RE: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Chris de Morsella
Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
LizR
Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
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ghi...@gmail.com
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
LizR
with thorium fuel?
On 19/02/2014, ghi...@gmail.com <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
>>
>> Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/
>> liter
>>
>> 13, 2014: *Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater* -- [Tepco]
LizR
>
> the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side.
>
ghi...@gmail.com
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 10:50:19 PM UTC, Liz R wrote:
Would this have happeed if Japan had been using subcritical reactors
with thorium fuel?
Edgar L. Owen
ghi...@gmail.com
On Tuesday, February 18, 2014 11:33:19 PM UTC, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
Ghibbsa,I tend to agree, if nuclear reactors are just built to the high safety standards they need to be. Quite obviously they should be built to automatically shut down safely, rather than having melt downs.In general the aggregate risks of nuclear power are less than comparable amounts of other energy sources and there is enough of it to last ~250 years.2. Also I think the solution to nuclear waste is pretty simple. One just encases it in lead within cement and drops it into oceanic subduction zones where it will be drawn down into the mantle, melted, dissolved and massively diluted.3. Remember Nagasaki and Hiroshima were nuked not that long ago and yet people now live there quite happily and
meekerdb
it could not have happened. The thorium salt is a solid at room temperature and is not
water soluble.
Brent
spudb...@aol.com
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ghi...@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become.
on
>>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath.
Dude – even the Report of 2005 (by the IAEA, WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) put the Chernobyl ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one hundred times bigger than the 40 deaths you believe are attributable to this atomic disaster. The 4000 figure has been challenged and criticized as being far too low and that over the decades the extra cancer deaths ultimately caused by this disaster have been far higher. For example: “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of sciences; authored by Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you are ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered by this disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people died from radiation induced cancers.
To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is an act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.
There have been revolutions in station design since plants like fukishima were built, and that disaster isn't shaping up to the dire predictions either.
What most of all this derives out of, are long standing questions about the level of risk associated with exposure to radiation at low doses up to somewhere below the 200 mark. There's no firm evidence of substantial risk. There's plenty of evidence for genetic protection. There's a whole plethora of statistics we could reasonably expect if low dose exposure was anything like the risk that still sits there in the model. Airline cabin crew should have higher frequency cancer for all that time so near space for one example. They don't.
Conversely there are some major natural radiation hotspots in the world. You'd expect those areas to produce more cancer and radiation poisoning related disease. But the opposite is true. People exposed to dramatically higher doses of radiation (inside the low dosage spectrum), actually become lower risks. There seems to be a triggerable genetic response when levels increase.
I'm over-compensating in the other direction a bit here. Not because I love the bomb, but if you only knew the power of the dark side.
--
Craig Weinberg
On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 12:45:19 PM UTC-5, cdemorsella wrote:
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ghi...@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become.
on
>>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath.
Dude – even the Report of 2005 (by the IAEA, WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) put the Chernobyl ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one hundred times bigger than the 40 deaths you believe are attributable to this atomic disaster. The 4000 figure has been challenged and criticized as being far too low and that over the decades the extra cancer deaths ultimately caused by this disaster have been far higher. For example: “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of sciences; authored by Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you are ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered by this disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people died from radiation induced cancers.
To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is an act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.
There's also the problems of uranium mining, milling, transportation, and waste storage.
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/uranium-mining-report.pdf
"ISL uranium mining, alone and in concert with other resource extraction activities,
contaminates groundwater. ISL operations in the United States have repeatedly failed to
restore aquifers to a pre-mining state, often leaving them unusable for any alternative future
use."
ghi...@gmail.com
On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 5:45:19 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of ghi...@gmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2014 2:02 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 3:01:26 PM UTC, cdemorsella wrote:Ground water contamination levels at the sampled well site of 54,000Bq/ liter
NHK, Feb. 13, 2014: Record cesium level in Fukushima plant groundwater — [Tepco] says water samples taken from a newly-dug well contained the highest levels of radioactive cesium detected so far in groundwater at the site [...] the record levels suggest that the leakage point could be near the well. [...] 600 times the government standard for radioactive wastewater that can be released into the sea. It is more than 30,000 times the level of cesium 137 found in water samples taken from another observation well to the north last week. [...] [Tepco has] yet to determine where the leak originates.
In general the dangers arsing from nuclear fission power are grossly exaggerated. It's far and away the best answer to greenhouse emissions, that is also realistic. If we'd been building nuclear power stations the fracking locomotive wouldn't be the unstoppable force that it has become.
on
>>Many ways the dangers are blown out of proportion.. Even catastrophic meltdown that blow the roof off and spread the love like Chernobyl, do not result in a tiny fraction of the disasters that the standard models predict. Ten's of thousands were predicted to die. In the end, just 40 deaths from Chernobyl, and most of those the people sent in to get control in the aftermath.
Dude – even the Report of 2005 (by the IAEA, WHO, and UNDP, agencies that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as hostile to the advancement of nuclear power) put the Chernobyl ultimate death toll at 4000 – a figure that is one hundred times bigger than the 40 deaths you believe are attributable to this atomic disaster. The 4000 figure has been challenged and criticized as being far too low and that over the decades the extra cancer deaths ultimately caused by this disaster have been far higher. For example: “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment” published by the New York Academy of sciences; authored by Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus; put the extra cancer deaths attributable to the Chernobyl disaster at almost one million – a figure that is 25,000 times greater than the 40 deaths you seem to believe caps the death toll for Chernobyl. I believe you are ignoring many thousands of horrible cancer deaths that were triggered by this disaster; and even the IAEA agrees that many thousands of people died from radiation induced cancers.
To claim that only 40 people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is an act of spreading propaganda; it is un-scientific.
LizR
They may never have provided any electricity in the first place. I have read, at length, some nuclear engineering papers, concerning accelerator driven reactors, subcritical thorium, and bluntly, they are like fusion reactors, they don't exist. There is research in a couple of places like the UK and Belgium, maybe India and China, but its been over-sold, as we don't have solid working models to evaluate. The closest working reactors would be Canadian CANDU reactors.
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 7:15 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 20 February 2014 00:20, <spudb...@aol.com> wrote:
They may never have provided any electricity in the first place. I have read, at length, some nuclear engineering papers, concerning accelerator driven reactors, subcritical thorium, and bluntly, they are like fusion reactors, they don't exist. There is research in a couple of places like the UK and Belgium, maybe India and China, but its been over-sold, as we don't have solid working models to evaluate. The closest working reactors would be Canadian CANDU reactors.
Taking this attitude, we would never have discovered powered flying machines, or invented agriculture. Assuming the things would work in theory, as far as we know, then we need to at least build a prototype before deciding it can't be done.
The MSRE & MSBR experimental molten salt reactors operated at Oak Ridge for almost ten years. These were LFTR reactor types, and as far as I know the only LFTR reactors ever actually built. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
John Clark
> Would this have happened if Japan had been using subcritical reactors with thorium fuel?
If it were a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) and the cowardly operators saw the Tsunami coming and ran for the hills and completely abandoned the plant then the liquid Thorium fuel (Thorium dissolved in un-corrosive molten Fluoride salts) would get hot, and that would expand the liquid, and that would cause the fuel to get less dense, and that would cause the nuclear reaction to slow down. Then a freeze plug at the bottom of the reactor would melt and the liquid fuel would drain out by gravity (no pumps would be needed) into a holding tank and the reaction would stop completely and the reactor would enter a safe mode. All this is assuming that the operators were completely incompetent and never lifted a finger to help the situation.
And because the liquid Fluoride salt is not under pressure as water is in the Fukushima plant leaks would be far less likely and much less catastrophic even if they did occur.
spudb...@aol.com
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 21, 2014 2:52 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Chris de Morsella
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
meekerdb
Brent
meekerdb
I am in agreement but I am guessing humankind does not yet possess a working LTFR that could power a large city. Nor, is a MSR (molten salt reactor) to accomplish the goodies we all need, abundant and comparatively safe. Like fusion, like solar, it needs development, and beyond a few bits of work here and there, little is happening.
There are a few companies pursuing development of LFTRs. One is proposing to do the actual development in Brazil to avoid the anti-nuclear political activists in the U.S.
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb
On 2/21/2014 2:27 PM, spudb...@aol.com wrote:
I am in agreement but I am guessing humankind does not yet possess a working LTFR that could power a large city. Nor, is a MSR (molten salt reactor) to accomplish the goodies we all need, abundant and comparatively safe. Like fusion, like solar, it needs development, and beyond a few bits of work here and there, little is happening.
>>Human kind did possess a LFTR for a few years at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. It was a research reactor and was not used to produce electrical power. It was rejected as the powerplant for nuclear submarines because the Oak Ridge director had Adm Rickover thrown out of the lab for interfering with his directives. Rickover, who was famously arrogant, contracted with Westinghouse to build a powerplant using their technology. And that's how the world ended up with uranium fission power reactors.
Thanks for the interesting back story on the Oak Ridge LFTR program; the why of how that program got de-funded and shut down was always a little murky.
Chris
>>There are a few companies pursuing development of LFTRs. One is proposing to do the actual development in Brazil to avoid the anti-nuclear political activists in the U.S.
There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water. The sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies… the cost overruns in nuclear facilities are legendary. The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile, especially once one factors in the ultimate costs of long term (and perhaps absurdly long term) waste sequestration.
Additionally, when one looks at the global recoverable uranium-235 reserve picture – not the rosy scenario in the red book (the quoted source for these figures and which has been shown to be unrealistically optimistic) – it becomes clear that there is no future for single pass through reactors, and that the world is nearing peak recoverable uranium.
Naturally this is different for breeder types, such as LFTR (which IMO is the best option of all the breeder proposals, both for the relative abundance of the needed resources and for the inherent passive safety features – as compared to the hellish example of what can go wrong with say a Mark II type reactor (Fukushima and all across this country as well Mark II are ubiquitous bad designs (at the time of their release by GE I recall that two of the chief engineers on the design team resigned in protest because their reservations about this design were ignored).
However realistically – the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least. Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online. By that time – they will need to compete with solar PV and the per unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades. If one projects the future per unit cost for PV based on extrapolating current long established trend lines the economics for LFTR seem questionable – IMO.
Chris
Brent
John Clark
> There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water.
>the sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies
> the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least. Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online.
> Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online. By that time – they will need to compete with solar PV and the per unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades.
> The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile
LizR
John Mikes
Solar cells are getting cheaper and easier to use (e.g. flexible plastic ones). It should be possible to stick them anywhere you want, e.g. on buildings or cars. This would mean at least some solar power could be harvested using existing infrastructure. As usual the technology is there, or almost there, but this needs political or commercial will to achieve.Personally I'd like to see a solar farm that uses the energy it receives from the Sun to power machinery that sucks CO2 and water from the air and turns them into petrol. (Then you really could run a 747 on solar power :)
LizR
Liz, I will sign up for your 101 chemistry class.
CO2 + 2H2O make CH4 PLUS 2 oxygen molecules. Use a multiple of such to make your 'petrol' (lesser ratio of H to C and even absorbing a little portion of the O2) yet the surplus of O2 is still generated.What I am driving at are CH3-CH2...CH2.CH3 types with occasional -OH ( -CO-?) groups included). The Germans applied a better format in WWI (!) for their 'Watergas' fuel, stopping at CO and H2 - (still worrying about the excessive O2).Nitrogen cann catalytically 'eat up' some of it into nitrous oxides etc. (from the air again) but the proportions are still odd. Not that I would call 'impossible'.Believe me, since Woehler (1828) who synthesized urea (NH2-CO-NH2) and the WWII (!) German rush for butadien-based synth. rubbers, everything was given a thought.Your idea is excellent, it will reap huge appreciation from Brent (who is also FOR solar).
I would be, too, had I better news of the delicacy, endurance and maintenance of the soalr panels - and the hazard of occasional wind-blown coverage (abrasions, breaks included). Of course not as in-flight 474s.
Russell Standish
> On 25 February 2014 12:20, John Mikes <jam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Liz, I will sign up for your 101 chemistry class.
> >
>
> Sadly not my strong point, as I'm sure you realise. I just know that car
> exhausts produce CO2 and water vapour (plus a bit of lead etc) so I'm
> guessing one can in theory reconstitute these substances back into petrol,
> using a suitable amount of energy, catalysts etc. (If plants can do it, I
> figure we should be able to. Surely human ingenuity can match plants' ?!
> Maybe not...)
efficiency. Plants are only about 10% efficient, IIRC, and the best
artificial photosynthetic cell to date is only about half that.
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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Chris de Morsella
> There are many reasons why nuclear power is dead in the water.
>>I think the main reason is that reactors got too big too fast and their design has been frozen for nearly half a century. They found a nuclear reactor design that worked well in submarines and figured if they just scaled it up a few hundred times it would work well in commercial power plants too, but it didn't work out quite that way. Freeman Dyson said the real problem is that reactor design isn't fun anymore because nobody is allowed to build even a small one if it is significantly (or even slightly) different from what has already been built, so the most creative people go into areas other than nuclear power.
I agree with you there. The GE Mark II design (which is unfortunately quite common) is the spawn of that bad engineering. Remember however that was the era when they were toying around with atomic airplanes and of course the Orion project, so it fits right in with the mindset prevailing during the initial pre-Cuban phase of the Cold War.
In addition I think the early experiments at Oak Ridge with LFTR were side-lined because it did not fit well with the requirements of the Cold War. The LFTR fuel cycle does not support (i.e. help scale up) the military need for highly enriched U-235.
>the sector would have never existed without massive government subsidies
>>Neither would wind farms or big solar energy power plants. And what do you make of the government putting a huge tariff on Chinese solar cells to protect domestic producers which makes photovoltaics much more expensive in the USA?
There is no comparison. The nuclear sector has enjoyed direct and indirect subsidies of a scale that dwarfs the sum total of all subsidies ever given to wind + solar + geothermal + tidal + wave. I purposely leave out ethanol & biodiesel, which has always been a welfare program for Big Ag (the EROI of corn ethanol for example is less than one; it is actually an energy sink – you get less than it took to make it)
Topically just in the news – and which very clearly makes my point -- Last Wednesday, the Obama administration announced $8.3 billion in public loan assistance to three nuclear power producers. That is a huge and brand new subsidy on top of the fifty or more years of subsidy that has preceded it. For comparison the loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar PV company Solyndra was in grand total $535 million; this is less than one fifteenth the amount of this brand new loan guarantee to the nuclear welfare queen. The right-wing blogosphere could not stop shouting about the Solyndra loan guarantee for years (and they still harp on it); I do not hear a peep of protest from these same fiscal conservatives about this new massive subsidy of nuclear.
If Solar PV had enjoyed even a fifth of the subisdies that nuclear has enjoyed we would already be living in a Solar era.
> the lead time to bring working LFTR reactors to market and to build out enough of them to begin to make an impact on the global (or some important regional) energy market is long and should be measured in decades at least. Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online.
>>That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons.
How many Apollo V rockets did we build for all that dough? It would take many trillions of dollars to retool our energy systems; again there is no comparison between the moonshot Cold War race and deploying a radically different electric energy generation infrastructure. The logistics alone mushroom out; these things take time and nine years is far too optimistic – IMO. There is more to it than just the science/engineering of LFTR and politics, there is also the economic dimension… capital allocation, scale out of the required industrial base and resource constraints that are also at play.
> Decades from today is as soon as the first LFTRs could begin to come online. By that time – they will need to compete with solar PV and the per unit costs for PV that are achieved over the next two or three decades.
>>Finding a good inexpensive solar cell is not enough, even more important is finding a cheap and reliable way to store vast amounts of electrical energy. And because solar energy is so dilute environmentalists will whine about the huge amounts of land required. And some applications are just not going to work, you'll never see a solar powered 747 or fighter jet.
Dilute sources of power actually match quite well with how power is actually consumed for the most part. Most electric power is consumed by the vast number of dispersed (dilute) small consumers. Currently the grid topology is dominated by having a few very large centralized producers and distributing (with large inefficiencies by the way) this centrally produced power to a large number of dispersed consumers over the grid. But that does not mean this is necessarily the best electric power network topology; in fact simply adding more centralized big thermo-electric power plants will not work, as the grid itself is pretty much at capacity… it cannot take anymore juice, without the high tension lines heating up and sagging down (until SPARK->SURGE goes the grid, as happened I believe in 2003 when NYC went dark)
Dispersed power generation makes sense – in this sense; solar PV on the roof is consumed directly – no new power distribution infrastructure (laid at great capital and political cost – power lines are always a huge legal battle)
The grid, as it is, without any major changes could absorb 25% wind/solar… the variability problem of renewables has been overblown [excuse the pun]
Urban areas have vast exploitable solar facing surfaces that could be exploited for PV. The Los Angeles metro area for example covers 12,519 square kilometers. Covering just 4% of this urban fabric with PV surfaces would yield a collection area of 500 square kilometers; at say a yield of 15% that gives a potential capacity for LA (by covering just 4% of its urban fabric with solar PV) of around 75GW. Naturally the sun does not shine at night or on cloudy days. A pretty widely rough capacity factor that I have seen applied is about 25% (which is to say that this is the actual averaged out yield). Even so this still is still more constant energy than 80 large nuclear power plants (which operate at around 80% capacity).
Clearly energy storage systems will need to evolve – as they in fact are. It is a huge race with a prize worth trillions for the organizations, inventors, venture capitalists that figure out scalable batteries (or other energy storage) A lot of money is going into this (and has been for some time) And some very promising low cost flow batteries for example are on the horizon. Utility scale batteries are critically needed. But not just that, the grid itself is an antiquated Victorian era machine (the largest machine on earth)
> The reason they are not getting built has less to do with political activists and a more to do with the negative economic profile
James Hansen is one of the world's leading environmentalists and has done more to raise the alarm about climate change than anybody else, he started to do so in 1988. Hansen has recently changed his mind and is now in favor of nuclear power because he figures it causes less environmental impact than anything else, or at least anything else that wasn't moonbeams and could actually make a dent in satiating the worldwide energy demand.
Yes I know and Hansen is terribly wrong on this. It is ironic to hear you speak of this alleged small environmental impact of nuclear just a few years scant years into the beginning of a trillion dollar mess at Fukushima – that is going to be a resource and capital sinkhole for hundreds of years, just as Chernobyl, Hanford, the enrichment plant at Oak Ridge (various places in the former Soviet Union) and others are also proving to be.
If just one of the SFPs on top of the Fukushima Mark II reactors should fail – what then? Several these units have been badly damaged by the hydrogen explosions and are deteriorating structurally exposed to the elements. Apparently the ground is starting to become unstable under unit #4 (which explains the insane urgency to try to get those still very hot spent fuel rods out of the SFP and into external storage – dry cask eventually probably. Fukushima may be out of the news, but it is not over. It has not been contained and the situation could quite suddenly become dire. They are speaking of desperate measures to try to contain this – including freezing a subterranean wall of injected water around the facility. The fuel assemblies in three or four of the five unit’s SFPs have partially melted and become deformed by heat. Zirconium metal clad fuel rods – as you know spontaneously combust in air – so removing them is a very tricky business. Also if any rods get too close that can be very dangerous as well.
Just because something is out of the news does not mean the problem has been solved. Hanford is out of the news. Have they dealt with the Hanford mess? You know the answer is no; the estimate of what it will take now stands at $112 billion (and rising)
There will be no easy answers to our looming need to adapt to energy reality. As peak oil hits – and global conventional oil has already peaked – and the other fossil energy types (including recoverable uranium) will quickly follow – capital availability is going to collapse. There will be no energy available to spare. Shale oil is essentially a Ponzi scheme boom – as the depletion rates of the Eagle-Ford formation (and increasingly now the Bakken as well) demonstrate. The EROI of Canadian tar sand is really not all that good – and mining, refining it is destroying and degrading vast areas and huge amounts of fresh water.
Everyone seems to be looking around hoping for that magical source of energy. But it does not exist. We need to adapt and become more adept at harvesting the solar flux and far more efficient in how we live. Otherwise all we will be doing is ensuring our own and most large animal species extinction – the global rate of species extinction is currently 10,000 times the average background rate…. Just a thought to chew on.
Chris
John K Clark
Chris de Morsella
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 1:21 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Solar cells are getting cheaper and easier to use (e.g. flexible plastic ones). It should be possible to stick them anywhere you want, e.g. on buildings or cars. This would mean at least some solar power could be harvested using existing infrastructure. As usual the technology is there, or almost there, but this needs political or commercial will to achieve.
One idea I like is to engineer road surface blocks that double as solar collectors… to turn the road surface itself into an energy harvesting medium. It is not as outlandish at it may seem at first. The PV layer would be beneath a tough layer of relatively clear roughened glass (good traction), and the blocks would be built to last for the useful life of the embedded PV.
>>Personally I'd like to see a solar farm that uses the energy it receives from the Sun to power machinery that sucks CO2 and water from the air and turns them into petrol. (Then you really could run a 747 on solar power :)
If battery energy density improves by a factor of around ten – lithium-air or zinc-air variants are getting so close in the lab at least -- you could have all electric jumbo jets, running on electric turbines.
Chris
meekerdb
>>That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons.
How many Apollo V rockets did we build for all that dough? It would take many trillions of dollars to retool our energy systems; again there is no comparison between the moonshot Cold War race and deploying a radically different electric energy generation infrastructure.
Brent
Chris de Morsella
True… in that nuclear power, is basically boiling water to produce hot high pressure steam. It is essentially the same from the stage of having produced high pressure steam to spin a turbine to make electricity, but the entire logistical tail is vastly different – and of course the nature of the “boilers” is essentially untested (sure there may still be some data from the old Oak Ridge experimental LFTR reactor that operated for some years in Oak Ridge during the 1960s, but that is all there is) The reactors themselves will need to be designed, tested, verified, stress tested, systems tested, material fatigue tested, and finally built from scratch. LFTR reactors do not exist, there are no blue prints to build them from. It is unknown how various proposed materials will actually perform, in the reactor core environment – over the years of operational life.
How many years do you think it would take – if it was a national priority? 10, 20, 30?
And finally – just to underline my point -- fusion reactors are also essentially water boilers – that does not make them the same as coal thermo-electric plants and they are not buildable with our current technology…. Though ITER is trying. There are fundamental technological hurdles that remain… for fusion certainly – and, I would argue for LFTR reactors as well -- even though in the end it is all about boiling water.
Chris
Brent.
John Clark
> I think the early experiments at Oak Ridge with LFTR were side-lined because it did not fit well with the requirements of the Cold War. The LFTR fuel cycle does not support (i.e. help scale up) the military need for highly enriched U-235.
>>That would certainly be true if there is no sense of urgency to get the job done, but we got to the moon in less than 9 years once we decided we really really wanted to go there. There is no scientific reason it would take decades to get a LFTR online, but there are political reasons.
> How many Apollo V rockets did we build for all that dough? It would take many trillions of dollars to retool our energy systems; again there is no comparison between the moonshot Cold War race and deploying a radically different electric energy generation infrastructure.
> Dilute sources of power actually match quite well with how power is actually consumed for the most part. Most electric power is consumed by the vast number of dispersed (dilute) small consumers.
>> James Hansen is one of the world's leading environmentalists and has done more to raise the alarm about climate change than anybody else, he started to do so in 1988. Hansen has recently changed his mind and is now in favor of nuclear power because he figures it causes less environmental impact than anything else, or at least anything else that wasn't moonbeams and could actually make a dent in satiating the worldwide energy demand.
> Yes I know and Hansen is terribly wrong on this. It is ironic to hear you speak of this alleged small environmental impact of nuclear just a few years scant years into the beginning of a trillion dollar mess at Fukushima
meekerdb
Well let's see, my car has 306 horsepower, one horsepower is equal to 746 watts so my car needs 228,276 watts. On a bright day at noon solar cells produce about 10 watts per square foot, so my car would need 22,827 square feet of solar cells, that's not counting the additional air resistance caused by the 151x151 foot rectangle mounted on the car's roof. And how do I get to work at night or on cloudy days
Brent
LizR
meekerdb
to do.
Brent
LizR
meekerdb
Brent
LizR
spudb...@aol.com
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Feb 25, 2014 4:23 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
meekerdb
Its only a pipe dream if it doesn't work. Its all lies and exaggeration if a technology if it does not. For decades, people all over the world have worked on energy systems to replace the "dirty" sources that we have trouble with, regarding air and water contamination. Many progressive billionaires and their kept politicians have promoted solar, but it cannot yet power a single city on Earth. I am not saying this is impossible, but the means of affordably making and storing electricity, is not enough to power, say, even one quarter of Auckland, for example. There are always articles on technical improvements, and I totally support all R&D, but if we cannot supply large cities with electricity on a 7 x 24 x 365 basis, and until solar can, its a crock. The problem is the progressives world wide, as an ideology, want solar to be the source-whether it supplies power of not. This, is a totalitarian quality, and as such, is civilizational threatening.
It is to laugh...or cry.
Brent
LizR
spudb...@aol.com
From: meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Feb 25, 2014 7:29 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
LizR
meekerdb
Point taken. But I know that the progressive billionaires do advocate switching off our current dirty, in exchange for promises of clean. Promises, only, that is. Hydroelectric, isn't really solar, its gravity, so we can call it gravity power.
We should never subsidize nuclear, fossil fuels, or solar, because they should stand or fall on their own.
Its not the politics of it, its the physics of it. Right now people are not using solar as a primary source of electricity because they cannot, even though a majority would love to have it. It doesn't provide enough and it cannot do 7 x 24. Nuclear has proven a disaster, the way its conceived,
hence my urging to switch to Canadian Slowpoke reactors. But lets face it, it will likely never happen. Shale gas has become the default power as a result of no other alternatives. What do you suggest and how much time do we have to replace the dirty and old, since, I take you support AGW? So, what do we do?
Brent
LizR
It's scope obviously requires government level leadership and organization, but YOU exemplify the obstruction to that with your Ayn Rand fear of government and dogmatic faith in 'free markets'.
Chris de Morsella
There is a whole sector of biofuels devoted to various interesting microorganisms -- some that have also been genetically engineered – to harness them in order to produce chemicals, including fuels and important pre-curser chemicals (Butanol being one)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24085385
Microalgae are another group of photosynthetic autotroph of interest due to their superior growth rates, relatively high photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, and vast metabolic capabilities. Heterotrophic microorganisms, such as yeast and bacteria, can utilize carbohydrates from lignocellulosic biomass directly or after pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis to produce liquid biofuels such as ethanol and butanol. Although finding a suitable organism for biofuel production is not easy, many naturally occurring organisms with good traits have recently been obtained.
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 3:22 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 26 February 2014 12:05, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
Yes.
--
Chris de Morsella
>> Its only a pipe dream if it doesn't work. Its all lies and exaggeration if a technology if it does not. For decades, people all over the world have worked on energy systems to replace the "dirty" sources that we have trouble with, regarding air and water contamination. Many progressive billionaires and their kept politicians have promoted solar, but it cannot yet power a single city on Earth. I am not saying this is impossible, but the means of affordably making and storing electricity, is not enough to power, say, even one quarter of Auckland, for example. There are always articles on technical improvements, and I totally support all R&D, but if we cannot supply large cities with electricity on a 7 x 24 x 365 basis, and until solar can, its a crock. The problem is the progressives world wide, as an ideology, want solar to be the source-whether it supplies power of not. This, is a totalitarian quality, and as such, is civilizational threatening.
I suppose that depends on your definition of work well now doesn’t it. Solar PV cells produce electricity from light. In what way do they not work? They work as advertised. I notice you put “dirty” [electricity energy sources] in quotes… pretty funny – you were joking right? Or did you buy into the myth of clean coal?
The global installed capacity for solar PV is growing at breakneck speeds – regardless of what you may believe. Cumulative global installed capacity of solar PV reached roughly 65 gigawatts at the end of 2011; newly added solar PV capacity for this year alone is forecast to be between 40 and 45 GW of new extra added capacity to the already installed base. Cumulative global installed photovoltaic capacities have doubled every two years on average since 2004.
The prices for PV keeps coming down as well; in fact it has dropped an amazing 99% in the past quarter century. The price for installed power systems is also rapidly falling; it fell by a range of 6 to 14 percent, or $0.30 per watt to $0.90 per watt, from 2011 to 2012 according to the sixth edition of “Tracking the Sun,” an annual PV cost-tracking report published this week by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I am going to go out on a limb here and point out that the facts pretty much demonstrate that you do not know what you are talking about.
Chris
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of spudb...@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 7:19 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Point taken. But I know that the progressive billionaires do advocate switching off our current dirty, in exchange for promises of clean. Promises, only, that is. Hydroelectric, isn't really solar, its gravity, so we can call it gravity power. We should never subsidize nuclear, fossil fuels, or solar, because they should stand or fall on their own. Its not the politics of it, its the physics of it. Right now people are not using solar as a primary source of electricity because they cannot, even though a majority would love to have it. It doesn't provide enough and it cannot do 7 x 24. Nuclear has proven a disaster, the way its conceived, hence my urging to switch to Canadian Slowpoke reactors. But lets face it, it will likely never happen. Shale gas has become the default power as a result of no other alternatives. What do you suggest and how much time do we have to replace the dirty and old, since, I take you support AGW? So, what do we do?
The shale gas and oil (kerogen) plays in the Eagle-Ford, Bakken, & Marcelus formations (to name the big American plays) is definitely a boom for the drillers who are getting rich off all that sucker money pouring into this sector…. It has also been a huge PR win for the Gas sector with people believing that it will provide energy for a long time…. Smile. For those, instead, who play close attention to the rates of depletion and the return on Capex (capital expenditure) it is proving to be a monumental bust. Depletion rates in fracked fields are much higher and the onset of depletion is much faster than it is for traditional non-fracked gas (and oil) deposits. Already the Eagle-Ford is showing abundant evidence of this – for those who look beyond the glossy – happy face -- PR spin put out by the sector, and the earlier Bakken formation wells are also following on the same depletion curves. As soon as the breakneck pace of drilling slows the house of cards is going to fall as reality can no longer be swept under the rug by huge numbers of new wells coming online.
Did you know that energy now accounts for fully one third of all global capital spending – the lion’s share of it for gas & oil. The global technology sector by comparison accounts for 7% -- http://www.businessinsider.com/capex-spending-by-industry-2014-2
Chris
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 7:23 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Hydro IS solar. How do you think the water gets up those hills and into the lakes?!
It must be by anti-gravity.
Governments having subsidised and otherwise helped out fossil fuels and nuclear for years, I believe, a level playing field would be to subsidise solar to the same extent they've been subsidised so far.
As I pointed out earlier – nuclear power just got a huge $8.3 billion doll out of new public assistance – a figure that dwarfs any assistance to solar and wind put together. In a truly level playing field the world would be seeing a lot more PV a lot more quickly.
John Clark
> You're car engine needs to generate that 306hp when it's going about 150mph.>> Well let's see, my car has 306 horsepower, one horsepower is equal to 746 watts so my car needs 228,276 watts. On a bright day at noon solar cells produce about 10 watts per square foot, so my car would need 22,827 square feet of solar cells, that's not counting the additional air resistance caused by the 151x151 foot rectangle mounted on the car's roof. And how do I get to work at night or on cloudy days
> In normal highway use it's probably making about 30hp.
John Clark
> The prices for PV keeps coming down as well; in fact it has dropped an amazing 99% in the past quarter century.
John Clark
> Hydro IS solar.
Chris de Morsella
From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
> Hydro IS solar.
LizR
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 10:22 PM, LizR <liz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hydro IS solar.And solar IS nuclear.
spudb...@aol.com
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
spudb...@aol.com
It's clear what to do. We continue to conserve power, convert to sustainable power, and replace coal fired plants with nuclear as fast as possible while continuing research on all promising power sources. The problem is how to get this done. It's scope obviously requires government level leadership and organization, but YOU exemplify the obstruction to that with your Ayn Rand fear of government and dogmatic faith in 'free markets'.
Brent
From: meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tue, Feb 25, 2014 10:31 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
LizR
Well, Liz, not to be a "nattering nabob of negativism," but its too diffuse. It's not like hydroelectric, we can gather up at one 'choke point' and then draw in to spin turbines, Its spread all over the surface of the Earth (the target zone). Therefore, engineers are so up o on getting PV cells efficiencies up. Then there's the great need for a power source to run 7 x 24 and this has been a problem. On the other hand Freeman Dyson estimated that the Sun produces in 1 second the same amount of ergs that human beings produce in one year. It turned out to be 33 trillion times what we use. But I have given up on solar and fusion, because it either works now or it doesn't. Color me too impatient.
Brian Tenneson
meekerdb
Here in the States, we have the executive branch using the IRS and the FBI to go after enemies of the progressives.
You have the vast expansion of the NSA spying on the American people and indeed people worldwide.
A statement by the head of NSA was that "We are not spying to halt terrorists.." So what are they spying for, our benefit? BHO has tried to pick tech winners but he cannot change physics nor economics. Think Solyndra.
You simply trust too much, or despise non Statists too much. People want clean energy, there is just no new tech to the dirty.
Brent
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:39 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 1:53 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
Solar PV cells can’t power rocket ships either – so what? You raise a straw man argument. No one is suggesting that, but you who have raised it – with the suggestion that because PV cannot DIRECTLY power your vehicle, that it is therefore of no value whatsoever as a power source.
Could your car run – again directly -- on coal… or nuclear energy? By your same logic these energy sources are therefore worthless. As I said…. A classic straw man argument.
Chris
John K Clark
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:54 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The prices for PV keeps coming down as well; in fact it has dropped an amazing 99% in the past quarter century.
That's very nice, but even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications.
So say you… and yet just this year alone – 2014 – it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed on a place called planet earth… another way of picturing the huge amount of solar capacity this represents is that this is well over 300 square kilometers of solar PV collection surface. What you don’t seem to get is that it is taking over and will increasingly take over as the most important source of electric generation. The prices will continue to fall – and though in the world you seem to live in the cost of something means little or nothing – in this world cost drives decisions.
You harp on dilute… well I have news for you – the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well, and yet – we have managed somehow to grow food. So what if solar is dilute – as you put it. Does the appliance in your house, sucking electrons down from the grid and dumping them to ground care what created the current? You make much of something that does not really matter in the long run. In the near term there is going to be dislocation of vested industries and outmoded ways of doing things, but after five or so decades people will wonder how the world ever functioned without ubiquitous solar PV.
The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will – and are in fact evolving. Some of the new utility scale flow batteries coming to market that use environmentally benign and low cost reactants are promising. All electric cars – which were I live are becoming quite common – are also driving [pardon the pun] the evolution of high power density batteries, and in addition are becoming a nascent distributed power storage network that in its aggregate could scale up to as big as the all-electric fleet grows. Solar PV – IMO – is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths, including down into the infrared range (meaning they would still produce some power – even on hazy and light cloudy days).
-Chris
John K Clark
spudb...@aol.com
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 6:52 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
spudb...@aol.com
Enemies? You mean those organizations like "Retake America" that claimed to be charitable organizations not engaging in any political activity in order to conceal their donors? And the FBI is going after who? The Koch brothers? Rev. Hagee? Rush Limbaugh? They can't seem to find anyone guilty of anything in the housing bubble debacle, but they can sure bust some medical marijuana sellers in Seattle.
From: meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Feb 26, 2014 10:23 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Edgar L. Owen
John Clark
> Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion reactor in the astronomical backyard?
Bruno Marchal
On 2/25/2014 2:52 PM, LizR wrote:
On 26 February 2014 11:18, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 2/25/2014 1:23 PM, LizR wrote:
The great thing about using an energy grid is you can plug in new components (i.e. different types of generators - nuclear etc) and everything continues to work the same way downstream.
This is why I'm keen on the idea of extracting CO2 from the air and making petrol, if possible. No change is required to the energy infrastructure, as there would be with say hydrogen or electric cars, but it's carbon neutral. We'd get a closed cycle in which the atmosphere was just a temporary reservoir for the materials needed to make the fuel. Presumably we'd eventually be able to extract CO2 at a rate that even reduced the amount of GHGs in the air.
That's essentially what the research on hydrocarbon producing algae and bacteris is trying to do.
Well, that's good. I wonder if there is any more efficient way of doing it (or do we have to wait for nanomachines which can grab passing molecules and stick them together?)
Dunno, but nano-machines are what algae and bacteria are - and self manufacturing to boot.
So I'd try for some genetic engineering to improve their efficiency, rather than trying to make nanobots from scratch.
Brent
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spudb...@aol.com
Why trust any of these billionaires?? Why trust the Koch's if you don't trust Soros (like me)? Let us call the US system what it is-a plutocracy. Run from the law firms on K-street in Washington, DC. Technically, its a corporatism form of government. Because somebody likes NOVA is no reason to embrace the Ruling Class, axiomatically.
John Clark
>> even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications.
> So say you… and yet just this year alone – 2014 – it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed
> You harp on dilute… well I have news for you – the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well
> So what if solar is dilute
> The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will and are in fact evolving.
> Solar PV – IMO – is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths
LizR
LizR
Why trust any of these billionaires?? Why trust the Koch's if you don't trust Soros (like me)? Let us call the US system what it is-a plutocracy. Run from the law firms on K-street in Washington, DC. Technically, its a corporatism form of government. Because somebody likes NOVA is no reason to embrace the Ruling Class, axiomatically.
Not that I'm advocating violence, of course, but they might be more amenable to changing their ways if, say, some protestors occupied Wall Street...
LizR
Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade.
LizR
Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper.
Quentin Anciaux
Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope.
Russell Standish
heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or
Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit.
Actually, there are two different definitions of "calorie", a small
calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000
small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books.
To convert from calorie to SI units, you need to use the specific heat
of water, which is about 4200 J/kg, meaning that 1 cal is about 4.2
Joules, or 1 Cal is about 4.2 kJ.
What do they teach in schools these days?
Cheers
--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpc...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
meekerdb
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:47:05PM +1300, LizR wrote:
>> On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has
>>> about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade.
>>>
>>> You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?)
> Actually, a calorie _is_ a metric unit (it is defined as the amount of
> heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or
> Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit.
>
> Actually, there are two different definitions of "calorie", a small
> calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000
> small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books.
melt the ice and another 30cal/g or so to raise it to body temperature it appeared that
just eating some ice cubes could completely cancel out a big meal.
Brent
LizR
Actually, a calorie _is_ a metric unit (it is defined as the amount ofOn Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:47:05PM +1300, LizR wrote:
> On 28 February 2014 07:47, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has
> > about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade.
> >
> > You have 1000 calorie jelly doughnuts??? (What's that in metric units?)
>
heat needed to raise 1 gramme of water by 1 degree Celsius (or
Kelvin)), but it is not an SI unit.
Actually, there are two different definitions of "calorie", a small
calorie (as defined above) and a large calorie (equivalent to 1000
small calories) which is commonly used in dieter's books.
To convert from calorie to SI units, you need to use the specific heat
of water, which is about 4200 J/kg, meaning that 1 cal is about 4.2
Joules, or 1 Cal is about 4.2 kJ.
What do they teach in schools these days?
LizR
Which led to an amusing fad of eating ice to lose weight in the 60's. At 80cal/g just to melt the ice and another 30cal/g or so to raise it to body temperature it appeared that just eating some ice cubes could completely cancel out a big meal.
Chris de Morsella
>> even if the price dropped to zero it wouldn't be enough to completely take over from nuclear and fossil fuel because it would still be too dilute and too unreliable and unpredictable for many, perhaps most, applications.
> So say you… and yet just this year alone – 2014 – it is projected that between 40 to 50 Gigawatts of new solar PV capacity will be installed
>>And it wouldn't be 1% that big without tax breaks and solar had to compete against other energy sources on merit alone.
A case of the talking point that refuses to die. Sure solar PV benefits form tax breaks; news flash – so does oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, ethanol, wind…. You name it. Selectively harping on about the “tax breaks” (feed in tariffs… and all forms of subsidy) that solar and wind enjoy; while conspicuously ignoring the vastly larger subsidies given to nuclear, oil, gas or coal is not being fair with the facts. As I pointed out earlier the nuclear sector in the US just got a more than eight billion dollar loan guarantee from the feds, without which that project in Georgia would never be able to get funding.
Can we please keep it honest?
> You harp on dilute… well I have news for you – the food you eat, that you need in order to survive, it is a dilute source as well
>>Food energy is not all that dilute, a 1000 calorie jelly doughnut has about as much chemical energy as a hand grenade.
False analogy…. The doughnut is the end product not the source. That calorie bomb’s dough was made from wheat that had to be grown in a field somewhere; the oil it is saturated with also was squeezed from seeds that had to be grown somewhere; as was the sugar it is covered with. As I said, you present a false; analogy; by that token I should speak of the awesome all electric acceleration from 0-60 mph in 3.7 seconds of the Tesla roadster – whose battery packs had been charged from solar PV sources. The Tesla is an equivalent all electric bomb that compares very favorably with your doughnut (I know which one I would rather have). Either compare source to source; or end product to end product.
> So what if solar is dilute
>>So it takes a great deal of land to produce anything worthwhile, so environmentalists will start screaming bloody murder that it's harming some desert lizard few have ever heard of.
You don’t seem to like environmentalists do you? I gather seeking to preserve for future generations the benefit of a living planet is something you find offensive and worthy of derision. Nice man.
As I previously pointed out – practically every metro area on the planet has enough viable areas located within its urban fabric (such as south facing roofs, walls, road, parking lot and other non-green/water surfaces) to provide for all of its electricity requirements 24X7X365 from solar PV alone (if adequate energy storage of some form is available). We are very far from this, of course, and the current grid could absorb somewhere between 25% - 35% of wind/solar electric energy without needing any major retrofits or improvements – and that includes any major new sources of energy storage.
In reality energy has always been a basket of sources – and will continue to be so. I can foresee natural gas turbines existing far into the future – utilized as spinning reserve and powered increasingly by synthetically produced biogas. What will happen and is happening is that solar PV is going to capture a growing share of this mix. The continuing rapid decline in its per unit cost will guarantee this.
> The grid will adapt, becoming adaptive, and beginning to act more like a true network; battery (and other utility scale energy storage systems) will and are in fact evolving.
That is one hell of a lot of hand waving! Imagine how big and how expensive a battery would have to be to power your big screen living room TV for 36 days, or your iPhone for 20 years; well one gallon of gasoline has enough energy to do that and it only costs about $4. Can you find a $4 battery that can do that?
You seem to misunderstand the requirements for utility scale battery systems, which are quite different form the unique requirements of a car or portable electronic devise (in which energy density is very much critical) Utility scale energy storage batteries are stationary installations. If you are going to argue something it helps to clearly understand the requirements of the system one is arguing about. Either we are talking about iPhones or we are talking about grid scale electric energy storage systems (which by the way can be many things, such as pumped storage for example – Japan has huge pumped storage capacity for example) -- so which is it?
>>Lithium batteries are the most energy dense batteries in use today and also the most expensive, they can store .72 megajoules per kilogram, gasoline stores 44 megajoules per kilogram; so gasoline is 61 times more energy dense than the best batteries and is far far far cheaper. I'm not saying batteries can't get better and cheaper someday, but making them will be a much bigger challenge than putting a thorium reactor online.
Utility scale flow batteries are nearing market. They can scale to huge sizes because the reagents are stored in external tanks – which could be really big tanks, and are flowed through the reactor in which in one direction current is produced and in the other current is absorbed and the reagent is re-reduced and the tanks are re-filled. Such batteries would cost millions of dollars, and have associated tank farms, but can scale to very large capacities.
There are quite a few candidates that are playing for various niches in the electric energy storage market. This is a very lively sector with a lot of venture capital floating around it (the payoffs could be huge), and things are moving pretty fast.
> Solar PV – IMO – is poised for a new wave of next generation multi-junction, multiple band gap, layered cells that can exploit the solar flux at many more wave-lengths
>>How well do they work at night?
They sleep soundly at night, having done their work in the day. The current continues to run, because during the day they have produced surplus power, which has been stored and is drawn down at night. Somehow this seems difficult for you to grasp; power generation can be coupled to energy storage; increasingly it is in fact going to be.
Chris
John K Clark
Chris de Morsella
>>Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope.
Zinc-air batteries, which combine atmospheric oxygen and zinc metal in a liquid alkaline electrolyte to generate electricity with a byproduct of zinc oxide; and when re-processed – that is re-charged - the process is reversed and oxygen and zinc metal are regenerated. These battery types are attractive, because zinc is cheap and abundant and because they have much higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries – the current high density leaders; Zinc air batteries ware also non-flammable unlike lithium ion (which is nice). Zinc air offers about twice the gravimetric density (Wh/kg) and three times the volumetric density (Wh/L) of Li-ion technology.
Lithium air has a theoretical specific energy of 11,140 wh/kg (lithium metal is around 45 Mj/kg) – you could fly an all-electric turbine jet with that kind of energy density.
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2014 3:42 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On 28 February 2014 06:43, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
Besides which, solar is and will be part of a mix of energy sources. Energy supply will never be provided from a single source. So the argument that unless it “could” provide 100% of all of the energy needed it is of zero value and interest is specious.
Chris
John Clark
>>> Why bother with all these other power sources when you have a fusion reactor in the astronomical backyard?>> Because the energy density decreases with the square of the distance and the fusion reactor is 93 million miles away, and because the energy drops to zero for at least half the time.
> It still delivers thousands of times more energy to earth than human civilisation uses.
John Clark
>>Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope.
Zinc-air batteries, offers about twice the gravimetric density
John Clark
>>Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope.
>Zinc-air batteries, [...] offers about twice the gravimetric density
(Wh/kg) and three times the volumetric density (Wh/L) of Li-ion technology.
> Lithium air has a theoretical specific energy of 11,140 wh/kg (lithium metal is around 45 Mj/kg)
LizR
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 12:23 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 12:45 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>Well if you can store 61 times more energy, that just means there's room for improvement in the existing batteries... Good news, if nature was able to do it so can we I hope.
>Zinc-air batteries, [...] offers about twice the gravimetric density
>>Who cares about gravimetric density?
Evidently you don’t; that much is clear. The automobile companies that are moving towards electric vehicles care – and care a lot. Just because you don’t give a fig does not mean that your opinion is universally shared. Increasing the storage potential per unit of mass – say as wh/kg for example – is critical in order to extend the range of electric vehicles.
(Wh/kg) and three times the volumetric density (Wh/L) of Li-ion technology.
And per weight that's about one thirtieth as much energy as gasoline can store, and they tend to stop working after about 3 years.
Internal combustion (ICE) motors are only between 15% to 25% efficient – so only a small fraction of the potential energy stored in the gasoline is transmitted to the wheel as useful work. Electric motors are around 80% efficient. So to compare the energy in the battery with the potential energy in the gasoline is an unfair comparison – which I am sure you are aware of (would hope so at least); but you do it, in any case, because it suits the point you are arguing.
> Lithium air has a theoretical specific energy of 11,140 wh/kg (lithium metal is around 45 Mj/kg)
That's about the same as gasoline, and although no machine ever operates at its theoretical maximum if and when Lithium air batteries ever become practical and move out of the laboratory it will change the world. But there are huge technological challenges that must be overcome before that can happen, larger than what it would take to put a LFTR online although probably not as large as what it would take to put a fusion reactor online.
The advanced battery field is moving very fast and the problems are being solved – often in parallel. Lithium air batteries would store more usable “work” per unit of mass than gasoline because of the inefficiency of combustion engines – even modern gas turbines are around 50% efficient.
It may surprise you but I wish the US would start up an LFTR program… in fact, I wish the 8+ billion dollar loan guarantee now earmarked to fund those nuclear white elephants in Georgia was instead – much more wisely IMO – being used to kick start an LFTR program.
Chris
John K Clark
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 10:34 AM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
But plenty of people are bothering to extract electrons from the photons… diffuse as they may be. 40 to 50 gigawatts are being added just this year. At some point don’t the facts on the ground begin to speak for themselves?
Chris
John K Clark
John Clark
>> Who cares about gravimetric density?
> Evidently you don’t; that much is clear. The automobile companies that are moving towards electric vehicles care – and care a lot.
Why? They care about weight and how much energy it can store, but I don't see why they'd care how dense it was. Well OK if it had the density of styrofoam there could be a problem finding a place to put 200 pounds of it in a small car, but that is not a realistic issue; as long as the battery was reliable and cheap and stored lots of energy for its weight I don't see why car makers would much care if it was as dense as aluminum or as dense as lead.
> The advanced battery field is moving very fast
> It may surprise you but I wish the US would start up an LFTR program… in fact, I wish the 8+ billion dollar loan guarantee now earmarked to fund those nuclear white elephants in Georgia was instead – much more wisely IMO – being used to kick start an LFTR program.
Chris de Morsella
On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Who cares about gravimetric density?
> Evidently you don’t; that much is clear. The automobile companies that are moving towards electric vehicles care – and care a lot.
Why? They care about weight and how much energy it can store, but I don't see why they'd care how dense it was. Well OK if it had the density of styrofoam there could be a problem finding a place to put 200 pounds of it in a small car, but that is not a realistic issue; as long as the battery was reliable and cheap and stored lots of energy for its weight I don't see why car makers would much care if it was as dense as aluminum or as dense as lead.
Gravimetric density is the measure of unit of potential energy per unit of weight; while volumetric density measures unit of potential energy per unit of volume. While both are measures of energy density; they are not inter-changeable and are measuring different things. Both are important. To give you an example hydrogen gas has a very high gravimetric density, but a very low volumetric density. Weight essentially determines how much power a car will need; the more a car weighs the more energy it will require to move it along. If a battery system has twice the gravimetric density as another type of battery it can store twice as much energy per kilogram of mass. Can’t you see how important this is for automobile manufacturers – or for that matter for the makers of all the mobile electronic devices becoming so ubiquitous nowadays…. The smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, music players and so on.
Hope this clears up any confusion on your part on the specific meaning of these two related means of measuring energy density.
> The advanced battery field is moving very fast
>>I disagree. Nearly all electronic components are astronomically better than they were 50 years ago, but batteries are the exception, they are only slightly better.
That was the case up until recently, but the need for better batteries is huge. Just the market for powering portable devices itself is huge and growing. Whereas before battery R&D spending languished and was stuck in the slow lane, for the last ten to fifteen years R&D spending has really ramped up on it and the results of all of this effort is moving through the R&D pipeline towards market.
But I agree it has moved frustratingly slow compared to the pace in say chip transistor density.
Energy density is critical for transportation and portable applications; it is much less of a factor for fixed large scale energy storage facilities. What matters for these is of course COST, scale, durability (how many cycles before degradation becomes a factor) and metrics of this nature.
Costs keep coming down -- EOS Energy Storage, for example, intends to launch its zinc-air battery next year with a price of $200-$250/kWh, which includes the cost of the inverters to go between DC and AC power. This is starting to close in on the cost for gas turbines, which are the current default means of providing spinning reserve for the grid.
> It may surprise you but I wish the US would start up an LFTR program… in fact, I wish the 8+ billion dollar loan guarantee now earmarked to fund those nuclear white elephants in Georgia was instead – much more wisely IMO – being used to kick start an LFTR program.
Well, we agree on something. And I would rather they had spent 8 billion dollars on research to improve photovoltaic cells and batteries rather than build more reactors based on designs from the 1960s; even the most promising ideas can go south and this matter is too important to place all our bets on just one vision.
We do agree on this.
Chris
John K Clark
meekerdb
On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 12:10 AM, Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Who cares about gravimetric density?
> Evidently you don’t; that much is clear. The automobile companies that are moving towards electric vehicles care – and care a lot.
Why? They care about weight and how much energy it can store, but I don't see why they'd care how dense it was. Well OK if it had the density of styrofoam there could be a problem finding a place to put 200 pounds of it in a small car, but that is not a realistic issue; as long as the battery was reliable and cheap and stored lots of energy for its weight I don't see why car makers would much care if it was as dense as aluminum or as dense as lead.
Brent
LizR
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of LizR
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 2:00 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Since this thread is about Fukushima, can I just mention that if all the power stations in the world could somehow switch to using renewables while all vehicles in the world (bar a tiny few) continued to use fossil fuels, that would STILL be a big boost for the environment.
With power stations you don't need to worry about the same factors (energy density etc) but you do need to worry about other things - load balancing, etc - which is why non-renewable sources are unlikely to go away completely for power stations (unless we get something like a world-wide power grid, which I don't suppose is very feasible). But they could still do a lot better than they are now.
A mix of renewables and gas turbines (which themselves could increasingly be fueled by algae bio-gas sources). Gas turbines achieve 50% efficiency, are relatively clean and are able to be spun up or spun down quite rapidly making them the best choice for spinning reserve – along with hydro, which can also take on the role of spinning reserve.
LFTR could provide a portion of baseload power that coupled with a much larger energy storage capacity (that acts to decouple supply from demand and smooth it all out) and the available spinning reserve could ensure grid stability 24X7X365
Some – varying from place to place – mix of renewable sources + baseload sources + spinning reserve + energy storage capacity will gradually supplant the current power generation mix dominated by large dirty unsustainable coal fired thermo-electric and an aging fleet of increasingly scary reactors (such as the one in Florida where they have just discovered that its high pressure steam tubes are worn up to 30% for example) a fleet of nukes that are operating well past their design specs – routinely getting relicensed, with SFP getting filled far beyond original intended capacity – by tight packing the spent fuel.
Speaking of baseload power sources; there is another baseload source that has a massive potential to scale, but also is saddled with some potentially serious problems – of the kind that is a terrible PR nightmare. I speak of engineered dry hot rock geothermal, using a similar fracking approach to engineer a steam permeable reservoir in a deep volume of hot dry rock. It would inject high pressure water/poppant slurry into the micro-factures the very high pressure fluid creates in the rock mass, but without all the toxic solvents, surfactants etc. present in the witches brews the gas companies are pumping down dissolved in the fracking fluid used by the kerogen and gas fracking plays. It has been tried a few times and famously in Basil seems to have triggered a fairly noticeable tremor – which ended that experiment immediately. For some reason the earth tremors are “acceptable” and little mentioned when it comes to fracking for gas or kerogen, but become large point headlines for dry rock geothermal.
It is a problem, but perhaps it is not that much of a problem in many geologic formations. A much improved understanding of how the forces and stresses at work in the deep hot bottom of the crust dynamically behave and what effects fracking will have could address this. If this issue can be addresses this form of geothermal energy has a pretty big upside potential for supplying baseload power – it gets very hot beneath our feet a few miles deep… and good deep rock formations are very widely available.
Chris
spudb...@aol.com
Not that I'm advocating violence, of course, but they might be more amenable to changing their ways if, say, some protestors occupied Wall Street...
Oh wait, they already did! How did it go?
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thu, Feb 27, 2014 6:45 pm
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
LizR
Occupy was a Soros funded org liz. It started with a Canadian mag call Add Busters, and is Soros owned. It was, what the dems called an astro-turf organization, created to react to the losses in the 2010 elections, due to us Tea Baggers. It was the idea that the "real masses were out in the streets against the capitalists, but the protestors walked past Soros's Manhattan townhouse. It was both creepy and phony. As for the second amendment simply look to the ugliness that is happening in the Ukraine right now. The ruling class is frightened of armed yokels for some reason.
Chris de Morsella
From: everyth...@googlegroups.com [mailto:everyth...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of spudb...@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, March 01, 2014 3:18 PM
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
Occupy was a Soros funded org liz. It started with a Canadian mag call Add Busters, and is Soros owned. It was, what the dems called an astro-turf organization, created to react to the losses in the 2010 elections, due to us Tea Baggers. It was the idea that the "real masses were out in the streets against the capitalists, but the protestors walked past Soros's Manhattan townhouse. It was both creepy and phony. As for the second amendment simply look to the ugliness that is happening in the Ukraine right now. The ruling class is frightened of armed yokels for some reason.
I call BS on what you just said. Clearly you are a Teabagger.. with an Ayn Rand rattled brain. Your entire movement is a Koch brothers operation; a case of throwing stones in a glass house.
spudb...@aol.com
John Clark
> With power stations you don't need to worry about the same factors (energy density etc) but you do need to worry about other things
*At the urging of environmentalist groups Sen. Feinstein of California has tried to put 500,000 acres of solar drenched land in the Mojave desert off limits to any solar development.
*Environmentalists tried everything they could think of to block a 2.1 billion dollar solar plant in Ivanpah California.
* They were successful in killing a solar power station in Fresno County California that would have supplied enough greenhouse free energy to power 75,000 homes.
"The Sierra Club opposes geothermal leasing or development in the following areas:
- Lands included in or adjacent to federal, state, or local park systems or in wildlife refuges and management areas;
- Areas known to provide habitat for rare or endangered species;
- Areas designated as valuable for archaeological remains;
- Units of the National Wilderness preservation System;
- Units of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System;
- Units of the National Trails System;
- Areas reserved by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture for ecological, scenic, natural, wildlife, geological, educational, historical, or scientific value, including Primitive Areas, Roadless Areas, Natural Areas, and Pioneer Areas;
- Areas of de facto wilderness under study by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture for reservation as part of one of the preservation systems listed above; and
- Areas of de facto wilderness which are the subject of intensive study by recognized citizen groups or coalitions, resulting in formal proposals to the agencies and/or Congress for reservation as part of one of the preservation systems listed above."
LizR
On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 Chris de Morsella <cdemo...@yahoo.com> wrote:> With power stations you don't need to worry about the same factors (energy density etc) but you do need to worry about other things
And one of those other things you need to worry about is dimwitted and hypocritical environmentalists who don't want power stations of ANY sort built, ANYWHERE regardless of if they are renewable or non-renewable:
*At the urging of environmentalist groups Sen. Feinstein of California has tried to put 500,000 acres of solar drenched land in the Mojave desert off limits to any solar development.
*Environmentalists tried everything they could think of to block a 2.1 billion dollar solar plant in Ivanpah California.
* The same people are trying to block a 680 million dollar solar plant in Owens Valley.
* They were successful in killing a solar power station in Fresno County California that would have supplied enough greenhouse free energy to power 75,000 homes.
* Environmentalists are trying their best to stop Obama from extending permits to build wind farms from 5 years to 30 because they kill little birdies.*And to quote directly from their website:
"The Sierra Club opposes geothermal leasing or development in the following areas:
- Lands included in or adjacent to federal, state, or local park systems or in wildlife refuges and management areas;
- Areas known to provide habitat for rare or endangered species;
- Areas designated as valuable for archaeological remains;
- Units of the National Wilderness preservation System;
- Units of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System;
- Units of the National Trails System;
- Areas reserved by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture for ecological, scenic, natural, wildlife, geological, educational, historical, or scientific value, including Primitive Areas, Roadless Areas, Natural Areas, and Pioneer Areas;
- Areas of de facto wilderness under study by the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Agriculture for reservation as part of one of the preservation systems listed above; and
- Areas of de facto wilderness which are the subject of intensive study by recognized citizen groups or coalitions, resulting in formal proposals to the agencies and/or Congress for reservation as part of one of the preservation systems listed above."
As I said the prefers solution to the energy crises according to some is to freeze to death in the dark.
LizR
spudb...@aol.com
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating
LizR
What if the sad choice is saving the environment or human beings?
Of course we've already destroyed the REAL environment, most of it 1000s of years ago, mainly as a result of inventing agriculture (and fire). My concern for the environment is to do with the survival of the human race, although it would be nice to keep the pandas, elephants, sharks and nasty little creepycrawly things, I happen to think humans are the best thing to have happened to the Earth since the pre-Cambrian explosion, and if it's us or the dolphins all I can say is so long, and thanks for all the triple somersaults while whistling the star-spangled banner.
Although I have to admit I'm biased.
spudb...@aol.com
-----Original Message-----
From: LizR <liz...@gmail.com>
To: everything-list <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: 03-Mar-2014 19:54:13 +0000
Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating