488 private links
Gordian Knot News is now up to 100 some posts. They range in importance from fundamental to trivial; in writing quality from pretty good to tech manualese. But it is impossible to figure out either importance or readability from the title.
So I've prepared a list of links, which groups the posts by subject and gives them a grade. The same post can show up multiple times.
A means you must read this to stay in the choir.
B means you should read the piece.
C means read this if you have nothing better to do.
D means don't waste your time.
In many cases, there is a very similar PDF on the Flop Book site, in which case I have also included a link to display that file.
Fear campaigns have led to tight regulation of nuclear power plants and nuclear waste, which means that to see dry fuel casks you have to jump through hoops with security clearance, over-the-top security checks, supervised visits and so on.
I think we should normalise nuclear waste by putting it in public places that allow people to see it. In the Netherlands, COVRA (The Central Organisation For Radioactive Waste) stores all of the country’s high-level waste and is also a public museum and art gallery that hosts many exhibitions.
Inside COVRA: the art of preservation
On a panel in Paris last year, I called nuclear power plants national monuments, and I believe that they are, because they represent clean air, good jobs, and high-quality lifestyles. I think we should decorate nuclear power stations like the mural on the Cruas-Meysse cooling tower in France. We should celebrate what humankind can achieve with clean energy: a high quality of life for everybody, without the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels.
Ryan Maue
@RyanMaue
·
Follow
Wow. Guyana's president tells the climatists to shove it.
Anas Alhajji
@anasalhajji
A must watch!
This is my hero!
He is Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of Guyana.
#Oil #Guyana
Embedded video https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/1773813984015127005
4:46 PM · Mar 29, 2024 //
BBC host Stephen Sackur essentially asked him during an interview isn't it a bad thing for you guys to extract $150 billion of oil and gas off your coast because of the carbon emissions that would ultimately be released into the atmosphere?
Ali's response is just pure gold. He stops Sackur cold and then just rips him a new one. //
First, Ali tells him they have a huge forest in Guyana that basically makes them carbon neutral because of how large it is, "a forest we have kept alive."
Sackur says, "Does that give you the right to release all of this carbon...."
Ali interrupts him, "Does that give you right to lecture us on climate change?"
"I will lecture YOU on climate change!" he said, pointing his finger at Sackur. Then he ripped him to pieces, using their own terms on him.
"Because we have kept this forest alive, that stores 90.5 gigatons of carbon. That you enjoy. That the world enjoys. That you don't pay us for...That you don't see a value in...Guess what? We have the lowest deforestation rate in the world." He said even with the greatest amount they could extract, they would still be "net zero." //
There was a little bit more that didn't make the above clip, where Ali explained the importance of paying for the development of the country.
Sackur complained that Greenpeace said the world needs to keep the majority of the world’s remaining fossil fuels in the ground.
But Ali was not having it.
“You just said that we are 6-feet below sea level. Who is going to pay for the infrastructure? Who is going to pay for the drainage and irrigation? Who is going to pay for the development and advancement of our country?” The President questioned. //
anon-pabn
a minute ago
That is perfect. We need to shame these climate alarmist, hypocrites. Set aside the current arguments, they are telling little Guyana not to drill after the rest of the world has drilled and prospered because of it. What balz! Drill, Baby, Drill. And congrats on your forest....better than any other countries efforts
Nika4h @nikit2h
·
Replying to @crit_architect
A hailstorm this month has damaged thousands of solar panels at the 350-MW Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, “Golf ball”-sized hail fell in the area on March 15, and aerial footage captured from a helicopter offered a glimpse at the extent of the damage
11:05 PM · Mar 26, 2024 //
Corey Thompson @Roughneck2real
·
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?
Or you the taxpayer?
3:06 PM · Mar 25, 2024 //
Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy watchdog group Power the Future, was even more emphatic about the need to proceed carefully with solar power:
"There's this enormous shell game happening by the Biden administration, by the environmental left, presenting wind and solar as perfectly green, clean, and carbon-neutral," Turner told Fox News Digital. "They use all of these buzzwords. But they're none of that and they also have enormous drawbacks. And it's doing the American people a great disservice to obfuscate these very obvious shortcomings."
He noted that, because solar panels are largely manufactured in China, the destruction of solar farms could be leveraged in geopolitical disputes between the U.S. and China.
"Why would we expect them to race to our aid when our grid is down nationwide, and they are the ones holding the goods that we need to get back up?" Turner said.
The 4,000-acre solar farm called Fighting J's near [Needville, Texas] took a beating during hailstorms on March 16.
"My concern is the hail damage that came through and busted these panels we now have some highly toxic chemicals that could be potentially leaking into our water tables," said Kaminski
"There's numerous makeup in the chemicals on this thing," Fugua said. "The majority of them are cancer-causing."
Consider uranium: the underrated element of awe //
Back to energy density: uranium metal really packs a punch. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead, and 1 kilogram of uranium-235 contains 2 to 3 million times the energy equivalent of 1 kg of oil or coal. This means that a relatively small quantity of nuclear fuel can produce significant amounts of energy through fission. How does uranium compare to other fuels? Calculations vary a little, but through fission, 1 kg of enriched uranium corresponds to roughly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal. That’s a lot of raw material that can be left in the ground. //
A single nuclear fuel pellet in a typical reactor creates about the same amount of energy as one tonne of coal. //
nuclear energy stands its ground. It’s reliable and dependable, with the highest capacity factor of all energy sources, which means that power plants produce maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s almost twice as much as natural gas and coal and nearly three times more than wind and solar farms.
Since less raw material is needed to create the same amount of power, nuclear energy also has a very small land footprint compared to the alternatives. More land is required to mine the coal and dig the metals and minerals used in wind turbines and solar panels out of the ground, and for the sites they are built on, which makes it the most land-efficient source of energy. //
Cyril R says:
March 3, 2024 at 7:34 AM
A good writeup Michael. A couple of poimts though.
Actually water without precise chemistry control is very corrosive. All reactors require good chemistry control (there’s no such thing as pure helium). Davis Besse shows that borated water isn’t too nice either. And 155 bar borated water at 320C doesn’t qualify as “no hazard”.
Fluoride salts are stable, don’t generate hydrogen, and corrosion control rests on having the salt reducing toward the structural alloy rather than the passivation layer required with water. Fluoride salts also do not cause stress corrosion. So it ends up a simple matter of allowance thicknesses.
I like LWRs. Much better than coal plants. But they are basically glass cannons. The power goes out, the core melts down, generating explosive hydrogen in the process that detonates the containment and spreads radionuclides all over the country. Or someone thinks there is water in the core when there isn’t and the core melts down. A glass cannon like that just begs for military grade bureacracy not unlike a nuclear missile silo. Said bureaucracy is very expensive and results in all manner of bloat that inflated prices and build times. With advanced reactors focussing on inherent safety you at least have a case for a more rational regulatory approach.
A 3000 MWt LWR gets you 1000 MWe. An advanced reactor of 3000 MWt gets you 1500 MWe. That’s a quarter billion bucks a year more revenue.
By the way, 3 outages in 10 years is very good. Solar power stations have 365 outages a year.
During the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) earliest years, the General Advisory Committee was sometimes viewed as a source of discouraging, delaying advice. Made up of selected members of the scientific establishment, the group habitually sought more studies and inserted costly delays aimed at making the perfect next step instead of taking steps that were good enough to support practical learning.
A March 8, 1952 New York Times article titled “Atomic Delay Laid to A.E.C. Advisers: Even Dr. Conant Should Yield to Men With Faith in Goal, Coast Chemists are Told,” provides a well-positioned person’s insights into the disappointingly slow process of developing power reactors. //
Pitzer gave the AEC a backhanded slap by calling it “reasonably efficient by general governmental standards,” and stated that its monopoly in atomic energy had delayed atomic reactor development.
He described how material production reactors, with their complex chemical processing systems, had been built in less than three years during wartime. During that time of rapid progress, he said, if there was a disagreement about which of two courses of action were best, both of them were followed.
In the succeeding years, following either route needed to be preceded by an “exhaustive series of preliminary studies” that added layers of cost to the project. Salaries, overhead and other cost components always accumulate during delays.
He noted how it took six years from the end of the war to build anything that could generate electricity, and even then it was a tiny reactor that produced just 100 kilowatts of power in December, 1951.
“The slowness,” Dr. Pitzer declared, “did not arise from a lack of designs for power reactors which reputable scientists and engineers were willing to build and test. It came rather from an unwillingness of the commission to proceed with any one of these designs until all of the advisers agreed that this was the best design.”
The speaker likened the present setup, with a multitude of committees advising the Atomic Energy Commission, to an automobile equipped with a separate brake lever for every passenger.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed new energy efficiency standards for distribution transformers. Almost all transformers produced under the new standard would feature amorphous steel cores that are, according to the DOE, significantly more energy efficient than those made of traditional, grain-oriented electrical steel. //
Portland General Electric has two critical points in its response to the delusional DOE.
First, Mandating a complete overhaul of transformer production during a severe shortage is basically insane. //
Second, the amorphous core transformers are significantly larger, leading to a host of technical issues that would jack up energy costs even more. //
An example for size comparison is that a 25KVA pole mounted amorphous core transformer is roughly the size of a 50KVA steel core transformer. This illustrates how much larger the new amorphous core transformers would need to be.
…This triggers a host of related issues that utilities would need to address. //
There is only one Grain-Oriented Electrical Steel (GOES) core maker in the United States (Butler Works, owned by Cleveland-Cliffs). That plant says that the rule is placing its operation in jeopardy.
The height of each colored block represents the average electric power consumption per capita. The width is proportional to the regional population, so the area represents regional average electric power generated and used. If citizens of developing countries use as much power as Europeans, electricity demand would rise by about 3,318 GW. Plot courtesy of Geoff Russell.
World electric power use averages 3000 gigawatts (GW).
The height of each colored block represents the average electric power consumption per capita. The width is proportional to the regional population, so the area represents regional average electric power generated and used. If citizens of developing countries use as much power as Europeans, electricity demand would rise by about 3,318 GW. Plot courtesy of Geoff Russell.
We need over 600 GW of new power plants for 2030 electricity demands.
New and growing demands for electric power require more power plants. A large power plant can deliver one GW. The examples below are based on full-time average power demand to meet just these specific new needs, which add up to over 600 GW. Population growth and economic development will add even more demand.
Connecting a billion poor to power: +100 GW
Connecting one billion powerless people with just 100 watts of power — a tenth of US and EU average electricity use.
Desalination: +62 GW
Desalination of 87 million cubic meters of water per year is growing at 8% annually, demanding 3 kWh per cubic meter.
Electric vehicles: +42 GW
Electric vehicle charging
By 2030, 122 million more electric vehicles travel 12,000 miles per year at 4 miles/kWh.
Air conditioning: +100 GW
By 2030 air conditioning demand will be 50% higher than in 2017.
Information technology: +300 GW
Data centers, the internet, and consumer electronics will demand 300 GW more by 2030.
California: Climate Groups Push to Stop Re-Licensing of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant – RedState
Random US Citizen
7 hours ago edited
I hope the loons win. Because CA deserves it.
On the other hand, maybe Diablo can claim it identifies as a solar plant and ask CA politicians to pay for energy reassignment surgery?
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
Green energy policies hold back the developing world, creating a gulf in energy consumption between the West and nations such as Kenya. //
Since most Kenyans rely on physical exertion to accomplish work, rather than machines, it’s useful to understand that an average person at rest produces 100 watts of energy, with most of that going to operate the brain, heart, and other vital organs. Heavy labor for several minutes can be sustained while generating 300-400 watts, while a professional athlete might produce 2,000 watts for short periods of time.
Thus, a person working in a field to tend crops over an 8.5-hour day might generate 2.1 kWh of power — a little less than the energy in one cup of crude oil. So, when thinking of the energy used by the DeVore family in a day, 6.9 gallons of crude oil, that’s the equivalent energy output of about 120 people doing physical labor in a day. //
There’s not a lot of time in the Machogu family’s day to watch Netflix or play video games, assuming they even had the electricity to do so. And there are no private jets or Dubai resorts for either family. The elites flying in to discuss the fate of energy consumers are perfectly willing for the poor to make sacrifices to their political whims. But they have no idea how the rest of us live — or do, and don’t care. //
The UN wants to fight climate change by taxing Americans and Europeans to send the cash to corrupt Third World leaders, while building a few trophy wind and solar projects to provide unreliable electricity to the masses. This will neither change global temperature (whatever that means) nor lift the 6.2 billion people of the planet’s 8.1 billion who live in developing nations up from poverty.
Americans use a lot of energy. It supports our high productivity. We make a lot of stuff, and we provide a lot of services with energy underpinning that productivity. The average American produced about $69.70 worth of goods and services every working hour with the aid of machines and energy in 2023 (in 2017 PPP dollars). //
The average Kenyan consumes 1/44 the energy an American does. This results in a per capita output of about $4.90 for every hour worked, about 1/14 of that in America, after adjusting for Kenya’s lower cost of living.
Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.
By Russell Gold
August 24, 2023
Update, September 25: General Electric filed a lawsuit last week claiming that Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to fulfill its promise to recycle thousands of blades. GE says it paid the company $16.9 million to recycle about five thousand wind turbine blades, but that GFS instead stockpiled them at facilities in Sweetwater and Iowa. “Only after GFS took millions of dollars from GE, did GFS all but shut down its operations without recycling the Blades,” reads the complaint, filed in U.S. district court in New York.
Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood. //
One West Texas "blade graveyard" alone contains thousands of used blades; these blades cannot be reused, nor can they practically be recycled. Another graveyard, this one in Newton, Iowa, contains a similar eyesore. One of the companies that manufactures the blades, Global FIberglass, has pledged to find a way to begin recycling the blades, but this has not yet happened—and the blades continue to pile up. //
It's all energy density; it's always energy density. To maintain a modern, technological society, like ours, requires greater energy density, not less. The federal government should be held to account; the Energy Department should, at a minimum, stop subsidizing these boondoggles (and, ideally, should be defunded and disbanded). Our society depends on abundant, cheap, high-density energy. //
redstateuser
10 hours ago edited
One of the links in this article brings you to an article that I think is well worth reading in its entirely. I found it eye-opening as to the waste going on with windmills:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/
In Google Maps, I found the dumping ground located in Sweetwater, Texas but, inexplicably, the aerial view had been doctored to make most of it look like raked dirt, poorly doctored yet detectable. Here it is, and you can compare it to the unretouched image in the linked article:
(1 GWye = roughly the electricity for one million people, living by western standards, for one year)
Let us suppose it is our mission to produce electricity for a run-of-the-mill city with about 1 million inhabitants living by Western standards. This city will need about thousand megawatts of electricity, year round, in short 1GWye. In the visual, I compare four ways to accomplish this, along with the input and output of each of the options.
What do you call it when the same people who screech about carbon emissions and climate change oppose clean, efficient, carbon-free nuclear energy? Is this hypocrisy? Ignorance? Both?
Representative Jeff Duncan (R-SC) has introduced H.R.6544 - Atomic Energy Advancement Act, which is co-sponsored by a Democrat, Diana DeGette (D-CO), who, while not the farthest left in the Democratic Party, is certainly no Zell Miller-like Blue Dog. This is a bipartisan bill, and one intended to facilitate the development of nuclear power plants in the United States. The bill lists as its purpose:
To advance the benefits of nuclear energy by enabling efficient, timely, and predictable licensing, regulation, and deployment of nuclear energy technologies, and for other purposes.
Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. -- Paul Ehrlich
It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. -- Amory Lovins, 1977
Why is nuclear power Green today when it wasn’t yesterday? Because it was never about the science.
Nuclear power has been the NetZeroiest energy on Earth since the sun formed from collapsing interstellar gas. Nuclear plants don’t produce any CO2 at all, but that wasn’t good enough because it was never about CO2 either. It was always about power and money and profits for friends.
And the best friend of a bureaucrat is a captive-dependent-industry, one that survives on handouts. Those in need of Big Government largess always lobby for Big Government, donate to Big Government causes and cheer on everything Big Government wants them to cheer on, even if it’s a naked man in high heels.
Yesterday gas was a fossil fuel, but today it’s a sustainable one: