NNadir
NNadir's JournalA Device For Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide Which Regenerates at Waste Heat Temperatures.
Events in the United States and Brazil - and in fact, practically everywhere else on Earth - in the last few years assure that every living being on Earth is going to face increasing catastrophe from climate change.
Coupled deliberate indifference by politicians, again notable in the US and Brazil, is the idiotic and unworkable misplaced but popular faith in so called "renewable energy" - which is neither "renewable" nor sustainable - that is often incorrectly described as "doing something" about climate change.
We are doing nothing about climate change.
Future generations will need therefore to find a way to clean up our mess, and do so with far reduced resources, because in our contempt for all future generations, we have been consuming vast amounts of resources for quixotic things like wind turbines and electric cars, as well as a lot of other consumer junk.
To clean up our mess, the only option for these future generations from whom we've stolen, well, everything will be - and it is an incredibly difficult engineering challenge - air capture of carbon dioxide.
About 7 years ago, a controversial but much discussed paper on the energetics and thermodynamics of air capture was published, which at least put the challenge in perspective. It is here: Economic and energetic analysis of capturing CO2 from ambient air, (House et al PNAS, 108, 51 20428–20433, 2011). It drew a negative conclusion about the possibility of doing this, by exploring an estimations the costs of various technologies for doing this:
Advanced nuclear: $286/ton
IGCC CSS: $666/ton
Gas CC CCS: $388/ton
Wind (land): $369/ton
Wind Offshore: $598/ton
Solar PV: $1,030/ton
Solar Thermal: $686/ton
Biomass: $580/ton
Hydroelectricity: $299/ton.
It is possible to hydrogenate carbon dioxide to make gasoline. I covered this topic elsewhere (in a place where I was banned for telling the truth): How Much Gasoline Could Hydrogenation of ONE Coal Plant's Waste Produce?
Using a similar calculation of cost, I have calculated - using 2,4 dimethylpentane as the model gasoline compound - what the cost of the carbon atoms in gasoline might translate in familiar terms in the US, dollars per gallon. (Note this does not include the internal and external costs of producing hydrogen and thus is only a fraction of the real cost of gasoline would be in this case. These costs would be, respectively, using the figures above:
$2.32/gallon, $5.40/gallon $3.15/gallon $2.99/gallon $4.85/gallon $8.36/gallon $5.57/gallon $4.71/gallon $2.43/gallon.
The House paper has been criticized in the same journal on the grounds that the analysis relied on a narrow focus on technology.
Another paper in the same journal argued that air capture is essential; it MUST BE DONE.
I personally agree with the last paper's claim, if the future generations from whom we've stolen everything are to save anything left to be saved.
Thus I was entranced by a recent publication in one of my favorite scientific journals, this one: The Development and Validation of a Closed-Loop Experimental Setup for Investigating CO2 and H2O Coadsorption Kinetics under Conditions Relevant to Direct Air Capture (Jovanovic, Ng, and Yang, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2018, 57 (42), pp 13987–13998.
I have convinced myself that the only sustainable option for providing the energy for this extremely challenging engineering task is nuclear energy, although I'm not convinced that the "advanced nuclear" House describes is really suitable for the task. Few details are provided directly in the paper about the kind of nuclear energy that constitutes "advanced nuclear" in House's paper, but I suspect it involves an electricity intermediate energy form, which, in my view, is unnecessary and wasteful. Carbon dioxide and water splitting by thermochemical means involves high temperatures, and high temperatures, although increasing thermodynamic efficiency, imply the rejection of heat to the environment. To the extent that this waste heat can be partially captured to do useful things, like say, capture carbon dioxide and release it in a concentrated form available for use, it can be environmentally attractive. Hence my interest in the Jovanovic paper where the regeneration of the absorbent occurs at a relatively low temperature, 95C, temperatures which would be relatively accessible for very high temperature nuclear reactors being utilized to either split carbon dioxide or water or both.
From the introduction to the Jovanovic paper:
The paper is rather detailed and involved, but it may be useful to look at the pictures to get a feel for it:
The caption:
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The caption:
The caption:
IRGA stands for infrared gas analysis. CSTR = continuous stirred-tank reactor
The caption:
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experiments compared in Figure
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Some excerpts from the text:
with qj (t) calculated from the temporal gas-phase species balance
where nj(t) and msorb represent the instantaneous sorbate amount in the gas phase within the closed-loop and mass of sorbent, respectively. The sorbate amount present in the gasphase can be determined using the ideal gas law if the sorbate mole fraction xj and the system pressure P, volume V, and temperature T are all known. Assuming the CSTR flow pattern in the tank and the plug flow through the reminder of the loop, xj is assumed uniform throughout the entire closed-loop. However, the pressure and temperature both vary within the loop due to the pressure drop in pipes, gas compression by the pump, and the lack of temperature control outside of the tank. To account for these nonuniformities in P and T, the closedloop was divided in several compartments as described in section S5 of the SI to calculate nj(t) as
where R is the universal gas constant and subscript “i” designates different compartments involved in the analysis. Note that the calculations of nj(0) and nj,(t) do not account for the exact same compartments, because the sorbate mixture bypassed the sorbent bed before the adsorption (see SI)...
...and...
the tracer material balance for the CSTR condition, that is, assumption that the CO2 composition in the tank is uniform and equal to that at the tank outlet, reduces to
In eqs 4 and 5, ntank designates the total amount contained within the tank and subscripts “in” and “out” indicate the quantities at the inlet and the outlet of the tank, respectively.
From the conclusion:
...The setup presented in this work can be readily implemented to determine the adsorption kinetics on other sorbents developed for similar applications as well as kinetics of some gas?solid catalytic or noncatalytic reactions. The design and validation methodologies presented in this paper can serve as a reference for the development of batch experimental setups for measuring adsorption/reaction kinetics free of the intrusions by heat and mass transfer.
The turn of events surrounding climate change are depressing because, in my opinion, even many of the people who get remain hostile to the only viable solution which necessarily will involve nuclear energy, but also require huge advancements in chemical technology and chemical and materials science engineering.
I will be gone from this planet soon enough, and I do not really expect, at my age, that things will really get better, but if they do, the work performed and published here, and thousands of examples more like it, written by scientists working in relative obscurity and enduring some popular contempt, will lead the way.
That it exists makes me feel a little better.
Have a wonderful weekend.
When the worst President in US history was in office, a tall, lanky, fun guy lost a Senate election.
He ran because an insanely racist Supreme Court made rulings that tore the country apart.
He lost, relatively narrowly, to Steven Douglas, racist, because he held locally unpopular opinions, but his espousal of these opinions garnered national attention.
Two years later, he was elected President of the United States, replacing the man considered, at least until recently, to be the worst President in US history, James Buchanan.
I am, of course, referring to Abraham Lincoln, Senate loser in 1858, who came to the 1860 convention as everybody's second choice for President, with the exception of some party leaders in his home state, Illinois, where he was the first choice.
The rest is history.
Just saying...
In case you ever find yourself looking for a monograph on the physics of bubbles, here it is.
Some time ago in this space, I wrote about Lord Rayleigh, at the height of his fame pausing to write a paper about what happens when water boils in a kettle: I just stumbled into a very old paper by "Lord Rayleigh" contemplating water boiling in a pot.
Lately I've been wondering about the physics of bubbles, specifically an unusual case, the physics of a bubble containg metallic gases formed from one or two or more immiscible metals appearing in a viscous liquid phase of another metal. Three metals have extraordinarily long liquid ranges: Gallium, plutonium and neptunium, the boiling points of the latter two having not been subject to direct laboratory measurement but rather inferred by extrapolation of their vapor pressures. (A great deal of plutonium was vaporized in the planetary atmosphere in the late 1940's, all through the 1950's and through much of the early 1960's, with smaller amounts having been so vaporized in rarer cases thereafter: It's still here.)
In the case where we consider doing something practical about reversing currently observed degradation of the climate - not that popular opinion shows even a trace of interest in reality - this situation might be of extreme importance: In liquid plutonium (or liquid neptunium) actively undergoing fission several volatile or potentially volatile metal gases are formed as fission products, notably cesium, rubidium, strontium and barium, as well as several inert gases, xenon, krypton and in proliferation proof plutonium, considerable helium. All of these elements are insoluble in liquid plutonium. Although this same volatility represented the greatest risk associated with the events at Fukushima and Chernobyl - it is also certainly conceivable to technologically exploit this very same process to do certain things, which might well take too long to describe.
Anyway, it took me a long time to locate a general monograph focused specifically on bubble dynamics, but finally I found and obtained one. This is it: Acoustic Cavitation and Bubble Dynamics.
There's two whole sections on Rayleigh's work on bubbles. Here's an excerpt on section 2.1, "Rayleigh–Plesset Equation."
The next section is on "Rayleigh collapse."
As an aside, my son had the grace to inform me that I've been mispronouncing Rayleigh's name my entire and overly long life by the way, as well as the pronunciation of Auger's name in "Auger electrons" since both scientists' work has relevance to his undergraduate research.
I appreciate that. I'm amazed no one ever corrected me on this score before, either because they assumed I was too stupid to correct or that they had pity on the fact that I was born in Brooklyn.
You may never have any interest in the physics of bubbles; most people don't, and I didn't for much of an overly long life, but in case you do, here's a shortcut to avoid spending as much time as I did to find a comprehensive monograph on the subject of bubbles.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Open racists running for the school board in Hamilton NJ.
This is what we've come to with a racist President and a racist Congress working to legitimize racism:
https://communitynews.org/2018/10/23/racist-facebook-posts-hamilton-township-school-board-election/
Update on the annual death toll from air pollution.
There are certain links I just keep on file for use here when discussing the external costs - costs to the environment and to human health - of our continued and rapidly growing use of dangerous fossil fuels.
Here is the link I routinely produce whenever I'm discussing hot topics like, um, Fukushima and/or Chernobyl and/or Three Mile Island, none of which actually matter, on scale:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
The actual figures given in the table are:
For ambient (outdoor) particulate matter: 3,223,540 deaths in 2010, with the uncertainty expressed as a range, (2,828,854–3,619,148).
For household (indoor) solid fuels (primarily "renewable" biomass but also some coal): 3,478,773 deaths in 2010; the uncertainty range, (2,638,548–4,386,590)
Ozone: 152,434 deaths in 2010, uncertainty range, (52,272–267,431).
The overstated precision in these figures is annoying, somewhat ameliorated by the error bars, but nonetheless, I think the data represented an excellent estimate.
I generally in my arguments rounded up to 7 million air pollution deaths per year.
The Global Burden of Disease surveys are an ongoing project funded by the Gates Foundation, and more recent figures have been published, but lazy person that I am, I haven't been using the more recent version.
The most recent full report from the Global Burden of Disease survey was published in 2016.
It is here:
Global, regional, and national comparative risk assessment of 79 behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risks or clusters of risks, 1990–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015 (Lancet 2016; 388: 1659–724)
The new report suggests that deaths from "renewable" biomass have actually fallen to 2,854,000 deaths per year from the previously reported figure from the 2012 study's report of 3,478,773 deaths. This improvement undoubtedly is tied to some success in the UN Global Sustainable Development Goals, which includes, among other things, improved stoves for indoor use by poor people.
It is surely the case that "development" has involved the displacement of indoor solid fuel combustion with the use of dangerous fossil fuels. If this offends you, I submit you are offended by reality. Even in the case where the change involves improved stoves with elaborate modern devices like, um, chimneys, the effect is still to move indoor pollution to outdoor pollution: The latter is suggested by an increase in the death toll related to outdoor particulate air pollution, which has risen to 4,241,000 deaths, as compared to 3,223,540 deaths reported in the 2012 study which refers to 2010.
Ozone deaths have risen to 207,000.
I can still round down to 7 million deaths per year. This is a holocaust every year, more or less, and every decade, more deaths than all deaths, combat, bombing, starvation, genocide etc than recorded in all of World War II for all countries involved.
We couldn't care less.
The death toll from what is sometimes represented as the only energy disaster to actually matter, particularly by people with their heads up their asses, Fukushima, does not appear in this list of causes of global mortality, probably on the grounds, realistically, that on scale, it doesn't matter.
Nuclear energy saves lives. Another bit I link often:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
I wish you a wonderful weekend and hope that you will vote next week. It has never been more important, with the possible exception of the 1864 election. My vote is already in, straight Democratic, although I had to abandon some principles to vote for one local Democrat, but did it anyway.
I wish I could vote, by the way, for the environment, rather than simply against racism, ignorance and fear, but I can't. Neither political party in this country actually gets it, though more on our side do than on their side do. It's small comfort but President Obama for instance, once appointed Steven Chu to be Secretary of Energy, a role in which he served with the great intelligence one would expect from a Nobel Laureate. Dr. Chu tried, but he didn't get there. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson essentially gave Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg effective cabinet rank.
I still can believe in hope and change. More serious than anything that happens on Tuesday though is the condition of our planet, whether anyone gets it or not.
Toward a sustainable materials system
I've been thinking all week about CO2 capture from air as a route for future generations to address our failure to do anything significant about the climate beyond praising even more consumer junk, like electric cars and solar cells.
I've been going over the aging, but still interesting - if controversial - PNAS House paper, Economic and energetic analysis of capturing CO2 from ambient air, (PNAS, 108, 51 20428–20433, 2011) poking around references and citations and I came across this short, non-technical and thoughtful commentary in a recent issue of Science; it's open sourced:
Materials consumption trends provide context to inform strategies for impact mitigation. Beginning in the mid-1950s, there has been a shift from biomass or renewable materials to nonrenewable substances, such as metals, fossil fuels, and minerals. Effective strategies for mitigating their impacts are different for high-volume materials with structural applications than for specialty materials with functional uses...
Toward a sustainable materials system Elsa A. Olivetti, Jonathan M. Cullen (Science 29 Jun 2018: Vol. 360, Issue 6396, pp. 1396-1398)
Well worth a read...
Interrogating the Development of Ant Castes with Interfering RNA.
The paper in the primary scientific literature I'll discuss in this post is this one: Social regulation of a rudimentary organ generates complex worker-caste systems in ants (Ehab Abouheif et al Nature Volume 562, pages 574–577 (2018))
I have a decent understanding of the molecular biology of proteins, including the remarkable nuclear proteins that choreograph the behavior the behavior of DNA, the highly conserved - because they're optimized across species - four histones of chromatin. Lipid chemistry is highly complex and important, but it's fairly easy to wrap one's head around it without too much effort; I've had to think about lipids a lot in my life time and seldom feel intimidated when I have to do so. Sugars, because of their complex stereochemistry and their large arrays of functional groups are often beyond me, but to the extent I have been involved with them, it's all been pretty much about N,O glycosylation of proteins, which sometimes plays a huge role in proteomics, but, well, I can generally get by by looking at the pictures and the schematics. I actually don't know too many experts in sugar chemistry because there aren't all that many synthetic sugar drugs, although there are indeed sugar based drugs on the market: In fact, one of the oldest drugs commercialized, digoxin, is technically a glycolipid. The absence of sugar drugs is probably a function of the difficulty of sugar chemistry. I'm always amused by this excerpt from a wonderful text on sugar chemistry, especially the lines I have bolded here: The Sugar Code that reads:
In other words, people shy away from sugar chemistry because sugar chemistry is hard.
This text also suggests that the biochemistry of the nucleic acids is better understood because it's easier.
Well perhaps...
There are, now, a few drugs on the market that are in effect nucleic acids or modified nucleic acids, in particular anti-sense compounds. Also a major gene insertion product has been approved, Luxturna which cures a certain type of blindness with a single dose. By the way drugs which cure diseases have more economic difficulty than maintenance drugs like blood pressure pills and statins which only address symptoms or prevent - so long as they are continually used - disease. Luxturna represents an interesting ethical case, because I believe that a single dose - the only dose ever needed - to the eye costs close to a million dollars.
Anyone who has worked in a lab in a research capacity knows about the long path of training and education, long hours, disappointment after the acquisition of expensive and rare materials, the danger, the cost. I can only imagine the work that went into making Luxturna into a marketed product - the cost - the fear that the product would fail, the terror at looking at results and traveling to regulatory meetings. If one knows this, one finds that scientists deserve to be paid, but on the other hand, if someone is blind and can be cured of blindness, one also feels that it should be done for free.
(I don't have an answer for this conundrum, but I do know that tax breaks for shitheads like the orange President and his family at the expense of the rest of the world's population is criminal.)
Anyway...
On a superficial level, there is a beautiful simplicity to nucleic acids, with only five core building blocks in contrast to the 20 core building blocks of proteins (if one ignores post-translational modifications like the arginine -> ornithine or citrulline, etc, etc and bacterial codons for things like selenomethionine, phosphorylation, etc, etc and the aforementioned glycosylations.)
However, this superficial understanding conveys very little of the complexity of nucleic acid biochemistry; one of the great discoveries of recent times and applicable to the nature/nuture issue (or perhaps the "exposiome" ) is the marvelous complexity revealed in epigenetics.
This said, I have a very superficial working knowledge of these compounds and some of the experimental notes in the paper cited at the outset on ants inspires me to learn more - since there are parts of the nuts and bolts that I'll excerpt here that are clearly beyond me.
I don't know about you, but I find social insects, as problematic as some species are - yellow jackets and carpenter ants come to mind - fascinating. Before I knew any science whatsoever beyond the very primitive concepts discussed in elementary school in my time, I recall spending hours upon hours just watching sugar ants; sometimes feeding them just to watch them work.
The abstract of the nature paper refers to this wonder:
The authors explore the developmental molecular biology of the development of soldier ants pretty much from the very same genome of minor worker ants and for that matter, winged ants, queens and drones.
Soldier ants have big heads - and even if General Bonespurs in the White House is a long standing coward with an absurdly big head and thus is no soldier - in soldier ants big heads and powerful jaws are important in defending the colony from attack. The authors note that the soldier ants also have vestigial wings that minor worker ants lack and they explore the origins of this anatomical feature and its relation to big heads.
They do this by shutting off the expression of some genes by using interfering RNA on the messenger RNA produced by the DNA of the organism at different developmental phases. Interfering RNA is RNA that is complementary to expressed RNA and thus can interact with it forming double stranded (ds) RNA - as opposed to the functional single stranded RNA - thus blocking its ability to direct protein synthesis and ultimately function.
Some pictures from the text:
The caption:
The caption:
A nice cartoon:
The caption:
And now some experimental text that is frankly over my head, but inspires me to learn more - I've ordered several texts from various libraries:
Forward: 5?-TATCCTTACCTKTAYCARACCC-3? and reverse: 5?-GCTGACTATTCCAAAAGGARGG-3? degenerate primers were designed based on a vestigial sequence alignment of Tribolium castaneum (XM_008201106), Apis mellifera (XM_001122002.4) and several ant species obtained from the Ant Genome Portal database (http://hymenopteragenome.org/ant_genomes/). P. hyatti RNA was isolated using TRIzol (Invitrogen) from a pool of embryos and larvae of different developmental stages. RNA was then reverse-transcribed to synthesize a cDNA library. PCR amplicons were ligated into the pGEM-T easy vector (Promega) and subsequently sequenced (MH683613) using Sanger sequencing at the Genome Quebec Innovation Centre at McGill University. To determine whether these vestigial sequences—including the TONDU/vestigial domain—are conserved, amino acid alignment was performed using Geneious Alignment on Geneious (R8), followed by manual alignment (Supplementary Fig. 2)...
...emi-quantitative reverse-transcription PCR of vestigial transcripts in P. hyatti
vestigial expression in wild-type terminal P. hyatti larvae was determined through the detection of vestigial transcripts using semi-quantitative PCR with reverse transcription (Extended Data Fig. 3 and Supplementary Fig. 1). The housekeeping gene Elongation factor 1 alpha (EF1a) was used as our reference gene because it has previously been validated as a reference gene for quantitative PCR with reverse transcription in social insects45. Therefore, EF1a was first cloned and sequenced (MH683615) from a P. hyatti cDNA library using the following degenerate primers: forward 5?-GATTCYGGCAAGTCGACCA-3? and reverse 5?-GGAACTCTTGGAAAGCCTCAAC-3?. The PCR product was sequenced using Sanger sequencing at the Genome Quebec Innovation Centre at McGill University. To extract RNA, three minor worker larvae and three soldier larvae at the terminal stage were collected from a laboratory colony and total RNA was extracted from minor workers and soldiers separately. The tissue was disrupted using a TissueLyser (Qiagen) bead mill and RNA was extracted using the TRIzol (Invitrogen) RNA extraction protocol46, and then purified using the RNeasy Plus Kit (Qiagen). Minor worker and soldier RNA was treated with DNase I (Invitrogen) to remove genomic DNA before being reverse transcribed into cDNA using the Superscript III First-Strand Synthesis System (Invitrogen). The concentrations of total RNA and total cDNA were normalized between minor workers and soldiers before cDNA synthesis and PCR, respectively. The two cDNA libraries were used as PCR templates for the semi-quantitative PCR with reverse transcription of vestigial and EF1a. The P. hyatti vestigial PCR primers used were: forward 5?-TCCTTACCTGTATCAGACCCATC-3? and reverse 5?-TGTCGATCTGTCGTCGTCCAA-3?, and the P. hyatti EF1a PCR primers used were: forward 5?-TCAGGACGTGTACAAGATC-3? and reverse 5?-CAATGACCTGTGCAGTAAAG-3?. The PCR was performed using an annealing temperature of 56?°C with 31 thermocycles and four serial dilutions of the two cDNA libraries.
I'm an old man, but being old, and recognizing that there isn't much time left, I feel more and more urgency about finding things out.
Youth - and certainly my youth - as they say in a wonderful platitude that became a platitude by being true, is wasted on the young.
If nothing else, I've tried to impress that on my sons, and happily they both seem to get it, more or less.
A beautiful thing on a rainy Saturday.
Have a nice weekend.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! Migrants building 2.6bn British Pound windfarm paid fraction of minimum wage.
The wind industry is soaking up vast resources for essentially - at least if the goal is address climate change - zero result.
According to the most recent report from the UNEP/Frankfurt School, the industry soaked up 1.031 trillion dollars between 2007 and 2017.
Frankfurt School/UNEP Global Renewable Energy Investment, 2018, Figure 3, page 14
In the period between 2007 and 2017 the average rate of annual carbon dioxide increases was 2.25 ppm/year as measured at the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory..
In the period between 1997 and 2007 - which included the El Nino year 1998 during which much of SE Asia's rain forest burned (2.93 ppm that year) the average rate of annual carbon dioxide increases was 1.987 ppm/year measured in the same laboratory.
In the period between 1987-1997 the measured rate of increase averaged 1.53 ppm/year.
Don't worry, be happy. We're doing great.
Twenty to thirty years from now, all of this "investment" will be landfill that people who are babies today will have to clean up.
But again, don't worry, be happy, because...because...because...well...um...that's their problem, not ours.
It's all about jobs! jobs! jobs! One of the great bits of propaganda about so called "renewable energy" is that it's all about jobs.
And right now there's a great £2.6 windfarm under construction off the coast of Scotland, a wonder of concrete, steel, aluminum, and a whole host of rarer metals you don't have to worry about because you're "green."
Jobs...Jobs...Jobs...
One may argue that unproductive jobs destroy the future - and the trillion dollar investment in wind, only exceeded by the equally useless investment in solar (1.291 trillion dollars between 2007-2017), has proved useless in addressing climate change - but, we'll that's OK if it's, um, "green." No?
Well, um, um, um...
Migrants building £2.6bn windfarm paid fraction of minimum wage
Offshore windfarming is one of the UK’s biggest growth industries, hailed by both the Conservatives and Labour as a priority for investment that will create thousands of jobs while also producing clean energy.
The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers’ union (RMT) have said, however, that the use of cheap foreign labour instead of local workers is a growing problem in the sector’s subcontracting chains. They have accused the government of failing to protect workers.
A group of Russian workers recruited as relief crew on the giant crane ship contracted to carry out the initial construction on the Beatrice windfarm were detained by immigration officials at Aberdeen airport in April 2017.
They were being brought in to the country on seafarer identity documents, intended for foreign crew leaving UK waters immediately, instead of the official permits required of people from outside the European Economic Area (EEA) entering the UK to work...
...An ITF inspection on board the crane ship in the Moray Firth the following month found more than 140 migrant workers, the majority from Russia and some from Indonesia.
Contracts for some of them, seen by the Guardian, set rates of pay that were a fraction of the UK minimum wage...
Oh well, don't worry, be happy.
Hopefully they can find poor people to work at less than the minimum wage to haul all this crap away in 25 years, assuming that there are the resources for anyone to do anything in 25 years, when carbon dioxide concentrations will be more than 50 ppm higher than they are now.
I predict these turbines will just rot at sea when they fail. They'll be nothing left with which to clean them up.
Have a wonderful day tomorrow.
A time when plutonium was utilized to model the lanthanides instead of the other way around.
In recent years I've been thinking about liquid plutonium metal quite a bit, as I reconsider the wonderful LAMPRE nuclear reactor that operated in the early 1960's at Los Alamos. I consider that this type of reactor, which was not pursued further back then, not only for funding and political reasons, but probably in consideration of materials science concerns, actually has many wonderful features that should be reevaluated given advances in Materials Science over the last half a century.
Of course, not much has been written on the subject of liquid plutonium in recent years, as the world has become enamored of dangerous natural gas, the external costs of which will be dumped, with contempt for every human being who lives after us, on all future generations.
If one is interested in learning about the properties of liquid plutonium and its eutectic alloys, generally one needs to refer to older literature, sometimes very old literature, to learn things about its properties.
The lipstick on the dangerous natural gas pig is so called "renewable energy" which is not really "renewable" owing to its dependence of somewhat exotic materials or toxic materials with high environmental impact. In particular, the popular forms, solar and wind, were they not still trivial forms of energy, which they are, would now be recognized as obviously unsustainable.
This is why I personally regard nuclear energy and only nuclear energy to be the last best hope for addressing climate change, not that anyone on this planet is willing to be inconvenienced by climate change unless their vacation beach house is destroyed.
One of the most prominent classes of materials utilized in the so called "renewable energy" industry - as well as the related and equally as useless electric car industry - are the lanthanides.
Today, access to plutonium is somewhat limited, and some scientists writing about it do experiments in which they choose a lanthanide to model the behavior of plutonium, usually cerium, since it exhibits two of plutonium's oxidation states, +3, +4, (but not +5, +6 and the suspected but unproved +7 and +8 states) and because it is trivial to order cerium compounds from a catalog, and not trivial to order plutonium.
The separation of the 14 lanthanides from one another remains until this day challenging, because most, with the exception of cerium, europium, which has a well defined +2 state, and a few others in non-aqueous systems, all exhibit only the +3 oxidation state under normal circumstances. This difficulty, although now addressed widely on an industrial scale, is responsible for the high external cost of the purified lanthanides, most of the external costs being borne by relatively poor people in China, which is the world's main source of lanthanides.
Lanthanide chemistry was pretty much a curiosity in the mid-20th century, and much of the progress made in it was an outgrowth of work performed beginning with the Manhattan Project, which was a nuclear project. The prominent presence of lanthanides in used nuclear fuel also drove interest in these elements. When I was a kid, and took high school chemistry, the only mention of them I recall is, "they're there, at the bottom of the periodic table, just above the actinides." I don't believe anything was said about their chemistry.
Today lanthanide chemistry is well understood, and anyone who wants to learn about it and has access to the scientific literature can easily find out lots and lots of stuff about it, should one be interested. (I am.)
But in 1963...
I've been thinking about the behavior of gases in liquid plutonium this week and an issue with this behavior in a fluid dynamics sense is the viscosity of liquid plutonium, which is higher than most liquid metals. Digging through my files I came across this old paper:
The viscosity of liquid plutonium, predicted from a general relationship between the activation energy and melting points of metals, and the experimental data (Grosse, J. Inorg. Nucl. Chem. 25, 1, 1963, 137–138)
Cool text from it:
A cool, if obscure, point from the history of science.
I personally need a friendly approach to solving stochastic differential equations with singular...
...data.
Who doesn't?
And if you do, here is the book for you:
Friendly approach for solving stochastic equations with singular data
This has to be the best book ad I've seen all week.
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