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”
Eclipse Now — I don’t know where you live but if the world stopped excess carbon dioxide emissions right now, say by magically building about 4500 Gw of nuclear power plants, the sea level will only rise about 25 meters. The average elevation of Sydney, NSW, is but 19 meters.
So some sequestration ought to start quite soon. Lowering the carbon dioxide concentration will keep the sea level rise from being so large.
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Wow DDB! 25 meters locked in on today’s CO2ppm? Really? I know you have trouble with links, but is there a report you have in mind that I can google?
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DBB: I have no dispute with your actual words. My dispute is with the way people actually behave. At your university, you deal with the stupid and recalcitrant by flunking them out. Once they are gone, you need no longer deal with them.
But they still vote.
I am taking a more mass-marketing approach. You can’t flunk the stupid out of the voting booth. You have to deal with them.
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Eclipse Now — I used the Wikipedia article on Pliocene climate.
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From the above, it seems that relevant options are:
Nuclear – because we know that we can start right now.
Sequestration – because we must soon (DBB), focussed on biochar (EN, quoting Hansen), although no practical large scale method is available for this.
Those who see population as a starting point are wasting their time and should re-read Barry Brook’s excellent article at: https://bravenewclimate.com/2011/09/19/population-no-cc-fix-p1/
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Eclipse Now’s statement that increased timber construction will “reduce 5% carbon emissions”, by any conceivable scenario, is innumerate folly, if not an intentional lie by whoever it originated from. It is an excellent example of the red herrings, delays and side tracks that those who actually do care about the environment face from those who merely pretend that they do. I’m thinking of such as Friends of the Earth here, whose leaders have led many well-meaning people astray as they further their careers by spreading as many scams dressed up as solutions as they can dream up.
Unfortunately, dreaming isn’t research or we would all have PhD’s.
How many timber buildings are needed annually to reduce CO2 emissions by 5%?
The world’s fossil fuel production in 2015 was:
Oil: 50.9 thousand million barrels. (8092 thousand million litres)
Natural gas: 3539 billion cubic metres (3199.5 mtoe)
Coal: 3830 mtoe
(BP Statistical Review, 2016)
That is about 15 thousand million tonnes of oil equivalent each year.
As a first approximation, 5% is 750 million tonnes of additional timber construction, annually. Each tonne of timber must be recovered at the end of the buildings’ lives. Only those tonnes which are recovered, charred and sequestered are countable. That scenario is not possible. The 5% figure is fiction.
Do the maths!
Footnote 1: A tonne of oil equivalent is not the same, in CO2e terms, as a tonne of timber. The above is a first approximation.
Footnote 2: I have great affection and respect for timber and of elegant, innovative structures. That does not automatically translate into adoption of timber construction as a practical pathway to reduced CO2 emissions.
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SE – thank you for doing the maths. We need to be able to interject, “not enough for long enough!” and then reply with figures when challenged.
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Singleton,
do me a favour? Go just a few posts back and you’ll see my NUCLEAR FIRST post to Edward. Read. Rinse & repeat.
Then go further up where I linked to the TED talk discussing the sheer quantity of housing required (100,000 dwellings a day) and work out a rough tonnage per dwelling.
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singletonengineer — Biochar on a massive scale is made the same way as biochar on a small scale but replicated many, many, oh so many times over.
Making biochar is moderately labor intensive. That is all right as there are many upon many people who are unemployed in the Maghreb and further south in the Saheel. Put them to work tending tree plantations in the Sahara, most of it, making biochar as they go.
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Eclipse Now — A quick check suggests about 4 tonnes for a smaller, but not tiny, American style house. Using half that for more minimal accommodations, the world requires about 73 million tonnes of processed wood per annum, assuming no other building materials are used as substitutes.
So using singletonengineer’s estimates this isn’t even half a percent but maybe as much as one percent by accounting for foregone steel and cement manufacture.
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Does anybody know the mass relationship between timber in and biochar out? There must be a substantial use of carbon to heat/char/burn the wood. Is 50% close?
How does processed wood perform when charred? I have in mind the resins used as adhesives and pore fillers.
Assuming 20% moisture in air-cured round timber and 10% in processed timber, along with two hydrogen atoms per carbon atom in both wood and resin, the carbon content in a tonne of average input is:
Wood: 600 kg/tonne
Processed timber: 675kg/tonne.
If 2/3rds of the carbon is retained as char, that is 400kg of char for each tonne of input. Thus, divide DBB”s figures by three.
To avoid double counting, disregard steel and concrete. Carbon reductions will eventually arise through redesign of the steel-making process, possibly via electric arc or other reduction processes. Similarly, alkaline concrete using the world’s copious fly ash deposits is possible, at a price. That’s where carbon pricing drives technologies via application of market forces. That seems to me to be a much preferred pathway to government-level picking of winners and expenditure of public money to projects on the basis of their popularity.
Carbon reduction has become a beauty contest. It should not be.
Subtract from the 400kg/tonne char product the carbon content of energy invested in growing, watering, gathering, transporting of the wood, plus the energy invested in charring, transport and long term “storage”, what do we have left? Doesn’t this clarify why it is imperative for the existing energy systems to be decarbonised asap, because otherwise the task grows with each incremental increase in conventional, fossil-fuelled energy, whether coal, gas or liquid?
Please understand that I don’t rule out biochar entirely and certainly not as a local opportunity under favourable circumstances. However, it is far too limited globally to make a significant contribution to the solution, whatever that may be.
Besides which, who is going to prevent the Saharan citizens from using the wood that they grow as fuel for their own version of the Steam Age or for domestic purposes? Substantial social development will be necessary BEFORE any of this can come to pass. Who pays? How is security to be assured? How long will that take? When will the first harvests commence? When will the project’s target annual output of stored char be reached? What percentage of the committed capital will be syphoned off by opportunistic governments, thieves, swindlers, ransomers and con-men along the way?
My gut feeling is that I won’t live to see mainstream biochar. In contrast, we are all currently witnesses to the first phase of the collapse of world’s oceans, in the form of dead and dying coral reefs in the tropics.
How long can we afford to wait before we roll out our big guns?
I remain convinced that biochar, along with tidal power, high altitude wind turbines, pedal cycles and many other photogenic feel-good low carbon proposals will always be “too little, too late” to affect the final outcome in any measurable, significant way.
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Eclipse Now — There is nothing wrong with 1/2% solutions. It only means we need 200 of them. A variety of methods is, in of itself, a good thing, providing stability against the unforeseen.
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I agree, diversity is valuable… within limits.
Biochar, as explained above, will never come close to 0.1%. This suggests a list of not 200 but 1,000 strategies.
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Those who consider that burying char is practical should view on Google Earth the Hunter Valley of NSW, where perhaps 5% of the global production of coal comes from. The residual voids from the current mines were reported in the Newcastle Herald last week to cover three times the area of Sydney Harbour.
Multiply that by whatever factor is appropriate to accommodate 1000 years of sequestration via biochar.
How can that vision be sold? Proponents of biochar at large scale have an insuperable task in front of them to gain “social licence” on the basis of land (mis-)use, even before issues like fertiliser and water are considered.
If water isn’t an issue, how come trees are so rare in the Sahara and why does the name of Australia’s Nullabor Plain translate from the Latin as “No trees”?
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Who said tall wood buildings had to have a concrete core? While 13 stories is hardly a ‘skyscraper’ these days, it seems a number of all wood buildings already fit in this category.
http://www.woodskyscrapers.com/building-systems.html
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SE asks, “Does anybody know the mass relationship between timber in and biochar out?” I have already given one answer to that above. On the long timescale required (10,000 years) it is SFA. Even before burial, the charcoal content is less than a half, and a minority of that is volatiles. After burial, even the charcoal eventually vanishes into the groundwater (see above.)
The concept of “biochar” is an archaeologist’s description, not a weighable quantity. They speak of soil darkened by residues from fires of thousands of years before. Considering the millions of tons of trees burnt by homo sapiens in this time, the ratio would also be in the vicinity of SFA.
I urge us all to respond to any claim of carbon sequestration with a reflex, “not enough, for long enough“. We cannot let any emitter claim to “net zero emissions”.
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“On the long timescale required (10,000 years)”
That’s not a problem! Seriously.
So there’s this Darko Mitotic study that claims biochar could sequester all anthropogenic emissions.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/refilling_the_carbon_sink_biochars_potential_and_pitfalls/2349/
(Unfortunately his study is behind a paywall)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544210005104
But I’m not siding with him, as I don’t want to throw my money into a study with claims like that. But Woolf (cited by the International Biochar Initiative and many others) claims 12%.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964457/
That’s nearly a 7th. Say it takes 700 years to sink the last century’s emissions. (Not true, as emissions were on an exponential upward curve for the last century. EG: 12% of todays emissions equals all of the 1920’s emissions). But for the sake of argument, let’s say it takes 700 years of biochar agriculture to sink the earth’s CO2 PPM back to normal. With a half life of 500 years in some conditions, that means by the time the first buried biochar started to break down and leak back into the atmosphere, our atmosphere would (hopefully) have normalised. Now, here’s the question. Assume we stopped the biochar industry at year 700. (Why, when it increases farmland productivity by increasing nitrogen and water and microorganisms in the soil?)
What fraction of the biochar are you assuming would leach out each year? What fraction is that of today’s anthropogenic emissions? Can you see where I’m going? Doesn’t the earth, and more specifically the ocean, already absorb something like a third of our annual emissions? But it just can’t keep up with the pace. It’s the other 2/3rd’s that is really killing us.
The bottom line: even if we assume that at some stage in the future we stop all biochar activities, and biochar starts to leak back into the atmosphere at the same rate at which we were putting it in the ground, I’m not sure that it will be a problem for the future climate as our oceans would probably deal with it at the rate it leaked out.
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singletonengineer — How many times and in how many ways is it necessary to state that both providing low carbon sources of energy and also lowering the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere and oceans are required. Both.
As for making biochar the usual reactor provides about 1/4 gasses, 1/2 liquids and 1/4 biochar. The gasses are consumed in making the reaction go. The liquids are readily refined into transportation and heating fuels.
The Sahara proposal is necessarily expensive. With a US $74 trillion global economy the world can easily afford the US $150 billion per annum to get started.
As for a sample much smaller project, near here is the irrigated Columbia Basin agricultural area. One could learn about it. In any case, it works well enough and so I am quite sure the people just surviving around the edges of the Sahara would be happy enough to be tree stewards in trade for adequate pay, housing and so on. Briefly, I’ve looked into it some and once was a weekend tree steward for 14 hectares.
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DBB: You are correct in saying that we have to do both. The problem is that most people cannot handle 2 things at once.
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To answer several people at once:
The population crash has already started. Growth in the population will be exceeded by the crash soon. “Rescuing” “migrants” is suicidal. You can’t change the number of survivors by rescuing migrants. The crash will continue. It doesn’t matter how you re-arrange the people on the surface of the planet or the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The thing to do is to attempt to save your own descendants and whatever remnant of civilization can be saved. You cannot do more. You must not do less. That is the Prime Directive.
Eclipse Now:
Do NOT try to do several mitigations at once because that only leads to confusion. Confusion is what the fossil fuel companies want. The more strategies you employ, the more the average person will want to do something useless or self-destructive like wind or solar power. For anything positive to be done, the law must be a single page. Congress generates 1200 page “laws” for the purpose of doing nothing.
Eclipse Now: I am not at all inconsistent. “Doomer” is your word, not mine and it is a wrong word. I am not a doomer. I am an extinction avoider. Avoiding extinction is a full time job. You cannot avoid extinction without acknowledging the possibility.
AFTER we have gone 100% nuclear, then and only then can we work on things like pulling CO2 out of the air. WHY? As I said, if you offer people 2 things to do at once, they will do everything EXCEPT what needs to be done. They will not do both. They will do neither. They will do some third thing.
Job # 1: Defeat the fossil fuel companies. You Cannot do any other job until you have completed job # 1. It will not work.
Eclipse Now: You have to understand that the average IQ is 100 and half of all people have IQs that are less than 100.
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Edward said:
Um, right. Because society can’t do more than 1 thing at a time. Ever hear of specialisation? The industrial revolution? Different sectors of the economy? Wow. Just wow.
Here’s what I propose: the energy sector moves to nuclear, the building and housing sectors moves to wood eco-apartments, the transport sector moves to more fast-rail and electric vehicles, the airlines sector moves to nuclear-derived synthetic fuels, the agricultural sector moves to intensification of land use through biochar sequestration and farmland remediation, green chemistry gradually replaces toxic chemistry, New Urbanism gradually replaces inefficient suburbia, some Olivine dispersal gradually reduces ocean acidification, plasma arc burners gradually replace council landfills & tips (while also providing abundant syngas feedstock for the plastics industries), national parks are increased and managed to prevent biodiversity loss, fish hatcheries are protected with marine park status to avoid overfishing, the Great Barrier Reef is protected by underwater droids injecting toxins into the Crown of Thorns starfish, the Sahara is gradually re-greened with seawater greenhouses (and other reforestation and afforestation schemes), and a million other things the human race hasn’t even thought of yet!
Now while that might create confusion in your mind, here’s a basic principle that might dumb it down for you.
DO WHAT WE’RE ALREADY DOING, ONLY BETTER!
OF COURSE it’s all about NUCLEAR FIRST! Climate change is the biggie. I wish there were a pro-nuclear party with a Nationalise and Deploy policy. I’d vote for them. I’d vote for Barry if he ran in my area!
But there really are other sectors than the energy sector out there, and they’re also messing up the place! Climate change is the biggie, but there are others right on its tail, not far behind.
EG: We’re going to build more energy systems, so let’s have nuclear.
EG: We need housing, and we’re GOING TO BUILD IT ANYWAY, so let’s do it with renewable, sustainable plantation wood, instead of using up all the other resources that go into housing. Etc.
I’ll say it again Edward. It’s a great big world out there. Maybe you need to turn off your computer, forget about nuclear power for a week, take a holiday, go on a walk, and actually see some of it?
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Eclipse Now: Your comment is not relevant to my comment. I am not talking about anything that has anything to do with “sectors” of the economy.
I am talking about what average people think and how they vote. Politicians are average people too, and that is a problem. If only people who could keep 2 ideas at once in their heads, voted, it would be different. If politicians had brains…..
There are people who think that they have solved Global Warming because their cars have LED [light emitting diode] lights.
Wedges: Who was it who suggested that there are “wedges” or pieces of different strategies that we could use to defeat GW? Using enough wedges solves the problem. The problem with that solution is this:
Stupid people vote. Ignorant people vote.
STUPID PEOPLE VOTE.
Bad people vote. Crazy people get elected. Ignorant people get elected. Corrupt people get elected.
One politician entered jail on 22 June, 2016. Unusual? Only because most of Congress should have been with him.
Get it? It isn’t only how good one particular idea is. “You have to take into account how people are” Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver.
How people are: People are stupid, ignorant, stubborn, ……..
People don’t listen. Why am I so patient as to try to explain this to you? If I wanted humanity to die, I would remain silent. Most people are unable to listen or read. But they vote anyway.
So here is what you have to do: Choose the biggest wedge. Make sure it is a wedge that cannot be influenced by individual personal actions. In other words, choose a wedge that can be policed by very few policemen. What wedge is that? It is the electric power “sector.” There are few corporations that generate electricity. There are hundreds of millions of citizens. Who can you police with fewer people?
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Roger Clifton — Nope, nope and nope again.
Biochar is the modern term for anaerobically heated plant materials, the solid portion thereof. There are companies which go around providing biochar to farmers by using the field wastes. The farmers use the biochar to improve their soil. It works well enough to pay.
The residents of the Amazon, well, parts thereof, use the name Terre Preta for the result of applications of ancient biochar, not the results of wildfire, to the soils there. The result is greatly appreciated. Those soils have kept the biochar for thousands of years. If anthropologists use any term, it is Terre Preta for the Amazon treated soils but whatever the local name is for the similar soils in West Africa.
Biochar applications in temperate climates have been studied since the 1930s. The results show that half the application disappears, but not into the ground water, after a few decades. The remainder persists. My hypothesis is that retention time is depth dependent. This is based on charcoal from wildfires, presumably, buried at depth in the Ukraine and dated to over 8,000 years ago.
Finally, we know that highly compressed carbon, no longer biochar or charcoal, lasts when buried for hundreds of millions of years; it is called coal. Surely that is long enough.
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Edward Greisch — Some can be tree stewards while others are nuclear engineers. No single person has to do both.
As for sequestration, we cannot wait for the last coal burner and the last natural gas building heater to be turned off before beginning. It is a big effort and we need to start learning now.
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Sweden’s 100 percent carbon-free emissions challenge
Science Daily
2016 Jun 21
“Replacing nuclear power with wind power doesn’t make sense in Sweden, study shows”
Yet the last nuclear generating station in California is going to be turned off. Does that actually make sense?
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Eclipse Now — Last two posts: that’s the way!
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Eclipse, thank you for your thoughts, much better than quoting other people’s! You mentioned the ocean, implying that it is a larger sink than the atmosphere. Well, it would be if it were all accessible to the air. However it is strongly stratified and recent evidence has reduced the estimates of the rate of heat and CO2 diffusing into the depths. However the air is in intimate contact with the so-called mixing layer, about 100 m deep. As a consequence it has heated up and acidified almost as fast as the atmosphere has increased its CO2 content. That amounts to saying, the accessible ocean already is in equilibrium with the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
There is a concern that the increased buoyancy of the mixing layer has reduced its connection with the deeper waters. (In the Black Sea, the top layer has sealed off the depths below, so that they have become anoxic, dead.) If CO2 were actively injected below this layer it would, in the short term be capped as an anoxic layer, but there would always be a real risk that it would break out through the surface again. Such a “burp” could be disastrous.
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Roger, you can change the topic if you want. I’m not talking about artificially sequestering CO2 as a gas and injecting it into any ocean, especially the landlocked Black Sea, hardly typical of our real oceans. I wonder what percentage of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans the Black ‘Sea’ is? I wonder why you’re talking about it, instead of the rate at which you estimate biochar to decay back into the atmosphere?
Honestly, if we managed to return CO2 to normal levels through a mix of biochar and Olivine, who can guess what they’ll have engineered in a few hundred years? Slowly leaking biochar might seem like the most trivial of concerns! Who can guess what kind of Sci-Fi like futurist kit we’ll have as automation exponentially takes over this planet? Will we have a billion robots tending Saharan and Australian seawater greenhouses, all fertilised by the nitrogen fixed in seaweed fertiliser by a giant automated kelp farm? Will we have algae-culture instead of agriculture, at about 1000 times more land efficient, producing 3d printed meat and milk and whatever else we could want in deliciously engineered proteins? What else will we get from algae-culture: all our plastics and fertilisers from sea-algae?
Will we have fired self-replicating android ships into the asteroid field, so that decades later gifts rain down to us from the sky? Will we have habitats in space with a space economy that is partly funded by the Earth buying climate protection in the form of a space shield? Will we have tiny vacuum sealed, lighter than air naanites, like tiny Hindenbergs, floating around with various accumulative patterns that influence global weather — an integrated networked global weather machine? What about genetically engineered super-vines, like giant symbiotic organisms thousands of kilometres wide, growing from kelp-analogues in the ocean that desalinate water and pump it across whole continents, bringing essential minerals with it, to fertiliser our land, bring clean water to our cities, feed our billions, and (as a side effect) reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by fixing it in a genetically engineered super-organism that regulates whole ecologies? Will we have a space elevator that can hurl all the smart-naanite solar-shield particles we want into the upper atmosphere, droid dirigibles floating around doing stuff we can’t imagine, droid miners crushing billions of tons of olivine out over the surface of the earth, or even carbon-nanotube factories building giant space elevators or enormous diamond pyramid cities from CO2 sucked directly out of the air? Basically, if we make it through the next few centuries, do you honestly think AI, droids, genetic engineering, nano-tech, carbon-nano-tubes and a space industry can’t cope with a little biochar leakage, let alone panicking what the stuff might do in 10,000 years? You are kidding, right?
But let’s move away from future tech. (Remembering that we live in a Sci-fi era compared to 50 years ago. Just think about the microwave oven, internet, mobile phones, and the fact that my son is still alive, on chemo already 12 years old. Had he developed Leukaemia 25 years before then, he would have been a gonner.)
What’s wrong with biochar giving us 500 years? If that’s how long it takes to remove all anthropogenic CO2 out of the atmosphere, and it slowly leaks out again, what makes you think it will leak out again as fast as we put it back in? If we got a large and cheap enough farmland-restoring CO2 sequestering biochar industry going, I doubt we’d cease it. Unless, of course, something better came along. (Like my engineered super-vine super-ecosystem above). But even if it did leak out at just under the rate we put it in, our oceans sequester CO2 at about 1/8th our emissions every year.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0312/How-do-oceans-absorb-carbon-dioxide-Scientists-find-clues
Finally, if you really hate biochar, Olivine can do the WHOLE job for $200 billion annually while ALSO helping the ocean become less acidic! (NUCLEAR FIRST! he says, rocking back and forth on his chair like Rainman in case poor Edward G has a fit).
And this time I’m too lazy to bother finding the individual links to the studies (especially when I was scolded last time as a self-quoting Greens because I dared to store the PDF’s on my own website!) The main Olivine studies informing my rants are here.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/olivine/
Now go ahead and rave about the Black Sea again.
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Oops … the mixing layer is about 100 m thick, forming the ocean surface.
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No, it does not. Frankly, it should be considered a crime against humanity and everyone involved in pushing it (especially the well-heeled silent backers of the “environmental” organizations) should be in jail cells on charges right now.
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Hate? No. The problem I have with any carbon sequestration scheme is that it is always in the future tense, a dream. While there are people who believe that it is possible, the concept will be used as an excuse to emit carbon. So, when one of our leaders says that it is okay to open this coalmine or that gas power station today because we’re gonna put it all back in the ground again, well, you know which word should trigger our response.
Because they ain’t gonna. They ain’t because they cain’t. Arithmetic defeats any sequestration scheme, so we can be confident in an instant dismissal of, “not enough, for long enough”.
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I have a problem with making important decisions which assume that a currently unavailable technology will somehow become available. Don’t forget the aphorism, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”. Surely that applies to carbon sequestration.
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Primitive tribes without science created self-regenerating terra preta in the Amazon. It’s real. It’s there. After thousands of years. But it’s never been deployed on an industrial scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
Sounds exactly the same as how Greenpeace advocates reply to the promise of IFRs and LFTRs and MSRs! “They’re only little prototypes here and there: never deployed on an industrial scale!”
It’s never been done before, so we can’t discuss it or think about it or even conceive of it.
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Eclipse,
Of course we can discuss things which have never been done before. We can also work towards developing technologies which do not currently exist. Had we never done so, we’d still be living in the stone age.
That is totally and completely different from DEPENDING on technologies which do not exist and proceeding on the assumption that they are certain to come into existence.
You have twisted and distorted what I have written. However, I have learned from decades of experience that it is impossible to write something so carefully that it cannot be twisted and distorted by those who are determined to do so.
The aphorism, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” is still a good one and we forget it only at our own peril. It certainly applies to the assumption that an adequate technology to sequester CO2 will be developed soon enough or even at all.
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@ Edward:
“Cracking skulls doesn’t open minds.”
This can be paraphrased as meaning that facts alone do not persuade those who have emotional connection to a view contrary to your own – whether social, religious, cultural, etc. Even financial motives, in the final analysis, emotional, because the value of money at an individual level is only what the individual wants it to be.
I suggest that we avoid argument about techno-crap and futuristic trivia.
Here’s why:
The current stream of posts is doomed to remain polarised, specifically because those who choose to take a “current technology, big things first” view have collided with the people who rigidly seek to cheer even the smallest potential future step forward regardless of the technical and cost status of the technology (conceptual, experimental, trials, pre-commercialisation, or commercially available).
We have read a stream of efforts to refocus discussion along these lines and thus BNC’s active readership is becoming ever more polarised and inflexible. I am aware of a couple of earlier contributors who have simply given up because of the trajectory of the current debate.
The six or ten recent repeat contributors thus represent, in microcosm, the world at large, where only the insane seek to destroy the global climate system, yet agreement amongst the other 99.9% as to the extent of the problem and how to address it escapes us.
The immediate challenge is not dreaming up and listing more and more ways to suck carbon dioxide out of the biosphere or to prevent it from getting there in the first place.
It might not even be ensuring that existing Gen 2 and 2+ power stations remain in service and more are constructed.
It very well could be addressing the failure to negotiate effectively, even among a majority of the willing, a vision of a resourced business plan that might best approach the climate challenge.
IMHO, using scatter-gun approaches to push third rate proposals into the front of the discussion is a huge mistake, especially when the same people who introduce them also claim to subscribe to a policy that expanded nuclear power is the best available single response. It is also beyond serious challenge that most of those who seek urgent implementation of nuclear options very readily agree that nuclear alone is not a complete and adequate response to the challenge. Thus, many of us are on the same page, which is headed “Nuclear plus More”.
If that is so, why are we so willing to be divided against ourselves?
The real issue is not a shortage of ideas as to how CO2e could be reduced or avoided.
It is about how,on a grand scale, to reach agreement/consensus about how to actually Get Started and to address the issue. Getting Started will, by itself, promote the other actions – research, development, refinement and assessment of more and better ways to achieve the objective.
Germany, California, Spain and France have provided us with large scale examples of Getting Started up to 45 or 50 years ago. Each of us possesses right now more than sufficient knowledge to enable us to evaluate those and myriad smaller examples and to Get Started, yet we choose as individuals and as nations to partake in academic and emotional and pointless and meandering and destructive banter, the net result of which is to NOT Get Started, but to demotivate others who, together, might do so.
The problem is not a shortage of ideas, proposals, science or engineering. The problem is entrenched, continuing, frustrating argument and delay.
That delay is due to failure to decide, on a grand scale, to Get Started the best ways (note the plural) that we can. It is not due to a failure to pile up more fact-based, fully referenced, detailed debating points.
It is due entirely to a failure to win minds.
That, dear friends, is why I am enjoying reading “I’m Right and You’re an Idiot”. (Cited earlier). It is a serious effort to provide guidance to achieving fruitful discussions.
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singletonengineer: “A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian
The method is good.
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The world’s disappearing sand
The New York Times
2016 Jun 23
So no more concrete. Maybe laminated wood will replace it for structures, but what about roads? The article just notes that sand is used in asphalt pavement, something I didn’t know despite the asphalt lab 4 stories below my office.
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DBB pointed to an issue which is more or less world-wide. Sand produced by crushing hard rock has very different particle shapes and other properties than either river sand or dune sand. Besides which, winning, crushing and grading sand from crushed rock is more expensive than simply digging up something that nature has provided and loading it into trucks.
Dune and river sand are finite resources.
Sand from the dunes north of Newcastle, NSW, is now a primary source for Sydney’s concrete and asphalt concrete market a couple of hours to the south, because closer resources have been consumed.
By way of an explanation of terms:
I understand that in USA, the term “asphalt” commonly refers to neat bitumen, which is derived from crude oil.
Asphaltic concrete, a.k.a. AC or just plain asphalt in both American and Australian colloquial usage, is, as I understand it, the formal name used in both nations for a mixture of sand, bitumen and crushed rock which is commonly used for road and footpath pavements plus minor markets including tennis courts and underneath some steel tanks. It is also colloquially called asphalt concrete, to the dismay of purists who don’t abide by the use of asphalt (noun) as an adjective.
There are many asphalt laboratories in production, testing and research facilities which only deal with the runny black stuff and not AC. Therefore, no sand in DBB’s building.
In some places, AC is manufactured using coal tars derived from coke ovens or gasworks. This was phased out in Australia circa 1980 because coal tar is a carcinogen, is more difficult to handle and tends to result in inferior strength concretes.
“Concrete” is a generic term applicable to materials which consist of graded aggregates (stone particles or other hard, strong, graded matter) stuck together by a cement, thus Portland Cement Concrete, the common grey stuff which is used in buildings. Apart from portland cement, tar and bitumen, many other cements, eg resins, have been used as binders, although these are rarities.
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Running out of sand? Quartz sand is everywhere in the soft stuff between our feet and the solid rock, which may be a hundred metres deep. The cost of sorted sand for concrete is dominated by transport fuel, as contractors are usually able to find flood-sorted or wind-sorted sand on every city’s outskirts. When the contractor is forced to use a less convenient form, he will spend a bit more money to dig deeper, wash out the minority clay etc and maybe seive the result. But contractors claiming that they are running out of sand is about as believable as those voices saying that the world is running out of the cheapest uranium. They may just be manoeuvring for permission to dig deeper, dredge more from the rivers or get more public land released for sand extraction.
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Hi Singleton,
The Kirk Sorenson MSR video converted one of my friends from being ‘anti-nuclear’ to being ‘anti-LWR’, pro-breeder reactor!
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
You guys are seeing conspiracy theories behind every mention of other promising ‘third way’ technologies. (What Tim Flannery calls them). We need to roll out nuclear power NOW, but also be making plans in case the climate tips over the edge. I’m not apologising for this. The world’s most famous climatologists are discussing a variety of other emergency solutions. They’re being forced to by global inaction.
But because you poor dears are so threatened by anyone discussing anything other than NUCLEAR FIRST, I’ll stop for a while. (Unless I find something TRULY cool!) I thought you guys might actually have been comforted by the knowledge that peer-reviewed papers suggest $200 billion is all it would cost to mop up ALL our annual CO2 emissions through Olivine. I thought you would have been excited to learn Olivine can help de-acidify our oceans and restore farmlands, and along with biochar, really bring our soils back to life. But, whatever.
What I’m curious about is just how much nuclear activism you Singleton and Edward G have been in this week? Or is preaching to the choir on this blog your main thing? What about the little guys? How are they going to get to know about breeder reactors and a host of other things if you’re all too busy scolding fellow Eco-Modernists because we happen to also be interested in solving other climate and environmental dilemmas?
What am I doing this week? I want some people who don’t blog to know about nuclear power. Maybe this poster will start them reading this blog. Maybe this poster will seed strange new ideas in their tiny little worlds. Maybe it will spark something.
My work (6000 people on a Sydney business campus), my local library, and my local shopping centres are all going to get some of these posters put up soon.
Are you and Edward G game? Or are you guys stuck in your ivory towers, bewailing why the little guys just don’t get it?
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Offensive. no?
Intentionally, yes?
EN has no understanding of what I wrote about seeking to avoid polarised and unproductive discourse.
See what I am getting at?
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But the real question is do we want this to be the referral site? It’s probably more intellectual than the dumbed down pro-nuclear summary site I’m imagining. I’m thinking of a Q&A introduction site that answers the top 10 basic objections clearly but really simply, and has links for further study. Any ideas? Any volunteers? We could even have the posters put up there and facebook memes put up there. Create a self-feedback loop. Any takers?
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Hear hear!
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I am amazed that someone who so clearly and consistently epitomises both dogmatism and intolerance reports the selective quotation from the Ecomodernism Manifesto as though it covers him in glory.
For the umpteenth time, I ask the question. Are we here to brawl among ourselves, or is there a higher purpose?
If this site doesn’t get some balance and perspective PDQ, it will reduce to the last two men standing. (Testosterone being an essential ingredient of unbridled aggression)
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Way to go, Eclipse Now!
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The formatting of that previous post didn’t work at all. Apologies.
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DBB,the truth is that many cities have outgrown the local sand deposits. Transport costs are, indeed, significant as you said and this has resulted in crushed rock being unexceptional in many cities as the source of fine aggregate, “sand”, as well as being the traditional source of coarse aggregate.
At the risk of referring again to my distant past career(s), I was for a time the engineer responsible for the operation of both premixed concrete plants and an asphalt plant. Much of the aggregates of all fractions for the asphalt came from crushed blast furnace slag. Most of the coarse aggregates for the concrete plants came by sea from 400km down the coast. Sand for concrete primarily came from beach dunes and the local river bed, each of which has since become restricted due to environmental factors.
40 years later, a large fraction of the aggregates used locally in low specification concrete is from recycled concrete. Everybody carries a share of the recycling cost – the carrier who delivers the material to the recyclers and the person who purchases the crushed concrete – then the property owner where the concrete is used, eg for paths and floor slabs on ground. Recycled concrete is less suitable for columns and suspended slabs due to quality concerns.
I guess that the future trend will be toward more recycled product and more efficient design, thus reducing the need for virgin materials. The drivers, as always, will be cost and environmental regulation. Blast furnace slag is no more – China has claimed the Australian steel market and the Newcastle Steelworks are only a memory.
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In one of my previous lives (!) I was running a little materials laboratory. Working with a heavy clay for red bricks, I found that its quality could be greatly improved by removing the sand from it. Initially I thought that an aggregate supplier would be able to use the sand and share the cost of a hydrocyclone operation. Nope, both his and our industry were much more willing to pay for trucking from further away than to secure a local operation.
To be fair, heavy extraction sites are quite transient. For a start, the material is quickly removed and the license requires prompt remediation because the sites are typically located as close as possible to the expanding city – to minimise transport costs. Soon afterwards, that locality is overrun by the expanding suburbs and the resource is “sterilised”.
In another laboratory, I scoped the possibility of recycling aggregate. Larger aggregate could be cleanly broken out if the cement been “soaked” above 105°, and the aggregate had to be tumble-washed in acidic water if it was to be re-used in high-quality concrete. But again, both those operations were more expensive than sending those trucks out further. However that was on the outer radius of a city of then 1 million (Perth), not a city of 5 million (Sydney).
Ironically, extraction of uranium from granite (which may become necessary if there is to be a rollout of mass-produced nuclear) produces large quantities of fragmented quartz, a particularly “sharp” sand.
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I beg pardon.
My reference to DBB should have been to Roger. Readers will probably have realised that by now.
My point is that sand is indeed a scarce resource in many parts of the world, especially close to large, built-up cities.
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I have to stop following this thread. It takes far too long to load and locks Firefox up for a good fraction of a minute while it renders. See you in the next open thread.
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Engineer,
This site also locks up Safari. I generally do something else while waiting but having too many windows open at once sometimes confuses my geriatrified brain.
Other sites, including 2greenenergy, have the same problem.
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I, too, find this site is slower than most. Sometimes the response time is so long that the application times out, even when none other are running.
Actual lockup or time-out appears to be limited to WordPress sites. Whether I am using Chrome (smartphone), IE or Firefox (Laptop).
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I live on top of the Columbia River Flood Basalts. These naturally weather into clay. As the climate is on the dry side and has been for millions of years, the clay is still here.
Two points: there is no obvious source of sand nearby. Ex situ enhanced basalt weathering won’t work here. In situ, along the lines of the setup in Iceland, might work but for the stupendous water consumption; there isn’t that much to spare. Anyway, there are no sources of pure carbon dioxide.
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DBB, you’re quite right. Basalt, a mafic or basic rock is on the end of the silica spectrum of rocks. (Granite, a felsic or acid rock is on the high silca end.) Consequently, the proportion of quartz is particularly low. There probably is some free quartz, but it willl be a fine silt of no use for concrete.
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http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18325&page=0
This article from an unexpected ally of plain analysis of energy issues, appeared in today’s On Line Opinion.
Several comments from regulars at BNC appear, along with the usual bunch of misguided over-estimates of the capacity and value of wind and solar unreliables.
This article and the comments beneath it demonstrate clearly the polarised nature of the debate. My own efforts fit that description. If only I had the skill to help to reframe the discussion, so that common ground could be explored more and differences analysed to death less often.
Presumably, Roses1, one of the comment writers, is trying to encourage elimination of CO2 emissions, or at least reduction of them, so there is a lot of shared ground. The question remains, how to open minds without cracking skulls.
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Thanks, Edward. I have ordered the book.
During the past 10 years or so I have infrequently addressed nearby Rotary clubs on a variety of energy-related topics. I want to step that up to cover small chunks, such as:
General limits to scale of wind + solar, with comments on possible pathways to address the remainder of the CO2 emissions of electrical energy and total energy in a society.
Climate Change – What the experts are saying. A non-technical explanation of the basic principles including ocean pH, temperature and rising sea levels. Atmosphere – temp rise, biological impact.
Beyond Renewables. Technologies that can support wind, solar (thermal and PV) and hydro. Batteries, geothermal, gas turbines, tidal, CAES, population reduction, demand management, energy efficiency, manufactured liquid and gas energy transporters (H2, methane?). Plus reference to history and performance of Gen II and II+ nuclear.
The idea is to get my Rotarian friends to think critically about their own opinions and generate their own non-confrontational discussion.
Clearly, argument will not bring results.
I’m toying with the idea of using the notion of “frames” – conceptual perspectives other than straight analysis and engineering. I first heard of frames in postgraduate management studies as a way to portray issues from different perspectives.
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Boghossian’s book: I’m glad you ordered it. But: It is a method that I find difficult. I would need actual training to use it. And it is oriented toward one person/convert at a time. And The conversion may happen years after you administer the 2 minute treatment. The person may become angry in the mean time.
He calls it “Street epistemology,” if I remember correctly. Boghossian is a philosophy professor.
Positive side: It actually works, if you can do it. Converting somebody from Born Again Christian to atheist is quite a trick.
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So Edward shares his metaphysics, and Singleton buys a book (probably full of logical fallacies, philosophy can be so cheap when agenda-driven), and maybe in a year Singleton tweaks his talk and gets a venue and talks to 30 to 60 people at an RSL one night?
That’s our great plan?
What about something that can go exponential, in the real world and cyberspace? Where we spend months recruiting and training a few new people who then go on to recruit and train new people etc etc until you have an exponential feedback group?
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Something that would help would be an equivalent of The Index of Creationist Claims.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html
An index of antinuclear claims with their refutations could be much smaller. Their are only a few actually different antinuclear talking points. The index would be a single webpage with the claim and a link to the refutation. Eg:
Nuclear power is dangerous
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Being able to link to the refutation of antinuclear BS quickly in any internet discussion would help.
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Exactly! But also with a “We want YOU!” banner and list of things laypeople and non-experts can do, like facebook memes to share, video’s to link to, and posters to download and put up in the real world.
Warning: large side-step on Creationist themes, but not that large. Many right-wing Republican American Christians are climate deniers. In debating them I have learned that many deny climate science because it indicates an old earth. Because they are Creationists! As a Theistic Evolutionist (TE) I see Creationism as simply poor reading of the bible. I’m deeply embarrassed and saddened by Creationism. It’s like they don’t know their history, or how to read. There were Jews reading Genesis metaphorically thousands of years ago, well before Darwin. Philo, for example (link below by Dr John Dickson, with degrees in both theology and a Phd in Ancient History.)
http://www.iscast.org/journal/articlespage/Dickson_J_2008-03_Genesis_Of_Everything
The first few chapters are replete with number symbolism, Hebrew poetic and metaphorical forms, and it makes as much sense reading them literally as it does reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet balcony scene literally.
A Creationist reads it literally, and Evolutionist attacks with “But Juliet was a human being: last I heard, human beings are not giant fusion reactors casting off immense amounts of heat and light!” Both sides are missing the point.
If you meed Christians online who are suspicious of climate change because they’re Creationists, don’t just bag them for being so silly. Instead, share the Dickson paper with them and encourage them to think about what it would mean for their faith if they didn’t have to fear everything ‘sciencey’ and could enjoy God’s creation with scientific input into how He actually did it, rather than trying to find that in a poem about why he did it and how it works (and the relationships of the parts).
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Hey Jim, that is a great idea ! The nuclear industry may already have one, which would be a great resource during on-line debates etc.
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Jim and Roger are onto something!
Of course there’s always the World nuclear website, but I was thinking about something that was more like Skeptical Science.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
They have their to 10 list of denier-myths on the left, with explanations in both basic and intermediate.
But the real power is the activist recruitment section, where enthusiastic newcomers can link with confidence to both the arguments, and the posters (and by that I mean both facebook and twitter memes and hard copy that can be downloaded and printed out). We slowly recruit activists that put up posters in university libraries, public notice-boards, and local shops. Gradually we get posters linking back to this website going up all over the planet. Then we get national campaigns going, with country-specific posters directing (and recruiting people) towards areas of the website/s that direct them to sign petitions for national referendums or which politicians to write to or whatever is the hot topic for that nation / state.
I can probably contribute about a poster a month, as we brainstorm new ideas. (I’ll have to earn some brownie points with the Missus, but one thing at at time).
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EN has again displayed much about himself by having a rant about who he thinks I am and simultaneously having a chop at two very large community organisations.
Am I really being criticised because I bought a book?
Or because I discuss things with my friends and associates?
Since when are either of those a bad thing?
Was it the mention of the word “atheist” somewhere along the way that was upsetting?
If any or all of the above are true, then the level of discussion here has just dropped to that of folk who, in their ignorance, take fright because the word “nuclear” or “radiation” has been used.
It’s sick stuff. Time for a walk outside to clear some offensive crap from my head.
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Testosterone? Nope. My motive is that I am scared out of my wits. We are on the Titanic and there are no lifeboats. Some people think the US is a lifeboat, but the US will float like a rock.
Reasoning: The only correct way to think about what to do, once you realize that you are motivated to do something, is with math, numbers and some actual knowledge. Getting people to be able to think requires sending them to college to get degrees in hard sciences and engineering. Most people couldn’t pass the courses if they would try.
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Edward, I don’t see James Hansen’s 115 reactors a year so that’s why I’m looking for lifeboats. Sulfur skies at $50 billion a year is the cheapest, which is quite a scary thought because that makes it the most likely. Sadly, the side effects are that it might shut down the Indian Monsoon.
Why so cheap? Because “one kilogram of well placed sulfur in the stratosphere would roughly offset the warming effect of several hundred thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide.“
http://www.cfr.org/publication/18635/
Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, yes, the ozone layer guy, endorses it.
Click to access fulltext.pdf
He’s the one that costed it at $25 to $50 bn a year.
http://goo.gl/XKUnSP
Then with Olivine at $200 bn a year, we could mop up the CO2 and neutralise the acid oceans. Sound like I’m pushing fossil fuels? Not at all. I’m just as desperate as you are to see the world adopting sensible energy policies. Don’t believe me, then check my blog. But 115 GW / year to solve climate change at, say, a factory produced MSR or IFR or SMR price of $2bn each, is $230 bn. Just on electricity. The world can easily afford that AND Olivine AND White Skies (least preferable) and biochar and anything else we can think up. There are lifeboats, mere assertion to the contrary is not dealing with the data, let alone forming a clever argument.
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If there is anything I don’t want, it is H2S or SO2 in the air. We spent a lot of effort getting that out of the air not that long ago [Clean Air Act].
My lungs are not in any condition to be breathing stuff that reacts with water to become sulfuric acid.
That is not a lifeboat anyway. The problem is that nothing will be done until civilization is collapsing all around us instead of just over there. A collapsed civilization cannot even put sulfur compounds in the air.
Reference: “The Long Summer” by Brian Fagan and “Collapse” by Jared Diamond. When agriculture collapses, civilization collapses. You don’t really want to know what it is like to live/die through that.
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Hi Edward,
I loved both Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse by Diamond. But you’re changing the subject.
How many lungs turned to acid in 1991?
“The large aerosol cloud caused dramatic decreases in the amount of net radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, producing a climate forcing that was two times stronger than the aerosols of El Chichón. Effects on climate were an observed surface cooling in the Northern Hemisphere of up to 0.5 to 0.6°C, equivalent to a hemispheric-wide reduction in net radiation of 4 watts per square meter and a cooling of perhaps as large as -0.4°C over large parts of the Earth in 1992-93. Climate models appear to have predicted the cooling with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The Pinatubo climate forcing was stronger than the opposite, warming effects of either the El Niño event or anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the period 1991-93. As a result of the presence of the aerosol particles, midlatitude ozone concentrations reached their lowest levels on record during 1992-93, the Southern Hemisphere “ozone hole” increased in 1992 to an unprecedented size, and ozone depletion rates were observed to be faster than ever before recorded. The atmospheric impact of the Pinatubo eruption has been profound, and it has sparked a lively interest in the role that volcanic aerosols play in climate change. This event has shown that a powerful eruption providing a 15 to 20 megaton release of SO2 into the stratosphere can produce sufficient aerosols to offset the present global warming trends and severely impact the ozone budget.”
http://pubs.usgs.gov/pinatubo/self/
Lifeboats are real. It’s just why use Lifeboats when we can first save the ship?
So, about those posters…. what kind of poster would you be prepared to print out and put up all over your university?
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The collapse of civilization is precisely the subject. Are you in denial?
This pollen season was bad enough. I don’t need any added anything to my air. I am recovering from water in my lungs already.
My university? I am a retired federal employee. I will be 70 in a month. Since both of my parents are still alive at 93, I could witness the collapse. I am not in any condition to be putting up posters. But I think you should stick to Boghossian.
lifeboat.com
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Boghossian? B-grade ad-homs and relativism? Cheap “guilt by association” arguments? Aren’t these the opposite of precision and analysis?
No thanks. I’d rather work on new posters.
So, who’s going to write this “Newcomers” website with the top 10 myths debunked in clear language and a few choice links to activist ideas?
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READ Boghossian’s book before making snide remarks about him. You are wrong about Boghossian.
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“Brain markers of numeric, verbal, and spatial reasoning abilities found”
http://www.kurzweilai.net/brain-markers-of-numeric-verbal-and-spatial-reasoning-abilities-found
“Verbal or spatial reasoning was linked to higher concentrations of a compound called NAA (N-acetyl aspartate) in the medial parietal and posterior cingulate cortices of the brain.”
“Number-related problem-solving was linked to brain volume in all subjects, measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).”
There is something for evolution to work on that leads to higher IQ and there is real variation in humans. The bad news is: Nature works by killing huge percentages of the subject species. Nature isn’t very selective, but is bloody. The times will not be happy for anybody. :(
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I think the antinuclear BS has mostly already been debunked somewhere on the internet & it is mainly a matter of having links to the debunking all in one place.
I haven’t used my Facebook account very much. Is it possible to create a page there with just such a bunch of links? Can I do that as a temporary expedient until I create a website of my own or it can be moved to an existing website link BNC?
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“Run for election to the school board, preferably the state board of education. If you get elected, push for more math and science education for all students, and make sure the teachers actually know what they are talking about.”
Yay! I’ll run off and do that right now. I’ll spend years trying to campaign for an idealistic, unrealistic, time-wasting belief system that somehow every citizen should do years and years of math and science then they will somehow come to know the truth about renewables for themselves. Better yet, why don’t I campaign that every citizen should be forced to do a 4 year course in nuclear physics after they leave high school! Answer solved! Seriously? What Freggersjr said above!
(Face palms!!)
Just how many generations of nuclear activists are going to get wasted pursuing Edward’s pipe dreams! Dude, wake up and smell the contradiction. You’re worried the world is burning right now, and you want us to pursue generational educational reform?
Also, is this blog about nuclear power, or your particular atheistic worldview? I could respond to the cheap epistemological angles Bog uses, and the self-contradictions in his alternatives, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to figure out how to promote nuclear power to the average Aussie. Why are you here?
You seem to push your atheism every 4 posts or so. While I’m used to it, just how many other citizens do you want to alienate? Are you about promoting nuclear power to newcomers, or just preaching to the nuclear choir? Or is that taking a big stick and whacking anyone already in the nuclear choir who doesn’t conform to every last “jot and tittle” of your particular worldview? Just how divisive and destructive do you intend to be on this blog?
I think I’ll stick to my posters. Memes. We can change opinions subliminally. People catch memes rather than being taught them. Repetition. Images. Subversive, counter-culture ideas that spread like wildfire because they are clever, catchy, and cool.
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EN: LOL LOL No contradiction since I don’t expect either program to have the required result in time to avoid a crash.
What we can realistically hope for: That human evolution will once again be driven by rapid climate change, as opposed to our extinction. Human evolution has been driven by climate change in the past 6 million years.
Good luck with the posters. You will need it.
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Don’t make posters. Run for election to the school board, preferably the state board of education. If you get elected, push for more math and science education for all students, and make sure the teachers actually know what they are talking about.
A hodge-podge of previous comments on Boghossian:
“A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian
“So the core piece of advice I give may at first sound counterintuitive, but it is simple: When speaking with people who hold beliefs based on faith, don’t get into a debate about facts or evidence or even their specific beliefs.” Rather, get them to question the manner in which they’ve reached their beliefs―that is, get them to question the value of faith in appraising the world. Once they question the value of faith, all the unevidenced and unreasoned beliefs will inevitably collapse on their own. In that sense, the book is really about getting people to think critically―the atheism part is just a by-product. – See more at:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/street-epistemology
Boghossian’s method is a lot like the method of Socrates.
Why should you do something about/for a person who believes religion rather than science? Because there are multiple reasons why we will have a human population crash soon. We humans could go extinct by 2060. Religion is part of the problem. Have you noticed that when children are taught more science, the income of clerics goes down? The clerics have noticed.
We need everybody to be able to understand the problems and act in the best way to solve them. That means teaching a lot of science in the public schools.
“A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian
Chapter 3: People may be more adamant about their previous ideas as they become more open to your ideas. They may even become hostile or violent.
I am on page 55. The same methods should apply to any counterfactual belief. Boghossian’s idea is to get people to look at experimental evidence by what he calls “street epistemology.” The problem, so far, is that it is for one person at a time. Boghossian gives lectures, so maybe that comes later.
That is the same as we want to do: Get people to look at the experimental evidence and quit believing nonsense. Or, quit reasoning by analogy and reason from experimental evidence with logic. The only difference is the subject to which the method is applied.
Faith is pretending to believe something that you have no evidence for.
“A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian
http://www.malcontentsgambit.com
7 Reasons Why It’s Easier for Humans to Believe in God Than Evolution
at
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/seven-evolutionary-reasons-people-deny-evolution
from
What science can tell us about our not-so-scientific minds.
―By Chris Mooney Tue. Nov. 26, 2013
All 7 reasons boil down to adults who think like children don’t believe in evolution or climate science or they think that Global Warming is a liberal cause. Adults who think like children tend to be innumerate.
“A Manual for Creating Atheists” by Dr. Peter Boghossian
at
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/street-epistemology
Boghossian says to use the method of Socrates rather than debate facts. Ask the childish person questions about why they believe whatever nonsense they believe.
As before, teaching math is necessary and teaching that truth comes from experiments is necessary. Anything that is neither a mathematical proof nor an experiment is not truth. Truth does not come from old books.
The book “Religion Explained” by Pascal Boyer is relevant here. The human brain evolved for survival in the pre-stone age and the stone age.
So here is the number 1 answer: Trying to teach climate science to humanities and fine arts students who have not taken the Engineering and Science Core Curriculum [E&SCC] is a bad idea. Without/before the E&SCC, they cannot handle the subject in a mature/mathematical way. In any case, they are taking the climate course because they want an easy way out of a requirement to take one science course. The answer is to require everybody to take the Engineering and Science Core Curriculum [E&SCC]. E&SCC = 2 years of calculus at the college level, 2 years of physics and 1 year of chemistry. All engineering and science students are required to take the E&SCC in their freshman and sophomore years. For non-E&S students, the E&SCC can be spread over 4 years to reduce the intensity. In no case should laboratory courses be neglected.
The answer is also to use the Socratic method to break down the idea that there is anything at all liberal about any science at the beginning of or before the climate course.
The answer is also: All high school students should be required to take 4 years of physics, 4 years of chemistry, 4 years of biology and 8 years [double classes] of math. Probability and statistics should be included starting in the third grade. In a technological society, all citizens need to know a great deal of science. Notice how many people get the wrong answer on nuclear power because they haven’t studied the science and math. Failure to educate everybody in science and math is suicidal for a technological civilization because Global Warming will be fatal to civilization if Business As Usual [BAU] continues for another 40 years. Drought/desertification will cause agriculture to collapse in the early 2050s if the burning of fossil fuels continues.
Experiments that the students personally do are the most important part of the new educational program. There must be laboratory courses at all K-12 and college levels. Experimental evidence that a person does him/her self is shattering to prior beliefs.
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Luckily, for me, this is an open thread.
The universe is some kind of intelligence and the test is whether or not we will survive our own collective silliness. Church is not my thing but grouping the belief in God with anti-nuclear sentiment seems not to be a psychological approach for achieving fossil free, as it distracts people (and me, as you will see) from nuclear and towards the discussion of religion, other than possibly suggesting that God doesn’t “want” us destroying the biosphere, and therefore, that we need nuclear to do what’s right (you can’t shake faith).
“By faith, we understand that the universe has been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen has not been made out of things which are visible” Hebrews 11-1 (I posted it because it sounds like the big bang to me).
I understand that the atheist “argument” is scientifically sound. God would be outside (and inside) all that. How else would creation appear to us.
Of course, there is no way to prove that God was behind evolution, however, there is no way to prove that there isn’t a god like intelligence until we completely understand the “theory of everything” including dark matter, energy, quantum mechanics and how that all relates to the time bending aspects of gravity and relativity. Clearly, the universe wasn’t made from matter.
Lots of scientists are/were agnostic rather than atheist.
I can’t help to post more “religious feelings”. When a society “evolves past faith” and no longer “cares about God” (or their own soul, as Black Sabbath would say), all hell breaks loose as per the laws of physics – (“Show the world that love is still alive you must be brave – or all you children of today are children of the grave”). I think I’m not brave enough…
All we know for certain is that nuclear is still intrinsically the least expensive, most abundant fossil free source given to us by the universe. How can the universe become self aware if we fizzle out on fossil fuels.
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Christianity is not of one mind on creation and many other matters either.
On a 5500 mile motorcycle trip, I attended Sunday services in a combined Episcopal-Lutheran church in a small town. During the sermon the priest said something like, “Science tells us that the universe began with the big bang. But what I would like to know is, who lit the fuse?”. Everyone laughed. At the lunch which followed the service, I met many of the members. They all seemed to be quite well educated, as I would have expected with the denomination, and certainly were not Biblical literalists.
Part or the OT of the Bible is simply a reflection of ancient Hebrew culture much of which I’m sure is contrary to the Will of God. Some of it is ancient Hebrew history written to rationalize the horrible things the ancient Hebrews did. However, I’m convinced that parts of the OT to express the Will of God; we have to use some judgment when reading the OT, i.e., we have to pick and choose even if some people think we have to accept all of it as literal truth.
The idea that the entire Bible must be accepted as literal truth has not always been common and is very radical. We have to use our brains.
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My comments on Boghossian were not made to promote atheism. This is the wrong class/venue for that.
I made comments on Boghossian because Boghossian’s method should work for enlightening people on the subject of nuclear power. One method, 2 subjects.
Another tactic that helps on nuclear power sometimes: Tell them about natural background radiation.
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One poster wrote:
“All high school students should be required to take 4 years of physics, 4 years of chemistry, 4 years of biology and 8 years [double classes] of math. Probability and statistics should be included starting in the third grade.”
In addition to being unrealistic, it is unlikely that that would solve the problem. I know a retired PhD physicist who asserts that we do not need nuclear power since renewables are fully capable of doing the job.
Probably high schools should require one year of physics, one year of chemistry, and one year of biology, and they should be taught by teachers who are competent both in teaching and in the subjects. The same courses should also be required to get a four year degree, but taught at the college level.
Unfortunately, science has not always been well taught. When I was in the sixth grade, we were taught that Jupiter was very cold and had an atmosphere of ammonia and methane. Students who learned better later might be excused for questioning the reliability of science.
We also learned about the Piltdown man. We were not taught that many scientists were skeptical of it. Thus, when the fraud was finally revealed, it no doubt caused many people to question the integrity of science.
Also, in high school, risk evaluation should be taught. The importance of multiplying the probability that event will occur by the seriousness of the event should be well understood.
But we don’t want to turn out students who are nothing more than technocrats. They should also study history, including the history of democratic and other governments. They should learn the responsibilities of citizenship so that they will be more likely to live as responsible citizens. Sociology, psychology, and philosophy are also important.
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The important thing for them to learn about science is:
Nature isn’t just the final authority on truth, Nature is the Only authority. There are zero human authorities. Scientists do not vote on what is the truth. There is only one vote and Nature owns it. We find out what Nature’s vote is by doing Scientific [public and replicable] experiments. Scientific [public and replicable] experiments are the only source of truth. [To be public, it has to be visible to other people in the room. What goes on inside one person’s head isn’t public unless it can be seen on an X-ray or with another instrument.]
We build confidence by repeating experiments.
But: Memorizing the above will do no good. They have to learn it by doing experiments.
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Commenters are reminded of the third paragraph of the preamble.
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I just remembered two problems I had when studying physics.
My last two years of high school were at a private boarding college prep school, i.e., I was a preppy. In physics, when we were studying magnetism, I told the teacher that I did not believe that the magnetic “lines of force” were actually discreet lines, but rather a method to depict magnetic fields. He insisted that the discreet lines actually existed and that the orientation of the iron filings proved it. I told him that I could explain the orientation of the iron filings that did not require discreet lines of force. Of course I was right and he was wrong.
At a highly respected college, I asked the physics professor about the possibility of using a heat engine instead of an expansion valve in refrigeration systems. By removing energy from the expanding refrigerant gas, the temperature drop would be increased and the power from the heat engine could provide part of the power required to drive the compressor thereby increasing efficiency. He came up with all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that it had been successfully done in early 20th century naval refrigeration systems that used air for the refrigerant.
So clearly there are incompetent physics teachers and professors. At least I think they are incompetent when a student has a better understanding of some things than the teacher or professor. Thus one wonders whether requiring four years of physics would actually improve competence.
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Incompetent teachers are a pandemic problem in public schools. I had a biology teacher w˙o didn’t “believe” in evolution.
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“The Meme Machine” by Susan Blackmore has been followed by, most recently, “The Virus of the Mind” by Richard Bodie and earlier the well received “The Selfish Meme” by Kate Distin.
Intreging ideas.
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The first and last of the above three books are available from Barnes and Nobel.
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“The Virus of the Mind” by Richard Bodie was first published in 1996, so the first of the three. It was republished in 2011.
From reviews, I shan’t bother with it.
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I guess, with Aussie journalism collapsing to this level, we were bound to end up with utter indifference to climate change.
I think we should – with Barry’s permission of course – use this blog as an activist hotspot and think-tank. My main nuclear poster already refers back here. But Barry could have the Top 10 anti-nuclear Q&A widget on the top left of his website, and I’ll eventually back it up with posters provoking thought about each one.
What would you want to see addressed in the top 10 objections to nuclear power? The most common layperson myths, not nearly at the level of the Mark Diesendorf deniers of the world but the memes. We’ve got to undermine them.
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The word “meme” originated with Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
Wikipedia and my memory.
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If this board is too long, we can always move across to the BraveNewClimate forums.
http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/
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Eclipse Now — That move is a good idea for the links on your posters.
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Cheers DBB. While Barry writes at a far more academic level, I’m really hoping the idea of a user friendly Top 10 section catches on and that each page also contains its own poster and suggestions for how environmental activists could help.
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Eclipse Now — Top 10?
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Just like these guys have their own top 10 on the left there, and then this page that continues on with over 100 other questions.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Something like…
Isn’t nuclear power dangerous?
Isn’t it expensive?
Doesn’t radiation mean we have to leave a city for 300 years?
Aren’t renewables cheaper than nuclear power?
Doesn’t it leave waste for 100,000 years?
Aren’t we going to run out of uranium?
What about terrorism?
What about proliferation?
…. etc
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I have good answers already written for all of those questions. Example: proliferation:
Spent nuclear fuel is not a proliferation risk because a power plant makes the wrong isotopes of plutonium for bombs. To make a bomb, you need pure plutonium239 [Pu239].
Isotopes: One chemical element can come in several isotopes. The element [atomic] number describes the number of protons in the nucleus. Different isotopes of an element have different numbers of neutrons. You are made of atoms. Every atom has a nucleus. Each nucleus contains the number of protons required for that element plus some number of neutrons. The number of neutrons for one element varies. For example, oxygen has 8 protons and either 8 or 9 or 10 neutrons. We say that 8O16, 8O17 and 8O18 are 3 different isotopes of oxygen. You breathe all 3 isotopes of oxygen. Some isotopes of some elements are radioactive, while other isotopes of the same elements are stable. You inevitably eat both radioactive and stable isotopes of the elements that you must eat to live.
To make Pu239, you have to shut down the reactor and do a fuel cycle after one month or less of operation. Since removing and replacing fuel takes a month, a short-cycled reactor operates half the time. A power plant that has a one month on, one month off fuel cycle would stick out a lot more than the proverbial sore thumb.
A reactor used to make electricity runs for 18 months to 2 years between refuelings. In that time, Pu239 absorbs extra neutrons, becoming Pu240, Pu241, Pu242, 95americium243, 96curium247, 97berkelium247, 98californium251, 99einsteinium25, 100fermium257 and so on. The higher [more protons] elements are made by beta decays, where a neutron becomes a proton, an electron and a neutrino.
7% Pu240 is enough to spoil a bomb and you get a lot more than 7% Pu240 from a reactor that has been running for 18 months. Separating Pu239 from those higher actinides is a technology that has not been developed. Nobody would try to do that separation because the easy way to make Pu239 is with a short cycle reactor. Governments that have plutonium bombs, have government owned government operated [GOGO] reactors that do nothing but make Pu239.
Notice that the “student” is required to comprehend:
1. everything is made of atoms, including people
2. every atom has a nucleus, making people “nuclear”
3. atoms come in varieties called “isotopes”
4. isotopes have consequences
The average high school graduate has never heard any of these 4 “difficult” concepts. That is where the difficulty is. How many high school science classes would it take to get the average high school student to still remember them 10 years later? A lot more than you think. The lower half of the class needs the courses slowed down and spread out over 4 years to get simple ideas like this into their heads.
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Edward,
MEGO. “My Eyes Glazeth Over.”
Talk about taking the long way around!
I’m slightly geeky, so I’m slighty interested in what you have to say: even though I’m from a humanities background.
But the vast majority of our target audience wouldn’t make it to the end of your ‘explanation’ above. The “simple ideas into their heads” that you’re so concerned about are simply not necessary for them to come to a place where they can accept nuclear. They are not ‘required’ to know your 4 points above any more than they are required to memorise the decay chains for uranium or thorium to accept nuclear power.
There’s knowing the stuff, and then there’s being able to share the stuff. They are 2 very different disciplines, and for all the Bog etc that you’ve read, you’re the last person I would consult about writing a layman’s guide to nuclear.
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Eclipse Now: Show us your version of the explanation of why nuclear power does not lead to proliferation. The long way around? Show us your short version that actually explains the same thing completely and correctly.
Yes, you are from a humanities background. “There’s knowing the stuff, and then there’s being able to share the stuff. They are 2 very different disciplines, and for all the Bog etc that you’ve read, you’re the last person I would consult about writing a layman’s guide to nuclear.” Is an insult. EN is saying that engineers and scientists are second class citizens. It is very easy to be insulting and another thing entirely to convince people that nuclear power does not lead to proliferation.
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Something like this should be included to respond to fears of radiation.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/06/24/radiation-poses-little-risk-to-the-world/#7cca6c5548b5
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Here in Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A., which is about 5000 feet above sea level, I tell people that if they fear any radiation, they should leave Albuquerque because the altitude here causes people to be exposed to a level of radiation which is far above the national average.
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Edward,
It is quite disturbing to read that the average high school graduate has not heard of any of the four concepts you list. I never would have suspected such a thing since I’m quite certain that before I was graduated from high school I was well aware of the first two concepts. Considering when I was graduated from high school it would have been unreasonable to expect that the last two concepts would have been taught and I don’t know exactly when I learned them. However, they certainly ought to be taught in high school now.
When I was a kid, perhaps 10 years old, I asked my father about electricity. He gave a watered down version and said that all matter was made of electrons, that in metals the electrons could move, and that the motion of the elections was electricity. That didn’t work for long because I used to experiment with electricity. I connected a copper wire to an iron wire and used a battery to cause current to flow. When the copper wire continued to be copper and the iron wire continued to be iron I knew that the explanation was wrong.
Kids are often smarter than adults expect them to be and are often ready to learn concepts much earlier than adults expect.
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Americans are paranoid about all things nuclear. NMR [Nuclear Magnetic Resonance] had to be renamed MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] to get sick people into the scanner. It is the exact same machine. Only the sign has been changed. Apparently, the average American doesn’t know that all matter, including people, is made of atoms and that all atoms have nuclei.
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Edward,
I call it NMR and refuse to call it MRI. Calling it MRI is nothing more than catering to irrational fears. And THIS American is not paranoid about all things nuclear. However, I do think that reasonable caution is required. Carelessness with many different technologies can cause unfortunate results.
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I believe that it was the radiologists’ profession that changed the name of NMR from “nuclear”. They don’t want their customers to know that x-rays are ionising radiation, either. I have to twist their arms to find out the radiation dose I cop from an x-ray, and it turns out to be microsieverts. Micro!
It is a crying shame they are so secretive, as they are the one profession that is widely spread throughout the community that can speak authoritatively on risks due to ionising radiation. They have kept statistics on injuries to their own profession since their fieldworkers in the First World War were falling ill, irradiating themselves beside their many patients.
I guess they just don’t want the image of someone saying, “now you just hold still there, while I hide in this bombproof bunker and set the device off.”
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I attended the second day of the Nuclear Citizen’s Jury in Adelaide as an observer. There are 50 observer slots and the guy said only 48 applied, so I guesss it’s not as popular as the football. (All of the presentations are available on the website.)
The highlight was Craig Wilkins from the Conservation Council. He bombarded the Jury with his version of the 100% renewables heaven (even though this wasn’t the topic of debate), and denounced nuclear from the pulpit, bringing in a term I hadn’t heard before, the ‘sacrifice zone’, which is the port where used fuel will arrive. One juror asked him a question and he proceeded to answer another one of his choosing. She stopped him in his tracks and asked for an answer to HER question. Watch the video replay if your stomach will allow it.
How the Jury is going to deal with all of this stuff is beyond me. A show of hands revealed that only about 5% of the Jury had read the NRC report. One Juror seemed convinced that the government was trying to drop nukes on her from Woomera a few decades ago. Another suggested that if we sell food to China we should take back their excrement, apparently paralleling the used nuclear fuel concept. A third asked where the water was coming from to cool the spent nuclear fuel!
The Jury seems to be made up of a mixture of ages, sex and cultures. I guess they are giving it their best shot, but it is a big task for the informed, let alone the uninformed. I can’t say that I came away with a lot of faith in the Jury process.
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DBB: Robert Hinds’ experience was what I would call typical or average. That is the level we are dealing with every day. At least there was no violence.
There was a Royal Commission [RC] to analyze the idea of storing spent nuclear fuel in Australia.
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Robert Hinds — That was disturbing reading! What is the NRC that you refer to? I doubt it is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
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(South Australian) Nuclear (Fuel Cycle) Royal Commission?
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@DBB:
The Royal Commission’s site remains intact – at least till the gremlins destroy it.
http://nuclearrc.sa.gov.au/
The current political aftermath is steered from here:
http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/nuclear
Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, once a place of high standards and knowledge, has withered during the past decade or two to the point where it uses the term “Nuclear dump” regularly in preference to balanced and more accurate terms such as “used-nuclear fuel and intermediate-level waste storage facility”. Memo to ABC: “Not all storage facilities are dumps.”
Millions of dollars of fact-gathering and expert opinion, all subject to judicial oversight, stand to be wasted at the foot of the altar of popular opinion driven by the combined might of the fossil fuel industry, the Green industry and know-nothing shock jocks. Plus, of course, the valueless rantings of such as Adelaide’s own creature, the no-longer-doctor, Helen Caldicott.
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book “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll
page 372: quoting Jerry Fodor: “If it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying. . . if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world.”
Nope. We have to teach people that there can be more than one correct way to think about a particular thing without the world ending.
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Caldicott? Anyone see Monbiot demolish her?
Part 1
Part 2
His article here is probably at the right level in how to discuss the dangers of radiation and present that to the public.
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/04/04/evidence-meltdown/
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Reading her submission in person to the Royal Commission of Enquiry is worth the effort.
She is impossible to embarrass, skin as thick as a rhino’s. Nothing she said was worth a crumpet as evidence, yet she made the trip back from USA to deliver her opinion. Expert witness? Neither word applies.
Click to access CALDICOTT-Helen-863-888.pdf
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I watched the video of the debate between George Monbiot and Helen Caldicott. Aside from the content, I was very impressed by the extreme patience of Mr. Monbiot as he was repeatedly and rudely interrupted by Dr. Caldicott. On the other hand, Mr. Monbiot never interrupted Dr. Caldicott when it was her turn to speak.
Dr. Caldicott stated her credentials, most of which seemed to be irrelevant. Also, she seemed shockingly unaware of some important studies and ascribed to what seemed to be rather fanciful conspiracy theories. On the other hand, it was clear that Mr. Monbiot had carefully studied the matter.
Dr. Caldicott clearly believes that wind and solar power can provide for all the the world’s power needs. It would be interesting to hear exactly how she thinks that intermittent power sources can provide reliable power.
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Freggers, the word “interesting” is not one I would use to describe contributions from Mrs Caldicott to a discussion of intermittent energy.
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Watch Helen Caldicott’s eyes. She closes her eyes when she is telling the biggest lies.
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The Caldicott has sleep apnoeia? That explains a whole lot.
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There is actually a form of dementia associated with sleep apnoea that can, apparently be reversed.
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I didn’t say Caldicott had sleep apnea. I think she closes her eyes so that she avoids looking into the eyes of the people she is lying to.
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singleton engineer,
Even fiction can be interesting.
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I just did a google search on “3 mile island” to see what I could find. Here is one of the links:
http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/27/three-mile-island-36-anniversary/
Obviously that link, and a number of others, is full of distortions and lies and there are more like it. I don’t understand how a poorly informed public, which has little knowledge of science or critical thinking, can be expected to read such material without being misled. And, a misled public will send signals to the decision making politicians thereby resulting in bad decisions which can potentially lead to a disaster.
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Ecowatch is evidently one of many sites which does not deserve to be trusted.
Is there some kind of ratings/rankings system for websites?
If so, is it reliable and somehow free from bias arising from populist swarms with their finger poised over the “Like” button?
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Reference book: “Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge” by Jean-Noel Jeanneney 2007 The original is in French.
Page 32: 62% of internet users questioned make no distinction whatever between advertising and other information, and only 18% proved capable of telling which data were paid for by companies for their promotion and which were not.”
“92% of users of search engines have full confidence in the results of their search, and 71% (users for less than five years) consider that information from this source [Google] is never biased in any way.”
Suggestion: Use only Google Advanced or Google Scholar. On Google Advanced, specify either the .gov domain or the .edu domain. Otherwise, use only web sites that http://www.RealClimate.org uses or the IPCC.
Reference book: “Web Dragons” by Ian H. Witten, Marco Gori , Teresa Numerico, 2007.
The search engines do not understand the web pages they find for you. They are just machines. They have no idea of whether or not the web pages they find tell the truth. In the US, we have “freedom of speech,” which means that nobody has to prove that anything is true before publishing it.
Corporations with cash flows of $ hundreds of billions can easily, and do, corrupt the Web to feed you whatever propaganda they want to.
You can’t trust books either because liars write books and corporations pay liars and book companies to propagandize you.
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Not necessarily.
Some people close their eyes while speaking to indicate that they are bored because the questioner should have known the answer and because he didn’t, he is incompetent. It indicates disrespect towards the questioner.
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I agree that Caldicott could be disrespectful, of at least facts.
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Probably disrespectful of both facts and those who accept the facts.
Her performance in the video clearly indicated disrespect. She kept interrupting the other person, almost ridiculing him, while he displayed the patience of a saint. Regardless of one’s position or viewpoint, such blatant disrespect weakens one’s influence.
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When that happens to me, it is saying, “I’m not going to listen to you, now you just listen to me.”
An equal-to-equal riposte would be to manage her tone and say, “Oh, are you deaf – let me repeat that…”
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… match her tone
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Actually, the moderator did a good job of dealing with it.
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Rod Adams’ Atomic Insights today is quite informative about the Diablo Canyon closure, some protests against it, Amory Lovins and the original backer for FOE. Those interested in supporting nuclear power will surely want to read these selections.
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Yes, direct electrolysis of iron ore to metal is possible. In a paper from the ULCOS program, hematite (iron ore, Fe2O3) dissolves directly in a chloride melt, iron metal deposits at the cathode and oxygen releases at the anode. That’s cleaner and cheaper than an intermediate Cl2 stage.
ULCOS was/is a consortium of researchers for Ultra Low CO2 Steelmaking.
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The ULCOS site contains little usable detail.
The electrolyte is CaCl2 plus CaF2 (80/20 by mass), which brings with it considerations of fluorine contamination of soil and atmosphere, both of which have been managed for decades, eg, in aluminium refining.
ULCOS also are developing CCS options for blast furnaces and aims at 50% CO2 reduction, the remainder being placed in geological storage.
The 5kg/day demonstration projects, Phase II, were planned for 2010 – 2015 but the web site contains no recent details. Perhaps this consortium is not going as well as anticipated, which would be a real problem – the world needs steel and plenty of it.
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My search turned up a 2015 article in Dutch about the Tata steel mill in North Holland adopting one of the UCLOS practices.
Nothing more recent and all the others were academic workouts.
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Chile’s impressive renewables growth may soon come to an end
Greentech Media
2016 Jun 29
Typical problems include lack of transmission and the mining companies unwillingness to depend upon power only when the sun shines.
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The link is here: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Chiles-Impressive-Renewables-Growth-May-Soon-Come-to-an-End
Typical of the Greentech site, the very next article is a veiled demand that baseload plants be forced to shut down during the daytime in order to force the market to move to PV and wind at increased wholesale prices, which is just plain silly – let the market manage that type of call.
Back to Chile – the article is quite clear that transmission capacity has not kept up with solar projects and now needs substantial upgrades, but not necessarily costed to the PV systems which caused the problem.
In a typical “have my cake and eat it too” discussion, it mentions that Chile’s electricity is close to being the most expensive in South America and then supports the transmission upgrade and even more PV, as though there is no practical alternative.
If the PV operators aren’t willing to pay for the upgrade, why should the users or the taxman or industry, each of whom have other calls for their money?
Step 1 isn’t mentioned. Step 1 is planning, including engineering and economic feasibility, scope and options studies BEFORE a rush to adopting any specific generation and distribution mix. If this isn’t the duty of a regulator, what is?
But there is no mention of a Regulator. Evidently Chile has fallen into the German, Spanish, Italian, etc trap of network management by politicians via legislation and the public purse instead of following Step 1.
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The Conversation is plugging solar thermal again.
https://theconversation.com/the-next-solar-revolution-could-replace-fossil-fuels-in-mining-61153
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“reduce this carbon input by up to 30%” is the dead giveaway that it is worthless. Anything less than a down to 97% solution is for ancient history, like the 1930s.
Eclipse Now, your humanities background is showing. You just don’t get that numbers matter more than hype. And by the way, where is your improved version of my poster on proliferation? You didn’t understand it, did you?
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Edward wrote:
So good to see you spanking the messenger and avoiding the link to the peer-reviewed data I supplied! Also, you seemed to have missed my policy on discussing posters with you. (Hint hint!)
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Eclipse Now — That looks to be an economic use of a solar thermal station. A high temperature gas nuclear reactor ought to be able to compete; unfortunately there is no market ready design.
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Edward Kreisch,
Numbers and statistics are also important for humanities. It is important to evaluate proposed solutions for human problems by using statistics to ascertain their effectiveness. Failure to do so, which unfortunately is common, is very expensive and causes problems to continue.
While working on her PhD in psychology, my sister had to study statistics. In fact, the study of statistics has significantly improved the effectiveness of psychology. It has practically eliminated some previously popular procedures which were found to be ineffective.
Thus, I would not assume that people with a humanities background are unaware of the importance of numbers.
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freggersjr: My name starts with a “G” not a “K”
Psychology is not a humanities.
Psychology is on the borderline of science. We call it a social science.
Psychology is just starting to be statistical. In the 1960s, psychologists sometimes used statistics, but not well.
I’ll bet your sister did not take the Engineering and Science Core Curriculum. [E&SCC]
Eclipse Now doesn’t get it that 30% or less CO2 reduction is not useful given the situation we are now in. That is important for this conversation.
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I read the puff piece published in The Conversation and came away none the wiser.
It refers initially to thousands of panels, but not whether they are PV or ST. I assumed PV, as was confirmed subsequently.
It then stated that the mine would achieve 15% reduction in CO2 emissions. NB, this is a mine, not a smelter.
Then unrelated stuff about STP, 30% possible future (always future…) CO2 reductions using STP, then onwards to hypothetical direct high temperature reduction of ores, thus cutting out the electrical generation circuit when using solar thermal at about 1000 degrees C. Remember, though, that this article is about a MINE and PV. The switch to the author’s research field in SMELTERS and STP is jarring.
I really don’t see what impact the “10MW” solar plant is claiming, or what capacity factor. Is it just a “feel good” PR stunt by the mine to gain public acceptance by use of greenwash?
Indeed, this article appears to have been pulled from several sources. It doesn’t hang together.
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Edward Greisch — Eclipse Now understands at least as well as you what is needed.
As for the mining industry, every little bit helps.
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DBB: For once I am going to disagree with you. Eclipse Now [EN] is not doing the numbers or the math and that is a fatal mistake. Fatal for humanity. What EN says is soothing and agreeable, but wrong enough to contribute greatly to giga-starvation.
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I think part of the discussion is people talking past each other.
Can we agree that:
1) Nuclear fission has to be the main tool for cutting CO2 emmissions to essentially zero.
2) All other low carbon energy sources are somewhere bewteen useful supplement to nuclear & useless distraction.
3) Anything being sold as something to do instead of nuclear rather than in addition to nuclear is a harmful distraction.
I think Eclipse Now is claiming that certain actions may be useful supplements to nuclear.
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Jim Baerg: Your #2 on all other “low carbon” energy sources is wrong. Wind and solar are harmful distractions except for niche applications. The average person is not enough of an engineer to avoid being led far astray by the concept of niche application, so don’t mention it. Niche application: Less than 100 watts in remote locations such as spacecraft that stay inside the orbit of Ceres.
When states and countries mandate “renewable” energy, they are doing great damage. The only way to do it right is to let the engineers do the engineering. Legislators are free to set a maximum CO2 per kilowatt hour, a maximum number of deaths per terrawatt year, etcetera. Politicians should keep their noses out of engineering.
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Thank you Jim! At least you get it.
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I agree with all three points. The problem is what to do about it.
This very afternoon I was at a public planning meeting of Power New Mexico (PNM). After the meeting I talked with a few people; some, including a PNM vice president, were PNM employees and others were concerned members of the public. There were about 50 at the meeting.
Everyone I talked to favored nuclear power, including PNM employees. They seemed to be quite well informed. The problems are that PNM has to follow the NM state regulations to encourage solar power and that PNM has no economic path to build nuclear power plants. Probably that is a common situation. One gentleman, who was not a PNM employee, suggested that the military be encouraged to install small modular nuclear power systems to increase their power security thereby helping the public become more accepting of nuclear power. That might work when such systems become available.
It seems clear that unless or until government action favors nuclear power plants few or none will be built. However, politicians see even mentioning nuclear power as the kiss of political death.
I think that we should put more emphasis on overcoming the attitudes that make it next to impossible to expand nuclear power.
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That 15% reduction forgives them for using the 85% diesel backing up the minesite’s electricity generation. The show of good faith entitles them to continue using diesel. Truth to tell, we have done little to provide mining or any primary industry with (100%) alternatives to diesel.
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“…we have done little to provide mining or any primary industry with (100%) alternatives to diesel.”
Within my lifetime, electricity distribution has been extended to many valleys and districts, thus bringing reliable power supplies to dairies, farms and rural industries, many of which previously relied on diesel or nothing. Cream, for example, was sent to the butterworks and the skim milk was fed to the pigs.
Now, whole milk is refrigerated from teat to town.
My point here is that half of the job has been done, for farms, rural industry and many (almost all) mines. Even the remotest of mines, eg at Leinster and Leonora in WA, are now served by HV transmission line, when a decade or two ago they needed on-site generation via diesel OCGT or internal combustion systems. Transmission, which is often held up as the bad boy of the power system, is pretty much available to all.
The second half concerns generation, which should have been an easy fix… until the politicians went weak at the knees about nuclear power. As it was in the 1970’s, it is still rational to replace existing coal-fired plant on existing sites, where transmission, workforce and more already exist. The pity is that brownfield development of large nuclear power has not taken place in Australia and many other countries.
Typical coal fired power stations In SE Australia’s National Electricity Market commonly come in blocks of 2660 to 1000 MW, connected at 220 to 500kV.
The simplest, quickest, most reliable and, in the long run, the most affordable electricity future is not a plethora of new unreliables plus new transmission systems and billions of dollars’ worth of wished-for battery banks – it is obvious.
The problem is not that we aren’t supporting the “and nuclear” cause. It is that serious, rational debate has been drowned out by the noise coming from the alternative energy fairground spruikers, whose products are designed and marketed not with sustainability in mind, but with profit at any cost. Then they want tariffs and transmission systems designed and paid for by others to support their toys.
I’m sure that most readers here support the “and the rest” causes, but that limits the vision to the 10MW greenwash system we read of today on The Conversation. We have been duped into arguments about increments of 10MW, when we should – must – stay clearly focused on 1000’s of MW, availability, system>/b> cost and reliability.
In Australia, that discussion hasn’t started.
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Point taken. I should have said that remote primary industries have only diesel for power. Even so, what is “remote” is changing too, discussed on the HVDC thread. Edireland (I think) proposed that a mineral field (ie of many minesites) could be served by HVDC-light powerlines that could be moved elsewhere when a mine closed. But this presupposes that the generators themselves cannot be moved and must remain fixed, central to a mini-grid. Already designed are “dig a hole, bung it in, switch it on” systems, and I see no reason why such a system could not be “cool it off, defuel it, dig it up, move it on” transportable.
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Dear Moderator… I failed to close the bolding in my post, above. Please ensure that it does not flow through to following posts.
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Fred Eggers — That is informative, thank you. The problem is the state mandating certain solutions rather than outcomes independent of technology. For example, requiring a certain percentage of clean energy by date certain, where clean means low carbon dioxide and methane emissions.
An alternative is an ever increasing tax on carbon dioxide and methane emissions. With the right oversight these could be net emissions so that offsets could be applied. But many offset plans are dodgy.
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Designing mini-grids for remote mines and refineries can be tricky because the loads are very lumpy – eg winding motors on ore hoists show as square wave loads. There are ways to accommodate them in the absence of a large, interconnected grid with plenty of spinning capacity to provide system inertia, but as I found in an overseas project these tend to require additional highly technical equipment, all of which requires maintenance in the remote location. Eventually, the Chinese were persuaded to extend a very long transmission line to the mines and smelter in Mongolia instead of the miner building a new coal fired power station on site.
Also, here is a correction.
I stated that Leinster is now on the grid. Not so – it has been connected to a gas line, so I presume that it is still running the GT’s it relied on when I was there last. It does not appear on Horizon Power’s list of service areas, although Leonora, somewhat south, does. Leinster is essentially a company town, so it seems reasonable to expect that the power supply comes from the mine.
See also here, but there’s not much on the site: http://horizonpower.com.au/about-us/overview/our-service-area/
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Singletonengineer,
You wrote, “Designing mini-grids for remote mines and refineries can be tricky because the loads are very lumpy – eg winding motors on ore hoists show as square wave loads.”
You may be talking about speed controllers which distort the wave form. It is not only mining hoists that cause that problem. Large fluorescent light loads can also create problems by distorting the wave form. However, more sophisticated electronics on the loads can avoid that problem and reflect a sine wave load to the power source. Of course electronics which draw current as a sine wave cost more, but the alternative is for the power supplier to deal with the cost of a distorted wave form.
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You didn’t get what he meant.
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On-site processing of ore involves crushing and grinding machinery that may switch off without warning as something gets jammed. At ~7 MW apiece, that’s a pretty lumpy load.
The Goldfields of West Australia run for >1000 km from around Meekatharra in the north via Leonora to Norseman in the south. The mines are not so remote from each other and it does make sense to connect them. My 1970 memory of Leonora includes a request by the publican not to use the (40 W) light after 9 pm, so they could shut down the genny early, but not to worry as they had pressure lamps (kero) in the bar.
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Roger, you were there before me. I spent my time primarily in Leinster, late 1980’s. They were good times but I desperately missed my family. Years later, stints in Mongolia and China were certainly more remote but I had grown a little older, if not wiser.
It seems Horizon Power now have a local grid for Leonora, perhaps supplied from one of the mines. Indeed, if the mines were connected via a backbone as you suggest, your 7MW crusher would be less of a threat.
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Hi, Freggersjr. I will try to explain my sloppy terminology.
I was referring to the on-off-on load cycle, not to the actual waveform of the AC power. For example, if a large winding motor runs on a ten-minute cycle of:
4 minutes UP
1 minute NO LOAD (ie, unloading/loading)
4 minutes DOWN
1 minute loading/unloading;
Then a plot of the electrical load against time will be approximately a square toothed step function.
If the winding motors are the largest single loads on an islanded system this load profile will cause problems.
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U. Ottawa climatologist Paul Beckwith has a YouTube video explaining the unprecedented fact that the jet stream is now crossing the equator. I found it in an article by David Edwards of Raw Story, 2016 Jun 30, with a long title including “Global Climate Emergency”.
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Demand in a townsite is likely to have a longer life than the mine that supplies it. If a nuke continues to supply power and desal water to the town, it might attract more economy into the town that might otherwise simply have died with the mine. Here is the related discussion on BNC, at Edireland’s alternate vision.
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