oldephartte(in training): A Climate of Energy Sense and Supply

Engineer-Poet wrote a Nov 2006 layout of a sample energy policy to eliminate crude oil imports to the US at the Ergosphere Blogspot. Knowing his interest in things nuclear - including Thorium - it is still a bit of a shock to see him treating carbon credits / anthropogenic global warming as other than a con game to pervert global energy supply by a tax on a fictitious problem ( making lots of money via fraud on the way while rewarding scofflaw nations and taxing the poor into extinction ) ...administered by an international body controlled by the US/UK ( power over power supply ). Still ... there is nothing like an independent thinker trying to pound sense into peoples' heads.

People do not seem realize - as per media publicity - the ice age prophecies ( as in also being pure speculation...computer modelled or no ) were roughly as credible ( make that incredible ) and would be a case of squeezing the lucre at the most devastating pricing opportunity should they come to pass.

Husbanding resources also means "Buy Low, Sell High" : a real ca$e for CONservation of strategic war materiel and necessity of modern infrastructure.

Energy Policy Wikipedia

Discussion on IEEE Spectrum 561 comments

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

EngineerPoet Voodude 11 hours ago

Try obfuscating URLs so they don't trip the filters. I do this regularly and it rarely fails.

I've embedded hyperlinks in this very discussion. As long as you have no more than 2 per comment, and avoid spammy sites, it seems to get through.

EngineerPoet Voodude 14 hours ago

They are not hyperlinks and probably go to journals behind paywalls. YOU put up the cites, YOU provide the evidence that they actually support the claims you're making.

Oh BTW, 700 ppm of CO2 is at least twice what we can allow and still be assured of our climate remaining like the Holocene.

EngineerPoet Voodude 16 hours ago

Go back over your references and tell me if they were using natural abundances of nitrogen and minerals, or if the plants received supplements. Remember that, without supplements, plant growth is subject to Liebig's law of the minimum.

Discussion on Michigan Radio 6 comments

Groups say Fermi 2 nuclear plant license shouldn't be renewed

EngineerPoet SHOULDBEATTENTION009554ii 17 hours ago

Nuclear power plants release radiation into the air and water during their DAILY operations.

YOU release radiation into the air and water during YOUR daily operations. You pee potassium-40 and exhale carbon-14. You carry about 4400 Becquerels of K-40 alone. Sleeping next to someone exposes you to their potassium's gamma radiation as well as your own.

Fortunately, there is every bit of evidence that this is good for you. Even environmental radon is negatively associated with lung cancer in non-smokers.

If you are concerned about radioactive emissions from powerplants, avoid coal. A lot of the uranium and thorium and radium winds up in fly ash, and of course all the radon goes straight up the stack. Nuclear plants emit practically nothing by comparison.

Higher incidences of childhood leukemia and breast cancers are found in populations who live near nuclear power plants.

Debunked by proper statistical work. Given the lower levels of radiation outside nuclear plants than others, such illnesses would have to be caused by something other than radiation.

Great places to start are:

ENENEWS

Oh, no wonder you're so misinformed; you're only reading propaganda sites. I suggest you read this personal account of radiation phobia and how circles of self-reinforcing misinformation promote it. It might enlighten you.

EngineerPoet a day ago

All this paranoia over the Fukushima meltdowns, which caused exactly 0 fatalities and 0 injuries to the public. The UN reported some time ago that the expected health impacts are indistinguishable from zero. Just what is the likelihood of a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami at the west end of Lake Erie, anyway?

The so-called environmentalists don't consider what a Fermi 2 shutdown would mean for the environment. Closing it would entail a minimum of 2 million tons of CO2 per year into the environment. Wind and solar will not offset more than a small fraction of this, because the plants needed to track their variations are the less-efficient (meaning more fuel-hungry) single-cycle gas turbines.

It's supremely ironic that an Ontario group is agitating against Fermi 2. Ontario's Bruce Point plant recently brought its last two refurbished reactors back on-line, which allowed the province to shut down its last coal-fired plant (Nanticoke). Ontario now has some of the cleanest electric power on the planet, and Toronto had zero smog days in 2014. They want to deny this to Americans... probably to keep up the price of Canada's gas sales to us. We should tell them "No".

Keep Fermi 2. Build Fermi 3. Put the air and the environment before the natural gas lobby and its "environmentalist" front groups.

Discussion on Stars and Stripes 4 comments

Study: Fukushima health risks underestimated

EngineerPoet 2 days ago

This personal account of radiation panic should be required reading.

EngineerPoet 3 days ago

1.1 μSv/hour is about 10 mSv/year. People in Denver, CO get about 11 mSv/year from a combination of higher cosmic ray exposure, "groundshine" from gammas emitted by radioisotopes (mostly uranium and thorium decay daughters) in granite, and radon which seeps out of the same granite. People in the Denver area are healthier than the US average. In short, this article is pure fear-mongering.

On the beach at Guarapari in Brazil, you can get up to 300 mSv/year from the monazite grains (which are rich in thorium). Guarapari is called "the healthy city" and people flock there to vacation on those self-same beaches. The same is true of the monazite beaches of Kerala, in India.

This is much ado about literally nothing, and Stripes should be ashamed about publishing such nonsense.

Of course, if the goal is to preserve the energy sales of Qatar (which sells LNG which competes directly with nuclear power in Japan, and elsewhere), the author of this article is serving his Arabian masters well.

Discussion on IEEE Spectrum 561 comments

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

EngineerPoet George Reeves 3 days ago

Wet-dry cycles are normal in the Southwest. Wholesale diversion of the jet stream, taking rainfall north and then down through the Midwest, is not.

EngineerPoet Neptune 3 days ago

Funny, France's solution scaled everywhere it's been tried (Belgium, Sweden to name two) while "renewables" have exactly ZERO examples of de-carbonizing any fossil-based grid of substantial size (more than 5 GW average demand) ANYWHERE, EVER.

If you assert that that's true, show me one example. Just one.

EngineerPoet mosswings 3 days ago

RMI is financed by fossil-fuel money. Lovins has been wrong on all of his predictions for literally decades, from negawatts to hypercars and everything else. Anyone still following him is a quasi-religious believer in his bucolic "soft option" vision, not an actual environmentalist.

Discussion on Crain's Chicago Business 1 comments

Need reasons to keep the U.S. a nuclear power leader? Here are 123

EngineerPoet 3 days ago

The author claims:

An alternate solution is to reprocess spent fuel, which removes
plutonium, rendering it relatively safe. However, there is a catch. The
plutonium can then be used to build nuclear weapons

Actually, it can't. It takes a very particular production cycle to make weapons-grade plutonium, and power reactors are completely unsuited to running on such cycles. The weapons isotope is Pu-239, but long cycles create lots of Pu-238 (which generates heat but is not fissile) and Pu-240 (which has so many spontaneous fissions it's practically impossible to make a bomb work properly if there's more than a few percent of it). It's like the difference between dynamite and angina pills; they both have nitroglycerine, but only one can go "bang" usefully.

Given both a research reactor capable of running on weapons-material production cycles AND reprocessing, a weapons program is possible. The simple solution is just to lease out fuel and take it back after use. We don't have to worry about other countries making fuel into bombs if they don't get to keep it.

Discussion on National Review Online 586 comments

A Future without Electricity

EngineerPoet equsnarnd 6 days ago

I capitalize and scare-quote "Green" when I mean FoE and the like. They are actually a front for coal and gas interests; FoE was started with a contribution from an Arco exec.

EngineerPoet equsnarnd 6 days ago

The "abiotic oil" theory is a Russian creation.

Discussion on Next Big Future 20 comments

Launching tiny interstellar spacecraft from Jupiter

EngineerPoet doctorpat 13 days ago

I'm using Firefox. I have a host of tracking sites blocked, including Sharethis. Things shouldn't become illegible just because some third-party site isn't accessible.

EngineerPoet 15 days ago

"Tweet Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Consider a particle accelerator. On Earth, these systems accelerate charged particles like electrons to relativistic velocities so that physicists can study subatomic phenomena."

For Pete's sake, Brian, can you separate all the sharing garbage from the post proper? I am repulsed from contributing here by all that junk I have to try to separate from the content to understand what you're trying to say.

Discussion on Next Big Future 511 comments

Coal is Still Dominant and no solution is being scaled to meet the challenge of cheap energy

EngineerPoet brentmulholland 19 days ago

Denmark was still 48% coal as of last year, and a substantial part of its "renewable" electricity came from burning wood chips (i.e. clearcutting forests). It cannot be generalized to the world, and is an absolutely horrid example on actual figures of merit such as CO2 emissions (several TONS per capita higher than France).

Discussion on Truthdig 35 comments

IPCC Demands Fossil Fuel Phase Out This Century

EngineerPoet Robert Riversong 20 days ago

The technological mindset is the problem

The pre-technological mindset eliminated all the N. American megafauna except the bison. It was quite successful in clearcutting forests and irrigating massive tracts of land until they failed from salt buildup. If you can't wrap your head around that, you're committing the error Santayana warned you about.

and cannot - as Einstein warned us - also be the solution.

Nobody's actually tried an entire economy that doesn't draw all its energy and material from nature, nor dump its effluents back into nature. Nuclear power really does present a new way of thinking. It's such a shame that you're religiously unable to grasp it, to the point that you characterize anything else as "idolatry" in opposition to your One True Faith.

EngineerPoet Robert Riversong 20 days ago

It appears that "you're insane" is your only comeback to actual proposals to solve the problem. (Mine is more or less the same solution that nature would use, just hurried up a heck of a lot—in other words, in time to actually prevent many of the worst consequences.)

A name like yours suggests you're one of those people who think that pre-technological society is the only "solution"... ignoring the sad little fact that Earth's carrying capacity under such conditions is maybe 1/10 of the present population, and people would eat all the wildlife they could catch and clear-cut forests for wood to try to stay warm before they finally starved or froze. Not exactly a good way to put nature back together.

At this point turning back is not an option; the only way out is through.

EngineerPoet Bella_Fantasia 20 days ago

I doubt that people can do anything to change the outcome of all that's happened.

We can't change the irreversible (like extinctions), but if we can engineer the putting of carbon into the atmosphere we can engineer the process of taking it out.

Imagine mining and crushing several billion tons of olivine every year, and spreading it on farmland and in wave-stirred coastal zones (perhaps to replace sand washed away by storms). It weathers, and the magnesium ions create carbonates while the silicic acid fosters the growth of diatoms. Both of these things sequester carbon and reduce acidity, while the diatoms help bulk up the base of the marine food chain.

Discussion on RealClearPolitics 85 comments

Nuclear Energy: The Once and Future Power Source | Comments

EngineerPoet DudesonMcDudeMan 20 days ago

I love the research and enthusiam. Your very well worded too. You're good.

Ten years of work, on top of 40 years of formal and informal preparation, is bound to produce something.

But I think about what you're saying and its insane...

Ah, right. You say it's easier to change PHYSICS than POLICY... and I'm the one who's nuts?

If you wonder why I come across as dismissive, that's why. You can go back to the regulatory regime of 1965, literally with the stroke of a pen. You can't make the sun shine or the wind blow at your command no matter what you do, nor can you make RE require less than tens of millions of acres for its various collectors. And that difference—nay, gulf—is at the heart of this issue.

Claiming replacing everything with nuclear is simpler and more cost effective is lunatic...

You're probably much too young to remember, but nuclear used to be cheaper than coal until new NRC regulations multiplied the cost several-fold. The popular press predicted the end of coal (when it wasn't touting coal-fired MHD generation). Coal is much cheaper than natural gas, so nuclear at late-60's prices would eliminate gas-fired generation too. Renewables? We mostly wouldn't need them.

This isn't opium dreams. This is how things really were. They could be that way again.

So we burn some NG, so what.

It's going to get really fecking expensive, that's what. And that's even if we don't have to worry about GHGs.

We burn less with renewables and far less than the current arrangement with coal.

So you say we should replace a little ceramic energy source that costs about 0.7¢/kWh, with a gaseous (and dangerous) energy source that will soon cost upwards of 10¢/kWh... and will have to serve upwards of 60% of demand even in your "renewable" scenario plus continue to provide most space heat, industrial process heat, etc.

You keep trying to imply that we'll burn less NG with renewables than running mostly nuclear. And you think I'm the one who's nuts?

I like how you brag about the efficiency of fuel/electric hybrid (you're not all electric you fossil fuel shill?)

If I win the Mega Millions jackpot, you can rest assured my second call after my stockbroker will be to the nearest Tesla dealership. In the mean time, forty grand was a real stretch when I suddenly needed a new car.

but can't for the life of you imagine how renewables and backup reciprocating generators will work together.

I've only been writing about it for nine years.

Your only synapse died of loneliness, didn't it?

EngineerPoet DudesonMcDudeMan 20 days ago

You mentioned how its collect, but not how its enriched.

If you use fast-spectrum reactors, heavy-water reactors or thorium reactors you don't even need enrichment. And learn some English grammar: "collected", "it's".

A nuke is maybe 40% efficient max and costs over 10 orders of magnitude more.

Someone is a scientific illiterate and doesn't know what "order of magnitude" means. Also, the thermal efficiency of concentrating-solar plants is considerably less than 40%. This doesn't matter if your energy source emits no carbon and requires almost no land.

Renewables will be paired most effectively with cheap gas.

You haven't heard? LNG exports are going to push American NG prices to within a couple dollars of the world price. There will be no cheap gas 5 years from now. But it will be REALLY profitable for the drillers and pipeline companies!

The GE J920 has a heat rate is 50% in simple cycle

49% at 60 Hz. The LHV of methane is 50 MJ/kg, which burns to make 2.75 kg of CO2. This means that the CO2 intensity of your J920 power is no less than 404 gCO2/kWh (ignoring upstream emissions). That is at least 4 times as much as the maximum we can tolerate.

You could (barely) get by with that if your renewables could only manage a capacity factor of 75%, leaving only 25% to be handled by your J920. Whoops! You'll actually need it to provide something like 60% (Texas wind, 40% CF) to 89% (German PV, 11% CF). That's 2-3 times too much.

Isn't it strange that your "renewable" grid is overwhelmingly powered by NG... Mr. Fossil Fuel Shill?

EngineerPoet DudesonMcDudeMan 21 days ago

Not turbines.. Reciprocating engines, the same ones in your car just with epic efficinecy.

If you think that anyone is going to install 11 Jenbacher recip engines instead of one GE LMS100 gas turbine, you're nuts. The cost and maintenance overhead of the additional ten units will swamp any savings from the marginal improvement in efficiency, even without the steam cycle that the LMS100 can drive. The LMS100 can start in 10 minutes anyway.

The detail you keep dodging is that even 50% thermal efficiency is woefully short of what's needed to get CO2 emissions down to where we need them. If you're dealing with PV with 20% capacity factor, or even wind with 40%, you've got to cover the other 60-80% with something that burns fuel. If you've only saved 40%, and you need an 80% cut in CO2, you need to triple thermal efficiency. Have you seen any engines achieving 150% thermal efficiency? Neither have I, and there's this little thing called the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics that makes me suspect we won't see one any time soon.

You don't have a problem starting your car and getting to highway speed in a few minutes??

I can start my car and have it to highway speed in 10 seconds without burning a drop of fuel. It's half-electric. I'm averaging over 700 MPG on the current tank, over 125 MPG overall.

my lack of evidence on emerging technology (it just arrived) is still better than the nuclear industries track record of failure.

What electric grids have your technologies decarbonized to less than 100 gCO2/kWh again? Nuclear has France at about 77, and Sweden down at about 22-23. You call that "failure"? It's only a fail if you're a shill for fossil fuels.

Here's your scenario played out

Wrong. The scenario played out is:
1. RE PTCs are discontinued (already a strong likelihood).
2. "Must-take" provisions for RE are repealed; over-generation is not rewarded.
3. Repeal of cost-escalating legal factors for nuclear puts it back on a level playing field for the first time since the 1960's.
4. Carbon tax prices backup generation for "renewables" out of the market.

It is vastly easier to deal with having 1 kW delivered to you 24/7 than having 168 kWh per week but no control over when you're going to get them. Natural gas hit ~$15/million BTU back in 2008, and LNG exports from the USA will keep it close to that price permanently. That puts your Jenbacher engine out of the market; at 49% efficiency, fuel alone costs you 10.5¢/kWh. If you tax CO2 at $20/tonne, you add another 2¢/kWh to everything powered by NG.

Before the unrestricted cost escalations of the NRC, nuclear plants were cheaper than coal. Let me repeat that: nuclear plants were cheaper than coal. Despite the NRC there are now designs for nuclear plants that would once again provide energy cheaper than coal. Such plants would destroy the fossil fuel business, and make the climate-change issue moot.

THAT is what you are afraid of, because you are a fossil-fuel shill.

grid parity becomes more than achieved, solar panels proliferate, off grid power proliferates, onsite power for industrial proliferates...

Ah, yes, "onsite power". If you think that running your own 9.5 MW plant on fuel that's going to cost a bunch even before carbon taxes is cheaper than having the utility run their own, much larger and more cost-effective plant on fuel that costs 1/14 as much and has no carbon liability, you're crazy. But I bet you just want other people to think that, because it helps your bottom line.

Even if you win, you'll still lose. its a paradigm shift.

Yeah, Denmark and Germany are paradigm-shifting right back to the 17th century, digging and burning coal. And that coal has more uranium and its decay products than the nuclear industry uses.

Figure out where to bury all that radioactive wastewaste for the next few mellenia, Mr environmental.

But we don't have to. The actual fission products become less radio-toxic than the raw uranium ore in about 500 years. The best way to get rid of our current spent fuel is to reclaim the actinides and extract the energy from them (radioactivity is just a release of energy from nuclei, so the more you get out in a reactor the less is left for anything else). You get rid of 90% of the remaining long-term radioactivity in a century. So, turn the "high-level waste disposal" into a profit center and a proven fossil-fuel killer. What's not to like... unless you're shilling for the coal and gas industries?

That's where the growth is in your industry.

You know, it's funny... but despite the "no growth" in the US nuclear power industry its output has continued to increase through uprates, and even in 2013 it produced more carbon-free electricity than all renewables put together. Watts Bar #2 is nearing completion, there are 4 AP1000's under construction with more applications likely, Monroe MI may become host to a 1600 MW(e) BWR next to Fermi 2... and that's just the USA. There's 20-odd units under construction in China alone, and 70-odd worldwide.

So, if you "win", all you will do is hand the industry (that the USA created from scratch!) to the Chinese. I guess that makes you a traitor as well as a shill. Hope you like firing squads!

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