November 28, 2021

Dominion Estimates $10B Installation Cost for 2.6-GW Virginia Offshore Wind Farm

Dominion Estimates $10B Installation Cost for 2.6-GW Virginia Offshore Wind Farm (by Sonal Patel, Power, November 8, 2021)



The capacity utilization of wind plants is typically below 30%, depending on the weather. This means that the plant will be the equivalent of a 780 MW reliable plant operating at or close to 100% capacity utilization.

However the 30% capacity utilization figure also includes times when the electricity is generated but not actually needed; conversely if electric demand is high and wind speeds low, it is necessary to burn gas and dump the waste CO2 directly into the planetary atmosphere.

Based on the data from the Master Data Register of Wind Turbines put out by the Danish Energy Agency, the average life time of a wind turbine is on the order of 18 years.

The 12,800 acres of disturbed benthic ecosystems amounts to about 20 square miles.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California produces more energy, more reliably and far more cleanly than this plant will on a facility footprint of about 12 acres. It will close owing to public foolishness after doing so for about 40 years. In a less stupid world, it would operate longer.

November 28, 2021

NERC Issues Grim Outlook for Bulk Power System Winter Reliability

NERC Issues Grim Outlook for Bulk Power System Winter Reliability (by Sonal Patel, Power, November 18, 2021.)



No comment.

November 27, 2021

Again, I couldn't care less about absurd, obscenely stupid obsessions with Three Mile Island.

Again, I regard these obsessions in a world being destroyed by dangerous fossil fuels, with hundreds of millions dead from air pollution since 1979 because shit for brains type have wedgies over Three Mile Island as insane.

Get it? Insane. Insane. Insane. INSANE.

Do I make myself clear? No? Again, I couldn't care less.

What I'm about to say falls into the level of discussing the fact that mRNA vaccines save human lives with an anti-vax Trumper, clearly useless, because dogma based on insistent arrogant idiot faith based dogma is intractable. I'll say it nonetheless:

Despite much stupid rhetoric from people who couldn't pass a precalculus course in an underfunded school, Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone. Then President Jimmy Carter walked through the Three Mile Island reactor building during the accident, this some decades after he went into the core of the melted Chalk River reactor as a naval officer.

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

He has lived the longest life of any President.

The supposition that we should spend billions of dollars to satisfy the idiot assumptions of anti-nukes that if anyone anywhere is exposed to a radionuclide because of nuclear power it's a tragedy - this on a planet where we won't spend any money at all to provide basic sanitary services to the billions of people on this planet who lack access to even primitive sanitary facilities - is criminal.

The idea is that we need to clean up Three Mile Island to a risk standard that no fucking normally operated coal plant could ever meet, even after the expenditure of trillions of dollars, that no normally operated gas plant could meet for the same expenditure, that no fucking normally operated wind plant could meet, is beneath contempt.

The basis for this nonsensical waste of money is wholly dependent on the dubious, unproven, and possibly even fraudulent "linear no threshold" (LNT) model for the effects of radiation, this despite that the potassium essential to all living tissue is radioactive. This ideology, again, kills people, on a scale of millions, tens of millions, over time, hundreds of millions of human beings. The fact that anti-nukes, including the very annoying and disingenuous anti-nukes who run around saying "I'm not an anti-nuke" while serving up meaningless anti-nuke rhetoric, that again, to repeat again and again kills people by promoting ignorance and hysteria, um, bothers me, to be sure, but there's nothing more I can do to make anti-nukes be, informed, rational, knowledgeable, and frankly remotely ethical or intelligent. They clearly can be none of those things.

Now, if some asshole wants to carry on about how Flo from Progressive won't bundle nuclear plant insurance along with car and boat insurance, or if Geico can save you 15% or more on all insurance except nuclear plant insurance, or that Liberty makes sure that you only pay for what you need except if you want nuclear plant insurance, there's nothing I can do about it.

They've been carrying on about insurance and Three Mile Island for the entire 19 years I've been suffering this insipid argument here at DU. Meanwhile, in that 19 years, between 110 million people and 130 million people died from air pollution according to the Lancet references I have been posting here time and time and time again, only to hear the same ridiculous arguments flung back at me.

As I wind down from discussing hard science and environmental issues on DU, I've taken the liberty of removing some of the most egregious and toxic anti-nukes from my ignore list, because I need to remind myself of exactly how futile a remotely intelligent discussion with any of these awful people would be.

Recently, an "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke offered the same kind of disingenuous claims as the present company, this with a dubious pronouncement that I should not flip off him or her. This was after posting in one of my threads pictures that had the same quality and fact checking as a World Weekly News headline:



A Minor Problem For Sound Science of the Effect of Offshore Windfarms on Seabirds: There Isn't Any. Post #9.

When I started writing here in late November of 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 372.68 ppm as recorded at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory. The most recent data point at the observatory was 414.88 ppm. In the week of April 25, 2021 the reading hit 420.01 ppm. In the spreadsheet I keep of Mauna Loa Observatory data, the 52 week running average of increases over ten year periods during the week I joined DU was 18.00 ppm/10 years = 1.80 ppm/year. As of last weekly data point (week beginning 11/14/2021) the same average was 24.52 ppm/10 years = 2.45 ppm/year.

Recently I updated the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" as we happily run along trashing huge stretches of wilderness, rendering them into industrial parks to serve the clearly failed rhetoric of anti-nukes.

Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.

I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.

The result, as recorded at Mauna Loa's CO2 observatory are clear enough. The degradation of the planetary atmosphere resulting from appeals to ignorance and wishful thinking is accelerating, not decelerating.

Over Thanksgiving dinner, I had a discussion with my son about the Breit-Wigner formulation of neutron capture cross sections. It was infinitely more intelligent and frankly worthwhile than listening, yet again, to fucking idiotic blather about Three Mile Island.

Which conversation is worthy of addressing the crisis before humanity? Rehashing stupid shit about spending billions of dollars to satisfy a collection of idiots concerned about a few radioactive atoms escaping from Three Mile Island or engaging a highly educated young man on the subject of neutron dynamics in a nuclear plant?

For the record: I've driven through Harrisburg many times; it's not all that far from where I live. It's still there. The people living there are living useful productive lives.

Meanwhile ignorance kills people, millions of people worldwide in the Covid case, tens of millions, hundreds of millions worldwide in the anti-nuke case. In my opinion they are exactly the same kind of ignorance.

But anyway, here's what I said to the other, "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke, and it applies here and now in this context:

Let me repeat that:

You won: We spent vast sums of more money on so called "renewable energy" than we did on nuclear energy, including the money squandered to "clean up" Three Mile Island to a ridiculous risk standard that we apply to nothing else, a risk standard set by dumb shit for brains anti-nukes

We hit 420 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 in the atmosphere in 2021, less than 10 years after hitting 400 ppm. We are absolutely sure to exceed 422 ppm in 2022.

You won.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Enjoy the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend.

November 23, 2021

The United Nations 2021 Report on Life Cycle Analysis for Electricity Generation.

It's here: Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options

Of course, this topic, life cycle analysis, is covered extensively in the scientific literature, which few people who shout loudly (as if they know something) about energy and the environment actually read.

This report however is nice, because it has all sorts of charts and graphs and summarizes things quite well.

It is interesting to compare the carbon cost of the options. One of the conceits of the so called "renewable energy" option is that the costs of intermittency are never included, for instance, the LCA of solar should include the cost of dangerous natural gas burned at night, because every damned night episodes of darkness occur.

This report excludes that, but it does have a nice evaluation of the cost of the big "let's mine all the world's cobalt using poor people to dig it for low or no pay" battery fantasy. It's ugly.

Another thing that's interesting is the comparison between solar PV and nuclear energy on toxicity. The toxicity risk (expressed as a unit "CTUh," "comparative toxicity units" ) associated with solar PV is between a factor of 3 to 6 more toxic than nuclear. Nuclear is roughly comparable to wind, and slightly worse than hydro, although we are fresh out of fresh water rivers to destroy. Of course, toxicity is only one issue, neither solar, nor wind, nor hydro can compare to nuclear on land use, an important component of climate change, and none of these match nuclear's carbon cost. (cf. Figure 41 in the report.)

I would note that much of the carbon cost attributed to nuclear energy - which is even without energy storage, which it actually doesn't need and is, in any case, lower than all other forms of energy - is attributed to mining and enrichment. I argue that neither are necessary, at least for several centuries, in "breed and burn" systems, given the uranium and thorium already mined, and in the latter case dumped from ores used to provide neodymium and dysprosium for redundant generators for wind turbines and gas plants. I will discuss this topic with my son over Thanksgiving Dinner, as he applies to Ph.D. programs in nuclear engineering. It will certainly be more useful to talk to him than it is to post long discussions of scientific punctilios on DU.

Nuclear energy is already better than everything else, but it can be even better, via heat networks and the recovery of valuable materials from used nuclear fuels. These are the topics I wish to discuss with my son, and about which I will write him, getting as much in as possible before I die.

Anyone who reads this report seriously, or even looks at the pictures seriously, would be compelled to agree, in my view, that opposing nuclear energy is insane, the climate change equivalent of being an antivaxxer in the time of Covid.

Of course, many people are insane; it's fashionable in these times to be so, in one way or another, but an undercurrent of popular insanity has always been there. We are paying for it, not only with a destroyed environment, but in many other ways.

As I approach the end of my life the thing that stuns me the most is the realization of how much we want to lie to ourselves.

Enjoy the holidays.

November 23, 2021

Salt Creek II

November 23, 2021

Salt Creek.

November 21, 2021

The COP-26 organizers stopped researchers from accessing the negotiations in Glasgow, UK.

This is from a Nature editorial: COP26 didn’t solve everything — but researchers must stay engaged.

Subtitle:

I believe the text should be open sourced.

An excerpt:



With due respect to the editors of Nature, one of the world's premier scientific journals, the conditional word "would" is not appropriate when discussing whether this will be a "tragedy." It is a tragedy, and the scientists were not disengaged because they were refusing to participate, they weren't allowed to participate.

An earlier excerpt:



Nature's happy. People committed to stopping to burn coal, unless I would guess based on events, as is happening in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, the wind stops blowing.

The editorial also states that no one could agree on what "net zero" means. I know what it means now: When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, a country, state, or organization counts all the dangerous natural gas and coal it would have burned if the wind wasn't blowing and the sun wasn't shining. If that sum is more than the dangerous coal and dangerous natural gas it does burn, dumping the waste CO2 directly into the planetary atmosphere, when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, they give themselves a big pat on the back and declare themselves "net zero."

COP26 would have been as effective at addressing climate change if, instead of the meetings they did have, they held a modern dance competition under klieg lights.

Speaking only for myself, I'm almost done.

November 21, 2021

The US Energy Information Agency Expects US Energy Consumption to Rise 27 to 38 EJ by 2050.

Source: Distillation Columns with Multiple Phase Divisions: How They Improve Thermodynamic Efficiency and Decrease Energy Consumption (Lilian C. K. Biasi, Ana L. R. Romano, Roger J. Zemp, Matthias Heinkenschloss, Fabio R. M. Batista, and Antonio J. A. Meirelles Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2021 60 (43), 15690-15705.) (Subscription required.)

They obviously didn't get the memo composed by Amory Lovins in 1976 at EIA, that energy efficiency and so called "renewable energy" would save the world.

Of course, the EIA tracks data, not wishful thinking.

Don't worry, be happy, Amory is still proud of what he wrote; data doesn't matter.

Lovins and his fellow anti-nukes sure owned the nukes like me. We spent trillions more dollars on this planet on wind and solar than we did on nukes in this century.

We hit 420 ppm concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere in April of 2021, and are racing to 422 or more in April or May of 2022. In this, the century of worshipping the sun and worshipping the wind, the concentrations of this dangerous waste rose from 370.06 ppm (week beginning 12/31/2000) to 415.15 (Week beginning 01/03/2021).

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

November 11, 2021

Life in the Age of the Lie: California passes a law stating that methane is carbon free.

It was always more painful for me when my sons displayed a flaw that I know myself to have.

With respect to Republicans and to us:

It hurts me less when they embrace lies than it does when we embrace a lie.

The structure of methane is a scientific fact; no one can pass a low level organic chemistry class without knowing its structure and its composition.

The laws of science are not subject to repeal by legislatures. Period.

As a lifelong Democrat, I wish I could say that this isn't true, but it is:

California governor Gavin-Newsom Proclaims Natural Gas to be Zero Carbon.

I'm very glad I don't live in California anymore. If I still lived there, voting for Governor would be extremely painful, as painful as when I had to vote for Michael Dukakis. I did it, but I hated that I had to do so.

I'm really in pain.

November 11, 2021

I'm pretty much done trying to reason with rote anti-nukes. The age of antivaxxers led me...

...finally to understand the power, as well as the more obvious danger, of deliberate ignorance which no amount of information, no compilation of facts, can change.

To what end would one succeed at arguing with an anti-vax that Bill Gates is not really putting microchips in vaccines?

This report, Practical handling of allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines (Klimek, L., Bergmann, KC., Brehler, R. et al. Allergo J Int 30, 79–95 (2021)) published April just past, reports this:

One can only imagine what an anti-vax Trumper could do with the use of the internet and the details of just one of the 21 cases described that met the criterion of anaphylaxis.

Nevertheless, vaccines save lives on a scale of tens of millions, ultimately hundreds of millions.

Because air pollution kills people - more people in fact than Covid has ever come close to killing - nuclear power saves lives.

But...but...but...FUKUSHIMA?

Really?

I will have been writing at DU 19 years as of this month. I know I have convinced a few people to change their minds about nuclear energy, but what's left is, to my mind, beyond hope.

I spent too much time writing here. The up side is that doing the background research for my posts was a mechanism for learning new things. For example, confronting a fool who carried on about a collapsed tunnel at Hanford led me to look into the geochemistry of plutonium and technetium. Of course, I already knew a lot about these subjects, but I learned more in the process of looking into this silly event, on which vast sums of money were spent to save zero lives. The money was spent to assuage ignorance, and nothing else.

One can always learn more about any subject, with the caveat that what one learns is often depressing.

I have a 22 year old son whose academic career in Materials Science Engineering has been close to spectacular thus far. He announced recently - I am deeply honored - his intention to pursue his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. As I've spent more than 30 years deeply invested in the subject, even though I am not a nuclear professional, I am aware of many excellent ideas that were lost, and have had many ideas that I believe may have been missed.

If the world is to be saved, and it may not be, nuclear engineers will save it. Fathers are always proud of their sons, but my pride may be far deeper. How is my time better spent to fulfill my responsibility to the world, writing here or writing to my son?

I will probably write a valedictory post on DU in which I will discuss the disturbing data from California's very detailed CAISO website in which I will compare the output of Diablo Canyon with all the wind turbines in California, commenting perhaps on the very important issue in climate change of land and mass intensity. But it will go nowhere here.

Of course, anyone who actually gave a shit could look at the CAISO website themselves, and do as I did, download the data files over a period of time to understand the trends, and count the number of periods that Diablo Canyon was producing more electricity than all the wind turbines in California. These figures are readily available at high resolution, nearly continuous, the resolution being five minutes over a period of months.

But people don't give a shit. They just shout through their ignorance with the same tired rhetoric that was stupid when I was shouting it (before Chernobyl), was stupid in 2011 and is stupid now.

Mostly we are old people here, and what we have done with the world is obvious. While crowing about how solar and wind are great and - as bourgeois materialists have claimed in a fit of delusion that they are "cheap" - we have left a world where as of April 2021, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, which is literally killing people and in fact killing the planet, broke 420 ppm.

When I started writing here, the week beginning Nov. 24, 2002, that concentration was 372.68 ppm. There is no value in any conversation I may hold here. I keep track of data.

The anti-nukes have won. Diablo Canyon will close, with California having written into to law that methane is carbon free.

420 ppm, and now the laws of chemistry are being changed by legislation. Galileo should roll in his grave.

Congrats to all the anti-nukes, they have triumphed...420 ppm.

Life is absurd, and then you die.

Have a nice day.