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NNadir
NNadir's Journal
NNadir's Journal
May 1, 2022
A graphic from it.
Some excerpts:
With due respect to Dr. Mac Dowell, it's quite possible that he may be missing some things, as is the chart above, since both rely on some assumptions about energy as well as carbon sources.
If the carbon is captured from the environment - direct air capture while possibly viable seems from my perspective to be the least likely option, but I hold some respect to dry reforming of some biomass, as well as seawater capture (about which I am currently writing) the carbon cycle is closed and there is no need to dump 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere.
Secondly, there is no mention of metal carbides, nor of carbon fibers, nor any of the highly useful allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and teh like. (I expect metal carbides - steel is, in a sense, an example, although the carbon source is currently coal - to play a big role in any sustainable economy which may exist.
On the first point the article continues a little further on:
This of course, represents energy storage, which is always conducted at a thermodynamic loss. This said, if the storage results from the storage of energy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere - this requires high temperatures and modern refractory materials - it may make sense.
Intriguing is this open sourced paper from open sourced Science Advances: Asmita Jana and Taishan Zhu and Yanming Wang and Jeramie J. Adams and Logan T. Kearney and Amit K. Naskar and Jeffrey C. Grossman and Nicola Ferralis, Atoms to fibers: Identifying novel processing methods in the synthesis of pitch-based carbon fibers. Science Advances , 8, 11,eabn1905, 2022.
This paper discusses the fact that carbon fibers, while extremely useful, currently are 4 times as expensive as aluminum, and details some process details that make it so. The current process begins with the polymerization of acrylonitrile, itself obtained from dangerous fossil fuels in the form of propene and ammonia which is made from hydrogen and nitrogen gas, the bulk of the world's hydrogen in turn also being produced from dangerous fossil fuels.
However a process is known to produce propene from methanol is well known: Yarulina, I., De Wispelaere, K., Bailleul, S. et al. Structure–performance descriptors and the role of Lewis acidity in the methanol-to-propylene process. Nature Chem 10, 804–812 (2018). It is well known that methanol can be synthesized from the hydrogenation of, um, carbon dioxide. (In fact, about 10% of the world's hydrogen, currently is devoted to methanol synthesis, as I noted in another thread: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.) Again, most of the world's hydrogen is currently produced from dangerous fossil fuels, but it is possible to engage in clean hydrogen production utilizing thermochemical water splitting, with a clean primary energy source, of which there is only one, nuclear energy.
From the Science Advances paper, it is clear that another driver of the cost of carbon fibers is heat, and thus high temperature exchange networks theoretically, and likely practically, can be used to reduce this heat cost via high thermodynamic efficiency.
It thus seems conceivable that the cost of carbon fibers may be well significantly released. Nor is the point of the Science Advances paper unworthy of consideration, the management of pitch. Pitch is generally a dangerous fossil fuel product consisting of a highly heterogenous and structurally complex set of molecules falling into a class called "asphaltenes." Much recent work utilizing very high resolution mass spectrometry - that of FT-ICR-MS - has been devoted to understanding the structure of asphaltenes. It is also true that asphaltenes are often a side product of the pyrolysis of biomass, and/or plastic wastes. This suggests yet another route to carbon fibers that depends on carbon dioxide effectively removed from the air. Structural elucidation is the first step on the way to specifications, and specifications define the goals of process chemistry and allow for its development.
I therefore suspect that perhaps, again, it is Dr. Mac Dowell who may be guilty of being disingenuous. With clean, sustainable primary energy - again there is one form and only one form, nuclear energy - carbon utilization in economically viable ways certainly seems promising.
We shall see.
From my perspective carbon dioxide utilization is far superior to carbon dumps. All of our pursuits of addressing climate change have failed, but some are worthy of further evaluation and research and some are not. The article and the chart above have not left me without a sense of some hard won optimism.
The key to this problem is, in my view, materials science, a subject in which a golden age may well emerge. We should hope so.
I trust you will have a nice evening.
A graphic on "making stuff out of CO2" and the time scale of sequestration by "stuff."
This came into my Nature Briefing email some weeks back and I never got around to posting it. The general idea is one of which I'm quite fond, but the graphic calls my enthusiasm in question, at least to some extent.
It's from here: The race to upcycle CO2 into fuels, concrete and more
Subtitle:
Companies are scrambling to turn the greenhouse gas into useful products — but will that slow climate change?
A graphic from it.
Some excerpts:
Tongyezhen is a town with coal in its bones. In this part of China’s Henan province, people have been mining coal and smelting metals for millennia. Today, Tongyezhen hosts a sprawling industrial park where huge ovens bake coal and limestone into coke and lime, both key ingredients for producing steel. Unsurprisingly, it is one of the smoggiest places in China.
It might seem an unlikely venue for a clean-technology milestone. But later this year, a chemical plant here is set to become the world’s largest facility for recycling carbon dioxide into fuel. It will combine CO2 from a lime kiln with excess hydrogen and CO2 from a coking furnace to produce methanol, an industrial chemical used for fuel and to make plastics. Carbon Recycling International (CRI), the Reykjavik-based firm behind the operation, says that the Tongyezhen plant will recycle about 160,000 tonnes of CO2 per year — equivalent to the emissions from tens of thousands of cars — that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.
It’s an alluring idea: industrial CO2 emissions are warming the climate, and many countries are working on capturing the gas and storing it underground. But why not recycle it into products that are both virtuous and profitable? As long as the recycling process avoids creating more carbon emissions — by using renewable energy, or excess resources that would otherwise be wasted — it can reduce the CO2 that industry pumps into the atmosphere and lower the demand for fossil fuels used in manufacturing. That’s a double climate win, proponents say.
This kind of recycling (sometimes called upcycling) is an increasingly crowded field, as companies big and small race to market a bewildering array of products made from CO2. Some are boutique items for the climate-conscious shopper — vodka or diamonds, for example — but most are staples of the global economy: fuels, polymers, other chemicals and building materials. More than 80 firms are working on new approaches to using CO2, noted a 2021 report by Lux Research, a market-research company in Boston, Massachusetts. The market for these products is tiny today, amounting to less than US$1 billion — but Lux predicts that it will grow to $70 billion by 2030, and could reach $550 billion by 2040...
...But there are tough questions about whether CO2 recycling genuinely benefits the climate. Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO2 consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that the global market for recycled CO2 products is unlikely to lock up more than a few per cent of the CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which totalled 36 billion tonnes last year. CRI’s plant, for one, will convert the equivalent of a little over 2 minutes’ worth of annual global CO2 emissions. “We can avoid a lot of that, for a lot less money, than we can by turning CO2 into stuff,” says Niall Mac Dowell, an energy-systems engineer at Imperial College London.
“The assumption that we can fix this climate-change problem in an economically attractive and easy way — at best it’s naive, and at worst it’s actively disingenuous,” he says. It’s an argument that’s heating up as CO2 recycling goes mainstream....
It might seem an unlikely venue for a clean-technology milestone. But later this year, a chemical plant here is set to become the world’s largest facility for recycling carbon dioxide into fuel. It will combine CO2 from a lime kiln with excess hydrogen and CO2 from a coking furnace to produce methanol, an industrial chemical used for fuel and to make plastics. Carbon Recycling International (CRI), the Reykjavik-based firm behind the operation, says that the Tongyezhen plant will recycle about 160,000 tonnes of CO2 per year — equivalent to the emissions from tens of thousands of cars — that would otherwise go into the atmosphere.
It’s an alluring idea: industrial CO2 emissions are warming the climate, and many countries are working on capturing the gas and storing it underground. But why not recycle it into products that are both virtuous and profitable? As long as the recycling process avoids creating more carbon emissions — by using renewable energy, or excess resources that would otherwise be wasted — it can reduce the CO2 that industry pumps into the atmosphere and lower the demand for fossil fuels used in manufacturing. That’s a double climate win, proponents say.
This kind of recycling (sometimes called upcycling) is an increasingly crowded field, as companies big and small race to market a bewildering array of products made from CO2. Some are boutique items for the climate-conscious shopper — vodka or diamonds, for example — but most are staples of the global economy: fuels, polymers, other chemicals and building materials. More than 80 firms are working on new approaches to using CO2, noted a 2021 report by Lux Research, a market-research company in Boston, Massachusetts. The market for these products is tiny today, amounting to less than US$1 billion — but Lux predicts that it will grow to $70 billion by 2030, and could reach $550 billion by 2040...
...But there are tough questions about whether CO2 recycling genuinely benefits the climate. Many of the products made this way only briefly delay carbon’s journey into the atmosphere — fuels are burnt, products made from chemicals degrade and the CO2 consumed during their creation is released again. That will happen at Tongyezhen: much of the methanol produced is destined to be burnt as fuel in China’s growing fleet of methanol-powered vehicles.
Meanwhile, some estimates suggest that the global market for recycled CO2 products is unlikely to lock up more than a few per cent of the CO2 that humans release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, which totalled 36 billion tonnes last year. CRI’s plant, for one, will convert the equivalent of a little over 2 minutes’ worth of annual global CO2 emissions. “We can avoid a lot of that, for a lot less money, than we can by turning CO2 into stuff,” says Niall Mac Dowell, an energy-systems engineer at Imperial College London.
“The assumption that we can fix this climate-change problem in an economically attractive and easy way — at best it’s naive, and at worst it’s actively disingenuous,” he says. It’s an argument that’s heating up as CO2 recycling goes mainstream....
With due respect to Dr. Mac Dowell, it's quite possible that he may be missing some things, as is the chart above, since both rely on some assumptions about energy as well as carbon sources.
If the carbon is captured from the environment - direct air capture while possibly viable seems from my perspective to be the least likely option, but I hold some respect to dry reforming of some biomass, as well as seawater capture (about which I am currently writing) the carbon cycle is closed and there is no need to dump 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide directly into the atmosphere.
Secondly, there is no mention of metal carbides, nor of carbon fibers, nor any of the highly useful allotropes of carbon, nanotubes and teh like. (I expect metal carbides - steel is, in a sense, an example, although the carbon source is currently coal - to play a big role in any sustainable economy which may exist.
On the first point the article continues a little further on:
Life-cycle arguments
Whether products recycled from industrial CO2 emissions actually protect the climate is unclear — because the CO2 they capture will still be released into the atmosphere if the molecules are burnt or broken down. Drawing CO2 directly from the atmosphere could have clearer climate benefits, but capturing the gas from air is extremely expensive, as are products made that way.
Proponents argue that recycling industrial CO2 into chemicals can reduce emissions in another way — by avoiding some fossil-fuel-based production. “Our process helps keep fossil fuels in the ground by tapping into existing streams of CO2,” a spokesperson for Twelve told Nature.
The stringent way to examine this is through a life-cycle analysis (LCA) — a detailed accounting of the carbon involved in making and using a product, from the origins of its CO2 to its final fate. Many CO2-recycling firms say they have done these audits, but don’t publish them because they contain proprietary information...
Whether products recycled from industrial CO2 emissions actually protect the climate is unclear — because the CO2 they capture will still be released into the atmosphere if the molecules are burnt or broken down. Drawing CO2 directly from the atmosphere could have clearer climate benefits, but capturing the gas from air is extremely expensive, as are products made that way.
Proponents argue that recycling industrial CO2 into chemicals can reduce emissions in another way — by avoiding some fossil-fuel-based production. “Our process helps keep fossil fuels in the ground by tapping into existing streams of CO2,” a spokesperson for Twelve told Nature.
The stringent way to examine this is through a life-cycle analysis (LCA) — a detailed accounting of the carbon involved in making and using a product, from the origins of its CO2 to its final fate. Many CO2-recycling firms say they have done these audits, but don’t publish them because they contain proprietary information...
This of course, represents energy storage, which is always conducted at a thermodynamic loss. This said, if the storage results from the storage of energy that would otherwise be rejected to the atmosphere - this requires high temperatures and modern refractory materials - it may make sense.
Intriguing is this open sourced paper from open sourced Science Advances: Asmita Jana and Taishan Zhu and Yanming Wang and Jeramie J. Adams and Logan T. Kearney and Amit K. Naskar and Jeffrey C. Grossman and Nicola Ferralis, Atoms to fibers: Identifying novel processing methods in the synthesis of pitch-based carbon fibers. Science Advances , 8, 11,eabn1905, 2022.
This paper discusses the fact that carbon fibers, while extremely useful, currently are 4 times as expensive as aluminum, and details some process details that make it so. The current process begins with the polymerization of acrylonitrile, itself obtained from dangerous fossil fuels in the form of propene and ammonia which is made from hydrogen and nitrogen gas, the bulk of the world's hydrogen in turn also being produced from dangerous fossil fuels.
However a process is known to produce propene from methanol is well known: Yarulina, I., De Wispelaere, K., Bailleul, S. et al. Structure–performance descriptors and the role of Lewis acidity in the methanol-to-propylene process. Nature Chem 10, 804–812 (2018). It is well known that methanol can be synthesized from the hydrogenation of, um, carbon dioxide. (In fact, about 10% of the world's hydrogen, currently is devoted to methanol synthesis, as I noted in another thread: The current sources and uses of hydrogen.) Again, most of the world's hydrogen is currently produced from dangerous fossil fuels, but it is possible to engage in clean hydrogen production utilizing thermochemical water splitting, with a clean primary energy source, of which there is only one, nuclear energy.
From the Science Advances paper, it is clear that another driver of the cost of carbon fibers is heat, and thus high temperature exchange networks theoretically, and likely practically, can be used to reduce this heat cost via high thermodynamic efficiency.
It thus seems conceivable that the cost of carbon fibers may be well significantly released. Nor is the point of the Science Advances paper unworthy of consideration, the management of pitch. Pitch is generally a dangerous fossil fuel product consisting of a highly heterogenous and structurally complex set of molecules falling into a class called "asphaltenes." Much recent work utilizing very high resolution mass spectrometry - that of FT-ICR-MS - has been devoted to understanding the structure of asphaltenes. It is also true that asphaltenes are often a side product of the pyrolysis of biomass, and/or plastic wastes. This suggests yet another route to carbon fibers that depends on carbon dioxide effectively removed from the air. Structural elucidation is the first step on the way to specifications, and specifications define the goals of process chemistry and allow for its development.
I therefore suspect that perhaps, again, it is Dr. Mac Dowell who may be guilty of being disingenuous. With clean, sustainable primary energy - again there is one form and only one form, nuclear energy - carbon utilization in economically viable ways certainly seems promising.
We shall see.
From my perspective carbon dioxide utilization is far superior to carbon dumps. All of our pursuits of addressing climate change have failed, but some are worthy of further evaluation and research and some are not. The article and the chart above have not left me without a sense of some hard won optimism.
The key to this problem is, in my view, materials science, a subject in which a golden age may well emerge. We should hope so.
I trust you will have a nice evening.
April 30, 2022
Some excerpts:
In my private studies, I've often perused the table of nuclides - I've always liked the Kaeri site for its simplicity, and ease for finding general things quickly; I use BNL when I want to go deeper - and this graphic is a cool representation of it pointing to the possible rather than the known:
The article states that a similar facility is being built in Germany and was scheduled for completion in 2027; however completion is in doubt because Russian scientists were partners in it and Russian participation has been frozen because an insane government in that country.
Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements
This is a news item in Nature; it should be open sourced.
Long-awaited accelerator ready to explore origins of elements
Subtitle:
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will be the first to produce and analyse hundreds of isotopes crucial to physics.
Some excerpts:
One of nuclear physicists’ top wishes is about to come true. After a decades-long wait, a US$942 million accelerator in Michigan is officially inaugurating on 2 May. Its experiments will chart unexplored regions of the landscape of exotic atomic nuclei and shed light on how stars and supernova explosions create most of the elements in the Universe.
“This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Kate Jones, who studies nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees. “This is the long-awaited facility for us,” she says.
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing had a budget of $730 million, most of it funded by the US Department of Energy, with a $94.5 million contribution from the state of Michigan. MSU contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. It replaces an earlier National Science Foundation accelerator, called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), at the same site. Construction of FRIB started in 2014 and was completed late last year, “five months early and on budget”, says nuclear physicist Bradley Sherrill, who is FRIB’s science director...
All FRIB experiments will start in the facility’s basement. Atoms of a specific element, typically uranium, will be ionized and sent into a 450-metre-long accelerator that bends like a paper clip to fit inside the 150-metre-long hall. At the end of the pipe, the beam of ions will hit a graphite wheel that spins continuously to avoid overheating any particular spot. Most of the nuclei will pass through the graphite, but a fraction will collide with its carbon nuclei. This causes the uranium nuclei to break up into smaller combinations of protons and neutrons, each a nucleus of a different element and isotope.
This beam of assorted nuclei will then be directed up to a ‘fragment separator’ at ground level. The separator consists of a series of magnets that deflect each nucleus towards the right, each at an angle that depends on its mass and charge. By fine-tuning this process, the FRIB operators will be able to produce a beam consisting entirely of one isotope for each particular experiment...
...Researchers have therefore concocted a variety of simplified models that predict some features of a certain range of nuclei, but might fail or give only approximate estimates outside that range. This applies even to basic questions, such as how fast an isotope decays — its half-life — or whether it can form at all, says Nazarewicz. “If you ask me how many tin isotopes exist, or lead, the answer will be given with a large error bar,” he says. FRIB will be able to synthesize hundreds of previously unobserved isotopes (see ‘Unexplored nuclei’), and by measuring their properties, it will begin to put many nuclear models to the test...
“This project has been the realization of a dream of the whole community in nuclear physics,” says Ani Aprahamian, an experimental nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Kate Jones, who studies nuclear physics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, agrees. “This is the long-awaited facility for us,” she says.
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing had a budget of $730 million, most of it funded by the US Department of Energy, with a $94.5 million contribution from the state of Michigan. MSU contributed an additional $212 million in various ways, including the land. It replaces an earlier National Science Foundation accelerator, called the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), at the same site. Construction of FRIB started in 2014 and was completed late last year, “five months early and on budget”, says nuclear physicist Bradley Sherrill, who is FRIB’s science director...
All FRIB experiments will start in the facility’s basement. Atoms of a specific element, typically uranium, will be ionized and sent into a 450-metre-long accelerator that bends like a paper clip to fit inside the 150-metre-long hall. At the end of the pipe, the beam of ions will hit a graphite wheel that spins continuously to avoid overheating any particular spot. Most of the nuclei will pass through the graphite, but a fraction will collide with its carbon nuclei. This causes the uranium nuclei to break up into smaller combinations of protons and neutrons, each a nucleus of a different element and isotope.
This beam of assorted nuclei will then be directed up to a ‘fragment separator’ at ground level. The separator consists of a series of magnets that deflect each nucleus towards the right, each at an angle that depends on its mass and charge. By fine-tuning this process, the FRIB operators will be able to produce a beam consisting entirely of one isotope for each particular experiment...
...Researchers have therefore concocted a variety of simplified models that predict some features of a certain range of nuclei, but might fail or give only approximate estimates outside that range. This applies even to basic questions, such as how fast an isotope decays — its half-life — or whether it can form at all, says Nazarewicz. “If you ask me how many tin isotopes exist, or lead, the answer will be given with a large error bar,” he says. FRIB will be able to synthesize hundreds of previously unobserved isotopes (see ‘Unexplored nuclei’), and by measuring their properties, it will begin to put many nuclear models to the test...
In my private studies, I've often perused the table of nuclides - I've always liked the Kaeri site for its simplicity, and ease for finding general things quickly; I use BNL when I want to go deeper - and this graphic is a cool representation of it pointing to the possible rather than the known:
...Jones and others will be especially keen to study isotopes that have ‘magic’ numbers of protons and neutrons — such as 2, 8, 20, 28 or 50 — that make the structure of the nucleus especially stable because they form complete energy levels (known as shells). Magic isotopes are particularly important because they provide the cleanest tests for the theoretical models. For many years, Jones and her group have studied tin isotopes with progressively fewer neutrons, edging towards tin-100, which has magic numbers of both neutrons and protons.
Theoretical uncertainties also mean that researchers do not yet have a detailed explanation for how all the elements in the periodic table formed. The Big Bang produced essentially only hydrogen and helium; the other chemical elements in the table up to iron and nickel formed mostly through nuclear fusion inside stars. But heavier elements cannot form by fusion. They were forged by other means...
Theoretical uncertainties also mean that researchers do not yet have a detailed explanation for how all the elements in the periodic table formed. The Big Bang produced essentially only hydrogen and helium; the other chemical elements in the table up to iron and nickel formed mostly through nuclear fusion inside stars. But heavier elements cannot form by fusion. They were forged by other means...
The article states that a similar facility is being built in Germany and was scheduled for completion in 2027; however completion is in doubt because Russian scientists were partners in it and Russian participation has been frozen because an insane government in that country.
April 30, 2022
Charpy/Izod impact testing? Really?
Smart ass.
Don't you hate it when the little brats grow up to be smarter than you are?
Nah, I'm proud of him being smarter than his dumb old man, and someday I'll have to ask him what the hell Charpy/Izod impact testing is.
Or else I'll have to look it up.
Little brat...
So I ask my kid a simple question and the little brat lays Charpy/Izod impact testing on me.
I was laying around last night, kind of goofing off, and I came across this paper: Elastic and electronic properties of TcB2 and superhard ReB2: First-principles calculations, Yuan Xu Wang, Appl. Phys. Lett. 91, 101904 (2007).
I'm going through the paper and I get to wondering, in a naïve kind of way, what the relationship between hardness and fracture resistance. So I say to myself, "Self, you could look it up, but it's late and you're supposed to do other things, so why not ask the little brat? He's educated and its easier than looking stuff up."
So I email him.
He emails back:
...Fracture resistance is really a measure of toughness though which depends on both the strength and ductility of the material. Hardness correlates pretty well with yield strength of a material but does not tend to say much about the ductility of the material, so it's somewhat impossible to predict a material's toughness simply from hardness measurements. To measure fracture resistance you would much rather want to perform tensile tests or Charpy/Izod impact testing. For some brittle ceramic materials you can also get some relevant information from 3-point or 4-point bend tests...
Charpy/Izod impact testing? Really?
Smart ass.
Don't you hate it when the little brats grow up to be smarter than you are?
Nah, I'm proud of him being smarter than his dumb old man, and someday I'll have to ask him what the hell Charpy/Izod impact testing is.
Or else I'll have to look it up.
Little brat...
April 30, 2022
The Health of Shanghai, Scientific Instrumentation, and Humans.
My company is supporting research into three different approaches to the treatment of Alzheimer's disease in support of three different companies.
I cannot relate the nature of these approaches, as they represent IP, but a key instrument for one of them, one of two such instruments in our laboratory, has gone down. Our "back up" instrument is already running at full capacity.
To repair the instrument, the company servicing it requires a part that is a semiconductor device. These types of devices used to be made in the US, but the company that supplies the instrument, founded in the "Silicon Valley," and once a titan of American Industry, has outsourced manufacture of this device to China.
Shanghai is under a Covid lockdown, a rather draconian one from what I understand. Thus this device is unavailable. Workers who run the plant are confined to their homes. This widely used scientific instrument is apparently, from my conversation with the company, is down all over the United States.
The particular mechanism for Alzheimer's treatment on which we are working may or may not work. After decades in the industry, although it has been my privilege to help in various ways to bring life saving medications to patients, I'm somewhat jaded when it comes to believing that everything I see is as near to earth shattering as the people working through it might believe; Alzheimer's is a tough nut to crack, and we are only now at the edge of developing reproducible biomarkers for it. Having a biomarker is an indicator that we actually know what the disease is. It appears from some work I've read that it may not be a single disease; like the generic term for the disease "cancer," Alzheimer's may represent a variety diseases under one general heading. Hence the multiple approaches to addressing it.
Yet all scientific teams believe in their work; as well they should. It may be the project that is delayed because we cannot get a part from the closed city of Shanghai might actually represent a real therapy.
I suppose the semiconductor industry moved to China for reasons of cost and - because the semi-conductor industry is anything but "green" no matter how much bullshit is handed out by the solar industry - lax environmental regulations.
The cost however goes beyond money. It goes to human lives. We do ourselves no favor as a culture when we see everything in terms of the "bottom line," because the "bottom line" sometimes leads to the bottom.
April 30, 2022
Excerpts:
I have had to endure several accounts of Russian soldiers being sickened by radiation during the occupation, both in social settings and in news accounts. (But her emails.) While nobody is cheering for Russian thugs, these accounts are nonsense. Scientific staff has been residing at Chernobyl for quite some time, studying the effects of radiation on the wild life which has been reestablished in the park as well as a population of Przewalski's horses introduced to the area to preserve the species which was once extinct in the wild but unlikely be hunted in a region closed to human habitation.
Here, from the same website, IAEA mission at Chernobyl, as anniversary is marked, is a picture of the Director General arriving at the reactor itself to lay a wreath:
Neither he, nor the Ukrainian soldiers with him nor the other staff, look particularly sick.
IAEA Update on the Elevated Radiation Levels at Chernobyl After Russian Occupation.
Zaporozhe 'top concern' for IAEA, Chernobyl radiation levels updateExcerpts:
A damaged external power line has been repaired allowing Zaporozhe to return to previous output levels, Energoatom said. It comes as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues efforts to get access to the plant for its inspectors - and outlines the initial results of its radiation monitoring during its mission to Chernobyl...
... The IAEA director general said that the mission to Chernobyl had already proved a success in terms of getting its direct remote monitoring reports reinstated. He also outlined the results of tests of radiation levels (see picture above) which showed that there were elevated radiation levels in the areas of the 'Red Forest' in the Chernobyl exlcusion zone where Russian forces had dug fortifications during their five weeks in control of the area.
However he said that the levels, at the places where they had tested, were still three times below the recommended exposure levels for workers. He said "this is not a place to have a picnic or excavate ... but the situation is not one that could be judged as posing great danger to the environment or to people at the moment that we were taking these measurements."
... The IAEA director general said that the mission to Chernobyl had already proved a success in terms of getting its direct remote monitoring reports reinstated. He also outlined the results of tests of radiation levels (see picture above) which showed that there were elevated radiation levels in the areas of the 'Red Forest' in the Chernobyl exlcusion zone where Russian forces had dug fortifications during their five weeks in control of the area.
However he said that the levels, at the places where they had tested, were still three times below the recommended exposure levels for workers. He said "this is not a place to have a picnic or excavate ... but the situation is not one that could be judged as posing great danger to the environment or to people at the moment that we were taking these measurements."
I have had to endure several accounts of Russian soldiers being sickened by radiation during the occupation, both in social settings and in news accounts. (But her emails.) While nobody is cheering for Russian thugs, these accounts are nonsense. Scientific staff has been residing at Chernobyl for quite some time, studying the effects of radiation on the wild life which has been reestablished in the park as well as a population of Przewalski's horses introduced to the area to preserve the species which was once extinct in the wild but unlikely be hunted in a region closed to human habitation.
Here, from the same website, IAEA mission at Chernobyl, as anniversary is marked, is a picture of the Director General arriving at the reactor itself to lay a wreath:
Neither he, nor the Ukrainian soldiers with him nor the other staff, look particularly sick.
April 29, 2022
Some excerpts:
"With a coordinated approach..."
Um...um...um...
I don't think so.
Of course the melt down of three reactors at Fukushima was far worse than the destruction of the oceans and the destruction of the atmosphere, but not as bad a Chernobyl.
Am I right, or am I right?
"With a coordinated approach..."
Make me laugh...nah...make me cry...it makes no difference.
History, should it exist, will not forgive us.
Science: A Stark Future for Ocean Life, Mass Extinction to Rival the Worst in History.
The perspective is in the current issue of Science: A Stark Future for Ocean Life
MALIN L. PINSKY AND ALEXA FREDSTON SCIENCE • 28 Apr 2022 • Vol 376, Issue 6592 • pp. 452-453
It may be open sourced; I'm not sure.
I haven't had a chance to download and read the "Penn and Deutch" paper this commentary to which this commentary refers, but will do so, and perhaps post some commentary on the full paper here.
I took the "mass extinction" language from the caption of the photo above:
Accelerating ocean warming and deoxygenation threaten a mass extinction rivalling the worst in Earth’s history, especially for cold water species, such as the Atlantic rock crab shown here.
Some excerpts:
The year 2021 marked the highest temperature and likely the lowest oxygen content for the oceans since human records began (1, 2). These changes have put marine species on the front lines of climate change. For example, marine species’ geographical ranges are shifting faster and experiencing more contractions than those of terrestrial species (3, 4). However, whether climate change poses an existential threat to ocean life has been less clear. Marine species are often considered to be more resilient to extinction than terrestrial ones, and human-caused global extinctions of marine species have been relatively rare (5). On page 524 of this issue, Penn and Deutsch (6) present extensive modeling to reveal that runaway climate change would put ocean life on track for a mass extinction rivaling the worst in Earth’s history. Furthermore, they reveal how keeping global warming below an increase of 2°C compared with preindustrial levels could largely prevent these outcomes.
The topic of climate change and species extinction on land has been fraught with controversy. This is in part because of debates over suitable methods of predicting extinctions and in part because of the relatively few documented extinctions to date (7). The marine research community has largely avoided making projections of extinction risk (8), even though experts widely see climate change as a major threat to the global oceans (9). This has left the watery 70% of Earth’s surface as a giant blank spot in the future projection of life on Earth.
Penn and Deutsch modeled suitable habitats for marine species on the basis of well-described physiological processes that link metabolic demand for oxygen to the supply of oxygen to organismal tissues as a function of temperature. As warming causes the demand for oxygen to exceed supply in a given location, survival likely becomes untenable, causing extinctions. The authors calibrated their model against the oceanographic changes they reconstructed for the end-Permian mass extinction event, which was a period of extensive warming and deoxygenation 250 million years ago, colloquially known as the Great Dying. Although not a perfect analog to the current climate situation, the end-Permian mass extinction is one of the most cataclysmic periods in Earth’s history for which there are records of extensive warming and extinction...
...Not too long ago, canaries warned coal miners of toxic gas accumulation. Today, marine life is warning the world of a different and global gas accumulation. Staving off widespread biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction is a global priority. Because marine extinctions have not progressed as far as those on land, society has time to turn the tide in favor of ocean life. Exactly where the future falls between the best-case and worst-case scenarios will be determined by the choices that society makes not only about climate change, but also about habitat destruction, overfishing, and coastal pollution. With a coordinated approach that tackles multiple threats, ocean life as we know it has the best chance of surviving this century and far beyond.
The topic of climate change and species extinction on land has been fraught with controversy. This is in part because of debates over suitable methods of predicting extinctions and in part because of the relatively few documented extinctions to date (7). The marine research community has largely avoided making projections of extinction risk (8), even though experts widely see climate change as a major threat to the global oceans (9). This has left the watery 70% of Earth’s surface as a giant blank spot in the future projection of life on Earth.
Penn and Deutsch modeled suitable habitats for marine species on the basis of well-described physiological processes that link metabolic demand for oxygen to the supply of oxygen to organismal tissues as a function of temperature. As warming causes the demand for oxygen to exceed supply in a given location, survival likely becomes untenable, causing extinctions. The authors calibrated their model against the oceanographic changes they reconstructed for the end-Permian mass extinction event, which was a period of extensive warming and deoxygenation 250 million years ago, colloquially known as the Great Dying. Although not a perfect analog to the current climate situation, the end-Permian mass extinction is one of the most cataclysmic periods in Earth’s history for which there are records of extensive warming and extinction...
...Not too long ago, canaries warned coal miners of toxic gas accumulation. Today, marine life is warning the world of a different and global gas accumulation. Staving off widespread biodiversity loss and the sixth mass extinction is a global priority. Because marine extinctions have not progressed as far as those on land, society has time to turn the tide in favor of ocean life. Exactly where the future falls between the best-case and worst-case scenarios will be determined by the choices that society makes not only about climate change, but also about habitat destruction, overfishing, and coastal pollution. With a coordinated approach that tackles multiple threats, ocean life as we know it has the best chance of surviving this century and far beyond.
"With a coordinated approach..."
Um...um...um...
I don't think so.
Of course the melt down of three reactors at Fukushima was far worse than the destruction of the oceans and the destruction of the atmosphere, but not as bad a Chernobyl.
Am I right, or am I right?
"With a coordinated approach..."
Make me laugh...nah...make me cry...it makes no difference.
History, should it exist, will not forgive us.
April 27, 2022
At this point in my life, I finally have to face it: I will never be a...
...Knight of the Golden Spur.
There comes a time in one's life that one has to recognize one's limits.
It's sad, but at this point, it's not even a long shot; it's an impossibility.
Oh, to be young again, and have one's hopes alive...
April 26, 2022
How much fresh water is 10^9 m^3, one billion cubic meters?
My recent combing through literature suggests that the annual water consumption for the drought stressed State of California is on the order of 45 million acre-feet of water, in SI units, around 5 billion cubic meters. Thus water more or less permanently destroyed by fracking as "flowback water" represents about 20% of all the water used in California for all purposes. And let's be clear, the ground on which that water is dumped is more or less permanently destroyed. (Fracking is practiced in California by the way, using and destroying permanently, ground water.)
Some flowback water, notably that produced on the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, is radioactive, having extracted radium from natural subterranean uranium formations, more radioactive that seawater outside the Fukushima reactors about which our anti-nukes like to complain incessantly while millions of people die every year from air pollution because we don't use nuclear power enough, this without a whimper of concern.
As we are seeing in officially anti-nuke like nations like Germany, where, as of this writing (6:36 AM Berlin Time, 4/26/2022) the carbon intensity of German electricity is 469 g CO2/kwh compared with 88 g CO2/kwh in neighboring nuclear powered France, reliance on so called "renewable energy," largely represented by wind and solar power, is dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels. (In "percent talk" German electricity is producing 533% more of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide than is France per kwh.)
When the Germans can't get Russian gas, they burn coal. As of this writing, Germany is producing 20.2 GW of power by burning coal and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, and is producing 3.92 GW of power from wind. In "percent talk" as of this writing Germany is producing 515% as much energy from coal as it is from wind.
For my entire adult life, I've been listening to claims that a "renewable energy" paradise was inevitable. It didn't come; it isn't here; and in my opinion will never come.
I'm not young.
For my entire life people have also been stating frequently with deep conviction that Jesus would come back soon too.
I'm not sure if either or both faith based claims are subject to the laws concerning religious practice, but it would appear, definitively, that they have nothing to do with the laws of physics, laws that are not subject to repeal by legislatures or courts.
Now people, largely in denial, speak of an "energy transition" being underway, which is nothing more than rebranding an unsustainable status quo. The belief in the existence of an "energy transition" is, in my opinion, nonsense. There is none.
US Fracking Flowback Water is 70 Times Larger Than All Other Forms of Liquid Hazardous Waste.
This interesting fact can be found here: Propagation of Swellable Microgels through Superpermeable Channels: Impact of Particle–Pore Matching Size Relationship Yang Zhao, Mingzhen Wei, Jianqiao Leng, and Baojun Bai, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (22), 18533-18542.
From the text:
Excessive water production during oil and gas development is a huge source of wastewater around the world (on the order of 10^9 m^3/year). (1) In the U.S. as an example, the produced water was about 70 times the volume of all liquid hazardous wastes. (2) The produced water raises environmental and economic concerns...
How much fresh water is 10^9 m^3, one billion cubic meters?
My recent combing through literature suggests that the annual water consumption for the drought stressed State of California is on the order of 45 million acre-feet of water, in SI units, around 5 billion cubic meters. Thus water more or less permanently destroyed by fracking as "flowback water" represents about 20% of all the water used in California for all purposes. And let's be clear, the ground on which that water is dumped is more or less permanently destroyed. (Fracking is practiced in California by the way, using and destroying permanently, ground water.)
Some flowback water, notably that produced on the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, is radioactive, having extracted radium from natural subterranean uranium formations, more radioactive that seawater outside the Fukushima reactors about which our anti-nukes like to complain incessantly while millions of people die every year from air pollution because we don't use nuclear power enough, this without a whimper of concern.
As we are seeing in officially anti-nuke like nations like Germany, where, as of this writing (6:36 AM Berlin Time, 4/26/2022) the carbon intensity of German electricity is 469 g CO2/kwh compared with 88 g CO2/kwh in neighboring nuclear powered France, reliance on so called "renewable energy," largely represented by wind and solar power, is dependent on access to dangerous fossil fuels. (In "percent talk" German electricity is producing 533% more of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide than is France per kwh.)
When the Germans can't get Russian gas, they burn coal. As of this writing, Germany is producing 20.2 GW of power by burning coal and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, and is producing 3.92 GW of power from wind. In "percent talk" as of this writing Germany is producing 515% as much energy from coal as it is from wind.
For my entire adult life, I've been listening to claims that a "renewable energy" paradise was inevitable. It didn't come; it isn't here; and in my opinion will never come.
I'm not young.
For my entire life people have also been stating frequently with deep conviction that Jesus would come back soon too.
I'm not sure if either or both faith based claims are subject to the laws concerning religious practice, but it would appear, definitively, that they have nothing to do with the laws of physics, laws that are not subject to repeal by legislatures or courts.
Now people, largely in denial, speak of an "energy transition" being underway, which is nothing more than rebranding an unsustainable status quo. The belief in the existence of an "energy transition" is, in my opinion, nonsense. There is none.
April 24, 2022
I added the bold to the excerpt to point out the scale.
Right now, on this planet, decades into the so called "energy transition" which is in fact not a transition at all but is rather a rebranding of the long standing status quo, we are dumping 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere each year from combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, and adding another 10 billion tons because of land use changes. That would be a total of 45 billion tons. Correcting for molecular weight, this 45 billion tons, translates into around 12-13 billion tons of carbon.
Propylcyclohexane is, by weight, 89.9% carbon. If all of the lignin on the planet were composed of isoeugenol - it's not even close to being so - 100 million tons of technical lignin would amount to 90 million tons of carbon, or 0.73% - in the "percent talk" widely utilized to make excuses for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to address climate change - of the world's annual carbon dumping.
That includes every tree in this country cut down and pulverized to make pulp.
Have a nice afternoon.
Adventures in Biofuels: How much "renewable" technical lignin does the US produce annually?
I am always interested in the interesting component of "lignocellulosic biomass" - the largest component, by far, of biomass.
A great deal of attention has been paid to the production of ethanol from this mass, as I noted elsewhere, with dolorous impact on important ecosystems, specifically the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland, the Mississippi River Delta, and the SE Asian rain forests: The Very Stable Genius of Biofuels.
As I catch up on some back reading, I came across two papers that touch on issues in biofuels. They are:
Hydrodeoxygenation of Isoeugenol over Carbon-Supported Pt and Pt–Re Catalysts for Production of Renewable Jet Fuel Mark E. Martínez-Klimov, Päivi Mäki-Arvela, Zuzana Vajglova, Moldir Alda-Onggar, Ilari Angervo, Narendra Kumar, Kari Eränen, Markus Peurla, Mehmet Harbi Calimli, Joseph Muller, Andrey Shchukarev, Irina L. Simakova, and Dmitry Yu. Murzin Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17755-17768
...and...
Depolymerization of Technical Lignins in Supercritical Ethanol: Effects of Lignin Structure and Catalyst Erika Bartolomei, Yann Le Brech, Roger Gadiou, Frédérique Bertaud, Sébastien Leclerc, Loïc Vidal, Jean-Marc Le Meins, and Anthony Dufour, Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17769-17783.
Isoeugenol is a minor component in lignins, although what is written in particular in this paper may apply to other components as well. The catalyst described (presumably more readily available technetium might replace rhenium in it) is designed to convert eugenol into propyl cyclohexane, said to be a suitable jet fuel.
One of the things that rarely happens when one considers so called "renewable energy breakthroughs" is an appreciation of scale.
Technical lignin is produced routinely in the pulp industry; it's an extant industry. The question is then, what is the scale at which it is produced, and how might this apply to the demand for jet fuel?
The second paper discusses the scale.
From the text:
Lignin is the most abundant natural macromolecule composed of aromatic moieties. (1) Approximately 100 million tonnes of “technical lignins” is produced annually in the world. (2) Technical lignins are byproducts of the pulping and cellulosic ethanol industries. The majority of the available technical lignins is the Kraft lignin (KL) produced in pulp mills. More than 70 million tonnes of KL is produced worldwide, but this lignin is actually burnt in the recovery boiler of the pulp mills in order to produce steam and power and to recover pulping chemicals. (3) The recovery boiler is often a bottleneck to increase the productivity in pulp mills. (4,5) This boiler burns the black liquor (BL) which is rich in lignin. KL can be extracted from the BL in order to debottleneck the recovery boiler. For instance, the Lignoboost process extracts the KL from the BL by CO2 precipitation. This process has been in operation at the industrial scale since 2013 at Domtar’s Fort Mill site in the USA. (6)
Then, the solid lignin extracted from the BL can be valorized into biomaterials with a value over USD 1000 per tonne, compared to about USD 150 per tonne when used as a fuel. This valorization would greatly improve the profitability of the Kraft mills. (3) Consequently, the global lignin market size is expected to expand. Increasing demand for lignin in animal feeds, biobitumen, concrete admixtures, adhesives, binders, resins, etc. is anticipated to drive the market growth. (2)
Nevertheless, only a very small fraction of the worldwide KL is yet extracted and valorized for high-value chemical applications. This may be explained by the actual lower profitability of the lignin valorization routes compared to crude oil ones (3) and also by the highly variable structure of KL. The chemical composition of KL depends on biomass species, seasonal and geographical location, and the delignification and extraction methods. Therefore, the various available KLs exhibit a high heterogeneity in chemical functionality as well as in molecular weight. (7,8)
Then, the solid lignin extracted from the BL can be valorized into biomaterials with a value over USD 1000 per tonne, compared to about USD 150 per tonne when used as a fuel. This valorization would greatly improve the profitability of the Kraft mills. (3) Consequently, the global lignin market size is expected to expand. Increasing demand for lignin in animal feeds, biobitumen, concrete admixtures, adhesives, binders, resins, etc. is anticipated to drive the market growth. (2)
Nevertheless, only a very small fraction of the worldwide KL is yet extracted and valorized for high-value chemical applications. This may be explained by the actual lower profitability of the lignin valorization routes compared to crude oil ones (3) and also by the highly variable structure of KL. The chemical composition of KL depends on biomass species, seasonal and geographical location, and the delignification and extraction methods. Therefore, the various available KLs exhibit a high heterogeneity in chemical functionality as well as in molecular weight. (7,8)
I added the bold to the excerpt to point out the scale.
Right now, on this planet, decades into the so called "energy transition" which is in fact not a transition at all but is rather a rebranding of the long standing status quo, we are dumping 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the planetary atmosphere each year from combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, and adding another 10 billion tons because of land use changes. That would be a total of 45 billion tons. Correcting for molecular weight, this 45 billion tons, translates into around 12-13 billion tons of carbon.
Propylcyclohexane is, by weight, 89.9% carbon. If all of the lignin on the planet were composed of isoeugenol - it's not even close to being so - 100 million tons of technical lignin would amount to 90 million tons of carbon, or 0.73% - in the "percent talk" widely utilized to make excuses for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to address climate change - of the world's annual carbon dumping.
That includes every tree in this country cut down and pulverized to make pulp.
Have a nice afternoon.
April 24, 2022
All of the primary energy sources in the pie chart in (a) have more energy than the hydrogen produced using them. This is the result of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Yet we still have people, year after year, decade after decade, calling this waste of primary energy in a shell game "green."
It's difficult to believe, but perhaps this is why we are seeing carbon dioxide concentrations scraping 421 ppm this week, less than ten years after we first saw concentrations of 400 ppm.
My feeling is that people should be required to have a passing familiarity with the laws of thermodynamics before being awarded a high school degree. It won't happen, but I think it should.
The current sources and uses of hydrogen.
I'm catching up on some back reading. The following graphic came from this paper: Progress on Catalyst Development for the Steam Reforming of Biomass and Waste Plastics Pyrolysis Volatiles: A Review Laura Santamaria, Gartzen Lopez, Enara Fernandez, Maria Cortazar, Aitor Arregi, Martin Olazar, and Javier Bilbao Energy & Fuels 2021 35 (21), 17051-17084
Here's the graphic:
The caption:
Figure 1. Global current sources of H2 production (a), and H2 consumption sectors (b).
All of the primary energy sources in the pie chart in (a) have more energy than the hydrogen produced using them. This is the result of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Yet we still have people, year after year, decade after decade, calling this waste of primary energy in a shell game "green."
It's difficult to believe, but perhaps this is why we are seeing carbon dioxide concentrations scraping 421 ppm this week, less than ten years after we first saw concentrations of 400 ppm.
My feeling is that people should be required to have a passing familiarity with the laws of thermodynamics before being awarded a high school degree. It won't happen, but I think it should.
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