Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumJapan Is Dropping a Gargantuan Turbine Into The Ocean to Harness 'Limitless' Energy
Deep beneath the waves there's a source of power quite unlike any other. To tap into it, Japanese engineers have constructed a true leviathan, a beast capable of withstanding the strongest of ocean currents to transform its flow into a virtually limitless supply of electricity.
Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries – now known simply as IHI Corporation – has been tinkering with the technology for over a decade now, partnering with New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in 2017 to put their designs to the test.
In February, the project passed a major milestone with the completion of a successful three-and-a-half year field test in the waters off Japan's southwestern coast.
https://www.sciencealert.com/japan-s-dropping-a-kaiju-sized-turbine-into-the-ocean-to-fish-for-limitless-energy
Looks like a prototype Enterprise, a body and two nacelles. I wonder if painting it the colors of the Ukrainian flag was accidental or intentional. Either way, cool beans.
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Yonnie3
(17,434 posts)
Response to Warpy (Original post)
wyn borkins This message was self-deleted by its author.
viva la
(3,289 posts)limitless.
People have been using water power for centuries-- mostly rivers and streams to power flour mills.
About time someone figured out how to use the tides!
Warpy
(111,254 posts)Ocean currents are a more reliable source of kinetic energy to drive turbines. Unless the currents shift, and they can, the power should be constant over a long time.
The current shifts, bring in a crane and move the generator.
I just hope they've thought of ways to discourage large jellyfish and other sea creatures from getting plastered up against the intake.
This doesn't use tides or waves, it uses deeper currents.
viva la
(3,289 posts)That's a problem you don't have with solar.
Warpy
(111,254 posts)and those are pretty frequent occurrences here in the high desert. The local utility company loves them, no moving parts to break down. We;ve got all the sunshine anyone could ask for. What we don't have is adequate water for nuke plants using water coolant/moderation and steam driven turbines.
Here is a page of stats so far: https://350newmexico.org/clean-energy-in-new-mexico/
HOw dry is it? Our one real body of water, the Elephant Butte Reservoir, is at 11.2% capacity. That's worse than Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The Rio Grande is bone dry for long stretches here and in Texas. We have little enough in good years. This year has not been good.
https://sourcenm.com/2021/09/18/memory-of-a-river/
Solar and wind power here are necessary to lower our dependence on coal. Until some new tech matures, it's all we've got.
viva la
(3,289 posts)Is desalination viable these days?
Warpy
(111,254 posts)Some solutions are surprisingly low tech. In Chile, which has humid air and lots of fog but little rainfall, people have strung nets with collecting troughs underneath them to harvest water for their food gardens. A higher tech prototype looks like an ordinary billboard but harvests drinking water
Here's a video detailing the large scale plants currently in operation.
Brine isn't a useless product. Not only can high demand metals and minerals be refined from it, used as is in evaporation pools will produce sea salt for food use.
None of this is going to help large parts of the southwest. First to go will be agriculture.
hunter
(38,311 posts)...desalinization can produce water urban users can afford, but not farmers.
That doesn't help higher elevation places hundreds of miles from the ocean.
Farmers in the Upper Colorado River Basin and Upper Rio Grande are pretty much out of luck. However the actual politics settle out, urban users will get whatever water remains, leaving farms dry.
Albuquerque, for example, has an elevation of 5,300 feet and is about 500 miles from the Gulf of California, 660 miles from Los Angeles, or 750 miles to Houston. Pumping desalinated sea water uphill and across those distances is the major hurdle, not the desalinization.
In all cases burning fossil fuels to desalinate water is insane since fossil fuels are the root cause of this problem and will only make it worse.
viva la
(3,289 posts)And I remember learning in school that "we will never give up our water!"
(To be fair, the Great Lakes does water the entire middle of the country through the Mississippi River. And also, half of the water is Canadian.)
Water will be the new oil-- there will be wars over it.
NNadir
(33,515 posts)One wonders why then, if it was such a nirvana, humanity gave it up beginning in the 19th century, and largely completed by the early 20th century, except of course, for people living in poverty.
Upon reflection, one might extend that question to the question of whether or not these fantasies, into which we have now poured trillions of dollars, might be, um, reactionary.
This latest scheme isn't going to do shit other than waste resources.
People are literally dying from extreme heat and still we have all this wishful thinking.
Warpy
(111,254 posts)What they're doing now is scaling it up. As an engineer, you know that sometimes that works as anticipated, sometimes it works better than anticipated, and somet6imes it shows you all the hidden flaws in your design. It is hardly a waste of resources since even a dud produces useful data.
The obvious flaw is that it only works where there are strong and predictable water currents, which restricts it to where the present design of nuclear power plants also work. This is not a solution for deserts or even semi arid areas like large parts of the upper plains and certainly a lot of the developing world.
NNadir
(33,515 posts)...the 16th century.
How's that working out?
Here's how:
June 09: 421.33 ppm
June 08: 421.40 ppm
June 07: 421.42 ppm
June 06: 421.54 ppm
June 05: Unavailable
Last Updated: June 10, 2022
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
Nuclear energy operates continuously and does not require flowing water. Historically they were devices for generating electricity, but they need not be, as I have pointed out in many posts, most recently this one: The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination. The point is made, that the devices proposed therein would supply multiple forms of energy, not just the thermodynamically degraded form of energy that everyone seems to think is magically benign, electricity.
The idea of storing a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, electricity, as chemical energy (hydrogen, batteries, blah, blah, blah) is thermodynamically, environmentally and ultimately economically insipid. The material requirements are obscene.
The wind and solar industry - the poster boys and girls for this disastrous scheme of so called "renewable energy" - have operated in an environment of extreme enthusiasm, misrepresentation and outright lying while the nuclear industry has operated in a public environment, driven by uneducated journalists, of hostility and contempt. For decades upon decades we've heard the lie, among many, that wind and solar are quick to build and nuclear takes "too long" to build. Yet, after half a century of this rather oblivious rhetoric, the expenditure of trillions of dollars on solar and wind, nuclear energy produces about 30 exajoules of energy every year - as it has done since the 1990s - and solar and wind, a little over ten.
Returning to so called "renewable energy" in all the expensive Rube Goldberg permutations has failed. People are literally dying in the streets around the world from excessive heat.
Unlimited energy?
Get serious. Again, people are dying from extreme heat, right now. Now. We don't have time for these fantasies.
We're out of it, out of time. We need to save what can be saved with stuff that works, on scale.
Warpy
(111,254 posts)in places where water power was unavailable or impractical. I loved those old designs, the stones staying fixed but the building with the sails stretched on frames to catch the wind able to rotate. When a customer would turn up with grain to grind, s/he would have to help the miller and his family rotate the building until the sails caught a breeze, at which point grain could be ground. Even at that, it was less laborious than the old quern-stones had been.
"Unavailable" meant most likely there was a strong gale which would have damaged the sails and the wooden gears inside the mill, but the weather would have been too inclement for customers, anyway.
And when I was little, every farm had a windmill that was used to pump water into a raised tank, gravity pressurized water supplying both house and barn. We'd moved on a bit, the heads of the windmills rotated to catch the wind.
Wind power is not the whole story, but it's certainly a big and still viable part of it.
And if people had never used resources on "fantasy," we'd still be squatting in the mud and using rocks to crack nuts and that's all.
NNadir
(33,515 posts)..."still depending on the weather for our energy."
None of this rhetoric addresses the question of why after millennia of living on the magical sun, wind, rain and flowing water, this putative nirvana, doing so was abandoned.
How many people here are willing to depend on their water supply to be a function of whether the wind is blowing?
Even the people hyping this delusional shit expect the lights to go on when they flick a switch. And this is why this horseshit prevails, because the people hyping it don't live in the dark or have their sinks not work when the wind doesn't blow for weeks on end.
What happens is that people burn dangerous fossil fuels so oblivious people can turn on their computers and worship pictures of wind turbines trashing a wilderness any damned time they want, 24 hours, 365.256363004 ephemeris days per year thus destabilizing the very weather on which they expect, in an orgy of self-righteous contempt, future generations to live.
I'm not in favor of mud, nuts, and rocks, nor am I particularly enthused about waiting for the wind to catch sails to grind food.
Those who lived with it realized it sucked and abandoned it. It wasn't sustainable in the 17th century, and it's not sustainable now.
In the mid 20th century, some of the finest minds that ever lived discovered a totally unrecognized form of energy, and in less to thirty years, brought it to commercial viability.
Many people objected, because they thought "the old ways" were better.
People ignorantly and dogmatically attached to the old ways are called "conservatives." I'm not one of those.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)From November 2016
Japan's government estimates the cost of cleaning up radioactive contamination and compensating victims of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster has more than doubled, reports say.
The latest estimate from the trade ministry put the expected cost at some 20 trillion yen ($180bn, £142bn).
The original estimate was for $50bn, which was increased to $100bn three years later.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248
NNadir
(33,515 posts)It is a cost generated by the paranoia of anti-nukes, their uncritical belief in the Linear No Threshold assumption, their indifference to deaths by air pollution, which can only be addressed by building more nuclear plants.
How much money do our stupid media driven anti-nukes think would be required to clean up the mercury being released all around by the coal being burned while we all wait for the grand renewable nirvana that has not come, is not here, and will not come?
The answer is that nothing will be done to clean it up, because nothing can be done because no amount of money can clean it up.
(I often wonder if "mad hatter disease" induced by coal, also known as Minamata disease, accounts for the existence of Republicans and anti-nukes.)
Suppose Japan chose to spend 100 billion dollars to provide clean water to everyone on this planet who lacks it, roughly 50 dollars per person. How many lives would be saved? Suppose they took 10 billion dollars to fund laboratories to really test the linear no threshold assumption, which is in my view, killing people with selective attention. Could they then make a rational estimate of risk?
The problem with the morally vapid assholes who chant about Fukushima endlessly is that they do not have the intellectual, moral, educational, or practical sense to even make very crude comparisons in this area.
The fact is that 20,000 people died in the Great Tōhoku Earthquake from seawater. How many people died again from radiation?
What would be a better idea and save more lives, spending the same trillions of dollars squandered on so called "renewable energy" fantasies, littering the oceans with greasy junk, or spending the same money trying to prevent far more than 20,000 seawater deaths from rising seas?
Don't know? Couldn't care less?
No surprise there.
People are dying right now, all over the world from extreme temperatures because we have assholes who applaud and indeed celebrate their paranoia about radiation. They are willing to demand the expenditure of billions of dollars to save very few, if any lives, from radiation, and won't give a dime to bury the dead who die because we don't expand nuclear power as fast as is humanly possible.
Usually this asinine rhetoric comes with a citation from some dumb reporter somewhere who doesn't ask any of these questions, thus motivating my oft stated suspicion that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.
It would be interesting to see if we had a dumb shit anti-nuke, including one "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, who could be talked into having an episode of critical thinking, but experience teaches they'd rather not. While the planet dies from something other than Fukushima, specifically climate change, they can't focus their tiny little brains on anything but Fukushima.
These sorts disgust and outrage me.
That their ignorance and obsessions have prevailed is the reason why history will not forgive us, nor should it.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)while you were jumping up and down DQIIIIIII
NNadir
(33,515 posts)...pollution in the last 2 hours since I conclusively pointed out how anti-nukes don't give a fuck, morally, intellectually, or otherwise.
I'm quite sure, too, that in the last two hours, the number of them who opened a scientific paper or a book is what it almost always is in any two hour period, zero.
In the next two hours, another 7,850,000 tons of carbon dioxide will be dumped, and another 1600 will die, while they burn and dump lots of gas in Texas, where in Austin, the temperature will hit 102°F (39°C) by 5:00 pm, and not fall to below 100 until 8:00 PM.
Happily it's nice and cool in Berlin Germany (24°C), where the country's carbon intensity as of this writing is 323 g CO2/kwh, because the wind isn't blowing, and all their future landfill wind turbines are operating at 18% capacity utilization (9.06GW/50.4GW capacity) and they're producing 17.4 GW by burning coal, dumping the waste in the air and killing people. France's carbon intensity is 77 g CO2/kwh.
Any Fukushima whiners give a shit?
No?
Of course not. Mostly they're giggling assholes with the moral depth of a garden slug, not that I have anything against garden slugs.
It would be funny to note that these people never miss an opportunity to show exactly how morally indifferent they are, how badly they're informed, how little they can see, except that very little is actually amusing about ignorance that kills people.
As of the data this morning at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory, it is reported that the carbon dioxide concentrations observed this past week, week 22 of the year, are 25.38 ppm higher than they were in week 22 of 2012. This 25.4 ppm/year rate is the 9th highest ever recorded, and it coincides almost exactly with the time the dumb shits have been whining about Fukushima while cheering for the expenditures of trillions of dollars to destroy wilderness for wind junk and happily been announcing their latest destructive and useless "victory."
Congrats.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)with the 100's of billions it has taken to clean up that mess in Fukushima and they will be spending billions more before they are finished?
Again, for the record, I am not anit-nuke. I have said many times it makes sense to me to keep the nuclear plants we have in operation.
the reasons we won't be building many more are clear:
NIMBY - nobody wants on in their back yard.
The federal govt isn't building them - for profit utility companies are and they are nearly impossible to fund - just ask South Carolina and Georgia.
So while you are tilting at windmills, solar farms, hydro dams, biomass, etc PA is still paying to clean up Three Mile Island...
NNadir
(33,515 posts)...I didn't take Donald J. Trump seriously when he announced he was "a very stable genius," either.
I suppose I'm generally taken to be as stupid by "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, when they launch into Trump like self-descriptions.
People can tell who Donald Trump is by what he says and what he does. There aren't too many really bright people who believe that Trump is a very stable genius.
I suppose I should take it as an improvement that people who drag out every idiotic anti-nuke shibboleth (cost, Nimby, speed, etc, etc.,) mindlessly and endlessly feel embarrassed to confess that they are what they are.
Recently, the United States government sold the benthic ecological zone off the coast of my State to wind investors for 4.4 billion dollars.
Offshore Wind Auction Raises $4.4 Billion to Topple Record
That's before they build a single turbine. It does not include the cost of the turbines themselves. Nor does include the cost of cleaning them up and removing 20 years after they come on line. (This of course, assumes that there will be no equivalents of Hurricane Sandy tear them to pieces in less than 20 years in a climate destablized world.) Nor does it include the cost of the back up plants that will be necessary to back this disgusting industrial plant up.
And yet...and yet...and yet...the two Vogtle reactors at 15 billion dollars each, are "too expensive."
Look. The anti-nukes here are free to assume I'm stupid. I can't control their fondness for their own abysmal ignorance. I've had an anti-nuke here carry on for years that he or she is not an anti-nuke simply because I defined him or her as an anti-nuke after he or she whined insipidly a tunnel collapsed at the Hanford weapons plant.
If one is still carrying on about the bogeyman at Three Mile Island, 43 years after the reactor melted, I have no use for garbage announcements that one is "not an anti-nuke."
It is curious, that anti-nukes never mention how much it cost to clean up the coastal city destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, any more than they give a shit about the deaths from that event from seawater. Of course, many, many, many cities are known to be at risk because people are unashamed to spend trillions of dollars on solar and wind, announcing that they're quick to build and cheap to build without ever bothering to look at the energy production tables in the WEO. The "quick to build" wind and solar industry, with a huge blank check that will be come due to future generations - the kids who are toddlers today will need to pay to remove the wind junk off the coast and New Jersey and Long Island as they start their careers - produced, after half a century of cheering, a total of 10.4 Exajoules of energy in 2020, compared to over 29 Exajoules for the hated nuclear industry.
NIMBY is a function of ignorance. An asshole complaining about NIMBY as a legitimate reason to not save the world from the consequences of ignorance does not impress me at all, particularly when they continuously drag out idiotic rhetoric that anti-nukes have been chanting for half a century.
I note that anti-nukes complaining about NIMBY, after dragging out every shit for brains chant over the decades, are, as I often say, arsonists complaining about forest fires.
People of course are free to tell me transparent lies and make delusional statements endlessly. After all, we live in the age of the celebration of the transparent lie.
As for the bogeyman at Three Mile Island, one can easily look up the electricity rates in PA.
Here's a recent announcement by the PUC of price increases:
Beginning June 1, electric distribution companies report the following changes in their PTCs for residential customers:
Citizens’ Electric, up from 7.3995 cents to 9.3667 cents per kWh (26.6%);
Met-Ed, up from 6.832 cents to 7.936 cents per kWh (16.1%);
Penelec, up from 6.232 cents to 8.443 cents per kWh (35.4%);
Penn Power, up from 7.082 cents to 8.694 cents per kWh (22.7%);
PPL, up from 8.941 cents to 12.366 cents per kWh (38.3%);
Wellsboro Electric, up from 7.7569 cents to 9.592 cents per kWh (23.7%); and
West Penn Power, up from 5.667 cents to 8.198 cents per kWh (44.6%);
PUC Alerts Consumers of June 1 Price Changes for Electric Generation
Somehow I don't really believe that these price increases to rates that are, in "percent talk," about 20% the cost of electricity in Denmark and Germany, are connected with the Three Mile Island clean up.
Whatever was spent for the "clean up" of the melted reactor, didn't save very many lives, because few lives were at risk. (Perhaps in the 1980's, when the question was less clear, some of the expense may have been justified.)
President Jimmy Carter walked through the Three Mile Island while it was melting over 20 years after he went into the core of a melted reactor as a young Naval Officer. The "clean up" certainly didn't do anything to save his life.
President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."
Yet we still here people raising the point of Three Mile Island at a point in history where in mid June, we are about to see today temperatures approaching of 37°C (99°F) in Sioux Falls South Dakota, and higher temperatures later this week.
If some disingenuous anti-nuke wants to prattle on about "clean ups" of messes, even they show disinterest in the cost of cleaning up the flowback water in Pennsylvania for the gas that is used to support the fossil fuel fig leaf wind industry, I would be impressed if they considered the cost of "cleaning up" the planetary atmosphere. It won't happen. They're all little bourgeois bean counters, head up the ass materialists who refuse to invest in future generations.
Their idiot rhetoric will be recorded by history, I believe, and it won't be pretty, assuming there is history.
Oh and to answer the stupid "how many reactors" for 100 billion dollars question, it depends on what reactors are built, their size and type.
The successor company to Babcock and Wilcox, the company that built the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, with one of the reactors saving lives over the decades and the other not costing very many lives - if any - just signed on to deliver portable nuclear reactors: BWX Technologies selected to build Project Pele microreactor
The US Department of Defense (DOD) Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) announced in April its decision to proceed with the project to build and demonstrate a TRISO-fuelled prototype mobile microreactor at the INL site following the release of a final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the reactor. Two companies - BWXT and X-Energy - were selected in 2019 to develop a final design for the prototype reactor.
BWXT has now been awarded a contract by SCO to complete and deliver the reactor in 2024. The prototype will be built under a cost-type contract worth around USD300 million, depending on options selected, by BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC in facilities in Lynchburg, Virginia and Euclid, Ohio. Some 120 employees are expected to work on the project over the next two years, the company said.
"We are on a mission to design, build and test new nuclear technology to protect the environment while providing power, and we are thrilled with this competitively bid award after years of hard work by our design and engineering team," BWXT Advanced Technologies President Joe Miller said. "The entire nuclear industry recognises that advanced reactors are an important step forward to support growing power needs and significant carbon reduction imperatives."
SCO has partnered with the Department of Energy to develop, prototype and demonstrate a transportable reactor in what has been described as a whole-of-government effort, also drawing on the expertise of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, US Army Corps of Engineers, NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Transportable reactors that can deliver clean, zero-carbon energy where and when it is needed can provide a resilient power source for DOD operational needs, but can also potentially be used in the civilian and commercial sectors for disaster response and recovery, power generation at remote locations, and deep decarbonisation initiatives.
I imagine we can build lots of these and should build lots of them, because we are currently experiencing disasters all over the world because we "invested" in the so called "renewable energy" fantasy - led by anti-nukes who never have given a shit about dangerous fossil fuels beyond weak lip service - instead of doing something practical.
My son is entering a nuclear engineering program, and the mantra is not to do what has been already been done, but to be creative, mindful, and intelligent to build reactors to address a wide variety of missions, only one of which is to drive the destructive fossil fuel/wind/solar industry out of business.
By the way, he told me this weekend that he's been through the entire series put out by the Health Physics Society that I referenced here: I hope to find the time to watch this video series on the history of the Linear No-Threshold Model. I'm glad he did. (I haven't found time yet.) I told him that one thing he'll need to do as a nuclear engineer is to be armed with facts when assholes begin spouting nonsense rhetoric, but I also warned him that the members of the anti-nuke cult are very much unimpressed with facts.
Nevertheless, facts matter.
Have a nice day.
mitch96
(13,895 posts)Warpy
(111,254 posts)Ocean cureents are like undersea rivers that never stop flowing.
