Time for a new open thread, since apparently the previous one is now loading a little slowly… I’ll close the old one to comments, so please continue discussion here.
As for the quiescence of BNC over the past few months, well, I’ve been travelling — what can I say? But I have a new post to put up tomorrow, and a few others in train.
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 
786 replies on “Open Thread 26”
PS: That last one is a sentence I would never have believed I would utter in my anti-nuclear days 6+ years ago! ;-)
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Can pebble fuel be recycled?
Those pebbles were designed to be very tough nuts to crack, with concentric layers of different materials including silicon carbide. (Fig) There is only a few grams of uranium oxide in the centre, but you would have to process the surrounding graphite as well because the high temperatures would have allowed fission products to diffuse into it. If you were a commercial recycler, it would be about the last fuel type on your shopping list.
IIRC, the earliest design was intended to have a larger amount of thorium at the centre, and the pebbles would have a long rest between cycles through the core so that the irradiated intermediary could decay to U233 and be returned to the core as enriched fuel. With no higher actinides accumulating and the surrounding graphite repeatedly absorbing the fission products, the fuel could go through many cycles for very high burn up rates. Eventually the tightly enclosed bundle of nasties would be buried unbroken.
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Eclipse, the website that posted the “compost bomb” article rejected my comment, possibly because it included the phrase “nuclear energy”. In contrast to many references to “renewables”, that phrase did not appear anywhere at all in a long discussion ostensibly searching for solutions to save the greenhouse. Zero.
That zero may be a useful measure of a site’s integrity. When visiting an unfamiliar blog, it might be worth searching for the phrase “nuclear energy”, to see if they are too deaf to be bothered with. I often check the associated advertisements to see if the principals are directors of companies that sell wind and solar equipment to believers, but this site appears clean.
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Thanks for both your comments Roger, much appreciated.
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Roger Clifton — Converting biogas to a stream of methane not of fossil origin is a most modest contribution to the excess greenhouse gas problem. But having lots of modest contributions may provide a feasible path to the solution.
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DBB, I have to agree with you. The only way the world could achieve “net zero emissions” would be if any remaining burning of hydrocarbon fuels were sourced from recycled atmospheric CO2, perhaps via biogas.
Rediscovering the Sabatier reaction is not as great an achievement as the article makes out. However, it does report something more important – that the laboratory is researching turning atmospheric CO2 into higher hydrocarbons, potentially liquid fuels. That is surely the sort of research we want universities to be doing for the common good.
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Illinois Sees the Light–Saves Nuclear Power
James Conca
Dec. 4, 2016
Forbes
The US state of Illinois has just saved 3 of its 11 nuclear reactors from closing. That’s wonderful news, especially on the heels of New York doing much the same thing.
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“Illinois… saving… 22 billion kWhs of carbon-free power each year”
Good news! That’s 2.5 GWe. Also, if a coal-generated 1 kWh emits 1 kg CO2, the saving is 22 Mt/a CO2.
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California Merchant Gas Generator, Citing Market Forces, Files for Bankruptcy
Sonal Patel
2016 Dec 08
A 13 year old combined cycle gas turbine, over 1 GWe nameplate, can’t compete in the Cal-ISO electricity market without a capacity, or reliability, payment of the sort that many operators of nuclear power plants say they have to have to keep running.
I’m shocked that with the low price of natural gas this came about. Somehow the big coal burners in Arizona which supply southern California are not in the same distress.
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Anyone have time to help (arch doomer) Mike Stasse understand the ‘massive’ French ‘problem’ of older reactors requiring servicing, retirement, and decommissioning? I’ve said I would leave a link here if anyone had the energy (pardon the pun on Dad-joke Friday).
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Here is a link to a recently published comparison of new power costs county by county across continental USA.
It concludes that wind power and solar, including rooftop domestic solar, are generally the cheapest options on an “LCOE basis”, but hidden in the text is the admission that “It does not… Account for the… [future variability in ?] capacity factors for fossil fuel and nuclear plants.” (I’m not sure, from the wording, what the authors meant here.)
Similarly, it does not “Factor in the costs associated with managing the variability in wind and solar’s generation output.”
Thus, it is useless spin, which is a pity, because this type of study is very much relevant to the energy and climate discussions.
I realise the pro-unreliables philosophical stance of EDF, but this sloppy article potentially works against their cause as well as that of most other energy proponents, regardless of technology through prolonging a messy argument about research methodologies.
At best, it represents a job half-done. At worst, it is less than worthless; an open invitation to climate change denialists from the echo chamber to do what they do.
http://breakingenergy.com/2016/12/09/groundbreaking-study-shows-new-coal-plants-are-uneconomic-in-97-percent-of-us-counties/
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singletonengineer — The LCOE depends, of course, on the capacity factor. That can never be higher than the availability factor. For the intermittent generators, but also for nuclear power plants, as generally operated in the USA, the two factors are almost the same. Not so for combined cycle gas turbine generators, which are run at close to 50% capacity these days.
I also find it infinitely amusing that the results suggest building a nuclear power plant in Stevens County, Washington.
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Singletonengineer, thank you for your link to that discussion. As is so often the case, they are applying LCOE calculations to an intermittent power supply when it is only valid for a dispatchable power supply. I have replied to that forum to that effect: http://disq.us/p/1edp3r0
However, it is not obvious how one would calculate the cost of bringing intermittent power up to dispatchable quality. In a world of ever-increasing penetration of intermittent generators, the planners must run out of existing dispatchable hydro and pre-existing OCGT gas. Beyond that level of penetration, e.g. extra installation of wind (say) requires an equivalent capacity of OCGT to be installed along with it. Then, when the expectation of wind drops and raises the level of balancing gas consumption by the (gas inefficient) OCGT, at that moment it makes business sense to shut down the intermittent supply. That is, we should calculate the value of intermittent energy as if it is a business unit that is selling renewables fully balanced, in dispatchable contracts.
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A Report on Combined Cycle Projects in North America
Russell Ray
02 / 03 / 2014
Power Engineering
states that most of the gas turbines used as balancing agents for wind farms are combined cycle; essentially no open cycle combustion turbines are being purchased.
According to this article natural gas generation is to grow at 3.1 percent per annum for decades.
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David, that article speaks about a risetime of 14 hours in standard versions of CCGT and bragged about a newfangled geewhiz version that could come up in just 10 minutes!
However that is far too long for “backup” in the sense of dispatchable power that is able to fill in between the spikes of wind or solar across a span of five minutes, the minimum contract to supply constant power to a grid operator.
If each wind farm of 50 MW capacity had to find its own gas backup so that it could sell 50 MW of constant power across any contracted timespan, it would have to be running or buying an equal 50 MW of idling gas turbine. Risetimes would be too short to raise steam, so the backup would have to be open cycle gas turbines, OCGT.
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South Australia’s recent islanding event is the subject of AEMO’s third report, available here:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3235211-2016-AEMO-2016-National-Transmission-Network.html
It is 107 pages long and considers transmission requirements for the Eastern Australian grid forward to beyond 2030, based on recent problems affecting South Australia and Tasmania.
SA has been issued a directive that two large synchronous generators must be in service at all times in order to maintain security. If that doesn’t send a message to the “100% unreliables” crowd, nothing will.
For example, today also saw Mia Pepper,
who is the Nuclear Free Campaigner with the Conservation Council of WA publish an article in OnLineOpinion titled “[SA]Premier’s nuclear push is proof of a government in meltdown”. She clearly suffers from a severe conflict of interests, plus a lack of technical knowledge. FWIW, it is here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=18719&page=0
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Apologies: There are two recent reports touching on the SA blackouts. One is in my previous post, above.
Here is today’s more specific press release:
https://www.aemo.com.au/Media-Centre/AEMO-publishes-preliminary-recommendations-following-the-South-Australian-state-wide-power-outage
And here is a link to the 170-page report:
Click to access Integrated-Third-Report-SA-Black-System-28-September-2016.pdf
A further (final?) report is planned for March 2017.
Further apologies – I have not carefully read these reports yet. My eyes are glazing over.
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Gas Turbine Combined Cycle Fast Start: The Physics Behind the Concept
S. C. Gulen
06/12/2013
Power Engineering
After your eyes stop glazing over you will see that fast starts are desirable and after an overnight period of no generation can be accomplished in one to three hours, even just 30 minutes in some circumstances.
Once running, a 600–1000 MWe CCGT can ramp at 100 MWe/minute, which should be fast enough to track decaying power from wind farms as the wind dies down. The problem is when this happens just as the load is picking up after the overnight low. Then the ramp rate for the CCGT becomes unacceptable due to various stresses, principally thermal. So the solution used in sensible countries, like Spain, is to begin throttling back the wind farms early enough that the balancing agents can ramp up power at an acceptably low rate.
In any case, in the USA CCGTs are used as balancing agents for wind farms when hydro is not available for that purpose. The average capacity factor of CCGTs in the USA is currently just over 50%. As CCGTs are not efficient unless run at 60% or more of nameplate rating that implies quite a bit of starting and stopping.
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Easier to read is an account of the latest offerings from the big 4 CCGT manufacturers:
Fast starts and flexibility: Let the gas turbine battle commences
Power Engineering International
which states correct ramp rates, much lower than in my previous comment.
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“sensible countries, like Spain… begin throttling back the wind farms early enough that the balancing agents can ramp up power at an acceptably low rate”
That certainly does sound sensible. However, I am under the impression that the Australian net operator “must take” any wind power dumped onto the grid. This would preclude the operator saying, “okay windies, I’m shutting you guys down for the day because I suspect you will become too intermittent for the CCGT guys to rise and fall.”… Perhaps a reader could tell us under what conditions the net operator can legally shut down the wind farms. And for that matter, whether the dumping of power still gives him credit for having accepted renewable energy, a question an auditor should be asking.
For the sharpest collapse of wind power, there is the spinning reserve, the angular kinetic energy of turbines idling. However that can only be a few megawatt-hours, a few seconds of reserve power. Between these few seconds and the 10 minutes for an idling steam-driven system to power up, there has to be some other reserve. My nonprofessional understanding is that it would have to be a similar capacity of hot, idling open gas turbines, (OCGT), with rich gas blasting into them for the acceleration to power. Ten or so minutes later, the more gas-efficient steam-driven (CCGT) system takes over, and having emitted its dose of CH4, COx and NOx, the OCGT idles down.
SingletonEngineer said earlier today that the South Australian government has issued a directive that the (wind-dominated, SA part of the) grid must include at least two large synchronous generators. How large? Idling and hot?
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Hi, Roger.
Inertia comes not from “idling” synchronous machines, but generally from partially loaded ones. Returning cold steam-driven machines of any design to service is time-consuming and can be unreliable, so having nice, hot, synchronised partially loaded machines on line is preferable.
Besides which, consider your car. It might theoretically be able to run all day at, say, 150kph, but isn’t it going to last much longer if top speed is used only occasionally. The same applies to most generating plant, especially the older units which are approaching their use-by dates and thus have a “sweet spot” between, say, 30% and 80% of full load. 150MW to 400MW for a 500MW coal fired unit leaves between 350 and 100 MW headroom which, when needed, might also represent higher bids and thus windfall profits for the owner. That is one reason why, in the NEM, units are bid in a number of price/load bands.
To counter failure of any generating plant or an increase in demand such as approaching the morning peak, the sum of the available individual headrooms will provide capacity for units with headroom to ramp up and hence, to “load follow”.
The same happens in reverse: generating plant which may or may not be fully loaded at the peak ramp back down to match a trough. There is a minimum load below which the flame in each boiler becomes unstable. It is generally not advisable for steam-driven plant to be completely shut down on a daily basis, however “two-shifting”, whereby steam plant is brought into service for morning and afternoon peaks and taken out of service at other times, has been used on occasion.
I am not familiar with the whole range of services that are biddable via the NEM, but I’m reasonably sure that there is provision for payment for coming into and out of service for all plant at the direction of the market operator, AEMO as well as for ramping up and down at up to the specified maximum rates. AEMO also has broad reserve powers for use in an emergency.
As to the direction to keep two large gas fired units in service in SA at all times, I have only seen mention of that, but not the specific direction, which is possibly now publicly available. Thus, I am unsure whether this is now a normal operating condition for the SA region of the NEM, or is an emergency measure intended to be reviewed as investigations and modelling proceed.
One common “rule of thumb” is the N+1 rule, whereby there is at all times sufficient total headroom in the system to accommodate the loss of the largest single generating unit. This is generally considered to be a “credible event”, which must be planned for.
Given the nature of the wind farms’ early self-withdrawal from service due to adoption of minimal fault ride-through settings, it is arguable that loss of a whole wind farm or even loss of all wind farms in the state is a “credible event” and should be matched by alternate readily available electricity from other sources.
This also raises the question as to whether loss of any one interconnector, in this case, the Heywood Interconnector from Victoria, is a credible event which must be matched by an equivalent response.
I simply do not know which way these dice will fall, but a guide might be found in AEMO’s recommendation that the Bass Strait DC link should be duplicated, at a cost of about a billion dollars, apparently in order not to increase its capacity but as insurance against failure of the existing single cable.
The final, fourth AEMO report into SA’s woes is due next March. I expect that the real fight will start then – keeping two CCGT’s in service continually in the interim is small beer in comparison with the cost of system-wide HV transmission system redesign.
This all begs the question:
“What do the retail customers receive apart from increased monthly or quarterly bills from their contributions which fund the $90/MWh bonus on the energy generated by the wind farms?”
Surely that should be on the table now, along with the question of who pays for the proposed $4B or so worth of additional interconnectors joining Tas, Vic, SA, NSW and Qld, since they are being justified by statements that lay the engineering need at the foot of wind farms.
The rational way to sort this out is for a price to apply to CO2e emissions, at least those which are above a predetermined threshhold and for the resulting cash flows to fund the new capital works.
Within a year or so, I am sure that many who are not strongly against considering fission as an energy source will have a much clearer understanding of the costs and benefits of the various energy options which are available.
Oh… before I go…did anybody else hear that AEMO also predicts a natgas shortage in SA in 2018, thus making operation of multiple CCGT’s both expensive and difficult?
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Thanks for that reference, DBB. Modern OCGT, in numbers, can certainly ramp up impressively.
While on interesting publications, I followed a twitter link today to a very interesting study from a university in Texas, one of a series regarding ongoing work to incorporate externalities such as environmental damage, in LCOE analyses.
It optimistically sets out to study a wide range of power generation options, for every county in mainland USA.
http://energy.utexas.edu/the-full-cost-of-electricity-fce/fce-publications/lcoe-white-paper/
There will be argument as to the relevance of pricing CO2 or CH4 20 to 50 years into the future, as also the choice of externalities allowed for – eg None re mining or nuclear waste repositories, by my initial reading, but al least they gave it a good shot and are continuing their efforts.
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Roger Clifton — I can only pass on what BPA can do in the event of excess wind energy here in the Pacific Northwest. If BPA, because of other generation commitments, cannot accept power from wind farms, it can select those which are not to generate but must pay them the full equivalent of the production tax credit, US $23/MWh. So is my understanding.
The arrangement in Spain is much more sophisticated, with the wind farms throttling back just enough for the ramp rate of the slow hydro balancing agents. I have no knowledge of how the financing goes.
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Roger Clifton said:
One way of doing system-wide comparisons of grid with renewables and CCGT using LCOEs is to adopt a technical version of “capacity payments”. In other words, if some capacity of CCGT is installed to back up wind and solar generation then you add the capital and fixed O&M costs of CCGT running at 87% capacity factor (in the latest US DoE LCOE document) to the usual quoted LCOE per MWh price of the renewables.
So, for instance, using US DoE 2016 figures you would add $12.8 + $1.4 = $14.2 / MWh from the CCGT LCOE to the LCOE for generation from renewables to get a figure including backup comparable with dispatchable generators. If the CCGT already exists and is already somewhat depreciated then you might add less, depending on how your payments work.
So the total LCOE (averaged over the USA) quoted for installation-weighted wind by the DoE rises from $58.8 /MWh (including an allowance for transmission) to $73.0 / MWh.
That gets around the issue that with more renewable generation the LCOE of existing (or new) CCGT should increases as the CCGT capacity factors reduce because the capital cost and fixed O&M have to be recovered over reduced MWh generated, while still letting you use the simplified LCOE approach.
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That UTexas study does not describe Washington state at all well. The Columbia Basin is in the south central portion of the state. Most of the wind farms are there and none of the gas turbines, not what their map depicts. I could go on but the point is made; where not simply obvious the advice seems suspect.
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Thanks, DBB. Other comments plus your own suggest that this report has been released prematurely and that further work is required. It certainly is an optimistic project in an area where more work is needed.
I guess that the advice is to wait for the final, reviewed version.
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Peter Davies — That was clear. Thank you.
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Many bandy about the idea of a ‘carbon tax’. First of all, the name is wrong. Nobody is proposing a levy on graphite or diamond, the two forms of elemental carbon. The levy is proposed to be upon emissions of carbon dioxide, possibly methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. Does nobody study and defend elementary chemistry.
The levy is proposed for excess greenhouse gas emissions, sometimes proposed just for carbon dioxide emissions from so-called fossil fuel combustion.
But is such a levy a tax? Looking into the Oxford English Dictionary I opine that ‘fee’ is the more suitable term, as in gate fee or tipping fee as used in Britain, and trash collection fee here in Pullman, Washington.
So I recommend the discussions be about an ‘excess greenhouse gas emissions fee’, where some of the greenhouse gasses produced might be either included or excluded.
Comments on the suitability of this term are encouraged.
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I think I have learned how to form a link on this mobile device. Just in case, here is the citation:
Towards safer, long-life nuclear reactors — metal design could raise radiation resistance by 100 times
Katherine Mcalpine
2016 Dec 16
Phys . org
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-12-safer-long-life-nuclear-reactorsmetal-resistance.html
This certainly looks promising. I don’t see anything wrong with adopting these mixed materials right away.
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Australia tangled with carbon taxes Vs other names. The result was ugly.
Below is a reference, but the contrast between the various possible words left the impression in many minds (I think) that something sneaky was happening and that any use of the term Carbon Price was really a dishonest attempt by a sneaky politician to avoid calling a tax by its real name, regardless of dictionary definitions.
Hence “Great big new tax on everything” became the slogan of the Opposition, the PM lost her job due to a revolt within her own party and then the Leader of the Opposition won an election and became Prime Minister.
Call it a fee or a price and its opponents will still refer to it as a tax, IMHO.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-10/carbon-tax-timeline/5569118
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“Excess greenhouse gas emissions fee”. Excess above what level? We know the level, it should not be negotiable. Faced with an army of hired accountants and lawyers, we cannot show such flexibility. Any emission is a bad, so any emission should be taxable.
Already the greenhouse has so much “excess” carbon dioxide, that any net global rate of emission should be negative. However we have already been sold out on that one at COP21 in Paris, where the agreement settled on “net zero emissions”. In that phrase is the level that we can aim at, the level that can be policed. Zero.
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The rise times for CCGT generators, searched out by DBB and SE, are not fast enough to back up a grid of 100% capacity of wind.
If the system consisted of one wind turbine and one CCGT (combined gas and steam generator), there would always be a lag of that-many minutes or hours after the wind drops, slightly or completely, during which the voltage drops below the standard, slightly or completely. SE has pointed out that steam turbines will only rise quickly (in minutes rather than hours) if they are already at pressure and generating power, so on that ground alone wind could never be the sole generator. Even OCGT (gas turbines, jet engines) need to be hot and generating in order to surge. 100% wind is not possible.
In most parts of the world, the proportion of wind is so small that a decay of say, 50 MW/min can be made up from ten steam turbines rising at 5 MW/min apiece. As the proportion of wind capacity increases, the capacity of fast-rising backup would have to be supplied by the faster-rising OCGT, and and an equivalent capacity of CCGT pulled out of service.
At some proportion of wind generation, every extra wind generator installed must be matched at the same time with an installation of plain CCGT of the same capacity. SE has told us the South Australian government has directed that a certain minimum of synchronous generation must backup the wind in their part of the grid. It will be interesting to find out if they have specified how fast it can rise…
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Agreed, Roger.
But first, my apologies for another very long post.
Rise times of minutes and up to an hour are of no use when instantaneous, 6-second, 60-second and 6-minute times are the targets.
Here is a discussion piece aimed at a non-technical audience, from an industry organisation. NB, thus not independent and possibly biased. Caveat emptor.
https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/power-quality-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/
From the same source, I note that it was the SA Government which demanded that two large gas fired plant remain in service continually. I had, probably incorrectly, thought that this came from AEMO. Hence my difficulty locating the precise wording of the directive.
https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/qa-on-the-south-australian-energy-crisis/
I have not fully thought through Roger’s statement “At some proportion of wind generation, every extra wind generator installed must be matched at the same time with an installation of [gas] of the same capacity.” Given the lack of hydro resources in SA, it is reasonable to assume that, broadly speaking, additional wind must be supported by an increment in gas, but need that be “equal”?
Off the top of my head, a full examination of this will require examination of the NER Rules as well as plant performance characteristics.
The Rules describe what is and is not a Credible Event, ie sufficiently probable that it must be allowed for in the overall design and operation of the NEM and, in this circumstance, the SA Region of the NEM.
The Heywood Interconnector was providing both energy (power) and other services (FCAS frequency control, plus black start capacity) immediately prior to separation of Vic from SA.
Other, smaller black start capacity within SA was contracted to the NEM but in the event, was either unavailable or far too late or too small or …
Separation was primarily due to demand for excess power above that which could be supplied via the interconnector, which of course tripped.
That left insufficient FCAS capacity to handle the combination of then-current (ie not yet isolated) transmission faults plus loss of wind generation capacity.
Hence, the directive appears to be driven not for backup power, per se, but by the need for workable levels of FCAS. Hence, perhaps the directive contained a requirement that some capacity be held in reserve to meet unserved demand, to provide inertia, or for availability to ramp up at given rates over various time periods (seconds to an hour or two).
Whether, in the context of SA, this implies a 1-to-1 relationship between new wind and backup gas, and if so in what configuration, I simply don’t know. I doubt it, because there might be smarter ways to operate the system and smarter ways to set individual protection devices throughout the state. I still don’t know why the load wasn’t rejected by operation of breakers close to the faults instead of the escalating wave of unserved load reached the Victorian border. That seems to me not to be a problem which lies at the feet of the wind farms entirely, but which is primarily the duty of the high voltage transmission system’s operators and designers. When transmission lines went down to earth, why were they not isolated before the problem spread?
Other emergency responses, not considered here, might include automatic rolling blackouts, but of course, when the combination of 400MW of wind and 700MW or so from the interconnector were lost in a very short timeframe, a black SA was inevitable.
My current thoughts are that the concept of “Credible Event” needs to be revisited. Unless controls are available to prevent loss of wind farms as single entities, rather than as collections of independent generating units, then it is clear that one family of credible event is instantaneous loss of any wind farm in the state, somewhat below 200MW AFAIK.
Another is the potential loss of the Heywood Interconnector, which is currently being upgraded to about 1GW, ie about half of the system load when the state went black.
My guess is that the only reasonable response to guard against the loss of the Heywood is provision of an equivalent interconnector, but from where? NSW? Victoria? Qld? Tas? Various sources, including AEMO, have recommended consideration of duplication and upgrades of interconnectors between all of these Regions.
But is that in response to the wind percentage in SA? Or is it because, in a world where each state depends for its electrical supply on a single interconnected system, the NEM, a weakness has been discovered and that weakness is the lack of capacity and diversity of the interconnectors generally?
The next report from AEMO will be due next March.
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I will attempt to explain a grid with generation entirely from wind turbines and combined cycle gas turbines.
There are three rates to consider as well as the start times for the CCGTs. These are the downramp rate for the wind turbines when a “blow” dies away, the upramp requirement of the demand at the beginning of the day, or whenever it is steepest, and the upramp rate for the CCGTs. The equation to consider is
CCGT supply = load – wind supply
with the worst situation being when the wind is dying just as the load is ramping up. So the CCGTs need to be already ready to go, having completed the hour or so turn on warm up. This is accomplished by accurate weather forecasting only at most three hours in advance, easy these days.
If the CCGTs still cannot ramp fast enough to keep up with the changes in the net load on the right of the equation, the solution is to fire up the CCGTs even earlier and curtail wind generation to match the curve of
load – CCGT supply.
Spain does this, but there it is mostly slow hydro, not so much CCGTs.
I encourage Aussies to inform their governments of this obvious idea of treating wind as semi-controllable instead of the inflexible “must take” policy which I gather is in force in at least South Australia. Here in the Pacific Northwest, at least, it is possible but BPA has to pay the production tax credit to the wind farm in proportion to the curtailment.
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Re: DBB. Wind plus GT.
DBB’s explanation is spot on, as far as it goes. SA is essentially served primarily from within, plus a single large AC interconnector leading from Victorian brown coal power generators.
The impact of the interconnector cannot be ignored, because it frequently provides 20 to 40% of the energy, but occasionally as little as (eg lunchtime on a midsummer clear sky holiday), perhaps zero or even a small flow eastwards.
Since the largest single loss event on the system is probably the interconnecter and not the wind farms or any credible combination of generation, loss of the interconnector must be considered as a credible event.
Whether this means that more GT’s are needed in SA, or an additional (AC?) interconnector or more aggressive load management I cannot say – perhaps all three.
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Thank you, DBB for your clear explanation. A typo on my part was confusing the issue… My punchline should have read: “At some proportion of wind generation, every extra wind generator installs must be matched the same time with an installation of OCGT (plain gas turbines) of the same capacity”.
I was arguing that the capacity to rise must be part of the design of a grid. As a grid grows, the capacity of any one generator to rise gets earmarked for a specific contingency, such as increases in load due to industrial activity. Of course it is cheap to install an OCGT before there is a demand for its rapid response capability, but subsequent installation of wind will eventually earmark all such un-earmarked OCGT.
Growing the grid any further by adding an intermittent generator would require that its backup be installed at same time. That implies OCGT of equal capacity and equal capacity to rise. That’s what I should have said.
My argument is simplistic. In the real world, business decisions would motivate the installation of the more efficient CCGT, leaving a minority of OCGT, that would be only inadequate in the extremely rare event of all wind dropping to zero at the same time. Operator/s would be fined for such a blackout or brownout according to the rules, as an event to be risked and insured against.
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A recent survey has shown that two thirds of Americans support a carbon tax/fee if the revenue is used to lower other taxes. The measure was backed by 81% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and, encouragingly, 49% of Republicans.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/16/nearly-half-of-Republicans-favor-this-kind-of-carbon-tax-contrary-to-gop-platform.html
Time for us in the US to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
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I am opposed to a ‘carbon’ tax-or-fee. I see no reason to levy on the production of graphite or diamonds, for that matter. Those are the two forms of elemental carbon, as everyone who has taken beginning chemistry knows.
I am in favor of a levy, I prefer the term ‘fee’, on greenhouse gas emissions, principally carbon dioxide.
Now as everyone should know, but it seems that all-too-many do not, carbon dioxide is a gas and is different than elemental carbon. Learned that in beginning chemistry as well.
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DBB,
I like the term “excess greenhouse gas emissions fee”. which you introduced two days upthread. It’s accurate.
But “carbon tax” is the term that’s commonly used. And it’s not that inaccurate if understood as a tax on the carbon content of fossil fuel.
The main difficulty occurs when people speak of a carbon tax, and then give the price in terms of CO2. But most people who are familiar with the subject make the mental adjustment.
Anyway, I certainly support an emissions fee, whatever it’s called.
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huon — The problem is the hoards of lawyers and lobbyists who will use any such misuse of language to mislead the legislators, few of whom seem to remember whatever basic science they studied in middle school, much less high school chemistry.
Here is a simple account about atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. In the mid-Pliocene sea levels were 25 meters higher than now, due to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels of about 400 ppm, the level now reached once again.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliocene_climate
So long as atmospheric carbon dioxide leveisls remain at least at 400 ppm we should expect a sea level rise of about 25 meters.
To help avoid that a fee on carbon dioxide emissions is advisable, to put it mildly.
No, this is not a fee on the carbon content of so-called fossil fuels. For, assuming no methane leaks, natural gas has at least twice the heating value of coal. It is only the carbon dioxide going out the exhaust which counts.
So the slang phrase, ‘carbon’ tax-or-fee, is misleading, hence confusing. Having listened to Bill McKibben recently, I am not sure that he understands the difference between carbon tax and carbon dioxide fee.
So could we all use the correct term in the attempt to introduce such a fee, everywhere we can?
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If I understand DBB’s argument correctly, we should be taxing emissions (of GHGs), and not taxing solid extractions like graphite and building limestone. If we are to be that precise, the wording would have to be an “emissions tax”. That would have the side benefit of allowing regulators to apply different tax rates to the different emissions — CO2, CO, CH4, CFCs, NH3, NOx, etc.
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Yes, Roger Clifton! I don’t care how much carbon dioxide is produced as long as it does not escape into the atmosphere. Think of a variation on a landfill for solid wastes, that is, a repository for carbon dioxide.
But if the carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, there is a substantial fee attached; a carbon dioxide emissions fee.
As for the other substances you mention, other emission fee schedules.
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And then there’s Tim Flannery saying that if we had some form of Carbon Tax (which after the last few elections is what it is written into the hearts of all Australians for all time, no matter what we prefer!) then maybe it could fund a massive kelp farm, something like 4 times the size of Australia to farm kelp for CO2. Then what do we do with it? Biochar it and eat it and feed it to cows to reign in deforestation, and reduce the cow-burp emissions that eating seaweed apparently does? Sounds good to me. But that would be a LOT of kelp, but then again, we eat a LOT of meat, and taking pressure off the Amazon for corn or soy beans or whatever they feed cattle would be good.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clayton-b-cornell/cooling-the-climate-with-_b_8486822.html
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Eclipse, the vast harvests from the kelp farms of your vision have at least one customer on the scale required. If aviation fuel etc is to be made from non-fossil carbon, your dried kelp could provide fuel refineries with the feedstock. Cellulose and lignin in the kelp are polymers of [CH2O], where nature has already captured carbon from the air and polymerised it better than we could. Turning it into hydrocarbons, polymers of [CH2], only requires us to remove the oxygen.
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Dear Barry,
I am a professional nuclear safety engineer (worked on the UK new builds, did safety analysis of all new plant designs for utilities etc.) and would like to reach out to you since you are very well connected. One of the main problems behind nuclear and its chief source for escalating cost is the simply the fact that the nuclear safety philosophy as developed by the NRC is simply false from the ground up.
Nuclear safety as practiced throughout the world revolves around the simple hypothesis:
Wanton and mass killing of the unsuspecting population by large scale radiological releases are GENERALLY acceptable and permittable, provided that it happens sufficiently rarely.
With time the component of what exactly does “sufficiently rarely” mean has evolved more and more, but the first part of the sentence, the real cause and problem, has not been revisited in the past 60 years of civil nuclear development.
With today’s technology, though unlike the 50s, we can now completely rule out large scale radiological releases to happen. And the crazy thing: there is no way to license a nuclear reactor to make use of this fact!
Exactly because of the limitations of current licensing regimes, the AP1000 or the AES2004 are such a wierd hodge-podge of competing technologies and safety goals. I personally know several of the lead engineers behind the AP1000 and they agree with me that without the false goals of current licensing practices, the AP1000 could be much simpler, much cheaper and much safer…
I am reaching out to you to hopefully reach a wider audience of people that the future of nuclear can only happen when the basic lie of nuclear safety is revisited:
large scale releases are NOT acceptable.
There is only one safety case that needs to be investigated:
Deal with a complete core meltdown with a closed or open primary circuit such that no outside action, energy, water etc. is needed for 72h, and after 72h only fire water supplied by ordinary fire trucks are acceptable to prevent large scale releases.
Also:
The shift of liability to the nuclear plant operator is not accpetable. This leads to the abandonment of design experience and knowledge into the individual sites. There is no learning effect. No, outside of gross negligence by the operator, the nuclear plant vendor is liable for his/her design.
This is very important in order to enable the amazing lifecycle learning and improvement rates experienced in the aerospace or car industry to expand to nuclear power.
What I am asking for is btw. no small feat. This will require the scrapping of basically every single piece of nuclear legislation, nuclear standards and design codes.
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It has never happened. It is not going to happen. Why give life to such an ugly fantasy?
You failed to give a reference to anybody saying that. My browser could find nothing like it on the web either. What sort of spokesman would say that?
Mind you, I did rather enjoy its apocalyptic poetry. How is this in the same style… Intermittent mass killings of innocent people across the globe by large-scale carbon dioxide releases are accepted without question, provided only that the emissions are decorated by occasional wind turbines and solar panels
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Roger C’s “poetry” provides some strong imagery for Christmas morn… now back to the visiting grandkids, who will inherit this world from the current adults.
Sad to say, I am convinced that any low-carbon energy plan that relies on one or a combination of:
Intermittents – backed by gas turbines;
Pumped hydro – not conceivably large enough;
Batteries – too little, too late, resource-limited;
Population reduction – what reduction?;
Demand management/ efficiency – and what about the 70% that is not currently electrical?;
Ignores LULUCF – Blind to much of the issue;
Not strongly founded in science – dreaming;
Does not assess safety consistently – biased;
Ignores the potential of selected options, eg nuclear – commercially conflicted;
Ignores ocean warming and acidity – blind to reality;
Ignores cost and affordability – also blind to reality;
Relies on public handouts while claiming that their technologies are mature – On the public teat; and
Chooses to ignore the realities of stable, operating power transmission and distribution systems – childish…
… are denying my two grandkids their birthright.
I could add meat-eaters to this list, but as one who until a year back raised grass-fed beef cattle I am currently reviewing the role of my lifestyle in my grandkids’ futures. Most land is not suited to cropping, so I have allowed 50% of my land to revert to lightly managed natural bushland, most of which has recently been accredited as “Old growth”, though established on grazing land in the 30 years I have lived here. This is very much a work in progress.
I’d be interested to hear opinion about my use of a wood fire for heating, when 100% of the fuel comes from management of my land.
Season’s greetings to all.
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singletonengineer — By all means wood for space heating and cooking too. For the former, I suggest a Franklin stove. For the latter see if you can acquire an old fashioned wood fired oven with range. Both are cast iron appliances. I have used both with fully dried wood.
Consider a charcoal maker. The advantage is less mess to clean out of stovepipes.
I future recommend looking into a biochar pyrolysis unit if your woodlot is large enough. Many people have fabricated their own, often trailer mounted, and describe the results on websites.
Feliz Navidad!
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I use windfall hardwood branchwood (Eucalypt) plus the results from keeping fencelines clear. It is all very dry, typically stacked for three years before use.
Our room heater is a European manufactured slow combustion heater which is very efficient. It never seems to need its chimney cleaned because it does not build up resins on my fuels.
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It is surely virtuous for SE to heat and cook using windfall timber from his own patch of ground. Purists might protest that the fallen branches provide homes for small fluffy animals, but it wouldn’t help their numbers any if the uncleared firewood had increased the likelihood of a catastrophic fire. Catastrophic fires are becoming increasingly prevalent as the climate diverges from the wetter, cooler climate into which each forest had evolved. I would guess that by clearing away the windfall timber, SE is finding a peaceful coexistence with the local ecology.
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Hi, Roger.
As a volunteer firefighter for over a quarter of a century and as a one-was-used-to-be remote area fire team member, (RAFT: helicopter insertion or walk in) I remember the fires which resulted in the addition of a new category above Extreme. In the past 15 years that category was demonstrated to be meaningful and necessary.
I leave small piles of timber on the ground throughout my land, wherever I have worked. This is not so much for “small furry animals” as it is for insects and other invertebrates, who need refuge as surely as I do. Only a fraction of the woody matter makes its way to the firebox. That includes occasional larger pieces, such as tree trunks, which, if left for 4 or 5 years and then disturbed invariably erupt with wriggly beasties of all shapes – some of which are rarely ever seen otherwise.
One small dam which is in my care but unfortunately is on a neighbour’s land is slowly becoming choked with grasses and sedges is a real delight, but no place for the unwary. Snakes abound, drawn by the frogs and lizards. There is no pump on that dam any longer and stock have been fenced out for no other reason than to let it become whatever it wants to be. That neighbour is now in his late 90’s and has only visited that corner of his property once in the past 30+years. I look after the fences and occasionally let some stock in to browse when feed is low.
Things that I didn’t know existed include Peripatus (?) (or “velvet worms” akin to millipedes) and Banda-banda snakes. Both beautiful, harmless and rarely seen.
Indeed, there is almost sufficient windfall timber left for the pit fired pottery weekends which we host every couple of years. I admit to topping up the fuel for these events with sawdust and a few discarded (untreated) pallets from the local hardware stores. It wouldn’t be honest to describe these events as being environmentally benign, but my guests who camp on site for a night or a week certainly appear to enjoy themselves. Cooking, of course, is primarily done using a wood-fired pizza oven. Music is either acoustic or none.
Bye for now.
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It all sounds charming, Singleton, with a real connection to place. In the burbs we so often have to buy wood in for events like those! But I see it as lifestyle choices. After all, the EcoModernist manifesto is all about intensified productivity of the areas we do use so that we have more room for those we don’t use, and I guess that should apply to accommodation as well.
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Very much agreed, EN. Our kids have left, we have a home far bigger than our needs and we are contemplating what to do with 60 acres in a town mining where coal and power generation are declining slowly.
I hope that some small part of the Ecomodernist Manifesto addresses the transactional friction which inhibits re-purposing of real estate – whether to new uses or to more appropriate owners as personal needs change. I’m thinking of real estate agents’ fees, stamp duty on contracts, the many repetitious other costs such as title searches and financing set-up charges. We are in no particular hurry to move on yet, but a lot of money is spent unproductively when shuffling land around.
And before I go… the windfall profits that accrue to developers through re-zoning, from which the community rarely gains much, if anything at all.
I’m particularly unimpressed by the fast train financial models which rely on income from transfer of town planning, rezoning, redevelopment and profits from land and property sales generally along the corridors and in the cities which have stations. I call that the “Sydney airport” model, whereby the operator gets the right to screw all and sundry at every point, for decades, with no community input or control.
You show me a fast train proposal and I will show you an undemocratic, out of control rip-off many times the scale and impact of any cross-city privately owned toll road.
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Wow. People can come to things from such different perspectives! No judgement on you, and I’d like to hear more about your concerns, but I was kind of hoping that corporate consortium proposal got through because then at least the East Coast would HAVE a fast rail and take some pressure of the world’s 3rd largest air corridor?
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BHP and friends first delivered a VFT proposal in the mid-1960’s based on this same Trojan Horse theory of ripping money out of the commons.
I attended, as a student, a lecture on precisely this circa 1966 and recall very clearly my concerns.
It is a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scam that, if agreed to, will line the pockets of a select few at the expense of the property, liberty and money of the many for generations.
If, and it is a big IF, VFT can support itself, then it should do so on the basis of its being a transport system, not as the largest land grab since colonisation. There you have it – a 50-year old thought bubble that has stood the tests of time.
As a civil engineer, I’d love to be involved in such a large infrastructure project, but this one is entirely driven by the almighty dollar. If it is worthwhile as an infrastructure project, then it should remain in public hands in perpetuity, rather than being driven by robber barons.
And, yes, you might have guessed correctly. I am somewhat of a leftie socially, if not always politically. I try to be rational, which is a major impediment to party involvement of any kind. But Barry’s web site is apolitical so I will cease at this point.
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Hi Singleton,
ever since I topped “Political Economy of the Welfare State” in my social sciences Advanced Diploma I’ve been both a bit of a leftie and a bit of a free-market fan. I can appreciate both systems, but tend to be into Ordoliberalism / Social Liberalism. But sometimes, if the government doesn’t have the vision or money to do something, I sometimes appreciate the efforts of Corporations, even if it is a land-grab. And what do they want to do but sell us a new town or two, something our growing population might need? (Only if they’re good places to live though, and that also depends on good town planning).
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EN, you do realise that the plan is to draw 5 or 10km radius circles around stations near Central, Campbelltown, Mittagong, Goulbourn, Canberra, Albury/Woodonga and so until Melbourne, plus a couple of side cities in (say) Gosford and Newcastle, I presume?
Plus a strip one or two km’s wide between these nodes, 1000km’s long. That way, the transport company will gain town planning and monopoly transport control over the centres of maybe 10 Australian cities, including 4 or 5 of the largest cities, counting the Campbelltown/Western Sydney as a city in its own right. Commercial advantage, not quality of life for the residents will rule the living.shopping/transport options and social fabric of the towns of up to 40% of all Australians, all under the guise of better public transport, although that will only serve those who seek to travel rapidly between the major centres – ie, the mid-to-upper income brackets and corporates.
Which bank do you want to be majority partner in this? Who do you trust?
Which political party would you trust to negotiate this deal on the public’s behalf? None? Remember, this backroom deal will probably, like the sale of ports, other infrastructure such as electricity assets and (recently) the Newcastle bus, passenger rail and ferry services, via contracts which are neither publicly disclosed nor openly negotiated. This is the way to foreign ownership, hidden profits, reduced services, tax avoidance and corruption on a grand scale.
The current local and state government systems might be deeply flawed, but that is not of itself justification for their broadscale flogging off.
If it is in the public interest to construct high speed rail then it is also in the public interest for the most experienced construction authorities in Australia, the state governments, to construct, own and operate them on behalf of those who elect them, rather than to pass the parcel to corporations which, by definition, cannot have the public interest at heart. Shareholders must and will come first.
As before, consider SYD airport and the rail line to the airport stations – both examples of the most expensive service providers of their class anywhere on the planet.
Is there a state where the NEM and AEMO has, through improved supervision, management and efficiencies of now-privatised electricity systems brought about reduced tariffs, increased reliability and lower carbon emissions? Or, perhaps, improved apprenticeship schemes and employment outcomes, improved local manufacture opportunities, better design standards, better knowledge retention and development either in-house or nationally? I say not. They have certainly not covered themselves with glory in the past two decades… and what have the states done with the billions of dollars that they sold these assets for? Where are the public benefits from the Thatcher era in Britain or the Kennett era in Victoria or those many who followed those trail-blazers?
By all means, pay and supervise a consortium to design and construct the VFT, but if the economics demand support, ensure that the assets remain in public ownership, along with every other social right which might otherwise be transferred out of public control. If the public and government want such a project, then the government must win the support of its electors and do the job properly. This includes arranging finance. To do otherwise is antisocial, whatever name it is called by.
But first and foremost: where is the draft of the project’s enabling legislation? Where is the financial plan? The expected cash flow statements for each year of the projected contract period? If it’s OK to lease something for 100 years, it is OK to see the financial justifications in similar detail.
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Love it. I’m copying this to my Public Private Partnerships folder. Great summary, and shifting me over to the left on this. Tom Blees has a great summary of why States should own and operate the electricity grids. I can’t remember, did you say you’d read Prescription for the Planet?
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South Australia power outage again:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/28/south-australia-hit-by-power-outages-following-gale-force-winds
Some thought this is becoming more common.
By the way, around here Avista Utilities is using Cortam steel poles as the replacements, as necessary, for old or downed sub-transmission and large distribution poles.
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The article says that the ex-tropical depression that is storming through South Australia currently “came from the Pilbara”, i.e. from the north-west of Australia. More accurately, it has come from an unusually hot sea between north-west Australia and Indonesia, the Indian Ocean equivalent of El Niño in the Pacific. The resulting humidity has given Darwin an early, heavy wet season. One consequence on all this poorly drained land is a saturated soil under a hot sun that perpetuates, rather than (as usual) dessicates cyclonic systems as they move from the hot sea onto the hot wet land. Yes, this time it was only a category one cyclone that decayed into a tropical depression, but this time it reached across the continent to South Australia. It won’t be the last time.
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Government interventions to incentivise renewable energy and to create capacity markets is exactly the opposite of the approach that is needed. Give up on wind and solar. Surely most informed people realise by now they can make no significant contribution to world electricity supply, let alone to world energy supply.
What is needed is not more intervention by governments driven by ideologues’ beliefs. Instead, what is needed is for government to remove the piles of regulations that distort markets and create high risk for investors. Start by removing all incentives for renewables. Minimise regulation and government intervention. Regulations should be aimed at ensuring fair competition, and secure and reliable supply for the long term at minimum cost.
France did it brilliantly from the 1970’s despite the headwinds of the anti-nuke protest movement. France is the pin-up example the world should follow. But times have changed. What was done back in the 1950-1980’s by governments building, owning and operating the plants can now be done more effectively by the private sector – as long as we have light, appropriate regulation that gives confidence to markets and investors that there will be regulatory stability for the expected life of their investments – e.g. 60 to 80 years for modern era nuclear power plants.
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I have skimmed parts of Tom Blees’s work, but never finished the book.
Most of this stuff is personal observation and conviction. Probably needs fact checking. Maybe needs more distance between me and the topic… but why aren’t 50 years enough? Why am I still not happy about the VFT proposals, when I know that very substantial decarbonisation of transport is an essential part of stabilising our climate?
This morning I read “Crocs in the Cabinet”, authors Ben Smee and Christopher Walsh. What a depressing read it is! It explains the backstabbing, deal-making and dishonesty that have been part of the NT Government and political scene for a couple of decades. It includes as asides the botched privatisation of the Territory Insurance Office and of the Port of Darwin.
My own experience as one who has assisted with staging of Chinese New Year in 2015 and 2017 on the Newcastle Harbour Foreshores I offer as an example of a future where once-public assets have been sliced up and locked away.
In order to stage the event, on land which was formerly part of a working port but has become a developer’s dream, we needed to access the foreshore promenade. Reduced to a mere shared-use walkway plus a few mini-parks not suited to kids’ cricket or kite flying, it now belongs to or is controlled by a handful of separate private owners (think 10 storey residential with ground floor restaurant and commercial), plus Council, the Ports Corporation, the representatives of the Chinese holders of the Port’s 100 year leas and more. In some places a simple roadway will have three proprietors, each with their own stipulations and tiny parcels of land.
Bottom line: Nobody seems to be in charge any more. The public has little say about “Public Access to Public Spaces”. Where I once roamed freely for miles as a child with a fishing rod is now nice enough in its own way, but horribly overbuilt and lacking in life other than rats and cockroaches, of which there are plenty.
We should do better than this.
Besides which, with Skype and similar, what’s the need for VFT? It’s now legal for electronic meetings of management committees of incorporated associations in NSW… why is it not general practice for governments at all levels and for businesses? Imagine a House of Representatives Dial-in session… a Senate video enquiry, a telephonic Question Time sans theatricals. There goes half of the justification for the VFT, which, by the way, will do nothing to reduce freight transport by truck or air. Ref: http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/regulations/2016-538.pdf. Clause 22, Page 17.
The simplest way to decarbonise travel is to reduce the need for travel. Smart organisations are getting smarter about travel. Early adapters are trialing Prius or completely battery-powered private transport, including battery assisted cycles.
I’ll read Tom Blees’s book when I get a chance.
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“regulatory stability for the expected life of their investments”
The possibility of hostile regulations from a future government present risks to a long-term investor, which could be insured against by a government loan guarantee system. Would that be too interventionist?
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A reminder that now, in some locations, solar PV is the least expensive source of electricity. For example, in the
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert
a recent contract for solar power was for just less than US$30/MWh. Similarly in a Persian Gulf state.
As for northern Chile, the copper mining companies are happy to take all the solar power they can obtain in the effort to control cost and restore profitably.
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A recent comment caused me to think about the role of semiconductors in destabilizing the old, staid electrical power industry. Power electronics for solar PV and wind turbines as well as computers and communications leading to digital meters and tighter controls. For example, here in Pullman we have a new industry, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratory, providing digital electronic protection devices for the electrical power industry.
So just now the structure and regulation of the industry is in flux.
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(@ DBB) Transmission of signal along the power grid represents one possible goal for application of new electronics. If the grid operator could dictate changes in frequency directly to the electronics of the generating devices, synchronous generation could become distributed. Currently distributed wind generators are asynchronous, which to my understanding means that they add power to the grid by slightly increasing the frequency (rather than the amplitude) of the waveform received on the grid. If I’m right, that requires the waveform to be dominated by synchronous, fossil generation at all times.
High frequency signal can only get from one side of a transformer to the other with the aid of a bypass of some sort. But the bypass also has to be robust against lightning and geomagnetic surges.
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I have heard much the same but lack understanding of the practical limits.
Of course, in this connected world where internet-linked metering and the like are commonplace, there are other possibilities.
A post on this subject might be appropriate.
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Anyone ever wonder what power would look like in 200 to 500 years? While I’ve moved from hating to loving nuclear power over the last 7 years, and see it as a wonderful gift to humanity, I’m also a fan of space colonisation. Anyone ever dream of the Luna Ring? https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/the-luna-ring-concept/
On 29 December 2016 at 21:35, Brave New Climate wrote:
> singletonengineer commented: “I have heard much the same but lack > understanding of the practical limits. Of course, in this connected world > where internet-linked metering and the like are commonplace, there are > other possibilities. A post on this subject might be appropriate.” >
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EN, we have to get there first.
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Eclipse asks for our vision of the distant future. For guidance, I am inclined to go 500 years back in time, and imagine I am looking over the shoulder of a hunter-gatherer, who in his turn is looking across a sun-blasted Australian landscape devoid of many slow and wonderful creatures that his ancestors had driven to extinction. The few remaining creatures, too fast or too poisonous, are only sufficient to support a thin scattering of homo sapiens. What more technologically advanced civilisations preceded them? No one knows, as we do not know who of us will have descendants surviving in their own wasted landscape. For it is surely wastage that is underway now.
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Hi all,
for years I’ve been recommending electrorefining pyroprocessing of nuclear waste on the basis that it brought out all the actinides together, and was therefore proliferation resistant. Now on page 5 of the following paper I find out there’s ways to fine tune pyroprocessing for the recovery of high purity plutonium, when I thought all the actinides had to be retrieved together. Comments?
Click to access 18064260.pdf
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Eclipse, perhaps you mean the special apparatus in Fig 3 on page 8? I guess no reactor design would be immune from military interference. However the design of the plant as described in “Plentiful Energy” is resistant to theft of weaponisable material. An inspector on a routine visit might check for inept military activity by checking that the reactor did not have a “blanket” set up, that is, fuel that was absorbing a lot more neutrons than it was emitting. However more likely the concern would be to frustrate any escape from the routine cycle of material containing weapons quality plutonium. To that end the operators need only ensure that (and the inspector need only check that) all fuel, whether fresh or partly used, contained a sufficient proportion of Pu240 (to actinide) to ensure that the ratio of 240/239 would always be greater than 7%. That is, that plutonium in any stage of the routine cycle would always be of reactor grade, unsuitable for weaponising.
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So where page 5 says “High purity plutonium”, does that mean pure plutonium but not really account for the particular isotopes? Is pyroprocessing able to separate out bomb-grade stuff from the rest?
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Eclipse, on your second question… Electrolysis is chemistry, that is, it works on the outer electrons of each atom so is not sensitive to which isotope of that element it is. It cannot change the isotopic proportions of plutonium or uranium from reactor grade to bomb grade. At the date of this paper, the proportions of the different isotopes of plutonium were only ever changed by the duration of neutron irradiation that the fuel had received.
The IFR process, described in “Plentiful Energy”, electrolyses an ionic solution with similar proportions of the two elements, uranium and plutonium. The more electronegative of the two is uranium, so uranium plates out on the cathode. The process continues to draw uranium out of the solution until the solution is relatively rich in plutonium. What was once a stray inclusion of plutonium in the plate increases until it’s becoming a significant proportion. Then that cathode is withdrawn and a liquid cadmium cathode is switched on and draws into it both elements at different rates, another proportion. In each case the proportions are determined by the Nernst equation, which is a function of the two electronegativities and their concentrations. Similarly, the remaining solution still has a mixture of the two elements.
The process you’re looking at in that paper refers to reactions across the face of a liquid cadmium anode. Metal fuel is dissolved in the cadmium, then a current travels through the face of the cadmium as mainly plutonium ions going into the ionic melt. So yes, relative to uranium the plutonium is enriched in the melt (but not its isotopes). But here too, the Nernst equation rules the different proportions. You would have to crank through the arithmetic to find out how “high” is the theoretical resulting purity.
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Thanks Roger, I’ll file that one away for future reference, I really will! (I email them to myself and have various nuclear tabs in gmail, so I can browse if it’s a slow day at work). One more thing if your time allows: does the Nernst equation ever allow bomb-grade stuff to be collected this way, whether Americium, Uranium or Plutonium?
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What you refer to as “this way” is only one of many tools in the training of a modern chemical engineer. In the bad old 1960s, the nuclear powers used a lot of expensive chemistry to purify plutonium from its uranium matrix and surrounding fission products and minor actinides. However such an industry requires its raw materials to contain plutonium with less Pu240 than 7%. That would require premeditated short-term irradiation of uranium-only fuel, referred to in old literature as “blanket fuel”.
In a future world where all new fast reactors were initiated with fuel that had been bred in fast reactors, the fuel would start with a much higher proportion of Pu240, which would actually increase as the fuel burnt. An operator who wanted to keep the inspectors off his back would ensure that all fuel that came through the front gate of his nuclear power station contained at least 7%. That way there would never be any fuel worth stealing, used or otherwise, and little for the inspectors to fuss over.
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Hi guys,
I’m running out of energy dealing with ‘Brian’, and anti-nuclear troll over at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This post rankles. Any comments on Brian’s post, and especially, the paper he quotes?
http://thebulletin.org/introducing-nuclear-fuel-cycle-cost-calculator8361#comment-3076314044
From Brian:
You lose.
This paper presents the results of an evaluation ofthe relative proliferation risks of particular reprocessing technologies of current interest. The assessment focuses on determining whether three alternative reprocessing technologies – COEX, UREX+, and pyroprocessing provide nonproliferation advantages relative to the PUREX technology because they do not produce separated plutonium. This study considers how a facility may be threatened under various proliferation scenarios. For each alternative, the measures of proliferation risk considered include the relative difficulty of achieving the objective, the time required, the cost to the adversary, the likelihood of detection, the cost ofsafeguards and physical protection, and the characteristics ofthe material acquired. This evaluation found only a modest improvement in reducing proliferation risk over existing PUREX technologies and these modest improvements apply primarily for non-state actors.
Click to access 70289.pdf
IBrookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973, USA 2Pac~fic Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, /iVA 99352, USA 3Los Alamos national LaboratOlT, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA 4Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA 5Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA 6ldaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID 83415, USA 7QinetiQ North America, McLean, VA 22102, USA
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EN, I have visited the site. After making a few comments to and about your tormentor, it is clear that this wrangle has continued beyond a year.
Give up.
You have already spent far more time than enough dealing with a fool with a closed mind. Better to save the energy for those who are prepared to listen, to stay on topic, to argue rationally and to avoid sweeping generalisations, appeals to “authority”, bait-and-switch and shouty commenting style.
If the site was competently moderated, “Brian” would not survive. Indeed, judging from the many deleted comments downthread, it appears that “Brian” may have received some pretty severe modification, but too late and inconsistently.
For what it is worth, my site name is “aussie engineer”. How come ended up with two WordPress handles I don’t know.
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Thanks “Aussie Engineer.” My wrangle with Bwwiaaaan a year ago died down, and only recently reignited when something triggered another attack on nuclear power in his tired brain. The main topic this time was pyroprocessing, and – as you have observed – good luck with trying to get him to stay on one topic! It’s just the same as debating climate deniers.
Assert A.
We share research that disproves denialist myth A and backs climate research.
Assert B.
Rinse and repeat a dozen times, until people drop out of the conversation in frustration with the denialist just changing the topic every time they’re trounced, and finally we end up back at A again!
Denialist’s don’t debate, they rotate. This guy seems to be doing the same with nuclear power.
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Bomb grade americium? That’s news to me.
I think that the answer is that chemistry isn’t going to separate isotopes, whose reactivity is similar regardless of the number of neutrons they have in their nucleus. Also, the Nernst Equation describes behaviour of electric cells, which is a branch of physical chemistry.
That is why physical methods such as centrifuges that operate on small differences in atomic mass are used.
Wikipedia: “While different chemical elements can be purified through chemical processes, isotopes of the same element have nearly identical chemical properties, which makes this type of separation impractical, except for separation of deuterium.” (Search term: “isotope separation”.)
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Windy, but introduces the concept of imposed cost to be levied against wind power as it displaces conventional generators:
http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/news-flash-wind-power-not-cheaper-coal/
This study assumes that only combined cycle gas turbines are displaced.
Maybe there is a fundamental flaw as nobody else seems to analyze wind power in this way?
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Eclipse Now — The fundamental point is that the plutonium in used power reactor actinide pins is a mixture of at least two isotopes. Only one of these can be used to make nuclear weapons. The other “poisons” the reaction so that there is only a messy fissle.
So so-called proliferation studies have to make up wildly improbable scenarios in order to justify the so-called research effort.
Also, if it matters, PUREX is hard to do and only the French have some success at it. Pyroproccessing, on the other hand, is relatively easy and was demonstrated some time ago with the EBR-II. It isn’t perfect, research continues, but in fact it is mostly good enough for practical use. The British NRL should soon state whether the PRISM, plus pyroproccessing, suffices to dispose of Britain’s excess weapons plutonium.
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Eclipse, that website is “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, a pack of fast talkers who are blatantly prohibitionist. Because they would blind the public to the alternative prospect of a world being cooked in carbon dioxide, they do not show the respect for evidence that would entitle them to be called “scientists”. Have nothing to do with them. You’re wasting your time, and by sicking us onto them you’re wasting our time too. Let’s check out DBB’s offering…
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Gail Tverberg isn’t always right and is often long winded. Nonetheless this is one of her better shots:
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/How-Misleading-Are-Solar-Yields.html
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EN: Re that pesky journal.
A quick check of some recent publications from this organisation confirms what others have written. The Journal itself has existed in several forms and via a number of publishers, starting with a pamphlet first circulated in 1945. Obviously, the original editorial staff and policies have evolved.
The Journal itself is described by its publisher as not peer reviewed, however the head corporation is Informa.com, a giant listed corporation with global reach. The company states on its corporate web site that its Academic Division publications are peer reviewed, which is clearly not the case.
An example of the nature of the Journal and its reluctance to accept criticism is in the Letters column at https://books.google.com.au/books?id=DwwAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=bulletin+of+the+atomic+scientists+peer+reviewed&source=bl&ots=VKM2EBCumi&sig=71xMxm1Ad5mBJE6Wd529B_bT3gU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwir57nV9Z_RAhVBJpQKHaBxCi4Q6AEINzAH#v=onepage&q=bulletin%20of%20the%20atomic%20scientists%20peer%20reviewed&f=false.
See “Yucca Mountain Logic” on Pp 74+. The letters are highly critical, yet the author’s response is shallow and self-serving.
I am left wondering what responsibility is attributable to this journal for the ultimate abandonment of the Yucca Mountain facility.
Aspects of the current South Australian debate closely mirror the tactics employed by those opposed to Yucca Mountain. negative side.
Verdict: A waste of time and effort.
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Re: DBB’s comment, where he referred us to an article where the levelised cost of electricity due to solar includes the “imposed cost” caused by running combined cycle gas (CCGT) as backup to the solar. By including the cost imposed on the dispatchable backup, solar could be costed as a dispatchable power supply, putting it on the same costing basis as fossil generators. Good idea.
Of course the author was simplifying the scenario to a system composed only of solar and CCGT in order to explain the concept of “imposed cost”. However, if CCGT were indeed used as backup for solar, the cost imposed on it would have to also include the wear and tear due to the steam pressure rising and falling so abruptly as to accommodate solar’s abrupt entry and exit. There would also be the cost of maintaining steam pressure that may or may not ever be released to the turbines when the solar cuts out.
I think it is more realistic to do the calculations on the basis that each new solar generating unit must be matched capacity for capacity by new open cycle gas turbines (OCGT) committed solely as its backup. Although other dispatchables can be made to throttle back when solar picks up, only OCGT has the risetime required to fill in when solar cuts out. In this case there is no wear and tear on the steam system, as there isn’t one. However, the gas turbines still have to be hot and running whether they are needed or not. I believe that planning for the frequent acceleration up and down increases an OCGT’s capital cost too.
Because the generation by the OCGT is entirely due to the absence of the solar, all of its costs should be included in an LCOE of a combined solar-plus-OCGT contribution.
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Cross laminated lumber eliminates much steel and concrete:
http://mynorthwest.com/500207/new-wood-technology-may-offer-hope-for-struggling-timber/
We hope.
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But Young’s modulus of elasticity will continue to ensure that timber flexes more than steel or concrete of similar section size.
Since serviceability requirements (eg deflection-to-span ratios) are real, very tall buildings constructed from timber are destined to have more column and beam volume than might otherwise be the case, thus leaving less usable floor space and increasing the height of a given number of floors. Or reducing the number of floors in a building of a given height.
Very good examples of buildings which were both rigid and lightweight included the World Towers. The external columns provided immense stiffness without using the more common approach, which is for heavily reinforced solid concrete central cores of lift shafts, stairs, toilets, etc. Yes these facilities were still central, but were largely lightweight concrete supported by structural steel columns.
Provided that there is an appropriate price on carbon dioxide emissions, competent designers and cost estimators will steer towards low-carbon solutions and away from high carbon ones.
I am not in favour of mandating that a particular material be used for any given purpose, since to do so would freeze development of more advanced, efficient designs. Kind of akin to mandating that wind+solar = good and that nuclear = bad, both of which are true only part of the time.
The article discusses 10-storey buildings and refers to the good fire protection properties of timber when used in large sections and appropriately detailed. I agree that both are practical and reasonable using laminated sections, whether glulam, cross laminated, or plywood or a combination of all three.
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Here is a combined cycle gas turbine with a solar boost:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain_Beni_Mathar_Integrated_Thermo_Solar_Combined_Cycle_Power_Plant
As natural gas is dear in Morocco this makes some sort of sense. Note the area required for a mere 20 MWe boost. Well, I suppose in Morocco there is area to spare.
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So the Moroccan solar thermal array has an “availability factor of 93%”.
Talk about meaningless numbers! How can this plant be available for more than the 50% of the time that we know as “daytime”?
Allowing for start-up in the morning and cooling off as shadows lengthen in the afternoon, plus allowance for cloud and rain and whenever the mirrors are stowed in storm mode during high winds, the maximum possible is well below 50%, probably less than 10 hours per day.
Question to ponder:
“If a power station lacks fuel, in this case, full sunlight, can it be considered to be available?”
Answer, from AEMO’s website:
“availability factor for a… generating unit means the amount of time in a calendar year as a percentage that the… generator would expect to be supplying electricity to the system.”
This is not to be confused with capacity factor, which relates to the actual energy delivered/generated and is thus lower again.
35% AF for this plant would be optimistic.
25% CF ditto.
93%? Someone’s dreaming.
Show me the numbers.
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Wind energy fluctuations:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161231184935.htm
No, Virginia, the wind isn’t always blowing somewhere. Cite this clearly stated release of a study of actual wind farm data when communicating with a so-called renewable energy advocate.
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singletonengineer — It depends upon the definition of ‘availability factor’:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_factor
Unfortunately there is not a single established meaning once intermittent generators are under consideration.
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Wiki’s first paragraph is correct. Then comes the spin.
How about IEEE, http://www.nerc.com/docs/pc/gadstf/ieee762tf/762-2006.pdf?
3.1 availability factor (AF):
The fraction of a given operating period in which a generating unit is
available without any outages.
Unless nights and high winds and rain and clouds are counted as outages, then Wiki disagrees with IEEE.
Here is a fourth authority:
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
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“some scientists have … arguing that the power produced by geographically dispersed wind turbines in windy and calm locations at any one point in time will average out”
Those would not be scientists! No doubt there are idiotic fanatics who believe that, on average, everyone in a 100% RE grid, would get adequate power. However that average would be over time, not an average in space, across the wind turbines supplying the grid. Like a gambler averaging out his winnings and losses in a casino, eventually the gambler will go broke and the grid will blackout. End of averaging.
No doubt studies of large-scale turbulence will add a refinement beyond a simple random distribution of wind power in the grid. In that case the researcher should be thrown some more funding. But the grid operators already have a white-knuckled awareness of the probability that the collected wind supply will drop below the reserves of dispatchable power.
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I shoulda said that quote was from the article in DBB’s comment above.
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singletonengineer — Humpty Dumpty reminds me of someone I know here.
Indeed.
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Oh, DBB, I hope that that you are not referring to me.
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OK, here we go again. Pyroprocessing may not separate out the bomb grade plutonium from fuel rods, but what if the reactor is burned for a short time only so that mainly bomb-grade Pu is there? The pyroprocessing does not have to be an isotope sorter if there’s only Pu-239 in the rods. As someone explained above, depending on the cathode used, it can be set up to extract pure plutonium, and if there’s only / mainly 239 there, we’ve got a problem.
From the paper Bwwwiaaaan quoted:
“The isotopic composition of plutonium is affected by how long it stays in the reactor. Short exposures produce plutonium with very little Pu-240 and with very little plutonium being consumed by fission. Long exposures produce high Pu-240 concentrations, and a substantial portion of the plutonium produced is consumed by fission.”
http://thebulletin.org/introducing-nuclear-fuel-cycle-cost-calculator8361#comment-3077471249
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Eclipse, we have given you a comprehensive variety of technical answers now, so I think any problem remaining is in the phrasing of your question. Rather than give us any more homework, may I suggest that you do some work on the question? If you were to rephrase it a dozen or so times, I think you’d find that you already know the answers to most of those versions.
For a start, I suggest that you replace those vague terms, “pyroprocessing” and “waste”, with more specific concepts. If you have a friend or a community that you are asking on behalf of, you might work with them on specifying quite what their concerns are.
Please don’t quote Brian or his ilk to me. His words are offensive to my eye. If you want to see a fight with him, go fight him yourself. It is your own puzzles that we can help with.
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“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”
Of course it is good practice for participants to agree on a meaning of an obscure word at the start of a discussion, to avoid subsequent confusion. We on BNC often fail to say what we mean when using the word, “actinides”, which is used in various circumstances to mean elements with Z equal to or greater than: 87 (Ac+), or 92 (U+), or 94 (Pu+), or 95 (Am+) – the last usage being short for “minor actinides”. Confusion can arise.
In hot discussions, a protagonist may have every intention of introducing a word with hidden meanings to ambush you when you use it in your reply. In the case of the word, “waste”, I try to avoid using it at all in my replies. Instead I substitute a more specific term with unambiguous meaning, such as “used fuel”, or “fission products”. To many of our antagonists, the only good destination for “waste” is for it to be completely converted into CO2 and released into thin air. Other waste is then logically “intractable” and again logically, should not be “dumped”.
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singletonengineer — I now understand that ‘here’ is ambiguous. I meant here in Pullman, Washington.
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Eclipse Now — Yes, that is the way wPu, weapons plutonium, was produced. The signature is shutting down the reactor every 7 weeks or so to replace the uranium pins. The IAEA is likely to notice.
Much, much easier is the method both India and Pakistan used to obtain uranium weapons; ultracentrifuges. That way no reactor is involved. The only disadvantage is that the weapons are noticeably larger.
The fact remains that state actors can acquire nuclear weapons. They don’t even have to be rich; consider North Korea.
I do not find proliferation boogeymen a valid reason to avoid nuclear power plants. Sufficient IAEA safety inspections suffice.
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Pyroproccessing refers to several different processes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyroprocessing
but in the context of nuclear spent actinide pin processing refers generally to separating the actinides from the actual “wastes” and further, sometimes, separating the uranium from the plutonium and both, possibly, from the minor actinides.
The account in “Plentiful Energy” is adequately thorough; enough to make my head spin. Some chapters are found on this website.
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The complete book can be downloaded here. We read that their implementations that they called “pyroprocessing” changed over time. The early work reacted melted metal fuel with a ZrO2 crucible. The “skulls” left behind became subject for electrofining later in their experiments, described in detail. The full-scale, full-cycle version planned to recycle one-month-hot fuel into ready fuel pellets was proofed but never implemented.
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The Chinese Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR) resembles the EBR2 (of IFR fame) in that it is a fast pool-type reactor of 65 MW thermal with two loops of sodium coolant. The WNN page says that the fuel has (starts up with?) 150 kg of plutonium 240 and 98 kg of plutonium 239, implying a safe ratio of 35%. Unlike the EBR2, it uses oxide fuel rather than metal fuel.
Russia is about to supply its next load of MOX. For those who like to get hysterical about such matters, this implies an international traffic in plutonium. On the other hand, it augurs hope for a decarbonised future where fast reactors in non-nuclear countries can be supplied with plutonium-bearing fuel prepared in the nuclear countries.
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I suppose the MOX will come by train and nobody will notice.
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German Vs French carbon intensities of electricity.
Leaves little room for argument as to whether the French efforts almost half a century ago were far more effective than the thousands of millions of Euros spent by the Germans in the past decade.
Sadly, the French carbon intensity has suffered a recent uptick due to a combination of anti-nuclear factors.
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Tim Flannery has suggested massive kelp farms could sequester all our CO2 emissions each year. ““Seaweed grows at 30 to 60 times the rate of land-based plants, so it can draw out lots of CO2,” Flannery told E360 in a recent interview.” …
“If you cover 9% of the world’s oceans in seaweed farms, you could draw down the equivalent of all our current emissions — more than 40 gigatons a year.” … Seaweed farms can also reverse ocean acidification. Off the coast of China, there are about 500 square kilometers of seaweed farms producing edible seaweed for the food market. PH levels have been shown to rise as high as 10 around these seaweed farms. At the moment with an acidified ocean it is 8.1. … You could buffer oceans,” he said. “They are fantastic places for growing fish, shellfish, or prawns, just because of that buffering impact.”
goo.gl/n6iFdG
Biologist, climate champion, and former Australian of the year Dr Tim Flannery has suggested massive kelp farms could sequester all our CO2 emissions each year. ““Seaweed grows at 30 to 60 times the rate of land-based plants, so it can draw out lots of CO2,” Flannery told E360 in a recent interview.” …
“If you cover 9% of the world’s oceans in seaweed farms, you could draw down the equivalent of all our current emissions — more than 40 gigatons a year.” … Seaweed farms can also reverse ocean acidification. Off the coast of China, there are about 500 square kilometers of seaweed farms producing edible seaweed for the food market. PH levels have been shown to rise as high as 10 around these seaweed farms. At the moment with an acidified ocean it is 8.1. … You could buffer oceans,” he said. “They are fantastic places for growing fish, shellfish, or prawns, just because of that buffering impact.”
goo.gl/n6iFdG
Seaweed can be fed to cows, which has been shown to reduce their methane burps close to zero
https://goo.gl/J27gw0
Could this massive biomass to replace niche liquid fuel markets like airline fuels? Or will something else be cheaper?
Could it replace shipping fuel, or again, will something else be cheaper?
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EN, that is 46 million square kilometres, or close to 6 times the surface area of Australia?
Where do you propose that we start, and how?
I used to think that Tim Flannery was an intelligent guy, a polymath and an extremely trustworthy judge of issues across a broad range of topics.
These days, I’m convinced that, like last Christmas’s mangoes, he is way past his prime.
Why he thinks that proposing hare-brained schemes such as this while simultaneously refusing to discuss, let alone to support, nuclear power as being a valid option for consideration of carbon free energy is his business. I know that this is so – as a foundation financial supporter of his Climate Council I asked for this policy to be either explained or reviewed but the answer from his senior staff was a flat refusal.
Tim’s assessment of both seaweed and nuclear power are erronious. I am now an ex-member.
As with most things, unless a costed, right-size, fit for purpose proposal is on the table, walk away.
This one’s just hype, which is otherwise known as click-bait.
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Knowledge builders and problem solvers and others.
I might be showing personal bias here, but EN’s question serves as a reminder, to me at least, that professional scientists are the world’s knowledge builders.
Similarly, engineers are in the profession of being problem solvers. Engineers’ primary role is to convert the bodies of knowledge which have been developed by scientists into solutions for the problems of the world.
Sorry, folk, but PR consultants, sales folk and lobbyists are not problem solvers and much of the hype holding back developments in low- and no-carbon strategies comes from their direction. Which, unfortunately, now includes the Climate Council which was started with great fanfare and which was, initially at least, received by many with great optimism.
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“you could draw down the equivalent of all our current emissions — more than 40 gigatons a year.”
Eclipse, you know that this is nonsense. You know that there is nowhere on this planet to put 40 gigatons a year of anything at all. Yet you repeat it here as though we have not already dismissed the concept of sequestration. Obviously, we’re going to get angry.
Don’t tell us that this is the voice of a much respected leader who needs his head banged against the wall. It is your voice. Cut it out!
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On the contrary, 40 gigatons is not insuperably large:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_production
For a land based mega-scheme to dispose of excess carbon dioxide, see Ornstein et al., “Irrigated Afforestation of the Sahara desert and Australia outback …” This I understand how to accomplish; just provide US $150 billion per annum for many centuries.
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Hi, DBB.
Two problems:
1. The Sahara is not empty space and is not exactly secure from a military perspective.
2. The Australian Outback is not empty either – it is a wonderfully complex and diverse group of regions, each with its own character.
Short of Armageddon, neither is available for such schemes.
Meanwhile, South Australians argue endlessly about the merits of setting aside a few acres for radioactive waste disposal/storage. One thread of the argument follows the line “there’s nowhere for it to be put”, ie the whole of the 1 million or so square miles is fully occupied.
Back in the real world, none of the extreme mega-dreams is achievable – no 40 billion tonne sequestrations, no broad ocean kelp forests and no million square kilometer projects.
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David, you did not provide an answer to the question of “where would you put 40 Gt/a of CO2?”. You did not because you cannot. But instead of admitting that the quantity is too huge to hide, you pointed to the primary production of the biosphere as if it were vastly greater. In contradiction, your own link gives a figure for terrestrial production (and subsequent respiration) of similar ballpark! It’s seems to me that you are in denial of the size of the problem.
Even if it were (miraculously) reduced to artificial wood, [CH2O], that would still be 40 km³/a. There is no place and no process on earth that can accommodate such a flux. It is one cubic kilometre per week, every week, for as long as the carbon-based civilisation lasts. And the energy required for any such process would be several times the energy that the carbon originally delivered.
We are surrounded by goodhearted people who desperately want to believe that token reductions will forgive them for destroying the environment that created us. They are in denial of the imminent death of the world we once knew. We should not join them. We should be bravely contemplating the new climate beyond.
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The afforestation argument calculates that the CO2 is both stored in the trees across the Sahara & outback and the new organic activity in the soil, which can be enormous. I remember reading somewhere that biochar stimulates extra microbial action, especially in fungi. They breed and dye and (fast) generations later build new soil in the process, which stores something like 5 times the weight of the original biochar.
If the kelp cannot soak up the whole 40GT, then can we at least agree that studies into the economics of the idea of it as an interesting fibre and fertiliser source could be beneficial? What if we can replace the airline industry’s liquid fuel needs this way, while storing some of the raw biomass NPK for fertiliser? What if kelp biomass helped generate some synthetic feedstocks for the petro-chemical industry? Is the fibre any good for producing synthetic mod-woods? What excites me about the idea is that it is sheer biomass from non-agricultural regions, which is of course the old problem with land-based biomass schemes. The old food v fuel problem.
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Roger Clifton — Please find and study the full paper by Ornstein et al., “Irrigated Afforestation of the Sahara desert and Australia outback …”, freely available as a pdf.
The paper claims that using much, but not all, of these two deserts will sequester a little more than 2 ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide per annum. That almost keeps up with current anthropogenic production of excess carbon dioxide. Obviously, the world population needs to move, as quickly as may be, to other than so-called fossil fuels. But start sequestering at the same time; in a subsequent comment I will elaborate on why.
The trees, if properly cared for, will continue to grow at a good pace for a long time. For example, on the north end of Vancouver Island I once saw a base section of a tree which was already over 250 years old at the time of the Battle of Hastings. In any case, the wood can then be converted to biochar. In fast pyrolysis about 1/4 is turned to a gas which is combustable; a heating fuel to replace natural gas? About 1/2 is turned into a liquid which can be refined into transportation fuel. The remaining 1/4 is the actual biochar. This can be buried up to root depth to improve soils. It can also be compressed into artificial anthracite for deep, permanent burial.
According to Ornstein et al. the cost is affordable, being less than one percent of the world’s gross domestic product. All told, feasible as well as necessary to avoid the consequences listed in “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas.
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singletonengineer — Armageddon started the year I was born, 1940. For already then Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica first backed off its grounding line. This will lead to much of the ice in West Antarctica eventually melting. It is easy to check that so long as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels remain at or above 400 ppm the sea levels will rise about 25 meters higher than now. For that was the sea stand in the mid-Pliocene, with a global temperature of around 2 °C higher than now. For other miseries, see recent articles on Real Climate.
The Sahara desert is 2.9 million square km, close to the same size as the 50 states of the USA. In Ornstein et al., “Irrigated Afforestation of the Sahara desert and Australia outback …”, it is proposed to use much, but not all of it, there being two large exceptions. I assure you that the remainder is nothing but sand and rock. Well, there are some oasis, etc. The few oasis are too small to change.
The peoples of Egypt and the Maghreb, but also the Sahel, are underemployed and would be pleased to have work in basic construction and tree farming. Some might be employed as security agents as might be required. I opine that having enough employment will tend to pacify the region. In any case, most people in Egypt and across the Maghreb do not live in the desert.
I know little about the Australian outback. The closest I came was a flight from Brisbane to Cairns.
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Australian Outback?
Lived and worked in Alice Springs plus terms on a fly-in-fly-out basis in Leinster, West Australia. Both qualify on any analysis as being in the Dead Centre, which I can confirm is very much Not Dead.
Central Australia is an exciting, vibrant, varied and hugely interesting place to be.
However, my real point is that real project proposals are founded on analysis, not spin. News coming from New York re closure of yet another great NPP and other news which links the gas industry with antinuclear activity convinces me that the real problems lie not with finding solutions to high atmospheric and oceanic carbon loads but with those who, acting out of self interest, are prepared to make bad into worse.
Have a great day. Mine isn’t quite that good – my doctor has just left, after diagnosing early stages of a degenerative, incurable disease. As might be expected,I sought medical advice for medical questions. If only climate scientists and engineers received the same respect.
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That’s horrible Singleton! So sorry to hear it.
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Spotted it early. Life goes on.
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My sympathes, singletonengineer.
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Please, no more sympathies.
I’m just a little to the left of where I thought that I was on the statistical distribution curve.
The real catastrophe is that one well-stocked wine cellar is now officially no longer of use to its owner.
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An earlier comment offers the challenge of disposing of a cubic kilometer of wood per week. Assuming that the proportions of gas, liquid and solid from pyrolysis of the wood are 1/4, 1/2, 1/4, the difficulty is utilizing the liquid.
For the gas can be consumed in keeping the fast pyrolysis going. This is what is done in the pyrolysis units I have read about. The solid is the biochar to be buried.
The liquid fraction is approximately twice the volume of the petroleum pumped each and every week. So all the existing uses of petroleum can, in principle, be displaced by “bio-oil” with the remainder to find beneficial uses for. More bioplastics? Heating oil? I am sure that the future can find some uses for what is essentially a waste product.
I haven’t included my, most approximate, calculations. Kindly check this yourself.
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Sorry, David. It takes me about an hour to compose a comment, during which time your reply had gone up on the site.
Turning captured CO2 into artificial wood at a rate of one cubic kilometre a week using vast amounts of (probably nuclear) energy was hypothetical, to point out that the quantity was impossibly huge. The destinations you propose for it would certainly flounder for the same reason: the volumes predicted would be equally impossibly huge.
Any process that could turn captured CO2 into any form of polymerised carbon cheaper than crude oil would instead be snaffled up by the (already huge) fuel refineries to be converted into familiar streams of petrochemicals and fuel.
(here is repaired link to forests-in-the-desert-pdf)
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David, your link to forests-in-the-deserts still doesn’t address the question of “where to put the stuff”. It waves its arms enthusiastically about creating the forests where forests couldn’t be before, happily under the delusion that the only thing stopping the growth of the forests before was lack of water. What to convert the wood to, and where to put it is simply not addressed at all.
Eclipse, none of the schemes you refer to include a sufficient description of “where to put 40 Gt/a CO2”. As far as I can see, all of them are in the category of token reductions, no more than pleas of innocence as emissions continue unabated.
However those schemes that propose to actually use it in place of fossil carbon could count. It is true that if all emissions from fossil carbon fuel were recycled, re-energised as replacement fuel, the problem would be solved without any need for storage.
However the question of volume still remains to be answered. Current fuel refineries throughput 4.3 Gt/a of hydrocarbons, so a complete recycling of emissions back to fuel would require something like a tenfold increase in the activity of fuel refineries.
Except for the idea of extensive kelp farms, the extraction of CO2 from the air remains an unsolved challenge.
(SE: what say you just drink the stuff anyway, slowly, sipping each rationed drop… :) )
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Roger Clifton — I have addressed the question of where to put the stuff in several previous comments. Do learn to read before commenting.
Your attempt to provide a link is broken.
In any case, the main issue is water. The micronutrients are readily addressed. The most important is nitrogen, which is considered in the Ornstein et al. paper. You ought to read it with some care.
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From
http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html
the presumed 2 ppmv of carbon dioxide removed per annum by growing trees in deserts contains 4.26 Gt of carbon. Wood is approximately 50% carbon so the annual weight of wood to be removed from the well established forests in the desert of Ornstein et al. is 8.52 Gt. The pyrolysis results in about half liquids, so 4.26 Gt of derived liquids is to be sent to refineries. From
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265229/global-oil-production-in-million-metric-tons/
that is almost the same as the weight of crude pumped and sent to refineries now.
Somehow I doubt that the weights and volumes are impossibly large as it is currently accomplished each and every year.
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DBB, are you assuming halving the woody mass by biocharing it at a 50/50 gas to biochar processing rate? There are many reasons to reverse the desertification we’ve caused around the Sahara, and if we leave enough desert for biodiversity concerns etc, but afforest some portions, then forestry is its own reward, let alone the added benefit of sequestering carbon.
SEAWEED
If we’re getting rid of the Tim Flannery seaweed project of 40GT a year, that’s 20 cubic km’s of syngas a year! That’s vastly more than the ‘cubic mile of oil’ we use a year, or 1.6 cubic km. That kind of syngas is … truly unimaginable. An energy baron’s dream. Surely, and here’s the real rub, that makes backing up renewables possible? Solar & wind during the day, seaweed syngas at night. Done?
OK, so once we’ve thoroughly rehabilitated ALL our farmland soils with biochar, and maybe some grazing and pasturelands as well (35% of the non-ice surface of the earth), what do we do with the rest to sequester it? Use industrial presses to crush it into bricks, maybe with a biomimicry agent to cement it, and then start rebuilding those coal-topped mountains with it? We’ve got to get rid of 20 cubic km’s a year! Crush it into bricks and drop in the deep ocean? How does it interact with sea microorganisms: would it be better to powder it into the ocean to stimulate other systems?
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Eclipse Now — Pyrolysis produces the following proportions:
1/4 gas, burnt to heat the pyrolysis;
1/2 liquid, to be refined similarly to crude oil;
1/4 biochar to be buried.
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EN, a cubic mile is not 1.6 cubic km’s.
More akin to 1.6 cubed, actually 4.17 cubic km’s.
I’m still getting my head around the rest of your post, but my starting point is that the easiest, simplest gains can be made at the front end by reducing carbon emissions, rather than in the middle via sequestration or afterwards via clean-up projects such as imaginary reforestation and kelp farming schemes.
There are many possible reasons for this, including:
1. Each tonne of CO2 not emitted is a permanent gain.
2. CO2 avoided cannot escape from storage after “capture”.
3. CO2 avoided cannot be leaked from processes such as during transport or industrial conversion.
4. Generally, the technology for avoidance exists and the need is for diversion of portion of current less effective efforts, eg development of wind, solar and natgas facilities to more effective (dollar for dollar) options including the frequently and irrationally overlooked massively increased use of nuclear power for primary, high value energy. Remember, electrical energy is the top of the tree. It is more flexible than any other and is able to be transported and converted anywhere and into any other energy form.
5. The time for development and implementation of nuclear energy has been demonstrated by France and others to be streets ahead of anything that can compare with it. China is currently proposing to grow its 28GW (Nameplate) of nuclear power to 120 to 150 GW by the 2030’s – I’m not sure of the dates. This is entirely achievable.
6. My grandchildren need the process of net “carbon” (ie GHG) emission elimination to be a done deal within their lifetimes. They cannot wait for the political, legal, social, research, trials, engineering and natural processes involved with world-scale untried, undeveloped, unplanned technologies to come to fruition. Simply growing those trees to maturity takes what? 40 – 50 years? Or, perhaps, you really envision sugar cane’s one-year cycle, in which case deserts are out of the question.
Maybe I’m missing a key fact or ten, but don’t trees grow extremely slowly when located in less than optimal conditions? Desert trees can be 100 years old and still only stand on 100 mm trunks. Or are deserts, suddenly, going to be fertile, with deep, moist, fertile soils and without harsh climates? I guess that I’ll have to read that book, but it certainly isn’t at the front of the queue. Is there an Executive Summary? Perhaps a few reviews by independent experts? Or is it just dreaming, like Professor Tim?
By all means, try other pathways; but in doing so, also ensure that you don’t provide the naysayers and roadblock-builders with excuses for “more of the same” FUD. Investigating alternatives must not be available as an excuse for not getting on with the job at hand at full speed and while using the very best and most effective tools that are available.
There is a world of difference between a Tim Flannery sideshow and a Broadway blockbuster.
To succeed at this task we need blockbusters and soon.
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Both elimination of the use of so-called fossil fuels and the sequestration of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the oceans are necessary; neither is sufficient unto itself. Neither is an excuse for not doing the other.
Won’t be easy or inexpensive. For example, somewhere I saw an estimate that rising wealth and expectations will double the demand for petroleum products in the readily foreseeable future. While sufficiently mature forests in deserts could supply enough “bio-oil” to replace current demand for petroleum, there is no possibility of doubling that, as far as I can tell. So about half the demand needs to be shifted to electricity based transportation, etc.
Growing anything in the desert requires careful attention to the details. The Israelis are very good at it, with many decades of practice. I would certainly want them as consultants.
But yes, while there is plenty of sunlight, the high evaporation rates have to be controlled. The Israelis, as far as I know, invented drip irrigation. Deployment of that technique appears advisable. One additional advantage is that the micronutrients can be dissolved in the water for spreading without waste.
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Here is a useful Acacia tree:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090824182535.htm
Fixes nitrogen.
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According to
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
the top 8 oil & gas companies earned, together , a total of about US $1919 billion in the year studied. Assuming but half that, very conservative, is from sales of crude oil, the world is willing to pay almost one trillion US dollars for the stuff.
So if it is correct that the fully established forests in the deserts can produce an equivalent amount of “bio-oil”, the operation can pay its own way even at prices ruineously low for the majors.
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Hi DBB,
biochar yields vary, and it can be set up to produce half biochar, half energy products (both syngas & oil).
“Temperatures of 400–500 °C (752–932 °F) produce more char, while temperatures above 700 °C (1,292 °F) favor the yield of liquid and gas fuel components.[12] Pyrolysis occurs more quickly at the higher temperatures, typically requiring seconds instead of hours. High temperature pyrolysis is also known as gasification, and produces primarily syngas, which has been used as vehicle fuel in some times and places.[12] Typical yields are 60% bio-oil, 20% biochar, and 20% syngas. By comparison, slow pyrolysis can produce substantially more char (~50%); it is this which contributes to the observed soil fertility of terra preta. Once initialized, both processes produce net energy. For typical inputs, the energy required to run a “fast” pyrolyzer is approximately 15% of the energy that it outputs.[13] Modern pyrolysis plants can use the syngas created by the pyrolysis process and output 3–9 times the amount of energy required to run.[7]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
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an equivalent amount
When a refinery gets from biomass an equivalent amount of carbon as currently, it needs to get the equivalent amount of energy as well to complete the processing into fuel. To increase the calorific value of a hydrocarbon stream, traditional practice in refineries is to “add hydrogen”, which in a decarbonised economy would have to be electrolytic hydrogen. However rather than bother with such a hazardous and intractable intermediary as hydrogen, I like to think they would more directly “subtract oxygen”. Electrolytically of course.
The current price of crude oil is US$54 per barrel or $396 per tonne. Its calorific value is about 40 GJ per tonne. So a competing source of energy would have to be cheaper than $10/GJ, or 0.036 $/kWh. That is pretty cheap to beat, but a nuclear power plant on site might achieve that.
The calculation would be different if a carbon tax had been applied to the crude oil before it arrived at the refinery…
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Roger Clifton, thanks but I fail to understand what the nuclear power plant at the refinery is supposed to accomplish.
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David asks, why add more energy?
If all of the world’s consumption of coal, oil and gas is to be replaced by recycled carbon, all of the energy that was taken out in the original process must now be inserted into the recycled carbon so it becomes fuel again. In other words, CO2 must be converted back to [CH2] so that the same carbon can supply the same customers with the same amount of energy from a different source.
In a separate BNC blog, we have discussed the extraction of the CO2 from seawater, in which case all of the energy must be put back using nuclear electricity. When the carbon capture is done by seaweed or forests, a certain amount of solar energy goes into making the intermediate biomass, [CH2O], but the energy content is a long way short of [CH2], the most popular carbon fuel.
If you pyrolyse the biomass before delivering it to the refinery, you may have increased the energy content per carbon somewhat, but at the expense of returning some carbon back to the atmosphere, which is contrary to the main point of the exercise. Considering that photosynthesis is much better at collecting carbon than it is at collecting solar energy, it is surely better to deliver all the carbon, as raw biomass to the refinery, and leave them to restore the energy content using an efficient, proven industrial process.
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Aha! Now I see what Roger’s saying. Instead of cooking some of the seaweed syngas to run the process, use nukes to cook the seaweed into biochar and then keep all the gas. It just depends on what is politically acceptable, I guess.
“Additionally, fifty percent of seaweed’s weight is oil, so we would theoretically only need to set aside three percent of the world’s oceans for seaweed farming to meet world energy needs.”
https://thinkprogress.org/seaweed-aquaculture-an-answer-to-sustainable-food-and-fuel-f60643f701dc#.ok77e8xa9
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Acacia plants… there are many nitrogen fixers in desert plant species, including many Acacias. That similarity is why Australian and African “wattles”, originally were classified as Acacias.
The various similar yet often unrelated species were reclassified globally in 2012.
Overall, the species formerly classified as Acacia are now spread across five genera:
http://anpsa.org.au/acacia1.html
Globally, approximately 1000 of the total of 1400 species of nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs are Australian natives,which are sometimes dominant in Australian desert landscapes. My guess is that 300 Australian Acacias are desert-dwellers.
As for Israel’s experience, I am well out of touch, but from distant memory they had great early success with species of Eucalypt, another primarily Australian genus with hundreds of members, especially several Eastern Australian coastal and inland species (nb not necessarily desert dwelling) including E. saligna (Sydney Blue Gum) and E. maculata (Spotted Gum) and the red ironbarks, E. Sideroxylon and E.crebra.
These eucalypts, also recently reclassified as Corymbia species, are not nitrogen-fixers and are not native desert-dwellers, so if grown in depleted soils will need heavy fertilizer application, eg from sewage effluent which relies on proximity to cities, or from artificial factory sources which these post-guano days rely on natural gas as a feedstock.
Fixed nitrogen, the major component of fertilizer, is an excellent example that one gets nothing for free in this world.
Proposal that rely on greening deserts needs to be supported by very much more detail than just wishful thinking and a suggestion that Israellis might be consulted.
Where, precisely, can the necessary millions of tonnes of nitrogenous fertilizer come from, and on what time scale? I say that it is an impossible dream.
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Apologies for the clumsy cut and paste reference above, regarding acacias.
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I like the way that you think, Roger. Linking the chain from start to conclusion and considering the pathway to the endpoint.
Considering the shape of a single step is not the same as designing a staircase.
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Siwa Oasis olive and date orchards:
http://www.egypt.travel/attractions/olive-and-palm-groves/
So it is possible to grow trees in the Sahara desert. Since those orchards have been there since time out of mind, I rather doubt fertilizers are required. Maybe there are some acacias.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siwa_Oasis
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Israel is far and away the world’s best recycler of sewage effluent at something like 40 to 50%.
It is difficult to justify use of broad scale desert planting on the basis of sparse population (ie “waste”, or at least, very low cost land), then to rely on sewage for nitrogen, without which growth becomes stunted.
Large olive and date trees at Siwa Oasis are not examples of high growth and are entirely unsuited to conversion of CO2 to biochar and oils.
A lemon-scented gum I planted in sand soil grew from seedling to somewhat over 30 feet high in the period 1970 – 1974. That is another species which was once planted widely in both Israel and California, but I understand to be less desired these days because of its vigor. Only after the local authorities removed the tree did the reason for its vigor become apparent – a broken domestic sewer pipe. Roots had traveled a long way down the smaller pipes to the main, where they caused mayhem.
Growth relies on water plus nutrient plus time. We don’t have time, so must focus on the other two.
By the way, date palms are among the worst of introduced pest tree species in inland Australia, for many reasons including that they provide shelter for other pests such as feral cats. They are entirely inappropriate.
African Olive trees are locally very widely distributed and difficult to eradicate pests, especially along country roadsides. I am reminded as I write this that I must grub out the thirty or more alongside my boundaries.
Informed consent for broad scale plantings within Central Australia would need at least a generation’s assessment in order to develop the necessary knowledge.
In the Australian vernacular, “It simply isn’t on, mate!” Not till the far side of 2050, at least.
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A reminder to contemplate the size of a problem and not just the possibility that there might be a problem.
Here is today’s news re 10,000 deaths per annum in London due to poor air quality.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-09/london-activists-ramp-up-fight-against-deadly-air-pollution/8168076
London: 10,000 per year.
Three Mile Island: Zero then and still zero.
Fukushima: Zero.
Yet there are misguided but otherwise educated and rational folk who steadfastly affirm that radiation due to nuclear power is a major killer.
What hope is there for the planet?
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singletonengineer — The Ornstein et al. paper proposes acacias, for nitrogen fixation, followed by giant eucalyptus. I am not proposing anything else for tree farms in the deserts. Sorry for the confusion.
As for additional fertilizer for faster growth, sure. Roger Clifton’s refinery will convert some of the biomass into methane so there is a source for the Haber process. The P and K for the NPK fertilizer will have to come from mines. However, the brine from desalination of sea water can be spread out to dry with the salts a source of whatever…
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