NNadir
NNadir's JournalA Recent Thread Not Removed or Deleted Is Not Appearing In the Science Forum Titles.
It refers to an article in a scientific journal.
The post is this one: Nature Energy: An Estimate of the Death Toll Associated with a US Nuclear Power Phase Out.
Oddly it seemed to have received one of 7 recs after disappearing. (I can access it through "My Posts." )
???
Nature Energy: An Estimate of the Death Toll Associated with a US Nuclear Power Phase Out.
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: Freese, L.M., Chossière, G.P., Eastham, S.D. et al. Nuclear power generation phase-outs redistribute US air quality and climate-related mortality risk. Nat Energy 8, 492–503 (2023).
I'm logged into my Nature account; apparently the paper is not open sourced.
Some excerpts:
Of course, there is in this paper lots of reference to so called "renewable energy" and the usual soothsaying that goes with it, although the reality, after the expenditure of a little over 4 trillion dollars in this scam in the period between 2015 and 2023, it has done essentially nothing more other than to accelerate the rate of climate change. After nearly half a century of such soothsaying there is little reason to expect the result will be any different.
The article discusses this thing called "reality:"
These recent shut-downs include the Indian Point Energy Center second reactor, which was shut down in April 2021 because of environmental and safety concerns due to its proximity to New York City11. Browns Ferry and Sequoyah nuclear power plant shut-downs in 1985 led to increased coal use12, as determined by regressions comparing power plant level production in the Tennessee Valley Area before and after the nuclear plant closures. Using similar regressions to assess generation by plants before and after the San Onofre Nuclear Plant (California) shut-down in 2012, ref. 13 found nuclear power plant closure led to increased gas use, as well as increased costs of electricity generation. Recent work has shown that phase-out of nuclear power from 2011 to 2017 in Germany led to replacement by fossil fuels14.
Many antinukes whine when I point out that they just don't give a rat's ass about climate change. The data referenced in the two paragraphs just posted makes this very clear. Even though they can't actually produce numbers that suggest that there is any form of energy with a risk as low as that of nuclear energy, they swear up and down they give a shit about climate change before launching into the usual selective attention balderdash about how "dangerous" nuclear power is. (Compared to what? Climate change?) They're lying.
The article continues:
Previous work has only addressed subnational-level response to nuclear power shut-downs or has quantified regional and globally averaged avoided mortalities from nuclear power use. Using the InMAP reduced form model, ref. 19 found that the shut-down of three nuclear power plants in the Pennsylvania–New Jersey–Maryland region led to increases in PM2.5 resulting in 126 additional mortalities. Another study5 quantified the global historical prevented mortalities and CO2 emissions due to historical and potential future nuclear power generation, using average mortality rates and CO2 emissions rates by electricity type. They project mortalities and CO2 emissions based on energy projections by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency out to 2050, finding that 4.39–7.04 million deaths would be prevented by using nuclear power, rather than fossil fuels, due to lower emissions of air pollutants. Previous work also has not consistently accounted for the potential growth of renewable energy, which has been shown to replace the use of fossil fuels20.
The study breaks down the ethnic distribution of people likely to be killed by nuclear shutdowns.
A figure from the paper:
Fig. 3: Distribution of exposure and mortalities by race and ethnicity for each county in no nuclear.
?as=webp
The caption:
More text:
I was banned some years back at another website, one nowhere near as good as DU, for making the true statement that opposing nuclear energy kills people, referring to James Hansen's seminal 2013 paper stating as much:
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)
Truth has a way of producing scorn. So be it.
The full paper can be accessed at the link in a good University library or by a Nature+ subscription. The authors are from MIT.
Have a nice evening.
My wife finally got around to going through her late Mom's photo albums.
The photos are circulating between the sisters in the order of birth, my wife being second. We're supposed to select the ones we want and pass them on to the next sister. My wife, considerately, isn't taking many she believes her younger sisters would want.
The photos go back to the very early 20th century and even a few from the 19th century. We're not entirely sure who all these people were, but its fun to speculate from the family stories we know. They say you die twice, once physically, and then when no one remembers who you were.
What is striking to me is that my mother-in-law had quite a few pictures of my wife and I from the period before we married and some from the early years of our marriage. This is somewhat surprising since I don't think my mother-in-law particularly liked me at the time, although we worked out our problems eventually.
I guess I looked slightly less dumpy back then, but damn! I'd forgotten how drop dead gorgeous my wife was physically. (She's still drop dead gorgeous, but in a different way.) I do remember all the men hitting on her, but she stuck with me somehow. I was very lucky.
There's one of us standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon - a stranger must have taken it for us - during our trip moving out to California that just blows my mind. I sure looked happy, and I sure know why.
I recall hearing from a colleague that the guys who worked for me at one of the jobs out in California that I held early in my marriage asked him what the hell a woman that beautiful was doing with the likes of me. I kind of laughed it off back then, but I see what they were wondering about.
I don't think I have an answer.
We've been together 40 years, and I still don't have an answer.
Of course, her looks have very little to do with who she is. It is the latter, who she is, that matters in the end.
I just saw a live performance by the greatest drummer I have ever seen.
Dafnis Prieto
Various awards include a 2011 MacArthur Fellowship Award; a GRAMMY Award and a Latin GRAMMY Award nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album for Dafnis Prieto Big Band Back to the Sunset in 2018; a GRAMMY Award nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album for Dafnis Prieto Sextet Transparency in 2021; a GRAMMY Award nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album for Absolute Quintet, and a Latin GRAMMY nomination for “Best New Artist,” in 2007; and “Up & Coming Musician of the Year” by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2006. Also a gifted educator, Prieto has conducted numerous master classes, clinics, and workshops throughout the world. He was a faculty member of Jazz Studies at NYU from 2005 to 2014, and in 2015 became a faculty member of Frost School of Music at UM (University of Miami), where he directs the esteemed Frost Latin Jazz Orchestra.
As a composer, Prieto has created music for dance, film, chamber ensembles, and most notably for his own bands ranging from duets to big bands, including the distinctively different groups featured by nine acclaimed recordings as a leader: About The Monks, Absolute Quintet, Taking The Soul For a Walk, Si o Si Quartet-Live at Jazz Standard, Dafnis Prieto Proverb Trio, Triangles and Circles, Back to the Sunset, Transparency, and Cantar. In 2022 Prieto premiered a new work for Latin band and string orchestra — Tentación — performed by People of Earth with the Louisville Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New World Symphony, and the Britt Festival Orchestra. He has received new works commissions, grants, and fellowships from Chamber Music America; Princeton University; Jazz at Lincoln Center; Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum; National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures; Jerome Foundation; East Carolina University; Painted Bride Art Center; Meet the Composer; WNYC; the Louisville Orchestra, the Britt Festival Orchestra, New Music USA, Hazard Productions, and People of Earth; and the Metropole Orkest...
Liner notes from the Princeton Jazz Festival.
I have been waiting for about 20 years for this paper to appear.
Listen folks, most of what one hears here and elsewhere about addressing what is possibly the most serious issue before humanity since humanity passed out of Africa to the larger world, climate change, is pure bullshit.
I cannot be dissuaded from taking this position, not by people who insipidly mutter "Fukushima" or "Chernobyl" of (even more stupidly) "Three Mile Island," not by people who think that the existence of plutonium inevitably will lead to nuclear war. The entire history of nuclear war, has not killed a tiny fraction of the people killed by fossil fuel wars; the entire history of the accumulation of so called "nuclear waste" has not killed as many people as will die this afternoon from fossil fuel waste, and has killed each and every afternoon of this century.
The last hope of humanity is to convince ourselves to consider things as the are and to prioritize them over the things we imagine through a prism of fear and ignorance.
Because so many of us are in our own ways as ignorant as right wing anti-nuke and antivaxxer Bob Kennedy the 2nd, here's where we are as of this morning with respect to the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2:
Week beginning on April 07, 2024: 425.90 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.68 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 401.36 ppm
Last updated: April 13, 2024
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 4/13/24)
Back in the late 1950's and early 1960s, the American scientists ran an nuclear reactor known as the LAMPRE, (Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor Experiment).
It was in the era of dynamic creativity in the development of nuclear energy which has been described beautifully in a monograph by the former director of ORNL, Alvin Weinberg, who died at the age of 91 in 2006: The First Nuclear Era.
That dynamism was quashed by appeals to fear and ignorance; it was an intellectual infrastructure that was destroyed along with the manufacturing and operational infrastructure in nuclear energy with the result that the planet is in flames.
Now we are in the "build back better" phase of the nuclear intellectual infrastructure; at least I hope we are. To build back, we must reach back to what was lost.
For many years I have in my Google Scholar alerts, a "liquid plutonium" search term; because I despaired of anyone anywhere ever looking as deeply into molten metal fuels. I badger my son, a nuclear engineering Ph.D student, about it from time to time, although his research interests are in nuclear materials as opposed to fuels. (In molten fuels, materials science is indeed critical, liquid plutonium is an excellent solvent. It dissolves steel and many other metals.)
Anyway, this morning the paper I was hoping would show up did.
Here's the link: Molten Fuel Fast Reactor: Concept of Core, Fuel Efficiency, and Safety (V.S. Okunev, 2024 6th International Youth Conference on Radio Electronics, Electrical and Power Engineering (REEPE))
The abstract:
I have downloaded the full paper and will badger my son by sending it to him so it may remain in his mind through his career, a career I hope will be dedicated to saving what is left to save and restoring what can be restored.
As my life winds down in the awful times through which I have lived, observing in a peculiar way the realities, my hope for the future has been challenged. I often think that anything we do will be too little, too late. I have enough hope left to hope I'm wrong.
Dr. Okunev is a Russian scientist, and thus lives in what is now a pariah state. Even in a dark world, there can be places in which light can emerge, and to my mind Dr. Okunev is just that, a light in darkness. I hope this paper gets some attention.
Have a pleasant weekend.
Possible improvements in the electrowinning of the lanthanide elements (aka "rare earths).
I have very little time tonight, and am way, way, way behind on catching up on my reading, but I thought I'd drop a note on processing neodymium, a key metal in electric motors, generators and other devices, which is often described as being a critical material is the so called "green revolution" or "energy transition" that is frequently hyped but are of little consequence.
I'll simply refer to this paper, and excerpt it a little, to show how "green stuff is actually made, coupled with a proposed improvement which may or may not ever be industrialized.
The paper is this:
Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Production of Rare-Earth Metals via Chloride-Based Molten Salt Electrolysis Benjamin Holcombe, Nicholas Sinclair, Ruwani Wasalathanthri, Badri Mainali, Evan Guarr, Alexander A. Baker, Sunday Oluwadamilola Usman, Eunjeong Kim, Shohini Sen-Britain, Hongyue Jin, Scott K. McCall, and Rohan Akolkar, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2024 12 (10), 4186-4193
Presently, REE metal production involves “molten salt electrolysis (MSE)” to convert oxide feedstock into metal. The state-of-the-art method for Nd metal processing uses an oxyfluoride MSE process in which Nd2O3 is dissolved in a molten NdF3–LiF mixture at a temperature exceeding the melting point of Nd (1050–1100 °C). Utilizing a carbon anode, Nd2O3 electrolysis leads to the following overall cell reaction: (4)
This method has several drawbacks, which prohibit its widespread deployment. (5−8) The process necessitates the oxidative consumption of a carbon anode, producing carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas (GHG). Annual global production of about 70,000 tonnes of Nd results in the emission of about 16 thousand tonnes of direct CO2. (9) Although this rate of CO2 emission is small in comparison to other metal production processes (e.g., Al or steel production), advancements in electric motors and the push toward green energy is predicted to increase Nd demand by at least fourfold by 2030 with steady growth thereafter. Another disadvantage of oxyfluoride electrolysis is that at high current densities, the fluoride ions produce perfluorocarbons (PFCs), such as CF4 and C2F6 at the anode, which are GHGs with very large global warming potentials (GWPs). Over time, the “consumable” carbon anode uncontrollably increases the interelectrode gap and thus the cell voltage, making process control and scale-up difficult, as well as increasing energy consumption. Finally, the consumable anode necessitates “batch” operation wherein significant energy is wasted in cell heat-up and cool-down cycles, lowering process energy efficiency. These drawbacks make oxyfluoride MSE unattractive for scale-up from a safety, cost, or sustainability point-of-view in geographical locations with stringent environmental regulations...
The authors propose dissolving the oxide in HCl and electrorefining NdCl3 in an KCl/LiCl eutectic. The chlorine is oxidized on a "dimensionally stable titanium electrode coated with RuO2.
Neodymium is a component of used nuclear fuel and can be recovered from it for use. Many molten salt proposals have been made for the recovery of valuable elements from used nuclear fuel, and this technique might merit in some part of the process, being put to use for recovery of fission product lanthanides, notably lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium and neodymium. Thereupon the recovered elements could be sold to industy.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
An Extremely Interesting View of Four Presidents and the Constitution.
I saw this extremely interesting lecture this weekend on CSPAN History.
Four Presidents and the Constitution.
The Lecture was held at Wheatfield, the home of the President long considered the worst in historian polls, James Buchanan, until Donald Trump came along to relieve him of that dubious honor.
The Presidents discussed are Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln.
In the most recent Historians Poll these men ranked respectively 39th, 42nd, 44th and first.
Donnie rescued 44 from the bottom by being 45th.
One of the above four listed (excluding Donnie) played fast and loose with the Constitution.
There are some scary and pointed (but not explicit) points made at the end of the lecture.
Earthquake on Friday, my mother's hundredth birthday over the weekend, today an eclipse.
Woo....woo...woo...
If my Mom is going to rise from the dead, this would be a perfect time to do it.
This would be a perfect time to have some superstitions, but I'm too old for that now.
As for the birthday, I challenged my late father, who never missed an opportunity on his mother's birthday that if she'd lived she'd be 115. He himself died around his mother's 103rd birthday or so.
When my grandmother died at 89, all of her still living sisters gathered around the casket and said, "She was so young." I guess that means I'm still a child, a happy thought.
Anybody carrying around a load of Sehnsucht lately?
I'm kind of done with it myself.
Sehnsucht
ˈzānˌzo͝oKHt
NOUN
Yearning; wistful longing.
Somehow, without understanding how it happened at all, I found myself with a word of the day news feed. I kind of like it, but wouldn't have any sehnsucht for it if it stopped.
This was one of the offerings I didn't already know.
A New Record Concentration for CO2, 426.35 ppm Has Been Set at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.
I have just deleted an earlier post on the new record since the Mauna Loa Observatory has revised the data since yesterday.Earlier this morning the readings were as follows:
Week beginning on March 31, 2024: 426.71 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.64 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.97 ppm
Last updated: April 06, 2024
The data has been revised during the time I was writing the earlier post
The revised data, still shows a record for all time, but the increase over week 13 of 2023 is not quite as large, and not in the top 50 of all time, although still disturbing. (See Below)
As I've indicated repeatedly in my DU writings, somewhat obsessively I keep spreadsheets of the of the daily, weekly, monthly and annual data at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I use to do calculations to record the dying of our atmosphere, a triumph of fear, dogma and ignorance that did not have to be, but nonetheless is, a fact.
Facts matter.
When writing these depressing repeating posts about new records being set, reminiscent, over the years, to the ticking of a clock at a deathwatch, I often repeat some of the language from a previous post on this awful series, as I am doing here with some modifications. It saves time.
Here's a recent post referring to weekly data:
2024's Unprecedented Terror At the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory Continues.
Yesterday in another post I noted that March 2024 was the absolute worst month ever recorded with respect to increases over the previous year's average readings:
March 2024 Was the Worst Month Ever for CO2 Increases Measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 Observatory.
We now have the highest concentration ever recorded for a weekly average reading at the Observatory:
Week beginning on March 31, 2024: 426.35 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 422.64 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 400.97 ppm
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
I've been at this for a long time, and I've never seen anything quite like the beginning of 2024, and the shock continues week after week of this year.
We are in the 13th week of 2024.
The increase over week 13 of 2023 is 3.71 ppm.
Week 5 (5.75 ppm higher than week 5 of 2023), week 7( 5.53 ppm higher than week 7 of 2023) , and week 10 (5.66 ppm higher than week 10 of 2023,) represent three of only four such week to week comparators with readings of the previous year to exceed a 5.00 ppm increase. The only other such an increase to exceed 5.00 ppm occurred in 2016, the previous "worst year ever" in CO2 accumulations, 5.04 ppm recorded in the week beginning July 31, 2016, week 28 when compared with week 28 of 2015.
The year is still young.
Of the top 50 highest readings of the difference between weeks of the year with those of the previous year out of the 2514 such data points, 15 have taken place in the last 5 years, 35 in the last 10 years, and 44 in this century. Of the six readings from the 20th century, four occurred in 1998, when huge stretches of the Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests caught fire when slash and burn fires designed to add palm oil plantations to satisfy the demand for "renewable" biodiesel for German cars and trucks as part of their "renewable energy portfolio" went out of control.
One of the other two readings of the 20th century, those not in 1998, to appear in the list of the 50 worst such increases is now the 49th highest, 3.79 ppm recorded during the week beginning 1/24/1999. The other reading from the 20th century to appear in the top 50 comparators with that of the previous year beginning 8/21/1988, (3.91 ppm over the same week of 1987, week 34) was the worst such week ever for ten years, until 1998. It is now the 31st worst such week ever recorded.
Since the first week of the year 2000, the week beginning January 2 of that year, the increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the collapsing planetary atmosphere has been 57.65 ppm.
Since I joined DU in late November 2022, when, then as now, the main issue on my mind is the relationship between energy and the environment, the increase in the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 has been 53.78 ppm.
In my tenure at DU, during which I have been a tireless advocate for nuclear energy, right through the big exceedingly stupid brouhaha about Fukushima, where deaths from seawater approached 20,000 and deaths from radiation are vanishingly small, if extant at all. Since the Tohoku earthquake that destroyed a city where nuclear reactors were situated, the concentration of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide has risen by 33.97 ppm.
And let's be clear, climate change kills people, threatening far more coast cities with inundation with seawater than the city destroyed (by seawater) during the Tohoku earthquake.
In reaction to these obscene numbers, I've heard endlessly from people for whom I have no intellectual, moral, scientific, professional or educational respect, all about Chernobyl, and then about Fukushima, as if these fucking trivial events matter in comparison to an entire planet in flames. The appalling indecency of these tiresome, if popular, fools, to my mind, is on a Trumpian scale:
The number of people killed by air pollution at a rate of 6 to 7 million people per year since Chernobyl in April of 1986 is between 230 million and 270 million human beings; since March of 2011, the death toll from the same cause, air pollution, has been between 80 and 90 million human beings since the disgusting distraction obsession with Fukushima began, continuing right up to this day, working to advance the use of dangerous fossil fuels, about which the mindless antinuke community of intellectual and moral Lilliputians could not care less. These death tolls do not include the vast death tolls associated with climate change, extreme weather, heat stroke, etc...
Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249)
Climate change was already killing people with heat exposure around the time I started writing here:
Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003 Robine et al., Comptes Rendus Biologie, 331 (2008) 2, 171-178.
Things are unambiguously much worse in 2024 than they were in 2003.
Some other stuff I say while reporting on this 2024 disaster, the one going under the radar while we all whine and carry on about things other than a planet in flames, our planet:
Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
There is some statistical noise in these readings, but the overall trends are clear enough, inescapable, dire, terrifying, even as they are largely ignored or swept from attention by cheap diversions:
In spite of these ever worsening and ever more astounding numbers - people lie to each other and to themselves but numbers don't lie - you will still find people mindlessly cheering for fantasies about bourgeois toys that do nothing to address climate change, be they electric cars, solar cells and/or wind turbines, all of which are exercises in promoting the use of fossil fuels, the destruction of wilderness, and the demand for mining. We also have people here and elsewhere selling fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen," the production of hydrogen, which overwhelmingly made from fossil fuels, involving exergy destruction and thus driving climate change faster along with all of the other public fantasies.
A new wrinkle I've just observed here is the same fossil fuel salespeople who prattle on mindlessly and exceedingly dishonestly about rebranding fossil fuels as "hydrogen" (with exergy destruction) are now carrying on about "geoengineering." There's nothing surprising about this, the fossil fuel industry is very good at manufacturing dishonest distractions while pretending to be "green," and, worse, having people buy into the bullshit they handout.
A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.
Even Exxon has joined the distraction show in pretending to give a shit about climate change. Clearly they don't; never have and never will.
The big lie people tell themselves and each other, egged on by fossil fuel interests, that these pixilated reactionary schemes, electric cars, solar cells, wind turbines, hydrogen, "geoengineering," sequestration blah, blah, blah is "doing something" about climate change. This is nonsense. That it is nonsense is clearly shown, again, by the numbers. The reactionary scheme of carrying on about so called "renewable energy" that led us here was never about climate change or any other environmental issue and the claim that it is is an afterthought. It was always about attacking the only realistic alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear energy.
Up to the present, there has never been anything quite like 2024, again, a young year, but the really scary thought is that in the future 2024 might seem ordinary.
The antinukes won and humanity, and in general, the rest of the biosphere lost.
We're clueless.
Enjoy the rest of Sunday.
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