Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. had a worthwhile guest essay in Foreign Policy titled: Climate of Failure published last year that Dr. Judith Curry has made a post about today that she calls a “good topic for Sunday discussion”. I agree. While I see many of the same things she does, I also see a different path forward. Her last takeaway point is:
… focus on goals that can actually be accomplished and getting people who think differently to act alike.
We have the technology to do that in our hands now, all we need is the will. If it weren’t for the need to make nuclear bombs (of which uranium based nuclear power is a spinoff), we might already have been there. Few people know this, but the demonization of coal didn’t start with environmentalists, it started with nuclear power advocates, but that is a story for another day.
Here are some excerpts from Pielke Jr’s essay in FP:
Environmentalists are just now waking up to the reality that if we’re going to stop global warming, we’re going to have to be a lot more politically savvy.
So what’s the next step? For years — decades, even — science has shown convincingly that human activities have an impact on the planet. That impact includes but is not limited to carbon dioxide. We are indeed running risks with the future climate through the unmitigated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the schemes attempted so far has made even a dent in the problem. While the climate wars will go on, characterized by a poisonous mix dodgy science, personal attacks, and partisan warfare, the good news is that progress can yet be made outside of this battle.
…
The heady days of early 2009, when advocates for global action on climate change anticipated world leaders gathering later that year around a conference table in Copenhagen to reach a global agreement, are but a distant memory. Today, with many of these same leaders focusing their attention on jump starting economic growth, environmental issues have taken a back seat. Leaders’ attention to climate policy is not coming back — at least not in any form comparable to the plans being discussed just a few years ago. A rising GDP, all else equal, leads to more emissions. But if there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable.
Stabilizing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would require more than 90 percent of the energy we consume to come from carbon-free sources like nuclear, wind, or solar. Policymakers often discuss reducing annual emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels. But emissions today are already more than 45 percent higher than in 1990, so that higher level implies a need to cut by more than 90 percent from today’s levels. Put another way, in round numbers, we could keep at most 10 percent of our current energy supply, and 90 percent or more would have to be replaced with a carbon-free alternative. Today, about 10 percent of the energy that we consume globally comes from carbon-free sources — leaving a long way to go.
Consider this: If the goal is to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a low-level by 2050 (in precise terms, at 450 parts per million or less), then the world would need to deploy a nuclear power plant worth of carbon free energy every day between now and 2050. For wind or solar, the figures are even more daunting.
…
Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, because it is still carbon intensive, but the rapidly declining U.S. emissions prove an essential policy point: Make clean(er) energy cheap, and dirty energy will be quickly displaced. To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation — technological, but also institutional and social. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation — not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price — is where we’ll make process.
The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished.
Full essay here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/06/climate_of_failure
Notes from Anthony:
“…the world would need to deploy a nuclear power plant worth of carbon free energy every day between now and 2050. For wind or solar, the figures are even more daunting.”
Given the size of the task presented, and the “herding cats” nature of individual sovereign nation economies, it seems to me that the promise of clean energy alternatives as a solution to carbon emissions is essentially stillborn.
In my opinion, Thorium based nuclear power is the way forward. It has all the benefits of zero carbon emissions, plus it has less problematic fissile by-products than comparable Uranium235 based power systems. Plus, the fuel components of thorium based power systems aren’t generally compatible with current fission and thermonuclear bomb making technologies, making such technology less of a terrorist action risk. Thorium is estimated to be about three to four times more abundant than uranium in the Earth’s crust.
Surprisingly, the US has already had (and discarded) a Thorium based power plant. The very first nuclear power plant at Shippingport , which converted to Thorium and began operating in August 1977:
It used pellets made of thorium dioxide and uranium-233 oxide; initially the U233 content of the pellets was 5-6% in the seed region, 1.5-3% in the blanket region and none in the reflector region. It operated at 236 MWt, generating 60 MWe and ultimately produced over 2.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. After five years the core was removed and found to contain nearly 1.4% more fissile material than when it was installed, demonstrating that breeding had occurred
It was decommissioned in 1982 and dismantled, the former site has been cleaned up and released for unrestricted use without any radioactivity issues.
Just think of the good people like Bill McKibben could do if they got behind ideas like Thorium power, rather than wasting their efforts trying to tear down existing energy supplies and replace them with impotent alternatives.
Here are two videos on Thorium based nuclear power, the first is 30 minute documentary,
The second is a 5 minute intro into LFTR reactors for the time-challenged.
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While on the subject I can also say that vast amounts of thorium are presently mined and thrown away.
Heavy mineral sands (HMS) are the main source of titanium oxide pigment which is the base material in all paint. Many million tonnes of heavy mineral sands are extracted each year. The monazite and xenotime minerals which mainly contain the thorium are concentrated then discarded back to the pit from whence the HMS was extracted. This is done becase there is no market for thorium to speak of and being slightly radioactive it represents a red and green tape hazard of the first order, so mineral sands companies don’t want to know about it. Its easiest to put it back where it came from.
Unlike uranium, thorium is much easier to recover into a high grade concentrate, because monazite is so easy to recover by gravity separation. No chemicals are needed during primary extraction. No problems with the radiactivity decay chains arise, which does in wet uranium processing. So you just have to take the monazite concentrate to a refinery and turn it into ThO2, thereby restricting the environmental issues to a single small site instead of in mines all over the place (which is the case with uranium).
There seems to be two themes here, (i) that the energy planners (aka: US politicians & military?) have made a monumental cock-up in not developing Thorium/LFTR decades ago, so no surprise there, governments are the always the worst at choosing winners, and (ii) that the claims that our CO2 emissions have any effect on the climate are unmitigated nonsense, a point which has been repeatedly made by a significant number of skeptical scientists, but repeatedly slapped down with no justification, i..e. supportable argument or evidence to back it up, by the ‘luke-warm’ skeptics.
The upshot of this is that thorium/LFTR solution is a good answer but to the wrong question, i.e. as an emissions reduction solution. LFTR is a good answer to the long-term economic and secure energy generation requirement for all the world’s nations, but the CO2 emissions question is a non-entity – there is no issue with it, and no evidence has been presented that supports any causal linkage between CO2 and global temperature. Quite the reverse, the last 17 years and the comparison between the IPCC models and real observational data have amply demonstrated that the claimed link is falsified – which is how science is supposed to work.
I note the US and EU government have asked the UN IPCC for more explanation about the global temperature hiatus, i.e. why they have no idea why the temperature trend shows no rise of any significance (even a fall, depending on data set), yet the full expectation is the next IPCC report and SPM will claim 95% certainty that the continued warming (which isn’t) is man-made. How can they not have a clue, yet be 95% certain at the same time???
There are increasing numbers of papers and reports being produce citing lower than expected ‘climate sensitivity’ levels, but no-one has yet stood up and properly examined and tested the ‘zero sensitivity’ scenario. This needs to be done, and without the assumption “that CO2 must cause some warming” denial.
RockyRoad says:
September 1, 2013 at 2:24 pm
… As a continuance of my reply to Paul Linsay, you call it “cold fusion”, which is a misnomer–it creates fusion products but not the way the sun or “hot fusion” creates it–by squeezing atoms together beyond the Coulomb barrier until they become one.
Instead, LENR cheates the strong-force realm and utilizes the weak forces, which haven’t been studied as much as their strong-force counterpart. Researchers are now studying it and find remarkable results–so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if the panacea to our energy future is largely if not completely LENR.
But to require characteristics of a reaction that isn’t that reaction only means you don’t understand what LENR is.
Given that the weak nuclear force has an effective range of 1% of the diameter of an atomic nucleus, this explanation is utterly ridiculous.
To create a weak nuclear force interaction, you would need to squeeze not just the atomic nuclei together, but the components of the nuclei would also have to be squeezed with a force comparable to the forces exerted when a neutron star forms, to bring the quark components of protons and neutrons close enough together to produce a weak nuclear interaction.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/638203/weak-force
We’d all like cold fusion to be true – but fantasies about imaginary interactions is junk science.
What risks this century? A greening biosphere? We are at the low end of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere geologically speaking. The net benefits of more co2 pumped into the atmosphere this century outweigh any imagined or real problems.
I doubt whether there will be “unmitigated release of carbon dioxide” in 2080. Not because of a danger from our co2 output but because of human innovation. What did we have in 1890? Compare that to what we had in 1990. What do we have since 1890? Nuclear power, cars, land on moon, land on Mars, smartphones, BigDog (US Robtics), PCs, airline passengers, microscopic genetic engineering, nuclear bombs, machine guns, keyhold surgery?, gas fracking, and so on. France gets over 70% of it’s energy from nuclear. The US has seen its co2 output fall for shale gas. And we are only in 2013.
Interesting comments, but presently there does not appear to be a strong case for not using coal, and coal is both abundant and cheap. China is rolling out a couple of new coal fired power stations every week and that does not seem to have caused rapid runaway warming these past 17 or so years.
Why look for other means for energy production when we have a tried and tested method that will see us through for thousands of years.
Of course, I am not suggesting that research into other systems for energy production should be abandoned, but merely that coal should be the main producer until something better comes along which it will in its own time.
It appears to me that we are unnecessarily switching away from cheap and reliable energy production.
Sorry, I made a mistake in my list. The Maxim (machine gun) was invented in 1884, but I hope I’ve still made my point. Let me replace the machine gun with cruise missiles. ;-(
[Machine guns have killed more people though. Mod]
It’s not about reducing man’s co2 output. It’s about shutting down the world’s industrial complex.
If co2 presents us with the most serious problem we have ever faced then adopt thorium nuclear reactors and shale gas as an intermediate energy source.
We are dealing with a bunch of people who wish to achieve their aims via scare stories and not the democratic process. Al Gore, the president that never was comes to mind.
Thorium looks good on paper, but violates my Second Rule:
“if it is that easy, someone would have done it.”
(my first rule is “it always costs more and takes longer”)
Or, to quote Heinlein: TANSTAAFL
Exactly! They speculate about the future. That’s it. The rest is biased and imagined problems of amphibians etc. But when they look to their boots they see the problem – it’s them spreading disease to amphibians. Most of them are suffering from the outrageous Declining Effect. It has often lead to consternation among dedicated science researchers.
(PS. I not that the author of the declining effect piece wrote a follow up attacking sceptics of CAGW when he realised that his article was being used by sceptics against Warmists scientists. He wants to have it both ways I suppose.)
Greenpeace et. al? France gets over 70% of its energy from nuclear I have been told.
Clearly you have your eyes off the ball of solar costs. Look again.
The JET/MIT NANOR device or the Rossi E-Cat device are better than any nuclear plant. If we put as much time and energy into LENR devices as we do into talking about nuclear, wind, solar etc it would be a done deal… In certain LENR devices the energy seems to come from the process of ionization and recombination(bond energy)..
Brant Ra
September 1, 2013 at 5:34 pm
The JET/MIT NANOR device or the Rossi E-Cat device are better than any nuclear plant. If we put as much time and energy into LENR devices as we do into talking about nuclear, wind, solar etc it would be a done deal… In certain LENR devices the energy seems to come from the process of ionization and recombination(bond energy)..
if Rossi E-cat actually worked, it wouldn’t need any money “put into it”. The demonstration units could be hooked up to the grid on a household scale, generating clean energy, collecting feedin tariffs, which could be used to fund more house scale e-cats, until everyone was using them.
The excuse that Rossi is based on “weak nuclear interactions” (as an explanation for the lack of radiation) is junk science. The true explanation for the lack of radiation is the lack of nuclear activity in the Rossi magic cauldron.
My understanding, from reading several papers by Henry Sokolski, is that spent enriched uranium fuel containing Pu239 can be run through the Purex process resulting in material that contains inconvenient isotopes of Pu (Pu-240 I think is the problem), but which can be used directly in a bomb. The needed assembly time is very short because of these other Pu isotopes, but the sort of technology used in the July 1945 Trinity bomb would result in a device that had about 30% probability of producing 5KTons. I’d call it a bomb. The only impediment to building a bomb from reactor material of any sort is timely accounting for the material.
I don’t think the “environmental” minded leaders intend to solve the problem by replacing that 90% with something more green. I think they intend for that 90% of demand to go away, meaning 90% of us have to go. They are very diabolical. Those who are left will use power when there is power available and those in power deem such use is in the accord with their central planning.
If we are bound and determined to eliminate fossil fuels as energy sources, it will take a lot of investment, leaving less for other needs, and a long time. I don’t see how we will abandon diesel engines for construction, or farming, for a very long time, maybe five decades as there aren’t good alternatives at present. I once calculated that to convert the electric grid in the U.S. entirely to wind energy in twelve years (I did the calculation because of a claim by Al Gore) would take about half-a-trillion dollars investment per year. Solar would be even more expensive. I doubt the resulting grid would be reliable or stable without some fossil fuel or nuclear plants included, but the point is that we cannot afford to concentrate investment in this manner to the exclusion of other needs–hence it may take five or more decades for the transformation.
arthur4563 says:
September 1, 2013 at 1:41 pm
“Thorium reactos may win out, but there is no advantage in terms of fuel availability..”
Arthur, there is indeed an advantage in that it is a by-product of beach sands mining for titanium and zirconium minerals and they have had to basically throw away the thorium (mineral monazite). But much greater an issue, and this is the point of the post, is we already have a lot of the AGW folks on side for thorium. The anti-nuclear bunch are going a bit soft on thorium and the fact that we can burn up the uranium tech wastes in the thorium reactor is an added bonus. Having said all this, Pielke Jr. is wrong about CO2, and nature itself is demonstrating this, but I don’t have any problem capitalizing on the sunnier face for thorium – it is the way to go.
Retired Engineer says:
September 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm
“Thorium looks good on paper, but violates my Second Rule:
“if it is that easy, someone would have done it.”
(my first rule is “it always costs more and takes longer”)”
R.E., you appear to be unfamiliar with the history of the rejection of Th. The pentagon didn’t want Th precisely because it didn’t produce weapons grade plutonium. Oak Ridge had a good concept but the US Atomic Energy Commission ordered all Th research to be stopped in 1973. I apologize for using Wiki but I knew this from other sources many years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
I advocate donating to land trusts and restoring watersheds in order to make a more resilient environment. That way we hedge against warming or cooling, natural or man made. Promote more entrepreneurial solutions. When people moaned that expensive mainframes would only allow the rich and governments to access computing power, in less than 2 decades the entrepreneurs put even more computing power on a telephone and into the hands of most people. Separate capital gains taxes from all others. That will create a better risk/reward ratio and encourage more investments in green energy and solutions that are not forced on the public by unmindful politicians.
Jumbo:
Very good find with that New Yorker link (above) about Declining Results. He is writing about medical studies in particular, and (deliberately ?) choice not to bring up anything about CAGW dogma in our Science presses, but every paragraph related directly to the mime and memo’s used for promoting CAGW and the energy denial policies it demands be placed on the public.
Hundreds of interesting quotes in the 5 page article, but these paragraphs are especially interesting.
Frank Kotler says:
A plant that was supposed to be shut down the year before due to age related safety concerns, that was designed decades earlier, was hit by a natural disaster beyond any imagined scenario that was considered during design, or, indeed, considered by anyone in the time since, and the result is: 0 deaths. That is an astonishingly safe technology! Normally operating coal plants have deaths from time to time, and deaths in the mining, and as for the health impacts of wind farms and wildlife death, heaven help us! What on God’s earth do you expect from nuclear technology? What result could possibly satisfy you?
If I were a utility looking at future power generation, right now I could NOT accurately project more than 5 years in the future (because of financing changes and expected load changes!) but I’d have gamble – literally l gamble my future on assuming that a nuclear plant 9800 Megawatt to 1200 megawatt) “might” be built in less than 10 years – IF i could get approval and ALREADY HAVE an existing “utility” nuclear economic baseline and security group and training and QA group and “attitude” in my nuclear division. the two – nuclear and fossil are so different, so extraordinarily economically non-competitive and take such extraordinary different management attitudes that you CANNOT run a nuclear plant inside a utility that is not already running a nuclear division.
Thorium cannot compete until it is simpler and as easy to get up and running as a simple 600 megawatt dual gas turbine and heat recovery steam secondary 3-way plant. If I can go from open field to running power plant in two years, and I am going to need 5 years to just get a design of a thorium plant off of the computer screens – never mind approval and licensing and material purchase! – thorium has no chance.
No. Thorium may be the best power supply, but no one can gamble on it until they see it running for 5 years of local recycling and refueling. And, if I were not the first operator, I’d prefer 10 years run time before committing my company to 10 years of construction and funding and licensing nightmares.. And even after 10 years will the first operators really “know” what in-core damage is going to turn up in the new metals and carbon dividing walls and recycling/refueling unknowns and poison buildups.
How long was asbestos being used as insulation before the lawyer-driven hysteria of lawsuits put that industry in the grave?
Build a reactor. Build a recycling unit that is running pounds of fuel every day, not a laboratory unit trying to put through micrograms once a year. get the molten salt through several startup and shutdown cycles – let’s see if it can be repaired at all.
I served the USS Seawolf, – Rickover’s second reactor design. It failed. Serviced the Nautilus reactor decontamination and defueling, and qualified on its prototype (S1W.) It worked. Qualified a couple of other reactors, serviced and engineered a couple dozen other light water reactors of various types and vintages.
There are too many failure modes out there for me to champion thorium this early. Am I cynical enough to say “Let the Indians and Chinese find out the mistakes” then we’ll buy what works? That also is stupid. But do i trust Obama’s DOE to fund Oak Ridge National Lab or INEL or any college or laboratory to make a working thorium reactor right now?
Yeah. Right. Sure. OK. (Does 4 positives imply a negative?)
72.
Ron House says:
September 1, 2013 at 6:44 pm
…
What result could possibly satisfy you?
—————————————————–
Hi Ron,
It isn’t so much what result would satisfy me, as what the “experts” promise us. Does “electricity too cheap to meter” sound familiar? I really should chase back to the first couple of days after the earthquake/tsunami (NOT a nuclear accident!) and “name names” of the self-proclaimed experts who claimed “all over in 12 to 24 hours” and ask them “what do you say now?” Unless you were one of them, this doesn’t apply to you. Rather than “all over” or even “getting better”, it appears to be “getting worse”. You’re quite right that no one has died, and I hope no one will. France seems to be having good success, and they don’t seem to be dropping like flies. Coal miners die “all the time”. We need to conduct a risk:benefit analysis for any method of producing energy. The benefits are quite large. They are reaped by people living now, or within 40 years (or however long we wind up licensing the things for). The risks, however small they may be, are imposed on people for… how long would you say, Ron? Thousands of years? Less? More? It seems to me that the number of people put at risk is much larger than the number of people reaping benefits – conceeding that the risks/benefits are quite assymetrical. I hope you’re not claiming that the risk is zero – that would set my bs-meter beepin’! I don’t know how to do a risk:benefit analysis on that basis. If you do, clue me in (please).
I have observed (perhaps not here) that we only need to swap two letters to turn “nuclear” into “unclear”. I have a friend – a “shroud waver” – who claims that children are dying in Japan (from radiation) in droves but it’s being covered up. Is this true? How the snip would I know? It’s being covered up! 🙂
We know (pretty sure) that many people have been evicted from their homes, and don’t know when (whether) they will be allowed(!) to return. This must be quite distressing! You don’t have to die to be “at risk”.
My point was not that nuclear (fission) is “too dangerous”. I’m quite hopeful about thorium and/or fusion (any temperature is okay with me). My point was that the “promises” being made for thorium/fusion may or may not be more believable than “too cheap to meter” and “all over in 12 to 24 hours”. “nuclear unclear”, that’s all.
Sorry, I don’t mean to hijack the thread…
I haven’t held out much hope that solar or wind would be able to significantly contribute to the terrawatts of energy needed to power modern civilization. But I came across this video about a new approach to solar based on photosynthesis. The technology is well beyond theory but I don’t know whether it can provide an economical solution or if so how soon.
The technology isn’t discussed until 40 or 50 minutes into the video but the background information is good, essentially exploring the options for generating the additional terrawatts of energy needed to raise all countries to the standard of living of Spain by 2050.
Jimbo says:
September 1, 2013 at 5:15 pm
=================================================================
A question. What does France due with its radioactive waste?
I’m a skeptic about AGW, but that skepticism is nothing compared to my skepticism about Cold Fusion. Many things, but let me just address the idea that a conspiracy of academic physicists has suppressed the truth. I have no problem with de facto conspiracies to suppress truth, which I think has happened with climate change.
However, in the case of cold fusion, it doesn’t make sense. There would have been Nobel prizes, million dollar consulting contracts, billion dollar startups for people who could support the theory. There has been really nothing for those who debunked it, because they have simply applied pre-existing theories.
So when mainstream particle physicists have uniformly discarded the idea, despite the enormous advantages to showing it to be true, I’m led to believe the simplest explanation. That it’s in fact not true.