The pyramid of aluminum shown in the photograph figures greatly in our nation’s history. This once rare metal was so prized that it was placed into a national monument by a grateful nation. Can you guess where? Now, aluminum is so common, thanks to an electrical refining process and plentiful, cheap electricity, that we throw it away in soda cans.
Two seemingly unrelated events on opposite sides of the globe occurred this past week.
One was the closure of an aluminum plant in Montana, and the other is the president of a European metals association threatened to move production overseas citing environmental rules and energy costs escalating due to emissions trading schemes.
Both stories are presented below. At the end, is the story of our “Aluminum Pyramid”, now in a national monument.
Google Map of above is here
First, Montana.
How They Are Turning Off the Lights in America
On October 31, 2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.
How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America’s industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.
America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?
Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.
But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?
We need to look no further than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America’s elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups. Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos stated to fall.
They began stopping nuclear power plants in the 1970’s. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources with land laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers foot the bill for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less productive wind and solar energy projects.
In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with environmental interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in the San Francisco Bay Area. The meeting was in a theater-like lecture room with the seating curved to face the center stage and rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending were many atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.
The room became silent when a man walked up to the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem was global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were trapping the earth’s radiation like a greenhouse and causing the atmosphere to heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will lead to environmental disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will now concentrate its research funding toward quantifying the disasters that would be caused by our carbon dioxide.
The room was silent. I was the first to raise my hand to ask a question, “How can you defend your global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis contradicts the paper by Lee in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1972 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse?”
He answered me by saying, “You do not know what you are talking about. I know more about how the atmosphere works than you do.”
Not being one to drop out of a fight, I responded, “I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room, and many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is your background and what makes you know so much more than me?”
He answered, “I know more than you because I am a lawyer and I work for the EPA.”
After the meeting, many of my atmospheric science friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for what I said, saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared for their jobs.
And that, my dear readers, is my recollection of that great day when a lawyer, acting as a scientist, working for the federal government, announced global warming.
Fast forward to today. The federal government is spending 1000 times more money to promote the global-warming charade than is available to those scientists who are arguing against it. Never before in history has it taken a massive publicity campaign to convince the public of a scientific truth. The only reason half the public thinks global warming may be true is the massive amount of money put into global-warming propaganda. The green eco-groups have their umbilical cords in the government’s tax funds. Aside from a few honest but duped scientists living on government money, the majority of the alarms about global warming – now called “climate change” because it’s no longer warming – come from those who have no professional training in atmospheric science. They are the environmentalists, the ecologists, the lawyers and the politicians. They are not the reliable atmospheric scientists whom I know.
Nevertheless, our politicians have passed laws stating that carbon dioxide is bad. See California’s AB32 which is based upon science fiction. (For readers who take issue with me, I will be happy to destroy your arguments in another place. In this paper, we focus on the damage to America that is being caused by those promoting the global-warming fraud.)
In the year 2000, America planned 150 new coal-electric power plants. These power plants would have been “clean” by real standards but the Greens managed to have carbon dioxide defined legally as “dirty” and this new definition makes all emitters of carbon dioxide, including you, a threat to the planet. Therefore, using legal illogic, the Sierra Club stopped 82 of these planned power plants under Bush II and they expect it will be a slam-dunk to stop the rest under Obama.
And now you know the real reason the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company had to shut down. America stopped building new power plants a long time ago. There is now no other source where the company can buy energy. Our energy-producing capability is in a decline and it is taking America with it.
I used to belong to the Sierra Club in the 1960’s. It used to be a nice hiking club. In the late 1960’s the Sierra Club began turning its attention toward stopping nuclear power. Then I quit the Sierra Club. It continues to prosper from the many subscribers who think they are supporting a good cause. What they are really supporting is the destruction of America brick by brick. The Sierra Club and similar organizations are like watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside. They are telling us we have no right to our own natural resources, and in doing so they are sinking America.
Inherent in ecology are three assumptions: “natural” conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and human influences are bad. Physics makes no such assumptions. By assuming climate is fragile, the global warming supporters have assumed their conclusion. In fact, the climate is not fragile. It is stable. The non-adherence to physical logic in the global-warming camp is what makes many physical scientists say that global warming is a religion.
So we have a new age religion promoted by environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and brainwashed into our people that is now destroying America from the inside.
Like a vast ship, America is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by its real citizens, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent into oblivion … her many resources saved for whom?
Edwin X Berry, PhD [send him mail] is an atmospheric physicist and certified consulting meteorologist with Climate Physics, LLC in Montana. Visit his website.
Now, Europe
From Heliogenic Climate Change:
Economic death march in Europe
“European non-ferrous metals producers may move to countries where environmental legislation is less strict unless the impact of forthcoming measures is reduced, an industry spokesman said on Thursday.
Javier Targhetta, president of Eurometaux, said the industry was concerned over high and unpredictable power costs [and] the added cost of a new emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2013 …
Targhetta was particularly concerned over what he said was the reluctance of utilities to sell power for terms of three years or more following deregulation for heavy users in Spain last year.
“This increases long-term insecurity and leads to a halt in investment. If we carry on like this, the industry is destined to disappear,” he said.
Eurometaux estimates a new phase of the ETS could hike its power costs by an unsustainable 150-200 million euros ($221.1-294.8 million), and may prompt “carbon leakage,” or relocation to countries where emission costs are low or nil.
“Carbon will still be produced, it will still be producing the greenhouse effect, but a European plant will have been lost,” Targhetta said.”
…
Electricity accounts for an average of 35 percent of production costs for non-ferrous metals — 60 percent for aluminum — and producers say big differences in policy between European countries and lack of interconnection make power more expensive.
Source: Reuters, “Europe metals producers warn of relocation”
Read the Eurometaux press release here (PDF)
About the “Aluminum Pyramid”, here it is being set:
From Wikipedia:
The building of the monument proceeded quickly after Congress had provided sufficient funding. In four years, it was finally completed, with the 100 ounce (2.85 kg) aluminum tip/lightning-rod being put in place on December 6, 1884. It was the largest single piece of aluminum cast at the time. In 1884 aluminum was as expensive as silver, both $1 per ounce.
Over time, however, the price of the metal dropped; the invention of the Hall-Héroult electric refining process in 1886 caused the high price of aluminum to permanently collapse. The monument opened to the public on October 9, 1888.
Still confused? It is the Washington monument.
Read the history of the aluminum cap here:
The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument
I just want to agree with some posters above:
a) conservation is by definition a conservative value, and eating ceaselessly through resources – whether or not they are renewable – is not a good idea.
b) alternate forms of energy DO hold a lot of promise. It’s not a zero sum game – we can support the burgeoning of an entire new industry and not decimate everybody else. I disagree with environmentalists who want to crush nuclear power and fossil fuel production, but don’t you think that crushing emerging energy sources is just as stupid?
c) changing the composition of the atmosphere is a risky prospect, whether or not the “greenhouse effect” per se is ever firmly disproven. Shall we wait another 20 years and see where we’re at? Another 50? Another 100? If it becomes too late, how will we know? Also, to the poster who said “obviously the environment is nothing like a greenhouse. Where’s the door?” – was that sarcasm?
d) “America think” is awesome, and it got us to be a great power beginning in the very late 1800s. Britain-think worked pretty well for them for the whole 19th century. France-think was really the way to go in the 1700s, supplanting Spain/Portugal-think, which was pretty damn successful before that. All of these nations lost their premier status because they refused to change with changing times, not because of rogue elements within the state who encouraged new paradigms that might successfully compete with the existing way of doing things. Can anybody name a superpower from any point in history that collapsed because it was too progressive and too willing to adapt to new circumstances rather than the exact opposite?
Stas Peterson (13:27:56)
I visited the Chernobyl reactor 4 in 1993, I have a photo of myself standing 400 yards from the sarcophagus. The whole 30km zone was one of the richest wildlife parks I have seen, the birds, deer and other wildlife free from human interference. (Someone forgot to explain to them the radiation was supposed to be harmful.) We were collaborating with a Kiev radiological lab to develop SSNTD passive detection of transuranics.
If you want to find the wealth of Ukraine, check out this link:
chmd (06:03:07) :
‘In the meantime, we need to do something. There are plenty of low hanging fruits to pick first, before we commit to large scale infrastructure changes, starting with efficiency and the reduction of waste.’
Where have you been. We have been picking “the low hanging fruit”
since the late 70’s and we are getting better at with out any type of CO2 regulations or CO2 Cap and Trade tax scam.
So, tell me again why we need to regulate CO2.
David Porter (12:20:09) :
We are not doing damage to the earth, we are merely living on it. It is much bigger than we are and it can look after itself.
The anology was ludicrous, yes, but it was in response to the equally ludicrous statement that more CO2 is better.
Life has acclimatised to the current atmosphere. Change the composition and you change life. Some plants will thrive and some will suffer. But which ones?
The Earth is not an infinite dumping ground or source of hydrocarbons, or radioactives, or wild life.
Many fish/mammals/birds have been brought to the edge, and further, of extinction by our actions. I’m sure you are capable of googling these.
Stas Peterson (13:27:56) : sad, so angry!
Phlogiston (15:21:31) : just keep taking the Radithor!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery
So the current climate and biota of the Earth c. AD 2009 is the supreme, ideal, never-to-be-surpassed, perfect arrangement, and we must make every effort to preserve it, as if it were a little Christmas scene embedded in glass—except those, of course, are usually snowy.
Not to mention that there is no single climate on this Earth—Melanesia is quite different from Milwaukee, and that from McMurdo Sound. But is the congeries of climates on the Earth of today preferable to that of the Medieval Warm Period? Or maybe you would prefer the Younger Dryas?
Not to mention that the notion we can materially affect the climate of the Earth by modifying the tiny quantity of CO2 in our atmosphere is quite fanciful, and the hypothesis that we are unwittingly doing so has no evidence in its favor.
However, there has been evidence adduced on this site that the modest increase in atmospheric CO2 has improved agricultural production over the last few decades (though the signal may be hard to detect because of great improvements in agricultural production—the Green Revolution). Greenhouse owners regularly increase the CO2 inside to foster better growing conditions.
Mankind thrives in warmer conditions; they would be a boon if we could create them, but alas, that is yet beyond our power.
/Mr Lynn
@Mr.. Lynn: Thanks!
bill (08:11:15) :
E.M.Smith (05:58:57)
your artcle is typical America-think.
Why, Thank you! I’ve tried very hard to maintain that capacity. Mum was a Brit, though, so I sometimes wander down those thought paths as well ( I drink tea with the pinky out, like scones, spell “behaviour” and a few other the Brit way and when I was a child folks told me I had a mild British accent – picked up from mum..) But I’m old, and my Mother was born about 1923 ? or so. She came from a ‘can do’ pre socialist Britain. So some of my “America-think” is undoubtedly a bit of ancient “Empire-think”… Guess that’s evil too. Oh well, my cross to bear… I like bearing crosses… 😉
But, to your “points”:
1. Nuclear stations consume “radiation” that will not be recovered.
Um, no.
Nuclear stations liberate radiation from intact atoms. You get more radiation at the end of the fuel cycle, not less. What is consumed is the U and Th atoms. But since more washes into the ocean each year than is needed to power the entire planet and since it CAN be extracted at economic prices, this is not a problem. You really ought to read the links, it would save my typing this the thousandth time and the moderators reading it the thousandth time.
We run out of Uranium when we run out of planet. Literally. A few million years from now. (Then we can start using the Thorium 😉
And please don’t spout that this can’t be. Go follow the links. All the work is done and proven. Citations of Japanese researchers, links to tests in the ocean off Japan. India making Thorium fueled reactors. The works.
2. Are there a never ending source of trees in a forest unless you replant. Are they replanting in the rainforests?
Is there a never ending source of cows if you don’t let them mate?
Your question is just as silly. Of course you replant them. And we do. Vast acreages of them. The bulk of all paper products in America come from tree farms. In New Zealand and Australia you will find wonderful Pine and Red Wood farms. Similarly, check out http://www.treepower.org/ getting about 54 tons of yield Per Acre Per Year. Oh, and Poplar is now a very common construction wood thanks to very high yield cottonwood / poplar clones that also grow at about 54 tons / acre / year. Full sized trees in about 10 years. ( I had one, a species about 1/2 the growth rate of the hybrids, the made it to about 18 inches in diameter in about 5 years. Just amazing. Smooth wood, finishes nice, burns well.)
But yes, you do have to plant them (or let them sucker from the roots).
Oh, and yes, folks do replant rain forests. There are whole organizations who buy up land and replant it. Contributed to one once (who’s name escapes me…
But frankly, if you plant a few of the hybrid fast growth species in tree farms, the pressure to use the rain forest drops and you can just keep the ones you have. Oh, and the FASTEST way to kill the rain forest is to promote “Carbon Credits for REFORESTATION”. Why? Because the rules let you cut down the old growth, then replant to get the “credits”. Carbon Credits == Rain Forest Destruction.
I am 100% for setting aside all the old growth left on the planet and preventing any further consumption of it. We just don’t need to do it. Tree farms are more productive and yield, in many cases, better common lumber. (Specialty woods are still an issue, but folks are working on it).
3. Fish is there an infinite resource of fish.
Not quite infinite in annual yield, but infinite in total yield (i.e. never ends), but it can be expanded a great deal more.
Again, please read the links. It is covered there. In a word: Aquaculture. We can grow more total mass of fish than the total mass of all people on the planet, and then some. It’s just not an issue. (AND you get 10 x more fish per pound of feed than you get beef per pound of feed. Fish will be the LAST thing to become short supply. Cows first… )
Cod is on quota.
Yes. We hit “peak fish” from the ocean about 20 years ago. At this point, roughly 30% of fish consumed world wide is from aquaculture operations.
We can double that a few more times before we need to “get fancy” and use some of the more interesting techniques. Interestingly enough, the Salmon Fishing operations on the west coast of the USA are really peeved at the Salmon Farmers. Cut the prices so low it’s hard to justify fishing the oceans.
One recent accomplishment was the culturing of Abalone in California. Each year another species or two is ‘figured out’ and the fishing pressure comes off the ocean just a little more. Tilapia, shrimp, salmon, oysters, clams, catfish, trout.. Don’t know where cod is on the list, but I think it was being looked at.
You know, I can get trout at Costco for about $2.40 / lb. When I was a kid, it was about $15 / lb IF you could find it. Aquaculture is a marvelous thing. What was once the most expensive and limited fish in the store is now the most common and cheapest. Gotta love it.
Whales are not slaughtered because of declining numbers.
Strange, last I looked their numbers were rising due to protection. So we’re wasting our time on all this conservation effort? Gee, who knew… /sarcoff>
Here I thought they were not slaughtered because we figured out they were intelligent sentient beings and deserved protection… Besides, with trout and salmon so cheap from aquaculture, there isn’t really any economic reason to hunt whales. It’s mostly a cultural thing. Talk to the sociology department…
4. At some point the energy used to extract, clean, separate, etc. oil/gas will equal the energy derived from its use. Is this not an end point?
An end point for what?
Look, there is an infinite supply of energy. Forever. Get over it. Wrap your mind around it. Embrace it. Then you can start to see what really is, instead of the “Limits to Growth” Club of Rome excreta.
You are about to run down the whole Energy ROE / ROI thing. Pointless.
Yes, for any given level of technology there is an energy breakeven point. But then technology changes and advances… So fields are ‘shut in’, then someone develops ‘steam stripping’ and they reopen. Then they close again after a few billion more bbls are pumped out. Then someone invented “Liquid CO2 flooding”. (Guess why Oil Companies are gung ho for mandatory CO2 sequestration… they get their competitor, Coal, to pay them to take the CO2 they would otherwise have to pay to get… CO2 sequestration == MORE OIL used, not less.)
At the end game, you no longer use the oil for energy, you use it for raw materials. At that point you use nuclear electricity to lift the oil and you are using it as a chemical feedstock, not prime energy source. But that point is about 200 years away. (And please, don’t run off to the “need it for petrochemicals – SAVE IT” thing. We don’t. ANY carbon source can be – and is- used. Coal, Nat gas, algae, wood, trash, ‘poo’, …)
I don’t even think we can rationally say what energy needs will be in 200 years. I’m pretty sure, given the advances in battery technology, that cars won’t be running on dino juice then (unless it is Diesel from Algae).
And then, after 200 years, we might, just maybe need to use any one of a half dozen already proven ways to GROW CRUDE OIL using a variety of plants including your choice of trees, algae, grass, bacteria, or even just feeding trash to the “oil factory” as is being done now in Los Angeles by a company whose stock I own… (RTK, SYNM, SYMX, PSUD, OOIL just a few of the stock tickers for companies doing this right now. I own some stock of the first 4 ) Cost to produce ranges from about $50 / bbl to $80 / bbl and dropping.
Eventually this will cross under crude oil costs and the wells will be shut. But not for lack of oil…
5. you can predict 250 years into the future ?
Yes. Not perfectly, but well enough.
Did you predict Chernobyl,
No. Wasn’t looking that way. Did know the Russian design had that risk, though. It’s a tacky design. The Westinghouse (now owned by Toshiba? somebody like that) passive design is much better. They can’t melt down.
wars in Iraq / Iran
Yes and yes. But folks didn’t want to listen to me.
BTW, I predict a bigger and nuclear war in the axis connecting Israel, through Iran, to Pakistan and on to China and ending in North Korea. When? 10 years or less. Who? That gets a bit harder. It’s a race condition between North Korea and Iran. I think Iran wins it, unless Israel does what it is so good at doing… (IF Pakistan destabilizes, it’s an India / Pakistan thing. About 20% odds right now, and rising… at least 10 years out, though, so not in the first round.) I’d give it about 15% odds we can avoid it. And dropping…
Don’t know what this has to do with Aluminum, though. And has even less to do with power. Those folks are swimming in power sources and resources.
/ Eastern Europe / Africa?
What? You want me to spend my days writing the whole future history of the planet? I try to concentrate on those areas that will make some money for me… (Used to ‘use the gift’ for entertainment, but nobody would listen. Now I just predict political economic process and invest on it. It’s a living. It’s how I make my lunch money…)
OK, you insist: Eastern Europe: No war soon. The European issue will be Russia in Georgia. Eastern Europe continues rapid economic advance and eventually joins the E.U. White Russia may hold back and stick with Mother Russia. Africa: ALWAYS will be wars. Too tribal and too greedy to do otherwise, and all the external countries are willing to feed those behaviours for their own gain. Most wars will be as in Sudan. Religion, race, or tribal traditional driven.
Did you not warn the Aluminium smelters that the subsidy of their electricity would be removed.
Nope. Not my job. Folks don’t listen anyway. BTW, it was not a subsidy, as pointed out above, it was a free market bargain. Lower costs surplus electricity in exchange for lower reliability and swing consumer status. But thanks to “no nukes” and coal being suppressed, there is no longer surplus off hours electricity. So the “deal” falls apart.
Didn’t invest in them though. You can see that any energy intensive industry will move to China (at least until the nutty wind and solar and nothing else fad breaks it’s teeth on a cold freeze winter; and we get back to building nukes and clean coal plants again). Harder to predict that one. Could be 10 years, but plus or minus 5. It will have a gradual ‘fade in’ with regional variations that makes a single number kind of hokey. Metals and refining are early on the list to go. Once gone, they do not return.
Given present social (i.e. socialist) trends in the USA, it is not a long term investment location for at least the next 5 years. People are very slow to learn and it will be a generational shift to tilt as back to decent capitalism. Might take up to 20 years. Depends on how fast the economy and society reach collapse.
Coal MINING and railroads win on the deal. BNS Burlington Northern SantaFe (that I now own thanks to BRKA BRKB Birkshire Hathaway buying them) is a coal hauling railroad. They are signing deals, as is BTU Peabody Coal, to mine and ship coal to China for decades to come. I’d own a Chinese aluminum company if I was buying aluminum; but I’m buying copper instead. And NOT in the USA. Energy and tax costs are too high. PCU Southern Copper in Chile and FCX Freeport copper and gold mostly mining in Indonesia are well placed. Avoid US operations of any company needing significant energy.
6. Have you done an energy budget for extraction of oil from shale
Yes. Breakeven is at about $75 to $100 bbl of oil equivalent. Not going to happen for about 40 years. Tar sands beat it until then, and frankly, algae has a shot at taking the $80 position and making it pointless to do at all in about 5 years. Don’t bet on shale. Too much other cheap energy around.
BTW, oil shale can be burned as is without extraction. Just crush it and burn it. Lots of ash, but it works. Cost works out to about 3 x coal. Energy / ton about 1/3 coal, but well past break even on energy basis. Worth doing in about 300 years when the coal get ‘slim’.
/semi depleted wells
No. Field is too specialized and fairly secretive. I just buy stock in the guys who are good at it… Apache APA is one of the better ones… Makes profit when other folks walk away.
BTW, a recent advance in “tight shale” has put about 50 to 100 years supply of Natural Gas on the market dirt cheap. Crashed nat gas prices from $15 to $5/ unit.
Look for lots of natural gas vehicles. (And yes, I own some stock in CLNE the T.Boone Pickens company pushing natural gas stations and vehicles. The man knows how to make money…)
In the 1970’s in “The Limits to Growth” by Meadows et.al. they predicted (pardon, projected) heck with it: They SAID we would run out of natural gas in 10 years. All their computer exponential curves said so… Sound familiar? Same folks pushing the same “stuff”, but with a different demographic now…
I strongly suggest you get off the Club of Rome “Limits” band wagon. They really do not know how the physical world works… (Though I must admire their ability in propaganda, social manipulation, fad creation, and general political skill.)
that you can post please.
No. Not the topic of this blog, and this is not my home, it’s Anthony’s.
And frankly, I think I’ve probably already pushed the limit of “Off Topic” too much with this reply as it is.
You want more, hit the links to my site. I’m willing to talk resource economics more there. (It’s my turf and I can do so without causing moderators to have eyestrain and be bored with a non-weather non-tech topic…)
Be advised: I’m an economist who has focused on energy and resource issues since about 1973. I’m really really into energy and resource economics and technologies. I did make most of my money in computer programming / management, though. Why?
The first thing you learn in Economics is the Law of Supply and Demand and that it is inviolate.
The second thing you learn is that there is a very large supply of economists and almost no demand … 😉
So I’ve “had a day job” to fund the resource economics interests…
But if you ‘want to go there’, well, I’ve only got 1/4 century of study and focus in it. Including a university level class in “The Economics of Ecology” where we studied “The Limits” and all it’s implications and bogosity plumb to death… (Sometimes I shudder when I remember the 200 entry bibliography for the reading material only… but it was a great class.)
crosspatch (21:37:51) : It is a shame the company can’t buy a pair of these and run for another 100 years on the site.
Way Cool! Nice to see a second player in the thorium fuel market! (I’ve got a chunk of what was Thorium Power, but had a name change to LTBR Lightbridge; also doing thorium fuel cycle work. They have fuel bundles about to go into burn in a few test reactors around the planet:
MCLEAN, Va., Oct 15, 2009 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — Lightbridge Corporation (LTBR) , the leading developer of non-proliferative nuclear fuel technology and provider of comprehensive advisory services for civil nuclear energy programs, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Russian Limited Liability Research and Development Company (“SOSNY”). SOSNY will serve as Lightbridge’s prime contractor in Russia to manage the research and development activities related to the lead test assembly (“LTA”) program for Russian-designed VVER-1000 reactors.
So it looks like the Thorium Fuel Cycle is about to “go live” one way or the other. There is at least as much Thorium as Uranium on the planet. There are whole beaches of the sand in the Carolinas and piles of the stuff in India. No one knows how much, for sure, since the market for it was basically non-existent due to nobody having a licensed fuel bundle. Yet.
Well, looks like that 11,000 thousand years of nuclear power life from “on land Uranium lifetime” just got extended to about 30,000 to 40,000 years. Guess the ‘extraction from the ocean’ couple of million years of fuel will have to wait a while 😉
And folks wonder why I’m not worried about any energy shortage (other than politically caused…)
BTW, there are also other potential fuel cycles and burnable isotopes. Just nobody sees any reason to even start investigating them with that kind of conventional and easy fuel supply overhang. And yes, putting a micro-nuke next to an aluminum refiner / smelter is a great idea.
China is making a modular pebble bed reactor for just that kind of thing. Passively safe design, too. We created the technology some many years ago and had one (Ft. St. Vrain?) some decades ago… VW cooked up a way to use the nuclear process heat from such a HTGCR to drive a coal to methanol process. About 3/4 of the energy in the fuel tank of the (VW) car would come from the nuke. Price was about $.75 / gallon of gasoline equivalent (that in todays dollars ought to be somewhere around $2.5 – $3 / GGE).
My personal fantasy design is a nuke, driving an aluminum smelter, that makes large chunks of aluminum for an “Aluminum / Air Battery” powered car. You fuel up by swapping out a bucket of AlO for a lump of Aluminum. The Al / air batteries are already used in UPS devices for commercial scale computer rooms, so the size needed already exists and is proven to work … All it would take is cheap electricity to power the Al company…
Some times I miss the days when folks could just do stuff instead of begging permission from the government… Now you can’t even adjust your fuel system or exhaust pipe without a permit… Guess that’s why the interesting stuff is happening in China, Russia, and India. Strange to think that freedom is surviving there…
Oh Well.
bill,
“Many fish/mammals/birds have been brought to the edge, and further, of extinction by our actions. I’m sure you are capable of googling these.”
We have all googled these, I’m sure. And you know what? Those animals are being brought to the edge of extinction through habitat destruction, illegal hunting, “voodoo” trades in tiger bones, rhino horn etc, over fishing. None that I know of are endangered because of CO2.
And how do we prevent these bad things from endangering still more animals? Well, for starters, we don’t want to burn down still more rain forest to plant biodiesel; we can provide affordable electricity from a power station so impoverished people can stop ripping up their environment for fire wood: we can educate people so they learn that tiger bones have no medical benefits; we can build more fish farms to relieve the pressure on the oceans.
These are just some of the ways to help the environment. There are many more. Those people that are pushing for CO2 reductions at the expsense of all else, are not “green” in any sense of the word that I can recognise – they are anti-green.
bill (16:37:41) :
“Phlogiston (15:21:31) : just keep taking the Radithor!”
Now thats quite unusual for an AGW proponent to be talking or thinking about events as much a 100 years ago. Past history is somewhat politically incorrect for global warming science, one is meant to tacitly bury the whole discipline of palaeo-climate for example and overwrite it with hockey sticks from Mann and Briffa for instance. (There are even AGW papers that extrapolate climate backwards from recent measurements e.g. Pollock and his bore-holes.)
But the subject raised here is relevant since there are direct parallels between the scientific community’s treatment of radiation biology and carcinogenesis, and that of climate and climate change. In both cases a theme is involved that has been discussed several times on WUWT – the inductive or deductive nature of scientific inquiry and Karl Popper’s writing on this. In both scientific fields, an established body of data obtained in generally a deductive manner – experimental measurements and direct conclusions, have been suppressed and a highly inductive body of theory, based on elaborate models and multiple interdependent assumptions, is imposed with all previous science on the subject consigned to oblivion.
In the case of climate science, the whole field of palaeoclimate, with voluminous evidence for the Roman Warm Period (just this week deleted from Wikipedia), the MWP, the LIA etc, not to mention the Vostok and other cores, have been airbrushed out in favour of a handful of highly dubious tree ring based hockey sticks (e.g. Mann, Briffa). Furthermore, predictions of future climate are mandated to be made only from complex computer models built around the GHG hypothesis, and well established natural cycles such as the oceanic decadal oscillations, and solar and orbitally related cycles are politically off-limits. And behind it all is the anarchic-anticapitalistic liberal faction purchasing this “science” on tap for their political objectives.
Exactly the same thing happened in the subject where I did my PhD: radiation biology. The same anarchic-anticapitalistic, not to mention anti-intellectual, class-war driven faction decided to destroy the nuclear industry. I remember anti-nuclear activists at University with bagdes ridiculing nuclear power with the slogan “Nuclear Pah – O K Yah”. It wouldn’t take a PhD in socio-psycology to see where that is coming from.
Our group in the UK looked at certain natural radionuclides. I found a natural model – the Canadian caribou, where natural levels of these nuclides in bone and other tissues were up to several thousand times higher than in humans, due to their subsistence on lichens during the long Tundra migrations. However this research became uncomfortable for the radiation community because, here were animals running round with levels of alpha radioactivity (the same category as uranium, plutonium etc.) but with no evident ill effects – in their albeit shortish lives. I once attended a press conference purely as a spectator for some grandoise announcement of a newly discovered molecular mechanism of radiation hazard – which apparently now made radiation more dangerous than it was before this discovery. I was minding my own business during a coffee break when a woman approached me – I remember she had a strange walk rather like a duck, and started saying something that I could not at first understand. She mentioned the phrase “caribou-free zone”. Then I twigged – she was telling me to keep my mouth shut about my research involving caribou and their sky-high natural radioactivity levels.
The message was clear – if I wanted to continue to receive funding for radiation biology research I needed to stay on message – it was deadly at the tiniest levels and all funded research must show this. Well I didn’t – and it wasn’t.
I am sure many contributors to this site who work in climate related research have had their own duck-woman incidents.
O there’s a thought – Bill – are you duck-woman by any chance? Perhaps you would like to reveal your identity to us?
I discovered later some very important studies that had been actively suppressed by the radiation community. One was possibly the closest to a perfect epidemiological study – the shipyard workers study in the USA. In epidemiology you look at groups of people to see if your pet hazard such as radiation or smoking or mobile phones etc. is having a harmful effect by comparing groups with different exposure. But a huge problem is confounding factors – things like socio-economic status and many other factors can introduce artificial differences. So ideally you need two groups where the only difference is the thing you want to study. So in the USA they looked at two shipyards, one dealing with nuclear powered ships and the other with non-nuclear. They studied the workforce heath records over many years. And they found no negative health effects whatsoever except in the highest dose categories. This and much other research pointed to a threshold – a level below which radiation exposure is practically harmless.
But a threshold is politically unacceptable when your agenda is to destroy the nuclear industry, since most population exposures are below the threshold. So instead elaborate models are created based on cell biology and molecular data, which show a zero threshold – i.e. harm all the way down to zero. This makes it possible to legislate punitively and prohibitively against nuclear activities.
As in the case of climate science, an established body of experimentally derived knowledge using a deductive approach is ignored and suppressed, and a new highly inductive approach is taken making elaborate models based on many interdependent assumptions. The models can be easily designed to show what you want to show, with complete contempt for what happens in the real world.
MMR05 (15:00:43) :
‘Can anybody name a superpower from any point in history that collapsed because it was too progressive…..’
Just to name two where progressive tax and spending was the down fall.
Egypt. Pyramid building was nothing more than a government work program that led to their down fall. Egypt went broke with their progressive taxing and spending.
Roman Empire. They could no longer pay for what was promised to their army.
I once watched an archeology dig (history channel) on the west coast of South America where a 10,000 year old stone foundation of a building was un-earthed. There were hundreds of rooms. The commentator made the comment, “This must have been a government building.” I really doubt it was a Holiday Inn but it could have been.
bill (10:30:22) :
‘CO2
Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. It initially stimulates respiration and then causes respiratory depression.
High concentrations result in narcosis. Symptoms in humans are as follows:
EFFECT: CONCENTRATION:
Breathing rate increases slightly. 1% (10,000ppm)
Breathing rate increases to 50% above normal level.’
bill do you want to make a bet. I’ll bet you a $1000.00 If you put me in a room with 10,000ppm Of CO2 along with a supply of Oxygen to maintain 18-21% Oxygen level and none of your CO2 “Symptoms” will accrue. Do you want to take me up on it?
Phlogiston,
That was interesting about the caribou – I had no idea. This is an example of what I love about this site – you get to talk to people with real in depth knowledge in certain areas and come away learning something that you would never have learnt anywhere else.
jorgekafkazar (21:26:50) :
(quote) Thanks, John in Spain. Quite so. The IRS Code is Title 26 USC § 7203. There is no reference to Title 26 USC § 7203 in HR 3962, thus the draconian measures cited by Ron appear to be disinformation on someone’s part. You find a lot of that kind of thing on the Internerd. (unquote)
– – – – – – — —
The writers of the Bill do not need to mention details such as 7203 in this Bill, they merely AMEND the existing IR Code as shown at:-
line 18 page 296 of H.R. 3926 “(a) IN GENERAL.—Subchapter A of chapter 1 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by adding at the end the following new part: …………….”
followed by the actual amendment: Section 59B of H.R. 3962 (starts page 297).
Basically, if a US taxpayer is without acceptable health care in a given tax year then he incurs an additional tax liability of $15,000 (estimated cost of acceptable health care coverage in 2016).
If the taxpayer does not pay this amount to the IRS and the IRS finds about this failure to pay, then penalties will be applied. The penalties will be in the range of “mild” to “draconian” depending on the way the IRS reacts to this failure to pay.
For more information on penalties I suggest you read the JCT letter which can be recovered from the link given in Ron’s original post
http://republicans.waysandmeans.house.gov/UploadedFiles/JCTletter110509.pdf
which runs through the various civil and criminal penalty options available to the IRS but in particular see letter page 3 and also footnote 3.
Toodle pip
Ditto about this site, even the stuff that’s over my head (love hearing pros talk shop).
Phlogiston’s account of the similarity between the faux science that killed nuclear power and the agenda-driven ‘climate science’ of today is revelatory. It’s really worth an article in a major publication.
And of course EM Smith is as expert as usual; reminds me of Heinlein with his conversational but intriguing lectures.
/Mr Lynn
bill (16:21:26) says that his…
“…anology was ludicrous, yes, but it was in response to the equally ludicrous statement that more CO2 is better.”
More CO2 would be beneficial, yes: Agricultural yields would improve. And since CO2 at trace gas levels is completely harmless, more in a starving world is better. After all, the current increase in CO2 has had zero detrimental effects.
If bill believes that the recent increase in CO2 has been harmful, he needs to provide some solid real world evidence.
I also was a member of the Sierra club but stopped paying my dues to
them when they were using their funds to promote the morning after
pill. I consider myself a common sense environmentalist, but the Sierra
Club extremists were just a little too much for me to take. I strongly feel they
are just as dangerous to our economy as any other terrorist group…
Sam Wilson