Since we are watching the plight of the Thompsons in Australia over cow manure, this submission titled “Unsustainable cow manure” on sustainable energy sent to me by Paul Driessen seemed appropriate. I put solar on my own home and a school in my school district. Without “OPM”, they would not have been viable, so he has a point- Anthony
Sustainable, affordable, eco-friendly renewable energy, my eye
Paul Driessen
Seek a sustainable future! Wind, solar and biofuels will ensure an eco-friendly, climate-protecting, planet-saving, sustainable inheritance for our children. Or so we are told by activists and politicians intent on enacting new renewable energy standards, mandates and subsidies during a lame duck session. It may be useful to address some basic issues, before going further down the road to Renewable Utopia.
First, when exactly is something not sustainable? When known deposits (proven reserves) may be depleted in ten years? 50? 100? What if looming depletion results from government policies that forbid access to lands that might contain new deposits – as with US onshore and offshore prospects for oil, gas, coal, uranium, rare earth minerals and other vital resources?
Rising prices, new theories about mineral formation, and improved discovery and extraction technologies and techniques typically expand energy and mineral reserves – postponing depletion by years or decades, as in the case of oil and natural gas. But legislation, regulation, taxation and litigation prevent these processes from working properly, hasten depletion, and make “sustainability” an even more politicized, manipulated and meaningless concept.
Second, should the quest for mandated “sustainable” technologies be based on real, immediate threats – or will imaginary or exaggerated crises suffice? Dangerous manmade global cooling morphed into dangerous manmade global warming, then into “global climate disruption” – driven by computer models and disaster scenarios, doctored temperature data, manipulated peer reviews, and bogus claims about melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Shouldn’t policies that replace reliable, affordable energy with expensive, intermittent, land-intensive, subsidized sources be based on solid, replicable science?
Third, shouldn’t inconvenient sustainability issues be resolved before we proceed any further, by applying the same guidelines to renewable energy as courts, regulators and eco-activists apply to petroleum?
Most oil, gas, coal and uranium operations impact limited acreage for limited times – and affected areas must be restored to natural conditions when production ends. Effects on air and water quality, habitats and protected species are addressed through regulations, lease restrictions and fines. The operations generate vast amounts of affordable, reliable energy from relatively small tracts of land, and substantial revenues.
Wind turbines generate small amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity from gargantuan installations on thousands of acres. Turbines and their associated transmission lines dominate scenic vistas, disrupt habitats and migratory routes, affect water drainage patterns, impede crop dusting and other activities, and kill bats, raptors and other birds, including endangered species that would bring major fines if the corporate killers were oil or mining companies. And yet, wind operators receive exemptions from environmental review, biodiversity and endangered species laws that traditional energy companies must follow – on the ground that such rules would raise costs and delay construction of “eco-friendly” projects.
Kentucky’s Cardinal coal mine alone produces 75% of the Btu energy generated by all the wind turbines and solar panels in the USA, Power Hungry author Robert Bryce calculates. Unspoiled vistas, rural and maritime tranquility, and bald eagles will all be endangered if 20% wind power mandates are enacted.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station near Phoenix generates nearly 900 times more electricity than Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base photovoltaic panels, on less land, for 1/15 the cost per kWh – and does it 90% of the time, versus 30% of the time for the Nellis array. Generating Palo Verde’s electrical output via Nellis technology would require solar arrays across an area ten times larger than Washington, DC.
Building enough photovoltaic arrays to power Los Angeles would mean blanketing thousands of square miles of desert habitat. Once built, solar and wind systems will be there just this side of forever, since there will be no energy production if we let them decay, after shutting down whatever hydrocarbon operations aren’t needed to fuel backup generators that keep wind and solar facilities operational.
Wind and solar power also mean there is a sudden demand for tons of rare earth elements that weren’t terribly important a decade ago. They exist in very low concentrations, require mining and milling massive amounts of rock and ore to get the needed minerals, and thus impose huge ecological impacts.
If mountaintop removal to extract high quality coal at reduced risk to miners is unacceptable and unsustainable – how is it eco-friendly and sustainable to clear-cut mountain vistas for wind turbines? Blanket thousands of square miles with habitat-suffocating solar panels? Or remove mountains of rock to mine low-grade rare earth mineral deposits for solar panel films, hybrid batteries and turbine magnets?
Since any undiscovered US rare earth deposits are likely locked up in wilderness and other restricted land use areas, virtually no exploration or development will take place here. We will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers, like China, which are using them in their own manufacturing operations – and selling us finished wind turbines, solar panels and hybrid car batteries. The United States will thus be dependent on foreign suppliers for renewable energy, just as we rely on foreign countries for oil and uranium.
To claim any of this is ecologically or economically sustainable strains credulity.
Green jobs will mostly be overseas, subsidized by US tax and energy dollars – other people’s money (OPM). Indeed, Americans have already spent over $20 billion in stimulus money on “green” energy projects. However, 80% of the funding for some of them went to China, India, South Korea and Spain, and three-fourth of the turbines for eleven US wind projects were made overseas. This is intolerable, indefensible and unsustainable. But it gets worse.
Denver’s Nature and Science Museum used $720,000 in stimulus money to install photovoltaic panels and reduce its electricity bills by 20 percent. The panels may last 25 years, whereas it will take 110 years to save enough on those bills to pay for the panels – and by then four more sets of panels will be needed.
As to biofuels, the US Navy recently waxed ecstatic over its success with camellia-based eco-fuel in fighter jets. But the PC biofuel costs $67.50 per gallon, versus $5.00 per gallon for commercial jet fuel.
To meet the 36-billion-gallons-a-year-by-2022 federal ethanol diktat, we would have to grow corn on cropland and wildlife habitat the size of Georgia, to get 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol – plus switchgrass on farmlands and habitats the size of South Carolina, to produce 21 billion gallons of “advanced biofuel.” By contrast, we could produce 670 billion gallons of oil from frozen tundra equal to 1/20 of Washington, DC, if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge weren’t off limits.
OPM-subsidized ethanol also means a few corn growers and ethanol refiners make hefty profits. But chicken and beef producers, manufacturers that need corn syrup, and families of all stripes get pounded by soaring costs, to generate a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per tank than gasoline.
Hydrocarbons fueled the most amazing and sustained progress in human history. Rejecting further progress – in the name of sustainability or climate protection – requires solid evidence that we face catastrophes if we don’t switch to “sustainable” alternatives. Computer-generated disaster scenarios and bald assertions by Al Gore, Harry Reid, John Holdren and President Obama just don’t make the grade.
We need to improve energy efficiency and conserve resources. Science and technology will continue the great strides we have made in that regard. Politically motivated mandates will impose huge costs for few benefits. Sustainability claims will simply redistribute smaller shares of a shrinking economic pie.
“Renewable” energy subsidies may sustain the jobs of lobbyists, activists, politicians, bureaucrats and politically connected companies. But they will kill millions of other people’s jobs.
Let’s be sure to remind our elected officials of this along their campaign trails – and on November 2.
Far from it. I come from exactly the same common folk background that you accuse me of despising. As I said, it is very easy to misunderstand people who are worried about the intellectual level of the masses as being elitist. In fact what those people usually want is to eliminate that difference by elevating the masses to the level they need to be at. That’s no elitism at all. Nobody has solved any problem whose existence hasn’t even been mentioned.
1. What exactly is the solution that you think I am proposing?
2. What exactly do you propose? I never said I like what has to be done (and for the 1758696th time, nobody is suggesting lining up people and shooting them, that’s only what completely deranged lunatics with absolutely no reading comprehension skills think I am suggesting, and it, ironically, what’s going to happen if we don’t get our act together)
3. You can only claim that there is a problem “in theory but not in practice” if you have absolutely no clue about the state of the world. I will be very surprised if there are no serious disruption to the social order in the next few decades. The food riots had already started in 2008 when the recession hit, what makes you think two years from now it will be better? Will we have solved Peak Oil in 2 years?
I don’t argue from theory, I argue from data. The US peaked in 1970 exactly as predicted by the models applied to the data. Those same models predict a world peak between 2000 and 2010 (given that discovery peaked in the 1960s), we have been on a plateau since 2005. When the US peaked, it became an importer, the planet, however, has nowhere to import oil from. The consequences are clear. What here is “theory”. What is “theory” about civilizational collapse? All civilizations that had existed on this planet before have collapsed. A large number of them have done so for reasons that very clearly have a lot to do with them overshooting the carrying capacity of their environment, and in most of those cases the collapse has been real ugly. Few of them ever recovered to a level anywhere close to their former glory.
You can only type up all that nonsense if you have absolutely no idea what scientists mean when they use the word “theory”. I am not going to waste my time explaining it to you, I will only say that the “theory is useless, practice matters” approach to thing is a manifestation of exactly the same knee-jerk anti-intellectualism I so often complain about.
JustAJoe:
Ok, that’s a number that I can agree with. As you can see from the Florida data, it’s probably a relatively good number. Thanks.
Is GM George Monbiot? Or Genetically Modified?
GM;
I never said I like what has to be done (and for the 1758696th time, nobody is suggesting lining up people and shooting them, that’s only what completely deranged lunatics with absolutely no reading comprehension skills think I am suggesting>>
For someone who accuses me of having no clue about the world, you display a remarkable ignorance of history. You may not be proposing that people be lined up and shot, but you are proposing doing “what has to be done”. Consider the history of those with good intentions who set out to do just that. Lenin paved the way for Stalin and Kruschev whose murder of tens of millions pales in comparison to the fall out from Mao’s revolution. Must I go on?
And you can throw all the data about peak oil around that you want. You seem oblivious to what so many people keep trying to tell you. Technology doesn’t stand still, there are alternatives to oil, rising living standards by themselves will result in birth rate decreases, and the food riots to which you refer are the consequence of poor regional management not a lack of supply.
The scam spreads
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/09/scam-spreads.html
I see GW is continuing his never ending saga of paranoia about the future. Guess he can’t read as the links I’ve given him a half dozen times now have several examples of things that will power the entire planet, renewably or not.
But I’ll give it one more try… I’ll even use CAPS like he does so he will feel at home…
In short, if you can’t power the economy with renewables, and if the renewable in their current form depend on fossil fuels and on rare earth elements in short supply, this means that the economy is TOO BIG TO BE SUSTAINABLE and has to SHRINK until it’s safely within the carrying capacity of the planet. It shouldn’t take much brain power to figure that out, yet for most people it seems to be an impossible feat of logical reasoning.
First off, your predicate is broken. We can power the world with renewables. It’s just much more expensive than with fossil fuels and so load of people die and everyone has a loss of living standards if you IMMEDIATELY cut over to them rather then letting them build up over time as their cost curve drops.
The Rare Earth’s panic is just another paranoia panic based on not understanding the economics of resources. Look, there’s LOADS of rare earths all over the planet. Most of it is not mined for the simple reason that is is mined CHEAPER in China. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a heck of a lot more in California and Colorado (we do). It just means that we won’t mine it until China raises the price too high. Until then the definition of RESERVES says it does not exist. That does not mean there is none, it means it’s not CHEAP ENOUGH yet. So no, we don’t run out of rare earths and we don’t have a problem getting much more of them.
Reserves are always a question of PRICE not of existence.
And per “peak oil”: Two major issues.
1) IF we run out in 150 years, we can just go use coal (400 years) or Uranium / Thorium ( somewhat north of 30,000 years to 3 Billion years.)
2) There is good evidence that deep pressure and heat is turning subducted carbonate rocks into oil (not dino juice) and refilling some wells. Oil may, in fact, be renewable.
One minor issue:
I can grow algae and make “oil” and very good Diesel today at about 200 TONS of fuel per acre per year. So about a 10 x 100 mile patch of dirt for the USA. We don’t do it because the fuel costs about $4 / gallon instead of $3. Not going to be the end of the world if my Diesel rises from $3 to $4 and comes from a Texas pond instead of Saudi.
So please put away the panic and repeat after me: “There is no energy shortage and there never will be”.
Unless, of course, people like you get to shut down our economy and return us to an energy dark ages…
GM says:
“Biofuels come in for a lot of stick but they can be really nice. For example just using 30% of the land set aside as unproductive in New Zealand since 1998, would be sufficient to grow all there liquid fuel needs.”
At a negative EROEI, it will be sufficient for absolutely nothing. Not to mention the soil destruction that will result from that and the general environmental devastation
Oh gawd, the EROI foible again. But first:
It would seem that you don’t garden, either. I suggest starting with a small 4 x 4 food double dug bed and you can learn some soil science fairly easily. “Soil Destruction” will not be part of the curriculum. Take whatever weeds are on top, and put them on the bottom as you turn the first shovel depth layer back into the hole, then put the bottom shovel depth back on top. This is called ’tilling the soil’. After a couple of years of this, even hard clay with poor content gains “tilth”. Adding some earthworms helps it along, but they tend to show up on their own anyway.
It make this happen in one year instead of 4, take any plant “waste” you have and compost it, then blend that in. This is called “building the soil”. EVERY farmer knows how to do this (though not all do).
What to say about “environmental devastation”. Sorry, best spend less time on the SciFi channel. In my backyard garden I have 4 species of birds not present when I first started (including some hummingbirds that nest here now – they LOVE the runnerbean flowers). There are 4 types of bee ( 3 native California) and I’ve got possums and doves nesting here too. I’ve also enjoyed watching the development of the wasp diversity ( I’ve got two large predatory types that eat the big pest and a few micro-size ones that predate the smaller pests. Yes, I run it as a sort of organic system.) There is nothing to prevent a bio-fuels system having similar diversity (though it isn’t needed). The Eucalyptus based systems are often pesticide free as are many of the others.
Sure, a fresh ploughed field is pretty barren, but a mature field of thorns does not support much life either… (I’ve trodden many of each). Often life thrives at the edges of farmed fields where the water and food are much better than the native conditions.
Frankly, your characterization of farming as “devastation” leads me to suspect a life spent largely in cities looking at picture books of the country.
“This will provide both employment and environmental gains cutting out imports of liquid fuels and reducing abiotic oil use.”
So what exactly are going to be the environmental gain given that you just suggested converting another 30% of whatever (semi)wilderness was left into feeding lot for more humans?
Well, for starters, all the fuel burned to move Arab Oil via tanker from Arabia to New Zealand. Oil spills from wells comes to mind too.
Oh, and one side bar point: Back on EROI. You seem to have bought the line that corn is a negative energy gain and then extrapolated it to all biofuels. Very silly. First off, corn is a net positive energy gain (about 1.3 : 1 ) and you still get to feed the distillers grains and silage to cattle. Not bad at all. But yes, others are better. The best, IMHO, is algae. You can get 54 tons / acre of wood but about 10 x the productivity with algae. And some algae can be up to 1/2 oil when raised nitrogen deficient. Fairly trivial to turn into bioDiesel. Several companies have competing processes to do it. Not a theoretical lab thing at all. So to the extent that turning grain into fuel is a bit daft (it is) given the alternatives; yeah, we ought to let the markets elevate the better choices.
Oh, and in case you missed it, in the original statement it looked to me like that land was called ‘unproductive’ and that often means it was farmed once but taken out of use for economic reasons. Not typically pristine forest or savanna. So unless you really like weed fields… not the best thing to ‘preserve’. Better to turn it back to a natural planting or move it back into production.
Finally, the fundamental brokenness of EROI is the fact that it ignores that one FORM of energy may have a large benefit relative to another form. Refining Oil has a negative EROI. So does mining and refining Uranium. In the end, though, one gives us a motor fuel we desire (gasoline / Diesel) at economical prices while the other gives us electricity we desire. Nothing at all prevents me using our nearly infinity Uranium supply lifetime to make electricity and use THAT to put fuel in my tank via a process with a negative EROI. Like, oh, Coal to Liquids.
EROI is just irrelevant to real energy SUPPLIES. As long as I have a lot of any energy, it just becomes a question of turning what I HAVE into what I WANT. So give me 100 years of oil with a ‘negative EROI on lifting costs’ from “depleted” wells, but with cheap nuclear power, and I’ll be driving my car on $4 / gallon fuel for 100 more years. (No, that’s not a theoretical. About 1/2 of all oil is still in the ‘depleted’ oil fields. Put an electric pump on them and you still get oil, at a price. It’s just that the price is about $100 / bbl and right now is not below the cost of Saudi crude.)
BTW, this is why it’s really stupid that the Obama admin has ordered the cementing in of 1200 ‘unproductive’ wells in the gulf. When oil rises back to $130 / bbl instead of just starting up the pumps again, we will need to re-drill at much higher costs.
So look, get out a bit more. Turn off the SciFi and go visit a farm. Start a little garden and maybe even try your hand at taking your used french fry oil and making bioDiesel in your kitchen (I have). It’s not hard. 19% Methanol, 1% lye as catalyst, 80% warm filtered oil. Put it all in a Mason Jar with a tight sealing lid. Shake it 30 seconds every 5 minutes for an hour. Let it set overnight. Now which is better, pouring that used cooking oil down the drain or into a landfill, or putting it in the fuel tank? Now go fishing. Look at the pond scum. Realize it can make BioDiesel too. Look around. Pleasant isn’t it….
Biology can be your friend. If you let it.
PS. On rare earths et.al. notice that the article says the SUDDEN onset of demand. It’s all about lead times and reasonable adoption rates. It’s not that we can’t use alternatives, the article correctly points out that the rapid adoption when we’ve put our own resources out of reach is daft. So we could, but we will be buying from China due to stupidity on our part…
E.M.Smith says:
September 23, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Your proposal of I can grow algae and make “oil” and very good Diesel today at about 200 TONS of fuel per acre per year. So about a 10 x 100 mile patch of dirt for the USA.
would be boring as it would disappear wars, so where is the fun with it?
GM says: And there are three ways to bring ourselves within the carrying capacity of the planet – increase death rates, reduce birth rates, reduce per capita resource consumption.
Ah, and here we have he core of the error. Those 3 and only those 3.
How about:
1) Find more sources of resources. (Exploration and production).
2) Rising prices bring new sources into “reserves” (definition of reserves).
3) Change what is a resource over time (technology improvement. When was the last time you used a mechanical typewriter? When did ‘veneer’ replace solid hardwoods for most furniture needs? Ever hear of “strawboard”? CarbonCarbon Fiber?)
4) More efficient use (better designs). (My old ’56 Olds had about 10 to 20 pounds of chrome in it if the bumpers are to be believed, and got about 12 mpg. My present similar sized Mercedes gets 32 mpg. The smaller Honda even more. We used about 1 oz Platinum for catalysts at the start, now many use mineral / oxide catalysts.)
5) Change what we do. (My present commute is 0 miles. Used to be 40. I now trade stock over the internet from my living room. I’m still being ‘carried’…)
6) Change how we live. (My Dad needed a whole farm, I grew up on 1/4 acre, my kids are happier in a Condo nearer to the shops and shows.)
7) Recycle. (Endless reuse for many / most resources is possible)
8) Invent new techniques: For example, there is no limit on fresh water. The whole running out of fresh water is just lunacy. A recent development in pressure recovery reduced energy to the point where it’s fine for domestic use and even some farming. Saudi Arabia has a greenhouse using desalinized sea water for vegetables)
9) Farm more and catch less: We’ve had rapid growth of fish farming as the ocean harvest level has peaked. Now 30% of “seafood” is farmed. We can farm a heck of a lot more.
There is a lot more I could add to the list, but I fear you never bother to read and learn, so I’ll stop here.
There may well be some ultimate carrying capacity limit, but it’s a few thousand years in the future and by then I expect us to be moving out into space. At least as long as we continue our technological growth and development.
Dave says: What people neglect to mention is that we don’t need air-con in most of Europe. The other big difference is that we drive more fuel efficient vehicles.
Well, I’d also point out that crossing Denmark is a minor day trip, crossing Texas is a career… ( 1/3 the coast to coast distance on the long axis…)
And that’s the problem with these kinds of fuzzy “my kid is cuter than your kid” comparisons. Living in Texas with A/C at 110 F in the shade (and thar aint no shade) with the drive from home to work in Dallas being 60 miles (30 miles of it just crossing the downtown urban area…) is a CHOICE, not a child of green dreams 😉
But I’d take that (and Texas BBQ!) over the insanity of downtown London any day.
The stupidly huge US trucks are one of those things, I reckon. Then again, the big cars over here with just the driver inside are nearly as bad.
Don’t know if you mean the large personal Pick-Up Truck or the “lorries” delivering all the goods. The economics are such that very large trucks are more efficient at delivering goods under about 400 miles, and rail beyond that. Since we have the land to put in the roads to use large 18 wheeler semi’s, we capture that advantage. Where at one time ‘rail spurs’ were into most industrial areas, they have largely been ripped out as large trucks are cheaper.
Per Pickup-Trucks. We need them to carry all the beer and camping equipment when we go out to hunt “nature” 😉
It should also be noted about the rarity of rare earths that…
“The term “rare earth” arises from the rare earth minerals from which they were first isolated, which were uncommon oxide-type minerals (earths) found in Gadolinite extracted from one mine in the village of Ytterby, Sweden. However, with the exception of the highly-unstable promethium, rare earth elements are found in relatively high concentrations in the earth’s crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust at 68 parts per million.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earths
How someone can be so wrong so often is a puzzlement. In response to a statement about Uranium / Thorium cycle rectors, GM says:
The Uranium-Thorium breeder cycle has the capacity to provide all the necessary energy for billions of years with no long term accumulation of nuclear waste whatsoever.
This is probably the 25th time I have to explain on this blog that:
1. If we are the plateau of oil production and it will take another 20-30 years just to develop the technology (and it isn’t clear at all whether it is possible to develop it, people like to believe in magic, because that’s how it is in the movies – everything is possible, but real life ain’t like the movies), then that technology will do nothing to help solve the crisis.
Well, let me help you out a bit here with the big numbers. Notice the poster said “billions of years” that’s a really big number. Even bigger than millions and thousands and a lot longer than 30 years. So he is looking at solving the problem essentially forever. You are worried about 30 years. Yet if we were at peak oil now it would take about that long for production to drop off. Yup. Bell curves work like that. 200 years to reach peak, 200 years down the back side. Decades at the top. So we have no problem for the length of time you are worried will be a problem. That’s called a logical inconsistency.
BTW, Thorium and mixed Thorium / Uranium fuel bundles are in burn-up now in reactors in various countries. India is doing it (as they have mountains of Thorium sands) and I own stock in a company that has bundles in for certification testing now. The design work is done, folks are moving to production. I’ve posted the link to that, too, before, but you seem hell bent on hanging on to your delusions rather than seeing facts on the ground and real products today.
http://www.ltbridge.com/technologyservices/fueltechnology/designs
So sorry to disappoint, but we have the technology today, no waiting…
From:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
Thorite (ThSiO4) is another common mineral. A large vein deposit of thorium and rare earth metals is in Idaho.
The 2007 IAEA-NEA publication Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand (often referred to as the ‘Red Book’) gives a figure of 4.4 million tonnes of total known and estimated resources, but this excludes data from much of the world. Data for reasonably assured and inferred resources recoverable at a cost of $80/kg Th or less are given in the table below. Some of the figures are based on assumptions and surrogate data for mineral sands, not direct geological data in the same way as most mineral resources.
Estimated world thorium resources1
(Reasonably assured and inferred resources recoverable at up to $80/kg Th)
Country Tonnes % of total
Australia 489,000 19
USA 400,000 15
Turkey 344,000 13
India 319,000 12
Venezuela 300,000 12
Brazil 302,000 12
Norway 132,000 5
Egypt 100,000 4
Russia 75,0003
Greenland 54,000 2
Canada 44,000 2
South Africa 18,000 1
Other countries 33,000 1
World total 2,610,000
And we’ve been doing it for a while:
Between 1967 and 1988, the AVR (Atom Versuchs Reaktor, Nuclear Test Reactor) experimental pebble bed reactor at Jülich, Germany, operated for over 750 weeks at 15 MWe, about 95% of the time with thorium-based fuel. The fuel used consisted of about 100,000 billiard ball-sized fuel elements. Overall a total of 1360 kg of thorium was used, mixed with high-enriched uranium (HEU). Burn-ups of 150,000 MWd/t were achieved.
Thorium fuel elements with a 10:1 Th/U (HEU) ratio were irradiated in the 20 MWth Dragon reactor at Winfrith, UK, for 741 full power days. Dragon was run as an OECD/Euratom cooperation project, involving Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland in addition to the UK, from 1964 to 1973. The Th/U fuel was used to ‘breed and feed’, so that the U-233 formed replaced the U-235 at about the same rate, and fuel could be left in the reactor for about six years.
General Atomics’ Peach Bottom high-temperature, graphite-moderated, helium-cooled reactor in the USA operated between 1967 and 1974 at 110 MWth, using high-enriched uranium with thorium.
In Canada, AECL has more than 50 years experience with thorium-based fuels, including burn-up to 47 GWd/t. Some 25 tests were performed to 1987 in three research reactors and one pre-commercial reactor (NPD), with fuels ranging from ThO2 to that with 30% UO2, though most were with 1-3% UO2, the U being high-enriched.
In India, the Kamini 30 kWth experimental neutron-source research reactor using U-233, recovered from ThO2 fuel irradiated in another reactor, started up in 1996 near Kalpakkam. The reactor was built adjacent to the 40 MWt Fast Breeder Test Reactor, in which the ThO2 is irradiated.
In the Netherlands, an aqueous homogenous suspension reactor operated at 1MWth for three years in the mid-1970s. The HEU/Th fuel was circulated in solution and reprocessing occurred continuously to remove fission products, resulting in a high conversion rate to U-233.
And we still are using it:
CANDU-type reactors – AECL is researching the thorium fuel cycle application to Enhanced Candu 6 and ACR-1000 reactors with 5% plutonium (reactor grade) plus thorium. In the closed fuel cycle, the driver fuel required for starting off is progressively replaced with recycled U-233, so that on reaching equilibrium 80% of the energy comes from thorium. Fissile drive fuel could be LEU, plutonium, or recycled uranium from LWR. AECL envisages fleets of CANDU reactors with near-self-sufficient equilibrium thorium (SSET) fuel cycles and a few fast breeder reactors to provide plutonium. AECL is also working closely with Third Qinshan Nuclear Power Company (TQNPC), China North Nuclear Fuel Corporation and Nuclear Power Institute of China (NPIC) at Chengdu to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel and to study the commercial and technical feasibility of its full-scale use in Candu units such as at Qinshan.
Advanced heavy water reactor (AHWR) – India is working on this and, like the Canadian ACR design, the 300 MWe AHWR design is light water cooled. The main part of the core is subcritical with Th/U-233 oxide and Th/Pu-239 oxide, mixed so that the system is self-sustaining in U-233. The initial core will be entirely Th-Pu-239 oxide fuel assemblies, but as U-233 is available, 30 of the fuel pins in each assembly will be Th-U-233 oxide, arranged in concentric rings. It is designed for 100-year plant life and is expected to utilise 65% of the energy of the fuel. About 75% of the power will come from the thorium.
Fast breeder reactor (FBRs), along with the AHWRs, play an essential role in India’s three-stage nuclear power programme (see section on India’s plans for thorium cycle below). A 500 MWe prototype FBR under construction in Kalpakkam is designed to breed U-233 from thorium.
So, per your 30 years to develop it and doom is near: The phrase you are looking for is “Sorry, that was wrong”.
The only problem is that there is do darned much dirt cheap coal and oil it’s hard to get folks interested in all the other massive energy supply options.
I presume the rest of your opinions rest on equally high quality work.
OK, GM claims Geothermal is just a nit. What does MIT say?
The MIT report calculated the world’s total EGS resources to be over 13 YJ, of which over 200 ZJ would be extractable, with the potential to increase this to over 2 YJ with technology improvements – sufficient to provide all the world’s energy needs for several millennia. The total heat content of the Earth is 13,000,000 YJ.[32]
Now that is one mighty big nit… just so it’s clear, it says “ALL the world’s energy needs” followed by “for several millennia”.
And that, in a nutshell, is the real “energy problem”. We have intense GLUT, not shortage. You can power the world for thousands and thousands of years on any of Uranium, Geothermal, Thorium, Algae, Solar, Waves,…
And that means that only the cheapest ones will be economically interesting and the rest will not appear in the chart of “reserves”…
But at least he did admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about this time:
GM says:
Grey Lensman said on Unsustainable cow manure
“The simplest easiest cheapest fastest and most environment friendly solution is geothermal.”
And what happens when the temperature starts to drop due to overproduction (as has happened in real life).
You reduce your production rate slightly and it warms back up. Normal part of operations management.
Geothermal isn’t infinite, in fact it is very limited – we can only harvest as much energy as the Earth releases into space, and I don’t know the number, but given that this is flow over the whole surface of the planet, the harvestable amount isn’t very big.
Not very big. Just enough to power the whole planet.
Do you just make stuff up as you go along? Not even bothering a simple Google? I got the MIT report from “Geothermal reserves global estimate”. Not exactly a hard search term to think up… The quote is from the wiki, Here’s the pdf:
http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf
GM says: … the society we have built has absolutely no mechanism to make sure that in situation, where a tiny minority understands something of such impact for everyone that drastic action by everyone is required in order to preent a catastrophe, that drastic action is taken. Exactly the opposite –
And thank GOD and John Browning we have!
I see you are a bit weak on history as well. History is full of folks who think themselves possessed of Special Insight desiring to grasp after power and make The Big Decisions for the good of everyone else. Nero, Atilla, Alexander, Caesar, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Min, …. usually to the tune of millions of innocents killed.
Since you have already stated you think we ought to kill off all but 100,000 million or so folks, you would make the tally of your benevolent wisdom 6 Billion or so.
But the common folks know their history now, and they understand the need to keep folks with that desire under close control. “For their own good”.
So my MIT+Caltech education and total lack of desire to sugarcoat things don’t work in my favor.
Most likely not. I’d suggest spending some time developing those social skills, and then go work on a farm or ranch for about 2 years. Then you will have a much better grounding in reality. Oh, and I suggest visiting Ashland Oregon for the Shakespeare festival in Lithia Park. Avail yourself freely of the lithia water fountains, as often as possible. While the taste is a bit mineraly, it will lift your spirits…
Which I am perfectly aware of, but I will keep saying it as it is in the vain hope of changing some minds, as hopeless as it is.
Please stop. It is hopeless. Entirely and utterly hopeless. We are all doomed, you see, because the world is dominated by people like ME. Mindless drones that can never understand your wisdom. We’ve been genetically selected by generations to be resistant to your sound reasoning. We are just incapable of it. It’s all a plot to get you to waste your precious time and pollute your Precious Bodily Fluids in the trying. They have developed us, just to thwart you. Remember that a stroll though the ocean of most mens souls will scarcely get your feet wet. Give up.
/sarcoff> and apologies to Deteriorata and Dr. Strangelove fans…
Give me numbers. How big an eruption and how much energy?
Well, the MIT report has enough power for the planet, with numbers. I’d just suggest if you want a volcano, try Yellowstone. About 1,000,000 atomic bombs worth at one go, plus or minus a few hundred thousand…
And assuming you are correct, what does geothermal do to address the problems of topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, exhaustion of various mineral resources, general ecosystem collapse, etc.?
Non sequitur alert, non sequitur alert!
Those are addressed by other means. Aqifer via dealinizers and less water demanding crops (already developed, but continuing advancement), topsoil is easily rebuilt in a couple of years. Look at any old town, the dirt will be a few inches above the cement fixtures. That’s added soil. I trucked 8 inches of it out of my parkway when we moved in 25 years ago. It’s now back to 8 inches above the sidewalk near the tree, only 2 inches over away from it. And decent gardener can show you how to increase soil tilth in a year or two. Less if you compost. Minerals has already been endlessly addressed, but basically you change your technique. More gold now comes from crappier ore via “heap leach” than was ever pulled out in nuggets, for example.
Phosphates? 11-22 BILLION tons of resource. 125 Million tons mined last year. So in 100 years we might need to answer that question. (At which time I expect the answer will be “the ocean” and the only question will be if it is via Algae as a concentrator, via a permeable membrane molecular filter, or via some as yet undetermined technology). Source:
http://www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf
That we mine easy rock now does not mean we can’t mine other sources later. Historically we mined bird poo from birds that nicely collected it from the ocean in their food. Nothing to prevent US from taking the phosphate out of OUR poo instead of letting it run back into the ocean as treated sewage.
Of course, given the time it would take to build all those geothermal plants, collapse due to Peak Oil + Peak Water, Soil, Phosphorus and others will occur long before geothermal (in the unlikely case you are correct) makes any significant contribution to the energy mix.
Let’s see. Peak Oil IFF it is true, we’ve got 30 to 60 years of gradual decline as we make more coal to liquids plants (already done in South Africa and China), then it’s a couple of hundred years more on coal, then, OOPS! Forgot about the Thorium, we’ll be on nukes way before then… OK, so not a problem.
Peak Water? With desalinizing and nukes that happens, er, um, NEVER.
Soil you can build up in a year or two, if you need it. But aeroponics and hydroponics don’t even need soil. Not an issue.
Phosphorus we just covered. 100 years until we need to start capturing poo and /or doing ocean extraction (which we already do as we harvest sea food, we just pitch out the bones now).
And when you have drilled all sediment basins of the world, where do you drill next? Everest?
Well, given the deep oil found by Std.Oil and Shell, and the deep oil finds by Petrobras, the immediate answer is “go back and drill deeper”. We’ve found monster fields at depth. Where theory said there can be no oil. Other folks pointed this out up thread, but you ignored it.
The other minor issue is that Russia is finding oil in crystalline rocks with the abiotic thesis. So ‘sediment basins’ is looking a mite overly restrictive. Not to mention that with trivial effort the TRILLIONS of cubic feet of natural gas we’ve found (that has crashed prices) can be turned into gasoline, Diesel, and oil.
http://www.gasresources.net/DDBflds2.htm
See that’s how folks do things in the real world. They drop their preconceived biases and learn new tricks. The explore, advance, and invent. They fix problems and they move on.
@Steve Schaper : Well done. Though I thought I saw a fair amount of sorghum in Texas, and you could always raise cattle on the grasses that grow so well in those states. (But corn most likely pays more…) Seem to remember some other grains a bit to the northing edge of the corn belt. Wheat? Barley? Oats? They ought to grow in other states too, but probably not a big infrastructure for marketing. Yeah, the midwest is ideal for wind. Few raptors cruising the ridge lift like we have in California.
And it looks like you have a good handle on the actual economics of corn ethanol. Leaner higher profit beef, side crop of ethanol, bioDiesel from the corn oil for running the ‘ol tractor and trucks. Brewers Yeast as a high vitamin high protein feed supplement. Saw one site, that I can’t find my reference for a the moment, that co-locates cattle with the ethanol facility. Ferments the cow poo to power the distiller. Whole thing pretty much closed cycle on fuels. Net energy gain…
JimF says: I’m not sure that Big Oil is much, or even any, invested in geothermal energy now.
There’s some. But the potential is far larger than the current production.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Geothermal_Oil_Wells
@ur momisugly GM
http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/personfactsheet.php?id=1038
might be a different guy but I doubt it
E.M.Smith
Thank you for your excellent and detailed posts above. A man after my own heart. The BBC no less trumpeted the launch of the latest Saudi Mega Oilfield. They waxed lyrical regarding the massive cost of the development, the quantity of oil produced and the length of time that it would produce. They aimed directly to frighten the life out of people regarding the cost and effort.
So I crunched the numbers. Seems the cost of production over the life of the field was usd 1.00 per barrel, yes one dollar per barrel. At the price then prevailing, the multibillion investment repaid itself in 46 days, yes 46 days. I did not take that into account in calculating the lifetime production cost.
[snip]
E.M.Smith
That really bugs me, just how do we get rid of that EROI nonsense, for thats exactly what it is. The fact that the so called super efficient USA uses corn to make ethanol and excludes ethanol from much more efficient sources does not help.
They tried to wipe put Brazilian ethanol, kept the price of oil at usd 10 for years. When most users changed back to oil, the oil price exploded and they thought ethanol was dead. Well they just re-opened the refineries.
When you restore land to productive use, provide employment and income and cut out imports, those are very real positive benefits.
The fact that the USA uses corn is due to the infinite wisdom of decoupling cost as measured in $ signs from the actual energy costs of things. This is the only reason.
The existence of a sufficiently large mass of [snip] who don’t understand the importance of EROEI is the other.
[snip]
One of the most amazing things I have seen in my years on the internet is that a pretty good indicator of the amount of censoring is how loudly the website touts freedom and democracy as highest virtues (and how loudly those that are perceived as threats to them are attacked). Very interesting observation…
Pity GM cannot apply his skills to economics, even worse than climate change.
Ah and he slips in a little name calling.
Never mind, he will get over it.
davidmhoffer says:
September 23, 2010 at 2:41 am “In theory, the problem you propose is real. Resources are finite and will be depleted. … Is there an end to entropy? Of course. … Is there peak oil and can guys like John put more in the ground? Of course there is and of course they can’t. ”
You give too much ground. I realise this wasn’t your main point, but the above statements are not correct. In an open universe, entropy can continue to increase for ever, without limit. The observational evidence suggests that our universe is of this type; that it is infinite in extent and will expand for ever. Such a universe can avoid the so-called “heat death”.
Peak oil was – and is – the theory that cumulative production follows a bell-shaped mathematical curve (the Hubbert curve), and that total production can be predicted from past production. Like AGW, the theory was soon disproved; it made predictions that proved false. It is false because it fundamentally misunderstands the economic and political nature of oil exploration and production. It is not a physical law.
The amount of oil we produce is and will always be determined by how much we want to proeduce (where “want” is some sort of resultant of all the economic and political demands, in conjunction with the fashionable technologies of the day). There is no physical limit. If we want to put more oil in the ground, we can do so. We probably will, at some stage, as a convenient way of storing reserves. My guess is that on Earth oil+gas production will plateau at a level rather higher than now, then slowly fall off as consumer demand shifts towards other technologies, mainly electric. There will be significant production for specialised purposes indefinitely. Off Earth, though, it will probably never become very important outside those specialised uses, other technologies being used from the outset.
@Grey Lensman: Glad you like it. Way more work than justified by the ‘stimulus’ but I figured it ought to help the lurkers who didn’t know it already.
GM says: One of the most amazing things I have seen in my years on the internet is that a pretty good indicator of the amount of censoring is how loudly the website touts freedom and democracy as highest virtues (and how loudly those that are perceived as threats to them are attacked).
Um, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen is how hard it is for some folks to be civil and follow the rules. There are not that many here. BTW, last I looked, this was not ‘touted as a democracy’ but rather a benevolent dictatorship. It IS Anthony’s site… If you don’t like the rules about word use and being civil, you could always leave. If you troll through the comments on various threads, you will find not that many ‘snips’. I’ve had one (and I was being a bit rude and deserved it.)
BTW, speaking as just one of the folks here, I don’t perceive you as a threat at all. That is just self aggrandizement on your part. PITA? Sure. Misguided? Certainly. But a threat? Laughable. BTW, it’s a sign of a certain degree of paranoia to misconstrue ‘guidance and correction’ as ‘personal attack’. So, for example, the 10th time I’ve pointed you at validated sources showing you are flat out wrong on something, like the availability of functionally unlimited nuclear power, and how that makes EROEI pointless, to then call it an ‘attack’ is just [ self snip] behaviour.
So perhaps you ought to take a moment to contemplate how much patience and tolerance has been dolled out in your direction as you endlessly prattle on spouting things that are trivially refuted with papers from name organizations and little things like existence proofs (say those Thorium nuke plants we’ve run for decades). Which you adamantly refuse to learn the smallest of things from reading.
Throwing a tantrum over being required to follow a couple of rules is hardly building a case for your positions.
Very interesting observation…
Yes, especially if you have any background in psychology and diagnosis…
Grey Lensman says:
Pity GM cannot apply his skills to economics, even worse than climate change.
I suspect he flunked an econ class. Has a tendency to rant against ‘economists’, but couldn’t learn that Malthus IS an economist and is the iconic center of his belief system. Strange, that.
Ah and he slips in a little name calling.
I think you meant ‘Ah and he SNIPS in a little…’ 😉
Never mind, he will get over it.
No, he won’t. IMHO: Brittle behaviour patterns, inability to learn and change, self affected grandeur, messiah complex, persecution complex. Nope, not the kind to get over it.
If you have to go there, self aggrandizement…that is unverifiable btw, then you’ve already lost.