscale has a contract for a dozen modules to power the Idaho Falls area when the utilities there turn off their coal burners in 2025. Notice the utilities are not depending upon Wyoming wind power although they might be going to buy some as the transmission line will go nearby.
The physics which gives rise to some form of emergency cooling is the use of oxides for nuclear fuel elements. Oxides are not thermally conductive so become very hot, requiring cooling to avoid melting the zirconium pipe holding the fuel elements. So both pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors require some form of emergency cooling.
However, a company recently announced metal fuel elements made of a uranium – zirconium alloy. As metal is a good heat conductor the need for emergency cooling is lessened and possibly removed.
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A company called Numec near Pittsburg, PA was in the business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. I almost took a job there in 1968, designing a nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker.
We don’t recycle nuclear fuel because it is valuable and people steal it. The place it went that it wasn’t supposed to go to was Israel.
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Sorry, no. Cooling is required because of the afterheat of radioactive fission products, not their chemical form. You can get away without “emergency” cooling of e.g. molten-salt reactors because air cooling of the dump tanks is sufficient given their high temperature.
The lack of conductivity of an oxide fuel pellet causes the center to heat up, not the periphery. When the reaction shuts down the power output of a pellet drops to 1% of its operational value within seconds. The thermal gradient and peak pellet temperature drops with it. What matters for fuel damage is mostly the temperature at the cladding. This has bupkis to do with the chemical form of the fissile fuel. Oxide fuel limits the specific power output in operation (to avoid melting the centers of pellets), not shutdown.
Lightbridge is testing metal fuel which is much denser than oxide, allowing greater water space and flow through the fuel bundles and thus greater heat removal and reactor heat output. The heat output after SCRAM will be proportional to the inventory of short-lived fission products, so it will scale with the recent core power output. The core cooling will have to cope with the afterheat, regardless of what it is. The major limit for post-SCRAM management will be the heat-removal systems, not the specifics of the fuel.
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Engineer-Poet — Perhaps I misunderstand but I don’t think so. Since metal is thermally conductive the metal fuel element never becomes as hot as the oxide form, on average through the fuel element, during normal operation. It therefore has less heat to be removed during an emergency shutdown.
The only criterion is avoiding the melting of the zirconium pipe enclosing the fuel elements. Lightbridge seems to have a solution.
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No, we don’t need carbon to make steel from iron ore. Regulars will remember the discussion on the electrolysis of uranium metal from a chloride melt, here on BNC. In a similar process, flakes of iron metal could be made to deposit on the cathode in the electrolysis of iron chloride.
An electrolytic process that started with iron II chloride (FeCl2, MP 620° C) would have a problematic anode product. Hot chlorine gas, or worse, FeCl3 (BP 315° C), both of which are ferociously corrosive. However, if (dry!) iron ore fines could be induced to dissolve sufficiently in the chloride, oxygen would be preferentially given off at the anode. Otherwise, iron oxide ore floating on the iron chloride would present an interface for the free chlorine to exchange with oxygen, a more tractable byproduct.
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Aluminum (aluminium?) is also made by using electrolysis to reduce it from its oxide. Presumably any metallic oxide could be reduced by electrolysis, at least in theory. It would be interesting to compare the cost of carbon-reduced iron oxide with the cost of electrolytically-reduced iron oxide. Of course cost is not the only consideration.
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Ironically, many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by the global aluminium industry over many decades to try to invent a way to reduce aluminium by other than electricity – using carbon reduction methods like blast furnaces. None of those efforts has succeeded. So they are stuck with expensive dry electrolysis. They have been doing this knowing that aluminium production would be much cheaper if they can make a breakthrough.
I’m not advocating this, of course, just pointing out the significance of the money side of the equation. Just because a technology is viable doesn’t mean it will be taken up. I believe this will be the case for global iron production for a long time to come. The industry will stay with what it knows best and what is cheapest – short of being forced to change.
Many of these debates point out neat technical solutions that may be viable, but it is more normally economics and politics and what is decided it corporate boardrooms that decides what actually happens in real life.
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Cost of electrolytic iron? Having twice the atomic mass and the same initial oxidation state (+3), the ballpark would seem to start at half the price of aluminium at 1600 $/t. The lower ionization energy means it must be cheaper still, so – less than 800 $/t.
The hall-heroult process for aluminum uses a sacrificial carbon anode, so it too, needs re-examining.
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I believe the carbon anode problem has finally been technically overcome. It isn’t in production owing to cost.
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“it is more normally economics and politics and what is decided in corporate boardrooms that decides what actually happens in real life”
Yes, so far. “Normally” is going to change as reality changes around us. But changing the norms will involve economics, politics, law, blockades, onging casualty lists and the evolution of public opinion.
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On a side issue, some of my more enthusiastic renewable energy advocates believe that if the cost of solar pv keeps dropping the way it has been there will come a day pretty soon when aluminium can be smelted using solar pv as the power source. The mind boggles. It’s not worth going into these impossible mathematics – millions of panels etc – it’s more of an illustration of the levels of faith and wishful thinking that drive many advocates’ thinking.
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Technical solutions must be ready by the time the whistle blows, and sites like this can point out which concepts deserve research funds and which of them are a waste of time. – Such as baseload solar powering heavy industry !
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Chris Harries,
Not only that, but if a process is driven by PV power, the capacity will have to be much greater because it cannot be run at all times. That is a problem that the anti-nuclear crowd doesn’t seem to understand.
Another good example would be sea water desalination driven by PV power. Because the PV power would be available only about 20% of the time (+ or -), the capacity of the desalination plant would have to be about FIVE TIMES greater thereby greatly increasing investment costs. In remote areas by the sea where no other power is available, powering a sea water desalination plant with PV power might be a reasonable thing to do but in general it would be too expensive.
I’m not a scientist, but at least I can think clearly and I do understand economics and accounting.
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Freggersjr, clear thinking is all we could hope for, and you’re doing fine.
My own sentiment is to agree with Gene (above), that by just by talking about intermittent power, we are wasting time on our journey towards a brave new climate.
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Roger Clifton,
After reading an article linked to by Gene on changing the minds of people, I shall try a different approach. Instead of knocking renewables, I shall point out the advantages of nuclear power, the main one being that it can provide continuous power and can be rapidly deployed as France did in only 15 years when they went from 0% nuclear to 80% nuclear for electricity in only 15 years. There are other positive things to point out about nuclear power.
Much of the battle is about human psychology and I think that we have not given that the consideration that we should have. We have acted on the assumption that people can be relied upon to make objective decisions based on facts and that just is not true for many people.
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Wooden skyscrapers — coming to a city near you
Scientific American
2016 Jun 16
“A new type in laminated wood is as strong and fire-resistant as steel and concrete.”
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Freggers, may I recommend you peruse the discussion on SMRs, started by DBB: http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/405/smr-small-modular-reactors
SMR designs are capable of mass production for world-wide deployment faster than France. The “Global Emergency” that would invoke that is yet to happen, but the first SMRs will be ready for purchase off-the-shelf in 2025 or so.
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New approach to building efficient thermoelectric nanomaterials
Science Daily
2016 Jun 16
Usually when I read similar reports of materials scientific research I conclude that the advance will not scale beyond the laboratory. But this one well may. So a considerable portion of waste heat, say 5%, might well be economically converted into useful amounts of electricity.
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DBB, don’t leave us hanging with such news items. Give us hyperlinks.
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Engineer-Poet — There is no reasonable way to provide links from this mobile device. I always provide enough information that a search can precisely locate the article.
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It’s hard to make a link on his (DBB’s) device. But many of us are blocked from watching a video anyway – even if we have the time and patience. (Dammit, it tries to give me homework!) I for one would appreciate a single sentence sketching the important bit. Then we could respond to the essence of his (in this case, DBB’s) thought.
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Ah ha! Apparently I’m not the only one who prefers to read articles instead of watching videos because of the inordinate amount of time required to watch videos. The lengthy cutsy introductions on videos add to the viewing time requirements.
There are preferred learning modes. Some us learn most effectively by reading.
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The Scientific American bit about wood skyscrapers is a short video without advertising. Some of the proposed buildings have already had stills presented by Eclipse Now.
The Science Daily article is to be read. It is about adding sulfur to a standard thermoelectric compound to improve efficiency. I was impressed that it works in bulk and not just at the nanoscale.
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DBB, if you can’t copy and paste a URL, you need a new interface.
I refuse to watch videos. I seldom listen to podcasts either. They are both wastes of time compared to transcripts, and there is no such thing as a well-referenced version of video or audio.
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DBB spoke of an improvement to thermoelectric compounds. Thermoelectric compounds are heat engines and obey the laws of thermodynamics, so there is little chance of them competing with the centuries of development into steam and refrigeration. Of course, they will always have specialist applications, such as cooling down a particular electronic component on a crowded motherboard, or providing local power for a medical prosthesis. The holy Grail for geothermal believers, who kid themselves about the laws of thermodynamics, a thermoelectric generator would at least be robust compared to a circulating fluid. They have negligible chance of it delivering useful amounts of electricity compared to a steam or Freon heat engine of the same heat throughput.
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Er, perhaps I should have said, how did you get the “5%” ?
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@DBB:
Strength is nowhere near as important as Young’s Modulus of Elasticity when it comes to deflections, vibrations and swaying in tall buildings. As I stated previously, the YM of timber is about one tenth that of steel. Improving it incrementally doesn’t alter the general truth.
It is the combination of Young’s Modulus and the cross-section area of the materials in a tall structure which determine whether or not the occupants are thrown off their feet or made sea-sick or just uncomfortable during high winds and other lateral loads, although it is possible to use smartly placed loads high up in a structure, eg fire fighting water tanks mounted on springs, to dampen specific harmonic frequencies. See: Centrepoint Tower in Sydney, designed circa 1970, which has such a damping system.
I suggest that DBB visit his civil engineering associates and discuss this with them before delving too far into the merits or otherwise of tall wooden structures.
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I suggest that singletonengineer ponder what moving the bulk of the structural strength of a building from the core to the skin does for the overall stiffness, and that we otherwise move this off-topic discussion to some other forum.
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Thinking wooden buildings are going to reduce CO2 is about as useful as the suggestion for putting bricks in a toilet to solve a water shortage problem. We need ideas that are many orders of magnitude larger in their impact.
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That is the problem with many suggestions to reduce CO2 emissions. Interfaith Power and Light pushes CFLs to reduce CO2 emissions. I think that replacing incandescent lights with CFLs is a good idea but on a global basis the difference it will make is trivial.
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Can’t the same be said of almost any initiative?
Surely its the sum of everything that gets done that makes the difference?
I think the day of the big king hit that fixes everything, under the prevailing circumstances, is a bit old fashioned.
That’s not to say that some initiatives may have more impact than others. But changing nearly all the light bulbs in the world has had the effect of turning off gigawatts of unnecessary power supply.
“The best energy of all is the energy that we don’t have to use.”
(Not saying that this is the only way.)
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Chris Harries says that any (reduction) initiative starts small. We should not ridicule small reductions such as the light bulbs Freggers points to.
But any attention spent on token reductions is attention wasted. They are at best, comforts – distractions for worried people. Worse, they are being used as excuses for inaction.
The token gesture that Freggers is referring to is a church acting on the parable of the widow’s farthing. As if it is the spirit of it that counts.
We should be more concerned at the carbon decision makers who –
“put a penny in the plate and take a pound note out,
and shed a conscience stricken tear,
in case they are found out”
(the village burglar, a Longfellow parody)
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Hey I think that’s a little unfair, Roger. The net effect of multiple energy conservation efforts have been very considerable, vying with major projects in terms energy quantities. Anything but token.
However, in so saying, I don’t preclude the need for large scale centralised projects either. And never have.
I do understand the frustration caused by lack technical understanding in the public sphere but I don’t think these debates, nor should this site, become so one-eyed as to dismiss everything out of hand except for a particular favoured technology.
As far as I’m concerned it’s all grist to the mill.
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Compact florescent lightbulbs [CFLs] and low flush toilets are diversionary tactics, like faking left and moving right. They make no difference but they make a lot of people annoyed and they make a lot more people think that something is being done. Nothing is being done.
To cut CO2 production, you replace coal and natural gas with nuclear. Wind and solar are decorations, not sources of energy. Wind and solar should be ridiculed. Roger Clifton: CFLs royally deserve to be ridiculed.
To save water, you cut irrigation water to farmers, forcing farmers to water each plant rather than whole fields. 80% of fresh water goes to irrigation. Quit allowing irrigation water evaporate. Even fresh water other than rain carries some salt into the fields, causing the ground to become too salty in half a century. Where farmers pump their own well water, regulation is difficult. Low flush toilets royally deserve to be ridiculed as thrones that don’t work.
Notice that the problem once again is innumeracy on the part of the masses and the politicians. Innumeracy also has a lot to do with fear of nuclear power.
Chris Harries: The truth is that there is only one technology that is available right now that can make a difference right now, and that is nuclear fission. Your minor savings make no difference. Jevons Paradox. You have to make a 95% savings in electric power or forget it.
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Edward, you are essentially saying that there is no place for energy demand management at all… the only way forward is to focus on the supply side of the energy equation.
I understand the potential for nuclear fission, to supply society’s needs, but rejecting out of hand what most energy experts accept with regard to demand management technologies looks like an extremist view and does a lot of harm to the nuclear cause. Putting forward extreme views like this tends to push people away from the cause, not endear them to it.
Jevon’s Paradox is a real phenomenon and it should guide experts as to the limits of demand management (no technology comes without some baggage) but it doesn’t knock on the head all demand management technologies and efforts, some of which work brilliantly.
This doesn’t diminish the relevance of importance of other efforts. The energy debate is far too built around single minded fanaticism… a point that nuclear enthusiasts should be very aware of.
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Chris Harries: Demand management is just an excuse to blame the victim. Blaming the victim diverts attention from the criminal. The criminal is King Coal.
Of course the electric [and coal and natural gas] companies want to blame the victim. They like to send accusing letters to customers.
Chris Harries: Your view is the extreme view. Are you working for the the electric company or the fossil fuel company?
“Galactic-Scale Energy | Do the Math
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an impressive and sustained growth in the scale of energy consumption by human civilization. Plotting data from the Energy Information Agency on U.S. energy use since 1650 (1635-1945, 1949-2009, including wood, biomass, fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, etc.) shows a remarkably steady growth trajectory, characterized by an annual growth rate of 2.9% (see figure). It is important to understand the future trajectory of energy growth because governments and organizations everywhere make assumptions based on the expectation that the growth trend will continue as it has for centuries—and a look at the figure suggests that this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. (See this update for nuances.)
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/does-the-logistic-shoe-fit/
Total U.S. Energy consumption in all forms since 1650. The vertical scale is logarithmic, so that an exponential curve resulting from a constant growth rate appears as a straight line. The red line corresponds to an annual growth rate of 2.9%. Data source: EIA.”
Demand management has not changed the 2.9% per year rate enough to be detected. Demand management is a scam/sham. The update is about the logistics curve, not CFLs.
There is nothing extremist about nuclear power.
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Edward,
I often refer people to this site for the good information that it contains, but I do add a rider: That some of the contributors have become so bitter and twisted by the energy debate that they reject out of hand everything except nuclear fission. I advise them not to be put off by that fanaticism and learn about the issues with a well grounded perspective.
What more can I say? When somebody dumps on all demand management as if it’s a conspiracy or heresy, sorry I just can’t take them seriously. Fortunately I’m aware that there are wiser heads around.
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Chris Harries appears to say that demand management contributes significantly to carbon reduction.
Six billion people aspire to consume power on the same scale that this one billion do. At the same time, we must eliminate (not just reduce) carbon emissions. To me, that is non-negotiable, so by all means call me one-eyed.
And by all means suggest a method of doing both other than nuclear. Conservation? – no arithmetic can conserve enough of my consumption to provide for seven. On the scale required, energy conservation is a mere token achieving little more than an excuse for the remaining emissions.
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You need to listen Roger. I’m not saying it’s an either / or.
There are multifold ways to reduce carbon emissions, many of them related to farm management and city planning and a multitude of other areas. Many serious scientists are working on all of these faculties. They aren’t nutters.
Energy demand management is another element in that matrix of approaches. It has it’s place.
To totally discount any feasible action is not a good way to excite people about your project. It’s a turn off. When I see advocates do that it signals to me that they must be becoming unhinged.
Don’t take that personally, Roger. As you know there are many irrational devotees in the energy scene. My advice is to you is not to become one of them.
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Yes, the 2015 Paris Meeting agreed to “net zero emissions” by 2100. In the absence of any credible sequestration capability, achieving this goal implies eliminating all use of fossil carbon. That doesn’t leave room for “reductions”, as zero can never be reached by reducing by a factor (such as 0.9), no matter how many times you reduce.
On the way, something like a carbon tax would transmit a price pressure through the carbon-fueled market. Demand reduction would follow in consequence, quietly, a transient behaviour on the way to complete decarbonisation. Not “instead of”, which is real risk while conservation is seen as an alternative to non-carbon power.
I don’t mean to be personal, either. But we do need to point out to each other when we are wasting time and breath on issues that have already been dismissed.
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Chris Harries: You are not one of the wiser heads. Get serious. As long as you keep pedaling lightbulbs and wind, too many people will say that nuclear is too dangerous and nothing will get done.
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Edward, you obviously don’t read my posts on energy issues. I challenge anyone out there who deserves to be challenged.
I’ve posted many times on many blogs on the subject of the hard limits of renewable energy and the fact that its virtues are over-sold. And also a lot of comment on the causes of that particular social pathology.
But you may be confusing me with someone else… I don’t know. Just please be careful with reckless labelling.
Again, I think some nuclear advocates do a lot of harm to their credibility by aggressively pushing people away. I’ve repeatedly argued in environmental circles the case for new nuclear technology to be on the table when discussing the urgency of climate change.
Many commentators have little knowledge of changing nuclear technology and are incipiently mistrustful, as you would know. If you want to help build trust it’s best not to be rude to those who engage.
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You do make a valid point. But IPL also ignores things which would make a far greater difference in CO2 emissions and doesn’t seem to understand that it will be necessary for all countries of significant size to reduce emissions of CO2.
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http://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/stations/canary-wharf/
As a carbon-neutral building material, wood has also been used to provide the framework for the 310m long roof over the roof garden of the new Crossrail Canary Wharf station in London. It only took 6 months to build and used 1000 cubic metres of wood.
And when you are spending $14bn on a new underground railway line through central London, you have to make at least one of the stations a talking point.
They also had to build a lot of the station under water, just to make life more interesting.
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@freggersjr
A few years ago 20% of the UK and USA electricity supply went on lighting. CFL and more especially LED bulbs eliminate most of that requirement.
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The article suggests 5%.
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That’s the kind of thing that needs an infographic, something like a stacked-bar graph with a tiny little sliver at the top representing how much CO2 CFLs can save, and a huge area showing the total of what needs to be done.
Ever notice that this sort of salami tactic is employed across the board? While attention is aimed at “renewable electricity”, space heat, DHW, industrial energy and motor and aviation fuels are ignored. The oil and gas companies are laughing all the way to the bank, because the “environmentalists” have so completely diverted attention from those major items that it will take years just to get them back into the public consciousness.
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As I think I wrote earlier, the latest power plan from the Northwest Power & Conservation Council specifies no more generators, specifically wind turbines, and a 15% improvement in effiency. That’s a lot and while I am dubious about such a large improvement in only 5 years, BPA is obligated to try so probably the big customer utilities will try as well.
This seems to mean no more wind farms over this way so Avista Utilities won’t have to buy an OCGT as balancing agent.
A great many small improvements have led to basically flat electricity demand in 2015, aggregated across the USA. The Northwest Power & Conservation Council seems to believe more can be done.
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@E-P:
As an experienced structural design engineer whose first years after graduation were spent designing multi-storey public buildings such as hospitals as leader of the design team. I don’t need to “ponder” what redistribution of load carrying members in a structure achieves. Those techniques are not only essential for tall buildings – they are also a very old story. I have designed structures in steel, concrete, timber, rammed earth, masonry and aluminium frames. Materials and structures were my early professional life and I never experienced a failure. Never a need for re-work or redesign mid-construction. So, please hold the armchair advice – it isn’t needed.
Regarding strong external skins, the World Trade Centre buildings, at 100+ stories tall, had extremely strong exterior members – in effect, a square sheath from ground to top. They were so strong and stiff that they influenced the mode of collapse, but that is a story for another day.
I usually welcome E-P’s comments, but in this instance he has missed the point, which is that – and I repeat – structural stiffness and in particular the Young’s Modulus of Elasticity of the framing elements is an important issue when it comes to deflections. Timber’s YM, even when enhanced by manufacture into plywood, impregnation with resins, etc, is nowhere near that of steel or even of concrete.
I don’t deny that tall-ish structures constructed from timber products are possible, but how good are they really? That which has been presented here in no way addresses cost, constructability, durability or serviceability. They are experimental, display structures which are pretty, interesting and innovative, even elegant but they will not influence the climate.
Timber structures are not viable or significant carbon sinks. The truth is that this discussion is nothing more than a diversion. How many timber buildings last beyond 30 years? 50? 100? How long does carbon need to be stored in order to achieve anything at all in climate terms? 1000+?
If we are going to discuss responses to the threat of climate change, we should stay on topic and true to our strategy.
There is a parallel between discussion of timber buildings and the Exxon-inspired diversionary intellectual black holes that resulted in decades of inactivity, wasted billions of dollars and extreme polarisation of opinion, all of which are at the expense of the globe as we know it.
As I said a week or so back – while the energy and carbon debate is without a strategy, low carbon goals – all of them – remain beyond reach.
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I like singletonengineer’s comment: “@E-P:
As an experienced structural design engineer…..So, please hold the armchair advice – it isn’t needed.”
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As I think I wrote earlier, Los Angeles has replaced street lights with LEDs. The saved electricity goes to a considerable number of electric car charging stations.
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If nuclear fission makes abundant electricity available, that electricity could be used for heating, domestic hot water, battery electric vehicles, etc. It could also be used to manufacture artificial fuels for vehicles. I think it has to start with electricity because of the versatility of electricity.
However, I would not knock wind and solar power. They have proven useful in areas which are not practical to connect to the grid and have improved the lives of people in those areas. However, I do not believe that wind and solar will ever be practical as a major source of power for large countries. Pushing them is a distraction from doing what has to be done, i.e., rapidly expand our current nuclear technology while also doing R & D to develop better nuclear technologies.
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Please read this Book: “Plentiful Energy, The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor” by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang, 2011 Download from:
Click to access PlentifulEnergy.pdf
Or get a free book from: http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html
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Roger,
You wrote that we must eliminate ALL CO2 emissions. Really? Do you actually mean ALL or are there some CO2 emissions, such as from flatulent cows, that we cannot eliminate? How about CO2 emissions from volcanoes, swamps, etc? All these are very significant.
Perhaps you could clarify what you really mean by ALL.
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If the CO2 level is projected too rise to a level that life on earth is not supported (think Venus) then the CO2 emissions must not only be stopped but CO2 will need to be removed to save the planet. We need to be thinking about the engineering of decreases in CO2 levels. This is the situation we are leaving our kids. Aren’t they going to be proud of our accomplishments along the lines of CO2 reductions? (not)
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A credible sequestration method is to plant a great many trees, as I previously pointed out. Another is a modest amount of injecting carbon dioxide into mafic rock for geochemical disposal. This is being done on a small scale in Iceland.
And of course it is carbon dioxide emissions which needs to be taxed, not harmless graphite, diamonds and Boeing Dreamliners.
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Wood? Again, it is the scale that defeats any sequestration scheme. To just remove only the current rate of emissions, a credible scheme would have to sequester –
all additions to the greenhouse, of ~30 Gt CO2 – that’s 15,000 km3 CO2 gas at STP
every year until the end of carbon-based fuels – not just once
0% leakage despite neglect, warfare, microbes, termites, wildfires etc
for 10,000 years if ever
and then release it much slower than it is currently being emitted
A scheme putting 1 Mt of wood aside for 40 years, every year, falls short by factors of 250x on timescale and 30,000x on the mass scale, so on those points alone it falls short by a total 7,500,000x. That factor spells out “negligible”.
The only credible way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is to not put it there in the first place.
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Chris Harries –
If your mind boggles at the thought of millions of panels etc, that suggests small mindedness! However that conclusion is not supported by your other posts, so it may just be an oversight on your part.
The decarbonization task is big, with or without nuclear power. But “big” does not equate to “impossible”, and if you take some time to go into the mathematics, you’ll discover it’s far from impossible.
There’s nothing wrong with faith when it’s based on evidence! And if you look at the parameters that would be required for that outcome to be viable, you’ll find that, far from being “wishful thinking” it’s actually quite a likely scenario. Over the past decade the cost of capital has been low, and doesn’t look like it’s set to rise much any time soon. Meanwhile the cost of solar PV has been falling rapidly, and there is nothing to indicate the trend won’t continue. And if non carbon anodes can be used, there is more scope to vary the speed of the process, diminishing the disadvantage of the fluctuating solar power output.
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MIT | June 6, 2013
400 ppm CO2? Add Other GHGs, and It’s Equivalent to 478 ppm
http://oceans.mit.edu/news/featured-stories/5-questions-mits-ron-prinn-400-ppm-threshold
Subscribe and read RealClimate.org. We are over 400 ppm for CO2 alone. Read James Hanson: The maximum safe limit is 350 ppm CO2 + equivalents.
“Six billion people aspire to consume power”
7.5 Billion people are going to die rather all at once between 2022 and 2040.
Impending doom list:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800914000615
Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies
http://upriser.com/posts/study-predicts-impending-collapse-of-industrial-civilization
Scientific Model Indicates Climate Change-Induced Collapse of Civilization by 2040
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28046-extreme-weather-could-trigger-frequent-global-food-shocks/
Extreme weather could trigger frequent global food shocks
“Accuracy Check on Predictions of Near-Term Collapse” by Barton Paul Levenson
Click to access BSVol.13%20(1)%20Article%202.pdf
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/03/unforced-variations-march-2015/comment-page-5/#comment-627687
233 Barton Paul Levenson says:
Click to access food%20system%20shock_june%202015.pdf
“Food System Shock” Food prices go up 500% by 2030. Lloyd’s of London insurance
Roger Clifton and Chris Harries: WHO is bitter and twisted? WHO is rude? Sorry we don’t have time for 30% measures. As long as people peddle light bulbs and wind, other people are going to say: “nuclear is too dangerous.” We do not have to wait for new nuclear. Generation 2 nuclear is much safer than any non-nuclear source of electricity that is now in use.
What is really rude: Leading people to extinction. “I’ve repeatedly argued in environmental circles the case for new nuclear technology to be on the table when discussing the urgency of climate change.”
Chris Harries: When you argue for “new” nuclear technology, you are leading people to their deaths. We have Generation 3.5 already in use and the research has been done for Generation 4. Chris Harries is rude.
Again: We do not have time for waiting. We do not have time for 30% measures. Do you not understand “Scientific Model Indicates Climate Change-Induced Collapse of Civilization by 2040?” Do you have any idea what life is like when civilization collapses? Have you been to Syria or South Sudan recently?
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Edward you gave a lot of references but none for this statement:
“When you argue for “new” nuclear technology, you are leading people to their deaths.” Why do you have this belief? Is it nuclear waste, nuclear plant accidents, or nuclear war you are worried about?
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Gene Preston: NO! You are reading me backwards. “When you argue for “new” nuclear technology, you are leading people to their deaths.”
BECAUSE YOU ARE WASTING TIME. I am advocating that we should build thousands of reactors per year because we need the clean, safe electricity that only nuclear can provide. We do not have time to wait for new technology. We have the technology we need and we have pre-certification to build as many as we want.
There is no such thing as nuclear waste. It is spent fuel that needs to be recycled.
Nuclear power plants are safer than any other source of electricity, as I have told you many times. There was no reason to evacuate Fukushima.
I am not worried about nuclear war. We cannot make ourselves extinct by nuclear war. We never had enough bombs.
Gene Preston: Please read what I say. Do not disinterpret what I say. Is Gene Preston playing the “Provoker” game? Twisting people’s words to mean something other than what is intended for the purpose of getting people angry? Gene Preston: The provoker game is not a funny joke. Provoking is uncivilized, boorish, childish, rude, etcetera. I have had a lot of experience with provokers. If you can’t stop doing it, my answer is to stop communicating with you entirely. Then you won’t be able to get anybody angry. So, if you get your jollies by causing anger, you will have to find somebody else to pick on.
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Sorry I did not mean to read your message backwards. I agree. Im just too busy to read all these posting. So I saw the soundbyte and grabbed it.
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Roger Clifton and Chris Harries:
We are headed for a human population crash from 7.5 Billion to 70 thousand or zero people within 13 years + or- 6 years. We don’t have time for research or fooling around with renewables. Causes of a population crash:
Global Warming [GW] will cause civilization to collapse within 13 years give or take 6 years because GW will cause the rain to move and the rain move will force agriculture to collapse. Famine has been the cause of many dozens of previous population crashes.
Reference “Overshoot” by William Catton, 1980 and “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse” by William Catton, 2009. Catton says that we humans are about to experience a population crash. Population biologist William Catton says that the US is the most overcrowded country. Collapse from overpopulation could happen any time now.
The Earth has 4.5 Billion too many people. An overshoot in population requires an equal undershoot. We overshot by 4.5 billion, and the consequence is an undershoot by 4.5 billion. The carrying capacity is 3 billion. 3 billion minus 4.5 billion is zero because there can’t be minus 1.5 billion people. This can happen even if there is enough food.
Aquifers running dry No irrigation, no wheat. No wheat, no bread. The “Green Revolution” was a bad idea. It caused India to double her population rather than get out of poverty. Now Indian farmers have “discovered” that water is a limiting resource. Water is a limiting resource in the US as well. When, not if, the aquifer under the high plains runs dry, there will be no bread and no pasta in the US.
We didn’t “cause” third world poverty. They were never “unpoor” in the first place. They were stone age, not poor. We invented science. They didn’t. Their failure to invent science is not our fault.
Resource depletion
4A oil
4B minerals
etcetera.
War will kill a lot of people. Famine will kill 8 billion out of 7.5 billion. 7.5-8=-0.5, but with population, the crash ends at zero.
Will there be survivors? Nobody knows. Nor does anybody have any idea who or where the survivors might be, if any.
NATURE has lots of other ways to kill humans. Don’t provoke her.
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Edward, I don’t disagree with the overshoot and crash theory, but if all this is going to happen soon, pray tell what do we have time for?
Sounds like you are arguing for a mass human cull before it’s too late. I think a few people have that notion in their heads but dare not speak it… and I don’t encourage it.
Also, I’m not too sure about the time frame for collapse. Industrial / capitalist civilisation seems to surprise us with its unexpected resilience. (Unfortunately this resilience leads people to believe that our civilisation is invincible and that’s a complacency problem so thanks for rocking the boat.)
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Roger Clifton — I previously posted a link to the Orstein et al. abstract, for which the full paper is available, for free. They point out that using most of the Sahara desert and much of the Australian outback suffices for most of the excess carbon dioxide emissions. I then went on to mention the role of biochar in permanently removing the carbon from the biologically active environment. This is feasible, just a large expense we ignore at our peril.
For carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and oceans are already too high. Some sequestration together with the elimination of the burning of fossil fuels and natural gas is necessary to avoid disaster.
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I think that we dealt with the Sahara/Australian Outback impossible dream several weeks back.
Repetition will not change things.
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“The toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up” is the subtitle of a very recent book from James Hoggan.
The actual title is perhaps not the best, ie “I’m Right and You’re an Idiot”. I haven’t finished reading it yet.
It requires thoughtful, deep reading (and re-reading), in part because it challenges almost everything I thought I knew about the way that people form opinions. It explores why science and maths and data are rejected, even by the well-trained, and suggests insights and practical advice for reframing arguments in order to recognise social and other reasons for avoiding change.
It also discusses the weakness in arguments,especially those which are based on statements of facts. It introduces concepts such as emotional dialogue and powerful stories to explain the reason for the gap in logic and as a possible path to bridging that gap.
It isn’t a toolkit and certainly does not have a potted set of answers. It does help the reader to understand the question – which might be paraphrased as:
“Why do we have to cut through a smog of propaganda, adversarial rhetoric and polarization which stifles discussion and debate, creating resistance to change and thwarting our ability to solve our collective problems?”
New Society Publishers, April 2016, 222Pp. http://www.newsociety.com
Much of our efforts on this site demonstrate the nature and limitations of adversarial dialog. I use it too. But is there a more effective alternative, one which bridges the gap between differing world views? What about dealing with psychopaths?
Chapter 6 does a pretty good job of explaining why every corporation is created… required… to be psychopathic. That, alone, is worth the purchase price.
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Thank you. I need training in this if somebody could give a MOOC.
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singletonengineer — If an ‘impossible dream’ then disaster will surely follow. How about working to make it possible. It only takes money.
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@ DBB says, “then disaster will surely follow”. The rate of climate-related disasters has already been increasing. However I think it has some ways to go before public opinion reaches the point of agreeing, “my God it’s really happening”. At that point, we need our leaders to have access to competent professional advice, so that they use the fresh momentum accurately.
In this community here on BNC, we have quite a lot of agreement on mass-producing small modular reactors, and your own discussion thread on SMRs must attract a lot of readers. If it could influence our leaders at all, we should address this topic more often.
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Yes I agree Edward about the population growth crash. This is a huge problem for us.
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Visionary Ted Turner remarked the world is likely to degrade into cannibalism by 2040. There is a history of this happening on Easter Island and possibly in Central America. I look at Haiti and think to myself, how are those people going to support a continuous growth in kids without more and more resources? In the end technology cannot save us.
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Roger Clifton — By all means support small nuclear reactors. This needs doing across the general populace, not just here on the BNC sites. That will take many as I surely cannot do that on my own.
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Gene says, “CO2 emissions must not only be stopped but CO2 will need to be removed to save the planet”. Each of the proposals to remove CO2 are hopelessly inadequate or impractical. (There is just nowhere to put several hundred tons of CO2 per person on the planet). You have seen my arithmetic pop them one by one, yet the proposals keep re-emerging as though we are unwilling to put our desperate wishes to the test.
The world as we knew it is dying, yet we simply cannot believe that the cradle of our existence can change so. Our daily routines are relentlessly familiar as we dismiss the changes by grumbling about the unseasonal heat or rain or wind etc. At least it is not changing faster than our capacity to adapt, and when the need for action becomes clear, I have faith that we will come good. Even so, we will still have to answer to our children as to why we let things get so bad.
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Roger if we are gg die anyway from climate change why not give nuclear power a chance. It might just save us from extinction.
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sorry I used a ham radio abbreviation gg means going.
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Re Young’s modulus: A quick scan finds values of 200 GPa for structural steel, ~11 GPa for red oak.
However, steel has specific gravity of about 7.8; dry oak is well under 1. The same mass of oak wood will be about 3x as big in cross-section vs. steel. Flex stiffness of a solid beam scales as the CUBE of the cross-sectional size, so the oak will be stiffer in flexion than the steel by something on the order of 50%.
How does this get back to our problem? Steel and concrete are made with fossil fuels. If we replace reinforced concrete structural elements with engineered wood, the carbon sources are replaced by a carbon sink. Further, this is a technique that is easily spread world-wide and made using local materials and labor.
It doesn’t matter if it’s small thing overall; it could easily make a big impact in the building industry. A lot of littles make a lot.
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The strength of wood? Depends if we’re talking about CLT.
Instead of CO2 emitting concrete, we could use CO2 sequestering wood, and then biochar it at the end. Bury the biochar deep in our soils and it will have a long enough half-life to do us some good.
“Lumber producers are now using über-powerful adhesives to assemble massive wood panels with the strength and durability of concrete and steel. Cross-laminated timber, as it’s known, is made of small planks bound together by a polyurethane adhesive. The pioneering technology has freed architects to dream up buildings that were previously inconceivable.
“Not only is [wood] attractive and warms up the building,” said Kris Spickler, a heavy timber specialist at cross-laminated timber manufacturer Structurlam, “I think architects really enjoy being able to use a product that they’ve used for interior spaces, and actually use it for the structure itself.”
Beyond its aesthetic appeal, cross-laminated timber boasts several other advantages. Wood construction sites generate less waste, noise, and traffic than conventional sites. And wood buildings can be erected more quickly than steel and concrete structures, keeping the projects cost-competitive. For example, Spickler pointed to a forthcoming skyscraper at the University of British Columbia.
“The building was competitively bid against concrete and steel. It wasn’t a show project,” said Spickler. “I think the speed an the affordability won out, and that’s why we’re building that 18-story.”
To observers, a wood skyscraper may sound like a fire hazard, but Spickler disagrees. Steel is vulnerable to melting in a blaze, twisting and contorting in the heat. Timber, on the other hand, will char on the outside, but flames will not penetrate its core. After a fire recedes, the wood beam will remain standing.”
http://www.popsci.com.au/tech/woodandglue-skyscrapers-are-on-the-rise,418659
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What you’re seeing is exasperation with the diversionary tactics of the entrenched interests. Haven’t you noticed that EVERYTHING they’re throwing out, from CFLs to demand management to unplugging your telephone’s charger when not in use, takes a lot of mind-space for very little improvement in the actual problem? How many billions of phone chargers have to be unplugged to make up for the loss of SONGS?
We’re not criticizing demand management. We’re criticizing the people who have bought the lie that demand management in combination with renewable pixie dust can solve a major, or even significant, part of the problem. NOTHING will work absent something else to do the heavy lifting of de-carbonizing the bulk of energy production. Without that, demand management is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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Thank you Engineer-Poet.
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This. A thousand times this. The insistence on NEW nuclear technology is one of the salami tactics used to halt calls for action using technologies we can build NOW.
We don’t have to put it anywhere, we just need to get it out of the atmosphere. Enhanced weathering does that just fine.
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Surely R & D to develop better nuclear technologies is very important. However, that can be done concurrently with rapidly expanding our best current nuclear technology; it need not be one or the other.
Improving energy efficiency, such as by using more efficient lighting and improving building insulation, can often be justified economically. However, some of the suggested economies make less difference than many suppose. I actually bought a watt meter to determine how much power my computer uses while in sleep mode, and how much power my various chargers use while idle. Some of the chargers take less power than the watt meter can measure which is considerably less than one watt. However, the self-powered subwoofer for my audio system takes about 5.5 watts when idle so powering it down may be worth the effort. My computer uses only 1 watt in sleep mode which is insufficient to justify the time and effort of powering it down. Many computers will use more power than that in sleep mode.
It would be good if these devices were labeled so that consumers would know how much power they use while idle. Doing so would require little expense for the manufacturer. It is not reasonable to expect people to buy watt meters and test everything.
That said, the above consecrations will make only a small incremental difference in global energy usage.
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EP says, “We don’t have to put it anywhere, we just need to get it out of the atmosphere. Enhanced weathering does that just fine.”
Really? Let’s see your arithmetic. Here’s mine.
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There are many papers on enhanced weathering. Here’s one:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n4/full/nclimate2882.html
Another:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rog.20004/pdf
I understand that the use of enhanced weathering on land can run into limits of transport of certain minerals to the ocean, but placing crushed rock on beaches where wave action provides mechanical agitation may be a solution. I’ve not followed these issues closely, but since weathering is the ultimate way that excess CO2 will be neutralized it is obvious that anything we do to accelerate the process is going to help.
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Yes. See
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/06/unforced-variations-june-2016/comment-page-5/#comment-656645
229 patrick
https://www.or.is/english/carbfix-project
They injected dissolved CO2 into basalt rock. The CO2 reacts with minerals to form carbonates such as calcium carbonate from calcium oxide.
The Carbfix version is easy to read. Pumping gas-rich water might be easier than moving rocks around. Making rock weathering happen faster is the right thing to do if you can do it fast enough.
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The message is spreading.
“this 80-story tower, if given the green light for construction, will be made of timber — making it London’s first w
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/26/design/wooden-skyscrapers-timber-trend-catching-fire/
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EP says, “enhanced weathering …can run into limits of transport ” Yes, because hundreds of gigatons of CO2 require thousands of gigatons of basalt. That tiny little bit of arithmetic dismisses the concept as nonsense.
Methane is a byproduct of the process too. A few percent of methane put back in the atmosphere negates any immediate benefit of carbon capture.
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That anchor does not resolve to a comment anywhere in the comment stream of that post. I checked the other 4 pages.
You need to take a look at the reaction stoichiometry of weathering of olivine. Each magnesium ion (atwt ~ 24) sequesters almost twice its mass of CO2. One of the products is silicic acid, which is an essential nutrient for diatoms. Tying up CO2 as biomass is good too; taking it out of circulation for even a few hundred years on the sea floor is more than long enough to get a permanent fix in.
Methane is not a byproduct of the room-temperature weathering of olivine. If it’s created by reaction with basalt, it’s a potential energy source which can be pulled out, reacted and put back.
It’s funny that you bring this up, because one of the tabs I’ve had open for weeks as research for a comment I’ll never write is this paper on the production of hydrogen from the reaction of water with hot ultramafic rock during serpentinization. There are a lot of serpentines around, but the people working on enhanced weathering don’t seem to be interested in them. I’m not a chemist, so I don’t know if this is because they aren’t very reactive with CO2 under ambient conditions or for other reasons.
Maybe hot supercritical CO2 reacts well with serpentines? That’s too far off what I’m working on at the moment to get any of my time.
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Engineer-Poet: Here is the rest of the comment from RealClimate. “Unforced Variations: June 2016”
“229 patrick says:
17 Jun 2016 at 7:48 PM
“Science” says: “Inject, baby, inject” (sic). Weather, baby, weather, I say.
Carbfix Project homepage, with paper in “Science” (10 June 2016) on the Iceland break (a cognitive break, hopefully, I mean):
https://www.or.is/english/carbfix-project
“The Conversation” article:
https://theconversation.com/new-technology-offers-hope-for-storing-carbon-dioxide-underground-60707
Earth Institute State of the Planet news (16 June 2016): presentation on Carbfix Project will be streamed 24 June and archived:
http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2016/06/16/watch-live-turning-co2-to-stone-scientists-discuss-a-climate-solution/?platform=hootsuite
Video: http://barnard.edu/news/prof-martin-stute-develops-new-method-combat-global-warming
Peter Keleman and group, Earth Institute (previously):
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/gpg/projects/carbon-sequestration
“Certainly, this epitomizes our approach to this problem: Understand the processes of natural olivine carbonation, and then do as little as possible to accelerate these processes in order to consume globally significant quantities of CO2.” Hear, hear.
If the science of geology pursues geothermal and deep-geothermal science in this century with the kind of devotion it pursued petroleum until now–guess what. I’ve been impressed by the elegance of the idea of anthropogenic weathering analogues, but I didn’t want to say so, because it seemed so–fringe. Glad to find my impression had a future–and it’s not over.”
======
Now I know a little more about “sequestration.” I’m not recommending or disrecommending sequestration. Sequestration isn’t my subject. I don’t know who patrick is. The thing that is different from what I knew before is that the CO2 is dissolved in water before being pumped into the basaltic rock. That I understand as old fashioned wet chemistry, rather than trying to react a gas with a solid, which I don’t understand.
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Dunno how you munged that URL. Here is the comment permalink that I just copied from it:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/06/unforced-variations-june-2016/comment-page-5/#comment-656055
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EP – that paper is greenwash, by believers, for the believers. Dissolving the Earth’s excess CO2 in crushed rock is a hopelessly ill-thought concept.
The “olivine” equation you referenced is not for massive basalt or even crushed olivine, it is for powdered forsterite in acid solution. Forsterite is a compound, magnesium orthosilicate. Olivine is a mineral, a solid solution of magnesium and ferrous orthosilicates. It is only one of the components of the rock, basalt, behind pyroxene and feldspar.
In nature, the mid-ocean ridges exude basalt that becomes the oceanic crust. There it slowly combines with whatever water, CO2 and O2 that can percolate into the swelling new rock – serpentinite. (In the weathering zone on land, it gets all three and over millions of years largely dissolves, leaving white clay behind.) In the gigaton-scale masses of the sea floor, the magnesium recombines with the other elements to create talc, asbestos and similar hydrated crystals. Some carbonates do form and bicarbonates escape. The ferrous iron combines exothermically with any oxygen, then with the biosphere reduces CO2 to methane and sulphate to sulphide.
Any scheme to crush many gigatons of basalt (and somehow pass a many times greater volume of seawater through it) would not get it all to dissolve, instead it would create a toxic sludge of ballpark ten times the mass of CO2 sequestered. Worse, it would have turned the diffuse gas from a volume above us to a condensed horror on the planet surface that we and the biosphere must share. It would be vast, thousands of gigatons. We have no room to hold it or hide it. No, the problem remains, where would we put the waste?
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Roger Clifton: True. The devil is in the enormous volume of rock that we would first have to obtain and process and then get rid of. The planet does it by spending millions of years. The speedup entails enormous energy expenditure and mountains of sludge that didn’t do as intended. Forcing Nature to do it our way always has side effects.
We could tell the fossil fuel companies that they have to pay for it and get a much higher cost for fossil fuel. Fossil fuel power plants are only for brief periods of propaganda.
If you go nuclear instead, the spent fuel is a million times smaller in the first place, and there is no exhaust to the atmosphere.
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Hi guys,
have I been banned? I couldn’t post the last 3 times I tried.
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Hi all, sorry for the melodrama: technical issues. I didn’t think that last post would go through!
3 important notes on Olivine:
1. World economy is $75 TRILLION a year, and could easily be legislated to run both clean energy schemes (like a fast roll out of nuclear) and various sequestration schemes like biochar and olivine.
Cost of olivine?
$200 billion to sequester all our emissions.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/let_the_earth_help_us_to_save_the_earth-schuiling_june2008/
Olivine itself is not a waste
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“Steel has specific gravity of about 7.8; dry oak is well under 1. The same mass of oak wood will be about 3x as big in cross-section vs. steel. Flex stiffness of a solid beam scales as the CUBE of the cross-sectional size, so the oak will be stiffer in flexion than the steel by something on the order of 50%.”
So what? Engineer-Poet’s example leads to an increase in structural member sizes by a factor of 10.
One of the factors which limits height of tall structures is the size of the columns (or other vertical load-carrying members) in the lower floors.
The lower the allowable stresses and the greater the section area required to limit deflections, the less usable space remains. Columns 10 times the size of those in your local 50-storey building will be huge. For what net gain?
As for Eclipse-Now’s hypothetical 80-storey timber structure in London… I promised myself not to comment on his stream of nonsense, but this indicated the gullibility of one who views the world through pipe dreams. I invite EN to tell us how good it is after it has been constructed, not how good the prospect might be if, somehow it proceeds.
For comparison purposes, I suggest considering the world-changing impact of yet another 1 km high tower in Dubai or Malaysia or China. They have absolutely no impact beyond being ego statements.
I remind the amateur futurists in our midst that nuclear fission power is a proven, safe, affordable, almost zero carbon technology. Recommendations that we focus our attention on unproven technologies is futile. That is what Germany is trying to do, but with no success (see below). There is simply no currently available energy solution which comes close to beating France’s example. France did the hard work of demonstrating, at scale, just how simple and reliable nuclear power can be. There is little need to rely on inferior and/or untried or speculative “solutions” when a proven one is available.
Why are we spending effort on trivia when there is work to be done? I much prefer the approach of Ben Heard of ThinkClimate – he is finding ways for fission energy to enter the discussion. Many here will have read his recent post about actually getting the nuclear power message across where it had previously been excluded: https://decarbonisesa.com/author/benph/
At the risk of repetition, I must emphasise that endless discussion about light globes or tall timber structures or demand management will do nothing to provide electricity to the 90% of the world that needs it, or to expand existing energy production in affluent countries in order to manufacture alternatives for gas and liquid fossil fuels. We all need much more electricity, not less!
If the problem of CO2-e induced climate change is 100% of the problem, then what percentage of our time can we afford to consider things which, at best, are less than 1 or 2% of a solution?
Germany have provided us with a perfect example. They have spend years and many billions of Euros and thousands of glossy reports and analyses to achieve… a very small increase in CO2e last year over the previous year. If a rich, high-tech nation of 80 million people cannot reduce their emissions, then what chance is there for a developing nation?
Germany demonstrates absolutely that a complete refocussing of effort is needed, else we are all stuffed, whether with or without modern light globes and timber buildings.
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Sorry Singleton, but you’ve got me all wrong on a few counts!
1. Where did I say we should drop fusion in favour of anything else? You see “instead of” and I’m saying “as well as, in a real run away climate emergency”. This blog has completely changed my opinion on nuclear power. Over 6 years ago I used to be anti-nuclear. It took a lot of work engaging with you guys here for a layperson like myself to turn that around! Why would I chuck it now?
I’m not quoting my own work. I linked to my wood page simply because it has all the links to other sources, and rather than do 2 acts of ‘self promotion’ I shared the actual links to my sources in this thread on Olivine, forgetting that I stored the sources as PDF’s on my website (in case the link broke or the original site was hacked)! That’s all! Download the PDF’s and see if I’m quoting myself: I’m not a scientist, not a geologist, not a geo-engineering expert. I’m just quoting studies I have found. But hey, if you don’t like the message just shoot the messenger. ;-)
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PS: This is an open thread. It will, by definition, come to discuss other interesting climate related stuff. It’s not all nuclear: there are plenty of other all nuclear threads for that. I suggest ignoring the posts you don’t like, and allowing other people to discuss some of these other technologies that we might need to deploy as well as nuclear ASAP!
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I did not mention fusion power. What’s that about, EN?
Open Thread or not, time wasted on speculative trivia is still time wasted.
I also happen to support – as I stated – efforts to get access to the public space, such as Ben Heard has being doing.
Technologies that have minuscule possible impact on CO2 emissions should not rank equally with more serious contenders – especially when without discussion of cost, resource constraints and program.
If ASAP means anything, then available technologies and actions should be preferenced over delays while other options might or might not be developed. Not trees in remote deserts which might be earmarked by others for mirrors and panels in any case. Not accelerated weathering of mountains of rocks. Not focussing on tiny, short term gains which might accrue from timber construction. Not fusion. All these have their place in the future but not for “ASAP”.
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Eclipse Now: Your kind has already wasted half a century. If it hadn’t been for delaying tactics like: “Why don’t we consider this or that nonsensical idea,” all of our big generating plants could have been 100% nuclear and hydro by 1970. I we had gone 100% nuclear by 1970, we would still be below 350 ppm CO2 and Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would not now be melting. They are melting hundreds of billions of tons of ice per year now.
If you want to design some machine to actually work, you don’t let everybody vote on it. You give the job to the engineers who know how to do it. Likewise, if you want to survive, or at least avoid extinction, you let the scientists and engineers tell the governments what to do. The politicians cannot do it.
Why? Because NATURE cannot be fooled. NATURE is an absolute dictator. NATURE is vastly better at killing than Hitler could ever have dreamed of being. NATURE has killed the entire planets Mars and Venus. NATURE has killed 99%of all species that ever existed on the planet Earth. NATURE and only NATURE can treat humans as no more than another weed.
Chris Harries: Your comment about a “Mass human cull” is barbaric. I would never advocate such a thing. Perhaps you would. In the future and past: My words mean nothing more than what the dictionary says they mean.
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Edward, re population cull, I’m glad you agree with me on that front. Many population control enthusiasts do indeed privately harbour such thoughts and some them dare to say it openly.
When I read a post that says there are too many people in the world therefore we are all doomed, it doesn’t leave much space for talking practical policy.
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Edward:
The world’s most famous climatologist has talked up both biochar and nuclear. Why don’t you go and tell Dr James Hansen that “his kind” have held up addressing climate change?
I’m one of you guys in that IF it was a choice between a penny on nuclear or a penny on crushed rock, that penny is GOING to nuclear! I’m on your side! NUCLEAR FIRST! NUCLEAR FIRST! How many times do I have to say NUCLEAR FIRST!
But the fact is that the world GDP of $75 TRILLION can quite possibly afford BOTH nuclear (FIRST!) AND biochar or wood skyscrapers (which are going to be built anyway, so what do you want: concrete and steel adding 5% carbon emissions or wood reducing 5% carbon emissions) AND maybe some olivine (even if not trying to sequester ALL our carbon emissions at $200 billion).
BTW, you’re being inconsistent. You’re the one on the doomer side of climate change, insisting that we’re facing an Extinction Level Event within a few decades. So, how about we use that big brain of yours to think about multiple strategies like, gee, I don’t know, NUCLEAR FIRST and some affordable ways to cool the planet fast if it looks like we’ve already stuffed the joint?
Have a warm cup of milk before bed and go on a walk in a park. You’ll live longer.
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@EclipseNow:
Our “Friend”, Jim Green, of Friends of the Earth, frequently quotes and cites his own work to support his claims.
EN shows a similar tendency.
I’m sure that I am not the only person who doesn’t bother to follow such links.
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If the enhanced weathering ideas can’t work, then they can’t work. Frankly, I’m skeptical about characterizations of “toxic sludge”. Volcanic ash is supposed to be one of the better natural fertilizers, and it comes from the same magma.
I can also see that the scale of effort could just make the notion impractical. I envision something like a bucket-wheel surface mining machine digging up the side of a volcano, carrying off the top 100 feet of material blasted loose from its flanks and shipping it to crushers which essentially just put it back with porosity and permeability added. You’d grow stuff on that crushed rock, if it would support anything; plant roots respire CO2 and symbiotic fungi extract minerals from rocks to swap for sugars. How many such machines would be needed? Lots. You need water, too; converting e.g. the lava fields of Craters of the Moon to black sand wouldn’t do much if you couldn’t get things to react.
It’s a big problem and it’s not going to be solved by small, inside-the-box thinking. Kicking ideas around and putting numbers to them is essential to getting stuff done.
Speaking of putting numbers on things, I just checked some. An S-PRISM is about 1 GW(t), and ConEd’s peak steam delivery of about 10 million lb/hr is about 3.5 GW thermal. So, roughly 4-5 S-PRISMs running with a topping cycle before feeding to the district heating system could replace the fossil-burners in Manhattan.
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Engineer-Poet: On the scale of enhanced weathering: Roger that. More on the scale of detonating nuclear bombs inside the Himalayas to shatter them so that rain could soak through them quickly. Conventional explosives would be many orders of magnitude too small. I’m thinking of the Soviet 56 megaton silo buster as a trial-size bomb. Their silo-buster is intended to penetrate hundreds of feet of granite before exploding, having landed at Mach 13.
Simply put for those who are paranoid of all things nuclear: It isn’t a small enough problem to be solved in any way that would be considered safe in Japan.
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Now be serious here. The industry was just getting moving in earnest in 1970. It would have taken AT LEAST until 1985.
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There may be too many people in the world. However, it has been shown that increasing prosperity, reducing poverty, and improving education reduce the reproduction rate. Therefore, it is likely that global population will gradually decline if abundant and economical energy improve the lives of people.
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