Open thread for climate solution discussion. Climate science discussions should remain on the Unforced Variations thread.
Reader Interactions
854 Responses to "Forced Responses: Dec 2019"
nigeljsays
Kevin McKinney @220, just to be clear I’m not suggesting gas fired turbines are the only way of providing reactive power. Any turbine can do this, so hydro power or the Drax wood pellet burner in the UK as below which was built partly to provide reactive power to the grid. And capacitors and what you mentioned.
Zebra says @236 “I am, as usual, just trying to tailor the communication to ‘the public’ and point out that solutions (electrical grids) are local because the problems are local.’
So no room for smart grids that connect across state boundaries?
William Jacksonsays
#235 You got that right!
Al Bundysays
Mr KIA @218 “All our side wants is to vet every immigrant so only good folks come here – we don’t want criminals – ”
AB: So you’re for open immigration with proper vetting? (MRKIA’s actual stance is quite clear. Note the process: “All our side wants” is linked to the most innocuous and universally agreed-upon truth – that looks nothing like the reality MRKIA is advocating. A reality where “kids in cages” is a legitimate tool to dissuade asylum seekers from expressing their legal rights.)
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nigelj: Although obviously you want to minimise illegals,
AB: Why? And why use a loaded and vicious description? Most “Undocumented” people are honorable, just as most “documented” people are honorable. Some of each are not. Frankly, I think that CRIMINALS who cross the border between the sidewalk and the street ILLEGALLY should have their kids put in cages.
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E-P: Entropy scales as the log of concentration so the difference between 6000 ppm and 400 ppm isn’t as big as it looks.
AB: Yes, and E-P would know better than me about this case but logs are generally larger than they look because we use base 10 and nature uses 2.718….
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E-P 212: Germany is proof that “renewables” cannot decarbonize an industrial economy
BPL: German CO2 emissions are down last year. I wonder why?
AB: Putting E-P’s hyperbolic “cannot” aside, renewable-heavy grids’ CO2 emissions suffer from serious noise. Like in climate science, weather swamps everything else in year-to-year comparisons. France gets about 93% of its electricity from low carbon sources. Germany still burns massive amounts of low-grade coal. And E-P is not being dishonest about Chernobyl deaths. That doesn’t mean he’s right. There’s serious contention amongst experts. My current take is that a fair number of people will die – but later and shadowy. Who knows if Mrs. Jones’ cancer was caused by Chernobyl or smoking? (Eh, a bit of each)
Of course, nobody is building Chernobyls nowadays. As long as the fuel is liquid it can’t melt down (already melted!) As long as the coolant isn’t water you won’t turn your facility into a hydrogen bomb (chemical, not nuclear bomb). As long as you keep pressurized fluids away from your reactor’s core, you won’t have to worry about all sorts of pressure-related stuff. Satisfy those and you can sell nukes to most people. Try to say that pressurized water reactors are safe enough and you may win the argument in fifty years or so.
Al Bundysays
Oh yeah, and use a fuel that burns up completely while producing valuable byproducts instead of godawful waste, that is proliferation-proof, and requires no mining since it is a byproduct of other mines. Modular molten fluoride salt thorium-fueled breeder reactors are the cat’s meow. Most anything else will die of radiophobia’s backup to backup to backup to backup never ending requirements. But these guys just use a cooled freeze plug. If the core gets too toasty OR electricity to a fan that’s keeping the plug cool is lost then all the salt and fuel drain into storage.
nigeljsays
Killian @223 says “Yup, so it’s this bad at somewhere around +1C~… +1.3C?… and still it’s tech this, tech that, 2050 this, 2050 that…It’s seriously funny. Deadly seriously funny.There’s exactly one way to *rapidly* deal with climate: Rapid simplification . I’ll be here when you all finally come around to reality.”
The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification” (if defined as huge and rapid reductions in personal energy use and other huge lifestyle changes), given peoples values, needs, desire for comfort, and the fact they take tech for granted. Therefore we probably either solve the climate problem with tech based solutions, in the main, or it won’t be solved.
These simple living advocates seem terrified that the world will run out of resources, driving people back to some sort of subsistence farming culture, yet they also tell us how superior subsistence farming and hunter gatherer culture is to modern society. So it all seems confused to me.
However some parts of the simple living philosophy do make sense, and we should obviously try to be sparing with use of things like hydrocarbons, because once they are burned they are gone, so no more nice and easy petrochemicals. And flying less is a plausible sort of goal.
Read this on why fixing the climate problem is proving to be hard work:
2006 Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
The risk projections suggest that by now Chernobyl may have caused about 1,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4,000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident.
Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400–72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000–59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes.
Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident.
Despite early reports suggesting that the paediatric thyroid cancer cases that developed after exposure to Chernobyl fallout were particularly aggressive, it now seems that the initial presentation and early clinical course of most of these cases are very similar to both non-radiation-associated paediatric thyroid cancers and thyroid cancers that arise after exposure to external beam irradiation. Over an average clinical follow-up period of about 10 years, the disease-specific mortality rate in these paediatric thyroid cancer cases that developed after the Chernobyl accident is quite low (1% or less). 73 citations https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0936655511002020
Global and local cancer incidents and deaths from Fukushima radiocaesium.
Significantly lower risks are expected from Fukushima that from Chernobyl.
360-850 cancer incidents are expected in Japan, of which 220-520 may be fatal.
Nevertheless, these numbers are expected to be even smaller, as the response of the Japanese official authorities to the accident was rapid. The projected cancer incidents are much lower than the casualties occurred from the earthquake itself (> 20,000) and also smaller than the accident of Chernobyl. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013002808
2007 30 citations
RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF IMPACTS OF THE CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT
Keywords
National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Chernobyl, dose, population, health effects
The recently completed Chernobyl Forum concluded that after a number of years, along with reduction of radiation levels and accumulation of humanitarian consequences, severe social and economic depression of the affected regions and associated psychological problems of the general public and the workers had become the most significant problem to be addressed by the authorities.
The majority of the >600,000 emergency and recovery operation workers and five (5) million residents of the contaminated areas in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine received relatively minor radiation doses which are comparable with the natural background levels.
An exception is a cohort of several hundred emergency workers who received high radiation doses and of whom 28 persons died in 1986 due to acute radiation sickness.
Found Via Google Scholar – Our best minds on the world including people like Bill & Melinda Gates and Dr. James Hansen are not gullible people who don’t understand the scientific literature on Nuclear Energy, and the potential Risks vs the unsubstantiated risks.
PS
Mr KIA says “America was a FAR more prosperous place before our borders were overrun.”
Yes. The Spanish, the French, the Dutch and the British really screwed up the place big time. Collectively they (and all who came after them) have pretty much destroyed the joint. A Pity.
As for voting deniers out of office, there was a good chance to do that in November last year. That the voters didn’t take that chance suggests that there is no environmental motivation driving voters, so I wouldn’t hold your breath about next year.
Hmm. So, you don’t think the flip of the House has *anything* to do with environmental issues? Even though the climate crisis and the Trump assault on the environment were quite prominent in Democratic policy debate? And even though public concerns about climate are now–for good and sufficient reason–at an all-time high in the US?
Seems a bit dubious to me. But even stipulating that, I’d have to note that “past results are not a guarantee of future performance.” And I’d add that holding one’s breath is not a very effective strategy for exerting persuasive influence–most three- or four-year-olds figure that out! What *is* effective is organizing, which means talking to people and creating networks which can (and do) mobilize for action.
“If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.”
I don’t think you needed the word “still”, as that implies that there are serious efforts underway to reach that target. As for voting deniers out of office, there was a good chance to do that in November last year. That the voters didn’t take that chance suggests that there is no environmental motivation driving voters, so I wouldn’t hold your breath about next year.
You’re saying voters never change their minds, which is disconfirmed by evidence. Politics in the US isn’t just a game of plutocrats buying and selling influence, but ultimately one of voter numbers. Every election is decided by a plurality, usually less than a majority, of individual voters, and we’re known to be fickle. If we weren’t, fossil-fuel capitalists wouldn’t spend so much on lobbying and public disinformation. It may not be enough to block decarbonization forever, as it turns out: my feeble hopes are raised by recent poll results, as cited in my previous comment (emphasis mine):
Numerous polls showed a rising proportion of Americans believes climate change is real, humans are contributing, and government and industry should take steps to address it.
To the extent polling is empirically rigorous, it’s a way of not fooling ourselves that everyone shares our personal opinions. Do you not think it significant that Frank Luntz, who advised GOP leaders to adopt AGW-denial in the early aughts, is now urging them to support carbon pricing? Climate realists don’t have a governing plurality yet, but the Science news item suggests those polling trends will continue:
And with unprecedented wildfires in Australia and North America, coral bleaching in the Pacific Ocean, and a deadly heat wave in Europe making the cost of warming unmistakable, governments’ failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions ignited protests around the world.
Hey, all I know is what I read in Science ;^).
Al Bundysays
From Unforced Variations–
Kevin McKinney: So the net effect of bullshit becomes a matter of scale in time and in space.
AB: Yeah. Tech moves essentially instantly, which I’m taking as 3-20 years. Planets generally move far slower. The traditional (flawed) definition of climate places a HARD lower limit of 30 years. When inputs scale years-to-a-decade-or-two and results scale decades-to-billions-of-years there is a mismatch and thought breaks down.
And yes, you only have indirect evidence but you have access. The ethical issue is re-framed but changes not a whit.
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nigelj: but its hard to see ICE’s falling much in price, although the technology will continue to improve.
AB: Excellent question. If efficiency doubles then by definition the amount of fuel burned for a task halves. If engine price scales with fuel burned (not a given but a reasonable approximation when efficiency and pollution “rule”) then it is expected that engine prices will plummet in step with efficiency gains. Current vehicles have laser-focused on this point as it allows for shoving more and more torque under the hood by simply converting said would-have-been-efficiency-gains into acceleration.
Add to that the concept of hybridization. Once the engine is relieved of the totally inappropriate task of acceleration the requirements placed on said engine are laughably small. ONE person can easily carry a car’s engine – IF one takes hybridization to its logical conclusion. So NO, engine expense is NOT a significant issue. HUGE batteries are and will remain way more expensive than teensy-tiny engines.
The REAL question is whether batteries will win the competition with bio/synfuel. Engines and motors are damn near irrelevant (at least once engines grow up).
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Ray Ladbury: What happens when a significant portion of the population simply rejects the truth.
AB: Lots of FUN! The USA is all about “today”. How can we entertain ourselves as much as possible TODAY? Who the ef cares about tomorrow since all those other assh***s are going to ruin tomorrow for ME anyway? MY choice is binary: either steal/grub as many chits as I can so as to try to protect MYSELF from tomorrow or party like it’s 1999.
What? You thought “Greed is good” would evolve into some other “truth”?
Killiansays
Amazing. There’s a word for why all but about three posters here have no clue what I’m talking about: Omnology.
Grab your down sleeping bag and parka, air force bunny boots, and let’s go camping for a week, measure the ice in a few places on the Tanana river, and then buy some tickets for the Nenana Ice Classic. :)
After that we can work on becoming sourdoughs. Requirements for becoming a sourdough:
1) Make love to an Eskimo.
2) Wrestle a Grizzly Bear.
3) Piss in the Yukon.
Come on, let’s go!
:)
nigeljsays
Something for the simple living people, and an interesting and useful read: “The role of culture and traditional knowledge in climate change adaptation: Insights from East Kimberley, Australia.
BPL: German CO2 emissions are down last year. I wonder why?
“Though renewables played a role in the 4.2 percent drop it has largely been attributed to warm weather. Despite this good news the country is certain to miss its 2020 target of reducing emissions by 40 percent over 1990.”
A merry Christmas, happy holiday, healthy and prosperous New Year, and all that other good stuff!
zebrasays
#241, #247 Engineer Poet,
“I’ve aced every last course”
But not mine. You failed the test with the scenario I gave at #173. And now you are demonstrating some serious confusion or misunderstanding.
“Transformers are limited by current, not power. They are rated in volt-amperes, not watts (e.g. kVa or MVa).”
Got it. Volt-amps are not power. Gotta call up all those EE and textbook people to let them know how wrong they have been all this time.
You said earlier that I haven’t posted a single equation. That’s because I understand what I’m talking about, unlike you. I’m trying to “teach” the subject for the hypothetical lurkers; equations don’t help:
I said the wires heat up. Your attempt to contradict me says: the wires heat up. The fact that the wires are coiled up in a transformer doesn’t change that fact– I mean, they’re called copper losses, duh. And since transformers are incredibly efficient machines, core losses and eddy currents and so on aren’t going to break the grid unless the unit is really incorrectly designed.
And then there’s: “Capacitors for power-factor correction are not energy storage devices per se.”
You go on to give an equation/word salad that makes no sense at all. What exactly do those capacitors do if they aren’t storing energy? You are just like the student someone mentioned a while back who hasn’t a clue about the question so writes down every equation and fact he can remember.
I’ll await your test-make-up efforts on this and your perpetual-motion-type wackiness as described in #173.
zebrasays
#260 Al Bundy,
I really don’t see the connection between efficiency (for the same function) and the price of the engine.
But you do hit on a (reverse?) Jevons-type question I have thought about:
If you can get a PISH (plug in serial hybrid) at 100 miles on a charge, covering most driving, how much of a selling point is the MPG of the “range-extender”?
Conversely, if you have a very efficient range extender, might that result in people not bothering to charge (from non-FF sources) as often as we would like?
It’s never easy, is it? ;-)
nigeljsays
xyz
guestsays
boo
Al Bundysays
nigelj: These simple living advocates seem terrified that the world will run out of resources, driving people back to some sort of subsistence farming culture, yet they also tell us how superior subsistence farming and hunter gatherer culture is to modern society. So it all seems confused to me.
AB: I mostly agree. As if it matters whether we run out of a mineral later or we decide to quit mining it now. However, our current path is degrading the environment that a simpler society would depend on. So if you remove a mountaintop to get at the coal you will toxify lots of land and water, and a simple society won’t as easily handle the resulting cancers. Then you burn the coal, creating an ash pile. Rain happens and the ash pile toxifies even more land.
Mad Max is the opposite of what Killian is envisioning but becomes more likely the further we go down this path. So from his viewpoint it is imperative to do a full stop immediately because it might help the “inevitable” simplification boot up successfully. Imagine how hard Killian’s vision would be to build in a 5C world that has gone through an all-out attempt (including lots of wars) to forestall the inevitable.
EP has responded to a lot of criticisms and posted details and calculations to make his point including the issue Zebra refers to. That sure looks like hes trying to apply physics in detail to the real world to me.
In general I agree, and I customarily hesitate to criticize a fellow traveler. However, E-P’s comments also evince an uncommon degree of self-absorption (stipulating that mine do too on occasion – perhaps it takes one to know one):
If you can’t specify a schedule of GHG reductions down to zero with a high likelihood of being able to meet it and specifying the proven means you’ll use, you are literally planning to let the planet cook. I find this unacceptable.
Following the examples of proven failures should also be unacceptable.
E-P is clearly well-educated, and at least narrowly well-informed. Yet surely even he realizes he isn’t omniscient? If it were possible to describe the future in detail, we wouldn’t need science, nor would we be in our manifest collective predicament. Nope: by the evidence, the future is irreducibly indeterminate, despite Einstein’s presupposition. I never knew Einstein, but I’m pretty sure he was smarter* than E-P, and he nonetheless turned out to be wrong!
E-P, can you imagine that your investment in a particular technological tool might not be helping your cause? AGW is a >10,000 year old economic and therefore political problem. Capping it, and its net aggregate cost in money and tragedy, will require all the technological tools we can bring to bear. The goal is to decarbonize the US economy by all feasible means. Feasibility will be partially determined by economic and political forces independent of your approval. Your beloved nuclear option may feature prominently. How the Hell do you know it will, if only we on RC sign up to your inner vision? Failing that: with due respect for an ancient cultural convention, what qualifies you to cast the first stone against all the rest of us (again stipulating the same about me WRT individual denialists, though I try to present probable cause)? Or is it all about the throwdown with you ;^)?
* In 1930, Einstein told a friend: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.” LOL!
with the assumption that molten salt thorium is the path taken. It’s about as safe and environmentally correct an energy as we’re likely to see this side of fusion.
So long as you can prevent extraction of pure U-233, that is. Turns out that the spontaneous fission rate of U-233 is quite low, so if e.g. Pa-233 can be extracted from the melt and allowed to decay away from neutrons, someone could make bomb-grade material relatively easily. This is far more difficult with a solid-fuel U/Pu fuel cycle. Because of this, all the MSR concepts out there seem to be going the way of not extracting anything at all from the fuel salt; ThorCon will swap out the “can” more often than it will change out the salt it contains.
We have a serious game-changer in the pipeline. NuScale is going to be highly competitive if it can be built using electron-beam welding; 6-inch steel can be welded at at least 50 mm/min in a single pass, so a full-circumference weld on a 3-meter reactor vessel will only take about 3 hours. Production of 2 units/day (welding 2 end caps and 2 flanges per unit) from a single welder would appear feasible, running 3 shifts.
Thin sections up to 10 mm can be EBWed at upwards of 750 mm/min. This has implications for things like a revived Fermi 1. Fermi 1 had 636 fuel/blanket channels in the core, which would require roughly 1272 welds to build up from 1/3 hexagon pieces. At perhaps 2250 mm overall height, this would require 3 minutes per weld, 20 welds per hour, roughly 64 hours to weld up a full core assembly. 4 welders running 2 shifts/day could produce 2 units/day. Welding 2 cm pool vessel end caps onto the barrels at 500 mm/min would take a bit over 6 minutes per weld, about 2 units/hour; hardly worth talking about.
tl;dr Electron-beam welding looks like it’s going to make it feasible to mass-produce reactors which were formerly hand-built. We’re going to see quality soar and cost drop like a rock, and we don’t have to wait for new technology to be proven before we can get started. Yes, thorium looks like great stuff and there’s lots of it, but we need to get moving long before it’ll be ready.
The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification” (if defined as huge and rapid reductions in personal energy use and other huge lifestyle changes), given peoples values, needs, desire for comfort, and the fact they take tech for granted.
Rapid simplification won’t fix matters; it will actually guarantee that things continue to get worse. As Bret Kugelmass said in front of the UN, an immediate halt to carbon emissions won’t even slow climate change down. There is too much warming “in the pipeline” already. We need to make a serious effort to draw CO2 levels down to 350 ppm or less, and for that we have to have energy and lots of it.
If efficiency doubles then by definition the amount of fuel burned for a task halves.
Thus making fuel affordable for tasks which were not previously affordable, and driving up demand. This is the essence of Jevons’ paradox. We’re not going to efficiency our way out of this problem; quite a bit more is necessary.
The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification”
Your Straw Man stupidity is not humanity’s problem. For two or three years you have repeated this utter dumbshit nonsense, always leaving out the fact it is predicated on two things: No other choice and no other way to be sustainable, thus it’s simplicity or failure.
Shut. Up. Your dishonesty is not acceptable, nor is your ignorance.
Killiansays
Rapid simplification won’t fix matters; it will actually guarantee that things continue to get worse.
Your just as ingorant as he is. The above is absurd. Reducing emissions 90-90% won’t have any affect? Sequestering billions of tons of carbon each year back to below 300 in as little as 20 years will have no effect?
Large-scale, industrial agriculture is often held up as the solution for feeding the world’s growing population. But small farms—with about 25 acres or less—along with family-run operations like Masumoto’s produce over 70 percent of the world’s food.
Something actually *worth* talking about. Solutions, not bullshit and lies and ignorance.
But when researcher Dhee arrived at a village in Hamirpur district in Himachal Pradesh, to understand how the residents viewed the leopard population in their midst, she realised that people don’t automatically view wildlife, even large carnivores like leopards as the enemy. Instead, the researcher contends that the people of Hamirpur saw leopards as conscious thinking beings, who could be negotiated with in order to coexist.
zebrasays
#271 Mal Adapted,
Mal, E-P is not applying physics to solving the problem. If he were, he would be able to discuss the issue without using industry jargon that is intended to obfuscate and valorize the existing monopolistic, Authoritarian, paradigm.
As you point out, economics and politics plays a huge role in this. EP, when asked if the US is going to nationalize the electricity sector in the Socialist approach taken by France, with the Feds deciding the nature and location of the nuclear plants, he says “of course not”.
But then, when it is pointed out that a true free market system is the best bet for getting nukes built, he rejects the idea… which means he’s back to fantasizing some kind of Authoritarian Nirvana solution.
We can’t seem to get away from that Nirvana thing, eh. Killian is going to save the world with all-small-farms (which now inefficiently use fossil-fuel tractors and pickup-trucks and so on).
But as nice as it is for those who can afford it to get fancy-tasting peaches, the only realistic structure is one which accommodates both large-scale agriculture for nutritional staples and local production where the conditions are favorable.
Kind of like my electricity market, with wind, solar, nuclear, and others, each source being chosen because it is the best fit for the local need.
David B. Bensonsays
Killian @275 — As is well-known, Greenpeace lacks any semblance of objectivity regarding matters nuclear. Specifically, the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
Al Bundysays
nigelj noted that solar installation causes more injuries than nukes.
Yeah, and my first comment ignored mining. Our minds accept the normal while screaming about abnormal. Mines kill in normal ways. Nukes are more spectacular. A solar worker getting fried via electricity is ho-hum. A person getting fried with radiation is a catastrophe.
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zebra: I really don’t see the connection between efficiency (for the same function) and the price of the engine.
AB: Engines are often referred to as “air pumping devices” because their output is based on the amount of air that passes through the engine (I used “fuel” because I was assuming the most efficient air/fuel ratio (14.7ish) and fuel is what we care about). So if you double efficiency you need half the air, and so half the engine.
zebra: If you can get a PISH (plug in serial hybrid) at 100 miles on a charge, covering most driving, how much of a selling point is the MPG of the “range-extender”?
AB: 100 miles is INSANE. Why spend a huge chunk of change and add incredible weight to a vehicle for minimal value beyond what a 10 mile battery would provide (or negative value since weight kills both acceleration and those highly-polluting tires)? After all, “range” is what engines provide. The proper configuration is a TINY battery for short trips, a SUPER-TINY engine/generator for hybridization, a TINY direct-drive engine (transmissions are inefficient) that is engaged solely for highway use, and a flywheel for beat-the-crap-out-of-Teslas-and-Lambos acceleration (and braking) with zero battery degradation. “Hybrid” is passe. “Tribrid” and “quadbrid” are the future.
And your discounting of E-P is an error. He knows his stuff. His “Please hate me” attitude is a disjoint issue.
zebra: Conversely, if you have a very efficient range extender, might that result in people not bothering to charge (from non-FF sources) as often as we would like?
AB: Uh, batteries are charged with fossil sources (by definition extra kilowatts added to the grid’s load are supplied by the least efficient source on the grid – if your city is at a particular moment in time 99% renewable and you add your EV that 1% coal just went up to 1.00001% coal – your EV is supplied with renewables ONLY if the percentage of renewables was over 100% prior to your plugging in.). And yep, liquid fuel tanks are filled mostly with fossil sources. That NEITHER ONE will be charged/filled with fossil sources in the future somehow is a plus for one but not the other?
zebra: It’s never easy, is it? ;-)
AB: Thank God. Boredom ain’t fun. Which makes me wonder about those whose goal in afterlife is to sit around doing nothing but sycophantic singing.
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E-P: Thus making fuel affordable for tasks which were not previously affordable, and driving up demand. This is the essence of Jevons’ paradox. We’re not going to efficiency our way out of this problem; quite a bit more is necessary.
AB: My vision doubles engine efficiency while halving air and rolling resistance, with current best practices being the baseline. So 200mpg. And you are right, Jevon needs to be considered. Fortunately, ANY six-year old could figure out the solution: Quadruple (or more) the price of fuel via a tax. Strange that you are deliberately clueless.
E-P: Yes, thorium looks like great stuff and there’s lots of it, but we need to get moving long before it’ll be ready.
AB: Good post. And yes, we need to get moving now. Thus, the question is whether we want to end up with thorium and solar/wind or thorium and uranium, cuz thorium needs time to develop and we have no choice but to build “crap” now. Given that uranium is a third-rail AND it isn’t “the big leagues” why bother with it in “the farm league”?
Al Bundysays
David B Benson: the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
AB: Naw, it’s a stupid issue, but it’s an incredibly powerful issue.
I’d love to disregard the rich leeches that our system has created since they are generally stupid. How far is that gonna get me?
David B. Bensonsays
zebra @281— In the ERCOT grid any generator at all can bid in the day ahead market. Presumably decisions are made on the expectations of turning a profit. So there are lots of wind farms and as natural gas is embarrassing plentiful, lots of natural gas generators.
nigeljsays
Mal Adapted @271, I can only say agreed, in the main anyway. I’ve also pointed out to EP that the nuclear power issue relates in large part to politics and organisational issues.
We probably all get a bit self absorbed. Zebra is self absorbed about free markets and population, Killian about sustainability etc, EP is self absorbed about nuclear power from an engineering viewpoint. I get self absorbed about what I see as problems with some of Killians ideas.
However you get an engineer like EP and he / she will get technical because its their area of things and pushing a particular option is how we humans argue things I quite enjoy EP’s free engineering tutorials! So SOME self absorption seems ok but not if it goes completely crazy. We need vigorous debate, and to push our own wheel barrows, but we also have to be able to see the bigger picture and other peoples points of views and not get to divisive. But I can see you know this. im not sure everyone knows this.
I try really hard NOT be be too self absorbed and I try to see things a bit more openly, because otherwise you get intransigence which can be a huge problem.
The basic reason Zebra and EP clash is Zebra prefers free markets, while its fairly obvious EP prefers an electricity system run more as a monopoly and by technocrats. In fact either system has its strengths and weaknesses, and either system can work if done well. Hopefully the debate on it doesn’t become too much of a personal feud. I dont like talking about other people like this, but an exception seems justified in this case.
Creating a market in a very small country is practically impossible anyway, but electricity markets do have the merit of customer choice and they minimise monopolies. The real issue is does that outweigh the fairly obvious problems electricity markets can create with their complexity etc? Because electricity markets are very much “created” things.
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @270
“However, our current path is degrading the environment that a simpler society would depend on. So if you remove a mountaintop to get at the coal you will toxify lots of land and water, and a simple society won’t as easily handle the resulting cancers. Then you burn the coal, creating an ash pile. Rain happens and the ash pile toxifies even more land. Mad Max is the opposite of what Killian is envisioning but becomes more likely the further we go down this path. So from his viewpoint it is imperative to do a full stop immediately because it might help the “inevitable” simplification boot up successfully. ”
Yes ok, but this is essentially technology causing environmental pollution and your cancer analogy stretches things to the limit. There are reasonable fixes for pollution, including problems cause by mining, although they will of course never satisfy the dark green purists.
Western countries have already done much to minimise pollution. Trying to solve these pollution problems by stopping using technology, or massively scaling it back, does seem like overkill and a fantasy dream anyway.
The pollution that is proving intractable to fix comes more from industrial style farming, eg nitrate pollution, and heavy use of pesticides and this is a killer problem to solve with a huge population reliant on farming. Even organic farming uses natural pesticides, but they arent harmless, and they obviously still kill insects.
The principle to apply might be harm minimsation, so weaning ourselves off so many nitrates, and in that respect the regenerative agriculture thing has some merits. But it wont be quick or easy.
But there’s nothing stopping people adopting regenrative agriculture in a free capitalist market. There are organic farms not that far from where I live and I buy some of their produce, partly because the bananas don’t seem to go off so quickly, and are not much more expensive. I admit that’s not a very noble motive, but “things are never simple” as someone pointed out.
Al Bundysays
E-P,
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve learned more from your comments than just about anyone else here’s comments. You add serious value.
Reminds me of a story where some business genius had wicked bad breath. Folks hung onto his every word while holding their breath. Perhaps you’ll reach that level. Perhaps you’ll try for the path I’m trying to take by buying a toothbrush.
In any case, taking pride in being an ass is an error.
Al Bundysays
nigelj: I get self absorbed about what I see as problems with some of Killians ideas.
AB: Yeah, you two should get married. The point is that you see “the current situation” as a jumping off point to a better future while Killian sees it as jumping off a cliff into a drained mine. For you “jumping” is a productive activity and for Killian it’s suicide.
Remember, Killian is at least as smart as you. Still wanna jump?
(the counter-argument is that wisdom trumps smarts)
nigeljsays
Killian @276
Nigelj: “The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification”
Killian :”Your Straw Man stupidity is not humanity’s problem. For two or three years you have repeated this utter dumbshit nonsense, always leaving out the fact it is predicated on two things: No other choice and no other way to be sustainable, thus it’s simplicity or failure.”
Nigelj : I disagree like nothing else on earth. You have also quoted me out of context. And unpacking your statements is a nightmare.
Rapid simplification, (ie huge and rapid reductions in use of energy and technology) is the choice you have been asking of people. You have said so many things that support it over the last couple of years. You keep saying deal with climate change by ending the use of all fossil fuels and only building very small amounts of renewable energy, none at all in America, and this is only possible if we massively reduce the use of both energy and technology. You must realise this.
Perhaps you are saying a lighter weight version of simplification is a step in the right direction, or simplification is just a process, not a quantifiable thing. But how is anyone to know if you don’t define your terms?
I have endorsed a lighter weight version of your simplification several times, where we try hard to make moderate reductions to our use of resources, so you either don’t read or are being dishonest. But I don’t see much sense in giving up on tech. that we take for granted these days.
The definition of sustainability you use is the strictest possible definition that says any use of minerals is unsustainable. This is all well and good, but how many people do you think will go along with this? It’s turning a term meant as a general guideline to look after the planet for future generations as best we can in a practical sense, and reduce things like plastic waste and over fishing, and extravagance, into something so strict it becomes impossible like a strict diet, and we know they have ended up failing.
The comments you make on farming make more sense, although industrial farming as a method is actually generally very productive. But I agree smaller in size is better and is backed up with some evidence.
nigeljsays
AlBundy #283 “A solar worker getting fried via electricity is ho-hum. A person getting fried with radiation is a catastrophe.” Yes exactly. Its the same with terrorism, in that it kills very few people in places like America, far more people die drowning, but its the psychological dimension to terrorism and its gruesome nature that scares the hell out of people, and can lead to knee jerk policy and over reactions.
Al Bundysays
me: So if you double efficiency you need half the air, and so half the engine.
I’m speaking weight, not volume. More efficient engines are more or less by definition of larger volume than less efficient engines (more expansion = more volume), but since the engineering and strength are focused on the bit of the engine that must contain peak pressure and temperature the rest of the engine can be built lightly and without significant regard to temperature. The second grab of energy (to double) is going to be of lower pressure, lower temperature, and way more volume.
You’re patently ignorant of the subject you’re trying to lecture me on. Worse, you’re so arrogant you won’t even try to examine your assumptions—assuming you have the math chops to do that, which it increasingly looks like you do not.
You failed the test with the scenario I gave at #173.
You show all the signs of being someone with a moderately above-average IQ who is often the smartest guy in the room because you’re surrounded by people who are merely average. But here you are in a crowd with IQs 20 and 30 points higher than yours. You are way, way out of your depth both in brainpower and in subject-matter knowledge. You might get more out of your limited brainpower if you made an effort to study the subject and work enough problem sets to grasp how the math works, but you show zero sign of any will to do so. It’s also possible that you’re simply innumerate.
And now you are demonstrating some serious confusion or misunderstanding.
“Transformers are limited by current, not power. They are rated in volt-amperes, not watts (e.g. kVa or MVa).”
Got it. Volt-amps are not power.
Correct (though you meant it sarcastically). Volt-amps in an AC system are divided between real power (watts) and volt-amps reactive or VARs. Total volt-amps is the square root of the sum of the squares of watts and VARs.
Gotta call up all those EE and textbook people to let them know how wrong they have been all this time.
The textbook writers have had it right since Tesla’s system started being taught in engineering schools. Here’s an on-line text on that very subject, and it pretty much states everything I’ve told you so far. You are the one who can’t be bothered to find, read and understand even basic intro material. Or maybe you don’t have the brains. Either way, you have nothing to contribute.
You said earlier that I haven’t posted a single equation. That’s because I understand what I’m talking about, unlike you.
If you can’t write the math, you don’t understand it. One of the things I’m working on right now is a refuse-to-fuel scheme. I’m digging into the energy losses as both sensible and latent heat from e.g. processing wet garbage and boiling all the water off as steam. So far it looks like the worst-case scenario will work just fine, but without running the numbers there’s no way to know that.
And then there’s: “Capacitors for power-factor correction are not energy storage devices per se.”
You go on to give an equation/word salad that makes no sense at all. What exactly do those capacitors do if they aren’t storing energy?
Note that the integral of voltage*current of that 90°-lagging fraction sums to 0 over an entire cycle. It transmits no power. And the beauty is that you can cancel it out with something that pulls current that leads voltage by 90°. If you do your balancing act right, you can get all the lagging and leading currents to add up to 0.
A capacitor connected across the AC line draws current which peaks as the line voltage crosses zero (current leads voltage) and goes to zero as the voltage hits peak (stops changing). What trivial amount of energy it stores is fed back to the line by the next zero crossing. One of the things it does is offset the lagging fraction of current drawn by inductive loads. It also offsets line inductance and boosts voltage; this is called “voltage support“.
You’re asking questions which were already answered, meaning that you made no attempt to look up the terms of art. They have definitions which have been stable for a century (in those textbooks you certainly did not read). True mastery of this stuff requires some facility with complex numbers, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that you struggled with algebra.
“It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”
E-P is clearly well-educated, and at least narrowly well-informed. Yet surely even he realizes he isn’t omniscient?
I know DAMN well I’m not omniscient. Nobody is. But as I can’t seem to get people to understand, we are already 30 years too late with a solid engineering response to this problem. One of the things we need is a huge source of emissions-free energy RIGHT NOW, and we have ONE proven method of producing it. Maybe we can come up with others, but waiting for them is a risk we cannot take. If we get something we like better, we can switch later.
E-P, can you imagine that your investment in a particular technological tool might not be helping your cause?
Show me where anyone’s produced emissions-free energy on the required scale and decarbonized what was a fossil-based energy system, without nuclear. I know they’re trying wind plus PHS on El Hierro, and despite favorable weather and geography they still had a rather bumpy start. Germany is set to miss its year-2022 decarbonization goal of 40% by something like 8%. We told them so.
AGW is a >10,000 year old economic and therefore political problem. Capping it, and its net aggregate cost in money and tragedy, will require all the technological tools we can bring to bear.
That, I’m afraid, is dead wrong. Some technological tools are simply not effective enough. They produce costs well outside themselves, which must be paid in both money and energy. Most “renewables” are in this category.
There is ONE technological tool which is SO effective, several countries decarbonized their electric grids by accident; it wasn’t a goal, but a side-effect. That tool is nuclear energy. There is nothing like it, at least nothing that scales. If you live on vocanically-active, snow-rich Iceland you can work wonders with geothermal and hydro, but there’s only one Iceland and it’s pretty small.
Maybe we can develop something more acceptable to the “Greens”. We don’t have it today. We HAVE to get started today. You go to war with the technology you have, not the technology you wish you had. Is this a war? Because I’m not seeing the urgency even here on RC.
The goal is to decarbonize the US economy by all feasible means.
And the first criterion for feasibility is “does it work?”
Feasibility will be partially determined by economic and political forces independent of your approval.
The economic forces are coming together to make nuclear fast and cheap; electron-beam welding is going to slash the cost of NuScales. The other thing is the “political forces”, which among other things means lots of marginally employed people taking oligarch money to march in the streets pro or anti whatever the oligarchs want. If this is war, jail the damned oligarchs and take their money away; we did it during the Civil War and WWI, we can do it again. If the planet is at stake, using anti-nuclear fearmongering to keep fossil fuels in business is treason not just to the country, but to the whole world.
Your just as ingorant as he is. The above is absurd. Reducing emissions 90-90% won’t have any affect?
“Affect” is a verb. You mean “effect”.
And no, it won’t. There is too much warming “in the pipeline” already to avoid firing the “clathrate gun”. Only massive NEGATIVE emissions will avoid that catastrophe, and we need heaps of energy to get that job done.
Sequestering billions of tons of carbon each year back to below 300 in as little as 20 years will have no effect?
Your “rapid simplification” throws away all the means of doing that sequestration. You can’t plant a trillion trees if you have to spend all your time digging in the earth to grow food. You’ll have nowhere to plant trees if the productivity of your farming falls by 80% because you don’t have artificial fertilizers.
Pulling down atmospheric CO2 requires measures like enhanced weathering. Mining and crushng ultramafic rocks for that requires energy. Do. The. Math. Already.
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @283, yeah I’ve said many times Jevons paradox is not a good enough excuse to ignore making things more efficient, and that the answer to Jevons Paradox, the only answer is legislation to counter the effect, whether a rule or a tax.
But anyway reading your comments I remembered this:
“SCIENTISTS have allegedly built the smallest petrol engine, tiny enough to power a WATCH. The mini-motor, which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel, is set to revolutionize world technology. It produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite being less than a centimeter long (Not even half an inch!). It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for months doing away with the need for recharging. Experts believe it could be phasing out batteries in such items within just six years.”
However it doesn’t appear to have got beyond prototype stage.
Mal, E-P is not applying physics to solving the problem. If he were, he would be able to discuss the issue without using industry jargon that is intended to obfuscate and valorize the existing monopolistic, Authoritarian, paradigm.
You’d be funny if you and your ilk weren’t so damned dangerous. The terms of the field describe the physics. You have zero grasp of the physics, which is why you go off on “obfuscation”, “oppression” and other po-mo BS.
You have NOTHING to contribute. You are all but certainly too stupid to be able to comprehend anything that would LET you contribute. A couple days in a pillory might correct your attitude, or it might not. I’d like to see if a good LARTing would fix your problem, but given the sickness of our current society I am doubtful that it’s worth the effort. We are all but certainly best off flushing ones like you and starting over with the rest.
economics and politics plays a huge role in this.
A massive amount of this comes from demanding “safety” from nuclear which is not demanded from anything else. That must be corrected.
EP, when asked if the US is going to nationalize the electricity sector in the Socialist approach taken by France, with the Feds deciding the nature and location of the nuclear plants, he says “of course not”.
Indeed, of course not. But if you can get electric power at par and space heat/DHW at $3/mmBTU using nuclear, you’re going to go for it… unless you have bought into the paranoia. You don’t need to socialize anything. It’s just a fact of physics that if your municipality is big enough, you can power and heat it cheaper with actinides than with anything else.
If you’re outside the area which can be economically served by nuclear district heat, you can still use electric heat pumps when sufficient juice is available and other electro-biofuels when it runs short. If you look at the curve of heating fuel demand, you realize that there’s excess energy available for well over half the year. You can bank this as chemical fuel in one form or another. So long as we can guarantee no shortages, why are we worrying about this?
Kind of like my electricity market, with wind, solar, nuclear, and others, each source being chosen because it is the best fit for the local need.
You deny the need to put numbers to it, but until you have put numbers to it you have nothing worth talking about.
nigeljsays
Apparently according to Killian us poor unenlightened sods need to learn something about the economist Nordhaus. Here’s something I came across a while back, a good expert critique of his work on climate economics and discount rates, especially describing his excessive optimism about both the climate issue and future economic growth. Important because this guy won a nobel prize so commands attention, but he isn’t getting the economics of the climate issue right.
Re #282 David B. Benson said Specifically, the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
That is 100% prevarication.
Lying is bad. Don’t lie.
If there were implementable solutions, wouldn’t they be implemented? If not, they are not implementable. What you seem to mean is there are theroetical, unproven, unbuilt fantasies of containing nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years. And anyone who thinks we can build containers that will outlast civilization itself is a damned fool.
zebrasays
#285 David Benson,
Not sure what you are trying to say there… didn’t we just discuss this recently?
The reason there are lots of NG generators is because ERCOT only meets one of the two criteria necessary for a true free market:
1. Competition.
2. Internalized costs.
Obviously, without a price on the externalized negative effects of CO2, NG is always going to be the better choice than nuclear.
However, as we see in many US States with regulatory capture, where they currently create obstacles for solar, a monopoly utility would be able to continue burning NG even if a carbon tax is imposed. Without competition, that would just get passed on to the consumer. The only reduction in CO2 would come from reduced consumption; not a bad thing but limited, especially in the monopoly situation.
Kevin McKinney @220, just to be clear I’m not suggesting gas fired turbines are the only way of providing reactive power. Any turbine can do this, so hydro power or the Drax wood pellet burner in the UK as below which was built partly to provide reactive power to the grid. And capacitors and what you mentioned.
https://www.drax.com/technology/keeping-electricity-systems-voltage-stable/
Zebra says @236 “I am, as usual, just trying to tailor the communication to ‘the public’ and point out that solutions (electrical grids) are local because the problems are local.’
So no room for smart grids that connect across state boundaries?
#235 You got that right!
Mr KIA @218 “All our side wants is to vet every immigrant so only good folks come here – we don’t want criminals – ”
AB: So you’re for open immigration with proper vetting? (MRKIA’s actual stance is quite clear. Note the process: “All our side wants” is linked to the most innocuous and universally agreed-upon truth – that looks nothing like the reality MRKIA is advocating. A reality where “kids in cages” is a legitimate tool to dissuade asylum seekers from expressing their legal rights.)
________
nigelj: Although obviously you want to minimise illegals,
AB: Why? And why use a loaded and vicious description? Most “Undocumented” people are honorable, just as most “documented” people are honorable. Some of each are not. Frankly, I think that CRIMINALS who cross the border between the sidewalk and the street ILLEGALLY should have their kids put in cages.
______
E-P: Entropy scales as the log of concentration so the difference between 6000 ppm and 400 ppm isn’t as big as it looks.
AB: Yes, and E-P would know better than me about this case but logs are generally larger than they look because we use base 10 and nature uses 2.718….
________
E-P 212: Germany is proof that “renewables” cannot decarbonize an industrial economy
BPL: German CO2 emissions are down last year. I wonder why?
AB: Putting E-P’s hyperbolic “cannot” aside, renewable-heavy grids’ CO2 emissions suffer from serious noise. Like in climate science, weather swamps everything else in year-to-year comparisons. France gets about 93% of its electricity from low carbon sources. Germany still burns massive amounts of low-grade coal. And E-P is not being dishonest about Chernobyl deaths. That doesn’t mean he’s right. There’s serious contention amongst experts. My current take is that a fair number of people will die – but later and shadowy. Who knows if Mrs. Jones’ cancer was caused by Chernobyl or smoking? (Eh, a bit of each)
Of course, nobody is building Chernobyls nowadays. As long as the fuel is liquid it can’t melt down (already melted!) As long as the coolant isn’t water you won’t turn your facility into a hydrogen bomb (chemical, not nuclear bomb). As long as you keep pressurized fluids away from your reactor’s core, you won’t have to worry about all sorts of pressure-related stuff. Satisfy those and you can sell nukes to most people. Try to say that pressurized water reactors are safe enough and you may win the argument in fifty years or so.
Oh yeah, and use a fuel that burns up completely while producing valuable byproducts instead of godawful waste, that is proliferation-proof, and requires no mining since it is a byproduct of other mines. Modular molten fluoride salt thorium-fueled breeder reactors are the cat’s meow. Most anything else will die of radiophobia’s backup to backup to backup to backup never ending requirements. But these guys just use a cooled freeze plug. If the core gets too toasty OR electricity to a fan that’s keeping the plug cool is lost then all the salt and fuel drain into storage.
Killian @223 says “Yup, so it’s this bad at somewhere around +1C~… +1.3C?… and still it’s tech this, tech that, 2050 this, 2050 that…It’s seriously funny. Deadly seriously funny.There’s exactly one way to *rapidly* deal with climate: Rapid simplification . I’ll be here when you all finally come around to reality.”
The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification” (if defined as huge and rapid reductions in personal energy use and other huge lifestyle changes), given peoples values, needs, desire for comfort, and the fact they take tech for granted. Therefore we probably either solve the climate problem with tech based solutions, in the main, or it won’t be solved.
These simple living advocates seem terrified that the world will run out of resources, driving people back to some sort of subsistence farming culture, yet they also tell us how superior subsistence farming and hunter gatherer culture is to modern society. So it all seems confused to me.
However some parts of the simple living philosophy do make sense, and we should obviously try to be sparing with use of things like hydrocarbons, because once they are burned they are gone, so no more nice and easy petrochemicals. And flying less is a plausible sort of goal.
Read this on why fixing the climate problem is proving to be hard work:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5530483
Have a good xmas people.
OK I’ll bite and use science as teeth.
2006 Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident
The risk projections suggest that by now Chernobyl may have caused about 1,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 4,000 cases of other cancers in Europe, representing about 0.01% of all incident cancers since the accident.
Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 (95% UI 3,400–72,000) cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 (95% UI 11,000–59,000) cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident, whereas several hundred million cancer cases are expected from other causes.
Although these estimates are subject to considerable uncertainty, they provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the possible impact of the Chernobyl accident.
It is unlikely that the cancer burden from the largest radiological accident to date could be detected by monitoring national cancer statistics. Indeed, results of analyses of time trends in cancer incidence and mortality in Europe do not, at present, indicate any increase in cancer rates —other than of thyroid cancer in the most contaminated regions—that can be clearly attributed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc. Citations: 75
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.22037
Despite early reports suggesting that the paediatric thyroid cancer cases that developed after exposure to Chernobyl fallout were particularly aggressive, it now seems that the initial presentation and early clinical course of most of these cases are very similar to both non-radiation-associated paediatric thyroid cancers and thyroid cancers that arise after exposure to external beam irradiation. Over an average clinical follow-up period of about 10 years, the disease-specific mortality rate in these paediatric thyroid cancer cases that developed after the Chernobyl accident is quite low (1% or less). 73 citations
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0936655511002020
Global and local cancer incidents and deaths from Fukushima radiocaesium.
Significantly lower risks are expected from Fukushima that from Chernobyl.
360-850 cancer incidents are expected in Japan, of which 220-520 may be fatal.
Nevertheless, these numbers are expected to be even smaller, as the response of the Japanese official authorities to the accident was rapid. The projected cancer incidents are much lower than the casualties occurred from the earthquake itself (> 20,000) and also smaller than the accident of Chernobyl.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412013002808
1996 A Long-Term Cohort Study of the Atomic-Bomb Survivors
However, to date no evidence exists of genetic effects in the children of A-bomb survivors.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jea1991/6/3sup/6_3sup_95/_article/-char/ja/
If that is still not enough —
2007 30 citations
RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF IMPACTS OF THE CHERNOBYL ACCIDENT
Keywords
National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Chernobyl, dose, population, health effects
The recently completed Chernobyl Forum concluded that after a number of years, along with reduction of radiation levels and accumulation of humanitarian consequences, severe social and economic depression of the affected regions and associated psychological problems of the general public and the workers had become the most significant problem to be addressed by the authorities.
The majority of the >600,000 emergency and recovery operation workers and five (5) million residents of the contaminated areas in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine received relatively minor radiation doses which are comparable with the natural background levels.
An exception is a cohort of several hundred emergency workers who received high radiation doses and of whom 28 persons died in 1986 due to acute radiation sickness.
Apart from the dramatic increase in thyroid cancer incidence among those exposed to radioiodine at a young age and some increase of leukemia in the most exposed workers, there is no clearly demonstrated increase in the somatic diseases due to radiation.
https://journals.lww.com/health-physics/Abstract/2007/11000/THIRD_ANNUAL_WARREN_K__SINCLAIR_KEYNOTE_ADDRESS_.5.aspx
Found Via Google Scholar – Our best minds on the world including people like Bill & Melinda Gates and Dr. James Hansen are not gullible people who don’t understand the scientific literature on Nuclear Energy, and the potential Risks vs the unsubstantiated risks.
PS
Mr KIA says “America was a FAR more prosperous place before our borders were overrun.”
Yes. The Spanish, the French, the Dutch and the British really screwed up the place big time. Collectively they (and all who came after them) have pretty much destroyed the joint. A Pity.
Mike Roberts, #266–
Hmm. So, you don’t think the flip of the House has *anything* to do with environmental issues? Even though the climate crisis and the Trump assault on the environment were quite prominent in Democratic policy debate? And even though public concerns about climate are now–for good and sufficient reason–at an all-time high in the US?
Seems a bit dubious to me. But even stipulating that, I’d have to note that “past results are not a guarantee of future performance.” And I’d add that holding one’s breath is not a very effective strategy for exerting persuasive influence–most three- or four-year-olds figure that out! What *is* effective is organizing, which means talking to people and creating networks which can (and do) mobilize for action.
“If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.”
Let’s keep pushing, friends.
Mike Roberts:
You’re saying voters never change their minds, which is disconfirmed by evidence. Politics in the US isn’t just a game of plutocrats buying and selling influence, but ultimately one of voter numbers. Every election is decided by a plurality, usually less than a majority, of individual voters, and we’re known to be fickle. If we weren’t, fossil-fuel capitalists wouldn’t spend so much on lobbying and public disinformation. It may not be enough to block decarbonization forever, as it turns out: my feeble hopes are raised by recent poll results, as cited in my previous comment (emphasis mine):
To the extent polling is empirically rigorous, it’s a way of not fooling ourselves that everyone shares our personal opinions. Do you not think it significant that Frank Luntz, who advised GOP leaders to adopt AGW-denial in the early aughts, is now urging them to support carbon pricing? Climate realists don’t have a governing plurality yet, but the Science news item suggests those polling trends will continue:
Hey, all I know is what I read in Science ;^).
From Unforced Variations–
Kevin McKinney: So the net effect of bullshit becomes a matter of scale in time and in space.
AB: Yeah. Tech moves essentially instantly, which I’m taking as 3-20 years. Planets generally move far slower. The traditional (flawed) definition of climate places a HARD lower limit of 30 years. When inputs scale years-to-a-decade-or-two and results scale decades-to-billions-of-years there is a mismatch and thought breaks down.
And yes, you only have indirect evidence but you have access. The ethical issue is re-framed but changes not a whit.
_______
nigelj: but its hard to see ICE’s falling much in price, although the technology will continue to improve.
AB: Excellent question. If efficiency doubles then by definition the amount of fuel burned for a task halves. If engine price scales with fuel burned (not a given but a reasonable approximation when efficiency and pollution “rule”) then it is expected that engine prices will plummet in step with efficiency gains. Current vehicles have laser-focused on this point as it allows for shoving more and more torque under the hood by simply converting said would-have-been-efficiency-gains into acceleration.
Add to that the concept of hybridization. Once the engine is relieved of the totally inappropriate task of acceleration the requirements placed on said engine are laughably small. ONE person can easily carry a car’s engine – IF one takes hybridization to its logical conclusion. So NO, engine expense is NOT a significant issue. HUGE batteries are and will remain way more expensive than teensy-tiny engines.
The REAL question is whether batteries will win the competition with bio/synfuel. Engines and motors are damn near irrelevant (at least once engines grow up).
_______
Ray Ladbury: What happens when a significant portion of the population simply rejects the truth.
AB: Lots of FUN! The USA is all about “today”. How can we entertain ourselves as much as possible TODAY? Who the ef cares about tomorrow since all those other assh***s are going to ruin tomorrow for ME anyway? MY choice is binary: either steal/grub as many chits as I can so as to try to protect MYSELF from tomorrow or party like it’s 1999.
What? You thought “Greed is good” would evolve into some other “truth”?
Amazing. There’s a word for why all but about three posters here have no clue what I’m talking about: Omnology.
http://omnologos.com/about-omnology/
Grab your down sleeping bag and parka, air force bunny boots, and let’s go camping for a week, measure the ice in a few places on the Tanana river, and then buy some tickets for the Nenana Ice Classic. :)
https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/ak/fairbanks
https://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/tickets.htm
After that we can work on becoming sourdoughs. Requirements for becoming a sourdough:
1) Make love to an Eskimo.
2) Wrestle a Grizzly Bear.
3) Piss in the Yukon.
Come on, let’s go!
:)
Something for the simple living people, and an interesting and useful read: “The role of culture and traditional knowledge in climate change adaptation: Insights from East Kimberley, Australia.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sonia_Leonard2/publication/257408092_The_role_of_culture_and_traditional_knowledge_in_climate_change_adaptation_Insights_from_East_Kimberley_Australia/links/5c383ce5458515a4c71ca32b/The-role-of-culture-and-traditional-knowledge-in-climate-change-adaptation-Insights-from-East-Kimberley-Australia.pdf
BPL: German CO2 emissions are down last year. I wonder why?
“Though renewables played a role in the 4.2 percent drop it has largely been attributed to warm weather. Despite this good news the country is certain to miss its 2020 target of reducing emissions by 40 percent over 1990.”
https://www.dw.com/en/german-greenhouse-gas-emissions-fall-for-first-time-in-four-years/a-48167150
nigel, #251–
Nice reference, thanks!
And to all:
A merry Christmas, happy holiday, healthy and prosperous New Year, and all that other good stuff!
#241, #247 Engineer Poet,
“I’ve aced every last course”
But not mine. You failed the test with the scenario I gave at #173. And now you are demonstrating some serious confusion or misunderstanding.
“Transformers are limited by current, not power. They are rated in volt-amperes, not watts (e.g. kVa or MVa).”
Got it. Volt-amps are not power. Gotta call up all those EE and textbook people to let them know how wrong they have been all this time.
You said earlier that I haven’t posted a single equation. That’s because I understand what I’m talking about, unlike you. I’m trying to “teach” the subject for the hypothetical lurkers; equations don’t help:
I said the wires heat up. Your attempt to contradict me says: the wires heat up. The fact that the wires are coiled up in a transformer doesn’t change that fact– I mean, they’re called copper losses, duh. And since transformers are incredibly efficient machines, core losses and eddy currents and so on aren’t going to break the grid unless the unit is really incorrectly designed.
And then there’s: “Capacitors for power-factor correction are not energy storage devices per se.”
You go on to give an equation/word salad that makes no sense at all. What exactly do those capacitors do if they aren’t storing energy? You are just like the student someone mentioned a while back who hasn’t a clue about the question so writes down every equation and fact he can remember.
I’ll await your test-make-up efforts on this and your perpetual-motion-type wackiness as described in #173.
#260 Al Bundy,
I really don’t see the connection between efficiency (for the same function) and the price of the engine.
But you do hit on a (reverse?) Jevons-type question I have thought about:
If you can get a PISH (plug in serial hybrid) at 100 miles on a charge, covering most driving, how much of a selling point is the MPG of the “range-extender”?
Conversely, if you have a very efficient range extender, might that result in people not bothering to charge (from non-FF sources) as often as we would like?
It’s never easy, is it? ;-)
xyz
boo
nigelj: These simple living advocates seem terrified that the world will run out of resources, driving people back to some sort of subsistence farming culture, yet they also tell us how superior subsistence farming and hunter gatherer culture is to modern society. So it all seems confused to me.
AB: I mostly agree. As if it matters whether we run out of a mineral later or we decide to quit mining it now. However, our current path is degrading the environment that a simpler society would depend on. So if you remove a mountaintop to get at the coal you will toxify lots of land and water, and a simple society won’t as easily handle the resulting cancers. Then you burn the coal, creating an ash pile. Rain happens and the ash pile toxifies even more land.
Mad Max is the opposite of what Killian is envisioning but becomes more likely the further we go down this path. So from his viewpoint it is imperative to do a full stop immediately because it might help the “inevitable” simplification boot up successfully. Imagine how hard Killian’s vision would be to build in a 5C world that has gone through an all-out attempt (including lots of wars) to forestall the inevitable.
nigelj:
In general I agree, and I customarily hesitate to criticize a fellow traveler. However, E-P’s comments also evince an uncommon degree of self-absorption (stipulating that mine do too on occasion – perhaps it takes one to know one):
E-P is clearly well-educated, and at least narrowly well-informed. Yet surely even he realizes he isn’t omniscient? If it were possible to describe the future in detail, we wouldn’t need science, nor would we be in our manifest collective predicament. Nope: by the evidence, the future is irreducibly indeterminate, despite Einstein’s presupposition. I never knew Einstein, but I’m pretty sure he was smarter* than E-P, and he nonetheless turned out to be wrong!
E-P, can you imagine that your investment in a particular technological tool might not be helping your cause? AGW is a >10,000 year old economic and therefore political problem. Capping it, and its net aggregate cost in money and tragedy, will require all the technological tools we can bring to bear. The goal is to decarbonize the US economy by all feasible means. Feasibility will be partially determined by economic and political forces independent of your approval. Your beloved nuclear option may feature prominently. How the Hell do you know it will, if only we on RC sign up to your inner vision? Failing that: with due respect for an ancient cultural convention, what qualifies you to cast the first stone against all the rest of us (again stipulating the same about me WRT individual denialists, though I try to present probable cause)? Or is it all about the throwdown with you ;^)?
* In 1930, Einstein told a friend: “To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.” LOL!
Al Bundy writes @249:
So long as you can prevent extraction of pure U-233, that is. Turns out that the spontaneous fission rate of U-233 is quite low, so if e.g. Pa-233 can be extracted from the melt and allowed to decay away from neutrons, someone could make bomb-grade material relatively easily. This is far more difficult with a solid-fuel U/Pu fuel cycle. Because of this, all the MSR concepts out there seem to be going the way of not extracting anything at all from the fuel salt; ThorCon will swap out the “can” more often than it will change out the salt it contains.
We have a serious game-changer in the pipeline. NuScale is going to be highly competitive if it can be built using electron-beam welding; 6-inch steel can be welded at at least 50 mm/min in a single pass, so a full-circumference weld on a 3-meter reactor vessel will only take about 3 hours. Production of 2 units/day (welding 2 end caps and 2 flanges per unit) from a single welder would appear feasible, running 3 shifts.
Thin sections up to 10 mm can be EBWed at upwards of 750 mm/min. This has implications for things like a revived Fermi 1. Fermi 1 had 636 fuel/blanket channels in the core, which would require roughly 1272 welds to build up from 1/3 hexagon pieces. At perhaps 2250 mm overall height, this would require 3 minutes per weld, 20 welds per hour, roughly 64 hours to weld up a full core assembly. 4 welders running 2 shifts/day could produce 2 units/day. Welding 2 cm pool vessel end caps onto the barrels at 500 mm/min would take a bit over 6 minutes per weld, about 2 units/hour; hardly worth talking about.
tl;dr Electron-beam welding looks like it’s going to make it feasible to mass-produce reactors which were formerly hand-built. We’re going to see quality soar and cost drop like a rock, and we don’t have to wait for new technology to be proven before we can get started. Yes, thorium looks like great stuff and there’s lots of it, but we need to get moving long before it’ll be ready.
nigelj writes @256:
Rapid simplification won’t fix matters; it will actually guarantee that things continue to get worse. As Bret Kugelmass said in front of the UN, an immediate halt to carbon emissions won’t even slow climate change down. There is too much warming “in the pipeline” already. We need to make a serious effort to draw CO2 levels down to 350 ppm or less, and for that we have to have energy and lots of it.
Al Bundy writes @260:
Thus making fuel affordable for tasks which were not previously affordable, and driving up demand. This is the essence of Jevons’ paradox. We’re not going to efficiency our way out of this problem; quite a bit more is necessary.
Stop talking about nuclear. It’s… stupid, violating multiple regenerative design principles.
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-storage-nuclear-global-crisis.html
Merry Christmas
Your Straw Man stupidity is not humanity’s problem. For two or three years you have repeated this utter dumbshit nonsense, always leaving out the fact it is predicated on two things: No other choice and no other way to be sustainable, thus it’s simplicity or failure.
Shut. Up. Your dishonesty is not acceptable, nor is your ignorance.
Your just as ingorant as he is. The above is absurd. Reducing emissions 90-90% won’t have any affect? Sequestering billions of tons of carbon each year back to below 300 in as little as 20 years will have no effect?
Stupid.
80-90…
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/future-of-food/photos-farms-agriculture-national-farmers-day/
Something actually *worth* talking about. Solutions, not bullshit and lies and ignorance.
And, living differently: *With* Nature.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/m/712c29d9-278a-3513-beed-a72a40f3753e/in-a-himalayan-indian.html
#271 Mal Adapted,
Mal, E-P is not applying physics to solving the problem. If he were, he would be able to discuss the issue without using industry jargon that is intended to obfuscate and valorize the existing monopolistic, Authoritarian, paradigm.
As you point out, economics and politics plays a huge role in this. EP, when asked if the US is going to nationalize the electricity sector in the Socialist approach taken by France, with the Feds deciding the nature and location of the nuclear plants, he says “of course not”.
But then, when it is pointed out that a true free market system is the best bet for getting nukes built, he rejects the idea… which means he’s back to fantasizing some kind of Authoritarian Nirvana solution.
We can’t seem to get away from that Nirvana thing, eh. Killian is going to save the world with all-small-farms (which now inefficiently use fossil-fuel tractors and pickup-trucks and so on).
But as nice as it is for those who can afford it to get fancy-tasting peaches, the only realistic structure is one which accommodates both large-scale agriculture for nutritional staples and local production where the conditions are favorable.
Kind of like my electricity market, with wind, solar, nuclear, and others, each source being chosen because it is the best fit for the local need.
Killian @275 — As is well-known, Greenpeace lacks any semblance of objectivity regarding matters nuclear. Specifically, the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
nigelj noted that solar installation causes more injuries than nukes.
Yeah, and my first comment ignored mining. Our minds accept the normal while screaming about abnormal. Mines kill in normal ways. Nukes are more spectacular. A solar worker getting fried via electricity is ho-hum. A person getting fried with radiation is a catastrophe.
_______
zebra: I really don’t see the connection between efficiency (for the same function) and the price of the engine.
AB: Engines are often referred to as “air pumping devices” because their output is based on the amount of air that passes through the engine (I used “fuel” because I was assuming the most efficient air/fuel ratio (14.7ish) and fuel is what we care about). So if you double efficiency you need half the air, and so half the engine.
zebra: If you can get a PISH (plug in serial hybrid) at 100 miles on a charge, covering most driving, how much of a selling point is the MPG of the “range-extender”?
AB: 100 miles is INSANE. Why spend a huge chunk of change and add incredible weight to a vehicle for minimal value beyond what a 10 mile battery would provide (or negative value since weight kills both acceleration and those highly-polluting tires)? After all, “range” is what engines provide. The proper configuration is a TINY battery for short trips, a SUPER-TINY engine/generator for hybridization, a TINY direct-drive engine (transmissions are inefficient) that is engaged solely for highway use, and a flywheel for beat-the-crap-out-of-Teslas-and-Lambos acceleration (and braking) with zero battery degradation. “Hybrid” is passe. “Tribrid” and “quadbrid” are the future.
And your discounting of E-P is an error. He knows his stuff. His “Please hate me” attitude is a disjoint issue.
zebra: Conversely, if you have a very efficient range extender, might that result in people not bothering to charge (from non-FF sources) as often as we would like?
AB: Uh, batteries are charged with fossil sources (by definition extra kilowatts added to the grid’s load are supplied by the least efficient source on the grid – if your city is at a particular moment in time 99% renewable and you add your EV that 1% coal just went up to 1.00001% coal – your EV is supplied with renewables ONLY if the percentage of renewables was over 100% prior to your plugging in.). And yep, liquid fuel tanks are filled mostly with fossil sources. That NEITHER ONE will be charged/filled with fossil sources in the future somehow is a plus for one but not the other?
zebra: It’s never easy, is it? ;-)
AB: Thank God. Boredom ain’t fun. Which makes me wonder about those whose goal in afterlife is to sit around doing nothing but sycophantic singing.
_____________
E-P: Thus making fuel affordable for tasks which were not previously affordable, and driving up demand. This is the essence of Jevons’ paradox. We’re not going to efficiency our way out of this problem; quite a bit more is necessary.
AB: My vision doubles engine efficiency while halving air and rolling resistance, with current best practices being the baseline. So 200mpg. And you are right, Jevon needs to be considered. Fortunately, ANY six-year old could figure out the solution: Quadruple (or more) the price of fuel via a tax. Strange that you are deliberately clueless.
E-P: Yes, thorium looks like great stuff and there’s lots of it, but we need to get moving long before it’ll be ready.
AB: Good post. And yes, we need to get moving now. Thus, the question is whether we want to end up with thorium and solar/wind or thorium and uranium, cuz thorium needs time to develop and we have no choice but to build “crap” now. Given that uranium is a third-rail AND it isn’t “the big leagues” why bother with it in “the farm league”?
David B Benson: the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
AB: Naw, it’s a stupid issue, but it’s an incredibly powerful issue.
I’d love to disregard the rich leeches that our system has created since they are generally stupid. How far is that gonna get me?
zebra @281— In the ERCOT grid any generator at all can bid in the day ahead market. Presumably decisions are made on the expectations of turning a profit. So there are lots of wind farms and as natural gas is embarrassing plentiful, lots of natural gas generators.
Mal Adapted @271, I can only say agreed, in the main anyway. I’ve also pointed out to EP that the nuclear power issue relates in large part to politics and organisational issues.
We probably all get a bit self absorbed. Zebra is self absorbed about free markets and population, Killian about sustainability etc, EP is self absorbed about nuclear power from an engineering viewpoint. I get self absorbed about what I see as problems with some of Killians ideas.
However you get an engineer like EP and he / she will get technical because its their area of things and pushing a particular option is how we humans argue things I quite enjoy EP’s free engineering tutorials! So SOME self absorption seems ok but not if it goes completely crazy. We need vigorous debate, and to push our own wheel barrows, but we also have to be able to see the bigger picture and other peoples points of views and not get to divisive. But I can see you know this. im not sure everyone knows this.
I try really hard NOT be be too self absorbed and I try to see things a bit more openly, because otherwise you get intransigence which can be a huge problem.
The basic reason Zebra and EP clash is Zebra prefers free markets, while its fairly obvious EP prefers an electricity system run more as a monopoly and by technocrats. In fact either system has its strengths and weaknesses, and either system can work if done well. Hopefully the debate on it doesn’t become too much of a personal feud. I dont like talking about other people like this, but an exception seems justified in this case.
Creating a market in a very small country is practically impossible anyway, but electricity markets do have the merit of customer choice and they minimise monopolies. The real issue is does that outweigh the fairly obvious problems electricity markets can create with their complexity etc? Because electricity markets are very much “created” things.
Al Bundy @270
“However, our current path is degrading the environment that a simpler society would depend on. So if you remove a mountaintop to get at the coal you will toxify lots of land and water, and a simple society won’t as easily handle the resulting cancers. Then you burn the coal, creating an ash pile. Rain happens and the ash pile toxifies even more land. Mad Max is the opposite of what Killian is envisioning but becomes more likely the further we go down this path. So from his viewpoint it is imperative to do a full stop immediately because it might help the “inevitable” simplification boot up successfully. ”
Yes ok, but this is essentially technology causing environmental pollution and your cancer analogy stretches things to the limit. There are reasonable fixes for pollution, including problems cause by mining, although they will of course never satisfy the dark green purists.
Western countries have already done much to minimise pollution. Trying to solve these pollution problems by stopping using technology, or massively scaling it back, does seem like overkill and a fantasy dream anyway.
The pollution that is proving intractable to fix comes more from industrial style farming, eg nitrate pollution, and heavy use of pesticides and this is a killer problem to solve with a huge population reliant on farming. Even organic farming uses natural pesticides, but they arent harmless, and they obviously still kill insects.
The principle to apply might be harm minimsation, so weaning ourselves off so many nitrates, and in that respect the regenerative agriculture thing has some merits. But it wont be quick or easy.
But there’s nothing stopping people adopting regenrative agriculture in a free capitalist market. There are organic farms not that far from where I live and I buy some of their produce, partly because the bananas don’t seem to go off so quickly, and are not much more expensive. I admit that’s not a very noble motive, but “things are never simple” as someone pointed out.
E-P,
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve learned more from your comments than just about anyone else here’s comments. You add serious value.
Reminds me of a story where some business genius had wicked bad breath. Folks hung onto his every word while holding their breath. Perhaps you’ll reach that level. Perhaps you’ll try for the path I’m trying to take by buying a toothbrush.
In any case, taking pride in being an ass is an error.
nigelj: I get self absorbed about what I see as problems with some of Killians ideas.
AB: Yeah, you two should get married. The point is that you see “the current situation” as a jumping off point to a better future while Killian sees it as jumping off a cliff into a drained mine. For you “jumping” is a productive activity and for Killian it’s suicide.
Remember, Killian is at least as smart as you. Still wanna jump?
(the counter-argument is that wisdom trumps smarts)
Killian @276
Nigelj: “The reality is it’s hard for me to see many people embracing “rapid simplification”
Killian :”Your Straw Man stupidity is not humanity’s problem. For two or three years you have repeated this utter dumbshit nonsense, always leaving out the fact it is predicated on two things: No other choice and no other way to be sustainable, thus it’s simplicity or failure.”
Nigelj : I disagree like nothing else on earth. You have also quoted me out of context. And unpacking your statements is a nightmare.
Rapid simplification, (ie huge and rapid reductions in use of energy and technology) is the choice you have been asking of people. You have said so many things that support it over the last couple of years. You keep saying deal with climate change by ending the use of all fossil fuels and only building very small amounts of renewable energy, none at all in America, and this is only possible if we massively reduce the use of both energy and technology. You must realise this.
Perhaps you are saying a lighter weight version of simplification is a step in the right direction, or simplification is just a process, not a quantifiable thing. But how is anyone to know if you don’t define your terms?
I have endorsed a lighter weight version of your simplification several times, where we try hard to make moderate reductions to our use of resources, so you either don’t read or are being dishonest. But I don’t see much sense in giving up on tech. that we take for granted these days.
The definition of sustainability you use is the strictest possible definition that says any use of minerals is unsustainable. This is all well and good, but how many people do you think will go along with this? It’s turning a term meant as a general guideline to look after the planet for future generations as best we can in a practical sense, and reduce things like plastic waste and over fishing, and extravagance, into something so strict it becomes impossible like a strict diet, and we know they have ended up failing.
The comments you make on farming make more sense, although industrial farming as a method is actually generally very productive. But I agree smaller in size is better and is backed up with some evidence.
AlBundy #283 “A solar worker getting fried via electricity is ho-hum. A person getting fried with radiation is a catastrophe.” Yes exactly. Its the same with terrorism, in that it kills very few people in places like America, far more people die drowning, but its the psychological dimension to terrorism and its gruesome nature that scares the hell out of people, and can lead to knee jerk policy and over reactions.
me: So if you double efficiency you need half the air, and so half the engine.
I’m speaking weight, not volume. More efficient engines are more or less by definition of larger volume than less efficient engines (more expansion = more volume), but since the engineering and strength are focused on the bit of the engine that must contain peak pressure and temperature the rest of the engine can be built lightly and without significant regard to temperature. The second grab of energy (to double) is going to be of lower pressure, lower temperature, and way more volume.
zebra erases any shadow of a doubt @266:
You’re patently ignorant of the subject you’re trying to lecture me on. Worse, you’re so arrogant you won’t even try to examine your assumptions—assuming you have the math chops to do that, which it increasingly looks like you do not.
Your scenario in #173 was a mish-mash of mistaken notions which substantially re-hashed your misunderstandings @51, which I went over in detail @62.
You show all the signs of being someone with a moderately above-average IQ who is often the smartest guy in the room because you’re surrounded by people who are merely average. But here you are in a crowd with IQs 20 and 30 points higher than yours. You are way, way out of your depth both in brainpower and in subject-matter knowledge. You might get more out of your limited brainpower if you made an effort to study the subject and work enough problem sets to grasp how the math works, but you show zero sign of any will to do so. It’s also possible that you’re simply innumerate.
Correct (though you meant it sarcastically). Volt-amps in an AC system are divided between real power (watts) and volt-amps reactive or VARs. Total volt-amps is the square root of the sum of the squares of watts and VARs.
The textbook writers have had it right since Tesla’s system started being taught in engineering schools. Here’s an on-line text on that very subject, and it pretty much states everything I’ve told you so far. You are the one who can’t be bothered to find, read and understand even basic intro material. Or maybe you don’t have the brains. Either way, you have nothing to contribute.
If you can’t write the math, you don’t understand it. One of the things I’m working on right now is a refuse-to-fuel scheme. I’m digging into the energy losses as both sensible and latent heat from e.g. processing wet garbage and boiling all the water off as steam. So far it looks like the worst-case scenario will work just fine, but without running the numbers there’s no way to know that.
Answered in #247 before you asked:
A capacitor connected across the AC line draws current which peaks as the line voltage crosses zero (current leads voltage) and goes to zero as the voltage hits peak (stops changing). What trivial amount of energy it stores is fed back to the line by the next zero crossing. One of the things it does is offset the lagging fraction of current drawn by inductive loads. It also offsets line inductance and boosts voltage; this is called “voltage support“.
You’re asking questions which were already answered, meaning that you made no attempt to look up the terms of art. They have definitions which have been stable for a century (in those textbooks you certainly did not read). True mastery of this stuff requires some facility with complex numbers, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that you struggled with algebra.
“It is better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Mal Adapted wrote @271:
I know DAMN well I’m not omniscient. Nobody is. But as I can’t seem to get people to understand, we are already 30 years too late with a solid engineering response to this problem. One of the things we need is a huge source of emissions-free energy RIGHT NOW, and we have ONE proven method of producing it. Maybe we can come up with others, but waiting for them is a risk we cannot take. If we get something we like better, we can switch later.
Show me where anyone’s produced emissions-free energy on the required scale and decarbonized what was a fossil-based energy system, without nuclear. I know they’re trying wind plus PHS on El Hierro, and despite favorable weather and geography they still had a rather bumpy start. Germany is set to miss its year-2022 decarbonization goal of 40% by something like 8%. We told them so.
That, I’m afraid, is dead wrong. Some technological tools are simply not effective enough. They produce costs well outside themselves, which must be paid in both money and energy. Most “renewables” are in this category.
There is ONE technological tool which is SO effective, several countries decarbonized their electric grids by accident; it wasn’t a goal, but a side-effect. That tool is nuclear energy. There is nothing like it, at least nothing that scales. If you live on vocanically-active, snow-rich Iceland you can work wonders with geothermal and hydro, but there’s only one Iceland and it’s pretty small.
Maybe we can develop something more acceptable to the “Greens”. We don’t have it today. We HAVE to get started today. You go to war with the technology you have, not the technology you wish you had. Is this a war? Because I’m not seeing the urgency even here on RC.
And the first criterion for feasibility is “does it work?”
The economic forces are coming together to make nuclear fast and cheap; electron-beam welding is going to slash the cost of NuScales. The other thing is the “political forces”, which among other things means lots of marginally employed people taking oligarch money to march in the streets pro or anti whatever the oligarchs want. If this is war, jail the damned oligarchs and take their money away; we did it during the Civil War and WWI, we can do it again. If the planet is at stake, using anti-nuclear fearmongering to keep fossil fuels in business is treason not just to the country, but to the whole world.
Killian emoted again @277:
“Affect” is a verb. You mean “effect”.
And no, it won’t. There is too much warming “in the pipeline” already to avoid firing the “clathrate gun”. Only massive NEGATIVE emissions will avoid that catastrophe, and we need heaps of energy to get that job done.
Your “rapid simplification” throws away all the means of doing that sequestration. You can’t plant a trillion trees if you have to spend all your time digging in the earth to grow food. You’ll have nowhere to plant trees if the productivity of your farming falls by 80% because you don’t have artificial fertilizers.
Pulling down atmospheric CO2 requires measures like enhanced weathering. Mining and crushng ultramafic rocks for that requires energy. Do. The. Math. Already.
Al Bundy @283, yeah I’ve said many times Jevons paradox is not a good enough excuse to ignore making things more efficient, and that the answer to Jevons Paradox, the only answer is legislation to counter the effect, whether a rule or a tax.
But anyway reading your comments I remembered this:
https://mooregoodink.com/the-worlds-smallest-petrol-engine/
“SCIENTISTS have allegedly built the smallest petrol engine, tiny enough to power a WATCH. The mini-motor, which runs for two years on a single squirt of lighter fuel, is set to revolutionize world technology. It produces 700 times more energy than a conventional battery despite being less than a centimeter long (Not even half an inch!). It could be used to operate laptops and mobile phones for months doing away with the need for recharging. Experts believe it could be phasing out batteries in such items within just six years.”
However it doesn’t appear to have got beyond prototype stage.
zebra spazzed out @281:
You’d be funny if you and your ilk weren’t so damned dangerous. The terms of the field describe the physics. You have zero grasp of the physics, which is why you go off on “obfuscation”, “oppression” and other po-mo BS.
You have NOTHING to contribute. You are all but certainly too stupid to be able to comprehend anything that would LET you contribute. A couple days in a pillory might correct your attitude, or it might not. I’d like to see if a good LARTing would fix your problem, but given the sickness of our current society I am doubtful that it’s worth the effort. We are all but certainly best off flushing ones like you and starting over with the rest.
A massive amount of this comes from demanding “safety” from nuclear which is not demanded from anything else. That must be corrected.
Indeed, of course not. But if you can get electric power at par and space heat/DHW at $3/mmBTU using nuclear, you’re going to go for it… unless you have bought into the paranoia. You don’t need to socialize anything. It’s just a fact of physics that if your municipality is big enough, you can power and heat it cheaper with actinides than with anything else.
If you’re outside the area which can be economically served by nuclear district heat, you can still use electric heat pumps when sufficient juice is available and other electro-biofuels when it runs short. If you look at the curve of heating fuel demand, you realize that there’s excess energy available for well over half the year. You can bank this as chemical fuel in one form or another. So long as we can guarantee no shortages, why are we worrying about this?
You deny the need to put numbers to it, but until you have put numbers to it you have nothing worth talking about.
Apparently according to Killian us poor unenlightened sods need to learn something about the economist Nordhaus. Here’s something I came across a while back, a good expert critique of his work on climate economics and discount rates, especially describing his excessive optimism about both the climate issue and future economic growth. Important because this guy won a nobel prize so commands attention, but he isn’t getting the economics of the climate issue right.
https://liu.se/en/news-item/liu-forskare-riktar-skarp-kritik-mot-ekonomipristagare
Re #282 David B. Benson said Specifically, the question of sequestering so-called nuclear waste has implementable solutions. This is a non-issue.
That is 100% prevarication.
Lying is bad. Don’t lie.
If there were implementable solutions, wouldn’t they be implemented? If not, they are not implementable. What you seem to mean is there are theroetical, unproven, unbuilt fantasies of containing nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years. And anyone who thinks we can build containers that will outlast civilization itself is a damned fool.
#285 David Benson,
Not sure what you are trying to say there… didn’t we just discuss this recently?
The reason there are lots of NG generators is because ERCOT only meets one of the two criteria necessary for a true free market:
1. Competition.
2. Internalized costs.
Obviously, without a price on the externalized negative effects of CO2, NG is always going to be the better choice than nuclear.
However, as we see in many US States with regulatory capture, where they currently create obstacles for solar, a monopoly utility would be able to continue burning NG even if a carbon tax is imposed. Without competition, that would just get passed on to the consumer. The only reduction in CO2 would come from reduced consumption; not a bad thing but limited, especially in the monopoly situation.
Still no reason to invest in nuclear plants.