August 31, 2022

Disturbing statistics, if true.

A "perspective" from a June issue of Energy and Fuels:

Perspectives on a New Age of Materials for Petroleum, Yunlong Zhang, Energy & Fuels 2022 36 (11), 5529-5530.

The 100 million tons per day is more or less consistent with most of the figures I've seen, but do not include land use changes, which add another 10 billion tons per year, 27 million tons per day. I fully expect that the burning of the world's forests will cause this figure to rise. As I've noted elsewhere both the first derivative and the second derivative of the function by which carbon dioxide concentrations seem to rise are positive. Indeed, it seems that the third derivative is also positive, although for now this can be ignored I think.

However the text includes a (now de rigueur) reference to an "energy transition." This is nonsense. There is none, despite all the idiotic pictures of wind turbines and solar cells that marketeers use to sell "stuff." We are burning more dangerous fossil fuels than ever and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it kills people and ecosystems continuously without interruption.

I never took little Jimmy Kunstler and his "peak oil" panic all that seriously, but it would have been nice if I could have done so.

The author of this perspective works at Exxon Mobile in New Jersey.

August 28, 2022

An interesting graphic on biologically derived carbon utilization in lithium battery anodes.

In general, I do not approve of carbon dioxide waste dumps (sequestration) called "CCS" - carbon capture and storage - but I do approve of "CCU" - carbon capture and utilization.

There is a widely believed rumor going around that batteries will save the world. I recently had a discussion in this space - perhaps a more than a little hostile - that this is a highly questionable belief, since it is a law of physics - a law that cannot be repealed by any legislature (or for that matter, any dictator) anywhere on the planet - in which I stated the fact that a battery is a device that wastes energy.

Facts matter.

Since wasting energy requires the use of more energy and no form of energy is environmentally benign - although we can minimize the environmental impact by being sensible - batteries raise the environmental impact of energy. They will not save the world, they will make it worse.

There is a widely believed rumor going around that so called "renewable energy" will save the world. However, massive investments in this belief have experimentally - experiment overrules theory and/or belief - shown that even with the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" on a multiple trillion dollar scale in this century, things are getting worse not better. Working with the weekly data recorded at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory, which I check every week, I calculate the 12 month running average of increases using week to week comparisons of present data with the same data ten years previous.

This week's data:

The 10 year comparator data exists in my weekly updated spreadsheet going back to 1984; the weekly readings go back to 1975. In late August 2000, (the week beginning August 20, 2000) this 12 month running average of ten year week to week comparators was 15.09 ppm/10 years = 1.51 ppm/yr. This week it comes in at 24.49 ppm/10 years = 2.45 ppm/yr. For the most recent particular week, the concentration compared to 10 years ago is 25.07 ppm higher than 10 years ago. Of the top 50 individual readings, ranging from 26.53 ppm to 24.73 ppm, 14 have occurred this year. All of the top 50 such individual readings have occurred since 2019.

It's immediately clear - or at least should be immediately clear - that all this talk of solar/wind/batteries/electric cars ad nauseum hasn't done jack shit to address climate change, isn't doing jack shit to address climate change, and - at least I'm convinced - won't do jack shit to address climate change.

But here's a graphic from a paper in the scientific journal Energy and Fuels I came across as I work to catch up on my reading. We can, apparently, make lithium battery electrodes - at least on a lab scale - using waste from coconut agriculture. This would be "CCU" of which I approve. The paper is this one: High Graphitic Carbon Derived from Coconut Coir Waste by Promoting Potassium Hydroxide in the Catalytic Graphitization Process for Lithium-Ion Battery Anodes, Fredina Destyorini, Windi Cahya Amalia, Yuyun Irmawati, Andri Hardiansyah, Slamet Priyono, Fauzan Aulia, Haryo S. Oktaviano, Yu-I Hsu, Rike Yudianti, and Hiroshi Uyama, Energy & Fuels 2022 36 (10), 5444-5455.

Here's the graphic in question.



The caption:



Note the temperatures of these processes. All include 500 °C for an hour, followed by 1200 °C for 3 hours.

Whence the heat for this process might come in the much anticipated solar and wind nirvana that people have been predicting for my whole adult life (and I'm not young) just as some people have been predicting the return of Jesus for a longer period? We are going to heat coconut coir in ovens powered by unreliable solar and wind energy and batteries, along with a million other things people not living in energy poverty do?

Really?

What has come (as predicted) - in contrast to Jesus and the "renewable energy" nirvana - is a climate disaster. Much has already been lost; much is being lost (at an accelerating rate) and more surely will be lost.

It's time to think anew. This faith based belief in a reactionary approach to energy - making our access to energy dependent on weather precisely at the time we have destabilized the weather - has failed.

It's time to "go nuclear" against climate change, and that is not at all a metaphor; it's a clear cut reality.

Have a nice Sunday afternoon.

August 27, 2022

Joan Brennecke.

The current issue of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry is a Festschrift in honor of Joan Brennecke.

I had the privilege of hearing one of Dr. Brennecke's talks when she spoke at Princeton on her research. She is a recognized world expert on two topics, I personally believe are important to saving what is left to save on this planet, as well as possibly restoring what can be restored. These topics are supercritical fluids and ionic liquids.

The dedication of the issue is here: Preface to the Joan Brennecke Festschrift Jennifer L. Anthony, Burcu E. Gurkan, Keith P. Johnston, and Aaron M. Scurto, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (33), 12061-12063

Some excerpts:

Just a great and important scientist. Whenever I see one of her papers, I always try to stop to read it, because I know something fabulous will be in it.

August 26, 2022

Let me say, first off, that I have been actively arguing that people should be required to have...

...at least a primitive sense of the laws of thermodynamics in order to graduate from high school, if not the somewhat arcane third law, certainly the very simple zeroth, first and second laws.

If one is illiterate about energy - and I certainly encounter a number of people who fit into the class of energy illiterates, some of whom are as proud of showing their illiteracy as Donald Trump is proud of displaying his illiteracy - one might profit by at least opening a high school level chemistry or physics text to learn that any process that converts one form of energy into another will be irreversible, that is, the second law.

If one actually gives a shit about the future of humanity on one level, and the future of the planet at a higher level, one can go even further and access college level texts, graduate level texts, or even (gasp) the primary scientific literature.

However if one has no time for any of the above, one can simply repeat lazy dogma when a bourgeois fantasy is exposed for what it is, ethical indifference of the worst possible sort. It is ethical indifference because people are quite literally, all over the world, literally dying from heat stroke. Rivers are disappearing, crops are failing, forests are burning, glaciers collapsing and what excites the attention of the type who chant insipidly on topics about which they clearly know nothing at all? The statement of the fact that a battery is a device that wastes energy.

Facts matter.

Had this been required for a very long time, that it be a requirement that to graduate from high school one would need to be familiar with at least the zeroth, first and second law of thermodynamics, everyone would know that a battery is a device that wastes energy. It's a law of physics, an incontrovertible law. The California legislature cannot repeal it. In this case, I suspect the planet would not be burning up, but it is burning up, this while bourgeois airheads carry on about their material fantasies of electric cars and how they can make this stupid fantasy address their appalling need to live with in absolute or at least maximal convenience.

I am not the type to be surprised to hear anti-nukes speak in defense of dangerous natural gas plants; their "solar and wind will save us" bullshit depends on access to natural gas, as the folks who funded Putin's brutal war, while declaring themselves "green" for willfully destroying nuclear infrastructure that was valuable to all humanity - this would be the Germans - are finding out. Of course, as they've pissed off the guy to whom they've sent all that money by not applauding the brutal war on which he's spending their money they paid him, they have to burn coal this summer, because their large amount of wind infrastructure hasn't been doing shit in this brutal low wind European summer. The Germans have no fucking idea how they're going to heat homes this winter, when their large amount of solar infrastructure will be as unreliable as their large amount of wind has been all fucking summer.

But let's return to thermodynamics:

Now, as it happens, I discussed combined cycle gas power plants with my son as he launched his nuclear engineering Ph.D. program, not because I have any interest in defending fossil fuel plants - I am quite clear that I want every fucking combined cycle dangerous natural gas plant on this planet shut - but because I regard process intensification as a vitally important issue. It doesn't make a fuck load of difference to me if they have higher thermodynamic efficiency than straight up Rankine coal plants such as the Germans are running this low wind hot summer. What matters to me is that the primary energy source, fossil fuels, is killing the planet. They shut their nuclear plants to burn coal. That's a fact.

Again, facts matter.

Again, people are dying in the streets from extreme heat, all over the world, and many of these people, particularly in poorer countries, will also face famine because of withered crops and the unavailability of water. I wonder, even if electric car worshipping types couldn't care less, how the cobalt digging slaves in the Congo River basin are doing in extreme temperatures.

Speaking of slavery you know, in this space, I recently directed attention to a scientific viewpoint in the recent issue of Environmental Science and Technology on the subject of human slavery, something about which I care, even though I'm powerless to do much about it: Toward an Emissions and Modern Slavery Impact Accounting Model. Predictably, none of the anti-nukes who populate this space had a peep to offer on the subject, but over the years, I've seen that any criticism of electric cars or batteries induces fits of rage.

It says a lot, at least to me.

In the original post on this scientific viewpoint on human slavery I didn't bold anything in the excerpts, but let me do so now in repeating an excerpt here:

What we care about says who we are.

Now, since the thermodynamic efficiency of combined cycle gas plants has been discussed, a combined cycle plant couples a Brayton cycle device to a traditional Rankine cycle device. A Rankine cycle device is generally a steam driven plant. The overall thermodynamic efficiency of a plant is driven is driven by how it it operates. A Rankin device's overall (24/7, 365 days per year) efficiency will decline if it is repeatedly shut down because some highly subsidized redundant and generally unreliable system - say a huge wind infrastructure in a summer of extreme heat driven doldrums - suddenly works for a few hours in the day. One need not understand the laws of thermodynamics on a profound level say, so as to determine the entropy of a system via the use of probability distribution functions or understand the Helmholtz functions. One can simply put a kettle on a gas stove, boil water, turn the gas off for a time, and see if the water instantly returns to boiling when the gas is turned back on. One would have to be a liar to say that it does.

Almost all of the nuclear plants operating on this planet are BWR's and PWR's, and everyone of these is a Rankine cycle device. This means, depending on ambient temperatures, they operate at about 33% to 35% efficiency. AGCR's, a reactor design prominent in Great Britain, are essentially Brayton devices, and their thermodynamic efficiency because of their higher temperature operation is about 41%, better than the Rankine coal plants with which the Germans are killing people by burning lignite in them.

Now, I note that solar energy is not environmentally unacceptable because its thermodynamic efficiency is low. For decades announcements of light to electricity efficiency of a little more than 20% have all been hailed as "breakthroughs." The solar industry is neither environmentally nor economically viable because it is unreliable, because it cannot operate without redundant systems. The low thermodynamic efficiency impacts the material and land destruction required to use it, but it's not the main issue. The lack of reliability is the issue. Fifty years of similar battery bullshit "breakthrough" hasn't changed this either. Overwhelmingly, wherever money has been squandered on solar and wind, these unreliable systems are backed up with dangerous fossil fuels.

It's fucking killing the planet.

Of course, it really doesn't matter how efficient nuclear plants are since their source of primary energy, nuclear fission, doesn't kill people when the plants operate normally. This contrasts with dangerous fossil fuel plants that we find anti-nukes applauding which kill people whenever they operate, normally or otherwise.

Still, to maximize the benefit to humanity, thermodynamic efficiency of nuclear power plants should take a high priority.

To my mind - and this is the point I made to my son as we sent him off to his Ph.D. program - we should not focus on (at the simplest level) Carnot efficiency, but rather on maximizing exergy from primary heat energy, this by deriving chemical potential energy - my preferred form being DME - from this heat via thermochemical cycles, with electricity being a side product.

As for "fast battery charging" "breakthroughs," they, like solar cells with efficiencies higher than 20% are a dime a dozen. The search terms (fast charging battery review) produces over 20,000 hits, going back to the dawn of this century, a period in which the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere rose nearly by 50 ppm while everybody chanted nonsense about solar, wind and energy storage.

My son is already a Master's level materials scientist. I note that the development of combined cycle systems was a function of developments in materials science, specifically thermal barrier coatings and refractory alloys. There is no reason whatsoever that this technology could not be applied to clean energy - of which there is only one form, nuclear energy - allowing us to abandon filthy energy, the fossil fuel industry on which the useless solar and wind industries depend and indeed to abandon the land and material intensive and unsustainable wind and solar industries.

I have heard bourgeois anti-nuke types here whine incessantly about the cost of the Vogtle nuclear plants one of which will fuel next month. These same people don't ever whine about the cost of climate change, about which they have never before, and do not now, and never will give a shit.

I expect that the Vogtle plants will operate until nearly the dawn of the 22nd century, perhaps with an interlude of refurbishment such as is being carried out on many of Canada's Candus, meaning they will have operated 80 years. The Vogtle plants will be operating when every single wind turbine blade on every disgusting wind turbine on this planet will have been in landfills for more than half a century, when every solar cell now installed will be leaching crap into water supplies around the world after burial with the rest of the electronic waste, including spent batteries, even if some of them are able to find the energy to be recycled. (No distributed energy system is subject to complete recycling, and all recycling schemes involve heat, which is not generally accessible from wind and solar junk - I hope to not be disgusted by reference to the destruction of huge land areas for solar thermal junk.)

My son agreed in his first meeting with his advisor, by the way, that he will begin his lab training by familiarizing himself with additive manufacture of refractory alloys, another term for additive manufacture being "3D printing."

This is a key technology that will revolutionize nuclear infrastructure building.

It's not at all futuristic: This year, for the first time, 3D printed nuclear components were installed in a nuclear plant. First use of 3D-printed nuclear fuel debris filters . I'm happy as a clam to hear about my son working in this area, since I have long thought about 3D printed ceramic reactor cores. We are well on our way there: First-of-its-kind 3D printed nuclear fuel component to enter use

Now, it's very clear - and Vogtle, despite being a gift to future generations rather than the liability that every piece of so called "renewable energy" junk will be when today's toddlers are finishing college is evidence - that the American nuclear energy construction infrastructure has been badly damaged by appeals to fear and ignorance by bean counting bourgeois anti-nukes who value their electric car fantasies above human decency and even human lives.

The answer to this willful destruction is the term that my President uses in a different context: "Build back better."

I really don't care what anti-nukes think. Neither does my son. Neither do his peers, his advisors, and his new friends among his fellow graduate students, most of whom are where they are because climate change is the most important issue before humanity, as opposed to how fucking convenient and fast it is to charge an electric car.

Antinukes can pick lint out of their navels and whine about criticisms of their battery bullshit to the end of their days. Irrespective of it, the damage they have done to the future is winding down, to be sure; reality - dire reality, awful reality - is before us. The German Emperor, the Renewable Energy Kaiser, has been shown to be naked, except for the stains of coal soot.

Have a great weekend.

August 26, 2022

Synthetic embryos obtained without eggs or sperm advance to organ formation.

Regrettably, I won't have a lot of time to discuss this note in the current issue of Nature.

The news item is here: Mouse embryos grown without eggs or sperm: why and what’s next?

Subtitle:

The full paper is available in an "accelerated release" format and is here: Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Amadei, G., Handford, C.E., Qiu, C. et al. . Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3 A similar paper on the same topic has been published in Cell.

Excerpts from the news item:



I suspect the news item is open sourced, if not the accelerated release paper.

August 26, 2022

The Removal of Some Radionuclides from the Nuclear Weapon Waste Tanks at Hanford w/Titanate IE.

During the Second World War, and then during the "Cold War" the United States and, after 1945, the former Soviet Union raced to make weapons grade plutonium at a prodigious rate. Weapons grade plutonium has specifications for isotopic purity requiring that require being as close to monoisotopic Pu-239 as is possible. Since the capture to fission ratio of Pu-239 in a neutron flux is not zero, this means that the irradiation periods in the fuel rods needed to be relatively short, with the result that the plutonium in the fuel be fairly dilute. As the concentration of plutonium reaches a certain level, the probability of a neutron being absorbed by Pu-239 to give Pu-240 increases, eventually beyond a point that exceeds the specifications for nuclear weapons. (Nuclear weapons with too much Pu-240 "fizzle." ) Given the methods utilized to isolate plutonium, first the Bismuth Phosphate process, and then the solvent extraction based Purex process, coupled with the unusually dilute concentrations of plutonium in the fuel, large amounts of chemical waste, containing significant radioactive species was generated.

These chemical and radiological wastes were at first dumped in open trenches, but ultimately were added to a rather large series of now famous tank farms, most of which are way beyond their design life. Some are known to be leaking, others are expected to leak.

These tanks are the topic of discussion in the paper I will discuss in this post: Evaluation of Load Behavior for Select Analytes in Hanford Tank Waste, Amy M. Westesen, Emily L. Campbell, Sandra K. Fiskum, and Reid A. Peterson, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (32), 11691-11698

The Hanford tanks, and the Hanford site in general, are favorite topics for discussion by antinukes. They live under the assumption that any exposure to radioactive materials is a vast tragedy, outweighing for instance, the hundreds of millions of people who have died from air pollution since, say, 1986. They almost never report a death toll associated with exposure to radionuclides (in non-medical settings), but nonetheless they get very excited by any such exposure; lots of coal has been burned to power computers and website servers devoted to often hysterical discussions of such exposure. I have chosen the year 1986 because herein I will discuss the properties of wastes found in the 241-AP Hanford tanks in the 200 area of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which accepted waste up until 1986, thirty six years ago. These tanks are "double shell" tanks; they had a design life of 50 years as shown in the following table:



RPP-RPT-55982, Rev. 0 241-AN Tank Farm Construction Extent of Condition Review for Tank Integrity

It is not a coincidence, by the way, that the tanks fell out of use in 1986. 1986 was, of course, the year the Chernobyl reactor exploded. The N-reactor (like the Chernobyl and other RMBK reactors) was a potential dual use reactor, for both producing electricial power and weapons grade plutonium. It was the only nuclear reactor in the United States that had a similar design to Chernobyl, inasmuch as it was graphite moderated and lacked a containment structure. Unlike Chernobyl - but certainly not other RBMK reactors in the former Soviet Union - the N-reactor was not potentially dual use; it was actually dual use. Almost all of the weapons grade plutonium in US nuclear weapons produced after 1963 was produced in the N-reactor, although some weapons grade plutonium was probably recycled from older decommissioned weapons. (Understanding the long term stability of metallic plutonium in the delta phase was the primary goal of underground nuclear testing that lasted almost to the end of the 20th century.)

The N-reactor was shut in 1987 to avoid "another Chernobyl" although the fact of the matter that the explosion of the Chernobyl reactor required really bad management to fail as it did.

By the way, the Soviet equivalent of Hanford was Mayak, where rather than dump the waste in double shell tanks (or even single shell tanks), the waste was dumped in a lake. Unsurprisingly, the lake is in bad shape.

I discussed Hanford and Mayak in a rather long and lugubrious post here: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels Some information about the residual plutonium from these weapons tests in Nevada geological formations is also included in this long post.

Vast sums of money have been spent "cleaning up" Hanford. To my mind - I'm sure I'm largely a dissident here - I don't necessarily approve of the expenditure, at least most of it (see below), since I don't believe it will save very many lives, since very few lives are seriously at risk. I wonder what the cost will be per "life saved" - if any lives are saved, as opposed to the cost of cleaning up fecal wastes that are uncontained for well over a billion human beings who lack [iany kind of improved sanitation].

It is probably true that much of the expenditure is wasted, a point I made in the afore referenced post when comparing the risk of 4000 truckloads of cement with the risk that someone someday somewhere might eat some Hanford technetium.



There is, despite scant proof of it, that the Linear No Threshold Model "LNT" is a canon - or, in my view, a "cannon" since the assumption's strict regulatory application almost certainly kills people in vast numbers - of irrefutable truth. We will spend almost unlimited amounts of money to prevent a single person dying from radiation exposure related to nuclear fission (but not x-rays or other medical imaging and treatment modalities), while not caring at all about who will die today from exposure from dangerous fossil fuel waste, never mind fecal waste. (Dangerous fossil fuel waste kills about 18,000 people per day.) We simply did not have the molecular biology tools in the 1950's that we have today when the assumption was put forward, nor did we have unintentionally formed sites like Chernobyl, or intentionally formed (albeit for a different purpose than to collect data) like Hanford, or Savannah River in South Carolina. There is considerable evidence, some from the application of modern molecular biological tools, as well as examinations of the original, perhaps dubious, experiments conducted ¾ of a century ago to formulate it, that the “LNT” is highly questionable, and yet it informs our regulatory, social, and (to an overwhelming extent) public perception.

In fact, the only very long term evidence we have of the behavior on actinides and fission products in geologic settings comes from analysis of the Oklo reactors which operated in Gabon nearly two billion years ago. I made reference to the natural nuclear reactors in the post about 828 nuclear tests:



Some of the Hanford waste tanks are leaking, and others may or are even likely to leak, and some of the waste, particularly in the early years of its operation, was dumped in open trenches at Hanford, and to the extent these are migrating, albeit in a drier climate than that at Oklo billions of years ago, they offer experimental insight to the geology of radionuclides.

A quick caveat: Many people still think that the appropriate way to dispose of so called "nuclear waste" is to bury it in geological formations such as that proposed, and then abandoned, at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The Oklo reactors were and probably still are discussed as a justification of the claim that radionuclides will almost certainly not cause cancer putative ranchers living in Nevada, were Yucca Mountain used, in the 25th century if suddenly Nevada is transformed into a tropical rain forest. (It would be an interesting and ethical world if we cared as much about the 18,000 people who will die today from air pollution as we do about this fictional 25th century Nevada rain forest rancher.) I do not approve, personally, of geological disposal of used nuclear fuel. Unlike most advocates of nuclear energy, I am rather happy that Yucca Mountain didn't happen. I believe that nearly every component of used nuclear fuel has value and should be put to use to address otherwise intractable problems. Some of these components are highly radioactive, and will remain so for long periods, so much the better, as the environmental problems they can be used to address, particularly in the case of wide spread chemical pollution of the air, seas, land, and fresh water resources that we face - and all future generations will face - that these products might address will take a long time to ameliorate. My view is that we need more fission products and higher actinides, not fewer.

I have argued and will continue to argue that the solar energy fantasy has proved useless to address climate change, that the trillions of dollars invested into research into developing the technology, manufacturing its components, constructing its infrastructure and connecting all these components together has proved to be a expensive and extremely wasteful endeavor that has done little to save the world now in flames. It failed, is failing and will continue to fail. It's no longer an expensive joke. The specter of climate induced famine is before us.

Considerable amounts of high level radionuclides were removed from the Hanford tanks many years ago. Much of the US industrial and research supply of cesium-137 originated from the wastes isolated from Hanford between 1967 and 1979, with additional purification lasting to 1984. I discussed the procedure utilized for this isolation quite some time ago in this space: 16 Years of (Radioactive) Cesium Recovery Processing at Hanford's B Plant.

The half-life of cesium-137 is 30.08 years. From the radioactive decay law, this means that about 58.3% of this isolated cesium isolated in 1984 has decayed without killing anyone. The balance remains radioactive and useful. (The Goiana event in which four people died and several hundred were contaminated when a cesium-137 source abandoned at a closed medical facility was stolen and opened is thought to have originated from cesium obtained from Oak Ridge National Laboratory by an Italian company.) By contrast, around 71.8% of the cesium-137 isolated from the Hanford tanks in 1967 has decayed since isolated and is thus less useful.

The methods described in the "16 years" report needed to be changed because several of the resins used ultimately failed after some time in use. The full report can be accessed from my 2018 post for anyone interested in the separation science.

The resins used back then were organic resins, and they worked well enough. The paper under discussion in this post uses inorganic resins. I suspect that unfortunately the purpose of these inorganic resins is to put the cesium in a "waste form" rather than to recover it for use, but all the same, it's an interesting paper.

From the introduction:



The interesting composition of the tank supernatants can be found in the supplemental information of the paper, which is free to access, Table S2.

The difficulty of this composition as I see it is the large amounts of potassium and sodium in the mixture, congeners of cesium, as well as calcium, the congener of strontium. (It is important to note that the units are different between the non-radioactive species and the radioactive species, respectively units of molarity and units of microcuries. The non-radioactive species dominate the waste. For example, the concentration of Cs-137 is given as 113 µCi/mL in tank AP105. Given the specific activity of Cs-137, the concentration can be shown to be 10 millionths molar. The concentration of sodium is roughly 600,000 times higher than that of cesium. Thus the separation factor is very challenging.

Nonetheless, the authors claim some success.

Graphics from the paper:



The caption:






The caption:



A feel for the separation factors for various elements in the tanks. (Note the different profiles for different tanks, reflecting to be sure, chemical differences.)



The caption:





The caption:




The caption:





The caption:






The caption:






The caption:



A table from the paper indicates the decontamination factors, rather spectacular in my opinion for cesium and strontium.



From the conclusion of the paper:



Again, the goal here is not recovery, but rather disposal, which I personally find unfortunate. Over many years of thinking about radiocesium, I have convinced myself that it is a very valuable material with many interesting uses, particularly in ameliorating, in continuous flow systems, some otherwise nearly intractable environmental problems. None of what I think about this, of course, will matter, but I hope I will be able to share these ideas with my son before I die, as he is very likely to be better situated to bring these ideas to fruition than I will ever be.

Cesium titanates are very insoluble, and it is difficult to imagine cesium leaching from a titanate waste form, never mind a titanosilicate. Although cesium is often thought to be a highly soluble and mobile element, and in many chemical forms it is very much so, the world supply of cesium to make cesium formate for the drilling of dangerous fossil fuels because so called "renewable energy" has proved useless to address the increasing use of them, never mind eliminating them, is obtained from minerals mined in Canada, primarily pollucite, an aluminosilicate. These minerals are well over 2.5 billion years old, and isolating cesium (and rubidium) from them is not especially easy.

(cf. Petr Černý, David K. Teertstra, Ron Chapman, Julie B. Selway, Frank C. Hawthorne, Karen Ferreira, Leonard E. Chackowsky, Xian-Jue Wang, Robert E. Meintzer; EXTREME FRACTIONATION AND DEFORMATION OF THE LEUCOGRANITE – PEGMATITE SUITE AT RED CROSS LAKE, MANITOBA, CANADA. IV. MINERALOGY. The Canadian Mineralogist 2012;; 50 (6): 1839–1875.)

Mineralized cesium (and rubidium) can be and is, geologically, extremely stable.

None of these facts will, of course, preclude the kind of assholes who, without ever opening a book, from declaring with monumental ignorance that "nobody knows what to do with..." (what they call) "...nuclear waste."

Nevertheless, it is almost impossible that cesium isolated in this fashion from the Hanford tanks will ever kill anyone, no matter where it's taken, put or stored, certainly nowhere near, over centuries, comparable to the number of people who will die from dangerous fossil fuel waste in the next hour and every hour afterwards, 750 people per hour approximately, 18,000 every damned day, about 7 million people per year and that does NOT include deaths from climate change, but only people killed by the chemical toxins in air pollutants. Climate deaths, including but hardly limited to likely rising famine are a whole other category.

But beyond that, for reasons I alluded to in the "828 nuclear tests" posts, it is probably very unlikely that the leaking tanks from the weapons plant will kill very many people, if any. The situation is very likely to be very much like the Oklo situation nearly 2 billion years ago, with small dilute amounts of radioactivity leaching away in subtoxic concentrations. The vast sums of money to satisfy the dark, and frankly illiterate fantasies of anti-nukes are probably thus all wasted, and history will not look kindly on them.

I know these statements fly in the face of "conventional wisdom," but in these times of rising insanity, "conventional wisdom" is something of an oxymoron, not at all to be trusted, as no "wisdom" is involved.

Have a pleasant day tomorrow.

August 25, 2022

China is set to fire up the first molten salt thorium reactor to operate in half a century.

The construction began in 2018 and was scheduled to complete in 2024, but the construction was accelerated and it's ready two years earlier than planned.

Chinese molten-salt reactor cleared for start up

An excerpt of the article:

The last MSR to operate operated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1964 to 1969. It was an experimental reactor and was not designed to produce power. The program was cancelled by the US in favor of expanding the PWR. The PWR has been a remarkable device, and has saved many lives that would have otherwise been lost to air pollution, but it's an inflexible device capable only of producing electricity.

This said, personally, I've lost some enthusiasm for the FLIBE system over the years; I think better options exist.

One interesting parameter on this new version is the highly isotopically purified Li-7 isotope to minimize tritium production. This is probably wasteful as the world could certainly use more tritium.

The most advanced molten salt utilizing reactor systems close to commercialization in the US are not true MSR's in which the fuel is dissolved in the molten salt. The Kairos reactor is a hybrid Triso reactor with a molten salt coolant, and the Terrapower reactor is a liquid sodium breeder with a molten salt thermal reserve.

August 22, 2022

Toward an Emissions and Modern Slavery Impact Accounting Model

There's an interesting commentary in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology in the "Viewpoint" section, this one: Toward an Emissions and Modern Slavery Impact Accounting Model, Joy Murray, Camille J. Mora, and Arunima Malik Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (16), 11103-11106.

It seems as if it may be open sourced - anyone can read it, but a few excerpts are in order:

Figure 1:



The caption:



No, it's not a relic of the 19th century, or even the 20th:



Further:



I downloaded some of the references, regrettably some are behind firewalls, as this topic is often on my mind.

Don't worry, be happy. We're "green."

August 21, 2022

My wife and I don't like the same kind of movies.

I like historical films, she likes "chick flicks" and "horror movies."

My wife sneered, "I don't want to watch movies about Hitler." I said I couldn't handle a "chick flick."

To bridge the gap, she googled "Hitler Chick flicks" and to our joint surprise lots of movies actually came up. We laughed like hell that anything came up.

We went to the library and checked out "Jojo Rabbit."

Not a bad compromise.

I rather enjoyed it, despite its elements of horror. It, um, bridged the gap.

August 14, 2022

It turns out that Trump was prescient about what would happen when he lost the election.