Why call it "clean energy" given the statement of the problem?
People keep talking about the so called "energy transition" to what is advertised as "clean energy."
It's become an almost Pavlovian chant, but the realities are beginning, too slowly perhaps, to sink in. Despite trillions of dollars thrown at solar and wind energy in this century, we are more dependent on dangerous fossil fuels than ever. The reality is that there is no "clean energy transition."
We've been seeing concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide rising at an accelerating rate while we chase more and more after the objects of the increasingly idiotic chants.
I assume that many people know this, including many in the scientific community where, nonetheless, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of papers offer suggestions on what we'll do with all this solar and wind energy we really haven't seen, are not seeing, and won't see. One needs to genuflect to the alabaster idol of so called "renewable energy" to get grants, I suppose.
But a little noise is being made, tenuous noise so as not to offend the idol, about some realities.
Consider this editorial in the current issue of Science:
The matter of a clean energy future
Studies project that producing the materials to enable a clean energy transition will be a massive undertaking. The International Energy Agency forecasts that keeping the world on a path compatible with the goals of the Paris Climate Accord will require expanding production of energy-relevant materials six-fold between 2020 and 2040, to 43 million tons per year. At first glance, that may seem to pale in comparison to the fossil fuel industries, which produced roughly 15 billion tons of coal, oil, and natural gas globally in 2020 alone and added 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when burned.
But the transition will be even more difficult than it first appears. Nickel, cobalt, and copper and many other energy-relevant materials occur in low-grade ores, which entail far more mining, processing, and waste than fossil fuels. Securing the millions of tons of finished materials needed will require mining hundreds or thousands of times more raw ore. Although this transition will ultimately lower greenhouse gas emissions, especially as more renewable energy powers mining processes, it will require processing metal ores at a scale that rivals the material throughput of today’s fossil fuel industries.
The potential harms of such a transition are considerable. Large-scale mining affects ecosystems, threatens water supplies, and is sometimes linked to poor working conditions, corruption, and human rights abuses...
Nevertheless, let's all sing Kumbaya and make promises we have no intention of keeping:
Why call it "clean energy?" It's, um, filthy. The low energy to mass density is appalling and unsustainable.
Are we really only going to mine to make this junk when the weather is nice and cooperates, when the wind is blowing at just the right speed and the sun is shining brightly and everyone shows up to work in the solar hydrogen fueled trucks whenever it is?
The poster boy for the energy is Germany, the country that financed most of the war in Ukraine. They can't burn coal fast enough as of this week, Late in June, 2022, after decades of loudly proclaimed bullshit about Energiewende for decades. It's not an energy turnaround. It's a coal driven disaster.
Climate change will only be addressed when we stop lying to ourselves.
These are serious, increasingly disturbing times, religious bigots in office for life on the far right legislating from a corrupt and illegitimate bench, savage dictators on wars of conquest, and, on top of it all - whether we concentrate on it or not - a collapsing planet.
Again, we need to stop lying to ourselves.
Have a nice weekend.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Chernobyl has developed into a major reserve, and an outstanding scientific laboratory for understanding radiation effects.
Now we know - anyone with a modicum of education anyway - that many scientists live and work there. I wrote about one in this space: Where I Work: Chernobyl.
We've already destroyed hundreds of thousands of square miles of pristine wilderness to render them into industrial parks to satisfy the preternaturally stupid, but Chernobyl, as a largely undisturbed ecological zone, regrettably recent disturbed by the Russian aggression financed by that wind and solar hellhole, Germany, doesn't need to be further fucked up by morons.
Polesie State Radioecological Reserve
Why fuck up more land for the stupid bourgeois wind fantasy that's killing the planet with complacency.
There are oodles upon oodles of scientific papers on the subject of the exclusion zone, it's flora and its fauna, but I chose a Wikipedia page because I know the scientific literacy of anti-nukes is low, and a scientific reference is beyond their reading level. I also readily understand their hatred of science.
In any case, one would need to be a total moron, totally uninformed, totally vapid to compare Chernobyl to climate change.
Regrettably, there are too many people with exactly that mentality. One thing is very clear, exactly like their intellectual equivalents, anti-vaxxers, anti-nukes have very selective attention, elevating the trivial over the real.
These idiots have no fucking idea about comparisons between the death toll at Chernobyl, about which they've stuck their brainless heads up their asses for the last 38 years, and the death toll in Pakistan last month from climate change.
The sad thing about ignoramuses is they're not only loud, they're persistent and they're unashamed of demonstrating exactly how little they know, how little they care, and frankly, how bat shit crazy they are.
...or the river ecosystems destroyed by dams?
One wonders when the assholes repeating this delusional shit ever bother to cite something called data.
Which of these numbers is too difficult to comprehend?
Source: IEA World Energy Outlook, 2021, page 294, Table A1A
How many times does one have to add 5.7 and 4.7 to get 10.4 and compare it to 29.4 before we stop hearing this tiresome bullshit lie? Are we still in the 5th grade?
Or have we just spent the 43 years hiding in our closets whining about Three Mile Island and wondering if everyone in Harrisburg is going to die?
Well?
We're half a century into this "solar and wind" are faster to build than nuclear delusional chant, and still, after squandering trillions of dollars, and still we are expected to believe Orwellian math, 10.4 is greater than 29.4.
As for this stupid shit about "free fuel" one would do well to read the editorial about mining to support this useless and dead fantasy, or perhaps pull one's head out one's ass to figure out what the environmental, human, and economic cost of the coal the Germans can't stop burning.
Germany Set to Increase Coal-Fired Generation in Face of Gas Crunch.
Free? Free, my ass. Everybody and everything that ever lives on this planet will be paying with flesh for Energiewende.
If we're talking about biofuels, the fact that half a century of prattling about them, climate change has placed the world food supply in danger.
I covered the environmental and moral cost of biofuels already in response to another "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinuke:
The Very Stable Genius of Biofuels.
The people who make excuses for the wind and solar industry's failure to produce significant energy anywhere on this planet, keep burying that failure by appealing to biofuels and hydro without bothering to notice what's happening to those systems because of climate change, which all the chanting, lying, misrepresentation, fantasy, cannot stop.
Numbers:
Week beginning on June 12, 2022: 421.03 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 419.00 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 396.07 ppm
Last updated: June 25, 2022
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Which of these numbers is too difficult to grasp?
For the whole last decade, while the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide rose by 25.96 we've been hearing this shit, 10.4 is greater than 29.4, and it doesn't stop?
The anti-nukes who keep referring to Vogtle are, once again, fucking arsonists complaining about forest fires. Once again, to get it through their tiny brains, the United States built more than 100 nuclear reactors in 25 years while supplying the cheapest electricity in the OECD, for decades. They have routinely acted with contempt for engineering, contempt for science, did everything in their power to destroy nuclear engineering programs with nitpicking balderdash, ripped the shit out of virgin ecosystems for land intensive wind crap that will be useless junk in less than 10 decades, and yet, and yet, and yet, they are always willing to display that they have no sense of decency, no sense of shame.
Now, while people die all over the world from extreme heat, while Germany announces plants to burn coal and shut its industries there are young people who have taken Kathryn Huff's call to action, to rebuild our nuclear manufacturing infrastructure.
We have lost a lot of capability to build big complex engineering projects on time and on budget.
Why have we lost that capability, one might ask, when China just brought it's sixth reactor at Hongyanhe on line, the first four in six years, the next two in five. Why? Why is a nation that built 100 reactors in 25 years designed by engineers who basically worked with slide rules apply 1960's technology having delays at Vogtle? Is it just to give idiot anti-nukes another triviality to scream about when they take breaths between screaming about Three Mile Island and Fukushima while the planet burns, or does it reflect something more dire?
I know the answer to that question. Unlike the liars who want to tell me they're not anti-nukes, because being one is morally, intellectually, and factually the same as being an antivaxxer, although anti-nukes have killed more people, given the losses to air pollution and now, climate change, I'm literate.
As for nuclear engineering, I'm very aware of what's happening in the new world before us. My son's on the front lines to defeat the fear and ignorance that has literally, very literally, left the world aflame.
I don't chant. I back up what I say with data, with facts. It is a fact that 10.4 is not greater than 29.4.
Facts matter.
One should not be allowed to graduate from the third grade if one can't grasp that 29.4 is greater than 10.4. You certainly can't get into an engineering program if you can't compare those numbers and recognize which is greater.
Have a wonderful Sunday.
...(gasp) a newspaper or even (bigger gasp) a scientific paper and read all about it.
I know why the rivers are dying. It's called "climate change." Why do we have "climate change?" Well among many reasons we had a wide set of people prattling on about shit like "Three Mile Island" for over four decades and announcing that "we don't need nuclear energy" because solar and wind are so great.
"Don't need nuclear..."
We don't, huh?
Week beginning on June 19, 2022: 420.87 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.62 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 395.92 ppm
Last updated: June 26, 2022
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Updated today. That's 24.95 ppm higher than the figure just ten years ago. For the last ten years, and the ten years before that we've heard "wind and solar" can be built faster than nuclear.
This was coupled with the following rhetoric:
"We don't need nuclear...because wind and solar are so fucking great..."
The people handing out this line never gave a shit about fossil fuels and there's very little evidence that they do now.
Well the Germans acted on that bullshit claim. They're burning coal with lip service to the people they're killing because Fukushima was the end of the world in their minds. They, even this late in the game, with all the money they sent to Putin to blow Ukrainians to pieces, they still say "nuclear energy" (and only nuclear energy) is "too dangerous."
You know, according the Reuters article I cited here recently in this post, As Russia cuts gas, German industry grapples with painful choices, the German company...
Top copper smelter? You don't say?
How's this going to affect all that copper necessary to string thousands upon thousands upon thousands of square miles of wind turbines together when they can't produce as much electricity as Hongyanhe nuclear plant produces in six nuclear reactors continuously, without stringing wires across thousands of square miles.
(To be fair, right now as of this writing Germany, where the carbon intensity of its electricity is 440 grams of CO2/kwh, compared to France's 84 grams CO2/kwh is producing slightly more power than Hongyanhe can, 7.76 GW, in "percent talk" 41% of the amount of electricity is producing by burning coal, 18.7 GW. France as of this writing is producing zero GW of power by burning coal and injecting the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere.)
What I heard in this space, as I've been hearing for decades, is that wind and solar are fast growing, growing faster than nuclear. In other words, that 10.4 is greater than 29.4. This claim is accompanied with cherry picked mumbling about Vogtle, which unlike every fucking wind turbine in this country now waiting for the wind to blow, will still be operating in 2050, this while the people screwed by anti-nukes will be trying to find fuel to haul the carcasses of every damned wind turbine now operating in this country away.
What's the theory, that 5.7 + 4.7 in 2020 has been replaced by 150 + 250?
That's the excuse? It took 50 years of cheering, and trillions of dollars to get solar and wind combined to 10.4 exajoules, and now, and now, and now, with the planet afire, people dying all over it from heat exhaustion, it's much, much, much, much bigger than 29.4, which is pretty close to the amount of primary energy the nuclear industry has producing for three decades in a climate of hostility and fear and ignorance about people who whine that "it cost too much to clean up Three Mile Island to save zero lives" but cleaning up after the failure of the solar and wind industry to do anything to address climate change, cleaning up from climate change will be cheap?.
Let's be fucking clear on something OK? The nuclear reactor manufacturing infrastructure in this county was destroyed by the dubious claim "we didn't need it." This bullshit has been going on since the 1970's:
2020 was fucking 44 years after Amory Lovins, hero of the anti-nukes, published his bullshit paper implying that solar energy would...
Lovins, Amory "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Foreign Affairs, October 1976 pp 65-96, excerpt found on page 76.
(A quad = 1.055 Exajoules.)
So I'm stupid? I don't know that to satisfy their oil soaked hero Amory, the solar industry just dug up 11.4 exajoules "only" 22 years late, even though Amory was referring to his fellow bourgeois provincials and not the whole fucking planet? After over three trillion dollars squandered on wind and solar energy between 2004 and 2019 to produce just 10.4 exajoules of wind and solar, 4.7 of them from solar, "by 2020" we now found 11.4 exajoules in just two years?
That's the claim?
I'm supposed to be that stupid? That's the assumption.
"Only" 22 years later. I'm an environmentalist, not an asshole staring at pictures of wind turbines and solar cells while waxing down the Tesla in the 4 car garage.
As an environmentalist, do any of our "OH MY GOD THREE MILE ISLAND!!!!!" "I'm not an antinuke" anti-nukes have any idea what "only" 22 years means to me? Let me spell it out in numbers. The week beginning June 19, 2022 is the 24th week of the year. The 24th week of the year 2000 was that beginning on June 11, 2000. The concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide - the fossil fuel waste Germany is dumping directly into the planetary atmosphere because they're terrified of used nuclear fuel staying in casks contained on site - was 371.73 ppm.
So that's what "only" 22 years means to me: 49.14 ppm of CO2 that cannot be recovered without reproducing all of the energy produced in putting it there, plus oodles and oodles and oodles of energy to overcome the entropy of mixing.
As for rivers, I am, and always have been a "free river" kind of guy. While I'm not a member of the modern "Sierra" Club, a club of people in modern times who, while waxing their Teslas, never saw a wilderness they couldn't trash with wind turbines, I remain rather attached to the legacy of the club's founder, John Muir, who founded it as part of a losing effort to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite from a dam.
John Muir: The Hetch Hetchy.
It doesn't matter what I think however. Dams or no dams, the damned rivers are dying, everywhere, on every continent except Antarctica, where the are appearing, much to the distress of humanity.
All the muttering about ships and irrigation make no difference.
I note that I have thought about water supplies: The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination. I would recommend that anti-nukes not read what I wrote - hardly an ideal solution but a better dream than California falling dead on the corpse of the Colorado River - because it involves science, specifically the phase diagram of seawater.
As for "fast growing" solar and wind, and "that was 2020, and now it's 2022," Peewee Herman level rhetoric:
I rather like the remark made by Professor Phyllis Gardner referring to Elizabeth Holmes in another context, "Excuses are like assholes, everybody has one."
There is no excuse for elevating a fantasy to attack our best tool to address climate change, by far, nuclear energy, really our only option. I don't give a fuck about people who whine about Three Mile Island but never look at the people dying today from German coal pollution. The whole game, like Holmes' Theranos, has been a scam, and every living thing on this planet has been and will be affected by the cost of this scam, a cost incalculable. The solar and wind fantasy did not work to address the goals of it's earliest adherents, the destruction of the nuclear industry, nor did it work to do what they added on as an afterthought, address climate change.
It didn't work.
It isn't working.
It won't work.
Burning coal, as the "we don't need nuclear" Germans are doing, kills people whenever the coal plants operate normally:
Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.
Table 2 therein:
That's a fact.
Facts matter.
Excuses, particularly excuses made at an enormous cost to all humanity and indeed, all living things, matter only inasmuch as they define disgrace. The very black mark, as black as coal, in history, that the people who committed these crimes against humanity will wear will never be erased. All the tortured, weaseling evasions in the world will not erase it. That outcome is clear.
Have a pleasant workweek.