What if some phenomenally large energy/materials breakthroughs were right here in front of us, vastly more accessible than experimental aspirations, but held back by an image problem?
To help ponder that question, it is necessary to share with you one of the best (meaning funniest), most explosive miscalculations in modern science; the reason for bringing it up is that it’s simply too good not to. But before that, some context.
It seems there are a number of energy paths ahead of us. One, there will be some sort of breakthrough in energy technology that ushers in a whole new way of powering things. But we can’t bank on that, for the same reason people can’t bank on lottery tickets for retirement. We don’t know if the breakthrough will actually happen, and even if one does, we don’t know what it would take to build it out – materials-wise, cost-wise, planning-wise, etc. (Please don’t send me a picture of what some team has working in the lab. Been far too dazzled by those things for decades now, call me when it’s on the market.)
We might get more comfortable societally with nuclear energy; the world seems hellbent on ‘carbon free energy’ and the only way that’s going to happen in a way that meets the needs of 8 billion people is nuclear power. But I get that some people get pretty rattled by nuclear energy, figuratively speaking, which I understand; nuclear fallout is probably not what you want to wake up and see dusting the patio furniture.
Far be it from me to add any negativity to the discussion however; I think nuclear is key to a low-emission future. Which brings me to the story mentioned at the outset.
By the 1950s, researchers had found that nuclear bombs were proficient at leveling cities, but there was much that was not known about them. To help answer questions, the US government launched the ominously goofily named Operation Plumbbob, a series of nuclear tests.
In 1956, a researcher named Dr. Robert Brownlee of the prestigious (before the experiment) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was asked to examine whether nuclear explosions could be tested underground, and what would happen to the subterranean earth in such an event. He apparently said sure, why not, or some such.
To find out just what would happen, the researchers dutifully detonated a nuclear bomb named Pascal A 500 feet underground (the military had an odd habit of naming nuclear bombs; why they would want to humanize these things in any way whatsoever I have no clue). In the spirit of modern YouTubers, that attempt was a 1950s equivalent of hillbillies launching a claptrap Jeep across a creek and coming up 50 percent short. In other words, the Los Alamos scientists severely miscalculated. But the miscalculation was not due to insufficient energy, quite the opposite; the force of the blast was some 50,000 times higher than expected. As Dr. Brownlee, apparently a droll master of understatement, put it, “We figured you could keep everything in but for a few per cent by going underground. But Mother Nature can outwit you in a great variety of ways.” Dr. Brownlee described the resulting monstrous jet of fire as “the world’s finest Roman candle.”
They weren’t done there, however. With curious minds still wanting to know, the team stuffed Pascal B down a similar hole to detonate it similarly, but with a “fix” – the team welded a four-inch-thick metal and concrete cap weighing 900 kilograms/2,000 pounds, over the bomb to contain the explosion.
You just know this is gonna be good, right?
Dr. Brownlee suspected the weld wouldn’t hold and that the lid would be blown off, so to document the shenanigans, the team installed a high-speed camera nearby that would capture the action at a thousand frames per second. If the main force of the explosion did go upwards instead of downwards as hoped, all would be documented.
Mother Nature outwitted them again though, in a way. The cement/steel lid did blow off, and the camera did catch it doing so, but only for a fraction of an instant, a single millisecond, in a single frame. In other words, the massive slab was going like a rocket. Actually, far, far faster than a rocket – the scientists calculated the cement slab’s speed at 66 kilometers per second, or 150,000 miles per hour – six times the velocity required to escape earth’s orbit. “I have no idea what happened to that cap,” said Dr. Brownlee. There is a chance that the speed was such that it blasted into space and is sailing off to parts unknown as we speak (recent calculations suggest the lid simply vaporized, which is a pretty neat trick in its own right).
It is unfortunate for us humans with dark senses of humour that Dr. Brownlee’s team was never commissioned to design a ride at Disneyland.
Now, it stands to reason that significant technological developments won’t always have such colourful episodes, unfortunately, but that doesn’t mean they will go smoothly. We may grumble about our supply chains and the emissions thereof and the dominant reliance on hydrocarbons to make it all work, but look at the challenges of trying to ram any new energy system through rapidly. The existing system has been cobbled together over more than a century; people, cities, civilizations and our modern way of life have been wrapped around it. They exist because of it. Changing the fundamental system is not going to happen quickly, no matter what comes along as a new energy source.
If nuclear took off (no pun intended), it would be massively disruptive in its own way, as mining giant Robert Friedland recently pointed out in an interview (“If you have a nuclear reactor you can make hydrogen…Obviously if we were serious about this we’d immediately build two thousand or four thousand or five thousand one-thousand megawatt nuclear reactors. Now, how much metal do we need to weld those containment vessels? The United States has lost the capability to even build a nuclear plant… and so yeah we could build two, five thousand reactors, out of what? How much niobium in that containment vessel, how much vanadium in that specialty steel, how do you weld it, how much steel, concrete, rebar, how much raw materials do you need, how you going to organize it, how you going to mine it… how many nuclear engineers do you have to train to build that shit and to regulate it… do you think that’s actually going to happen?… You say definitely I say maybe… talk is cheap.”
People get excited about nuclear fusion and lithium metal batteries and heaven knows what dreams are going on in green brains, but any of them are going to be massively disruptive and a challenge to integrate, because it is hard to build any infrastructure anywhere, and our countless systems work because of that existing infrastructure. An energy transition is not like a transition from land lines to cell phones; it is more like moving every highway in the world a hundred meters to the east. Some fraction of that task would be easy, but much would be challenging beyond belief.
The world will be much, much better served if we leverage what we have and what we know to the full extent, without demonization, without vilification, in the full, purely scientific sense of curiosity.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Here then is a look at something we all should be excited about, particularly in Canada. The oil sands have been extensively vilified, and children around the world have been taught to loathe this inanimate natural oil deposit (a task made easier by giving a more repulsive name, tar sands – hey, in modern energy warfare, no strategy is too small).
It turns out that the bitumen – the heavy, thick oil component in the oil sands – has many potential uses beyond just burning it. Through decades of producing, processing, and refining it, we know a great deal about the goo. Combining the knowledge of bitumen itself with a view to other uses shows that there is staggering potential in the use of bitumen beyond combustion.
Logically enough then, there is a program called Bitumen Beyond Combustion (BBC), details of which can be found at the Alberta Innovates website. A fascinating white paper located there describes the program in detail. The concept is to divert produced bitumen from its use as a fuel towards using it to generate industrial products. Bitumen can generate a number of high value products including asphalt binder, carbon fibre, and numerous others.
Carbon fibre is my personal favourite, having been a Formula 1 fan for years. In a modern F1 car, as many components as possible are made from carbon fibre, including the basic chassis known as a monocoque, a weird name for what is sort of a tight bathtub that forms a shell around the driver and attaches to the engine. F1 designers call this carbon fibre structure “virtually indestructible”; doubters can check this picture of the wreckage of F1 driver Roman Grosjean’s car; the driver hit a track wall at close to 120 mph, and the carbon fibre tub and halo remained intact. The material is twice as strong as steel and five times lighter. An F1 car’s tub is usually made from 12 layers of carbon fibre mats. The whole thing weighs 35 kilograms, as much as a small goat but offering vastly better protection.
What makes these car parts interesting to all of you guys out there is that these fancy bath tubs cost an estimated US$700,000. It’s great stuff, but hideously expensive, which, for bitumen producers, spells opportunity. The BBC document shows a chart of value added to bitumen; as a combustible fuel the product is worth about $0.30-0.50/kilogram. As carbon fibre, the bitumen is worth $10-20/kilogram, and utilizes only about 20 percent of the barrel.
Those are staggering values to extract from a barrel of bitumen. As a whole, the BBC white paper estimates the following benefits. If one million barrels per day of bitumen is sold to refineries at $50/barrel after diluent removal, the revenue is $18 billion per year. If the same volume was used to create BBC products, the potential revenue is calculated at $42 billion. This number includes the value of BBC products ($28 billion) plus the value of the light ends remaining from the bitumen ($14 billion).
Of interest to the feds, and everyone with their Net Zero 20xx scorecard out, there are enormous emissions savings to be had here as well. For every million barrels of bitumen used for BBC, 480,000 barrels would be diverted to non-combustion BBC products. If used as a fuel that volume would generate 70 million tonnes of emissions per year. Furthermore, a study cited in the white paper estimates that carbon fibre derived from BBC would have a 52 percent lower life cycle GHG emissions intensity than conventionally produced carbon fibre.
Alberta Innovates estimates that total annual revenue from BBC could exceed $100 billion, yes that’s per year, by 2050.
Such great stuff! Imagine if this industry took off here in Alberta, and large quantities of oil sands output went into BBC manufacturing. This program should be a top priority if you ask me.
Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to be. Certain groups like Alberta Innovates are working very hard on it and committing material sums. But the numbers devoted to BBC seem, relative to government largesse on virtually anything remotely considered ‘renewable’, kind of pathetic. Alberta Innovates notes some $20 million devoted to the program to date (feel free to correct if wrong, I may be missing some sums but not a lot). The federal government seems keen on the idea, having its own web page dedicated to bitumen beyond combustion, and it links to a bona fide research centre in Devon, Alberta, but that research centre’s website shows that most of the researchers are working on something else. All valid projects, it appears, and well worthwhile, but a focus on BBC there does not seem to be.
And that is ridiculous, in the context of the tens of billions being thrown around like confetti in the ‘energy transition’. The Alberta Innovates white paper outlines that it will take $300 million in total government investment over the next 10 years to recognize the full potential of BBC. Recall the prize: global-scale reductions in GHG emissions from utilizing bitumen rather than combustion, potential for $100 billion/year BBC revenues, backed by a 165-billion-barrel bitumen resource.
$300 million over 10 years. $30 million per year. The federal government recently contributed $150 million to the daffy plan to generate hydrogen in Newfoundland and ship it to Germany, and that amount is surely a tiny, tiny fraction of federal largesse that will be sent to the Rock for this plan that no one anywhere thinks makes sense. A CBC article noted how one of the participating companies is investing $160,000 in scholarships (wonder where that money came from) for students in new programs build on this hydrogen-to-Germany scheme (“While none of these wind hydrogen programs have gotten the provincial government’s green light, the College of the North Atlantic has launched two new programs to feed the industry”), though the article includes some appropriate head-scratching: “There are questions about where these students will go once they graduate – because there won’t be any wind hydrogen programs up and running in the province yet.”
If we as a country can somehow accomplish that, what can/should we do about as huge a prize as BBC, a prize of immense benefit using a lot of existing infrastructure, at relatively low cost, to generate an incredibly valuable product? For $30 million per year? That can’t be much more than the travel budget of a couple dozen of Ottawa’s elite planet savers. To be less facetious, a CBC story pegs Ontario’s planned Stellantis battery plant as receiving $15 billion in subsidies; the entire program cost for BBC is two percent of that total.
Politicians, energy transitionists, Alberta business leaders: I suggest it is imperative you put your shoulder behind BBC, and you should all be kicking in a lot more than $300 million over ten years. Other countries will get there faster if you don’t.
We don’t need crazy new ideas that blow huge manhole covers into outer space, figuratively speaking, but which blow similar sized holes in governmental budgets. We just need to use what we have right in front of us.
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
quote:””designers call this carbon fibre structure “virtually indestructible”
Exactly the same sorts of words were used to describe Asbestos…..
Peta, why the doom about that very useful asbestos?
Think of the many thousand lives that were not lost because of asbestos protection when fires threatened death.
Like all materials, there are plus and minus aspects. Like life, there is progress when compromise works. Geoff S
Unfortunately , there’s a huge industry built around creating scary images of things that can be successfully dealt with safely (at least, just as safely as things with less scary images). Such well-known things, of course, are CO2, nuclear, acid rain, DDT, and…asbestos, etc. It is simply not possible to re-educate the true believers in dealing safely with these, once the scare mongers have done their thing.
Just read an article about two @ssh@ts in Montana that were making a living off of killing Bald and Golden Eagle parts.
The article mentioned the DDT is killing eagles lie.
Like CAGW, now just called “Climate Change” to hide the CA part, the lie will never be corrected in the leftwing modern media.
Another example. The Rosenburgs. After the USSR dissolved, massive amounts of KGB files were made available, or just no longer protected. Available documentation PROVES that the Rosenburgs were Russian spies.
Has anyone here heard of this reality. Of course not. The “MSM” spent 40+ years claiming they were innocent.
But wiki now shows the truth, it is just that, like all liberal political claims, when proven false they are like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjYoNL4g5Vg
Except they don’t say the “that’s different” part.
Which asbestos are you talking about? The main one is dissolved in the body, and so in moderate amounts becomes harmless.
How many stone workers and scribes went blind when stone chips flew into their eyes while working? You know that had to happen a lot in the 3 million years of stone working and before there were government regulations requiring the use of safety glasses. Yet throughout all of human history not everyone went blind and they somehow survived to use the tools and multiplied.
If this is such a slam-dunk, why hasn’t private industry already started on it? Why does it need government investment at all?
In the whitepaper, there was only one single mention of sulfur! The heavy fractions contain 5% or more sulfur by weight, with most being bound in aromatic rings. For asphalt applications, this is fine and even desirable as it can help with polymer binding, but to think that these high sulfur feeds are suitable for performance material feeds involves a lot of wishful thinking.
Further, even if they could develop processes to work, the high prices for products would become low prices as supply would exceed demand. There are only so many Formula 1 cars to be sold.
Take diamonds, every women’s favorite carbon allotrope, they sell for more than a trillion dollars per tonne. Make a few tonnes of bitumen diamonds and call it a day. /sarc
In Canada’s case if anything is good enough idea that private industry would invest then it wouldn’t require the federal and provincial governments to invest, just that they get out of the way. Investors are sacred off because of Canada’s volatile anti (Canadian) energy industry political climate, nor do investors want to be bogged down in endless bureaucracy or have to deal with the negative press of targeted protests. Alberta has finally gotten a provincial government and premier that is pro industry, but our corrupt federal government wants to shut down Canadian industry, while virtue signaling how green they are to the international community and doing backroom deals with the likes of Saudi Arabia.
An entertaining story. It would be interesting to see how much of the conversion to tar/carbon products would be possible if even 50% of the Net Zero tax funding would be diverted into this venture, and other similar alternatives. Naw, way to logical.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t wind turbine blades carbon fibre? And how much of the net zero funding is used to buy wind turbine blades currently?
AFAIK wind turbine blades are made mostly with glass, not carbon, fiber. I think building them with a majority of carbon fiber would would be really expensive.
And therefore produce even more high paying jobs!!! The whole purpose of the green new deal!!!
No. They are glass fibre soaked in an oil based resin applied over balsawood cores
“The material (carbon fibre) is twice as strong as steel and five times lighter.”
This is fantastic. Twice as strong but five times lighter. Wow! This is the material that should be used in the manufacture of BEVs to offset the additional weight due to the batteries. The batteries could also be encased in carbon fibre to reduce the weight even more.
Yahoo! Carbon fiber burns at 300 to 400 deg C, so the whole car can go up!
Carbon fibre has been around for decades. If they aren’t using it now, there is a reason. Probably cost.
You overlooked the “price of material” factor.
As stated in the article: “It’s great stuff, but hideously expensive”
I don’t think he did. The whole “price of material” for EVs is out of bounds for a commercial product. Without massive subsidies, tax credits, forced transfer of costs from ICDE vehicles to EVS by ever increasing CAFE corporate MPG requirements and not requiring owners pay a per mile expense for road maintenance, this cost shifted to ICE owners or directly to taxpayers, and a massive subsidy to build charging locations “every 50 miles on Interstate”.
Yep, why not add one more “hideously expensive” layer to the EV game. Since, like the UK, every woke government is mandating only EVs for sale at some point, what difference does the cost make? If you can’t afford one, walk, bike of ride the bus, exactly what you want to force on others.
Well largely you are correct. the McLaren supercars are carbon fibre. The main problem is that in an accident the repair costs are horrendous.
Again you are cat belling. Whilst every road car should be built like an F1 car there simply aren’t enough man hours and petroleum derived epoxy resins to do it
This post is ridiculous frivolous bullshit.
The instant this dufus mentioned “nuclear fallout” from reactor power plants he revealed his utter ignorance of nuclear power. Then he went into a long rant about underground nuclear bomb testing – utterly meaningless and irrelevant to any discussion of generating electrical power from nuclear reactor plants as a stupid effort to discredit our extremely well proven history in nuke power generation for the last 60+ years.
Where does WUWT come up with such idiots, and why are you publishing their mindless drivel?
After thus tedious, long word salad press release, I was expecting the author to offer to sell shares in some Canadian penny stock bitumen company.
Bitumen dreaming is for a carbon fiber that will cost about double of aluminum and over eight times mote than steel per pound. Not useful fr automobiles.
Carbon fiber-reinforced composite materials are used to make aircraft and spacecraft parts, racing car bodies, golf club shafts, bicycle frames, fishing rods, automobile springs, sailboat masts, and many other components where light weight and high strength are needed.
This is not green dreaming, but is bitumen dreaming. Production coming in ten years, just like fusion energy.
“The sticky, heavy, high-carbon asphaltenes that makes up about 20% of bitumen’s content—and which are currently a waste product—can be processed to produce carbon fiber at a fraction of the current cost.” From June 2019
Bitumen is useless for combustion; although it can burn, it’s too dirty a fuel be practical, and this is especially true with tightening environmental regulations.
An alternative source of pitch, which the team also tested, is coal pitch, a similar material that is a byproduct of coking coal, used for example for steel production. That process yields about 80 percent coke and 20 percent coal pitch, which is basically a waste.
The story seems to be that government experts made many silly errors and faulty estimates in bomb testing. Therefore, it would be a bargain to fund like minded government experts to develop applications for bitumen.
Really???
“6. How large an area was affected by the radioactive fallout?
Some 150,000 square kilometres in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are contaminated and stretch northward of the plant site as far as 500 kilometres. An area spanning 30 kilometres around the plant is considered the “exclusion zone” and is essentially uninhabited. Radioactive fallout scattered over much of the northern hemisphere via wind and storm patterns, but the amounts dispersed were in many instances insignificant.”
—https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/chernobyl/faqs
Now, you were saying something about utter ignorance and idiots . . .
But that wasn’t just any nuclear power station it was a RUSSIAN RBMK nuclear power station. Operated by alcoholic chimpanzees. Or equivalent.
And they continued to operate the other reactors next to it for another 8 years, that’s how dangerous the ‘exclusion zone’ really was.
Don’t fall for ArtStudent™ thinking, It’s not whether it was dangerous or not, it was how dangerous its really was.
Chernobyl is without doubt the worst possible thing that could ever happen to a reactor, and it’s not possible with any later designs. On a scale of one to ten the ‘devastation’ was about one.
The effects remote from the reactor were completely insignificant in reality, everyone waited for cancers, mutations and Jesus toys that glowed in the dark to appear, and the square root of Sweet Fanny Adams, actually did.
Like the man tearing newspapers up and throwing them out of the train windows to ‘keep the elephants down‘ the nuclear regulations were duly followed allowing everyone to gainsay those who said ‘but there are no elephants’ with ‘That’s how effective regulations (or tearing up newspapers) are!’
Quite easy for you to say . . . got any proof to go with that?
As for your assertion of “. . . it’s not possible with any later designs”, there is this:
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster occurred as a result of a tsunami breaching sea walls and in turn shutting down emergency generators needed to maintain cooling flows of reactor cores.
“The result was a series of nuclear meltdowns and hydrogen explosions that released a large amount of radioactive material into the surrounding environment — including microparticles rich in radioactive caesium that reached as far Tokyo, 225 km away. Recent studies have revealed that the fall-out from reactor unit 1 also included larger caesium-bearing particles, each greater than 300 micron in diameter, which have higher levels of activity in the order of 105 Bq per particle. These particles were found to have been deposited in a narrow zone stretching around 8 km north-northwest from the reactor site.“
— https://physicsworld.com/a/new-type-of-fallout-from-fukushima-daiichi-found-a-decade-after-nuclear-disaster/
(my bold emphasis added)
Of the four separate nuclear reactor plants at Fukushima, three suffered meltdowns of their nuclear cores . . . all four units were written off as “totally destroyed” due to the extensive damage they all suffered directly from the tsunami and subsequently from the explosions and site-wide radioactive contamination.
You might want to compare what happened at Fukushima to the loss of the single nuclear reactor at Chernobyl:
“After the explosion at reactor No. 4 and construction of the Shelter Object, the remaining three reactors were de-contaminated and re-launched (reactor No. 1 on 1 October, 1986, reactor No. 2 on 5 November, 1986, & reactor No. 3 on 4 December, 1987) and continued to operate until the post-Soviet period.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Otherwise, how are those art classes coming along?
Uhh…have you guys ever heard of CANDU reactors? Not all nuclear power plants are the same. If the US had adopted the proven CANDU process instead of high pressure light water reactors working on highly enriched uranium, neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl accidents would have happened.
Rumour is that the US didn’t want to pay royalties to those smart-ass Canuks. Environmentalists and industry have both made efforts to make the public think there is only one kind of nuclear reactor that works.
Yes.
CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) was a Canadian pressurized heavy-water reactor design first developed in the late 1950s. The basic operation of the CANDU design is similar to other nuclear reactors, except for the fact that its use of relatively expensive deuterium enabled CANDU reactors to run on unenriched natural uranium, or uranium mixed with a wide variety of other materials such as plutonium and thorium.
The CANDU reactor design never received much widespread use.
“By the early 2000s, sales prospects for the original CANDU designs were dwindling due to the introduction of newer designs from other companies. AECL responded by cancelling CANDU 9 development and moving to the Advanced CANDU reactor (ACR) design. ACR failed to find any buyers; its last potential sale was for an expansion at Darlington, but this was cancelled in 2009. In October 2011, the Canadian Federal Government licensed the CANDU design to Candu Energy (a wholly owned subsidiary of SNC-Lavalin), which also acquired the former reactor development and marketing division of AECL at that time. Candu Energy offers support services for existing sites and is completing formerly stalled installations in Romania and Argentina through a partnership with China National Nuclear Corporation. SNC Lavalin, the successor to AECL, is pursuing new CANDU 6 reactor sales in Argentina (Atucha 3), as well as China and Britain. Sales effort for the ACR reactor has ended.”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
Your last sentence in your first paragraph, as regards the Fukushima disaster, is not supportable. The Fukushima containment dome hydrogen explosions and nuclear core meltdowns basically occurred due to loss of ability to cool the reactor cores due to complete loss of electrical power. The CANDU design also requires continuously circulating (i.e., electrically-driven pumped) heavy water to cool its reactor core, and thus would have failed in a similar way for the same reason.
As regards your assertion that the US adopting the CANDU design would have prevented the Chernobyl disaster, that is a laugh. The RBMK-1000 nuclear reactor that melted down was a Soviet designed and built graphite moderated, boiling light water, pressure tube type reactor with direct steam feed to the turbines, without an intervening heat-exchanger.
Finally, rumors are worth exactly what one pays to get them.
Fukushima would have been avoided with a single waterproof door.
The danger was known and warned of but ignored.
Better example is France.
That depends on one’s perspective. Wikipedia list eleven nuclear power plant accidents occurring in France between 1969 and 2017.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country )
How many if these incidents have been “warning signs” but have been otherwise ignored?
“a four-inch-thick metal and concrete cap weighing 900 kilograms/2,000 pounds”
Probably about the same size and weight of the top lids of some Russian tanks, under which are the tank’s shells. After getting hit by any Ukrainian shell or missile, the tops are shot up hundreds of feet- making for some fine Ukrainian YouTube videos. It’s often joked that some are believed to go into orbit.
If a solid enough object is above escape velocity and moving directly away from Earth, a clear path to space will be taken. Maybe calculations of escape velocity reached are a bit of a journalistic exaggeration sometimes. Like we Australians using toilet paper at Mach 1.8, being 1.8 times the speed of sound.
Geoff S
If a person was moving bare-arsed through the air at Mach 1.8, he wouldn’t need toilet paper to wipe…
Forward or backward?
Meanwhile the Ukrainians lost the Donbas region, lost up to 400,000 soldiers and lost the war. But dictator Zelensky wants more Ukrainians to die so he can claim the war is not i over yet.
If you add up all the estimates Russia has put out regarding the number of Ukrainian soldiers they have killed, it comes to several times the pre-war Ukrainian population.
It is usual to simply reverse the statements made by Russia..
So that if that becomes Russia has lost 400,000 soldiers and utterly failed to take all of the Donbas region, you are near the truth.
Dictator Zelensky .. what would be your label for Putin?
Meanwhile Czar Ras-Putin the Terrible has lost 350000 men used as cannon fodder….he even suckers in people from Nepal and Cuba and puts them on the front line…Putey is so desperate that he is goes to Kimmy Jong and begs for help…Putey is a POS equal to Stalin.
The Ukrainians lost the Donbas region to Russian soldiers claiming to be Ukrainian separatists in 2014, regained it after that but then lost it again (apparently by 2019) well before the latest offensive by Russia.
Either you know that and just didn’t mention it to try to make people believe this takeover happened recently, or you don’t know that and, as an apologist for Putin, that would be really scarry.
Please, everyone, remember that the reason these eastern regions of Ukraine have such a high population of Russians is that Stalin killed MILLIONS of “ethnic” Ukrainians by starvation in a genocide to make room for the Russians.
The “problem” in Ukraine is that Europe, as before the invasion of France by Germany initiating the true beginning of WWII, did nothing as Russia took “small pieces” through “annexation”, and military actions “disguised” as separatists which the world knew were Russian soldiers. Since Russia was not made to keep to the promise to defend Ukraine after Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, (Bill Clinton signed the agreement with the US as a defender of the status quo, and under Obama the US did nothing in the Crimea except send Ukraine blankets.) then this invasion and continued expansion by Russia was inevitable. BTW, look at the regions Russia it trying to control, words like coking plant and ironworks are used regularly, Ukraine’s heavy industrial regions. I wonder why Russia would want those regions, or at least deny them to Ukraine??
Richard, please respond to any of these comments to defend your ridiculous position.
Ukraine hasn’t lost the Donbas – most of the Luhansk region has fallen to Russia but there are large sections of the Donetsk Oblast that Russia has still been unable to take. There are attacks and small gains being made by both sides.
Since we are talking impossibilities, can an engineer please describe a plan to move a road 100 metres to the East, when the road crosses the South Pole?
Moving away from impossibilities, please recall that France built a fleet of nuclear fission reactors some decades back, still working without drama to produce around 70% of the electricity that now powers France.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the world is sitting in a cluster of juvenile nervous Nellies including some debating if one should be so brave as to build a national first reactor, the case here in Australia.
Chaos results when engineering and science excellence is overtaken by blithering idiots who don’t even read, let alone understand, required technical reports on the way to making political decisions to advance national welfare. It is sad to see dogma instead of research. Geoff S
France also built their reactors in a short period of time and they were all exactly the same, which makes parts for repairs a much simpler production task.
Government policy, set under a former administration in 2014, aimed to reduce nuclear’s share of electricity generation to 50% by 2025. This target was delayed in 2019 to 2035, before being abandoned in 2023. In February 2022 France announced plans to build six new reactors and to consider building a further eight.
In 2022, France had 56 active nuclear reactors. The year with the highest number of reactors connected to the grid was 1981, with eight new connections. 1999 was the last year when a new nuclear reactor was connected to the grid. In 2023, one nuclear reactor was under construction in France.
Good luck getting your first reactor built, mate!
Here in the US our modern indoctrination system and a diet low in fat and protein, and high in addictive processed foods has successfully produced a generation or two that are largely incapable of analytical thought while being highly susceptible to emotional and mental breakdowns, obesity and diabetes!
We may not have the expertise to build any modern nuclear reactors; but, damn, we should lead the world in snappy TikTok videos!
If you live in the US, you are in the western hemisphere. So drop the compass, GPS, etc and just pick that road up and move it 100m closer to the US.
It’s a simple detail, when the compass doesn’t work just flip back to our longitude labels.
Oops…. further from the US.
Ian,
When you stand on the South Pole, which direction is East?
Geoff S
Take one step and turn your head to the left. That is east, but not for very long.
I attended a presentation on the German power grid a couple of weeks ago. There was a chart showing how much of the production is from coal, wind, solar and gas. It included an interesting chart showing how more of their power production was from renewables each year.
What it did not show was the power Germany consumes! Germany has terrible shortfalls of energy nearly every day and imports nuclear powered electricity from France! So while they are bragging how clean and green they are on production, their grid doesn’t produce the energy needed to run the country, at any price, and they are now reliant on France to build nukes for them. Clever!
This was a real lesson for me. Ask not how a country is producing power for their grid, but how the energy they are consuming is produced.
It has been one very cleverly hidden fact of the “green transition” in Germany: that 70% of electricity produced in France, well, does the export of electricity to Germany come out of that 70% or is it part of “how France produces electricity”? Perhaps 15% of that 70% is exported to keep Germany afloat. They are talking about production – OK, is it electricity produced for local consumption only? What about production for export?
I heard the UK is also becoming dependent on French nukes as well. Undersea cables. Again, is that part of France’s “70%” or in addition?
This looks like an electric shell game.
I reckon all of these answers depend on how and who you ask:
The focus is on producing electricity, how it will be delivered is ignored.
People should be looking at the copper ore production needed to provide the copper for the 50 million miles (minimum) of transmission lines that Net Zero would require.
They may find an alternative conductor to copper needs to be found.
To me it looks like the price of copper over the past couple of decades has not even kept up with inflation. Is that a signal that the market does not see such scale of electrification?
Modern high voltage conductors, (strung between pylons), have a steel inner core for the tensile loads and aluminium strands for the electrical conductors. No copper.
Overhead transmission lines are aluminum, sometimes reinforced with steel.
SO, for overhead lines, the alternative has been in use for over 100 years.
For building systems at lower voltage, most conductors over #8 AWG are also already aluminum.
Aluminum just requires more care in terminations that copper for most distribution and building uses.
BUT for generators and transformers, copper produces smaller units.
Thank you for introducing me to a topic I was woefully ignorant about. Some interesting ideas and questions.
You got to wonder what Turdeau is doing with that $23billion of carbon tax he’s collected since 2019… Can u say slush fund
Yes we can!!
Carbon fiber can be used by the ton but it is merely about as strong as ordinary steel in tension but not in compression. High strength steel is a little stronger in tension. Carbon fiber cloth is not too expensive but products require lots of hand labor to build parts and the product must be baked in a vacuum oven to attain its strength. I believe those Formula 1 machines have some titanium used also so apparently carbon fiber by the ton or even fibre by the tonne is not enough.
Just one word….”:Graphene”.
Two words: Bucky Balls!
Not true.
Commercial carbon fiber composite material have tensile strengths (ranging from 3 to 7 GPa), or five to ten times greater than high strength steels (0.3 to 0.7 GPa)
However, high strength steels have greater compressive strength the carbon fiber composites.
The standard tension test is to take a maybe one inch diameter bar and place it in a hydraulic machine that stretches the bar to failure. A one inch carbon fiber rod compared to a one inch steel one is the key….not equal weight but equal size. Carbon fiber does not rust and does not conduct heat or electricity very well but carbon fiber does not bend well unlike steel….magnesium is being used more today than in the past but it is also brittle to bending ….like carbon fiber.
Perhaps interesting to some, but tangential to the point that carbon fiber material, with favorable ply orientation, definitely has much greater tensile strength than high strength steels.
Tensile strength is expressed in units of force per unit area (such as lbf/in2, or in pascals), such being the same units as pressure. Therefore, tensile strength measurements are generally independent of the initial size and shape of the test coupon, if they are designed to ASME standards for mechanical testing and at or above some minimum test coupon size.
And properly performed tensile strength testing (to yield or to ultimate) specifically eliminates introducing bending of the coupon during the test.
Formula One halo is made from titanium tubing and carbon fiber is connected to it. Why? Becuz carbon fiber can’t take the bending and compression unless it was much thicker than the titanium. A one inch carbon fiber rod is equal to or slightly stronger than one inch ordinary steel in tension but weighs much less than the steel but costs much more than the steel.
Hmmm . . . this thread started off with you making the simple (incorrect) statement: “High strength steel is a little stronger in tension.”
It appears you’re now arguing about other things. Carry on.
Wouldn’t a magnesium lithium battery make a pretty nice bonfire?
You would think from the article that it was the cost of Coal that makes Carbon fibre so expensive. It may be that you can fabricate carbon fibre more efficiently from bitumen but we get no indication how this is so.
IMHO, this is a very well written article with a concept that offers great promise.
However, IMHO there is a fly-in-the-bitumen, so to speak, that comes immediately to mind and which I admittedly have not thoroughly investigated myself.
The problem with the BBC use as discussed above is that the carbon (eventually to become carbon fiber) in bitumen is chemically bound to hydrogen in long-chain polymers . . . and there are a huge variety of those polymers, some containing sulfur:
“Bitumen typically contains, elementally 80% by weight of carbon; 10% hydrogen; up to 6% sulfur; and molecularly, between 5 and 25% by weight of asphaltenes dispersed in 90% to 65% maltenes. Most natural bitumens also contain organosulfur compounds . . . ‘It is almost impossible to separate and identify all the different molecules of bitumen, because the number of molecules with different chemical structure is extremely large’ [cited reference]”
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitumen
So, how to extract the elemental carbon from bitumen?
— might do it chemically, but that’s a lot of chemicals to use and then one has to deal with the inevitable chemical waste stream/tailings as well as the waste heat developed by the chemical reactions . . . and the variety of molecules present greatly complicates the range of chemical reactions that will be required
— might do it thermally, but if that doesn’t involve combustion of a portion of bitumen itself (with attendant production of CO2), some other source of thermal energy will be required . . . practical choices for processing the amount of bitumen being envisioned would seem to limited to existing fossil fuel power plants or nuclear reactors . . . it MIGHT be possible that the hydrogen released from the decomposition of bitumen hydrocarbon polymers could be extracted in an efficient manner and then combusted with air to supply the necessary thermal energy, but the practicality of doing such would need to be assessed.
The white paper referenced in the above article (https://albertainnovates.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AI-BBC-WHITE-PAPER-Nov-2023.pdf ) touches on this issue rather superficially. One has to get to page 13 to find:
“The dominant carbon fibre manufacturing process requires multiple steps and chemical conversions (and associated energy/GHGs) to produce propylene, ammonia, acrylonitrile and finally polyacrylonitrile – the starting material for 90 per cent of today’s global carbon fibre manufacturing. Polyacrylonitrile is heat-treated at temperatures greater than 1,200°C to form carbon fibre . . .”
and below this in the paper’s Table 2 one finds the Development Target:
“Develop low-cost, low-emission bitumen-carbon fibre (B-CF) technique”
and the Remaining Challenges:
“B-CF technology development is now focusing on reproducibility in manufacture and consistency of fibre properties” and
“Scaleup has not yet started but is a focus area for CFGC Phase III”
So, I assert we are a LONG way from seeing the statement “As carbon fibre, the bitumen is worth $10-20/kilogram” come to fruition.
If the author has any connection at all to Alberta Innovates, have them change the name of the Bitumen program immediately. As mentioned in the aside about the term ‘tar sands’, having the wrong name can go a long way to being rejected for having a bad reputation. The acronym BBC already has two common meanings in the English speaking world (a rare case where being associated with a man’s member is the better option), neither of which lends to being taken seriously.
Well, doesn’t BBC garner the female vote?
On the topic of unintended consequences using nuclear bombs –
The Russians decided to put nuclear bombs to work to reduce mining costs. Rather than hundreds of thousands of little explosions used in a mine over the course of years, they decided to use a single nuclear bomb to fracture the entire orebody in a single blast then just extract what was broken up over the following years.
The bomb was located hundreds of metres underground inside a sealed chamber and detonated.
Rather than a large region of fractured rock, they ended up with a massive solid blob; described to me by an observer as ‘ceramic”. The other downside was that it was radio active and would be for a long time. They managed to turn an orebody into a useless mass.
I have no doubt the sealing plug on the New Mexico test site was vaporised. I have seen a piece of steel used in a shaped charge that only reaches 2,400m/sec. The edges are torn away as it accelerates. It forms a teardrop shape. with ragged trailing edges.
BBC to us Brits sadly means our national publicly funded broadcaster, laughingly referred to as Boy Buggering Communists.
It was the inspiration for ‘1984’