Guest essay by David Archibald
It is a significant fact that half the protein the world eats has its origin in fossil fuels. We are all aware of the green revolution that, amongst other things, saw dwarf strains of wheat increase yields by a couple of hundred percent. There was another revolution in agriculture sixty years prior to the green revolution. That was the development of the Haber-Bosch process of combining hydrogen and nitrogen to produce nitrogenous fertiliser.
The plants that produce that fertiliser, the source of half of the protein we eat, run on natural gas or coal. One day these fossil fuels will run out. Does that mean that half of our population starves? It does if we don’t have a way of producing nitrogenous fertilisers cheaply using something other than natural gas or coal.
And it won’t be sunbeams or wisps of the wind that will keep people fed. Those things barely pay for themselves, if that. Take the case of the Ivanpah solar facility in California built at a cost of $2.2 billion. Rated at 392 MW, Ivanpah is a near 20-fold scale up from the previous largest solar thermal facility of 20 MW in Spain. Despite all the engineering that went into the design of Ivanpah, it operated at least 40% below design in 2014.
The chief economist of the International Energy Agency, a warmer by the name of Fatih Birol, once said ‘One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us.” What is true of oil, the liquid fossil fuel, is also true of the solid, coal, and the gaseous form, natural gas. One may quibble about the detail but the overall effect will look something like this:
Figure 1: Fossil Fuel Production 1800 – 2300
Oil production will be the first to start the long decline to oblivion. We can fix the problem of declining transport fuel availability by a form of alchemy that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. And we will be doing that. But it will be another short term fix until the coal runs out. You might think we have a lot of coal. We had a lot of oil too, once – until we burnt it. Converting coal into the transport fuels we need will double the rate of our coal consumption. And our coal endowment will be largely gone in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.
If we combine the data from Figure 1 with world population growth, we get this figure:
Figure 2: Per Capital World Fossil Fuel Production 1800 – 2300
Per capita fossil fuel production falls off a cliff in 2030. Projections of agricultural land available to be brought into production suggest that the system might cope with growing demand at least up until the late 2030s. Fossil fuel availability though indicates that prices will start accelerating well before then.
There is no alternative – nuclear energy is the only energy source that has any prospect of making good the looming fall in energy supply. Only nuclear power has any hope of being cheap enough to provide the energy to cook up the slew of chemicals and fuels we need to maintain our high standard of living. But it won’t be nuclear power as it is commonly understood. That is power plants burning U235 and using water as the coolant. Civilisation took a wrong turn way back in the 1950s when that technology became dominant in the nuclear power industry.
There are a number of reasons why it was a wrong turn. Firstly, U235 is only one thousandth of the nuclear fuel available to us. The best nuclear fuel, thorium, is eight hundred times more abundant. If you like to believe in a Creator who made the earth as a paradise for us to inhabit, U235 is the nuclear match made for us to light the fire that will sustain civilisation indefinitely. We are still burning that nuclear match though and we should have already moved on from that.
The second big problem with nuclear power plants running on U235 is decay heat. You can’t turn off nuclear power plants instantaneously. They continue to produce heat for a while after the reactions have been shut down. If the cooling water doesn’t circulate for some reason during this period, then there is a good chance you will get a hydrogen explosion. This is what happened at Fukushima which had three reactors blow up due to hydrogen explosions.
The question now being asked about thorium reactors is, if they are so wonderful, why haven’t they been developed yet? The only major company that once expressed an interest in developing molten salt thorium reactors was Teledyne Brown. There are a number of startups in the thorium space but none seem to have traction yet.
Perhaps the reason is that nobody has looked past the development of a commercial thorium reactor, a wonderful thing in itself, to the enormous commercial opportunity that follows from that. Let’s assume that each thorium power plant is 250 MWe, the same size as the conceptual design at Oak Ridge National Laboratory 50 years ago. Assuming no economic growth that required a higher rate of build, just replacing declining fossil fuel production to 2100 would require the building of 14,500 units at 250 MWe. The build rate would get to about 300 a year by mid-century. The rate could be 30% to 40% higher than that if carbon-based transport fuels are going to be created from hydrogen from electrolysis and carbon scavenged from forestry and agricultural waste. Also assuming that each unit lasts for sixty years before it has to be replaced, then the ramp up of replacement units in the second half of the century is just as fast as the initial ramp up as per Figure 3 following:
Figure 3: Number of 250 MWe nuclear reactors required by year to 2100
Thorium molten salt reactors, without the need for all the backup safety systems that U235 nuclear plants have, should be no more expensive to build than coal-fired plants. This is an overnight capital cost of $3,246/kW as opposed to U235 nuclear at $5,530/kW. At that rate, a 250 MWe plant would cost about $800 million. Building 300 per annum would provide a revenue of $240 billion per annum.
To put that in perspective, in the first quarter of 2015 the commercial division of Boeing sold 184 aircraft for $15.4 billion. That is an average revenue of $84 million per aircraft. The list price of a 737-800 is $93.3 million. Annualised, Boeing has a revenue of $60 billion per annum from its commercial aircraft division. Our prospective thorium reactor builder would become four times larger in the base case.
That will be the reward for saving humanity from a bleak future by developing the thorium molten salt reactor – owning an enormous industrial enterprise.
David Archibald, a visiting fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance (Regnery, 2014)
The proportion of grain that is derived from fossil fuels has steadily increased during my life time. It’s not just fertilizers and pesticides, but the gas and diesel consumed in soil preparation and harvesting, as well as bringing the raw materials in and moving the grain into storage or to market.
“The proportion of grain that is derived from fossil fuels has steadily increased during my life time.”
Are you over 100 years old? Farmers today use far less oil products per acre and way way less per bu today than ever.
Nope. Going on 65.
Much of the increase from 35 bu/A Federation wheat to the varieties yielding over 100 bu/A on the same land (in my family since 1865) today is from fossil fuel inputs of all kinds, as well of course as from breeding the new varieties. The same is true throughout my region. No-till requires even more such inputs, despite fewer tractor passes.
I wonder how you derived your conclusion?
Intrigued by your claim, I checked fertilizer consumption data, which USDA reports only from 1960, so the first decade of my lifetime is missing.
In 1960, the US consumed 7.46 million short tons of NPK fertilizers. Use peaked in 2004 at 23.37 MT, and has fluctuated since then based upon acres planted and the economics of farming. Last reported year was 2011, in which 21.75 MT were consumed. Yield has stayed about the same, depending upon WX and quality of land planted, since the newer miracle strains don’t provide the same umph that the first ones did over the old, taller, smaller headed strains.
Larger equipment means fewer passes for field work and harvest, but at higher fuel consumption. Didn’t check pesticide consumption.
Bit of a non sequitur, but you might appreciate this article:
US Farmers In “Dire Straits”: JPM Warns Of Imminent Liquidity Crunch
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-15/us-farmers-dire-straits-jpm-warns-imminent-liquidity-crunch
Max,
Thanks. I have already observed that in my area. Luckily, my family and friends already own their land outright, so are not in a cash crunch. We can get whatever loans we need to operate without fear of foreclosure. I’ve seen this before, back in the 1980s.
While grain prices remain higher in unadjusted terms than previously, so too are input prices. The first time that soft white wheat for Portland delivery touched $7 per bushel was in that “climatic” year of 1977, when diesel was around 30 cents rather than $3.00 per gallon.
At least borrowing costs are also low, but can that last forever?
Hyperzombie, you obviously do not run a farm. I do. It is true farmers have vastly increased productivity. Round hay bales weighing half ton each, GMO weed killer resistant corn and soy, synthetic fertilizer… And 200 HP tractors. Diesel fuel is a big bill for us. Hundred years ago, a farm was 40 acres and mule power run on hay. Now it is a minumum of several hundred (dairy, orchards) to several thousand (row crops) and diesel power run on oil.
Rud,
So true.
On my wall hangs a photo from 110 years ago of my great granddad’s ranch (4000 rather than 40 acres) being harvested by a 32-mule team pulling a combine. In the next generation came tractor-pulled combines. In the next appeared self-propelled combines. In the present generation we have tracked rather than wheeled combines, the biggest and best yet.
Sturgishooper,
For your own family’s good, I implore you to open your mind to the idea that there is a world of difference between low and stable interest rates, which is beneficial, and a falling interest rate structure such as we have had since 1980, which is lethal.
10 Year US Treasury Bond Yields
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5ETNX+Interactive#{“useLogScale”:true,”range”:”max”}
People don’t realize that a falling interest rate structure destroys capital on the balance sheet by increasing the liquidation value of debt.
And don’t think that yields (the flipside of bond prices) can’t be halved and halved again, ad infinitum, each time obliterating capital by doubling the burden of debt.
FALLING INTEREST RATES ARE NOT A PLUS!
I know that is counter-intuitive to everything you know, but trust me. At a minimum, read this article:
Is Our Accounting System Flawed?
By ignoring the Law of Liabilities, it may be insensitive to capital destruction.
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles%5CAEFIsOurAccountingSystemFlawed.pdf
Don’t get caught up on the references to gold; the point here is seeing the balance sheet effects of a falling interest rate environment, even in a Federal Reserve Note world.
At a minimum, at least read through to the section on the Law of Liabilities.
Once you comprehend the key point, you will see that we are in the midst of the Greatest Depression, now 35 years old, still going strong, with the worst yet to come.
I should add that even your capital, in the form of a farm with no debt, is still subject to the maw of a falling interest rate environment.
I’m short German bonds. Does that help?
Shorting bonds is suicidal.
If you are forecasting the demise of the bond bull, you will be gored.
BONDS MAY BE DEFYING DIRE FORECASTS
BUT THEY ARE NOT DEFYING LOGIC
Parts 1 and 2
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles/AEFBONDSAndLogicPart1.pdf
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles/AEFBondsAndLogicPart2.pdf
* * * * *
The hallmark of a depression is a bond bull, as it vacuums capital from savers and producers.
The depression is deepening. Hyperdeflation is looming on the dark horizon.
Those who are predicting hyperinflation based on the erroneous (and $%#@! imbecilic) Quantity Theory of Money will continue to get their fingers burned up to their armpits.
Max,
Thanks for your concern and advice.
Few asset classes will flourish in a depression. I am however diversified across asset classes internationally but concentrate resources when I see what looks like an opportunity. So far this approach has stood me in good stead in good times and bad. My stake in our family ranch is a small part of my present net worth.
However if, as you argue, we’ve actually been in a depression for 35 years, then most of my investing has been during such conditions. So what do I know? But at least I’ll be able to feed myself and my family if the world comes crashing down, even if it means going back to 35 bu/A.
Incidentally, few understand that the Great Depression was a bond bull.
Few it seems understand the causes of the Great Depression at all, or rather the source of its deflation.
“If you are forecasting the demise of the bond bull, you will be gored.”
Which is worse; to be gored by a bull or bulled by a Gore?
Sturgis says:
Few it seems understand the causes of the Great Depression at all, or rather the source of its deflation
Max says it’s deflation, although he doesn’t use that term. Deflation destroys capital (so does runaway inflation; Weimar, Zimbabwe, & others). So I agree with both of you.
The current situation cannot go on indefinitely. Back in the day, I was a real estate broker. I remember FHA owner occupied home % rates of 17%+, and VA rates of 18%. In 1984 I bought a 15-unit apartment building and financed it with an intitial interest rate of 25% (One of the best investments I ever made; as rates dropped, the rise in value accrued entirely to the owner. As usual, tenants did not benefit. It is ever thus.)
Anyway, the current 4% interest rates on 30-year home loans are amazingly low. Not to say it might not tick even a little lower. But when rates inevitably rise, to say, 6% (still very low historically), that will disqualify a really big fraction of potential home buyers, who barely qualify as it is at 4%. Less demand = lower prices, so house prices will be directly affected. And housing constitutes a big fraction of the economy. The domino effect will follow: more deflation.
IMHO, house prices have been propped up by very low interest rates. That is by far the most important reason. So long as % rates remain around 4%, the demand for houses will be a strong support for the market. But when % rates rise a few %, it’s Katy bar the door.
The country cannot print many $Trillions without the chickens eventually coming home to roost. That will happen. The only unknown is when. But it WILL happen.
Naturally, everyone else and his brother will be blamed for this Administrations profligate and unconscionable money printing. It is a temporary expedient intended to make Obama look good, and kick the can down the road to the next president. GW Bush did it, too. But he was a piker by comparison.
What are the answers? How can the ordinary joe citizen arrange his affairs to avoid the resulting fallout? Well, pick your poison. If you think inflation, a la Zimbabwe is in the cards, buy leveraged real estate. If you expect deflation, buy gold and don’t be a lender. Do both, if you can afford it; hedge your bets.Because it will be every man for himself in the coming musical chairs dance. Lots of losers, a very few winners — and plenty of misery to go around. And this time it won’t be benign, like the Great Depression. As the Chicago reprobate said, never let a crisis go to waste. The gov’t will use the pretext to accumulate even more power. So much for the Constitution and the free market. They were very good for everyone while they lasted. But the crooks have gamed the system.
Now it’s every man for himself. Good luck… Comrades.
Why is it that people who can see so clearly the foolishness of the CAGW crowd (who believe it is possible to understand and control the climate of an entire planet) are so prone to the exact same type of error on other subjects?
Here are people discussing the global economy (about which even professional economists cannot find much agreement) as if it is not only understandable and predictable, but as if they themselves actually understand it well enough to make dire predictions. Sound familiar? The global economy is at least as chaotic, complex and beyond the grasp of most human minds as the Earth’s climate. Probably more so.
The link to the Anti-Federal Reserve eyeroller was the cherry on top.
I freely admit I may be wrong on this comparison; and there is no malice or ill-will intended. The rhetoric and tone around the two subjects just strike me as eerily analagous.
Fire at will…
“And this time it won’t be benign, like the Great Depression. As the Chicago reprobate said, never let a crisis go to waste. The gov’t will use the pretext to accumulate even more power. So much for the Constitutyion and the free market. They were very good for everyone while they lasted. But the crooks have gamed the system.
Now it’s every man for himself. Good luck… Comrades.”
Cripes DB, and I was having such a good morning.
Tools and skills. You gotta have tools and skills.
My daddy always said it, and I took it to heart.
If a person has tools and skills, he can only fall so far.
Even more true now, when many know so little about so much.
I know people that can literally not be bothered to figure out how to change a light bulb in their car.
Growing things, making things, building things…has been my whole life.
Nurseryman and gentleman farmer, chemist, carpenter and cabinet maker, options trader, mechanic…wheeler-dealer…
I know I will be OK, but there are many I fear for.
Back to my beautiful day…if I can stop thinking about what I quoted up top…I basically fear the same.
IMO, falling interest rates are not nearly as big a problem as the US dollar no longer being world trade currency.
From the last data I saw, the US dollar represents roughly 36% of world trade by payments, but actual trade to the US is only 12% of world trade. With world trade in the $19T range, and even giving some margin for the US being a large financial center (Singapore and other similar financial centers also have overlarge representations in payments), we’re still talking roughly $4T cash floating around and subsidizing the US economy. Throw in another $2T of central bank deposits backing this, and the result is a $6T Sword of Damocles.
Without going into why this switchover might happen – the point is that any rapid or relatively rapid return of these dollars would most likely result in inflation. I say this because we’re already at ridiculously inflated asset prices; at this stage, only wage inflation thus overall inflation can absorb that much cash.
It would be ironic indeed if the mass financial destruction wrought by the banksters winds up neutralizing a big part of this switchover, albeit with a multi-year gap in between.
I come from farming stock and grew up on one.
We like to say that farming is really just a way to turn oil into food. It’s about hydrocarbon fuels all the way from start to finish.
We also say, if you want to make a small fortune, start with a big fortune and then buy a farm.
Bruce
“We like to say that farming is really just a way to turn oil into food.”
Or you could grow hemp and somewhat reverse the process.
A regulatory regime that was designed to make it nigh on impossible to build new types of reactors has managed to kill of innovation. We all now suffer the consequences of greens controlling legislation.
It sure is going that way.
The assumption is then that every 60 years we repeat the process into infinity? At what time exactly do all of the other finite materials required become extinct? Seems to me that this dead horse has already been flogged. My feeling is that still the best way to end it is to watch individuals blasting each other with shotguns to get their hands on the last gallon of high test.
The answer is fusion power. Unlimited energy from sea water with no harmful by products.
Only drawback is, we can’t get it to work
Minor detail 🙂
And I can’t help noticing that “we can’t get it to work” is also the problem with Thorium Reactors, so far.
Of course, we can’t get Wind to work economically either and it hasn’t stopped us,
But it doesn’t bode well.
There’s no Tritium in sea water.
As for getting it to work it works already in the sun. Well the sun works because gravity sucks.
But gravity is far too weak to work on earth’ you need a sun sized reactor.
So far, nobody has shown that the Coulomb force which blows, instead of sucks, is capable of applying the necessary forces to confine the thermonuclear fuel in a stable steady state condition; let alone being able to introduce new fuel to the confinement volume, nor removal of the reaction products (garbage) without interrupting the process.
Setting off hydrogen bombs is not a practical way of producing thermonuclear energy for industrial and social purposes. Nor is laser powered inertial confinement.
The fusion energy proponents are on a par (roughly) with the SETI crowd.
The ITER program is about the same, as launching a high speed train onto one end of a bridge under construction, before you have finished a design that you have proven can stand up across the gap you are trying to span.
Fusion will always remain the energy of the future.
george e. smith: “Fusion will always remain the energy of the future.”
Lockheed Martin appear to believe otherwise.
http://www.lockheedmartin.co.uk/us/products/compact-fusion.html
Mike don’t be so negative. All we need is an academic/bureaucratic commission to use computer modeling adjusting the data to show that it already works! Easy peasy, I’m sure something like that has already been done.
George,
I don’t see where anyone mentioned tritium. However by mass the isotope deuterium accounts for about 0.0312% of all hydrogen in the oceans.
There is a group who think they can develop Fusion power:
Focus Fusion
http://globalwarmingskeptics.info/thread-2278.html
It is called Aneutronic Fusion.
Catweazel,
” Smaller is better”, may well be the conceptual breakthrough that was needed to get a fusion energy breakthrough. But until they have an actual experimental result, they have ideas and that is all. Until they can demonstrate a working prototype, they are no closer than anyone else has ever been, and until they have an actual machine that creates more power than it uses and does so cheaply enough to be profitable, I think I put all their claims in the “Oh, that will be nice” file, which is, in turn, part of the “Claims by car salesmen for their brand of car” folder.
The upshot?
I will be ecstatic, as it will mark the day that humans control our own destiny in an entirely new way.
But…
I would not be holding my breath if I was you.
If they were on the verge of such a breakthrough, everyone that knows anything on the inside would have their entire net worth, and all the money they could borrow, in the stock, because they (That company) will soon have all the money.
And I mean ALL THE MONEY.
Do they?
I do not think so.
So ask yourself…why not?
catweazle666 May 16, 2015 at 4:31 pm
Yes, putting their ongoing success with the F-35 behind them, LockMart now looks to develop a new money pit with compact fusion,
The MSR is very close to what the dreams of Fusion are. Except it is easy to build, no mimic of the sun’s interior. 200 times more efficient than PWRs. 1/3 to 1/2 as expensive to build due to low pressure and it inherent safety. It load follows and in a small modular MSR format, will allow the highly distrusted grid to flourish.
Check out LPPhysics.com . best results in the world, will enable small 5MW installations anywhere at about 5¢/W, output at 0.3¢/kWh. Fuel is boron/hydrogen, local supplies adequate till solar red giant stage. No waste (He4), no radioactivity (b/g 9 hrs after shutdowns for refuel).
Well, no one can get “tokamak” designs to work… and probably never will. But there other remarkably clever fusion designs that have made enormous progress on a shoe-string budget. One of my favorites is an aneutronic, dense plasma focus machine developed by LPPFusion in Middlesex, NJ. This design is incredibly efficient because it directly produces electricity, without boilers and turbines. And being aneutronic, there’s virtually no radiation to cope with.
Here’s the design
So far the LPPFusion reactor has achieved two of the three Lawson criteria. Upgrades just installed a few weeks and final configuration next Fall are very promising, and very well could produce high levels of net energy. Results have been published in top journals and noted in Science and Nature articles.
Latest news and Details here
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/
“””””…..
sturgishooper
May 16, 2015 at 3:24 pm
George,
I don’t see where anyone mentioned tritium. …..”””””
Well evidently you didn’t notice that I mentioned tritium, myself.
D+T > 4He +p +17.6 MeV You can look up the ignition condition yourself.
D+D > T +p + 4.04 MeV ditto for its ignition condition.
So how many laboratories are building D+D reactors; and that would include consideration of what Lockheed Martin is building.
When someone has a continuously running D+T reactor actually running at a commercial level, then they might want to try their hand at the D+D.
Now when I was at Uni, we actually had people shooting Deuterons, at heavy ice targets with a 600 KV Cockroft-Walton accelerator. And they did get 14 MeV neutrons out of it, and protons too.
They were researching the polarization properties of those 14 MeV neutron beams.
I’ll drink a beer to Lockheed Martin, when they succeed. Not about to discourage anybody from doing it; so more power to them.
g
George,
Of course I did notice that you mentioned tritium, which I use for my .45 Colt pistol sights, but it appeared to me that you were responding to another commenter’s mention of seawater.
My point was that those advocating waiting for fusion say we can power the world with seawater, which as you know contains copious amounts of deuterium (heavy water), but not, as you correctly point out, tritium.
Naturally, I see your point that tritium would come in handy in starting fusion, but that isn’t a problem. If need be, the US could restart its shut down tritium plants. Or build new ones. If fusion is possible, it would be a trivial expense.
So no worries that it’s not in the seas, was my point.
@McCourtney: “And I can’t help noticing that “we can’t get it to work” is also the problem with Thorium Reactors, so far.”
Not true. There have been a number of thorium reactors, mostly research reactors at Hannford, Washington and I believe Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Thorium was abandoned because it didn’t produce plutonium, something the Pentagon wanted in order to build more nuclear warheads. But that was back in the 50’s and 60’s.
The question is which flavor of thorium reactor should be built? Molten salt? Cascade? External neutron triggered? Unlike uranium, thorium doesn’t easily self-fission, meaning if you pile a bunch of it together you won’t get a chain reaction. It requires neutron source. That source can take the form of a small amount of U235, which them in turn starts the reaction in Th232 that again in turn creates U233, another neutron source. The source can take the form of an external neutron source like a cyclotron (I believe the British are investigating such a design).
The molten salt reactor might be the one you’re thinking about (I could be wrong…it wouldn’t be the first time), though I believe there were some such research reactors built in the past, but I believe theu used uranium.
David Wells,
Finite resources? How big is the earth? Our deepest bore holes are not even a scratch on the surface as a proportion. All the oil ever burned is not even a pimple on the mite on the flea on the buffaloes ass of the entire earth.
And beyond that…have you ever looked up?
So, where is this place which is “finite”?
I have never seen it…not on the human scale of things.
“To Finity And Beyond!”
There are millions of tons of petroleum products in the asteriods. I saw an item in the Space Studies Institute newsletter one time, where they got readings from a carbonaceous asteriod, and the chemical composition was very close to that of Pennsylvannia crude oil.
I believe the ultimate answer is solar power satellites. But we still need substantially lower cost to orbit (by about a factor of 100) to make them pay for themselves. Thorium will easily get us by until then.
Glad to see another convert to the cause. Kirk Sorenson has been whistling in the wind in his efforts to interest people in this concept, perhaps this article will at least help acquaint more with the possibilities inherent in the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. What is required is an international programme to iron out the final engineering challenges before Alvin Weinberg’s brain child can produce the goods, these are achievable. The money might be found by diverting funds currently allocated to the quest to develop fusion power, the reason here being that whatever the potential of a fusion reactor, it will never be cheap or practical in the short term.
Saw a recent interview with him and he had some interesting updates. India, which had been trying to do thorium in normal reactors, has decided to go the molten salt routine. They told him that they wish they’d just done it that way from the start as it is way more practical. China has pushed up the schedule from 30 years to 10-12 years for their first one.
Like I’ve been saying for a while, “We’ll wait until China makes something that was invented in the USA and then we’ll buy it from them”. Sad but true.
At Wall Mart?
Here is a listing of Thorium links I have collected:
Nuclear Power
http://globalwarmingskeptics.info/forum-106.html
One of the links is about Kirk Sorenson’s 2 1/2 hour Video, on PROTOSPACE on Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors.
Cheers.
The oil industry simply regulates their competitors out of business.
Follow the money.
this article, like so many others, confuse liquid fuel reactors with thorium. there is nothing wrong with thorium. but, if you look at the reactor proposed by Transtomic that uses nuclear waste for fuel, we have enough nuclear waste in this country provide 100% of our electrical needs for hundreds of years.
we should not add confusion to the discussion by comparing liquid fuel thorium reactors with light water uranium reactors. the comparison should be light water reactors with liquid fuel reactors. and then a discussion on a different fuel choices.
Brian, on point about solid vs liquid fuels. A little know fact is the waste stream of green energy’s use of rare earth elements tosses away enough Thorium yearly that can power the planet using MSRs. Imagine recycling green energy’s waste to power the planet!
A constant aggravation of the Thorium RaRa crowd… It is the MSR that is what is promoted, not thorium as fuel. Thorium has been used in water reactor fuel bundles already. India has not given up on getting it to work, they have a CANDU style design in which thorium is already known to work.
Also the USA has already made MSR reactors that work. It is not a tecnical problem, but a political and economic one.
Also, we never run out of Uranium fuel, should we choose to use it.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/uranium-from-seawater-advances/
Do not get me wrong, I am 100% for the MSR. I just do not like hype based on not quite truths…
Should we wish it. we can run our present fleet of reactors on thorium with technology already in hand and fuel bundles that have already gone to long duration burnup tests.
Should we wish it, we can economically make electricity from sea water U today.
Long after oil as fuel is too expensive to pump, nuclear electricity can pump up some of the 80% or so left in the gound in “spent” fields for chemical feed stock.
Finally, we can turn our garbage into nitrogen fertilizer as is already done today in one commercial operation.
There is no enery shortage, and there never will be. Period.
Brian, you are correct. There is no substantial advantage of Thorium over Uranium other than its abundance, which is significant, and should have been the author’s only point for Thorium. A liquid salt (or molten metal) reactor can be made with either. Decay Heat is still present in both cases, but is not a big problem in a liquid fuel design at atmospheric pressure – and that should have been his argument for the shift from LWR design. Recycling / Breeding fuel is necessary for a Thorium future though (Th232 does not work without breeding U233 as the actual fuel), and depending on how you were taught or indoctrinated that may be a plus or a minus. Some will worry about diversion of fissile material (U233, or U235/Pu239), but good security, actinides, and the level of tech needed is enough to keep all but government level efforts at bay. I’m all for reprocessing and breeding in both U or Th cycles – greatly extends both resources, and reduces the high level waste amounts – and how long that has to be stored.
By the way, I really like the sturgishooper guy – I hope he becomes a regular commenter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariff
Thorium certainly seems to be a viable answer to our energy needs. Are there any downsides?
A summary of potential and real disadvantages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Disadvantages
They don’t actually exist do they?
The MSR was developed at ORNL in the 1950s to late 1960s and the MSRE ran 20,000 hours and met all its goal. As its next phase using Thorium was about to start the lab’s director was fired due to his focus on civilian nuclear energy safety. The fact that MSRs being 200 times more efficient than PWRs meant there was little useable weapons material to help during the Cold War nuclear arms race.
Markl,
1) The biggest problem is the lack of objective education of the masses, if we were honestly and openly educated about the pros and cons of Thorium and not be railroaded by greens and other self interested NGO’s there would be no questions about it – actually the information is all there if you have the time and make the effort to find it!
As you could infer by the numbers of respondents here who clearly have made that effort!
(the same is true of the CAGW debate!!)
2) Followed closely by the TOTAL LACK OF POLITICAL WILL OR LEADERSHIP to look and plan for the long term benefit of their nations and the world, and not short term political advantage.
3) I think if you look at it logically it dose not give the UN any advantage (Agenda 21) but would have disadvantages as people and nations would become energy independent!
AS for downsides:-
1) Yes there are radioactive wastes however I understand that they have a much shorter half-life than Uranium wastes and a lot of these can be reused in the reactor.
** A significant upside is that you can USE AND CONSUME uranium and PLUTONIUM nuclear bombs in Thorium reactors.
Other things that David Archibald could have made clearer:-
He said “Thorium molten salt reactors, without the need for all the backup safety systems that U235 nuclear plants have,” the reason they do not need the backup safety is because they CAN NOT MELT DOWN unlike Uranium reactors – Huh – YES THATS RIGHT = CAN NOT MELT DOWN = easily designed FAILSAFE. Yes we have known this for 60 – 70 years ( as said elsewhere in comments). Your wonderful leaders chose Uranium so they could make bombs!!
As I said above – the information is all there if you have the time and make the effort to find it – enjoy your education then PASS IT ON!!
I have no issues with the promotion of thorium reactors – they seem like an excellent direction. I do have issues with “peak oil”, however, including at least one statement from this post: “We had a lot of oil too, once – until we burnt it.” It strikes me that the known, proven oil reserves today are HIGHER than they have ever been, at least for the world as a whole. Looking at the figures for these known reserves makes it clear to me that we are NOT about to see a sudden drop-off in oil production (based on declining resources) that would seem to be claimed here.
Regarding peak oil, I agree with what you say. I feel that the peak oil production won’t be known until years after it has passed. I’ve been reading about peak oil for at least a decade of my life, and it ain’t here yet. I feel that all this peak oil nonsense is another way to force the environs agenda of getting everyone except the select few to live a hard, primitive life.
Actually, peak conventional oil was 2008. See essay IEA Facts and Fictions; it is their estimate. The debate is over how much longer unconventional oil (tar sands, shale) can postpone the ultimate total liquid hydrocarbons peak. My own calculations based on gamma distributions rather than Hubbert’s logistics curve say somewhere between 2020 and 2025, best guess 2023. But not a sharp peak, so not distinguishable for sure for a few years after. Ebook Blowing Smoke.
FWIW, my contribution to the peak oil nonsense is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/18/peak-oil-re-visited/
As per the first graph in this article by David Archibald, peak oil is inevitable, as is peak fossil fuel, the hard part is knowing when it will happen – and it may even be difficult to know for some years after it has happened. My sincere hope is that it doesn’t matter.
Anyone who believes we have passed Peak Oil, I have one word.
Macondo.
Backdated Reserves.
The first issue is not “reserves” but when the field was discovered and what the production costs are for what is left. See Jean Laherrere on reported vs backdated reserves.
Cheap oil is over.
e.g Oil projects needing high prices to make sense; some 80% of new projects need prices >> $60/bbl to break even.
Declining EROI
Third is declining Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROI). Oil EROI had dropped from > 100 to ~12 in the US. Society needs > 10 to sustain western civilization. That leads to the problem of how to overcome the EROI cliff.
” Cheap oil is over. ”
Not so much if you adjust for inflation, we pay for gasoline about what we did in 1950 +/- 30% or so — see
http://www.davemanuel.com/2010/12/30/historical-gas-prices-in-the-united-states/ or
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2010/ph240/bui1/
Philip See James Hamilton’s real prices of oil 1947-2013 shows a far different underlying picture. http://econbrowser.com/archives/2013/09/coping_with_hig
Your comment hints at a number of geophysical misundertandings. Read Gaia’s Limits– there is a lot of illustrated, laymen’s level petroleum geophysics laid out there. Reserves DO NOT say how rapidly they can be produced. Only how much in total, ever. Peak oil is about how much per year.
ristvan,
I think you misunderstand me. I was not commenting at on the production rate itself, but rather the seemingly falsifiable remark that we had “..burnt it.”. Note the parenthetical clause “(based on declining resources)”.
In my opinion (based on observing the continued failure of gloom & doom predictions of “the end of oil”) the rate of production in the future will be determined by the value of the oil produced, not that we have “run out” in any meaningful way.
I think that we SHOULD be encouraging technological development of ALL kinds of energy – and that those forms of energy should all have to compete for their market share. Subsidizing any form of energy production (with public funds) should be limited to a very short period in it’s development cycle – not forever.
If Thorium reactors (or windmills) can provide energy economically – great — if not, then they should fall by the wayside.
And before someone asks what I think of high-sulphur coal or other “dirty” energy sources, I think we need to be very careful to include the TOTAL cost of the technology (something the renewable energy industry has NOT been doing) in determining what is economic (or not)
Non-OPEC, non-US oil production peaked in 2005. That was a decade ago. These people could have made a lot of money if they produced more oil during the high prices of the last decade. But they didn’t. They didn’t because they couldn’t. That is why the major are investing in LNG projects. There aren’t enough oil projects to soak up their cash flow.
“These people could have made a lot of money if they produced more oil during the high prices of the last decade. But they didn’t. They didn’t because they couldn’t.”
I am pretty sure there was something I read at some point that said if you increase the supply of something, the price will go down.
I am skeptical of the idea that if everyone had doubled production back then, they would have made twice as much money.
One or a few small suppliers, yes…because it would not effect total supply very much.
And the production was held back by political opposition, lag time between price spike and new sources coming on line, and then prices falling.
The past few years speak very loudly about when prices stay too high for too long…production will increase rapidly.
Causing prices to fall farther than they really should… Which halts new production… Which causes prices to rise…etc ad infinitum…
Anyone speaking of market forces in oil needs to remember 3 things:
1) OPEC is a cartel formed to counter market forces.
2) Much of world reserves are owned by state agencies ( like Pemex or the Brazillian Petrobras) who are less interested in markets than politics and sometimes graft.
3) The small part that is market based is an oligopoly.
As a sidebar remember that major oil projects take decades to develop and bring on line. You don’t make 20 year plans based on 5 year price swings in a very volatile commodity.
This is not a free market at all.
No doubt many would like to control market forces. Few can and never for long. Market forces, supply and demand, drive markets. You are right about governments constantly sticking their oars in. But it is an oar in a river – there are many wrecked boats – everyone will best serve his own interests if they understand what a powerful river it is. Market forces rule, eventually, rebels always perish in the flood.
Mr. Gardner,
You are correct to say that proven reserves are higher than ever.
In fact, a review of the history of proven reserves shows that they have never stopped increasing. Proven reserves have always increased faster than usage, and there is one basic pattern…we seem to always be about twenty years from running out.
Look at the numbers for how much oil is a reservoir is “recoverable”. And they consider that the reservoirs themselves are recharged continuously…slowly, but continuously.
Reservoirs are places where all the oil in the ground can collect in a way which is concentrated enough to be economical to extract.
Logically, the amount in reservoirs must be a fraction of what is down there.
Sorry, …and then consider…
They will be built. Obama has made it possible. Coal is dead and being buried by his regulations. These same regulations will prevent the burning of oil and natural gas after the Envirowhaco Lawyers take action. Sun and Wind can not provide the needed power even with storage (batteries, lakes, whatever) That means that soon, as the brownouts and blackouts get worse, we will be buying nuclear power plants from China, just like we now buy everything else.
Obama has done nothing in regard to molten salt reactors. The NRC has made it virtually impossible to get one of these designed approved in this country, that’s why all the start-ups are going overseas. Thorcon Energy to S. Korea, Terrestrial Energy to Canada, Bill Gates to China, etc.
You missed usurbrain’s point. AFTER the brown & black outs, the regulation will be demanded to be changed as we watch the rest of the world’s nuke program successfully. But by then, they will have developed tech, we won’t and so we will buy from “them” (India, China, whoever succeeds first).
Thorcon has been in talks to build and test their design at the Hanford nuclear site in Richland, WA. They’ll probably only be able to do pre-nuclear work there, but that isn’t Obama’s fault. The NRC has been around for decades and has a choke hold on the domestic nuclear industry. They’re the primary reason that nuclear plants cost twice as much in the US vs China. Maybe Obama could help fix the problem, but he didn’t create it.
I agree with Drew.
Look what happens when there is a blackout: Mayhem and rioting, looting…destruction and chaos.
And this is from one random event.
Imagine if they are commonplace, or predictable.
Civilization will be in jeopardy, and that is not an exaggeration, IMO.
The best thing that could happen is to roll these regulations back with one stroke of the pen after the next election. Just wipe them all out.
Other regulations are making it nearly impossible for anyone to start a business in this country.
We are now not even on the list of places that are considered business friendly.
And many more are going on the books daily.
@ g2-05f440992a1230…..
Anyone with any interaction with the NRC KNOWS that Obama’s choice for the chair of the NRC set back the use of Nuclear by more than 10 years and probably 20. He made mountains out of molehill issues and helped increase the cost of operating a NPP to the point that 4 were shut down because of his actions and 4 to 6 more are seriously considering it. He has added more CO2 to the atmosphere than will be saved by either new “renewable” energy or the closure of the coal plants and their replacement by Nat Gas.
No methane hydrated on your list/chart. You omitted oil shale kerogens too. If we have a free market in energy and thorium can compete, that’s great. I don’t think you can predict the future of hydrocarbon fuel. I know you David, you will keep trying
To deliberately rain on your parade, read essays Ice that Burns (methane hydrates) and Much Ado About Nothing (including, but not limited to, kerogen shales). Then get back with counterfacts rather than internet blather. Please. I look forward to your reasoned geophysical replys.
ristvan – Look, David Archibald is a very smart guy and he knows a lot. But he is always prophesying. It is not internet blather to say he can’t predict the future of hydrocarbon fuels. Who knew about the extent of recoverable shale oil ten years ago? Seriously, how much do we know about shale oil now?
You think the future of methane hydrates and kerogens is sealed. You are entitled to your opinions. All I am saying is “I don’t know.”
You are trying to refute my ignorance?
David knows a lot of cool things about the sun and about the solar cycle and he is habitually trying to predict the future. He can’t predict the future – he doesn’t have the gift of prophecy. Peak Oil, Crop Failures, Grand Minima.
Latitude says he is tired of the peak oil garbage. That is not very scientific way to object to it, neither is it pure internet blather. Peak Oil is a good example of a failed calculus. I’m not sure why David clings to it so tenaciously.
The first attempt to demonstrate the thorium fuel cycle at large scale was at Shippingport in the 1950s.
Thorium itself is not a fissile material. It has to be first transmuted to U-233, which is. It is the U-233 which supplies the nuclear power. The thorium fuel cycle therefore relies on the supply of neutrons from another source to produce the fissile material, which in practice means fission neutrons from U-235 or Pu-239. This is also the reason that the uranium fuel cycle had to be established first.
Several thorium reactors have been tried in the past but all found to be uncommercial. The problem seems to be the highly corrosive materials used in thorium reactors make building and maintenance costs prohibitive.
The UK reviewed the prospect a thorium rector in 2012, but decided against it.
However, India is trying again.
A minor correction. The Shippingport plant as built in the late 1950’s was a normal U-235 cycle. The conversion to U-233/Th-232 was done in the mid-1970’s.
General Atomics HTGR’s were also intended to run the Thorium cycle, but would have required either a stream of U-235 or neutron source generated U-233 to make up for the not quite unity conversion ratio. The CANDU reactors will also run on the Thorium cycle with a very slight breeding ratio.
Yet another technology is the Integral Fast Reactor, which can make use of the Plutonium in the spent fuel from the LWR fleet. There is enough depleted Uranium laying so that no mining would need to be done for at least a century.
Yep, it seems your right. This UK report seems to be wrong
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/65504/6300-comparison-fuel-cycles.pdf
But it is from the Dept.of Energy and Climate Change.
Erik, best contribution so far.
Mike B.
Thanks for the link. I was particularly intrigued by the accelerator driven subcritical reactor – which seems to be straight of Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen”.
There is more than one way to skin the thorium cat. India is not building LFTRs – it is using thorium fuel in conventional breeder reactors.
“There is no alternative – nuclear energy is the only energy source that has any prospect of making good the looming fall in energy supply.”
I support nuclear energy of all types, but there will certainly be alternatives in the future. We don’t know what they are yet, but one thing I suspect is than in 100 years we’ll be beaming down massive amounts of microwave or laser energy from gigantic solar panels in space. And of course, fusion will be much better than thorium when harnessed.
Then there’s genetic manipulation to make a bacteria that excrete fertilizer… The possibilities are endless. It’s not ‘thorium or bust’. Thorium is just one of many possibilities.
I like your attitude blogagog! There is something to be said for some clearing out the regulatory obstruction of bringing online new and more efficient forms of energy production. The trick there is not to be crisis or mythology driven when creating safe practices regulations. How you do that is one of those questions that Dr Pielke addresses all the time. It’s as difficult as framing financial regulations that can tell the difference between a capitalist entrepreneur and con man or a farmer and a drug lord. Maybe that is harder since there seem to be so many “free enterprise” sort who have a little trouble understanding regulation protecting useful productive investment from piracy. But..hey so long as we got a wish list going… Maybe we in the US could elect a President who would slash through the Gordian knot of the EPA and set it right and toss all the foxes in the hen house out over there at Treasury?
we’ll be beaming down massive amounts of microwave or laser energy from gigantic solar panels in space.
_________________________________________
I seem to remember from my Azomov and Clarke days, that there were two great proposals for future space engineering:
a. Space solar panels, beaming ‘free’ energy to the world.
b. Winged solar sails that would propel spaceships to unheard of speeds.
What will prevent your solar panel becoming a solar sail?
R
There’s another glitch in your satellite square rigger Ralph.
At present solar EM energy is too diffuse (1362 Wm^-2; maybe more like 1,000) to be able to collect economically on earth, so presumably your microwave or laser spaceborne system, is going to increase that power density by a big enough factor to make it worth collecting down here on earth.
Tonopah and Ivanpah KFC factories demonstrate what happens, when you concentrate energy much denser than ordinary sunlight.
Land area is the one thing that is truly in limited supply here on earth; and that includes the wetted land area.
To get more transmitted energy, you need either more antenna area, or a higher power density; your choice.
Argh! Really, all you need is to re-read “The WInd From The Sun”, wherein it states that the sheer mass of the solar power satellite itself (versus the ‘as flimsy as possible’ solar yachts) would prevent the SPS from being flung away from Earth.
It is amazing the amount of SF that considers this question. Apart from the Asimov and Clarke references, you should really acquaint yourself with the Allen Steele books, where ‘beamjacks’ are building Solar Power Satellites in orbit. Another author, whose name completely escapes me at the moment, discusses how voltage applied between two ‘levels’ on a satellite (some 30km apart), would be enough to stationkeep without propellant, just via magnetic thrusting against the magnetic field of Earth.
Since I love the ‘hard’ SF field, I can supply you with current references, should you so desire.
Bill Platt,
Yes, PLEASE!
I would like the name that escapes you, and many more.
Thank you!
the sheer mass of the solar power satellite itself, versus the ‘as flimsy as possible’ solar yachts would prevent the SPS from being flung away from Earth.
______________________________
I think you missunderstand the whole concept of space engineering.
When it costs up to $10,000 a kilo to put something into low earth orbit, the idea is to make everything as light as possible. And in terms of space solar panels, as much area for as little weight as possible. In other words, your space solar panel will end up as some kind of a synthetic pv cell array that has the same surface-area-to-mass-ratio as, say ………… a giant solar sail.
And off it goes, to Jupiter an beyond…….
I always thought the “Balloon” solar power satellite was a neat and simple concept. Flexible Solar cells covered a sphere one mile in diameter. The sphere would be folded up for the launch, and then once in orbit, 40 pounds of helium would be used to fully inflate the sphere. Half of the solar cells on the sphere would always be in sunlight, no matter how it moved. Once we conquer the low-cost Earth to low-Earth orbit hurdle, humanity will be off to the races throughout the Solar system. We need to get over that hurdle soon, for a number of very good reasons. I love this website. It is very entertaining and informative, and funny. Keep up the good work, all of you.
Flexible Solar cells covered a sphere one mile in diameter. The sphere would be folded up for the launch.
__________________________
You forgot to add the 360,000 km tether to the Moon, to stop it getting blown away… 😉
R
Frickin’ lasers from space! What could go wrong?
Somewhere in that next 200 years, a fusion reactor design will come into the mix. Another thing worth mentioning is we are in the midst of a 3rd agricultural revolution, hydroponics, aquaponics, fogponics, aeroponics.
Chris, got any links to back up this 3rd ag revolution you mention?
I am very interested, but dubious of claims made with no support.
Please steer us to where to read up on this, or to people actually “revolutionizing” agriculture via these methods.
Thanks.
BTW, I would not consider growing some particular “high value crop”, inside under artificial light, to be very useful in terms of commercial food production for a hungry world.
Japan: World’s largest indoor farm:
http://weburbanist.com/2015/01/11/worlds-largest-indoor-farm-is-100-times-more-productive/
Thank you!
I will read this later. No time right now…but I love stuff like this.
https://futureprospects.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/pig-city-a-nice-view-for-pork/
pig skyscrapers…. farming is not just plants and hydroponics…
So a problem with U-235 reactors is that they produce decay heat. What? Is Mr. Archibald trying to say that thorium-based reactors don’t produce any decay heat?!!
The decay heat comes from the decay of the fission products. If you fission an atom — even a uranium-233 atom produced by neutron capture in a thorium atom — you’re going to have fission products. Almost all fission products are highly radioactive, decay rapidly, and produce decay heat.
You shouldn’t be allowed to comment on the merits of one type of reactor versus another unless you understand this basic point.
There are only so many facts you can put in a 1,000 word essay. In all nuclear reactors at stable operation, 7% of the thermal energy at any one time is coming from decay heat. Thorium reactors rinse out the fission products that cause the decay heat. There will always be some in the circulating fuel which in a thorium reactor drain to holding tanks with a non-critical geometry. You just need a big chimney to suck the air past those holding tanks.
To be picky, the objections to conventional nuclear power are absurd – their safety is far better than those older machines at Fukushima, which failed when the backup power supply (diesel engines)was lost.
Nor can any experience a hydrogen explosion these days – they all have hydrogen absorbers to avoid that situation. Nor do Gen 3 reactors need a constant source of pumped coolant – in the event of an accident they can cool themselves passively for days. And the leading developer of molten salt reactors, Transatomic Power, whose reactor, which is twice the size of the plants mentioned here and can burn either uranium or Thorium, prefers to fuel their machine with nuclear wastes/uranium, for two reasons – it’s less likey to have proliferation issues thanThorium fueled machines, which produce plutonium, and
nuclear wastes are free and buring them caneliminate a costly storage problem.. It can also be fueled by low grade unranium, extracting 98% of its energy, as opposed to conventional reactors, which can extract but 2-3%.
Just fueled by nuclear wastes in this country, these reactors can produce all the energy needed for this country for the next 1000 years. The amount of uranium available on land and which can be extracted by filters from sea water, is far beyond any demand that can come to pass. The fuel chosen will not depend upon availabilty – uranium will be around for a very long time. And if the avialability of the fuel chosen
extends beyond the 60 year lifespan of the reactor, then future availability of the fuel beyond that time is
totally meaningless and will have no influence on the fuel chosen.
just to nitpick, spent fuel is not free. it has to be remove from the casing and then processed to get rid of the oxide. this processing will probably make it more expensive then virgin uranium. transatomic’s nuclear reactor will operate on both.
Nor can any experience a hydrogen explosion these days – they all have hydrogen absorbers to avoid that situation.
________________________________
Why all the high technology? All Fukashima needed, was some windows that could be cranked open by hand.
R
Actually the problems at the Fukashima reactor complex were the result of uneducated environmentalists blocking every attempt at upgrading and modernizing the reactors. The hazards of running these reactors was known and countermeasures designed.
Claudius knows of what he speaks.
Fukashima had back up pumps and generators in a place that they should never have been.
Backup were installed at a location nearby that remained above water and would have prevented any problems.
But the transfer switches were not moved!
The transfer switches were still in a floodable location. Still, a waterproof enclosure or room would have protected them…but neither of these was installed.
It was sheer idiocy.
I had not heard that it was not done because of activists blocking design changes.
But, all this was even taken into account in the original plant design…but then then changes were made which moved the whole place much lower, and the original design was used anyway. During construction, these issues were noted, but for some reason it happened as it did anyway.
It is a webwork of failure.
Imagine the characters in the book “A Confederacy of Dunces” building and operating a nuclear plant.
I read of a proposed design change to the Fukashima reactors that replaced a gravity system that dropped moderator rods into the reactor with a compressed air powered system in the event of an emergency shut down. The knee-jerk no nukes crowd blocked the upgrade. My question is how hard would it be to collect up the names of the individuals and organizations that blocked all these upgrades that would have helped to avoid the disaster at Fukushima and publish them so that the people and groups most responsible could be held up to public spectacle, ridicule and legal action. Once again the people most directly responsible for a global disaster aren’t even known. I’d like to see the people most responsible for this tragedy answer for their actions.
Not only was Fukushima an old design. Not only was Fukushima considered a worst case scenario. Not only did Fukushima have some safety design shortcomings identified that were not mitigated. Not only was Fukushima in the midst of a cataclysmic tsunamai that killed 15,000+ people.
But Fukushima Daiichi had 0 short term fatalities from radiation exposure. What? That’s right, 0. And the worst case model for long term exposure is less 130 fatalities due to cancer, a worst case model that nobody trusts because its too conservative. A cataclysmic tsunami, and 0 short term radiation deaths and the most likely 0 long term too. Screw the anti-nuke radiation fear mongers.
Short term is not necessarily the issue. I invite you to go live in Fukushima prefecture and help them look for the missing coriums.
The opposition to nuclear power was never founded in science. It was whipped up by the friends of Communism to hinder Western nations in the cold war nuclear arms race.
The modelling used to determine expected deaths from low level radiation are as unscientific as they come.
Low level radiation has been found to be protective, and people exposed to it suffer less risk of cancer in many real life cases that have been carefully studied and documented..
Research India monazite sand, and cancer rates of those who live nearby.
Look at Taiwan cobalt-60 radioactive buildings, and the cancer rates of those who lived in the units there.
Look into radiation hormesis.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monazite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
This is all true Drew. The overriding lesson is that nuclear energy is not very forgiving with shortcuts or jackass experiments such as those experienced so fatally at Chernobyl (which wasn’t even a commercuial reactor anyway). My understanding is that TEPCO which operates Fukushima was warned and advised to relocate the backup power systems but TEPCO didn’t want to make the investment on a plant scheduled to be closed around 2013. Bad choice TEPCO.
Still and all the deaths and morbidity arising from the natural disaster– direct and indirect — are very, very low. And even at Chernobyl, the remaining residents are in excellent health and well into their old age. Wildlife around the plant thrives, as it does in Fukushima. More people died on Amtrak last week than died at Fukushima — or likely will die from the accident, bad as it was.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that “objections to conventional nuclear power are absurd.”
Conventional nuclear power plants are more cumbersome to build than the molten salt reactor. For instance, PWRs need a huge, concrete containment vessel, unlike a MSR. Further, PWRs need redundant systems to ensure: i) keeping the water pressurized; and ii) keeping the pressurized water flowing over the hot fuel rods. Such redundancies are not needed to such an extent in MSRs.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article178055.html
it has been proposed to the french government by professor Edgard Nazare in 1960 (about) but they refused to listen to him – (he died in 1996)
I’m really tired of this peak oil garbage……..
From a 2013 report on using microbes to turn carbohydrates into hydrocarbons:
Biological Conversion of Sugars to Hydrocarbons Technology Pathway
Ryan Davis, Mary Biddy, Eric Tan, and Ling Tao
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Susanne Jones
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Biological Conversion of Sugars to Hydrocarbons
Developing Pathway Cases to Understand the Cost of Converting Biomass to Hydrocarbon Fuels
In support of the Bioenergy Technologies Office, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are undertaking studies of biomass conversion technologies to identify barriers and target research toward reducing conversion costs.
Process designs and preliminary economic estimates for each of these pathway cases were developed using rigorous modeling tools (Aspen Plus and Chemcad). These analyses incorporated the best information available at the time of development, including data from recent pilot- and bench-scale demonstrations, collaborative industrial and academic partners, and published literature and patents. The economic results of these analyses are in the process of further refinement and will be published in FY13 and FY14 design reports. This report summarizes the preliminary technical data used for the models and identified data gaps.
This technology pathway case investigates the biological conversion of biomass-derived sugars to hydrocarbon biofuels, utilizing data from recent literature references and information consistent with recent pilot-scale demonstrations at NREL. Technical barriers and key research needs have been identified that should be pursued for the pathway to become competitive
Key Highlights
• The biological conversion of sugars to hydrocarbons technology pathway has the potential to produce high-value, targeted fuel components with desirable properties. This pathway leverages prior experience in biochemical conversion technologies, specifically the production of sugars from cellulosic biomass.
• Microorganisms can be genetically engineered to produce targeted fuel components or co-products with high yields and value.
• The biological production pathway will produce a hydrocarbon intermediate that will generally require mild upgrading at a marginal cost to achieve a final fuel blendstock.
• Opportunities exist to reduce the conversion costs by focusing on process integration improvements. The sugar production steps (pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis) can be tailored to achieve a hydrolysate quality for maximized microbial conversion and improved process yields.
• Increasing overall biomass utilization toward value-added co-products will improve economic viability. New pathways for converting underutilized fractions of the biomass, including lignin and acetate, will need to be developed and demonstrated to increase overall product yields.
• Important research needs for this pathway include maximizing sugar (and/or carbon) utilization and microbe metabolic performance, improving tolerance of the microbes to lignocellulosic-derived sugar stream impurities, and developing
Or mining or colonizing the asteroid belt:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1945-5100.2010.01103.x/abstract
All it takes to make or obtain hydrocarbons is energy. I’m confident that humanity will find a way to keep going.
I’m really tired of this peak oil garbage……..
_________________________________
The UK hit peak oil in 2001. It happens, I’m afraid. That’s life. Finite resources do run out….
And the UK is simply a microcosm of the world, a scale model to demonstrate what can and will happen on a wider scale. Fossil fuels are a finite resource, that will eventually go past their peak.
Oh, and do bear in mind that peak oil has nothing to do with reserves, it is counted in units of production. Saudi has huge reserves (so it says), but most of their fields will not increase production whatever you do to them.
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/uk/images/ukfieldbyfield.jpg
And you know for sure that “most of their fields will not increase production whatever you do to them”.
Just what would happen if you paid more for the oil you need?
Do you think they (the market) would produce more or less?
There may be a limit, but I haven’t seen one yet, have you?
Just what would happen if you paid more for the oil you need?
Do you think they (the market) would produce more or less?
___________________________________
Less, of course. Did you think it would go up??? If petrol or heating gas doubles in price, I use 30% less or thereabouts. Simple economics, that the Greens cannot fathom.
This is why peak oil is a reality, because you can hit an economic peak oil as easily as you can hit a geological or technical peak oil. If getting that energy out costs so much that it becomes unafordable, people will simply stop using it, and production will be forced to peak.
The world only has so much wealth (productive effort). If you start using a huge proportion for one sector of the economy, then people become poor and the economy shrinks and demand fall off a cliff – and you have just hit the economic peak fossil fuel.
Look what happened when the oil price shot up in 1979-1980, during the oil crisis. Did production increase because of higher prices???
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/World_Oil_Production.png
@silver ralph
“Look what happened when the oil price shot up in 1979-1980, during the oil crisis. Did production increase because of higher prices???”
Actually efficiency of use increased and as the demand trend followed, so did production, as well as price.
It is simple economics…
and then they discovered North Dakota….you people do not realize how large this planet really is….and how few places are actually tapped
Silver ralph: “and you have just hit the economic peak fossil fuel.”
Wrong again.
You Peak Oilers will never learn, will you?
My, what a lovely graph from 2000 showing a 2000 peak and a sharp reduction to 2010. You wouldn’t happen to have a updated 2015 graph, would you? Because I bet I can guess what it would show.
yeah yeah yeah yeah. And before that was peak oil and before that and before that and before that. We’ve been there and have done that over and over again.
“the UK is simply a microcosm of the world”
Thanks a lot. Do you know how much it hurts when you laugh so hard milk comes out of your nose?
Now who is going to clean up this mess? I need a shower…as soon as I stop laughing!
My, what a lovely graph from 2000 showing a 2000 peak and a sharp reduction to 2010. You wouldn’t happen to have a updated 2015 graph, would you? Because I bet I can guess what it would show.
__________________________
And I bet you would guess wrongly.
I don’t have a graph, but the Department of Energy (and climate change) tabular figures show that UK oil production has continued to decline over the last five years. The figures are:
2010 …….. 70m
2011 …….. 58m
2012 …….. 49m
2013 …….. 44.5m
2014 …….. 44m
https://itportal.decc.gov.uk/pprs/full_production.htm
So your point is?? Do you have a point, or are you arguing merely for the sake of it?
R
ralfellis – well I’m impressed. A peak oiler actually found a place where one of there predictions… Didn’t come true, but at least they got the direction of the trend right. And only was off by a little more then half! That’s pretty good for a peak oil prediction.
Of course, that then begs the question of why we’re looking at oil production in the UK. It’s hardly a power house in the industry. Maybe it’s because the old standard of the US (Hubbards original peak) has stopped following the predictions and started back up again.
A decade ago I would have spent a few hours digging into this. I would have looked at the production figures. Where and why. How much was being left out because it was ‘unconventional’ or ‘offshore’ or some other excuse. Now I just don’t care. You people have always been wrong. You will always BE wrong. The whole reason I was originally skeptical of CAGW was because it was being pushed by a lot of the same clowns as peak oil, the ozone hole, the population bomb, and a whole mess of other alarmist bull. An avalanche of failed predictions who’s promoters will never admit they were wrong about it, no matter how much time has passed.
Thanks a lot. Do you know how much it hurts when you laugh so hard milk comes out of your nose?
______________________________
You are still on ‘mothers milk bar’? That explains a lot.
R
ralfellis – well I’m impressed. A peak oiler actually found a place where one of there predictions… Didn’t come true, but at least they got the direction of the trend right. And only was off by a little more then half! That’s pretty good for a peak oil prediction.
________________________________
Half? I did not make a prediction, I just said that Peak Fossil Fuels can and will happen, and used th UK as a microcosm example of what will happpen to worl production. If Peak FF can happen in the UK, with a relatively stable population, it can sure happen in the rest of the world.
Ok, so you want to talk Peak Coal? Well the UK had Peak Coal back in the 1920s…
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/williampentland/files/2011/09/UK-Coal-History2.jpg
But I know you will shout: ‘no, we want to know about gas production’.
Sorry mate, the UK hit Peak Gas in 2000……
what if oil is of abiotic origin, not fossil !!!(the deep hot biosphere : the myth of fossil fuels – by Thomas Gold)
Garfy, well of course. The UK hit peak oil in 2001, a contributor says. What if the ‘depleted fields’ refill from below as is rumoured to be happening in S Arabia?
Huge areas of a huge country, including offshore, are forbidden zones – the US of A.
Methane clathrates are formed from what exactly? And there is how much down there?
The US may run out of energy and be dependent on foreign everything, but the ROW won’t.
The suggestion above that the US will be importing Chinese reactor technology is a non-starter. The US won’t even use the foreign-sourced CANDU reactors from a rather friendly neighbour even though they can clean up the mess created by the fast breeders. They would rather freeze in the dark.
It is the French who may provide the surprises. They could appease the Greens with a heavy water reactor as part of a long term global clean up plan. Canada gets along with France, in general, and the US doesn’t. China is not interested in saving the US. Why should they? They will build what they need.
The China Agricultural University is doing advanced studies on biogas and bioconversions of materials. The Chinese are cooperating with South Africa which is building SASOL plants for indirect conversion of coal to liquids. Two at least. There is a strange rumour that a plant is going up in Inner Mongolia that is using direct conversion but I find no details available. China is establishing long term commitments for coal supplies from Mongolia’s tiny population sitting on about a trillion tons of it. Japan eyes the same source but there is no rail link through friendly territory.
Peak coal is more that half a century away and as it gets expensive they will simply start processing the dumps for carbon to make liquid fuels. The only thing that is happening of consequence is that the US and Western Europe are voluntarily shutting down their energy production systems and raising costs dramatically. Except for France of course. Fifty years ago no one could have predicted such insanity taking hold in the developed countries.
Anyone have the latest research and thinking on this?
Very interesting.
I wondered about that too. The first graph above appears to show peak oil in 2010, which clearly didn’t happen — oil production is still going up.
from this post, it would sound to me that no one was working on liquid fuel nuclear reactors. That is not correct. China is investing in all things nuclear, including liquid fuel thorium reactors. Check out this website http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2014/11/25/chinas-next-generation-nuclear-ambitions/
I go to the Weinberg site with a lot of hope in my heart but then I read about them preparing for “key Paris 2015 climate conference”. They have brain rot.
In-situ gasification releases incalculable quantities of coal, enough for centuries.
Drilling date set for North Sea’s vast coal reserves
Tynemouth to be one of first locations for £1bn scheme to access deep sea deposits which could power Britain for centuries
A billion-pound plan to reach untapped coal reserves under the North Sea will be under way by the end of the year, as the vast scale of the energy source beneath the North Sea is made clear.
Scientific data of the true extent of the coal deposits on the sea bed reveals that even a tiny percentage of them would be enough to power Britain for centuries to come, says a local expert.
Dermot Roddy, chief technical officer of energy company Five Quarter which will be leading the much-anticipated extraction work, said there are trillions of tonnes of deeply-buried coal stretching from the North East coast far out to sea: an amount thousands of times greater than all oil and gas extracted so far.
And now technology is advanced enough to be able to reach it.
http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-east-news/drilling-date-set-north-seas-6896191
That’s trillions of tons in the North Sea alone.
Output from the gasification process consists of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrogen, the latter two constituting Syngas (synthesis gas), feedstock for the good old Fischer-Tropsch process.
And then there is the truly vast quantity of methane hydrate available on the ocean bed, Japan for one has already concluded a successful pilot scheme and is working on industrial level extraction.
So I think it likely that there will be plenty of carbon-based fuel available well past 2300,
Tynemouth to be one of first locations for £1bn scheme to access deep sea deposits which could power Britain for centuries.
________________________________
Interesting, but what are the seams like? They said exactly the same about the Selby Superpit, but it closed after just 25 years, because:
a. The geology was a nightmare for mechanised mining. Might be ok for a man and a pick, but that was not the big idea of the Selby Superpit.
b. The world price of coal plummeted, and the government refused to subsidise coal.
The same could easily be true of ‘fantastic reserves’ of coal under the north sea.
a. If the seams are highly fractured, it may be impossible to drill reliably into the required seam. You could probably do the job, but at quadruple the price expected, or more.
b. If your wonderful new fuel is coming out at ten times the world price of other fuels, who will buy it? And if you subsidise it, how many hospitals do you close to pay for it all? And if you simply ban all imports and force everyone to use expensive UK fuel, then who will buy our expensive exports? And who in the country could aford to buy our expensive foods and expensive products, let alone aford to heat their homes in winter? So you have just driven the nation into pennuary and a massive economic recession.
This is the problem with peak fossil fuels – it has nothing to do with on-paper reserves, nothing at all.
R
The advantage – in fact, the whole point – of in-situ gasification is that it utilises the same steerable drilling technology that is used for shale gas and oil extraction, so is nowhere near as restricted by geologically difficult deposits, in the same way as the same new drilling technology has massively increased access to hitherto unusable gas and oil deposits.
This is the problem with peak fossil fuels – it has nothing to do with on-paper reserves, nothing at all.
All my life I have been hearing that tale. It was not true in the 1950s and it is no more true now.
As a matter of interest, the concept of “Peak Oil” has been about for a long time, it was first postulated in the mid to last part of the 19th century, when Scotland was the World’s leading exporter of petroleum products, produced from shale, curiously enough.
http://www.scottishshale.co.uk/
Silver ralph
You say
Absolute rubbish!
The Selby complex was efficient, economic and had decades of extractive life left when the Thatcher government closed the entire coal industry – including the Selby complex – for purely political reasons.
As for subsidies, if the UK coal industry had received the same subsidy as nuclear power at the time then the coal industry could have given away all its coal production for free and given £13 with each tonne of coal taken while still making a profit!
Not content with that ignorant twaddle, you yet again promote the daft idea of ‘peak oil’ saying
I yet again explain why ‘peak’ resources of oil or anything else is a nonsensical idea that has been repeatedly demonstrated to be plain wrong.
‘Peak oil’ is one example of the fallacy of overpopulation which derives from the disproved Malthusian idea that wrongly assumes humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in percentage.
Now, the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
As Figure 2 inthe above article shows, there is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no existing or probable problem of overpopulation of the world by humans and, therefore, ‘Peak Oil’ is nonsense.
Richard
The advantage – in fact, the whole point – of in-situ gasification is that it utilises the same steerable drilling technology that is used for shale gas and oil extraction, so is nowhere near as restricted by geologically difficult deposits.
_______________________________
We know how gasification is done, Catweazle.
Ok, you are drilling a 1m seam, which is usual for UK coal seams, and the seam jumps up by 1.5m and you find yourself drilling shale (with no gas). Ok, what do you do? I suppose back up and drill higher, if that is possible without huge expense. But then you drill another 100m and the seam drops by 2m. See the problem?
Now it might be that the North Sea seams are less fractured than the land-based seams, because they are further from the Pennines. Or they may be worse, because the North Sea basin has sunk and stretched considerably. But you have provided no evidence either way. Which is it – easy drilling or a nightmare?
Ralph,
On the one hand you say coal got too cheap, and on the other hand that it is too hard to get out.
I think you have some sort of mental block, or blinders on.
Technology will prevent us running out of energy for a very long time. The earth is a very big place, and has been around a very long time.
How much sedimentary rock is there on the earth? How much organics are in those rocks?
What if there is abiotic hydrocarbons.
Why make silly arguments? With all due respect.
Ralellis,
they do not have to back up and start over…the drill rigs can simply steer up. They are directional, not just horizontal. And I doubt there are many places where there is a sharp and sudden one meter jump…this could only be caused by a fault, and such are identifiable.
They might be wavy, but the drillers are good at what they do. Coal is soft, and the drill rig follows path of least resistance.
Why so negative?
catweazle666
May 16, 2015 at 12:55 pm
Canadians have been actually physically mining coal beneath the sea around Cape Breton, Nova Scotia for much more than half a century – this is nothing new. Anyway, you are correct about there being a lot more coal. There is also a lot more fossil liquid and gaseous fuels, too. Enormous resources of methane hydrates (clathrates) on the sea floor (the demon of the Bermuda Triangle) WILL one day be produced.
Fracking using new ceramic frac sands that resist crushing at depths of 30,000ft (~30,000psi) has also permitted exploitation of colossal reserves of oil in the extension of the prolific East Texas Tertiary formation deep below the Gulf. Several fields (Tahiti, Jack and others) indicated to contain 15B BOE could expand US oil reserves by over 50%. These are conventional reservoirs that formerly were beyond technology’s grasp because of depth and the depth of the water in the Gulf. Here is a news story of the discovery from 2006 but recent developments indicate that production from these and other extensions are well in hand.
http://www.cob.unt.edu/firel/Kensinge/Fina5170/Selected%20Cases/JackField20060905WSJ.pdf
Re unconventional oil and gas, presently we are extracting only 8% of the hydrocarbons contained in shales by fracking and already this technology is evolving and will ultimately succeed in recovering double or maybe triple this. There is a saying now that you never have to close a production hole it will continue to produce for a generation or more. They are already re-entering earlier holes and re-fracking with improved techniques and increased application of frac sands and will be “re-producing” the reserves from the same holes. Enhanced production techniques are also in the cards analogous to re-pressuring conventional fields. Interestingly, the hyped rants about frack fluids and pollution has resulted in some promising tests using liquid nitrogen for the frack fluid!!!! When this stuff gets warmed, you will get a lift!
No siree, make sensible regulations and business will find a way, as it always has, to alleviate your worries about what do we have to do to cope with peak oil or any problem whatsoever. It is only socialist thinking that thinks government has to dabble at it in some way to find solutions.
Gary Pearse: “Canadians have been actually physically mining coal beneath the sea”
In Great Britain too, since 1575, in fact.
In 1575, Sir George Bruce of Carnock of Culross, Scotland, opened the first coal mine to extract coal from a “moat pit” under the sea on the Firth of Forth. He constructed an artificial loading island into which he sank a 40 ft shaft that connected to another two shafts for drainage and improved ventilation. The technology was far in advance of any coal mining method in the late medieval period and was considered one of the industrial wonders of the age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining
However, in-situ gasification is capable of reaching seams that for various are totally inaccessible by conventional mining techniques. It partially combusts the coal by injecting oxygen and superheated steam.
catweazle666
Underground gasification of coal is a nonsense as daft as ‘peak oil’. There are no foreseeable ways that the underground gasification can work although trials of it are repeatedly used as a method to obtain funds from gullible governments. This has been demonstrated by many studies in many places since the first large study was conducted by the Soviets in the 1920s and 1930s.
The problems are severe. To understand the problems it is necessary to understand how coal is gasified.
Coal gasification is very different from the Victorian production of ‘towns gas’ that heated coal in a sealed container to drive off volatiles and to collect them as ‘gas’ (e.g. for lighting) leaving the carbon as coke which could be burned as fuel.
Coal is mostly carbon (C) and it can be gasified because it burns by combining with oxygen (O) in a two stage process.
Stage 1
2C + O2 → 2CO
The coal combines with oxygen to form carbon monoxide with consumption of heat and, therefore, heat has to be provided to start a fire.
Stage 2
2CO + O2 → 2CO2
The carbon monoxide from Stage 1 combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide with release of much more heat than Stage 1 consumed and, therefore, an ignited fire can spread.
Coal gasification consists of providing the coal with sufficient oxygen to convert all the carbon to carbon monoxide (complete Stage 1) and then adding additional oxygen so enough of the carbon monoxide is converted to carbon monoxide (some of Stage 2) to provide the heat needed to conduct all of Stage 1.
The result is a product gas rich in carbon monoxide (CO) but diluted with some carbon dioxide (CO2) that ideally when burned would release as much heat as would have been obtained by burning the original fuel.
In practice the product gas would also contain some hydrogen (H) because the coal contains some water that boils and the resulting steam combines with carbon in a water gas shift
H2O + C → H2 + CO
And impurities (e.g. oxides of sulphur and nitrogen) would also exist in the product gas because the coal is not pure carbon.
An industrial gasifier is constructed and operated to control the chemical reactions, and the control is not easy. The oxygen must be supplied to the coal surface for conduct of Stage 1 while the resulting carbon monoxide shields the coal surface, and oxygen must be supplied to the resulting carbon monoxide in correct amount.
The gasification process stops if there is inadequate oxygen
and
the product gas is very diluted with incombustible carbon dioxide if there is too much oxygen.
The gasification can be adequately conducted in a specially designed gasification reactor vessel. It cannot be properly conducted in a coal seam because the underground gas flows vary as the geometry of the seam changes when gases are formed and removed.
Excess oxygen is supplied for underground gasification because that overcomes the problem of the process stopping from inadequate oxygen. But the excess oxygen results in great dilution of the product gas with incombustible carbon dioxide so the product gas has low calorific value. Also, the conversion varies as the geometry of the seam varies in unpredictable ways.
Thus, underground gasification provides a product gas with low and very variable calorific value. There is no commercial or industrial use for a product gas with low and very variable calorific value.
And the problems are not only that the product gas is useless: the process has risks.
Removing a coal seam causes subsidence of the ground above the coal seam. Mining engineers put much effort into controlling the subsidence and its effects. There cannot be any such control of subsidence when the gasification is removing the seam as, when and where the gases flow underground. This may not be a problem for undersea extractions but certainly would be near urban areas.
The subsidence cracks the subsiding ground and, thus, provides the possibility of product gas seeping from the surface of the ground. Carbon monoxide is a cumulative toxin. This,too, may not be a problem for undersea extractions, but it would be a severe potential problem near urban areas.
All these difficulties – and more – have been repeatedly demonstrated by trial of underground coal gasification during the past hundred years.
In summation, underground coal gasification has as much likelihood of being adopted as ‘peak oil’ has of becoming a problem; i.e. none.
Richard
Removing a coal seam causes subsidence of the ground above the coal seam. Mining engineers put much effort into controlling the subsidence and its effects. There cannot be any such control of subsidence when the gasification is removing the seam as, when and where the gases flow underground. This may not be a problem for undersea extractions but certainly would be near urban areas.
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Sort of yes and no, Rich.
Coal seams are just left to collapse, and they do give subsidence above. But obviously the miners do not mine under towns and cities (which wastes a lot of coal), while all outlying houses in the countryside must be built upon a concrete raft (an old law going back to the early 20th century).
But yes, if you extract significant amounts of deposits in an uncontrolled drill, it does cause subsidence in unexpected places. The famous one is Northwich in the UK, where uncontrolled salt drilling caused most of the town to collapse. They ended up with all the shops being built on adjustable jacks. They also built two very ingenious floating swing-bridges, which would always adjust to the water level, no matter what the land was doing.
But you are arguing against yourself Rich. Here is the great hope that will prevent peak fossil fuel, and you say it will not work….
http://northwich.daniel-clark.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/nw_1.jpg
Richard Courtney,
That was an excellent explanation of the process. Than you for that!
‘Peak oil’ is meaningless. As the price rises due to the exploitation of the ‘low hanging fruit’, prices rise, more supply is brought online, and the market is supplied. In a true free market, there are few shortages. Higher prices? Yes. But the market always supplies the necessities.
That is Econ 1A. But the alarmist cult is populated by economic illiterates who actually believe that once ‘peak oil’ is passed, that’s the end of the game, and we will all shiver like their alarming and scary narrativves predict.
As usual, you are right, and they are wrong.
ralfellis
Clearly, you know as little about modern coal mining as you do about ‘peak oil’.
Planning of how and where to cut panels to control subsidence is an important modern coal mining activity which is more than not mining under towns. And you demonstrate this by providing a sepia photograph of nineteenth century mining subsidence.
Importantly, I am NOT ” arguing against {my}self”. Underground gasification is NOT as you claim “the great hope that will prevent peak fossil fuel”.
There is no possibility of “peak fossil fuel” – none, zilch, nada – as I again explain to you in my post that will probably be here when it is released from modification.
Richard
Richard, that is the strangest description of gasification I have read in a while.
Coal combustion can start spontaneously without any outside heat or oxygen. Coal seams are burning all over the place, running on water (!) which is needed to make the chemistry work.
Coal gasification is a very simple and easily controlled process. The major portion of coal gas comes from the water which is split endothermically by the hot coal. The result is that the CO2 is split to 2 x CO absorbing about 24 MJ/kg. The heat comes from burning some of the carbon and hydrogen. Coal can be gasified on a scale the size of a bucket.
Ulaanbaatar’s ambient air pollution, down more than 50% in three years, has been accomplished by introducing top lit updraft gasifiers burning wet lignite on a scale of 8 kW. The largest can hold 12 kg of fuel.
The largest local source of lignite, Nalaikh Mine, is being considered as a source of coal bed methane, or underground gasification. If they really want to make gas in quantity they should bring it to the surface because it is not deep. For the deep and undersea deposits, in situ gasification is easy enough to get started. Shutting it off is more of an issue. The same approach – coarse gasification – can be taken with duff coal and high ash waste (“burned” coal from the edges of deposits) to get out something in gaseous form that can be refined and piped at the surface.
Most people are surprised that CO2 is easily converted to CO and CH4 and H2 by applying water. I have done it at a scale of less than 4 kW. The point of the process is to make a useful gas, not to ‘burn coal’. In part it demonstrates why the concept of ‘dirty coal’ is logically flawed.
Crispin in Waterloo
I described coal gasification and the problems of underground coal gasification.
As I explained, coal gasification is a controlled conduct of part of the combustion process. Coal gasification is NOT coal combustion.
But you say
Yes, and if coal combustion were coal gasification then the combustion products from burning coal seams would be used.
And you say
Yes, I briefly explained the water gas shift.
The important points are – as I said –
and
Nobody has adopted underground coal gasification because it doesn’t work and nobody has imagined a way to make it work.
Richard
Crispin in Waterloo
This is a separate answer to you because it addresses a different issue from coal gasification.
You say
Coal bed methane is nothing to do with underground gasification.
Methane gas is trapped in coal seam structures. Fracture the coal and the gas escapes. Methane is combustible and it can explode at some concentrations in the air. Miners used to call it ‘fire damp’, and it is the major reason that ventilation must be very good in coal mines.
Methane is often extracted from coal seams for use, especially in the USA. This is done by drilling down into the seam often with hydraulic fracturing of the seam.
This is not relevant to coal gasification except that product gas of underground gasification would include any methane trapped in the seam.
Richard
Clearly, you know as little about modern coal mining as you do about ‘peak oil’.
___________________________
Richard, one of us used to be a coal mine surveyor – and it was not you. So what was wrong with my description of long-wall mining, eh? You have a habit of making sweeping ad hominem statements that do not explain anything. So what was wrong with what I said?
And the Northwich subsidence was caused by drilling and fluid injection and extraction, much the same as coal gassification involves injection and extraction. And the 19th century problem was that the extraction did not always occur where the drilling was located. I suspect that might be a problem with modern gasification too.
And what Crispin said is correct, deep coal is very easy to set alight and very difficlt to put out (although not sure about the water claim). The entire coal column under Coventry is still alight, as far as I know. But my guess is that getting useful amounts of energy from in situ gassification would be very difficult.
R
Richard, you entirely overlook the essential part played in the gasification process by superheated steam.
Without reference to this, the rest of your post is entirely irrelevant.
Richard
We are not yet talking at cross purposes though catweasel seems to pick up the same point.
Candidates for successful in ground gasification will try it on a deposit that is high in hydrogen, water, underground but accessible. Nalaikh is one such place. Anywhere there is a chance of getting something useful out of a crummy deposit would be a candidate.
Although water shift reaction processes tend to be episodic, I am not convinced it will not be solved. Underground mining is expensive. I have confidence that we are pretty inventive and will come up with a way to gasify all manner of underground carbon and hydrogen rich resources.
Just to toss out a straw man, gasifying high volatiles coal (like lignite) and working only with the water in it might pay where underground digging for “low quality coal” won’t. Starting at a site where methane is already available in interesting quantities makes sense, not somewhere deep under the sea. Maybe they need to make four foot diameter drills first and send hardware down there. I don’t know. As gasification is so easy I expect it to be successful. Perhaps if the steam is hot enough the resource can be extracted in gaseous form without if being a combustible gas at the time, to be cleaned up on the surface by dehydration. People are clever.
catweazle666
You write
More absolute rubbish from you!
And, as usual, it is because you failed to read what I wrote.
I wrote
This exothermic reaction is useful because it ‘gains’ energy for the process and alters the combustion efficiency of the product gas. But it is not “essential”.
Richard
catweazle666
I write to provide a sincere apology.
I confused you with ‘silver ralph’ aka ‘ralfellis’. It is him – not you – who keeps writing “absolute rubbish”.
Please accept my abject apology for the insult which was not warranted in your case.
Sorry.
Richard
Silver ralph
You say to me
You did NOT describe describe long-wall mining.
You said the Selby complex was shut because of seam faulting. It was not. If such faulting existed then coal mining surveyors would have determined the problem at the planning stage for the mines so the complex would not have been constructed.
You have a habit of making sweeping ad hominem statements that attempt to conceal you don’t know what you are talking about.
The rest of your post supports my explanations of why underground coal gasification does not work and nobody has imagined a way to make it work.
Richard
Crispin in Waterloo
I will address each of your points in turn
You say
Perhaps. But I don’t understand your statement.
You continue
“Candidates for successful in ground gasification” are all underground coal seams everywhere.
You then assert
Perhaps someone will overcome the problems of underground coal gasification. A century of research has yet to do that. Please get back to me when somebody does.
And we don’t need to gasify hydrogen rich resources because they are oil and natural gas which are extracted by drilling.
You conclude saying
From the start, you seem to have been confusing gasification (i.e. the conversion of coal to combustible gas) with gas reforming (i.e. chemically reacting gases to chemically alter them) and with coal bed methane (i.e. a combustible gas trapped in many coal seams).
I repeat, underground coal gasification does not work and after a century of research nobody has imagined a way to make it work. Please get back to me when somebody comes up with a method to make it work.
Richard
You did NOT describe describe long-wall mining.
You said the Selby complex was shut because of seam faulting. It was not. If such faulting existed then coal mining surveyors would have determined the problem at the planning stage for the mines so the complex would not have been constructed.
________________________________________
Richard, are you merely a troll? You have never been north of Watford, let alone been down a pit, and you presume to challenge and correct a mine surveyor who was there at the time (although not in Selby).
Selby WAS closed due to geology. That is a fact.
The only way it could continue, was if it had (another) huge public subsidy.
And no, the problems were not detected before opening. Firstly this was a gold-plated government project, like the Brabazon aircraft. It was going to open whatever, because it was a political sop to the miners, to stop them all striking and briging down the governemnt. And secondly the shear zones did not show up on the initial 2-D survey. And the many shear zones meant that the roadways buckled and the seam blocks were too small and irregular for effective long-wall mining. Check out the section on shear zones on this surveyors report.
http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/three-dimensional-seismic-surveying-to-investigate-the-geological-structure-of-shear-zones-within-the-selby-coalfield-pbCSNA17161/downloads/CS-NA-17-161-EN-C/CSNA17161ENC_001.pdf;pgid=y8dIS7GUWMdSR0EAlMEUUsWb00005xBTVqrj;sid=tPIS-HYXgYES7CccpvCMXxQyFjFuqHHEsiE=?FileName=CSNA17161ENC_001.pdf&SKU=CSNA17161ENC_PDF&CatalogueNumber=CS-NA-17-161-EN-C
So it was very difficult to push roadways through these weak shear zones, and very difficult to long-wall mine the small irregular seam blocks. You do know what long-wall mining is, Richard?? It is not a reference to an access tunnel, for your information. Try looking it up in the Jack-and-Jill guide to mining, you might find some amazing facts there that you had no idea about.
To the other posters here, please ignore everything RichardCourtney says. He has never been in a mine, he knows nothing about mining, and as you can see from his postings he always evades answering questions – relying on ad hominem attack instead. If Richardcourtney’s knowledge of gasification techniques is the same as his knowledge of mining, you would be better off researching the ‘technical’ books in Mothercare.
R
Silver ralph
No, I am not a troll, but you are. For example, you write
I lived north of Watford for over 30 years and have been down several pits.
I was elected as the Vice President of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) in five successive elections. The mining engineers who comprised most of BACM would not have consistently elected me if I were ignorant of their interests.
Also, I wrote the chapter on coal in the prestigious Kempes Engineers Year Book.
The UK coal industry was closed for purely political reasons and that closure included the Selby complex. Your assertions of its closure from geology is plain wrong. And the Selby complex was providing the cheapest available coal to the local power stations without subsidy because Selby coal was transported by merry-go-round trains while imported coal had high transport costs from the docks.
Your untrue nonsense about the Selby complex is part of your deluded Malthusian notion that we have reached “peak fossil fuels”.
And your daft trolling includes this
All of that is ad hominem attack which you always use when shown to be wrong.
I worked on the research and development of British Coal’s Air Blown Gasification Combined cycle (ABGC) project. We perfected each part of the system (including the gasifier) at full scale and used the resulting data to construct a computer model of an assembled power station: the model indicates that ABGC would provide the cheapest coal-fired electricity of any technology. The next stage was to construct a complete demonstration plant at full scale but that was halted because the government completed its closure of the UK coal industry in 1995.
I have answered every point out to me. And Mothercare does not stock e.g. Kempes Engineers Year Book.
Richard
Wow!
Richardcourtney.
I was elected as the Vice President of the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) in five successive elections. The mining engineers who comprised most of BACM would not have consistently elected me if I were ignorant of their interests.
_________________________________
In other words you were a pen-pusher who has never done a day’s work in a mine. And a Scargilite nation-wrecker by the sounds of it, who got exactly what he deserved.
And you are obtuse to boot. I give you prima face surveying evidence that faulting caused the loss of production at Selby, and all you can say is: ‘no it did not’, ‘no it did not’. Go on, then give us the evidence. You have none, because you are 100% wrong, and your word is not worth a brass farthing.
As to the closure of Selby being political, yes it was, but not in the way you think. The government put £40 million into Selby in the few years before it closed, and what happened to that, eh? Gone in a trice. So the real reason for the failure of Selby is the political Scargilite numbskulls that ran it as a Communist fiefdom, and did not cut their cloth to match their geologically trimmed pocket.
In fact, if you want to know why Selby closed, look in the mirror. Here is a claimed president of Colliery Management who does not know that faulting caused the output of Selby. The surveyors knew, the Guardian knows, the Independent knows, and even the local MP knew. But the president of management does not have a clue. Want to know why UK PLC is more than £1 trillion in debt? Well now you all know – out of touch and clueless management.
Oh, and here is the local MP for Selby, speaking in the Houses of Parliament:
Quote:
However, in the face of increasing geological disturbances, some reserves had to be discounted and production began to tail off in the mid-1990s. Whitemoor and North Selby mines merged with their close neighbours Stillingfleet and Riccall to concentrate mining activities in areas with more favourable geology and fewer uncertainties.
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/westminster_hall/2002/apr/16/selby-coalfield
And I suppose you will accuse John Grogan MP of lying too. Yeah, everyone is wrong, except Richard ourtney.
Ralph
Troll posting as Silver ralf, and ralf ellis, and etc.
Your flagrant attacks on anybody who opposes your ridiculous belief in ‘peak fossil fuel’ are an indication of a mental disorder.
You know nothing, and you understand less than nothing.
For the record, I was never a “pen pusher” during my coal industry employment when I was based at the Coal Research Establishment. I was the Senior Materials Scientist. And pen pushers don’t get Inventor’s Awards.
For some time after the UK coal industry was shut for political reasons I became the Contributing Technical Editor of CoalTrans International but I then used a keyboard not a pen.
Richard
You know nothing, and you understand less than nothing.
_______________________________
I gave you cast-iron evidence of serious faulting problems from a geological survey, and evidence from Parliament, and you have not answered even one of the many points they made.
You said faulting would be discovered prior to the project, and yet the geologist’s report clearly stated that they were not discovered and also explained why they were not discovered, and again you fail to answer these points.
Really, Richard you are so full of shiite, it is untrue. If you are typical of colliery manmanagement, I am not surprised the entire industry went down the tubes. With you and Scargil in charge, it did not stand a chance. And the sad thing is, you took a hundred thoudand workers down with you. And did you ever apologise for your failings? No, I bet you put up a brick wall and denied everything, just like you do here, and blamed everyone else. You have lived a sad and pointless existence, by the sounds of if.
R
Silver ralph: “You know nothing, and you understand less than nothing.”
Dear oh dear.
What a spectacularly sad, entirely ignorant little troll you are.
” You have lived a sad and pointless existence, by the sounds of if.”
Heh!
Methinks you are THE leading expert on sad and pointless existence.
Thanks, Dr. Archibald for pointing to Thorium. I see it as a far less dangerous source of nuclear energy.
We need to build one of these in a remote location and run it for twenty years. By that time we’ll know if the corrosion can be safely managed.
pochas,
Better yet, build twenty or thirty. Give it a real test. Fix any unforseen problems. Then… profit!!
dbstealey
You suggest
Novelty risk provides good reason to do that but – at the same time – makes it almost impossible to obtain commercial finance for any such demonstration projects.
I explain as follows.
A power station requires capital for its construction. Its owners need to to take out a loan for that capital so they obtain large debt.
The power station needs to operate for a minimum of 30 years. Over the first 15 years of the power station’s operational life the power sold from the power station provides income to its owners who use that income to repay off the capital loan. After that the power station provides real profits to its owners.
There is a possibility that a power station using a novel technology may hit an unforeseen snag so not operate for 15 years and, therefore, not pay off its capital loan. This is the novelty risk. The loaners of the capital insure against this risk by applying a high interest rate for their loan. And the high interest rate makes the power station’s output expensive so it is not competitive with output from conventional power stations. Hence, novelty risk prevents adoption of the novel technology.
The only possible solution is for a government to underwrite the novelty risk. This is often done for e.g. new aircraft. Indeed, it is the excuse governments use to subsidise wind and solar power supposedly as power sources. But governments don’t underwrite novelty risk for power stations.
Richard
richardcourtney,
OK Richard, you made a convincing point. There are some situations where a subsidy may be necessary. So I’ll amend, and say that in almost all cases government should not subsidize commercial activity.
Important products such as aircraft, fossil fuels, railroads, and other things that turned out to be a great benefit to society began without a government subsidy. And at first, government subsidies were restricted to things that really paid off, like the Indian rail system.
But now subsidies are completely out of hand, at least in the U.S. There is no legitimate reason why Elon Musk should have his electric cars subsidized. If he builds a good product that the public desires, he will be successful.
As I’ve posted before:
1. Government is force
2. Good ideas do not have to be forced on others
3. Bad ideas should not be forced on others
4. Liberty is necessary for the difference between good ideas and bad ideas to be revealed
The only possible solution is for a government to underwrite the novelty risk.
_________________________
Richard’s Communist credentials come to the fore once again. “Yes, we can make a profit, if the government pays 90% of our expenses”. Heck, even a five year-old can run a company on that basis.
And your comparison is not valid, because modern aircraft development is expensive, but not a venture into a technological unknown. Unless, of course, you are talking about R-101, the Brabazon or Concorde, where there was lots of risk. But these were gold-plated government projects, which all failed either technically or economically – like all government projects do.
R
@dbstealey,
This would be a subsidy, but limited in scope and duration. Government would provide a budget to build and operate one unit of specified capacity, for a definite time, then decommission. No blanket subsidies to build unlimited nuke plants / wind turbines / photovoltaic / battery cars ad infinitum. Current data on operating costs and capital, plant performance, maintenance costs and history, would be made available to industry. Fuel reprocessing would have to be included as required to make for an independent operation. Then, if its uneconomical it dies. Or sooner, if the numbers don’t add up after the preliminary design stage. We can do this.
dbstealey
Thankyou for your considered response. I strongly agree that government subsidies are way, way out of control.
The underwriting of novelty risk would be an investment to assist future infrastructure. In principle, it is akin to government providing roads: not all new roads are toll roads. And I agree with pochas: underwriting the novelty risk would be a temporary subsidy for a specified demonstration.
Please note that if the demonstration plant works as intended then the subsidy for underwriting novelty risk need cost nothing : the underwriting is a government assurance that government will meet costs in the event of the novelty providing unanticipated failure of the plant. This is very different to e.g. the payments made to operators of wind-powered subsidy farms.
Richard
PS
The contemptible idiocy from the troll who posts as Silver ralph, and ralfellis, and etc. only warrants ridicule, and I cannot be bothered to respond to his dogging of me this time: I merely feel pity that he is not getting the needed medical treatment for his obvious mental problems.
The average electricity consumption for a home is less than 30kWh/day (2013 data). There are about 6 equivalent hours of usable solar energy in a day, thus a 5kWh solar system will produce enough energy to cover that use. The best residential panels produce 345 watts in 17.37 sq ft, so you only need 260.5 sq ft of panels to meet the needs of a typical house (grid tied). Add some for conversion losses, subtract some for switching from incandescent to LED lighting, more efficient appliances, and more efficient structures, subtract some more as solar panels will continue to get more efficient and subtract another 30+% if you mount them on a tracker.. The cheapest solar panels are about $0.75 per watt. Add some costs for racking, inverters, and installation. And prices are continuing to drop. A couple hundred square feet on your roof to generate all the power you use….
(People can learn to time-shift their (smart) appliance use from night to day, and if necessary add a battery to cover night time power requirements or the grid can provide that function.)
Ok, so let me get this straight:
So 6 hrs solar/day (at 100% available) will require only 260.5 sf panels on my roof (what about snow load?). What if there’s a fire underneath these roof panels and the first responders have to deal with live electrical circuits?
But anyway, I have to convert to LED lighting, also buy new appliances, build a new more efficient house and bingo, I’m done!!
Oh wait, I have to also add battery backup and maybe all this stuff will get so much more efficient in the coming years that it will actually work.
Are U Friking nutz?
The best residential panels produce 345 watts in 17.37 sq ft, so you only need 260.5 sq ft of panels to meet the needs of a typical house (grid tied).
___________________________________
Unicorn engineering, with added fairydust.
Yeah, but I only want 15kwh in the summer, and 60 kwh in the winter. But in the winter I only get 6 hours of a a vague immitation of daylight hiding behind 20,000 foot of cloud. So my demand is 60kwh and my supply is 5kwh. And so my family ffffreeze. And even if I could generate 60 kwh, with a vast array covering most of the neighbourhood, I will need to store 40kwh of that for the dark bits of the day. And If a car battery contains 1kwh, then I also need 40 batteries in the garage.
And since I traded my car for a Tesla, and I cannot keep the car warm in the garage anymore, let alone charge it, and so I cannot get to work. And the result is that I have lost my job, and need to sell all the solar panels and the Tesla to pay the mortgage. And lo, I have just become another Green Pauper. (Unless I can get everyone else on the planet to pay for my fairydust follies, like the Greens normally do).
This is far fetched, you say? Not at all. A physicist colleage ripped out his gas central heating and replaced it with liquid solar panels. Great idea – and he even got a subsidy. But after two winters without heating, his wife left him. So that little deal cost him his family, his house (which has had gas reinstalled, 70% of all his assets, and 25% of all his income for the next 15years. As Greenie blunders go, that one is right up there with the best of them…..
R
Nice story.
How long is your nose now, Mr. Pinocchio?
You left out loss of health and derangement from the insomnia caused by the blue 540 nm peak in LED lights…
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/superchiasmatic-led-light-insomnia/
No joke. I now have about $60 of LED bulbs in a drawer… but the spouse is sleeping well again.
Mr. Smith,
Maybe cheaper and easier to try some melatonin supplements?
In the article, U235 is used, but I have also seen 235U. Why the difference in nomenclature?
Why do you use the moniker “Mark and two Cats” and not “Two Cats and Mark?”
If I used both those forms, then one might ask why I do.
Your question has no relevancy to my initial query.
The cats tried to get top billing, but then got into a fight over which one got listed first. Then Mark distracted them with treats.
I see schitzree has cats.
My wife Barbara and I do too, four of them. Treats are supposed to control cats. But as we know, cats use treats to control humans.
235U is the more formal notation for the nuclide, with the “235” in superscript. The even more formal notation has “92” proceeding the “U” as well in subscript.
TY schitzree, dbstealey, Erik Magnuson, and Arsten! 🙂
U235 follows English conversational use, e.g. “Uranium Two Thirty Five” as when spoken aloud. Proper textual nomenclature is U^235, so if you can’t create a superscript, then “U235” makes sense, both in a general essay and conversations.
235U I have seen, but I usually see from documents in/translated from other languages. I have always linked it to their conversational style – but that is, of course an uninformed assumption that follows from my experience in the bastard language – English.
“(People can learn to time-shift their (smart) appliance use from night to day, and if necessary add a battery to cover night time power requirements or the grid can provide that function.)”
What a great idea – who is going to arrange shipment and installation of enough of these units to help folks out in Nepal and Haiti? And how are they going to pay for it all? They don’t need help in 10 or 20 years time, they need it now.
While I’m all for thorium reactors, anytime I hear someone mention either thorium or hemp, I want to scream. You would think these two materials have magic properties, considering the cult following that each has garnered. Thorium reactors have some nice properties, and they have some not-so-nice properties as well.
Curious pairing of hemp – which works – with thorium reactors, which don’t.
Works at doing what exactly? I agree with Zombie, there is nothing that hemp/cannabis/pot/snake oil can’t do. So what exactly can it do, and what are sources?
Hemp is great fiber material for clothing, bags, and so forth.
Cannabis is a mild to moderate analgesic, a mile sedative/relaxant, and has some possible blood pressure lowering effects that needs more study.
Pot is the plant-source of cannabis that is generally smoked to get the desired effect.
Snake oil is no joke, however. Millions of snakes are crushed for their oils every year, and it makes mother Gaia cry, you heartless monster. (in case you were wondering, this one was a joke).
● Hemp produces the best biofuel.
● Hemp fibers are extremely strong & durable; used in a variety of applications.
● Hemp seeds are a high-protein food source.
● Marijuana is a proven medicine with anti-cancer properties.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2008/jan/28/whyishempoffthebiofuelme
Hemp seeds are notable as a high-protein food source, providing 73% of the Daily Value (DV) in a 100 g serving.[7] Hempseed amino acid profile is comparable to other sources of protein such as meat, milk, eggs and soy.[8] Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score values (PDCAAS), which measure the degree to which a food for humans is a “complete protein”, were 0.49-0.53 for whole hemp seed, 0.46-0.51 for hemp seed meal, and 0.63-0.66 for dehulled hemp seed.[9]
Hemp seeds also are a rich source of the dietary minerals, magnesium (160% DV), zinc (77% DV) and iron (53% DV), and a good source of dietary fiber (13% DV).[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp
As I say, hemp works.
Marijuana has anti-cancer properties.
This fact has been known since at least the 1970s
The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.
The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out — unsuccessfully — to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”
More recent news on the cancer-fighting properties of marijuana:
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a research institution run by the federal government, has grudgingly admitted that marijuana is capable of killing certain cancer cells.
A publication from NIDA, revised as of April 2015, states that “recent animal studies have shown that marijuana can kill certain cancer cells and reduce the size of others. Evidence from one animal study suggests that extracts from whole-plant marijuana can shrink one of the most serious types of brain tumors. Research in mice showed that these extracts, when used with radiation, increased the cancer-killing effects of the radiation.”
http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/02/did-the-federal-government-just-admit-that-marijuana-can-shrink-serious-brain-tumors/
“THC, the major active component of marijuana, has anti-cancer properties. This compound is known to act through a specific family of cell receptors called cannabinoid receptors,” says Dr. Peter McCormick, from UEA’s School of Pharmacy.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/279571.php
Many birds love hemp seeds.
On one plant, very useful fibers, seeds, leaves, and flowering tops.
.
“Dave’s not here”!
“Here man, take this”
“Uh, OK.”
“Oh, hey man, don’t take that.”
“What? I already took it.”
“OH WOW MAN…”
Marijuana much safer than alcohol for drivers:
Overall, statistics, when adjusted for factors such as age, race and gender, suggest there’s little difference between driving stoned or sober when it comes to the risk of having a wreck, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) claims.
[…]
While there isn’t any statistically significant increase in the risk of a crash associated with marijuana use prior to driving, alcohol use resulting in a blood alcohol level of 0.05 or above will increase the risk of a crash seven-fold, according to the study.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/32956/20150216/stoned-drivers-are-safer-than-drunk-drivers-nhtsa-study-suggests.htm
Previous studies have shown stoned drivers to be overly cautious, with some extra lateral correction, where drunks are infused with a sense of reckless bravado that often has tragic consequences.
Steve, I am sure you are correct. But one will still get you locked up, even if you are not driving. OK, not everywhere anymore, but in some places.
I just think it saps motivation and makes people too happy to sit around and do nothing with their lives.
On the plus side, the jokes seem to be funnier:
“The light was yellow, ossifer”.
I have two major problems with Mr. Archibald’s post.
First, he says ‘we’ over a dozen times. WE will all be dead way before any of his doom occurs. Therefore, WE need to do NOTHING.
Secondly, I have ragged on the Thorium Dreamers enough on these pages, I’m not going to do it again now. I will simply say that producing uranium from thorium is a grossly expensive way to get uranium. It is not a marketable process. Hundreds of years from now, in a ‘peak uranium’ environment, it could be viable. It will not be in our lifetimes.
We respect to the overuse of the word “we”, I am sorry that it has upset your delicate sensibilities but I have an excuse. A month ago I met a federal parliamentarian who volunteered that society needs to make a long term transition from coal to nuclear. I decided to help him by writing a draft speech with plenty of the vision thing. He didn’t use it so the speech got recycled into this article with certain words surviving as an artifact of its provenance.
I am thankful you posted it.
When 5000+ tons of Thorium is tossed away into Rare Earth Proceesing tailing ponds yearly, it is very low cost, add to the fact that MSRs are by design 200 times more efficient than PWRs considering fuel burn and thermal transfer, cost of making U-233 through transmutation is least cost option for nuclear energy. That is why Dr. edward Teller is his last paper before his death focused upon the advanced MSR in 1994.
Fig 2 is nonsense. Look at post 1970.
His name is very similar to Faith Broil.
In the 21st century energy will come from…
3rd place – Conventional Nuclear
2nd place – Gas
1st place – King Coal
Thorium molten salt fission is one nuclear possibility. Prototypes have been built and run for a few years. But there are others. Travelling wave reactors–TerraPower, backed by Bill Gates, being just one fission example. Much more speculative, high Beta Fusion (Lockheed Skunkworks claims). Most speculative, LENR based on the weak rather than strong force as positd by Widom Larsen. The phenomenon is almost certainly real, and ot cold fusion. But whether it can be harnessed commercially is completely unknown.
In the absence of a climate crisis, we could divert billions from climate science to sorting out properly the best nuclear options, then proceed on them when ripe. One of thr many distortions introduced by CAGW and radical Greens.
“Thorium molten salt fission is one nuclear possibility. Prototypes have been built and run for a few years.”
Got a reference for that assertion? I didn’t think so.
Yes I do and therefore you are obviously ignorant of the following fact. Oak Ridge National Laboratories ran a Molten Salt Reactor for 5 years. “The salt was loaded in 1964 and nuclear operation ended in December 1969 and all the objectives of the experiment were achieved during this period”.[1] There are others, but I will leave that as homework for you.
Let me put it to you bluntly, Gamecock, Thorium reactors have been built, are being built and will be built.[2]
Which leads me to the following prediction. Thorium reactors will be the main stay of energy for thousands of years into the future[3] and for Uranium[4], whether you like it or not.
Hay, don’t take my word for it, look it up yourself.
Regards
Climate Heretic
PS You must be a Troll or a Watermelon
[1] Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
[2]Thorium
[3] How long will our supplies of uranium and thorium last?
[4] Breeder Reactors: A renewable energy resource
Climate Heretic May 17, 2015 at 4:06 am
Except that the MSRE did not demonstrate full thorium breeding cycle, and only ran at full power, if that’s what 7 MW* is, for less than two years.
The MSRE was a 7.4 MWth test reactor simulating the neutronic “kernel” of a type of inherently safer epithermal thorium breeder reactor called the liquid fluoride thorium reactor. It primarily used two fuels: first uranium-235 and later uranium-233. The latter 233UF4 was the result of breeding from thorium in other reactors. Since this was an engineering test, the large, expensive breeding blanket of thorium salt was omitted in favor of neutron measurements.
[…]it operated as hot as 650 °C and operated for the equivalent of about 1.5 years of full power operation.
The result promised to be a simple, reliable reactor. The purpose of the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment was to demonstrate that some key features ofthe proposed molten-salt power reactors could be embodied in a practical reactor that could be operated safely and reliably and be maintained without excessive difficulty. For simplicity, it was to be a fairly small, one-fluid (i.e. non-breeding) reactor operating at 10 MWth or less, with heat rejection to the air via a secondary (fuel-free) salt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
* Reference to 7 MW:
The Taichung power plant in Taiwan is the largest coal-fired power station, at 5,780 MW.
The Surgut-2 Power Station in Russia is the world’s largest natural gas power station at 5,600 MW and the 19th largest plant in the world.
In Japan, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is the world’s largest nuclear power plant at 8,212 MW. It is also the fifth largest power plant in the world.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2013/08/26/worlds-39-largest-electric-power-plants/
Climate Heretic –
Yes, Thorium wil power the world for thousands of years – no matter HOW much more industrialization occurs. Once the reactors are online, others will follow.
The last time thorium came up on WUWT, someone commented that Thorium reserves weren’t infinite. I took the thorium % in the crust and figured out how much the Thorium on Earth would last. It came out to about 14 billion years. Since that is pretty much the time from the Big Bang until now, I thought that that was close enough to infinity for all practical purposes. At 3 generations per century, 30 per millennium, that comes out to about 420 million generations of humans.
And if we last beyond 14 billion years, we can always use what is on the Moon for a few more billion years.
Are these numbers real? I just took the numbers that others provide for how much Thorium exists. Maybe we can’t access all of it in the crust. Maybe only 10% of it. That should be pretty conservative. I’d think I’d still go with 1.4 billion years as pretty freaking long.
http://media.photobucket.com/user/TheCuteWoofer/media/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=bullshit%20meter%20gif&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images&filters%5Bsecondary%5D=videos&sort=1&o=0
The Chinese, at a very senior level, are investing heavily in taking the shelved Oak Ridge design as the starting point for a thorium reactor. There are some interesting challenges, though.
Lord Chris,
I am an ex-nuclear engineer. CANDU
Aside from the corrosion issues inherent with salt and metal tubes, what is the downside the Chinese are witnessing?
I’d be more inclined to follow INEL’s Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)design which was demo’ed with the EBR-II. This would be able to make use of the spent LWR fuel (albeit reprocessed) for initial core load. The thorium reactors would either need a serious program to produce 233U from current LWR’s or start with 20% enriched uranium.
Both the MSR and IFR designs would have the problem of dealing with volatile fissions products that are currently left in the fuel with current LWR designs. The IFR at least would keep the metallic fissions products in the fuel.
One good thing that Obama did was to stop Yucca Mountain so the US still has 72,000 tonnes of spent fuel rods sitting around in dry cask storage. From memory, those fuel rods contain 660 tonnes of fuel-grade plutonium. Thorium reactors need 1 kg of fissile startup fuel per MWe of capacity. So those fuel rods are good for the first 2,600 reactors of 250 MWe each. The doubling time on thorium reactors may mean that enough U233 is generated for the complete build out.
David,
My recollection was that the dry casks to be stored in Yucca Mountain were supposed to be retrievable.
The IFR can breed with the 239Pu/238U cycle as well as the 233U/232Th cycle, whereas the MSR needs to use 233U/232Th due to the relatively high non-fission thermal neutron absorption cross section. The IFR can make use of the decay heat from metallic fission products, being a fast reactor the breeding is affected as much by the neutron poisons present in fission products. In addition, the EBR-II ran for longer and at higher power than the MSR at ORNL. One disadvantage of the IFR is dealing with the material damage from the high fast neutron flux (which would be far worse in a D-T fusion reactor).
The Chinese buy 747s because they really can’t make that great airliners yet, how are they going to make a thorium reactor?
I dunno about the reactors or the 747s, but they do seem to know how to build towering skyscrapers, which must be seen at least informally as a sign of wealth.
Chinese city Tianjin near Beijing has under construction 3 towers which will stand 597 m, 530 m, and 488 m respectively, with another proposed at 588 m. Suzhou, Wuhan, and Shenzhen all have 600 m or taller skyscrapers under construction, all rivaling or exceeding the world’s current 2nd tallest building in Shanghai, 632 m.
16 of the 25 tallest buildings under construction worldwide are in China
Contrast with 1 WTC at 546 (with spire), or the Willis Tower at 527, also with spires.
Noted in case anybody was wondering what the Chinese are doing with all that $$$. Meanwhile, they can buy good airplanes from the United States, Russia and several other nations who will happily sell their wares to anybody with $$$.
Tom Trevor
You are implying that the US has not built a thorium powered power generation industry because it is hard to do. Making a product as large and complex as a 777 or 747 cheaply does not make Thorium impossible. The US chose to make fast breeders. That was a policy decision in part to keep the cost of the fuel and plants and waste management high.
The Chinese or Indians don’t need to build everything. There are two forces working against Thorium power: fanatical resistance from the anti-nuke industry and entrenched investments in expensive alternatives. India and China and Russia and South Africa are not bound by either of those limitations. Why should they be? They are quite capable of making complex things when they want to. Examples are the Russian heavy lifters for space flight, the Rooivalk helicopter, the Silkworm missile and the Mars satellite by India. It would not surprise me if all four were running Indian software.
Steve P –
It’s not just skyscrapers, dude. The Chinese also lead the world in high-speed rail miles, and they haven’t stopped building them. How many miles of high-speed rail does the USA have? ZERO.
Do not discount how much work and design go into skyscrapers, either.
While we sit and blow a little bit of hot air, at a non-official level like this blog, the Chinese officials have committed all sorts of resources at thorium reactors. India, too.
Basically, we in the USA are blowing it out our rectal orifices while others are puttig scientists and engineers on this.
WHY? Because they see that the principle proved itself 50 years ago, and that it is a matter of engineering it now, and that is what they intended to do more than five years ago.
NO matter WHAT naysayers here blow out their bums, this is happening, people. WE in the USA are not and WILL not be part of the process – except as customers. Someday in about 10-15-20 years our cities will be buying LFTRs from China or India.
I learned a lot a couple of years ago reading on how much effort it was eearly in the Industrial Revolution to transport ores and coal. Early on people were building canals in indiustrial Europe and the very young USA. Lots of people went bankrput in the process, and then the canals became obsolete very quickly with the advent of trains. And many people went bankrupt with THOSE, too. And then trains only really lasted maybe 130 years or so before interstates and trucking took over most of industrial transportation – and airlines took over passenger transportation.
In all of that, the main beneficiaries were the people of the countries with canals and rail systems, and they still are.
Some of the people working on thorium are going to go belly up, but the people of the countries which have LFTRs will again be the beneficiaries.
* * *
Someone paraphrased Kirk Sorenson above, the Indians are now committing themselves to LFTRs instead of trying to run conventional reactors with thorium – and that they are sorry that they had not decided this earlier in their program.
I always thought that trying to stuff thorium solids into some bastard form of present technology was a really stupid idea. It seems the Indians see the light.
Dang, thought I could post just the BS Meter itself. Sorry! Remove.
But, the whole exercise deserves the BS Meter.
Any “forecast” going out over 30 years, even 10 to 20 is PURE BS! And worthless.
Max
Right click on the BS meter and copy the URL
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo194/TheCuteWoofer/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif
OK, here goes :
http://i375.photobucket.com/albums/oo194/TheCuteWoofer/Smilies/Weird/bsmeter.gif
Is that the best B.S. meter one click can buy?
Where is my lame-o-meter?
We really don’t need thorium at all. We only use about 5% of the energy capacity of conventional fuel rods. If we engaged in a reprocessing programs, we would not need to use even one tiny bit more of enriched uranium. We already have enough fuel to satisfy our needs for a couple of centuries sitting in spent fuel storage. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste/
Thorium reactors also can burn nuclear waste: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/187917-startup-gets-funding-for-its-molten-salt-nuclear-reactor-that-eats-radioactive-waste
Probably true, but it is a solution looking for a problem, in our case. It’s fine for a place that has large thorium reserves but little Uranium (like India) but we have enough uranium to last for centuries.
As usual, crosspatch is correct. We have plenty of resources. Only misguided enviro-politics stops us from using them.
True Db, but my understanding is that the storage of conventional nuclear processing is a huge issue, and my understanding is this solves that, both eliminating over 90 percent of the waste, and leaving a product with a greatly reduced 300 year 1/2 life. As mentioned, freed resources from the green nightmare, and natural economics would likely sort this out fine, with all resources working in a natural harmony.
Once energy was reliable and abundant, then the energy to produce coal to liquid would also be abundant. We will run out of energy, when we run out of planet.
The entire universe, and earth included, is literally awash in energy.
That, IMO, is the long and the short of it.
The rest is all details.
Choose which stream to dip a toe into.