Graphic Update On How We're Doing With Carbon Dioxide.
My working number for the amount of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide we dump each year, carbon dioxide being only one component for such waste, not quite the deadliest yet, but getting there, has been 35 billion metric tons per year. Being a lazy sort of person, I just let that number, gleaned from general reading, gel in my head for a number of years, without searching out a formal reference to support that number. I kept muttering to myself that I really should update that number, but I didn't do it.
I had an inkling that I might be out of date - old people get used to being "out of date," - when I attended a lecture by Dr. Robert Kopp of Rutgers University a few years ago, this one: Science on Saturday: Managing Coastal Risk in an Age of Sea-level Rise. Dr. Kopp gave a higher figure in his lecture, and in the QA, I questioned him on it and he pointed to the issue of land use. Later, I see in my notes, I emailed him for a reference, and he graciously responded the reference which provides the graphic below, but somehow I forgot about it -
This morning, going through a journal I read regularly, Environmental Science and Technology, and came across this paper, which posits that we could do better than capturing 90% of the carbon dioxide we release, and find some place to dump it eternally, although there is zero evidence that we have ever come remotely close to doing so, and zero evidence that we could find a place to dump hundreds of billions of tons of this waste, permanently, ultimately trillions of tons in such a way that no one on Earth, irrespective of their level of education, could ever imagine it ever escaping and injuring anyone at any time in the future stretching for the entire tenure of the human race on this planet. The paper's first reference is the one that Dr. Kopp shared with me some time ago while I continued to lazily mutter, "35 billion tons a year." I'll produce the nice graphic from that reference shortly.
That paper is here: Deep CCS: Moving Beyond 90% Carbon Dioxide Capture (Matthew N. Dods, Eugene J. Kim, Jeffrey R. Long, and Simon C. Weston, Environmental Science & Technology 2021 55 (13), 8524-8534)) Three of the authors are from UC Berkeley, one, Dr. Weston, is from, unsurprisingly, Exxon.
The financial disclosure statement in the paper reads as follows:
Exxon, which funded this work, apparently claims it has no financial interest in this paper, since it has been able, for free, at no cost, to dump vast quantities of dangerous fossil fuel waste into the planetary atmosphere, where such waste from Exxon and other companies, kills millions of people per year, and is completely destroying the planetary atmosphere, although Exxon has spent huge amounts of money claiming, weakly and transparently, that this is no big deal.
Note that this standard I applied above to the capture and storage of dangerous fossil fuel waste above, is the standard that people apply to so called "nuclear waste." People who have no idea about the nature and composition of used nuclear fuels, which in the United States, after more than half a century of operation, amounts to around 80 thousand metric tons. To repeat, that standard is:
People who complain loudly about so called "nuclear waste," never apply this standard and ask this question about dangerous fossil fuel waste when they start their cars in the morning. I am acutely aware of this.
Eighty thousands is written in scientific format 8 X 10^(4). The rate at which used nuclear fuel is becoming available to future generations increased for many years, and has regrettably leveled off but the average accumulation per year, over say, 64 years, beginning with the Shippenport Nuclear Power Plant - which was located on ground that is now a public park - in 1957, up to the present day, amounts to about 1200 tons per year, in scientific notation, 1.2 X 10^(3). By the way, in scientific notation, 35 billion tons, my lazy figure, is 3.5 X 10^(10). The ratio of 10^(10) and 10^(3) is 10^(7), or ten million. Each year, according to my lazy figure, we dump, at no charge to the dumper, ten million times as much dangerous fossil fuel waste on the planet as a whole, than the United States has been accumulating, on average - although the current rate is much higher than the average rate - of used nuclear fuel, so called "nuclear waste."
There is about 4000 tons of used nuclear fuel at the idle San Onofre Nuclear Plant in California. It has killed none of the surfers who routinely surf just beyond the plants borders. The composition of this used fuel is roughly between 95% and 96% actinide elements, chiefly uranium, with about 1% being plutonium, and smaller amounts of the valuable elements neptunium, americium, and perhaps trace amounts of curium. If one assumes a working figure of 200 Mev/fission for these actinides, which works out to 80 trillion joules per kg, one can calculate that the energy value of the actinides available at this single shut plant is on the order of 300 exajoules, the energy consumption very roughly of the entire United States for just under 3 years.
Yet people who know very little about what so called "nuclear waste" is and who couldn't care less about its spectacular record of over more than half a century of killing very few people, in any, and also couldn't care less about what to do with the dangerous fossil fuel waste released when they start their engines, dangerous fossil fuel waste having killed hundreds of millions of people since 1957 when the Shippenport reactor came on line, claim "nobody knows what to do with nuclear waste."
They could disabuse themselves of this notion by opening science books and scientific papers, but that's too much to ask.
I have no room to talk: I lazily use the figure of "35 billion tons" for the amount of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide dumped each year, for free albeit at the expense of every living thing, including human beings, forever, by humanity.
The figure in Weston et al, Weston of Exxon, is 40 billion tons per year, not 35 billion tons. What's 5 billion tons between friends?
I'm such a lazy person.
The reference in Weston et al, which Dr. Kopp shared with my lazy ass two years ago, albeit probably to an earlier version of this series is this one: Global Carbon Budget 2019 (Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 11, 1783–1838, 2019) This paper is open sourced, and the list of authors and their institutions is too long to repeat, which is understandable, given the magnitude of the task of figuring this matter out.
The promised graphic is this one:
The caption:
Note that this figure gives the values in elemental carbon, not carbon dioxide. The atomic weight of carbon is roughly 12, the molecular weight of carbon dioxide is roughly 44. This translates 12 billion tons of carbon to 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
I started paying some small attention to environmental issues when I read the very stupid paper by the very stupid anti-nuke Amory Lovins in 1976: Energy Strategy, the Road Less Traveled. Of course that the time I read it, I was a very stupid young man, as opposed to the very lazy, hopefully less stupid, old man I am now. Being credulous in my youth, I bought into the notion that the very stupid anti-nuke Amory Lovins was in fact, a "genius," a status applied by the media to him as a result of him being awarded the "MacAuthur Prize," the so called "Genius" award. Amory Lovins contention was that we could save the world with so called "renewable energy" and energy conservation, the latter claim expressing contempt for the billions of people who lacked any access to industrial energy then and now.
Of course, as a believer in the rhetoric of the very stupid anti-nuke Amory Lovins, I was anti-nuclear. I changed my view of nuclear energy to "not so bad," around 1988, after analyzing the scientific data available in the literature to which I had access, coming out of the Chernobyl disaster, which established the previously unknown, yet often evoked, "worst case."
I still believed that so called "renewable energy" was a good thing, probably for another decade or so.
I changed my mind about that as well, since this affectation has soaked up trillions of dollars, requiring vast amounts of dangerous fossil fuels to be burned to support it, vast wildernesses rendered into industrial parks, and huge mining operations to embrace it, all for no other result than making the situation get worse faster.
I think the case that this effort has been a failure is graphically indicated in the graphic above, which I have been too lazy to access.
Go figure.
But then again, this is the age of the celebration of the lie. After all, a cheap lying carney barker completely devoid of a trace of ethics and disinterested in matters of faith, was elected to the office once held by Abraham Lincoln, and celebrated by people who consider themselves "faithful" arbiters of morality, morality apparently consisting of vast faith in White Supremacy.
Of course, people have vast faith that so called "renewable energy" will save the world, a reactionary premise equivalent in my mind to the reactionary 19th century premise that White People, a vast cabal of murderers and imperialists, were morally superior to other people as they waited for Jesus to be resurrected. Now we are resurrecting the idea that by returning to the practices of the 18th century, when pretty much everyone lived on whatever "renewable energy" could provide, most people living short miserable lives of dire poverty, we will save the world.
So called "renewable energy" has not saved the world. It is, again, graphically as graphically shown above, not saving the world. My personal, albeit lazy, analysis suggests it will not save the world.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
Have a nice weekend.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The Original nuclear energy! I love fusion 
The fact is there is more than enough electro magnetic radiation on the earth to power the earth; the how to get there best is the rub.
I agree, current nuclear technology is needed. It’s is not the only solution and nor a perfect one. I do not agree that alternative energy is a fool’s errand. Look at the increases in effective solar photovoltaics since the 70s. There is significant progress.
Nnadir, I appreciate your posts, research and your positions. I do believe that the future is the greatest variable.
