If you still don’t get it after a few passes through it, I can’t help you. I can’t understand it for you, and I’m not going to waste any more time trying to teach the pig to sing.
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @395 & 399
“This is true, and why I consider the PHEV to be in the current “sweet spot”. It bags immediate fuel savings, provides far greater energy flexibility and does not incur the weight and other penalties of a pure BEV. We should be pushing for almost every LDV sold to be PHEV.”
Yes I get where you are coming from. Hard to argue with. It frustrates me a bit, because you still get some emissions from a PHEV, where a BEV is emissions free over time and given the right generation, but I see you are doing a practical compromise and a sort of wide scale cost / benefit analysis.The maths would have to be checked but its intuitively quite convincing.
Its similar to the power generation issue I mentioned earlier. A grid consisting entirely of solar, wind and storage is expensive because of the storage costs currently, but if the grid is about 75% solar, wind and storage, and 20% nuclear power or turbine power the $ costs are much better. This is the sweet spot, for a renewables grid anyway.
However getting back to automobiles, we are unlikely to be limited to lithium and cobalt that have supply difficulties. There are other battery technologies as below:
It frustrates me a bit, because you still get some emissions from a PHEV
Note, I said “sweet spot right now.” It’s something we can get done by 2025 and it would have a major impact. The sweet spot is a moving target; 10 years ago it was probably a Prius-style hybrid with NiMH cells. Currently we don’t even have everything with idle-stop let alone electric launch assist, so there’s a long way to go yet.
Note that the radically reduced liquid fuel demands of an all-PHEV fleet increase the fraction which can be supplied by biofuels. It lets you push at the emissions problem from both sides, while keeping the advantage of energy stockpiled as fuel in the tank farms. The problem with wind and solar is that they have no energy storage, so are highly vulnerable to disruptions of many kinds. A big tank full of ethanol or DME or whatever is insurance.
a BEV is emissions free over time and given the right generation
Given the embodied energy in large battery packs and where our energy currently comes from, we might be better off going light on them for the next few years.
If the IBM battery turns out to be more than vaporware, maybe we can leap straight to all-BEVs. Otherwise it’s going to take quite a bit of time (it takes years to open new mines), and we are better off putting resources where they electrify more travel rather than less.
A grid consisting entirely of solar, wind and storage is expensive because of the storage costs currently, but if the grid is about 75% solar, wind and storage, and 20% nuclear power or turbine power the $ costs are much better.
Everything hinges on the cost and duration of that “storage”. Large-reservoir hydro is good. PHS, not nearly so good. Batteries, between an hour and half the duration of PHS and much higher cost. 20% dispatchable isn’t nearly enough.
Our society needs 24/7 electric power, and plenty of it. You can’t “smart grid” your way out of powering water treatment and sewage and stormwater lift pumps on their own schedules. You lose pressure in your city water system and you have to implement “boil orders” because of bacterial contamination. You fail to pump sewage out as it accumulates and it backs up into basements. This always-there load is something like 50% of total electric consumption. Hydro handles it nicely until you run out of water, and too many places don’t have any water to begin with. The max electric generation of Hoover Dam is way below nameplate because there just isn’t much water in Lake Mead any more. California and Australia, ’nuff said.
Nuclear energy is the one thing that works pretty much everywhere. I have been giving this stuff a great deal of thought lately, and I may have discovered a way to build a Fermi-1 class core holder assembly, all 636 fuel channels of it, in one day with one welding machine (albeit a very specialized one). To say that this reduces the cost is perhaps the understatement of the year, but you’d probably need to commit to a production run of at least 500 to make it pay. OTOH it would take about 7700 of them to supply all the USA’s primary energy, so a minimum run of 500 seems reasonable. At 1/day 250 days/yr that would only keep you busy for 2 years.
If the design became obsolete in 20 years because of proof-testing of something like molten chloride FBRs, I wouldn’t shed a tear. I’d be glad we got a 20-year jump on the climate problem instead of waiting, because we have already waited 30 years too long.
Al Bundysays
BPL: E-P and his pals assume that everything has been worked out, so there will never be a Brown’s Ferry, a
AB: “Never again” is a truly dorky metric. It’s like terrorism. Some guys with boxcutters took down four planes and two towers, plus damaged the Pentagon. So the airlines reinforced and locked cockpit doors. Since then we’ve had flailings via shoes and undies.
The risk of failure generally declines as systems evolve. The damage resulting from failure generally declines as well. None of your examples rise to the level of damage we know will result from other systems (with Chernobyl being the exception for both damage (disputed) and insanity-of-design-brought-on-by-not-communism-but-a-totalitarian-government).
Compare options and compute risk, then draw conclusions. So, is wind safer than next-generation nuclear? How about solar? How about waste? Lots of solar cells and turbine blades are poised to enter the waste stream, eh? What sort of nuke is acceptable? What characteristics must it have?
In other words, take the advice of BPL, who recently admonished, ‘Do the math!’
_______
zebra: How much CO2 could be saved building those communities with proper orientation, solar panels, geothermal slabs, R30-50 insulation, and a local DC grid, and some small batteries…
And what would you have to give up?
AB: Drafts, discomfort arising from radiative heat loss to cold inner window and wall surfaces, noise from an inefficient HVAC fan, noise from the street, the flimsy feel of cheap and inefficient stuff, writing huge checks for energy, writing checks for repair or replacement of HVAC, windows, et al when they give up the ghost,…
And the biggie is that you’d miss out on seeing the end of the world as we know it. What a catastrophe! I’ve already bought popcorn!
I’ve said it before. Simply add energy cost into the equations banks use to qualify folks to buy products. There’d be way fewer lost opportunities from now on. Systems design determines behavior. Free will isn’t terribly important from an actuarial standpoint.
________
Kevin McKinney: To be fair, batteries are indeed a constraint–now. But the evidence suggests that that is a matter of capacity-building, not what I called a ‘hard constraint’.
AB: Yep. But the Nazis are storming the beaches today so for today we need to fight with the batteries we have. Building up capacity is a related but separate issue. Until no pure petrols are required to be built because of battery constraints EVs represent an inferior solution for the present build cycle.
And mindshare is important. If every vehicle has a battery then every mechanic and every consumer acclimates to a future without pure petrols.
_______
E=P: I consider the PHEV to be in the current “sweet spot”. It bags immediate fuel savings, provides far greater energy flexibility and does not incur the weight and other penalties of a pure BEV
AB: And batteries are likely to improve so that in 10ish years when the PHEV’s battery gets swapped a larger capacity battery can provide more range. Perhaps the barely adequate 10 mile range battery I suggested will get swapped with a more robust 20 miler like you contemplated.
_________
zebra: If the capacitor isn’t storing energy, what is it doing?
AB: Consider a ship plowing through a relatively rough sea. Two people are walking across the deck. The landlubber is having a difficult time and expending lots of energy fighting to stay upright (and not barf). The sailor rolls right on by absorbing and releasing a bit of energy in tune with the ship’s movements. It seems said sailor bought a capacitor.
Killiansays
Re #386 nigelj said Disposal of nuclear waste controversy. Its fair comment that you can never 100% guarantee that a storage site wont have an accidental leak, but Chernobyl was a pretty good example of a spectacular accident, and potential ecological damage, but even the most polluted 10kms exclusion zone bounced back fairly fast ecologically.
Really? Go live there. That things are alive there does not = your asinine statement above.
“The after-effects of Chernobyl on the mountain lamb industry in Norway were expected to be seen for a further 100 years…”, e.g.
Yeah, that’s lickety-fricken-split.
Again, go build a house right there in the center. Go ahead. I’m sure you’ll be fine. In the mean time, “bounced back” is not a phrase one uses to describe something still dangerously poisonous across two continents.
“In 2014, there was a huge spike in radiation levels that scientists put down to a bumper season for mushrooms. Hundreds of Norwegian reindeer intended for slaughter had to be released back into the wild…
The relatively high level of radiation permitted by Norway was a government response to radiation levels in reindeer that threatened the very existence of the Sami herders’ way of life.
When RFE/RL witnessed the testing of the Snasa herd, in 2016, the highest reading was 2,100 becquerels per kilogram. Norway’s current limit is 3,000, far higher than the EU limit of 600 becquerels per kilogram for foodstuffs.
[Thus limiting the market for the Sami.]
Kjell said the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 showed that nuclear power was still unsafe. “It can have consequences for many years, for thousands of years, and we don’t have the right to spoil this world for our children.”
So, sure, let’s just keep doing this till the entire planet is irradiated, but not “too much?” Buy a goddamned clue.
Last point: If you try to go nuclear to “save the planet” and fail – because it absolutelty cannot be done, but let’s assume it could – yet, climate gets into unstoppable feedbacks, as signs are pointing to being far more likely than many like to admit, tell me what happens to all those reactors when civilization falls?
Rhetorical question…
Killiansays
Re #372 David B. Benson said Killian @369 — The salt domes east of Carlsbad, NM, have been there for many tens of millions of years and will remain for many tens of millions of years more. These provide ideal storage for so-called nuclear waste.
And the idea you can seal them, maintain them, repair them and guarantee no leakage over the time frame of radioactivity is infantile reasoning given statements and evidence already posted in this and other threads.
Say something of use or resist the desire to fill the internet with nonsense.
Serious times, serious people. “Salt domes exist” is not a serious response.
Killiansays
Re #380 Engineer-Poet said And Killian goes off the rails @369:
There is ZERO proof, let alone evidence, you can store *anything* safely for 30k years
If you say this you are TOTALLY ignorant of the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo some 2 billion years ago. We know EXACTLY where the fission products were “stored”. They endangered NOTHING.
30k years is NOTHING, and we only need 500 years. We’ve got this.
Natural, extremely low-level radiation occurrances equal a non-natural, man-made containment system? That’s as big a lie as ever told on these pages. That’s Trumpian in its dishonesty.
How you have not been banned is beyond me…
Killiansays
Re #385 Al Bundy said Killian: Bullshit. There is ZERO proof, let alone evidence, you can store *anything* safely for 30k years, let alone nuclear, and certainly not for hundreds of thousands of nuclear plants built over tens of thousands of years.
AB: E-P gave a detailed plan, with short half-life stuff allowed to decay or be used for whatnot and long half-life stuff either used for fuel or scattered into the ocean or stored in designed-to-be-indestructible casks, with various options for storing said casks. It was pretty comprehensive, included examples, and gave reasons for various options.
What has that got to do with the price of tea in China? That engineers, et al., claim they can do these things proves that 30k years later they are proven correct? Are you out of your mind with this reasoning or just so poor at risk analysis you actually believe this crap? Claimed equals safe! Designed equals reality!
Genius…
It’s too bad you missed it. Probably the comment-hiding bug in RC’s system.
No, just your insipidly childish attempts to minimize logical arguments.
And my posting point stands. When tossing an insult (as opposed to a normal post) check your post carefully or you’ll look like a doofus. Even more so if you make not two but three errors in a short comment and then post a correction for only one of them.
Yes, child. Buy a clue and figure out why that typo was allowed to stand.
Simply add energy cost into the equations banks use to qualify folks to buy products.
I have been saying this since the era of McMansions. Mortgages approved based on income, without any consideration of the cost of utilities, are basic accounting malpractice.
Either that, or everyone expected the area to be overrun by urban blight by the time the mortgages were mostly paid down so nobody gave a damn if the buildings were falling apart and too costly to heat. Who knows, with the epidemic of Section 8 invasion turning nice areas into gang turf, they may well have been right.
the Nazis are storming the beaches today so for today we need to fight with the batteries we have.
Nazis from the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica, literally crawling up our beaches and flooding roads and buildings.
mindshare is important. If every vehicle has a battery then every mechanic and every consumer acclimates to a future without pure petrols.
Very much so. Not having to visit gas stations all the time is liberating in ways you don’t understand until you experience it. And the quiet… the quiet is very pleasant.
batteries are likely to improve so that in 10ish years when the PHEV’s battery gets swapped a larger capacity battery can provide more range. Perhaps the barely adequate 10 mile range battery I suggested will get swapped with a more robust 20 miler like you contemplated.
I don’t know the form factor of these cells, but given what I’ve read about their capacity and low-temperature performance (stellar!) they would make superb replacements for the old-and-getting-tired ones in my 2013 car. FWIW, I get considerably better than 10 miles of range even on my old battery if I watch my speed. Haste literally makes waste.
And we have Al Bundy, nigelj and Engineer-Poet all in more or less a consensus. This heralds the end times, I know it.
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @403, I’ve always been a fan of both BEV’s and PHEV’s. I’ve probably created the impression on this website that I hugely favour BEV’s above all else. This is not really the case. I sometimes play devils advocate, and I’m a bit reactive and I have promoted BEV’s more as a counter to criticisms coming from the climate mitigation “denialists” which zero in on electric cars.
A couple of years ago I did some letter writing to politicians urging them to do more to promote both BEV’s and PHEV’s, using tax breaks or subsidies. This year our government finally introduced a scheme as below that promotes lower emissions and fuel efficient vehicles. Not because of me alone obviously, but probably because of a variety of people pushing them. Its not ideal but it has its merits:
“Car buyers to be charged up to $3,000 or given a discount of up $8,000 under proposal to make cleaner cars a more ‘realistic choice’ for NZers”.
The logic for PHEVs is good, you get the best of all worlds, until the ideal battery comes along. I would be comfortable if governments gave the main incentive for PHEV’s, as long as biofuel blends were used, and BEV’s also got some lesser incentive to ensure their development improves as well. You dont want to put all the eggs in just one basket even if the case seems compelling.
In fact I’ve been mystified why more people haven’t bought hybrids, but like I said the Toyota Prius was an ugly looking thing, and people are not the smartest and probably compute that two motors could create more problems, when its unlikely to be significant and actually gives flexibility. But for these reasons its essential for the government to have financial incentive schemes.
nigeljsays
From Zebra “How much CO2 could be saved building those communities with proper orientation, solar panels, geothermal slabs, R30-50 insulation, and a local DC grid, and some small batteries…And what would you have to give up? Some extra ugly design features, or granite countertops, or gold-plated toilets? That stuff can be retrofitted if you have the money sometime in the future, much of which you will accumulate through savings/profits on energy.”
So true. Passive solar design is great, and for the average home owner the example I’ve used is you give up on a small bit of floor area and maybe one ensuite. In return you get great energy efficiency and vastly reduced power bills. Our houses are huge these days anyway so its not a sacrifice to be a little bit smaller.
But why hasn’t passive solar design taken off? Perhaps its becasue it tends to be bespoke design for wealthy people. But I remembered this article where we have a construction company offering standard plans, which opens up a wider market. I hope they succeed.
Although bear in mind a very decentalised local solar panel electricity grid system has limits, so you will still need a centralised electricity supply for industry etc at least until incredibly efficient and low cost batteries or similar comes along. Although I’m a bit of a battery enthusiast, the sheer scale of mineral resources required suggests there may be limits on a totally decentalised very local grid.
———————————-
Al Bundy @404, agreed although appreciate that passive solar highrise buildings are difficult to design compared to single family homes. You can do a lot with highrise buidlings with double glazing against heat loss and low emissivity glass to control heat gain, but the depth of highrise floor plans typically limits how much heat sinking you can practically do and what it can achieve, and opening windows in highrise buildings creates various problems. So on this basis you would probably still need HVAC systems, but at a lesser scale.
Of course this assumes relatively conventional floor plans, and if you have more freedom you can get a more effective passive solar highrise design going. Unfortunately we have backed our cities into a corner where floor plans are inevitably very deep to maximise building size, and so they become very dependent on artifical light, fan ventilation, and artificial heating etc. Not terribly “sustainable”.
Thomassays
If you’re curious about fire developments (climate change impacts in action) in Australia good rolling updates found via the (100% Publicly Funded) National Broadcaster the ABC News 24 channel https://iview.abc.net.au/show/abc-news-24/ By all reports matters are becoming even worse with Saturday being extreme again. Active fires are now in every State.
Al Bundysays
nigelj: It frustrates me a bit, because you still get some emissions from a PHEV, where a BEV is emissions free over time and given the right generation,
AB: reminds me of a Malcolm in the Middle episode. Malcolm’s dad was a former roller skating star of some sort and he gave a display of his talent. Malcolm wanted that.
His dad agreed to teach Malcolm and bought him a pair of super skates. Malcolm was thrilled until his dad put them on top of the fridge for when Malcolm was ready.
I won’t spoil any more except that Malcolm’s first skates were cardboard boxes.
BEVs are your super skates.
zebrasays
Capacitor 101, from Texas,
I’m not surprised that EP is running away rather than admit to being wrong, but I was giving him the chance to man up and stop being such a jerk. Anyway, here’s what Richard Fitzpatrick, who teaches physics at UT Austin, tells us.
The equations are there, but here are the words (my bolds):
“The first and second terms on the right-hand side of the preceding expression can be recognized as the instantaneous energies stored in the capacitor and the inductor, respectively (Fitzpatrick 2008). The former energy is stored in the electric field generated when the capacitor is charged, whereas the latter is stored in the magnetic field induced when current flows through the inductor. It follows that that the quantity $ E$ in Equation (40) is the total energy of the circuit, and that this energy is a conserved quantity. The oscillations of an LC circuit can, thus, be understood as a cyclic interchange between electric energy stored in the capacitor, and magnetic energy stored in the inductor. ”
and
” In other words, any energy that the capacitor absorbs from the circuit during one half of the oscillation cycle is returned to the circuit, without loss, during the other. The same goes for the inductor. ”
So, when zebra said that capacitors store energy when used to reduce reactive power issues, he was exactly correct.
And when EP said that a capacitor “is not an energy storage device”, he was exactly wrong.
Energy storage is exactly why we put those capacitors in the circuit when there is an inductive load.
The thing is, even without the circuit theory math, any second-year student would understand what a capacitor is. It’s a device that stores energy in an electric field. It stores energy whether it is big or small, and it stores energy at whatever frequency it is being charged and discharged. It is, as they say, what it is.
If someone who claims to be a genius with expertise about electricity doesn’t understand how that fits into the reactive power situation, there’s clearly a problem.
If anyone wants to tell this Fitzpatrick fellow how wrong he is, look him up. And yes, I picked the Texas source because they have that electricity market thing going, eh.
E-P 396: Chernobyl was the ONLY one with measurable health consequences
BPL: There was at least one death at Fukushima Daiichi, and you’re discounting all the epidemiological studies which say death and health problems resulted from the radioactive releases there and at Three Mile Island. Nuke freaks generally take the attitude that radiation releases don’t matter. Epidemiologists and public health scientists do not.
Tesla hasn’t even finished Gigafactory 1 yet. When complete it’s supposed to be able to manufacture 30 GWh/yr of cells and 50 GWh/yr of completed battery packs. This would do for half a million vehicles at 100 kWh each.
As of November 2018, GF1 was turning out “approximately 5000 [model 3s] a week for several months.” So, pretty close to a half million vehicles a year–though to be fair, the Model 3 uses battery packs ranging from 55 kWh to 75 kWh, not the hypothetical 100 kWh pack cited.
However, the bottom line appears to be that:
As of May 2019, Gigafactory 1 has achieved a theoretical capacity of 35 gigawatt-hours per year but utilization levels have resulted in a 24 gigawatt-hour output, according to Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga. Tesla is aiming to increase this utilization significantly in 2019 by optimizing their higher-speed production lines, rather than relying on further investments for new production lines.
So it’s more-or-less ‘finished for now,’ it would appear, at least with respect to battery pack production. (Progress on the solar roof continues, I think, as probably does other contemplated aspects of the GF, such as recycling capability.)
Meanwhile, Tesla has ‘completed’ GF3 in Shanghai, at least to the extent that it’s now producing vehicles: the first deliveries happened on December 30th. Impressive, given that groundbreaking was only on January 19 of last year! No word yet on production levels. (I’m sure the folks in Buffalo are a bit miffed, since the so-called GF2 there–not really comparable because its output is dedicated to the Solar Roof tile product, not EV batteries–has been slow to ramp up.)
Groundbreaking for GF4 should happen in the next couple of months near Berlin, Germany.
Killiansays
Simplicity: the only pathway that is consistent with all the changes we need to make.
The same Wikipedia page claims “Of the 440,350 wild boar killed in the 2010 hunting season in Germany, approximately one thousand were contaminated with levels of radiation above the permitted limit of 600 becquerels of caesium per kilogram, of dry weight….” That’s about 0.23%. But suppose you were eating meat with the peak level of 20,000 Bq/kg, not just once but a kilo every week. What would it do to you?
Cesium passes through the body like any other alkali cation. The biological half-life of cesium is somewhere between 53 days for children and 110 days for adults. Taking the number for adults, that’s about 1/159th [ln(2)/110] per day eliminated. 20,000 Bq a week comes to 2857 Bq/d. Multiplied by 159 to get the steady-state value, you’d be carrying about 453 kBq. This is roughly 100x the normal amount of K-40.
Conclusion: you could eat a kilo a week of the most-radioactive meat ever found in the Chernobyl-irradiated zone and you would never notice the effects.
Yeah, that’s lickety-fricken-split.
Why do you care, when it is harmless and always was?
Norway’s current limit is 3,000, far higher than the EU limit of 600 becquerels per kilogram for foodstuffs.
Norway’s limit is just 15% of levels that are themselves too low to hurt you, so why go down another 5x? Seriously, this is JUST like telling people that a tablet of aspirin a day is dangerous because downing a whole bottle will kill you. It’s beyond stupid.
let’s just keep doing this till the entire planet is irradiated, but not “too much?”
The planet was BORN radioactive. Considerably more so than today, too. The actinides we need to tap for carbon-free energy were just a small part of that, though their long half-lives make them a bigger one now.
Buy a goddamned clue.
Take your own advice. I’ll even give you a dollar.
If you try to go nuclear to “save the planet” and fail – because it absolutelty cannot be done
The last time I checked the numbers on this, it turned out to be easier than I had believed possible. It’s vastly easier than with wind and PV, which require 10x as much bulk material before you get into the issue of storage systems.
Providing the starting fuel charges for 7700 Fermi-1 equivalents @1891 kg enriched U @25.6% U-235 would take about 79 metric tons of uranium apiece, a bit over 600,000 tons total. Over 15 years that’s just 40,000 tons a year, and then you don’t need any more. There’s almost 8 million tons world uranium reserves and 4 billion tons of uranium in the oceans; we can do that. Heck, we’ve got a pile of slightly depleted uranium, still stored as UF6, that we could throw straight into centrifuge plants and get quite a bit of enriched U out. No mining needed at all for that, just electricity and spare centrifuge time. Then there’s all the uranium sitting around in spent fuel, at 0.8-1% U-235, going literally to waste.
The only reason we’d need that much uranium is that breeding in FBRs couldn’t keep up with the rate of new reactor starts on a 15-year decarbonization schedule. At a 1.2 breeding ratio your fuel supply increases at about 2% per year. If you dare to use liquid thorium you can get the doubling time down to maybe 2 years, but the proliferation genie rears its ugly head.
yet, climate gets into unstoppable feedbacks, as signs are pointing to being far more likely than many like to admit
They give you a saving throw, because you can do things like generate large amounts of H2S and burn it in the stratosphere. Sulfate clouds do a pretty nice job of knocking temperatures AND atmospheric CO2 levels down. I expect this to happen by 2030, driven by increasingly-dire situations in places like Australia.
tell me what happens to all those reactors when civilization falls?
Most are designed to air-cool for decay heat, so the answer for the first century or so is “not much”. About 90% of the Cs-137 and 91% of the Sr-90 would decay over this time. If they did start to go (or people released stuff by tampering) people who entered the reactor building would very likely sicken or die, but you wouldn’t notice the difference elsewhere due to the resurgence of diseases we now control with vaccines and antibiotics. And of course, the very first thing that would happen is a massive dieoff as water systems failed and people got dysentery, followed by mass starvation since the food networks would shut down. That’s more likely the more unreliable energy gets. Nuclear power wouldn’t even be a footnote if that started happening.
Things would keep going the longest where nuclear plants kept the grid up. If you would read “Lucifer’s Hammer” you’d realize that they’d be among the biggest redoubts of civilization.
@406:
the idea you can seal them, maintain them, repair them and guarantee no leakage over the time frame of radioactivity is infantile reasoning
The idea that a concrete-sealed shaft going into deposits which have not even been disturbed by groundwater for tens of millions of years is going to need “maintenance” or “repair” is anti-reasoning.
You never looked it up. Fissioning even 0.003% of uranium creates a significant radiation field and fission products. Those FPs didn’t go anywhere; they sat where they were formed. The natural tendency of most FP-range elements to bind to rock prevents them from getting very far under any circumstances. The exceptions like Kr-86 and I-129 are harmless once diluted.
That’s as big a lie as ever told on these pages. That’s Trumpian in its dishonesty.
Aside from you being totally backwards on the facts, your choice of adjectives is very revealing.
You think so? Looks pretty standard for a hatchback to me. As a kiwi I doubt you’ve ever seen a Pontiac Aztec but the Prius looks like an Aztec that never grew to full height. The Aztec had its fans. I think the thing people hate about the Prius is that it has become a political statement and people react to the self-righteousness. Nobody reacts that way to my Fusion Energi, people think it’s cool.
@411:
why hasn’t passive solar design taken off? Perhaps its becasue it tends to be bespoke design for wealthy people.
Put bluntly, those features are not valued on the market. If a bank can’t resell a property if the owner defaults on the mortgage, they won’t lend money (or a lot less money than it costs to build). That’s why it’s mostly rich people who build them; it takes lenders out of the equation.
There’s also the building trades to consider. You can make a much stronger, better-insulated wall in a factory than you can on a building site and just truck it in. However, the building trades have influence on building and code inspectors and may collude to not let you do that so they get their cut. If you can’t get your plans for your super-insulated but unconventional construction approved, you can’t build.
And I see zebra @414 has stumbled across a description of what’s known as a “tank circuit”. Hint, lil’ troll: that’s the sort of thing you put in a harmonic filter, but it’s not what your power-factor correction caps do. Very similar part, different function.
If you are capable of doing trigonometry, consider the energy stored in a power-factor correction capacitor in a 3-phase system. To make it simple, let’s make this 3 separate capacitors each one connected phase-to-ground (what’s called a “Y” connection). For a peak voltage of V, the instantaneous energy stored in the reference-phase capacitor is ½C(V sin ωt)². There are 3 lines, each one differing in phase from the other 2 by ±2π/3 radians (120 degrees).
Now sum up ½C V² (sin²(ωt) + sin²(ωt – 2π/3) + sin²(ωt – 4π/3)). (If you can, which I suspect you cannot; you show every sign of being innumerate.)
David B. Bensonsays
Killian @406 — Salt domes are self-sealing. Etc.
You ought to learn the relevant geology before commenting. Not to mention the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
There was one death attributed to radiation. However, it was not in one of the 3 workers who waded through the plant basements without protective gear and got beta burns on their feet and lower legs, taking by far the highest dose of anyone exposed. Neither was it from acute radiation sickness (ARS) or leukemia, by far the most common radiation-induced cancers. It was lung cancer, as reported by both the BBC and by Time.
The great majority of lung cancers are caused by chemotoxic agents. Know what string you will find in neither article? Search for “smok”; you won’t find it. And Japan is a country of smokers. The overwhelming likelihood is that the cancer came from tobacco.
The only way to pin a lung cancer on the meltdowns would be to find an inhaled “hot particle” where the tumor originated. It wouldn’t be at all hard; you just need a gamma camera. There’s been no mention of this, and I looked. Verdict: innocent.
you’re discounting all the epidemiological studies which say death and health problems resulted from the radioactive releases there and at Three Mile Island.
The same populations suffered acute stress due to radiophobia. That’s called a “confounding effect”.
Nuke freaks generally take the attitude that radiation releases don’t matter. Epidemiologists and public health scientists do not.
Epidemiologists and public health scientists have spent decades examining people who live in areas of natural high radiation, expecting to find harm to health… and finding none, or even the opposite. Yet they have not admitted that high natural radiation, like at Mansur and Kerala and Guarapari and even Denver, is harmless.
All your so-called “nuke freaks” do is declare that there’s no difference between natural and man-made radiation, and demand honesty from our so-called “experts”.
nigeljsays
Killian @405
“Re #386 nigelj said Disposal of nuclear waste controversy. Its fair comment that you can never 100% guarantee that a storage site wont have an accidental leak, but Chernobyl was a pretty good example of a spectacular accident, and potential ecological damage, but even the most polluted 10kms exclusion zone bounced back fairly fast ecologically.”
“Really? Go live there. That things are alive there does not = your asinine statement above.”
I would live there is radiation levels are reasonably low, don’t know what they are currently. Remember we are exposed to all sorts of damaging radiation even sunlight. Here’s a concise account of conditions close to the explosion, so within the 10kms exclusion zone:
While the Chernobyl dead zone is neither desolate nor cluttered with freakishly mutated animals, its reality over the past 25 years has tasted bits of these extremes. For example, in the Exclusion Zone that received 10-20 Gy, 90% of the trees died by 1997. [1] This 10 km2 region was coined “the red forest” due to the overwhelming presence of orange colored pine tree needles. Krivolutsky et al. found that diversity of invertebrate species in heavily contaminated areas did not return to normal levels until 1996. [2] And while you’ll be hard pressed to find two headed rabbits frolicking near ground zero, numerous morphological changes in trees have been documented ranging from growth of secondary shoots and intense needle growth to feature specific gigantism (i.e. needles) and dwarfism (i.e. trunks). Studies conduced by Shevchenko et al. (1992) and Pomerantseva et al. (1997) showed that embryo fatality rates were elevated when mating captured mice that were exposed to chronic radiation with laboratory female mice. [3,4] These rates decreased after a period of two weeks. In addition 2 of 122 captured mice were found to be sterile.
“The after-effects of Chernobyl on the mountain lamb industry in Norway were expected to be seen for a further 100 years…”, e.g….Yeah, that’s lickety-fricken-split…..Again, go build a house right there in the center. Go ahead. I’m sure you’ll be fine. In the mean time, “bounced back” is not a phrase one uses to describe something still dangerously poisonous across two continents.”
While this is a horrible problem for reindeer and indigenous communities, it’s stretching things to talk about problems with Reindeer to things being “dangerously poisonous across two continents”. Remember Chernobyl was about 30 years ago now, time for problems to be showing up on mass. Apart from the expected thyroid cancers there’s no increase in cancer rates across Europe and the UK. Of course its hard to tease out something like this with so many variables, but a huge problem would become very obvious. There’s probably some increased mortality, but it looks like nothing very much.
I was just out of my teens when Chernobyl exploded, and this made me sceptical of nuclear power for a long time. Perhaps stuff imprints on young minds. Maybe with you and BPL. Obviously we still have to be very careful with nuclear power, but I’m less sceptical now. Credible studies show nuclear power kills far fewer people per megawatt hour than fossil fuels generation, and slightly fewer than wind and solar power. A lot of people die from falls erecting this stuff.
“Last point: If you try to go nuclear to “save the planet” and fail – because it absolutelty cannot be done, but let’s assume it could – yet, climate gets into unstoppable feedbacks, as signs are pointing to being far more likely than many like to admit, tell me what happens to all those reactors when civilization falls?”
Can’t see why it cant be done. You haven’t explained. FWIW, I see nuclear power as part of the generation mix. We have billions of tons of uranium and what point is there in just not using it?
Uranium does not seem to have many applications beyond nuclear power:
Let’s say civilisation falls ( and its possible). This process won’t happen overnight, or the probability of this is so small as to be inconsequential. Some sort of total collapse of the socio-economic system will definitely be a decades to centuries long process. Reactors will be turned off, material stored away, people wont be falling dead at their posts from climate change.
If civilisation falls to the extent everyone dies, or most people die, like a Mad Max / Steven King scenario (incredibly unlikely imho) then there would be a problem ecologically. Nuclear waste storage sites might eventually break down and leak with nobody to fix the problem. and this would not be good for what animal and plant life is left on the planet in the surrounding area. However the Chernobyl experience suggests even this would not he a huge issue.Remember there’s a lot of natural background radiation anyway.
When a reactor explodes there’s serious damage from acute exposure, but that is for a short time. There is also an issue longer term with thyroid cancers, but in general the long lasting low level radiation that spreads far and wide looks like its not as dangerous as once thought. There are valid criticisms of the linear no threshold model, easily googled. Imo there’s probably some danger there but not as much as this model predicts, or enough to suggest nuclear power should be banned. I do admit I’m far from having any in depth knowledge on this, so don’t take my word for it. Do some reading yourself and with an open mind.
nigeljsays
Zebra @404 says “And when EP said that a capacitor “is not an energy storage device”, he was exactly wrong.”
I don’t recall EP ever saying that. Or he is being quoted out of context.
The message I get from EPs posts is he says capacitors are sometimes used for different things other than acting purely as an energy store , and he has quoted the examples of reactive power and other things. Its common knowledge that the basic principle of a capacitor is it store energy, and everything else flows from that principle, including many other functions. Even I get that and I’m not qualified in electronics. Some examples of the many functions of capacitors:
This Zebra / EP thing sounds like crossed communications.
As a side issue, Zebra apparently wants to teach people about ‘science’ in a sort of back and forwards teacher pupil relationship. Nobody in their right mind is going to subject themselves to that in public on the internet and be humiliated, so either Zebra is naieve, or is playing cat and mouse. Any teaching has has to be more of a debate and discussion amongst equals, or a tutorial like BPL sometimes does.
“And when EP said that a capacitor “is not an energy storage device”, he was exactly wrong.”
I don’t recall EP ever saying that. Or he is being quoted out of context.
zebra is operating at a middle-school intellectual level. He can neither calculate actual energy storage, nor distinguish “is not being used as an energy-storage element” from “is not an energy-storage element” (even when the maximum energy storage is less than a joule). He lacks both the intellectual and verbal abilities required to grasp the difference.
This Zebra / EP thing sounds like crossed communications.
Nope. It’s failed communications across a 40-plus point IQ gap. Such is to be expected.
As a side issue, Zebra apparently wants to teach people about ‘science’ in a sort of back and forwards teacher pupil relationship.
I was a teenager once. I have been where zebra was, and I am glad that there was no Internet at the time to immortalize all the idiotic things I declared. He is not so lucky. Time has yet to say if he will yet repent and learn.
Killiansays
Cross-posted from AGU thread:
Re #2 Richard Pauli said
This year it seems very difficult for the public to see content from AGU. I notice Michael Mann gave a talk that warns of new level of risk:
*”This final slide from @MichaelEMann is devastating. The time for incremental climate policy is over*. – He estimates annual emissions may have to drop by 15% a year (rather than 7.5%). – In other words we have zero years to tackle climate change.” https://twitter.com/DrNoelHealy/status/1204204976953626624
How might we see the entire talk?
I’m going to say this again because it bears saying *because* I feel I have something to add to the conversation that is unique and important.
I said ten years ago sensitivity *had* to be greater than thought. It was obvious. Look at the data, look at the models, look at the projections, then look at side (real world observations): One of these was not like the other. Ergo, something was wrong, and it could not be Nature.
The 1.5 report, the talk of higher sensitivities in the most recent climate models/model updates, and Mann’s presentation validate what I have been saying for a decade.
Now, please start listening on the solution side.
Killiansays
Re #421 David B. Benson said Killian @406 — Salt domes are self-sealing. Etc.
You ought to learn the relevant geology before commenting.
It is self evident that digging a massive cavern into a salt dome… repeatedly… equals not nearly fucking “self-sealed.” Egnineers are some of the most virulent climate denialists for the very reason they think their engineering skills to be unquestionable. They’re questionable.
I don’t give a damn that someone claims they can store the waste away till it’s no longer radioactive because it is something that simply cannot be proven in any way, or form because you don’t have 30k years to do the goddamned experiment.
This is an issue of risk, and you are simply refusing to accept that. Denial is dangerous, and foolish.
Not to mention the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Pilot.
Don’t respond if you can’t address the issues as raised.
Killiansays
There may now be so much heat trapped in the system that we may have already triggered a domino effect that could unleash a cascade of abrupt changes that will continue to play out in the years and decades to come.
Rapid climate change has the potential to reconfigure life on the planet as we know it.
We know this because the geologic record contains evidence that these events have occurred in the past. The key difference is that we’ve never had 7.5 billion people on the planet, so the human species really is in uncharted territory.
The scientific community is acknowledging this by including new sections on abrupt climate change throughout key areas of the upcoming IPCC report. We now consider these “low probability, high impact” scenarios an increasingly critical part of our work.
And, so, once again validation comes as science catches up to systems analysis and appropriate risk analysis.
BPL: There was at least one death at Fukushima Daiichi, and
AB: you’ve gone anecdotal, which is the opposite of science. How many deaths were avoided by Fukushima before it was destroyed?
Al Bundysays
E-P: All your so-called “nuke freaks” do is declare that there’s no difference between natural and man-made radiation, and
AB: There is a difference, as you inferred in the same comment. Natural radiation tends to be well-mixed, so biological systems do what they’ve done for millions to billions of years. Apoptosis and whatever, and life goes on. Your “dump nuclear waste in the ocean (but sanely)” concept uses that reality to solve the waste problem. But, as you said, a hot particle lodged in one’s lung can cause cancer. But that’s anecdotal and local, as in: People die from sharing space with vehicles. Ergo, lets ban transportation.
Yeah, nukes can’t get to a guaranteed zero harm ever for the rest of the universe’s life. So? The question, as you rightly say, is which path causes the most benefit with the least harm?
nigelj: Uranium does not seem to have many applications beyond nuclear power
AB: Armor-piercing ammunition is one. It is imperative that we build more nukes so we can slaughter brown people more efficiently with depleted uranium shells.
Al Bundysays
nigelj: Any teaching has has to be more of a debate and discussion amongst equals,
AB: goals are grand but testosterone is all about domination. I have treated BPL, Killian, E-P, and certainly others quite poorly in a laughably stupid attempt to avoid your goal. Hopefully I’m not as young, dumb, and full of cum as I used to be. Hopefully all of us are attempting to incorporate your wisdom into our psyches.
Why are there essentially no women here? Cuz they don’t care about the planet? Nope. They can’t stand the stench.
There is a difference, as you inferred in the same comment. Natural radiation tends to be well-mixed
If that was true, there wouldn’t be such things as uranium ores.
Different concentration doesn’t make it different stuff. Natural radium precipitates out in pipe scale in oil and gas production, for example. There’s no reason in principle that natural processes couldn’t do the same thing, producing hot-particle parent material.
The great thing about this stuff is that it decays. Instead of hanging around for aeons like asbestos fibers in soil, radium disappears all by itself. Cesium and strontium, even more so.
But, as you said, a hot particle lodged in one’s lung can cause cancer.
So ironic that the measurable harm from burning more fossil fuels is ignored, while the one fatality attributed to Fukushima is almost certainly bogus.
Why are there essentially no women here? Cuz they don’t care about the planet? Nope. They can’t stand the stench.
You may be right. (I’ve been known to wonder myself just who we think we’re prescribing to; who is it that eagerly awaits each of our pearls of wisdom?)
OTOH, we don’t actually know how many female participants we may have; remember the Bronte sisters, AKA “Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.” Simpler, sometimes, to just sidestep the misogyny?
zebrasays
EP,
You are just embarrassing yourself, and sounding desperate and silly. You might actually earn some respect if you just said “it’s been a while since I took physics and circuits, and I guess I got that wrong.”
I don’t think anyone doubts Prof Fitzpatrick’s nicely written textbook… very concise and clear description of the physics of what capacitors do in circuits with inductors. And I don’t know why you would expect otherwise, since you offer no description at all.
It may be that your psychology/personality doesn’t allow you to admit error, but it really is a productive and liberating process. Making mistakes is the best way to learn stuff, in my experience.
zebrasays
#434 Kevin McKinney,
“who we’re prescribing to”
I have a very good picture of the hypothetical lurker I’m trying to reach: A curious young(er) person willing to learn about science, quantitative reasoning, and reasoning in general, along with the specifics about climate change.
I would like them to see what a real science/engineering discussion, following the guidelines about warrants in that excellent “Just the Facts” post, is like, so they can argue effectively in other venues.
The problem is, we will never know if such a person exists, because they will never get a chance to let their presence be known, because of all the column-inch addicted people who just can’t shut up.
People who have confidence in themselves don’t need to drown out everyone else; many people here participate only when they feel they can contribute in a specific area of expertise. But then, there are those who feel they can replace quality with quantity.
So, yes, women with the background to comment on much of this stuff probably aren’t interested in trying to make themselves heard in a room full of insecure little boys… they’ve been doing that all their lives.
David B. Bensonsays
Killian @428 — While it might seem “self-evident”, tunnels dug in salt formations do creep shut. You could read about the geology before pronouncing ober dicta.
The once-used nuclear fuel pins produced so far would fit comfortably into a cavern about the size of a football field, stacked a few high. The geology is clear; nothing will externally disturb the salt domes for many tens of millions of years. Again, you could go read the geology of that region.
nigeljsays
Engineer Poet @426, yes it was a typo. Typing it during an ad break on TV, not concentrating. Agreed on the main issue we are discussing. However one of the biggest internet discussion problems is lack of clarity and consequent misunderstandings. Nobodies perfect. Make sure you don’t add to it
I have a very good picture of the hypothetical lurker I’m trying to reach: A curious young(er) person willing to learn about science, quantitative reasoning, and reasoning in general, along with the specifics about climate change.
… says the one who hasn’t shown so much as a single equation. Some “quantitative reasoning”.
For the record, I hold a degree in Electrical Engineering from a Big Ten school, which I obtained in 2-3 semesters less than the typical time required. I built it on top of a decade of intensive study of everything physics (which is how I cut that much off the time required) plus things like radio electronics, took considerable coursework outside the direct degree requirements, and have spent literally decades deepening and broadening my knowledge since graduation.
The once-used nuclear fuel pins produced so far would fit comfortably into a cavern about the size of a football field, stacked a few high. The geology is clear; nothing will externally disturb the salt domes for many tens of millions of years.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well. There is internal moisture in salt deposits, and it migrates. Whole used fuel rods generate quite a bit of heat, which attracts water. That water + heat generates pressure which could break the seal on a repository.
Salt domes are suitable for long-lived waste isotopes which generate little heat (e.g. Tc-99 and I-129). Stuff with short half-lives, like Cs-137, Sr-90 and so forth, need 500-year isolation plus heat dissipation rather than 20-million-year isolation. Salt domes are unfit for that purpose. Deep borehole, maybe. So the solution is to separate the used fuel and dispose of the actual waste products in accordance with their specific characteristics.
nigeljsays
Zebra @ 436 accuses people of being insecure, and like “little boys” and talking outside their areas of expertise, while Zebra routinely backstabs people (me included), accuses people of being crazy, runs to KM and AB seeking approval, lies about what people say, tries to lecture an electrical / mechanical engineer who clearly knows more than he does on that subject, wont ever admit when he’s wrong…..I mean no need to say more really is there?
Stick to the ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES Zebra. And another thing. This website is not your personal vehicle to teach people about science in general, its a frigging climate change discussion / information sharing forum. Got it?
nigeljsays
Al Bundy @432 “Why are there essentially no women here? Cuz they don’t care about the planet? Nope. They can’t stand the stench.” True, and who is doing most of the name calling (you crazy, ignorant, moronic, lying….) Not you or me. I have got some self control.
BPL: The original contention (by E-P) was that no deaths had occurred at Fukushima Dai. It is merely necessary to cite one to refute that contention. That was my only intent.
Re #437 David B. Benson said Killian @428 — While it might seem “self-evident”, tunnels dug in salt formations do creep shut.
Creep shut. Great. What an amazing deterent.
You could read about the geology before pronouncing ober dicta.
And you could learn to think independently.
The once-used nuclear fuel pins produced so far
So far? Are you serious? If we powered the world on only or primarily nuclear, there would be magnitudes more waste to deal with, particularly over multiple plant lifetimes strectching potentially thousands of years. But, go ahead, pretend I didn’t already raise those points before you wrote “so far.”
The geology is clear; nothing will externally disturb the salt domes for many tens of millions of years.
Then I guess 1. we’d better not need the use of those domes for a while and 2. hope that society doesn’t collapse and they get opened by people unaware the waste is there.
And none of this, even if every argument you make is sound and every argument I make against is not, changes the fact it violates principles by which we must live if we want a sustainable future. What’s the point of destroying the place we live when it is unnecessary? We don’t need nuclear. It’s not sustainable. It’s not ecologically sound. The sole argument for nclear is, “Because we can,” and that’s asinine.
Ray Ladburysays
David Benson,
NO. The salt domes are NOT completely dry. NOTHING is completely dry. They contain brine, and brine is attracted to heat sources. It is also extremely corrosive. This is a known problem with the WIPP site.
Dan H.says
Nigelj@424,
I would agree. The perceptions of the nuclear industry do not match its performance. While the reoccurrences at Chernobyl do not encourage re-civilization, the other two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bustling metropolises. The overall track record of the nuclear power generation industry exceeds all others (even including the Russian disaster). However, it still suffers from strong negative media relations, which is evident in the posts by some here. The nuclear power industry went into a coma about 40 years ago, but has seen a recent resurgence due to the demand for green energy. Someone once said that if napalm has been invented first, we would all be driving electric cars. Perhaps clearer minds will prevail.
I told you precisely why the attribution was almost certainly erroneous @423 in this thread. There was an additional incentive to mis-attribute the cause of death: to pay benefits to the family, which was noted in your cites. You lack reading comprehension and emotional detachment. Your Feels Don’t Matter. Get used to it.
Creep shut. Great. What an amazing deterent. [sic]
Meaning it will close all the gaps and entomb the deposited material in solid salt in a relatively short time. That’s a preventative. Precisely who or what are you implying must be “deterred”? Evil spirits?
And you could learn to think independently.
“Thinking” independently of facts? Is that your thing? Explains a LOT.
If we powered the world on only or primarily nuclear, there would be magnitudes more waste to deal with, particularly over multiple plant lifetimes strectching potentially thousands of years.
So, Mr. Killian, just how difficult would you rate the secure disposal of perhaps 10,000 tons/year of fission products, only a small fraction of which seriously needs to be isolated for over 500 years, compared to dumping several tens of gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? I rate the latter as at LEAST 1 million times more troublesome. ONE. MILLION.
If you don’t agree, tell us all why. Quantitatively.
And none of this, even if every argument you make is sound and every argument I make against is not, changes the fact it violates principles by which we must live if we want a sustainable future.
Appeal to unstated “principles”. Handwavium, aka BS.
What’s the point of destroying the place we live when it is unnecessary?
Wrong. We can’t survive WITH fossils. That is what your handlers are scared to death of people knowing.
The sole argument for nclear [sic] is, “Because we can,” and that’s asinine.
Completely wrong. The argument for nuclear is “because we have nothing else that can do the job, and the job needs done NOW.” Find something else that can do the job and we can revisit the question. Until then, have a nice hot cup of STFU.
Someone once said that if napalm has been invented first, we would all be driving electric cars.
“Greek fire” predates controlled nuclear fission by a couple thousand years, and the USA firebombed Tokyo and Dresden before the first watt of nuclear electricity hit the grid. Perhaps 3 people in the West have ever met someone who died from radiation in a commercial NPP accident (which would be Chernobyl).
Perhaps clearer minds will prevail.
Haven’t yet, sadly. The propaganda organizations have far too much mindshare.
zebra: go read the tutorial on the power triangle. It says everything I’ve been trying to get through to you, and it’s better-written.
If you still don’t get it after a few passes through it, I can’t help you. I can’t understand it for you, and I’m not going to waste any more time trying to teach the pig to sing.
Engineer Poet @395 & 399
“This is true, and why I consider the PHEV to be in the current “sweet spot”. It bags immediate fuel savings, provides far greater energy flexibility and does not incur the weight and other penalties of a pure BEV. We should be pushing for almost every LDV sold to be PHEV.”
Yes I get where you are coming from. Hard to argue with. It frustrates me a bit, because you still get some emissions from a PHEV, where a BEV is emissions free over time and given the right generation, but I see you are doing a practical compromise and a sort of wide scale cost / benefit analysis.The maths would have to be checked but its intuitively quite convincing.
Its similar to the power generation issue I mentioned earlier. A grid consisting entirely of solar, wind and storage is expensive because of the storage costs currently, but if the grid is about 75% solar, wind and storage, and 20% nuclear power or turbine power the $ costs are much better. This is the sweet spot, for a renewables grid anyway.
However getting back to automobiles, we are unlikely to be limited to lithium and cobalt that have supply difficulties. There are other battery technologies as below:
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/01/10-disruptive-battery-technologies-trying-to-compete-with-lithium-ion-batteries/
nigelj writes @402:
Note, I said “sweet spot right now.” It’s something we can get done by 2025 and it would have a major impact. The sweet spot is a moving target; 10 years ago it was probably a Prius-style hybrid with NiMH cells. Currently we don’t even have everything with idle-stop let alone electric launch assist, so there’s a long way to go yet.
Note that the radically reduced liquid fuel demands of an all-PHEV fleet increase the fraction which can be supplied by biofuels. It lets you push at the emissions problem from both sides, while keeping the advantage of energy stockpiled as fuel in the tank farms. The problem with wind and solar is that they have no energy storage, so are highly vulnerable to disruptions of many kinds. A big tank full of ethanol or DME or whatever is insurance.
Given the embodied energy in large battery packs and where our energy currently comes from, we might be better off going light on them for the next few years.
If the IBM battery turns out to be more than vaporware, maybe we can leap straight to all-BEVs. Otherwise it’s going to take quite a bit of time (it takes years to open new mines), and we are better off putting resources where they electrify more travel rather than less.
Everything hinges on the cost and duration of that “storage”. Large-reservoir hydro is good. PHS, not nearly so good. Batteries, between an hour and half the duration of PHS and much higher cost. 20% dispatchable isn’t nearly enough.
Our society needs 24/7 electric power, and plenty of it. You can’t “smart grid” your way out of powering water treatment and sewage and stormwater lift pumps on their own schedules. You lose pressure in your city water system and you have to implement “boil orders” because of bacterial contamination. You fail to pump sewage out as it accumulates and it backs up into basements. This always-there load is something like 50% of total electric consumption. Hydro handles it nicely until you run out of water, and too many places don’t have any water to begin with. The max electric generation of Hoover Dam is way below nameplate because there just isn’t much water in Lake Mead any more. California and Australia, ’nuff said.
Nuclear energy is the one thing that works pretty much everywhere. I have been giving this stuff a great deal of thought lately, and I may have discovered a way to build a Fermi-1 class core holder assembly, all 636 fuel channels of it, in one day with one welding machine (albeit a very specialized one). To say that this reduces the cost is perhaps the understatement of the year, but you’d probably need to commit to a production run of at least 500 to make it pay. OTOH it would take about 7700 of them to supply all the USA’s primary energy, so a minimum run of 500 seems reasonable. At 1/day 250 days/yr that would only keep you busy for 2 years.
If the design became obsolete in 20 years because of proof-testing of something like molten chloride FBRs, I wouldn’t shed a tear. I’d be glad we got a 20-year jump on the climate problem instead of waiting, because we have already waited 30 years too long.
BPL: E-P and his pals assume that everything has been worked out, so there will never be a Brown’s Ferry, a
AB: “Never again” is a truly dorky metric. It’s like terrorism. Some guys with boxcutters took down four planes and two towers, plus damaged the Pentagon. So the airlines reinforced and locked cockpit doors. Since then we’ve had flailings via shoes and undies.
The risk of failure generally declines as systems evolve. The damage resulting from failure generally declines as well. None of your examples rise to the level of damage we know will result from other systems (with Chernobyl being the exception for both damage (disputed) and insanity-of-design-brought-on-by-not-communism-but-a-totalitarian-government).
Compare options and compute risk, then draw conclusions. So, is wind safer than next-generation nuclear? How about solar? How about waste? Lots of solar cells and turbine blades are poised to enter the waste stream, eh? What sort of nuke is acceptable? What characteristics must it have?
In other words, take the advice of BPL, who recently admonished, ‘Do the math!’
_______
zebra: How much CO2 could be saved building those communities with proper orientation, solar panels, geothermal slabs, R30-50 insulation, and a local DC grid, and some small batteries…
And what would you have to give up?
AB: Drafts, discomfort arising from radiative heat loss to cold inner window and wall surfaces, noise from an inefficient HVAC fan, noise from the street, the flimsy feel of cheap and inefficient stuff, writing huge checks for energy, writing checks for repair or replacement of HVAC, windows, et al when they give up the ghost,…
And the biggie is that you’d miss out on seeing the end of the world as we know it. What a catastrophe! I’ve already bought popcorn!
I’ve said it before. Simply add energy cost into the equations banks use to qualify folks to buy products. There’d be way fewer lost opportunities from now on. Systems design determines behavior. Free will isn’t terribly important from an actuarial standpoint.
________
Kevin McKinney: To be fair, batteries are indeed a constraint–now. But the evidence suggests that that is a matter of capacity-building, not what I called a ‘hard constraint’.
AB: Yep. But the Nazis are storming the beaches today so for today we need to fight with the batteries we have. Building up capacity is a related but separate issue. Until no pure petrols are required to be built because of battery constraints EVs represent an inferior solution for the present build cycle.
And mindshare is important. If every vehicle has a battery then every mechanic and every consumer acclimates to a future without pure petrols.
_______
E=P: I consider the PHEV to be in the current “sweet spot”. It bags immediate fuel savings, provides far greater energy flexibility and does not incur the weight and other penalties of a pure BEV
AB: And batteries are likely to improve so that in 10ish years when the PHEV’s battery gets swapped a larger capacity battery can provide more range. Perhaps the barely adequate 10 mile range battery I suggested will get swapped with a more robust 20 miler like you contemplated.
_________
zebra: If the capacitor isn’t storing energy, what is it doing?
AB: Consider a ship plowing through a relatively rough sea. Two people are walking across the deck. The landlubber is having a difficult time and expending lots of energy fighting to stay upright (and not barf). The sailor rolls right on by absorbing and releasing a bit of energy in tune with the ship’s movements. It seems said sailor bought a capacitor.
Re #386 nigelj said Disposal of nuclear waste controversy. Its fair comment that you can never 100% guarantee that a storage site wont have an accidental leak, but Chernobyl was a pretty good example of a spectacular accident, and potential ecological damage, but even the most polluted 10kms exclusion zone bounced back fairly fast ecologically.
Really? Go live there. That things are alive there does not = your asinine statement above.
“The after-effects of Chernobyl on the mountain lamb industry in Norway were expected to be seen for a further 100 years…”, e.g.
Yeah, that’s lickety-fricken-split.
Again, go build a house right there in the center. Go ahead. I’m sure you’ll be fine. In the mean time, “bounced back” is not a phrase one uses to describe something still dangerously poisonous across two continents.
“In 2014, there was a huge spike in radiation levels that scientists put down to a bumper season for mushrooms. Hundreds of Norwegian reindeer intended for slaughter had to be released back into the wild…
The relatively high level of radiation permitted by Norway was a government response to radiation levels in reindeer that threatened the very existence of the Sami herders’ way of life.
When RFE/RL witnessed the testing of the Snasa herd, in 2016, the highest reading was 2,100 becquerels per kilogram. Norway’s current limit is 3,000, far higher than the EU limit of 600 becquerels per kilogram for foodstuffs.
[Thus limiting the market for the Sami.]
Kjell said the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 showed that nuclear power was still unsafe. “It can have consequences for many years, for thousands of years, and we don’t have the right to spoil this world for our children.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/the-norwegian-reindeer-impacted-by-the-chernobyl-disaster/29971904.html
So, sure, let’s just keep doing this till the entire planet is irradiated, but not “too much?” Buy a goddamned clue.
Last point: If you try to go nuclear to “save the planet” and fail – because it absolutelty cannot be done, but let’s assume it could – yet, climate gets into unstoppable feedbacks, as signs are pointing to being far more likely than many like to admit, tell me what happens to all those reactors when civilization falls?
Rhetorical question…
Re #372 David B. Benson said Killian @369 — The salt domes east of Carlsbad, NM, have been there for many tens of millions of years and will remain for many tens of millions of years more. These provide ideal storage for so-called nuclear waste.
And the idea you can seal them, maintain them, repair them and guarantee no leakage over the time frame of radioactivity is infantile reasoning given statements and evidence already posted in this and other threads.
Say something of use or resist the desire to fill the internet with nonsense.
Serious times, serious people. “Salt domes exist” is not a serious response.
Re #380 Engineer-Poet said And Killian goes off the rails @369:
There is ZERO proof, let alone evidence, you can store *anything* safely for 30k years
If you say this you are TOTALLY ignorant of the natural nuclear reactors at Oklo some 2 billion years ago. We know EXACTLY where the fission products were “stored”. They endangered NOTHING.
30k years is NOTHING, and we only need 500 years. We’ve got this.
Natural, extremely low-level radiation occurrances equal a non-natural, man-made containment system? That’s as big a lie as ever told on these pages. That’s Trumpian in its dishonesty.
How you have not been banned is beyond me…
Re #385 Al Bundy said Killian: Bullshit. There is ZERO proof, let alone evidence, you can store *anything* safely for 30k years, let alone nuclear, and certainly not for hundreds of thousands of nuclear plants built over tens of thousands of years.
AB: E-P gave a detailed plan, with short half-life stuff allowed to decay or be used for whatnot and long half-life stuff either used for fuel or scattered into the ocean or stored in designed-to-be-indestructible casks, with various options for storing said casks. It was pretty comprehensive, included examples, and gave reasons for various options.
What has that got to do with the price of tea in China? That engineers, et al., claim they can do these things proves that 30k years later they are proven correct? Are you out of your mind with this reasoning or just so poor at risk analysis you actually believe this crap? Claimed equals safe! Designed equals reality!
Genius…
It’s too bad you missed it. Probably the comment-hiding bug in RC’s system.
No, just your insipidly childish attempts to minimize logical arguments.
And my posting point stands. When tossing an insult (as opposed to a normal post) check your post carefully or you’ll look like a doofus. Even more so if you make not two but three errors in a short comment and then post a correction for only one of them.
Yes, child. Buy a clue and figure out why that typo was allowed to stand.
Al Bundy demonstrates to my satisfaction that 2020 is the Year of the Apocalypse:
I have been saying this since the era of McMansions. Mortgages approved based on income, without any consideration of the cost of utilities, are basic accounting malpractice.
Either that, or everyone expected the area to be overrun by urban blight by the time the mortgages were mostly paid down so nobody gave a damn if the buildings were falling apart and too costly to heat. Who knows, with the epidemic of Section 8 invasion turning nice areas into gang turf, they may well have been right.
Nazis from the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica, literally crawling up our beaches and flooding roads and buildings.
Very much so. Not having to visit gas stations all the time is liberating in ways you don’t understand until you experience it. And the quiet… the quiet is very pleasant.
A while back, GCC noted a tech company called Enevate promoting its silicon-dominant Li cell chemistry. Late in 2018, GCC noted LG Chem investing in Enevate… quickly followed by announcements of deals with car makers and lithium miners. This means BIG stuff is in motion.
I don’t know the form factor of these cells, but given what I’ve read about their capacity and low-temperature performance (stellar!) they would make superb replacements for the old-and-getting-tired ones in my 2013 car. FWIW, I get considerably better than 10 miles of range even on my old battery if I watch my speed. Haste literally makes waste.
And we have Al Bundy, nigelj and Engineer-Poet all in more or less a consensus. This heralds the end times, I know it.
Engineer Poet @403, I’ve always been a fan of both BEV’s and PHEV’s. I’ve probably created the impression on this website that I hugely favour BEV’s above all else. This is not really the case. I sometimes play devils advocate, and I’m a bit reactive and I have promoted BEV’s more as a counter to criticisms coming from the climate mitigation “denialists” which zero in on electric cars.
A couple of years ago I did some letter writing to politicians urging them to do more to promote both BEV’s and PHEV’s, using tax breaks or subsidies. This year our government finally introduced a scheme as below that promotes lower emissions and fuel efficient vehicles. Not because of me alone obviously, but probably because of a variety of people pushing them. Its not ideal but it has its merits:
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/100611/car-buyers-be-charged-3000-or-given-discount-8000-under-proposal-make-cleaner-cars-more
“Car buyers to be charged up to $3,000 or given a discount of up $8,000 under proposal to make cleaner cars a more ‘realistic choice’ for NZers”.
The logic for PHEVs is good, you get the best of all worlds, until the ideal battery comes along. I would be comfortable if governments gave the main incentive for PHEV’s, as long as biofuel blends were used, and BEV’s also got some lesser incentive to ensure their development improves as well. You dont want to put all the eggs in just one basket even if the case seems compelling.
In fact I’ve been mystified why more people haven’t bought hybrids, but like I said the Toyota Prius was an ugly looking thing, and people are not the smartest and probably compute that two motors could create more problems, when its unlikely to be significant and actually gives flexibility. But for these reasons its essential for the government to have financial incentive schemes.
From Zebra “How much CO2 could be saved building those communities with proper orientation, solar panels, geothermal slabs, R30-50 insulation, and a local DC grid, and some small batteries…And what would you have to give up? Some extra ugly design features, or granite countertops, or gold-plated toilets? That stuff can be retrofitted if you have the money sometime in the future, much of which you will accumulate through savings/profits on energy.”
So true. Passive solar design is great, and for the average home owner the example I’ve used is you give up on a small bit of floor area and maybe one ensuite. In return you get great energy efficiency and vastly reduced power bills. Our houses are huge these days anyway so its not a sacrifice to be a little bit smaller.
But why hasn’t passive solar design taken off? Perhaps its becasue it tends to be bespoke design for wealthy people. But I remembered this article where we have a construction company offering standard plans, which opens up a wider market. I hope they succeed.
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/moving-toward-passive-house-in-new-zealand
Although bear in mind a very decentalised local solar panel electricity grid system has limits, so you will still need a centralised electricity supply for industry etc at least until incredibly efficient and low cost batteries or similar comes along. Although I’m a bit of a battery enthusiast, the sheer scale of mineral resources required suggests there may be limits on a totally decentalised very local grid.
———————————-
Al Bundy @404, agreed although appreciate that passive solar highrise buildings are difficult to design compared to single family homes. You can do a lot with highrise buidlings with double glazing against heat loss and low emissivity glass to control heat gain, but the depth of highrise floor plans typically limits how much heat sinking you can practically do and what it can achieve, and opening windows in highrise buildings creates various problems. So on this basis you would probably still need HVAC systems, but at a lesser scale.
Of course this assumes relatively conventional floor plans, and if you have more freedom you can get a more effective passive solar highrise design going. Unfortunately we have backed our cities into a corner where floor plans are inevitably very deep to maximise building size, and so they become very dependent on artifical light, fan ventilation, and artificial heating etc. Not terribly “sustainable”.
If you’re curious about fire developments (climate change impacts in action) in Australia good rolling updates found via the (100% Publicly Funded) National Broadcaster the ABC News 24 channel https://iview.abc.net.au/show/abc-news-24/ By all reports matters are becoming even worse with Saturday being extreme again. Active fires are now in every State.
nigelj: It frustrates me a bit, because you still get some emissions from a PHEV, where a BEV is emissions free over time and given the right generation,
AB: reminds me of a Malcolm in the Middle episode. Malcolm’s dad was a former roller skating star of some sort and he gave a display of his talent. Malcolm wanted that.
His dad agreed to teach Malcolm and bought him a pair of super skates. Malcolm was thrilled until his dad put them on top of the fridge for when Malcolm was ready.
I won’t spoil any more except that Malcolm’s first skates were cardboard boxes.
BEVs are your super skates.
Capacitor 101, from Texas,
I’m not surprised that EP is running away rather than admit to being wrong, but I was giving him the chance to man up and stop being such a jerk. Anyway, here’s what Richard Fitzpatrick, who teaches physics at UT Austin, tells us.
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/315/Waves/node5.html
The equations are there, but here are the words (my bolds):
“The first and second terms on the right-hand side of the preceding expression can be recognized as the instantaneous energies stored in the capacitor and the inductor, respectively (Fitzpatrick 2008). The former energy is stored in the electric field generated when the capacitor is charged, whereas the latter is stored in the magnetic field induced when current flows through the inductor. It follows that that the quantity $ E$ in Equation (40) is the total energy of the circuit, and that this energy is a conserved quantity. The oscillations of an LC circuit can, thus, be understood as a cyclic interchange between electric energy stored in the capacitor, and magnetic energy stored in the inductor. ”
and
” In other words, any energy that the capacitor absorbs from the circuit during one half of the oscillation cycle is returned to the circuit, without loss, during the other. The same goes for the inductor. ”
So, when zebra said that capacitors store energy when used to reduce reactive power issues, he was exactly correct.
And when EP said that a capacitor “is not an energy storage device”, he was exactly wrong.
Energy storage is exactly why we put those capacitors in the circuit when there is an inductive load.
The thing is, even without the circuit theory math, any second-year student would understand what a capacitor is. It’s a device that stores energy in an electric field. It stores energy whether it is big or small, and it stores energy at whatever frequency it is being charged and discharged. It is, as they say, what it is.
If someone who claims to be a genius with expertise about electricity doesn’t understand how that fits into the reactive power situation, there’s clearly a problem.
If anyone wants to tell this Fitzpatrick fellow how wrong he is, look him up. And yes, I picked the Texas source because they have that electricity market thing going, eh.
E-P 396: Chernobyl was the ONLY one with measurable health consequences
BPL: There was at least one death at Fukushima Daiichi, and you’re discounting all the epidemiological studies which say death and health problems resulted from the radioactive releases there and at Three Mile Island. Nuke freaks generally take the attitude that radiation releases don’t matter. Epidemiologists and public health scientists do not.
E-P, #399–
As of November 2018, GF1 was turning out “approximately 5000 [model 3s] a week for several months.” So, pretty close to a half million vehicles a year–though to be fair, the Model 3 uses battery packs ranging from 55 kWh to 75 kWh, not the hypothetical 100 kWh pack cited.
However, the bottom line appears to be that:
So it’s more-or-less ‘finished for now,’ it would appear, at least with respect to battery pack production. (Progress on the solar roof continues, I think, as probably does other contemplated aspects of the GF, such as recycling capability.)
Meanwhile, Tesla has ‘completed’ GF3 in Shanghai, at least to the extent that it’s now producing vehicles: the first deliveries happened on December 30th. Impressive, given that groundbreaking was only on January 19 of last year! No word yet on production levels. (I’m sure the folks in Buffalo are a bit miffed, since the so-called GF2 there–not really comparable because its output is dedicated to the Solar Roof tile product, not EV batteries–has been slow to ramp up.)
Groundbreaking for GF4 should happen in the next couple of months near Berlin, Germany.
Simplicity: the only pathway that is consistent with all the changes we need to make.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biologically-younger-people-defy-real-162300684.html
Killian plagiarises @405:
That un-sourced quote turns out to be from Wikipedia. The actual reference turns out to be a piece in Norwegian from 2010, which does not incorporate any of the findings from the much-faster-than-expected decline of Cs-137 at Fukushima.
The same Wikipedia page claims “Of the 440,350 wild boar killed in the 2010 hunting season in Germany, approximately one thousand were contaminated with levels of radiation above the permitted limit of 600 becquerels of caesium per kilogram, of dry weight….” That’s about 0.23%. But suppose you were eating meat with the peak level of 20,000 Bq/kg, not just once but a kilo every week. What would it do to you?
Cesium passes through the body like any other alkali cation. The biological half-life of cesium is somewhere between 53 days for children and 110 days for adults. Taking the number for adults, that’s about 1/159th [ln(2)/110] per day eliminated. 20,000 Bq a week comes to 2857 Bq/d. Multiplied by 159 to get the steady-state value, you’d be carrying about 453 kBq. This is roughly 100x the normal amount of K-40.
Now, what does that come to in actual radiation exposure and health effects? Beagles dosed with Cs-137 all survived at least one year if given 1400 μCi or less. 1 Ci = 3.7e10 Bq so 1400 μCi comes to about 52 million Bq, or well over 100 times what you’d be carrying… and a beagle is just a fraction of a human’s body mass. Stanford says that 10-2000 μCi is “low hazard”; 453 kBq is 12 μCi.
Conclusion: you could eat a kilo a week of the most-radioactive meat ever found in the Chernobyl-irradiated zone and you would never notice the effects.
Why do you care, when it is harmless and always was?
Norway’s limit is just 15% of levels that are themselves too low to hurt you, so why go down another 5x? Seriously, this is JUST like telling people that a tablet of aspirin a day is dangerous because downing a whole bottle will kill you. It’s beyond stupid.
The planet was BORN radioactive. Considerably more so than today, too. The actinides we need to tap for carbon-free energy were just a small part of that, though their long half-lives make them a bigger one now.
Take your own advice. I’ll even give you a dollar.
The last time I checked the numbers on this, it turned out to be easier than I had believed possible. It’s vastly easier than with wind and PV, which require 10x as much bulk material before you get into the issue of storage systems.
Providing the starting fuel charges for 7700 Fermi-1 equivalents @1891 kg enriched U @25.6% U-235 would take about 79 metric tons of uranium apiece, a bit over 600,000 tons total. Over 15 years that’s just 40,000 tons a year, and then you don’t need any more. There’s almost 8 million tons world uranium reserves and 4 billion tons of uranium in the oceans; we can do that. Heck, we’ve got a pile of slightly depleted uranium, still stored as UF6, that we could throw straight into centrifuge plants and get quite a bit of enriched U out. No mining needed at all for that, just electricity and spare centrifuge time. Then there’s all the uranium sitting around in spent fuel, at 0.8-1% U-235, going literally to waste.
The only reason we’d need that much uranium is that breeding in FBRs couldn’t keep up with the rate of new reactor starts on a 15-year decarbonization schedule. At a 1.2 breeding ratio your fuel supply increases at about 2% per year. If you dare to use liquid thorium you can get the doubling time down to maybe 2 years, but the proliferation genie rears its ugly head.
They give you a saving throw, because you can do things like generate large amounts of H2S and burn it in the stratosphere. Sulfate clouds do a pretty nice job of knocking temperatures AND atmospheric CO2 levels down. I expect this to happen by 2030, driven by increasingly-dire situations in places like Australia.
Most are designed to air-cool for decay heat, so the answer for the first century or so is “not much”. About 90% of the Cs-137 and 91% of the Sr-90 would decay over this time. If they did start to go (or people released stuff by tampering) people who entered the reactor building would very likely sicken or die, but you wouldn’t notice the difference elsewhere due to the resurgence of diseases we now control with vaccines and antibiotics. And of course, the very first thing that would happen is a massive dieoff as water systems failed and people got dysentery, followed by mass starvation since the food networks would shut down. That’s more likely the more unreliable energy gets. Nuclear power wouldn’t even be a footnote if that started happening.
Things would keep going the longest where nuclear plants kept the grid up. If you would read “Lucifer’s Hammer” you’d realize that they’d be among the biggest redoubts of civilization.
@406:
The idea that a concrete-sealed shaft going into deposits which have not even been disturbed by groundwater for tens of millions of years is going to need “maintenance” or “repair” is anti-reasoning.
@407:
You never looked it up. Fissioning even 0.003% of uranium creates a significant radiation field and fission products. Those FPs didn’t go anywhere; they sat where they were formed. The natural tendency of most FP-range elements to bind to rock prevents them from getting very far under any circumstances. The exceptions like Kr-86 and I-129 are harmless once diluted.
Aside from you being totally backwards on the facts, your choice of adjectives is very revealing.
nigelj writes @410:
You think so? Looks pretty standard for a hatchback to me. As a kiwi I doubt you’ve ever seen a Pontiac Aztec but the Prius looks like an Aztec that never grew to full height. The Aztec had its fans. I think the thing people hate about the Prius is that it has become a political statement and people react to the self-righteousness. Nobody reacts that way to my Fusion Energi, people think it’s cool.
@411:
Put bluntly, those features are not valued on the market. If a bank can’t resell a property if the owner defaults on the mortgage, they won’t lend money (or a lot less money than it costs to build). That’s why it’s mostly rich people who build them; it takes lenders out of the equation.
There’s also the building trades to consider. You can make a much stronger, better-insulated wall in a factory than you can on a building site and just truck it in. However, the building trades have influence on building and code inspectors and may collude to not let you do that so they get their cut. If you can’t get your plans for your super-insulated but unconventional construction approved, you can’t build.
And I see zebra @414 has stumbled across a description of what’s known as a “tank circuit”. Hint, lil’ troll: that’s the sort of thing you put in a harmonic filter, but it’s not what your power-factor correction caps do. Very similar part, different function.
If you are capable of doing trigonometry, consider the energy stored in a power-factor correction capacitor in a 3-phase system. To make it simple, let’s make this 3 separate capacitors each one connected phase-to-ground (what’s called a “Y” connection). For a peak voltage of V, the instantaneous energy stored in the reference-phase capacitor is ½C(V sin ωt)². There are 3 lines, each one differing in phase from the other 2 by ±2π/3 radians (120 degrees).
Now sum up ½C V² (sin²(ωt) + sin²(ωt – 2π/3) + sin²(ωt – 4π/3)). (If you can, which I suspect you cannot; you show every sign of being innumerate.)
Killian @406 — Salt domes are self-sealing. Etc.
You ought to learn the relevant geology before commenting. Not to mention the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Barton Paul Levenson @417 — I encourage you to read the links towards the end of
http://bravenewclimate.proboards.com/thread/312/wade-allisons-radiation-critique
to understand why radiation epidemiologists have thoroughly muddled matters, and, indeed, many continue to do so; bad statistical methods.
BPL wrote @415:
There was one death attributed to radiation. However, it was not in one of the 3 workers who waded through the plant basements without protective gear and got beta burns on their feet and lower legs, taking by far the highest dose of anyone exposed. Neither was it from acute radiation sickness (ARS) or leukemia, by far the most common radiation-induced cancers. It was lung cancer, as reported by both the BBC and by Time.
The great majority of lung cancers are caused by chemotoxic agents. Know what string you will find in neither article? Search for “smok”; you won’t find it. And Japan is a country of smokers. The overwhelming likelihood is that the cancer came from tobacco.
The only way to pin a lung cancer on the meltdowns would be to find an inhaled “hot particle” where the tumor originated. It wouldn’t be at all hard; you just need a gamma camera. There’s been no mention of this, and I looked. Verdict: innocent.
The same populations suffered acute stress due to radiophobia. That’s called a “confounding effect”.
Epidemiologists and public health scientists have spent decades examining people who live in areas of natural high radiation, expecting to find harm to health… and finding none, or even the opposite. Yet they have not admitted that high natural radiation, like at Mansur and Kerala and Guarapari and even Denver, is harmless.
All your so-called “nuke freaks” do is declare that there’s no difference between natural and man-made radiation, and demand honesty from our so-called “experts”.
Killian @405
“Re #386 nigelj said Disposal of nuclear waste controversy. Its fair comment that you can never 100% guarantee that a storage site wont have an accidental leak, but Chernobyl was a pretty good example of a spectacular accident, and potential ecological damage, but even the most polluted 10kms exclusion zone bounced back fairly fast ecologically.”
“Really? Go live there. That things are alive there does not = your asinine statement above.”
I would live there is radiation levels are reasonably low, don’t know what they are currently. Remember we are exposed to all sorts of damaging radiation even sunlight. Here’s a concise account of conditions close to the explosion, so within the 10kms exclusion zone:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/goldenstein2/
While the Chernobyl dead zone is neither desolate nor cluttered with freakishly mutated animals, its reality over the past 25 years has tasted bits of these extremes. For example, in the Exclusion Zone that received 10-20 Gy, 90% of the trees died by 1997. [1] This 10 km2 region was coined “the red forest” due to the overwhelming presence of orange colored pine tree needles. Krivolutsky et al. found that diversity of invertebrate species in heavily contaminated areas did not return to normal levels until 1996. [2] And while you’ll be hard pressed to find two headed rabbits frolicking near ground zero, numerous morphological changes in trees have been documented ranging from growth of secondary shoots and intense needle growth to feature specific gigantism (i.e. needles) and dwarfism (i.e. trunks). Studies conduced by Shevchenko et al. (1992) and Pomerantseva et al. (1997) showed that embryo fatality rates were elevated when mating captured mice that were exposed to chronic radiation with laboratory female mice. [3,4] These rates decreased after a period of two weeks. In addition 2 of 122 captured mice were found to be sterile.
“The after-effects of Chernobyl on the mountain lamb industry in Norway were expected to be seen for a further 100 years…”, e.g….Yeah, that’s lickety-fricken-split…..Again, go build a house right there in the center. Go ahead. I’m sure you’ll be fine. In the mean time, “bounced back” is not a phrase one uses to describe something still dangerously poisonous across two continents.”
While this is a horrible problem for reindeer and indigenous communities, it’s stretching things to talk about problems with Reindeer to things being “dangerously poisonous across two continents”. Remember Chernobyl was about 30 years ago now, time for problems to be showing up on mass. Apart from the expected thyroid cancers there’s no increase in cancer rates across Europe and the UK. Of course its hard to tease out something like this with so many variables, but a huge problem would become very obvious. There’s probably some increased mortality, but it looks like nothing very much.
I was just out of my teens when Chernobyl exploded, and this made me sceptical of nuclear power for a long time. Perhaps stuff imprints on young minds. Maybe with you and BPL. Obviously we still have to be very careful with nuclear power, but I’m less sceptical now. Credible studies show nuclear power kills far fewer people per megawatt hour than fossil fuels generation, and slightly fewer than wind and solar power. A lot of people die from falls erecting this stuff.
“Last point: If you try to go nuclear to “save the planet” and fail – because it absolutelty cannot be done, but let’s assume it could – yet, climate gets into unstoppable feedbacks, as signs are pointing to being far more likely than many like to admit, tell me what happens to all those reactors when civilization falls?”
Can’t see why it cant be done. You haven’t explained. FWIW, I see nuclear power as part of the generation mix. We have billions of tons of uranium and what point is there in just not using it?
Uranium does not seem to have many applications beyond nuclear power:
https://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/92/uranium
Let’s say civilisation falls ( and its possible). This process won’t happen overnight, or the probability of this is so small as to be inconsequential. Some sort of total collapse of the socio-economic system will definitely be a decades to centuries long process. Reactors will be turned off, material stored away, people wont be falling dead at their posts from climate change.
If civilisation falls to the extent everyone dies, or most people die, like a Mad Max / Steven King scenario (incredibly unlikely imho) then there would be a problem ecologically. Nuclear waste storage sites might eventually break down and leak with nobody to fix the problem. and this would not be good for what animal and plant life is left on the planet in the surrounding area. However the Chernobyl experience suggests even this would not he a huge issue.Remember there’s a lot of natural background radiation anyway.
When a reactor explodes there’s serious damage from acute exposure, but that is for a short time. There is also an issue longer term with thyroid cancers, but in general the long lasting low level radiation that spreads far and wide looks like its not as dangerous as once thought. There are valid criticisms of the linear no threshold model, easily googled. Imo there’s probably some danger there but not as much as this model predicts, or enough to suggest nuclear power should be banned. I do admit I’m far from having any in depth knowledge on this, so don’t take my word for it. Do some reading yourself and with an open mind.
Zebra @404 says “And when EP said that a capacitor “is not an energy storage device”, he was exactly wrong.”
I don’t recall EP ever saying that. Or he is being quoted out of context.
The message I get from EPs posts is he says capacitors are sometimes used for different things other than acting purely as an energy store , and he has quoted the examples of reactive power and other things. Its common knowledge that the basic principle of a capacitor is it store energy, and everything else flows from that principle, including many other functions. Even I get that and I’m not qualified in electronics. Some examples of the many functions of capacitors:
https://electronics.fandom.com/wiki/Capacitor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_capacitors
This Zebra / EP thing sounds like crossed communications.
As a side issue, Zebra apparently wants to teach people about ‘science’ in a sort of back and forwards teacher pupil relationship. Nobody in their right mind is going to subject themselves to that in public on the internet and be humiliated, so either Zebra is naieve, or is playing cat and mouse. Any teaching has has to be more of a debate and discussion amongst equals, or a tutorial like BPL sometimes does.
nigelj writes @425:
Note: The #404 I see isn’t from zebra, it’s from Al Bundy. Could you perhaps mean @414?
zebra is operating at a middle-school intellectual level. He can neither calculate actual energy storage, nor distinguish “is not being used as an energy-storage element” from “is not an energy-storage element” (even when the maximum energy storage is less than a joule). He lacks both the intellectual and verbal abilities required to grasp the difference.
Nope. It’s failed communications across a 40-plus point IQ gap. Such is to be expected.
I was a teenager once. I have been where zebra was, and I am glad that there was no Internet at the time to immortalize all the idiotic things I declared. He is not so lucky. Time has yet to say if he will yet repent and learn.
Cross-posted from AGU thread:
Re #2 Richard Pauli said
I’m going to say this again because it bears saying *because* I feel I have something to add to the conversation that is unique and important.
I said ten years ago sensitivity *had* to be greater than thought. It was obvious. Look at the data, look at the models, look at the projections, then look at side (real world observations): One of these was not like the other. Ergo, something was wrong, and it could not be Nature.
The 1.5 report, the talk of higher sensitivities in the most recent climate models/model updates, and Mann’s presentation validate what I have been saying for a decade.
Now, please start listening on the solution side.
Re #421 David B. Benson said Killian @406 — Salt domes are self-sealing. Etc.
You ought to learn the relevant geology before commenting.
It is self evident that digging a massive cavern into a salt dome… repeatedly… equals not nearly fucking “self-sealed.” Egnineers are some of the most virulent climate denialists for the very reason they think their engineering skills to be unquestionable. They’re questionable.
I don’t give a damn that someone claims they can store the waste away till it’s no longer radioactive because it is something that simply cannot be proven in any way, or form because you don’t have 30k years to do the goddamned experiment.
This is an issue of risk, and you are simply refusing to accept that. Denial is dangerous, and foolish.
Not to mention the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Pilot.
Don’t respond if you can’t address the issues as raised.
And, so, once again validation comes as science catches up to systems analysis and appropriate risk analysis.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/03/we-are-seeing-the-very-worst-of-our-scientific-predictions-come-to-pass-in-these-bushfires
BPL: There was at least one death at Fukushima Daiichi, and
AB: you’ve gone anecdotal, which is the opposite of science. How many deaths were avoided by Fukushima before it was destroyed?
E-P: All your so-called “nuke freaks” do is declare that there’s no difference between natural and man-made radiation, and
AB: There is a difference, as you inferred in the same comment. Natural radiation tends to be well-mixed, so biological systems do what they’ve done for millions to billions of years. Apoptosis and whatever, and life goes on. Your “dump nuclear waste in the ocean (but sanely)” concept uses that reality to solve the waste problem. But, as you said, a hot particle lodged in one’s lung can cause cancer. But that’s anecdotal and local, as in: People die from sharing space with vehicles. Ergo, lets ban transportation.
Yeah, nukes can’t get to a guaranteed zero harm ever for the rest of the universe’s life. So? The question, as you rightly say, is which path causes the most benefit with the least harm?
nigelj: Uranium does not seem to have many applications beyond nuclear power
AB: Armor-piercing ammunition is one. It is imperative that we build more nukes so we can slaughter brown people more efficiently with depleted uranium shells.
nigelj: Any teaching has has to be more of a debate and discussion amongst equals,
AB: goals are grand but testosterone is all about domination. I have treated BPL, Killian, E-P, and certainly others quite poorly in a laughably stupid attempt to avoid your goal. Hopefully I’m not as young, dumb, and full of cum as I used to be. Hopefully all of us are attempting to incorporate your wisdom into our psyches.
Why are there essentially no women here? Cuz they don’t care about the planet? Nope. They can’t stand the stench.
Al Bundy writes @431:
If that was true, there wouldn’t be such things as uranium ores.
Different concentration doesn’t make it different stuff. Natural radium precipitates out in pipe scale in oil and gas production, for example. There’s no reason in principle that natural processes couldn’t do the same thing, producing hot-particle parent material.
The great thing about this stuff is that it decays. Instead of hanging around for aeons like asbestos fibers in soil, radium disappears all by itself. Cesium and strontium, even more so.
Which is pretty much the only way anyone could have gotten lung cancer from the Fukushima meltdowns, and nobody has presented any evidence for it. Geological radon correlates negatively with lung cancer rates, at least by zip code. But even some kinds of hot particles seem to be only minor risks. The UPPU group almost all lived long, healthy lives despite inhaling significant amounts of plutonium.
So ironic that the measurable harm from burning more fossil fuels is ignored, while the one fatality attributed to Fukushima is almost certainly bogus.
#432, AB–
You may be right. (I’ve been known to wonder myself just who we think we’re prescribing to; who is it that eagerly awaits each of our pearls of wisdom?)
OTOH, we don’t actually know how many female participants we may have; remember the Bronte sisters, AKA “Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.” Simpler, sometimes, to just sidestep the misogyny?
EP,
You are just embarrassing yourself, and sounding desperate and silly. You might actually earn some respect if you just said “it’s been a while since I took physics and circuits, and I guess I got that wrong.”
I don’t think anyone doubts Prof Fitzpatrick’s nicely written textbook… very concise and clear description of the physics of what capacitors do in circuits with inductors. And I don’t know why you would expect otherwise, since you offer no description at all.
It may be that your psychology/personality doesn’t allow you to admit error, but it really is a productive and liberating process. Making mistakes is the best way to learn stuff, in my experience.
#434 Kevin McKinney,
“who we’re prescribing to”
I have a very good picture of the hypothetical lurker I’m trying to reach: A curious young(er) person willing to learn about science, quantitative reasoning, and reasoning in general, along with the specifics about climate change.
I would like them to see what a real science/engineering discussion, following the guidelines about warrants in that excellent “Just the Facts” post, is like, so they can argue effectively in other venues.
The problem is, we will never know if such a person exists, because they will never get a chance to let their presence be known, because of all the column-inch addicted people who just can’t shut up.
People who have confidence in themselves don’t need to drown out everyone else; many people here participate only when they feel they can contribute in a specific area of expertise. But then, there are those who feel they can replace quality with quantity.
So, yes, women with the background to comment on much of this stuff probably aren’t interested in trying to make themselves heard in a room full of insecure little boys… they’ve been doing that all their lives.
Killian @428 — While it might seem “self-evident”, tunnels dug in salt formations do creep shut. You could read about the geology before pronouncing ober dicta.
The once-used nuclear fuel pins produced so far would fit comfortably into a cavern about the size of a football field, stacked a few high. The geology is clear; nothing will externally disturb the salt domes for many tens of millions of years. Again, you could go read the geology of that region.
Engineer Poet @426, yes it was a typo. Typing it during an ad break on TV, not concentrating. Agreed on the main issue we are discussing. However one of the biggest internet discussion problems is lack of clarity and consequent misunderstandings. Nobodies perfect. Make sure you don’t add to it
zebra beclowns himself @436:
… says the one who hasn’t shown so much as a single equation. Some “quantitative reasoning”.
For the record, I hold a degree in Electrical Engineering from a Big Ten school, which I obtained in 2-3 semesters less than the typical time required. I built it on top of a decade of intensive study of everything physics (which is how I cut that much off the time required) plus things like radio electronics, took considerable coursework outside the direct degree requirements, and have spent literally decades deepening and broadening my knowledge since graduation.
What have YOU got?
DBB writes @437:
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work so well. There is internal moisture in salt deposits, and it migrates. Whole used fuel rods generate quite a bit of heat, which attracts water. That water + heat generates pressure which could break the seal on a repository.
Salt domes are suitable for long-lived waste isotopes which generate little heat (e.g. Tc-99 and I-129). Stuff with short half-lives, like Cs-137, Sr-90 and so forth, need 500-year isolation plus heat dissipation rather than 20-million-year isolation. Salt domes are unfit for that purpose. Deep borehole, maybe. So the solution is to separate the used fuel and dispose of the actual waste products in accordance with their specific characteristics.
Zebra @ 436 accuses people of being insecure, and like “little boys” and talking outside their areas of expertise, while Zebra routinely backstabs people (me included), accuses people of being crazy, runs to KM and AB seeking approval, lies about what people say, tries to lecture an electrical / mechanical engineer who clearly knows more than he does on that subject, wont ever admit when he’s wrong…..I mean no need to say more really is there?
Stick to the ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES Zebra. And another thing. This website is not your personal vehicle to teach people about science in general, its a frigging climate change discussion / information sharing forum. Got it?
Al Bundy @432 “Why are there essentially no women here? Cuz they don’t care about the planet? Nope. They can’t stand the stench.” True, and who is doing most of the name calling (you crazy, ignorant, moronic, lying….) Not you or me. I have got some self control.
AB 430: you’ve gone anecdotal
BPL: The original contention (by E-P) was that no deaths had occurred at Fukushima Dai. It is merely necessary to cite one to refute that contention. That was my only intent.
E-P 433: the one fatality attributed to Fukushima is almost certainly bogus.
BPL: Now you’re just lying.
https://time.com/5388178/japan-first-fukushima-radiation-death/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties
Re #437 David B. Benson said Killian @428 — While it might seem “self-evident”, tunnels dug in salt formations do creep shut.
Creep shut. Great. What an amazing deterent.
You could read about the geology before pronouncing ober dicta.
And you could learn to think independently.
The once-used nuclear fuel pins produced so far
So far? Are you serious? If we powered the world on only or primarily nuclear, there would be magnitudes more waste to deal with, particularly over multiple plant lifetimes strectching potentially thousands of years. But, go ahead, pretend I didn’t already raise those points before you wrote “so far.”
The geology is clear; nothing will externally disturb the salt domes for many tens of millions of years.
Then I guess 1. we’d better not need the use of those domes for a while and 2. hope that society doesn’t collapse and they get opened by people unaware the waste is there.
And none of this, even if every argument you make is sound and every argument I make against is not, changes the fact it violates principles by which we must live if we want a sustainable future. What’s the point of destroying the place we live when it is unnecessary? We don’t need nuclear. It’s not sustainable. It’s not ecologically sound. The sole argument for nclear is, “Because we can,” and that’s asinine.
David Benson,
NO. The salt domes are NOT completely dry. NOTHING is completely dry. They contain brine, and brine is attracted to heat sources. It is also extremely corrosive. This is a known problem with the WIPP site.
Nigelj@424,
I would agree. The perceptions of the nuclear industry do not match its performance. While the reoccurrences at Chernobyl do not encourage re-civilization, the other two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are bustling metropolises. The overall track record of the nuclear power generation industry exceeds all others (even including the Russian disaster). However, it still suffers from strong negative media relations, which is evident in the posts by some here. The nuclear power industry went into a coma about 40 years ago, but has seen a recent resurgence due to the demand for green energy. Someone once said that if napalm has been invented first, we would all be driving electric cars. Perhaps clearer minds will prevail.
BPL wrote @444:
I told you precisely why the attribution was almost certainly erroneous @423 in this thread. There was an additional incentive to mis-attribute the cause of death: to pay benefits to the family, which was noted in your cites. You lack reading comprehension and emotional detachment. Your Feels Don’t Matter. Get used to it.
Killian emotes again @445:
Meaning it will close all the gaps and entomb the deposited material in solid salt in a relatively short time. That’s a preventative. Precisely who or what are you implying must be “deterred”? Evil spirits?
“Thinking” independently of facts? Is that your thing? Explains a LOT.
So, Mr. Killian, just how difficult would you rate the secure disposal of perhaps 10,000 tons/year of fission products, only a small fraction of which seriously needs to be isolated for over 500 years, compared to dumping several tens of gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year? I rate the latter as at LEAST 1 million times more troublesome. ONE. MILLION.
If you don’t agree, tell us all why. Quantitatively.
Appeal to unstated “principles”. Handwavium, aka BS.
Paranoid ideations. The evacuation order for Futaba is being partially lifted, and it will eventually be total. The worst nuclear accident ever has not “destroyed” anything beyond the plant itself.
Wrong. We can’t survive WITH fossils. That is what your handlers are scared to death of people knowing.
Completely wrong. The argument for nuclear is “because we have nothing else that can do the job, and the job needs done NOW.” Find something else that can do the job and we can revisit the question. Until then, have a nice hot cup of STFU.
Dan H. writes @447:
“Greek fire” predates controlled nuclear fission by a couple thousand years, and the USA firebombed Tokyo and Dresden before the first watt of nuclear electricity hit the grid. Perhaps 3 people in the West have ever met someone who died from radiation in a commercial NPP accident (which would be Chernobyl).
Haven’t yet, sadly. The propaganda organizations have far too much mindshare.