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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:
In a radical move, the French government has quietly dropped their renewables targets from their draft energy bill, risking being seen as unfashionable losers in billionaire ski clubs. The nation that, forty years ago, built 56 nuclear reactors in 15 years has decided they just need to build another 6 to 14 new nuclear plants to reach “Net Zero” by 2050. This puts them in danger of being one of the only nations on Earth that might reach their target.
This, of course, is terrible for the renewables industry as it risks exposing the wanton frivolity and utterly superfluous nature of the wind and solar subsidy farms. If France can do this without the bird chopping, the slave labor and the lithium bombs, so can nearly everywhere else.
It’s a big change from 2014 when France aimed to reduce nuclear power to just 50% by 2025.
A new paper in PLOS ONE, “Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape 2”, examines the land use requirements of various alternative energy sources. The paper is open access with the full text available at the link or as a PDF file 5. The results are summarised in the following graphic.
The global energy system has a relatively small land footprint at present, comprising just 0.4% of ice-free land. This pales in comparison to agricultural land use– 30–38% of ice-free land–yet future low-carbon energy systems that shift to more extensive technologies could dramatically alter landscapes around the globe. The challenge is more acute given the projected doubling of global energy consumption by 2050 and widespread electrification of transportation and industry. Yet unlike greenhouse gas emissions, land use intensity of energy has been rarely studied in a rigorous way. Here we calculate land-use intensity of energy (LUIE) for real-world sites across all major sources of electricity, integrating data from published literature, databases, and original data collection. We find a range of LUIE that span four orders of magnitude, from nuclear with 7.1 ha/TWh/y to dedicated biomass at 58,000 ha/TWh/y. By applying these LUIE results to the future electricity portfolios of ten energy scenarios, we conclude that land use could become a significant constraint on deep decarbonization of the power system, yet low-carbon, land-efficient options are available.
Today, nuclear power is not usually considered among the “sustainable” alternatives to fossil fuels and, since it relies upon uranium as a fuel, of which a finite supply exists on Earth, is classified as “non-renewable” and hence not viable as a long-term energy source. But what do you mean “long-term”, anyway? Eventually, the Sun will burn out, after all, so even solar isn’t forever. Will ten thousand years or so do for now, until we can think of something better?
Energy “experts” scoff at the long-term prospects for nuclear fission power, observing that known worldwide reserves of uranium, used in present-day reactor designs, would suffice for only on the order of a century if nuclear power were to replace all primary power generation sources presently in use. But is this correct? In fact, this conclusion stems not from science and technology, but stupidity and timidity, and nuclear fission is a “bird in the hand” solution to the world’s energy problems awaiting only the courage and will to deploy it.
That is the conclusion by the authors of a paper with the same title as this post, “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible 45” [PDF, 8 pages], presented at the IEEE EIC Climate Change Conference in Ottawa, Canada in May 2006. Here is the abstract:
Nuclear fission energy is as inexhaustible as those energies usually termed “renewable”, such as hydro, wind, solar, and biomass. But, unlike the sum of these energies, nuclear fission energy has sufficient capacity to replace fossil fuels as they become scarce. Replacement of the current thermal variety of nuclear fission reactors with nuclear fission fast reactors, which are 100 times more fuel efficient, can dramatically extend nuclear fuel reserves. The contribution of uranium price to the cost of electricity generated by fast reactors, even if its price were the same as that of gold at US$14,000/kg, would be US$0.003/kWh of electricity generated. At that price, economically viable uranium reserves would be, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible. Uranium could power the world as far into the future as we are today from the dawn of civilization—more than 10,000 years ago. Fast reactors have distinct advantages in siting of plants, product transport and management of waste.
“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.
The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. //
It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.
The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added. //
Bulqizë was entirely different. The gas pushed out of the Bulqizë mine is 84 percent hydrogen, one of the highest concentrations on record. Moreover, the hydrogen was not dissolved in water—it bubbled through Bulqizë’s underground pools, making them look like a jacuzzi. //
So Donzé’s team got busy looking for such places, and they found one. “There is a mine in Ural, central Russia, that has the exact same geological configuration as Bulqizë: harzburgite, dunite, and chromite,” said Donzé. “And guess what. They have a problem with explosions.”
How the country is going K-nuclear //
In 1972 South Korea began construction of its first commercial nuclear power plant, at a time when the country’s per-capita income was slightly lower than that of North Korea. Since South Korea had a relatively small industrial base at the time, undertaking a large infrastructure project was risky.
Propitiously, the venture paid off, and South Korea’s daring has been an overture to success: the country’s industrial growth is largely thanks to nuclear power. With 25 nuclear reactors, South Korea is currently the world’s sixth-largest producer of nuclear energy. In 2022, South Korea ranked third worldwide in terms of the number of nuclear reactors under construction, following China and India.
The country has put a significant amount of effort into developing its nuclear industry, which is demonstrated by the three South Korean power plants in the top five on the list of leading nuclear power plants ranked by capacity in 2023.
After President Yoon Suk Yeol took office in 2022, the administration embraced nuclear energy fully. Speaking of the previous government’s stance against nuclear energy, Yoon pulled no punches, stating: “Had we not been foolish over the past five years and further reinforced the nuclear power ecosystem, we probably would not have any competitors now.” //
Standardisation is key to South Korea’s success with nuclear energy. This means building the same design, ideally using the same engineers who have become familiar with the design, repeatedly, and licensing multiple new reactors at the same time. A paper on standarisation in South Korea summarises that: “Where a number of nuclear power plants are constructed in series within the framework of a long-term national power development plan, nuclear power plant standardisation can definitely facilitate self-reliance in the technology.”
As President Yoon puts it, "The competitiveness of our nuclear plant businesses lies in our ability to construct on time and on budget, which no other company in the world can imitate."
The US could soon become a world leader in rare earth minerals after over two billion metric tons were found in Wyoming.
ThorCon is a packaged nuclear power plant concept from Martingale, Inc. that is designed to wring capital costs out of nuclear plant construction. The company visionaries have recognized that the biggest hurdles to building new actinide-fueled reactors are the initial capital investment along with the excessive required construction lead time.
Instead of complaining that “the market” does not reward carefully crafted works of industrial art designed to last for sixty to one hundred years with lucrative paybacks delayed for three or four decades after final investment decisions, the ThorCon design team started with the notion that product designers must create offerings that satisfy market demands.
Today’s energy market rewards financial flexibility, predictable construction schedules, reasonably low investment, affordable operating costs, low or no emissions, and readily implemented upgrade paths. If the offered solution is one that uses actinide fission, customers will also want to clearly understand provisions for handling process leftovers, liabilities, accident prevention, consequence mitigation and regulatory barriers.
Zion Lights @ziontree
One of the reasons I like nuclear energy is its small land footprint.
This video shows the amount of land required by the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland compared with wind power.
Data visualisation by @Klimavenner
The Hydrogen Ladder is my attempt to synthesise all the information known to me about all the factors driving technology uptake across all sectors of the economy in all countries of the world. Not ambitious at all!
What the Hydrogen Ladder is designed to do is to show how likely it is that any proposed use case ends up being a significant user of hydrogen (perhaps via one of its derivatives) in a decade or so, say 2035. That doesn't mean it's game over, the transition has happened, it just means it is absolutely clear by then that hydrogen is either the answer, or a major answer, to decarbonizing that use case.
In other words, it looks forward to a time after the current firehose of subsidies has subsided to affordable proportions, after there has been enough time for a bit more tweaking of technologies, after the emergence of supply chains, after a bit of familiarity has grown in the project finance sector, and so on.
As for what the rows mean, here's how I think about them:
- A - no alternative (though this does not mean the use case is growing)
- B - decent market share highly likely
- C - some market share likely
- D - small market share plausible
- E - niche market share possible
- F - niche market share in some geographies possible
- G - the Row of Doom
The Hydrogen Ladder is not all about efficiency, as its detractors claim. It does not include information about market size. It does not include information about speed of adoption. It does not include information about relative emissions reduction per kg of hydrogen or kWh of electricity. I leave it to others to add that information to the discussion.
Conversely, it does take into account cost, safety, convenience, critical mineral availability, co-benefits, externalities like air pollution, geopolitics, human behaviour and - underlying it all - thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, other sciences and economics.
mopani
4 days ago edited
Hydrogen molecules are the smallest in the universe, making it very difficult to make effective seals. First strike.
Hydrogen has an extremely wide flammability range, 4% to 76% of air. Strike two.
While the molar energy density (per molecule) and energy density by weight of hydrogen are exceptional, its volumetric energy density is extremely low, even in liquid form. Compare the size of hydrogen tank to the size of the oxygen tank in the space shuttle. That's one of the primary reasons the SpaceX Super Heavy and Starship rockets use methane instead of hydrogen, because the volumetric energy density is orders of magnitude greater. Strike three.
The Hydrogen energy economy is just another government boondoggle like Solyndra. Attractive on the surface, and sounds intelligent, but ultimately impractical and wasteful.
It's funny actually, if not ironic, that the volumetric energy density of hydrogen is so poor, but as soon as you combine it with some other element, say carbon, its volumetric energy density and practical usability go off the charts! I'm sure some commercial enterprise will discover this and exploit it real soon, and I'm willing to wager that it won't take any government money to build an absolutely booming economy out of it either!!
Just skip the hydrogen! If you're not going to exploit the most efficient energy store in the universe by using a hydrogen compound (hydrocarbons), why do you want to use only half of it, the hydrogen alone?
One should not too quickly dismiss what several generations of the most brilliant minds have already developed and streamlined into an efficient system with sophomoric thinking that somehow believes is an overlooked insight into the fundamentals of the universe.
What is being overlooked is the fantastic energy available from fissioning atoms. The most powerful chemical reaction generates 9 electron volts of energy per molecule. The energy from the fission of one atom (of which there are at minimum three in any chemical reaction) is almost 2 million electron volts. We know how to safely harness an energy source that is six orders of magnitude more powerful than any other, and yet it is rejected. You have to ask why.
"What about the nuclear waste?" It's not waste, it is used fuel, and it can be reused, except that Jimmy Carter, who calls himself a "nuclear engineer" although he never completed the Navy nuclear school, decreed that reusing spent fuel was too dangerous.
Consider too, that nuclear power plants are the only source of energy that completely contain all of their waste/byproducts. The used fuel from all of the nuclear power plants in 70 years of operation in the United States would not fill one single Walmart store.
Annual fuel use for one reactor is 35 tons of uranium fuel -- one semi truck load, although it would only fill a couple of milk crates. The same size coal power plant requires 100 coal cars per day.
Much Hoon, Very Flerp -> mopani
3 days ago
Mo, if you don’t mind my asking, what is it you do for a living? That’s probably the best short form explanation of the issue I’ve ever heard or read. Thank you.
mopani -> Much Hoon, Very Flerp
a day ago edited
Thank you for the compliment. I'm a missionary radio engineer that manages diesel generators and some solar plants because of poor energy supply in Africa.
I've been reading about and studying "renewables" and energy most of my life; I've come to the conclusion that most of the world's leaders are at the energy sophomore phase I was at in high school. Will they ever grow up? Doubtful, to be honest.
If you want a really well-rounded perspective on the whole energy and environment picture and not just the hot takes, read Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never. Fantastic book, and hard to put down! His website is http://environmentalprogres... and is the only thing I've ever seen come out of Berserkely that I could whole-heartedly support. =)
[Edit: I should also give a shout-out to David MacKay's Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air, available on Amazon and online at http://www.withouthotair.com. There is not a better "whole picture" view of energy use out there. ]
One of the best nuclear reactor designs was the Molten Salt Reactor, built and tested at Oak Ridge National Labs from 1965-1969. Thorcon Power wants to mass produce this proven design on a ship-yard assembly line. If CO2 emissions are an existential threat, then we need to be building one hundred 1GW nuclear power plants per year.
A molten salt reactor doesn't need to exchange fuel when the fission product isotopes start to poison the reaction, because the worst poisons ("neutron eaters") are noble gases, and if your fuel is liquid, they can easily be removed instead of being trapped in a solid fuel pellet. So instead of 35 tons of fuel per year, it would only need 1 ton of nuclear fuel per year, and it would extract at least 30% of the potential energy instead of 1%, like the typical Pressurized Water Reactors (Boiling Water Reactors are similar efficiency).
Besides Thorcon's website, visit http://www.daretothink.org to learn more about Molten Salt Reactors; I recommend starting with the "Numbers" page. //
mopani > C. S. P. Schofield
2 days ago
"Hydrogen has its own problems"
Yes, yes it does. It may have the highest energy per molecule, but it is also the smallest molecule, making it very difficult to seal. It also has the worst volumetric energy because of its low density. It's funny how combining it with a couple of carbon atoms fixes that! I wrote a long comment about this the other day on Ward Clark's article about hydrogen.
What would really be interesting, and I think is being ignored for obvious reasons, is hydrocarbon fuel cells, combining the simplicity of the electric drive train with the efficient energy storage of hydrocarbons. It also makes it very easy to make it a hybrid, and if we're wanting to improve efficiency and lower emissions, every vehicle should be a hybrid to recover braking and downhill energy. But hybrids with internal combustion engines add significant complexity.
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
“We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles” - Thomas Edison
Edison was dreaming big when he said that. //
Belgium was dreaming big when they built the Atomium. It took 18 months to design and another 18 months to build. //
J'ai vu le futur. “I have seen the future.” These words are displayed inside the structure like a mantra for humankind. It’s not wrong. Consider the structures we admire the most: the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Easter Island heads, etc. We do not argue that these structures are too big. We visit them because they are so big, to marvel at their bigness.
For much of human history, we have tried to show our greatness, or to celebrate that which we have believed to be greater than us, through constructing large monuments.
So why are large-scale projects now so heavily criticised?
It may not surprise you that the idea that big is bad came from an anti-growth, anti-technology activist.
E F Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered in 1973. The book argues in favour of what Schumacher calls small, “appropriate” technologies as a superior alternative to the general ethos of "bigger is better". The latest edition of the book features a foreword by depopulation and degrowth activist Jonathon Porritt.
The book is a holy text for degrowthers, anti-progress activists, and Malthusians alike. It suffers from the recrudescence of the common fallacy of man versus nature, as Schumacher argues that “The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.” //
What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it. Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.”
Consider that last statement. “Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.” And yet we have heating, lighting, telephones, the Internet, shoes, glasses, clothes, and so on, thanks to science - not Shakespeare (though I take no umbrage with the Bard). The greatest irony of this statement is that we only have books like Schumacher’s and Shakespeare’s thanks to science and technology.
That a prophet of such pessimism and blinkered thinking has influenced our ideas of large-scale technology ought to concern us. While activists argue against large-scale technological projects, note that when they consider the structures to be works of art the same argument is seldom made. For example, the construction of the Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, began in 1882 and continues to this day. For the most part, people do not cry “it’s too big!” or “what about the cost?!” regarding the church. They allow it to be built. They want to see it finished. Similarly, the Notre-Dame is being rapidly rebuilt after it caught fire in 2019. //
The fact is that we need one - power plants - to have the other - the Sagrada Família, Notre-Dame, etc.
Back to the Atomium. With this single structure, Belgium depicted its love of physics through art. The country wanted to highlight and promote the post-war ideal of peacefully applying atomic research and other advancements in technology, and with over 600,000 visitors per year, the Atomium has achieved this aim. //
Schumacher and I do agree on one thing. He wrote: “To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.” Indeed, we should act now and start building. Large-scale nuclear energy is needed to displace fossil fuels, and committing to it represents the veriest foresight. Without new power plants, we cannot hope to overcome the vicissitudes of tomorrow and maintain the progress that led us here, and beyond. Sometimes we need to dream big and build big. Or, to put it less elegantly, we should go big or go home.
Gopher 5 hours ago
The easy answer... There is NOT enough electric generation (or power grid capacity) available to replace the power used by gasoline vehicles.
1 gallon of gas = 33.7kWh of power.
The US uses 134,830,000,000 (yes, 134 Billion) gallons of gasoline/year.
4,543,770,000,000. 4.543 Trillion kWh of electricity.
In 2018 we used 3,900,875,000,000 or 3.900 Trillion kWh of electricity.
In other words we need the ability to generate well over TWICE as much electricity (8.4 Trillion kwh) as we currently generate just to stay even.
Add the range and power of semi's and locomotives and ships fueled by diesel and we are WAY, WAY short on our electric generation needs.