I wish I could attend Jessika Trancik's lecture tomorrow at the Andlinger Center for Energy...

[NNadir]

...and the Environment.

Here's the abstract of her talk:

ABSTRACT
Wind and solar industries have grown rapidly in recent years but they still supply only a small fraction of global electricity. The continued growth of these industries to levels that significantly contribute to climate change mitigation will depend on whether they can compete against alternatives that provide high-value energy on demand. Energy storage can transform intermittent renewables for this purpose but cost improvement is needed. Evaluating diverse storage technologies on a common scale has proved a major challenge, however, owing to their widely varying performance along the two dimensions of energy and power costs. Here we devise a method to evaluate storage technologies against the dynamics of energy demand. Some storage technologies today are shown to add value to solar and wind energy, but cost reduction is needed to reach widespread profitability. The optimal cost improvement trajectories, balancing energy and power costs to maximize value, are found to be relatively location invariant, and thus can inform broad industry and government technology development strategies.

highlight seminar: jessika trancik, massachusetts institute of technology

At the Andlinger Center, it's all "renewable energy" all the time.

The bold above is mine, and is a rare bit of what's called "honesty" about so called "renewable energy" about which we've been cheering like rednecks for Trump for half a century.

but they still supply only a small fraction of global electricity.

In the week ending February 27, the readings at Mauna Loa were 407.37 ppm, 3.29 ppm higher than last year during the same week.

Now we hear, "Energy storage can transform intermittent renewables for this purpose but cost improvement is needed. Evaluating diverse storage technologies on a common scale has proved a major challenge, however, owing to their widely varying performance along the two dimensions of energy and power costs"

How and when will wind power become a significant form of energy? When we hit 450 ppm? 500 ppm? 550 ppm?

I'm getting a little fed up with the Andlinger Center.

When they look at a ton of plutonium over at the Andlinger Center, they run over to Von Hipple's office at the um, Woodrow Wilson school, and figure out how many nuclear weapons could be made from it.

Curiously they don't look at an offshore oil rig and figure how much napalm it could produce, but they look at plutonium and calculate how many theoretical bombs it involves.

When Jim Hansen - and I - look at a ton of plutonium - including weapons grade plutonium which, speaking only for myself, I'd like to see denatured via fission/capture - we see about 80 petajoules of energy, enough to power two large nuclear plants for a year, thus saving thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to air pollution.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and it is, in fact, our last best hope. This crap about "economic energy storage some day" is no more useful than "wind power will be the answer by the year 2000" half a century ago.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[GliderGuider]

1. By 2035 the world could be getting half its electricity from renewable sources

If the last 25 years of growth trends for both electricity consumption and renewable electricity production stay on track. But of course that's a long time to project a trend.

Unfortunately, by that time electricity demand could have doubled, so we'd be no further ahead than today in terms of ecological damage, both from increasing CO2 and the ecological damage that's caused by humans using that energy to do stuff to the biosphere.

In the USA, Trump and all his "coal-rolling" cult members sure as hell aren't going to help things.

[NNadir]

2. Bullshit. People were saying the same damned thing 20 years ago about now.

Spare me the Amory Lovins hand waving redux, please.

So called "renewable energy" in the form of solar and wind doesn't even produce 1% of the world's primary energy, after half a century of mindless cheering, in which, I participated for a time, until I grew up.

So called "renewable energy" hasn't worked; it isn't working; and it won't work.

If it was going to work, the two trillion bucks we just squandered on solar and wind in the last ten years would have at least allowed the accumulation of new dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere to slow. That's not what happened. What happened is that the rate accelerated. We're at 407 ppm today, and no one now living will see a level below 400 ppm.

The reason so called renewable energy is a dangerous fantasy - and nothing else - is physics. The energy to mass ratio is absurdly low and the thermodynamic cost of the storage to address its absurd lack of even a modicum of reliability is unbridgeable.

What will happen is that we will burn more gas than ever, and when that runs out - and it will - we'll go back to coal, not that we ever really left it. We'll make stupid statements like "renewable energy is the fastest growing source of new capacity" by pretending that capacity utilization doesn't matter. It does. A 10,000 MW plant that operates 20% of the time is a 2000 MW plant, not a 10,000 MW plant. In fact it's less than a 2000 MW plant, since it needs 8000 MW of back up.

As I noted elsewhere, we are now burning, as of 2015, 170% as much coal on this planet as we burned in 2000, less than 20 years ago. We're not going to stop burning coal until we have a system with a high energy to mass ratio, one comparable to that of coal, petroleum, or gas. There is only one system on scale that fits the bill. It's nuclear energy, which has the highest energy to mass ratio of any technologically demonstrated system.

However, if we're talking about Trumpian ignorance, there isn't really much difference between claiming that "nuclear power is dangerous" to my mind than announcing that "vaccines are dangerous." Both statements are incredibly, awfully, disturbingly ignorant, and that people believe this crap kills other people, and sometimes, in a rare burst of justice, the people who make these claims.

[GliderGuider]

4. No Amory Lovins from me.

You have me confused with some other asshole.

All I did was some brain-dead curve projection based on 25 years of history for "all electricity" and "electricity from non-hydro renewables". Projected out 19 years that's what the curves show - the projection for the proportion of electricity provided by non-hydro renewables rose to 50%, while electricity consumption doubled.

Since there are so many things wrong with curve projection, such a result is ... um ... unrealistic. However, even if it were to come to pass, we would still have to get the other half of the electricity from somewhere else. If it's from NG and coal, as it is today, we're just running the Red Queen's race. Unfortunately, if the American energy oligarchs manage to hold onto power, there is a high probability that the situation will not change. Those guys, like their Russian counterparts, aren't keen on giving the world what it needs, so much as getting what they themselves need - which is money.

I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but both a renewable and a nuclear future look like low-probability outcomes to me. Unless by "renewable" one means that the remaining few people sit huddled around campfires. Such visions are not my preference, but they are what the energy-use data, population growth and the current materialist human nature suggest is likely.

[NNadir]

5. Well, I agree with one statement.

Curve projections are brain dead, so much so as to be useless.

The most frequently used brain dead evocation about so called "renewable energy" is that it's growth is "exponential."

As for guessing what will happen, one never goes wrong betting on stupidity, but we don't need to be stupid; we choose to be.

From a purely engineering and ethical standpoint nuclear energy should be a "no brainer" but unfortunately, people with no brains rule the world, both on the right, and regrettably, on the left.

I've recently been exposed to the quality of the young people now embarking on engineering careers. They are an impressive bunch. At one "accepted engineering students" open house I attended at one of the Universities to which my son was accepted, a student in the audience raised his hand to say, "I'd really like to go here, but I wish you offered a degree in nuclear engineering."

It was so wonderful, I wanted to cry.

I have hope that they, this coming generation, who will pay the price for our ignorance, will not be as ignorant as we are.

[madokie]

6. You really need to lay off that sauce bro'

it's going to kill YOU grave yard dead.

You are a perfect example of someone who believes his own stupid shit. Theres a word for that, Hubris. Exactly what our present 'CONs in congress and the white house are guilty of.

My o my you are good for laughs but not much else. I've known very few people in life who can twist a steaming pile of bullshit into something they believe in as fact but man o man you DO have that down pat

For a fact, You or anyone else for that matter can't even find enough uranium, let alone mine it and process it, to supply the worlds supply of energy even if YOU tried. Thats fact big guy. Now, you need to go sober up

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

Oh BTW, buy a star and help support this website. Is it mother won't give you enough allowance so you can afford to do that, or what. What is it? I mean the admins here allow you to spout your opinion as fact so why can't you at least show some respect


Have a great day, I plan too

Peace

[NNadir]

8. It's always a pleasure to be lectured on stupidity by the stupid.

I'd recommend that you open a book, but as you delineate the quality of your set, I'm nowhere convinced that you can in fact read.

You certainly can't write. Without the idiot emoji key you'd have zero to say.

Thanks, as always, for obviating the quality of the anti-nuke mind. You know absolutely nothing about uranium, or the many tens of thousands of publications on the five billion tons naturally occurring in the Earth's oceans and their recovery from it.

Uranium is inexhaustible

Scientists don't give a shit what the small minded bastards who led the world to 407 ppm of CO₂ think.

The low quality minds in the anti-nuke set, so readily obviated here by the present company will die off soon enough, and the fine minds of a younger - and infinitely smarter - generation will take over.

As far as I'm concerned, it can't happen soon enough.

[madokie]

9. my o my

you are one nasty drunk too.

Get a grip!



Not only is it not feasible to build and maintain 15000 nuclear power plants the suggestion of doing that is totally, completely, 100% INSANE

Now go off and pout, it'll do you good

Have a good day big guy, I plan too do exactly that

I hear mommy calling you

[NNadir]

10. Let's see...

...we have a person whose emoji involves rolling on the floor talking about their suspicion that other people, who they are obviously incompetent to understand, are drunks.

This is certainly consistent, not really amusing, since ignorance kills people, but consistent, an effort to substitute a subject about which one knows zero - in this case nuclear energy - with something one knows well, substance induced incoherence.

This is as amusing, which is to say not at all, as when a really, really, really illiterate asshole - I suspect he's been high his entire life and has never once been sober - reports that seven million air pollution deaths per year are irrelevant since, according to his completely uneducated world view, they all take place indoors.

And there is such an asshole here. I hear frequently from him, and I rather enjoy it on the level of exposing this mentality for what it is, complete and total ethical indifference.

Happily people called "scientists" who again, don't give a rat's ass what the mindless think, beg to differ. Their job is to publish the truth for anyone who happens to give a shit. Anyone with a brain, present company excepted, could easily google one's way to a scientific paper in one of the world's most important scientific journals to grasp the magnitude of the death toll because people don't support nuclear energy.

The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale

One would need to exist at the moral level of a turnip to not give a shit, but, unhappily, people with the moral depth of a turnip are not all that rare, even at a nominally liberal website, as we can clearly see.

[madokie]

11. Wrong

there are TWO assholes here, One big one and myself who has about had all the shit I can take coming from that BIG asshole, you btw.

You are just like dRumpF, if anyone doesn't totally agree with you you start in on the ad hominem attacks.

Remind me again why DKO ran your ass off? then point me to the Peer reviewed papers you've produced. Then maybe you can be taken seriously but I must add II doubt with your attitude towards anyone who questions you that that can be or will be possible

Again have a good day, I plan too

Oh yes about that Star, where is it?


ETA: in the mean time I have yard work to get done today so I'll see you Later oh wise one

[NNadir]

12. Donnie says "wrong" a lot when he doesn't know what he talking about too.

My suspicion is that this entire exchange involves a lot of projection.

Apparently on this website, we have people with a fairly violent streak requesting that other people suspend their anonymity to discuss - this is funny and cute - peer reviewed papers.

That's not going to happen. Scientists know when they are talking to other scientists, and this is what the word "peer" means in the context of scientific papers.

I am more than happy to repeat - it's a source of pride - why I was "run off" at DKO, a website run by a journalist with no scientific training whatsoever, who, lacking even a modicum of scientific training is also a dumb assed anti-nuke.

I said, citing the clear result of a widely read and widely discussed scientific paper this one that, in effect, "opposition to nuclear energy is murder." It's not a statement for which I can apologize, since it's, um, a true statement.

In making this case, one of the world's leading scientists on the topic of climate change used exactly the same analysis I often use here, that air pollution kills about 70 million people every decade.

The scientific literature literally explodes with information on that topic.

Markos, um, didn't like that, but I notice that Jim Hansen has become persona non grata at Kos and elsewhere. When liberals - and I am a political liberal - make the case that they admire scientists only because the scientists tell them what they want to hear rather than the, um, truth, the result is becoming that to which you object.

This certainly applies to Markos in the current case. For years there was all this evocation of Jim Hansen as a wonderful thinker until he said something that is true but which differs from Markos's preconceived, and frankly, idiotic notions: "Nuclear energy saves lives."

I will say that my writings at Kos did allow me to befriend a number of scientists of like minds, and thus was worth it. The ownership there is clearly not smart enough to understand environmental issues, but some of the people who wrote me there were.

You've been mildly amusing over the years, but you're reaching the point of obsession that seems, um, Trumpian to me, and, I suspect, with an under current of lacking in self control. One never knows where these kinds of things go, but there's no need to find out.

I think it's time to add you to my small, but pointed, ignore list, which consists entirely of people who I regard as having nothing useful or intelligent to say. Since adding the other two frequent posters in this forum of similar mindlessness, I find I waste less time. So be it here.

Have a nice life, and watch out for that liver, big boy.

[madokie]

13. A few things you might be

but a scientist is not one of them.
I can tell you're happy camper, (not,) by the way it gets under your skin when I mention that you're no longer allowed to post your screeds over at DKO. How long has it been now big guy? how long


Please add me to your ignore list, I'd be honored LOL

Oh btw my liver is fine. Speaking of livers I also notice how it gets under your skin when I mention your drinking. Drunks don't like to be called drunks LOL

have a good rotten day, you deserve it

'smooch'

[jpak]

3. LOL!!!!!!11111

My small town in Maine is host to a multi-MW hydroelectric dam, a multi-MW PV array and I can see a large wind farm in the distance.

Thank the the goddess we don't have any nucular power plants here.

unlike Nucular New Jersey - which is a fraud.

[madokie]

7. Just think the mess we'd have if we indeed did get all

our energy from nuclear. 15000 more nuclear power plants and all that that entails,