Another Great Day For Renewable Energy in California.

[NNadir]

12. The realization I had relatively recently - I don't know why it never occurred to me - is...

...that a significant portion of sea level rise actually involves draining fresh water off land. Big examples in North America are the mining of the water of the Ogallala aquifer in the Central US, but groundwater mining in California is nothing to sneeze out.

There is the destruction of Lake Owens by LA, the depletion of Mono Lake, and the murder of the Colorado Delta.

I have spent a considerable amount of time looking into what the great minds in the early days of nuclear power were thinking; they had a huge expansive view that is forgotten now.

It wasn't all about electricity; it was about heat.

The very first commercial nuclear reactor built in the Western World was Calder Hall, in Britain. Its working fluid was not steam; it was carbon dioxide. It turned out that the materials science aspects resulted in the necessity of operating it at lower temperatures than were planned, but the coolant was chosen because it could easily be adapted to provide process heat.

In recent years, the world has become infatuated with membrane based desalination, but, as you and I discussed in the science section, another path to desalination is supercritical water separations. A stream of supercritical water will move great distances at great speeds because it is under great pressure.

Building on this idea, one can cool supercritical water streams any time when wants to do so with carbon dioxide Brayton type cycles, or if one wants to do a reverse Allam cycle, convert any carbon source, from waste plastic to nutshells, into a chemical fuel. If one designs systems carefully, one can actually do reverse combustion, reduce carbon dioxide in two steps to one or more of the many allotropes of carbon that are showing up in materials science over the last twenty years.

California is drying up; the situation with respect to waster is of huge concern.

Fuels synthesis from carbon dioxide requires hydrogen, and hydrogen requires water.

In my dreams, perhaps at public expense, we drain a little of the ocean, refill the aquifer in the San Joaquin valley, restore Owens lake, unshackle the Colorado and set it free, breathe life into Mono Lake, restore John Muir's vision of the Hetch Hetchy. All this water restored to land as fresh water would drain at least a little of the ocean.

For amusement, I've been downloading graphics from the CAISO site I referenced here, at different hours of the day.

One of the cutest things is to see how often the wind disappears, at random, and how those billion, trillion solar roofs produce power during relatively low demand periods. This actually works to destroy the economics of electricity. People think that negative prices are a good idea, and then they complain when the power lines are poorly maintained, and the use of an essential resource causes fires because it cannot be maintained.

People look for blame, not answers.

It seems that California right now - on a bad day - will require instantaneous peak loads between 45,000 - 50,000 MWe, more typically, perhaps 5000 to 10000 MW lower.

At a readily achievable thermal efficiency of 50 to 60% - compared to around 33% for most Rankine type heat engines - this would put the thermal demand at somewhere around 100,000 MWth to cover all of California's electricity needs, with lots of waste heat to do other useful things.

A kg of plutonium, fully fissioned produces about 80 trillion joules (neutrino free) of thermal energy, particularly if one down converts gamma radiation (preferably while doing useful things). That means it would require a little more than 1 gram per second to power all of California, a little over 100 kg per day.

Somehow - it boggles the imagination - people believe that it's OK to dump 10,000 metric tons, ten million kg, of carbon dioxide into the air every hour - numbers one can see at the CAISO site along with self congratulations about how "wonderful" California is doing in innumerate "percent talk" - but impossible to handle 100 kg per day of anything involved in used nuclear fuel.

Go figure.

No, these fires didn't have to be. The driver behind them is endless appeals to fear and ignorance, and as we've seen here over the years, although we often congratulate ourselves on being less ignorant than people on the right, our own emotional responses and our inability to think clearly, to thinking critically are just as responsible as is anything else from the racist dunderheads on the right.

I've come to see this forum as something of a tragicomedy, which is why I mostly write in Science now.

These fires didn't have to happen, but they are here.

At the end of my life, these fires break my heart. They didn't have to be in California (or anywhere else), in California, the place in which I knew so much love and saw such beautiful things.