September 29, 2022

Definitely on my reading list...

Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

September 29, 2022

At this moment, all the wind turbines in Germany are producing less power than its three...

...three remaining nuclear plants.

The nuclear plants are producing 100% of capacity, 4.06 GW.

All of the wind turbines in Germany are producing 3.78 GW, 5.82% capacity utilization.

The German carbon intensity is 517 g CO2/kwh.

Coal is producing 48.52% of Germany's electricity, 25.24 GW of power.

Germany Electricity Map (Accessed 12/30/22, 0h:34 min, 9/30/22 Berlin time.)

It's just after midnight. No sun. It's 7°C, (44°F).

Whether one experiences energy poverty in Germany depends entirely on whether the wind blows.

Guess which plants the Germans want to close?

Hindsight is an awful instructor.

September 26, 2022

Man they got that right on CCS schemes...

I'll briefly excerpt for amusement the opening lines of the introduction of this paper: A Machine Learning-Aided Equilibrium Model of VTSA Processes for Sorbents Screening Applied to CO2 Capture from Diluted Sources Alexa Grimm and Matteo Gazzani, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2022 61 (37), 14004-14019.

I refer to the cited play myself when discussing energy schemes.

The text:

I often refer to waiting for Godot as the "nothing happening" associated with the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.

CCS - carbon capture and storage - is a proposal to make dumps. It is unconscionable to build dumps with which future generations will need to deal. CCU - carbon capture and utilization - is another issue entirely although the energy and technical demands are indeed daunting.

It's not going to be easy; that's for sure, and the fact that we have used the planetary atmosphere as a dump will not be forgiven by history.

September 25, 2022

For my 30,000th post, I'd like to thank DU for inspiring me to expand my knowledge, and of course...

...for giving me the right to assert my disagreement on a key element of our party's dogma.

For my 30,000th post, I'd like to talk, using the style of my posts and recalling some of them, about how and why I write my posts, the serious ones at least, and - as I am a member of the pernicious baby boomer generation to whom such things matter above all else - what's in it for me.

I have chosen DU's magnificent Science forum for my 30,000th post because, after being a husband and a father, the most important love in my life is my love of science. The majority of my original posts at DU have been about science.

First off, as is my style, a diversion about a 30,000th post, which this post is:

There is nothing particularly remarkable about that number, 30,000 in my view. It's an artifact of the evolution of human beings with ten fingers.

Other number systems might have proved more useful than base 10, ten having only two factors, 2 and 5. If one wrote "30,000" in the duodecimal system (base 12), which would be more utilitarian than base 10 because it has more factors (1,2,3,4, and 6), "30,000" would convert to 62,208 in base 10.

The advantages of the duodecimal system and derivative enumeration schemes based on it, are related to the reason why we have 360 degrees in a circle, for example, rather than 100, because we can express π/6 radians, π/3 radians as well as π/2 and π/4 radians as whole numbers. It is why we have a word for "dozen" so we can divide a dozen donuts between either 2, 3, 4 or 6 people if we don't eat all of them ourselves. (As for a "baker's dozen," let's not go there.) We can have a third of a foot (4 inches), a quarter of a foot (3 inches), half a foot six inches. These ratios are more problematic in base 10.

Trapped as I am intellectually in base 10, we'll have to live with a repeating decimal for a third of a meter in the metric system in which I live for most purposes.

In any case, I would have never gotten to "30,000" in base 12.

Anyway. Here I am, 30,000, base 10, quite sure I'll never live to have reached 40,000, base 10, posts on DU.

Recently in one of my OP's I remarked on why I have been a Democrat since I was 18 years old (much to the chagrin of my father).

To wit:

I added the bold here that was not in the original which is here: Governor Gretchen Whitmer Announces Plan to Reopen the 50 Year Old Closed Palisades Nuclear Plant.

There are many things that are important to us in the Democratic Party, most recently, doing something about arresting and imprisoning the racist, abysmally stupid, incredibly uneducated orange traitorous thug who somehow left an indelible stain in the Oval office and on our nation's history as well.

Nevertheless, the fact is that in the long run, Donald Trump will be as meaningful as the "last" Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, who actually was a ten year old child rather than a 75 year old petulant son of a bitch who simply acts like a ten year old child, an overly narcissistic one at that. Nearly 1600 years later, no one gives a shit about Romulus Augustus sometimes mocked in his own time as "Augustulus" (little Augustus).

Of the things Rome left behind that does matter, one is that is somewhat obscure, but which nonetheless matters to some people in which I include myself, for instance people interested in the health of birds, is an environmental consequence of Roman "civilization."

To wit:



Proceedings of the Oxford Lead Symposium, 10 December 2014, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University. Lead Ammunition: understanding and minimising the risks to human and environmental health (Professor Richard J. Delahay, University of Exeter, Professor Chris J. Spray, MBE, FRSA, University of Dundee, Eds.)

It would appear that the Romans mined and used about 24,000,000 tons of lead if the above figures are correct, and the effects of that industry are still with us.

(cf. also: Ingemar Renberg,* Richard Bindler and Maja-Lena Brannvall, Using the historical atmospheric lead-deposition record as a chronological marker in sediment deposits in Europe The Holocene 11,5 (2001) pp. 511–516)

Here, for comparison purposes, is the amount of lead that was vaporized as a gasoline additive in the 20th century, during the rise to dominance of the car CULTure:



Source: The Rise and Fall of Tetraethyllead. 2. Dietmar Seyferth Organometallics 2003 22 (25), 5154-5178.

At its peak, the amount of lead vaporized in gasoline alone exceeded by a factor of six, the entire annual lead output of the Roman empire.

Of course, lead is commonly used in many products, batteries, bullets, ballast and shielding, and the amount of lead mined each year dwarfs anything the Romans might have done.

Further, there were and are lots of other applications for lead than those I've just listed in modern technology and more are being proposed:

If this is in any way shocking, I note that one of the big trends in so called "renewable energy" is the development of lead iodide perovskite solar cells. Here, from a recent paper on the subject, (Peng Yu, Wenjun Zhang, Fumeng Ren, Jianan Wang, Haixin Wang, Rui Chen, Shasha Zhang, Yiqiang Zhang, Zonghao Liu and Wei Chen Strategies for highly efficient and stable cesium lead iodide perovskite photovoltaics: mechanisms and processes J. Mater. Chem. C, 2022, 10, 4999–5023) are some of the chemical reactions for methyl ammonium lead iodide perovskites decomposition in solar cells at 95°C:



The "HI" in reactions 5, 7, 9, and 10 is hydroiodic acid, an acid marginally stronger and corrosive than hydrochloric acid, which for full disclosure is an intermediate in my favorite thermal water splitting cycle, the closed sulfur iodide cycle, but (if not neutralized by ammonia or methylamine in the gas phase) could prove problematic for fire fighters fighting a fire at a bourgeois McMansion covered with "green" lead perovskite solar cells. More serious is the methyl iodide in reactions 8 and 9, which is an insecticide, now largely (but not entirely) banned because of its ozone destruction potential, that alkylates tyrosine, serine, and threonine residues in proteins, causing their essential tertiary structure to fall apart. The issue of slower decomposition is always present of course, since solar cells can rise to temperatures far above ambient temperatures much as asphalt does as one may notice walking barefoot in a parking lot.

Happily, at least in my opinion, "efficient" (is this a joke?) lead iodide based perovskite solar cells have not gone commercial, owing to their stability issues, and they are not (yet) a major source of lead pollution.

By the way, the idea of putting tetraethyl lead in gasoline was considered wonderful in its time, and the discovery of its use as an antiknock agent won all kinds of awards and praise. Maybe stable lead iodide perovskite solar cells, should they be realized will be similar, perhaps in the very same way with the very same consequences.

Be that as it may, this brings me to the point underlying a major theme of my 30,000 posts, at least beginning around 2010, I'd guess, which is a dissident view among the bulk of my fellow Democrats. I reject, totally and completely, without reservation, the notion that so called "renewable energy" is either sustainable or environmentally benign. For me the purpose of a political party should not be simply to hold power vs the "bad guys," but rather to govern well. In my view, when Democrats hype the value of so called "renewable energy" - in reality the use of the word "renewable" renders the phrase oxymoronic - we are not governing well. We need, as Lincoln wrote in another context in one of my favorite writings, his 1862 message to Congress - from which my sig line here is an excerpt - as Democrats to "think anew" about what I regard as the most serious issue before humanity in our times, climate change.

On the political left this issue is most often of critical importance; way more than 90% of us, I'm sure, think it so. The question is not whether we acknowledge the importance of the issue; the question is whether we have any idea at all as to what can or should be done about it.

Here is a statement, in various forms, that I have included in a large number of my 30,000 posts on this website:



Amiri Baraka wrote a beautiful poem, first published in The Dead Lecturer in 1964, a poem, the opening lines of which have hung in my mind since the early 1970's:



"To repeat...the tired sounds..."

I repeat myself a lot at DU, with slight - often very slight - modifications, more about that below. I appreciate where tolerance for my practice of doing so is allowed. It's like echolalia to which Kurt Vonnegut once referred mocking one of his characters, or perhaps, even more accurately, palilalia.

Baraka's poem ends like this:



...go out to what is most beautiful...What country is this?"

I suppose that anyone who is familiar with my writings here and elsewhere will refer, with more than a little accuracy, to me as "pronuclear activist" - another form of my dissidence as a Democrat, although this is changing for people like Gretchen Whitmer, and indeed, more quietly, with Joe Biden - but on a deeper level, the far more profound level, what I really am is as much as I might hate to admit it, is an "anti" as in "anti-fossil fuels." I often mock the "antis," antivaxxers, anti-GMO, antinukes, but in that's what I am, an "anti," anti-fossil fuels. I note that there are many pronuclear activists - although this is also changing - who a pro fossil fuels - muttering insipidly about economics. Of course, there are antinukes who also mutter insipidly about economics, a subject about which they are clueless as they are about environmental issues.

Climate change is the most serious risk associated with dangerous fossil fuels, but it is hardly the only risk by any stretch of the imagination. I sometimes muse to myself whether the rise of insanity in the world is actually a massive case of "Mad Hatters Disease" aka "Minamata disease" which is related to the neurotoxic element mercury, but at least with respect to its symptomology, in an etiological sense, also to lead. The mechanism for the neurotoxicology for both elements is, as I recall, generally associated with effects on the metabolic proteins responsible for energy generation in the most energy demanding tissues in human beings, brain tissue. Without energy, brain cells cease to function or die.

Without sustainable and clean energy, much of humanity will cease to function and die.

Let me return to the subject of the dangerous fossil fuel waste lead:

By far, one of the largest sources of environmental exposure to lead on this planet right now is longer tetraethyl lead gasoline; it’s the combustion of coal. (Coal also releases significant mercury to the environment.)

Here are two graphics from the following publication: Muyang Li, Wei Liu, Wenqiu Liu, Mengyan Bi, Zhaojie Cui, Dynamic substance flow analysis of lead in the fossil fuel system of China from 1980 to 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production, Volume 313, 2021, 127918,



The caption:





The caption:



Note that these environmental releases are not related to technological use of lead, but rather the release of the element into the environment from the use of coal. The technological use makes things worse, far worse. As the above graphics show, the lead in raw coal used just by by China rose from around 15,000 tons in 1980 to close to 90,000 tons in 2018. In the "percent talk" used by advocates of so called "renewable energy" to obscure its uselessness, assuming the numbers in the graphic in figure 2, by 575% in just 38 years, and is releasing into the environment twice as much lead as the Roman Empire consumed on average for all purposes each year during its existence.

And if China, where much of our "stuff" is made seems far away, we shouldn't feel all that smug. In my "what's in it for me" generation, we should know that the lead released in China does get "here:" Provenance of Anthropogenic Pb and Atmospheric Dust to Northwestern North America Bess G. Koffman, Patrick Saylor, Roujia Zhong, Lily Sethares, Meg F. Yoder, Lena Hanschka, Taylor Methven, Yue Cai, Louise Bolge, Jack Longman, Steven L. Goldstein, and Erich C. Osterberg Environmental Science & Technology 2022 56 (18), 13107-13118. From the text:



If accurate, this suggests that taking tetraethyl lead out of gasoline formulations did very little to address the distribution of lead as a single component dangerous fossil fuel waste. In fact, it appears the situation is getting worse, not better.

And yet...and yet...there are people, albeit people for whom I clearly have little intellectual or moral respect, who want to tell me about so called "nuclear waste."

Here is a follow up paper from the authors of a scientific paper - designed to evaluate the migration patterns of tuna fish by the use of radioactive tracers - discussing the media reaction to that paper, since the radioactive tracer in question, the isotope cesium-134, was released by the famous (or infamous) Fukushima reactor: Fisher, Nicholas S. , Beaugelin-Seiller, Karine , Hinton, Thomas G. , Baumann, Zofia , Madigan, Daniel J., Garnier-Laplace, Jacqueline Evaluation of radiation doses and associated risk from the Fukushima nuclear accident to marine biota and human consumers of seafood , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, 26, (2013) 10670-10675.

The paper is open sourced, and the reader is invited to look at Table 1, therein, which is about risk discussed in an important way, relative risk. I note that in Table 1, the nuclide in question, cesium-134, is observed to have one decay per kg per second (1 Bq) in a tuna fish. That single decay issue has come up in one of my favorite posts here, which I'll reference herein.

The introductory text from the paper just cited:



The authors go on to report, in language more gracious than I generally use and will use, that the concern about the radioactive atoms in the tuna fish was, simply put, stupid.

Now, let's be clear on something, OK? Above I reported on the release of tens of thousands of tons of the neurotoxic element lead in just one country, albeit a big country, much of which ends up in the ocean and in the food chain of tuna fish. This release takes place more or less continuously, without interruption on a massive scale from the normal operation of dangerous fossil fuel plants. Although I have not focused on it, another dangerous fossil fuel waste released by the very same process is the similarly neurotoxic element mercury which is well known to be bioconcentrated in the food chain of tuna fish.

This fact is not "covered by >1,100 newspapers worldwide and numerous internet, television, and radio outlets."

And yet...and yet...there are people, albeit people for whom I clearly have little intellectual or moral respect, who want to tell me about Fukushima.

Respect...



Recently a generous soul commenting on my personality in this space said that though he or she or they liked my posts, they felt I can be a little, um, "off putting."

Some people can be too nice. Other people have described my personality as being that of a "damned asshole," again, too nice. A few, people, mostly pro-nuke types elsewhere, have described my style, approvingly, as "take no prisoners."

This is an old "problem" with me.

Shortly before I was banned at DailyKos - I say it was for telling the truth - I commented thus on my aggressive writing style, referring then to the famous Fukushima tuna fish of that time and my sense of outrage.



Now, in the years that have passed since that long ago Kos post, we have discovered a new type of pernicious being, the MAGAT. No one here is inclined to be overly polite on the subject of MAGATS. They are awful people, overt and unapologetic hypocrites, who talk about "law and order" and then work to beat cops to death with flagpoles. They are racist and as perhaps the ultimate expression of sacrilege, if one accepts the concept of their being sacrilege, worship a dishonest and corrupt orange pig. They have killed people by spreading obnoxious idiocy about the nonexistence of Covid, or, if there is Covid, that it is cured by a cow de-wormer, or the anti-parasitic drug hydroxychloroquine or worse, have allowed the disease to spread based on an irrational fear of vaccines that they continuously hype and promote. Their ignorance literally kills people.

Frankly I think it would be morally dubious, even overtly wrong, to indulge MAGATs, to appease them with even a smidgeon of understanding. If they are not morally and intellectually wrong, nothing is wrong. Again, "to repeat, as the day repeats its colors," their ignorance kills people.

I refer to my own anger with nonsense expression on the subject environmental issues, issues that far outweigh the worst of Covid, and the people who grotesquely distort them with tiresome dogma, by analogy.

I am not inclined to worry if people regard me as an "insufferable asshole." I'm not trying to make friends or be admired. I am here to bring attention to a serious issue that will not be addressed by calling the solar installation guy and buying a Tesla car. It's no longer time for jokes. I am doing so because I feel a certain responsibility to future generations, as much as I am appalled by what my generation has done to them.

The general way I choose what to write on scientific/environmental subjects is basically the same, albeit somewhat more organized and sophisticated. I still go through certain scientific journals, to use an antique word, "religiously," but now I keep notes on the first pass through them, recording what I regard as "papers of interest" in the titles with a color code. Here are screen shots of a recent such file in MS Word, referring to the most recent, as of this writing, issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology:





The papers and descriptions that are in green are papers that on first impression about which I'd like to write either here on DU or elsewhere. Only a very small percentage of the large number of papers so marked actually appear in my writings; there simply isn't time to cover or read everything. Nevertheless, in terms of developing ideas, the sampling is extremely valuable. Red text refers to a paper about which I have written or on which I've commented in my writings. I cited a paper on lead transport in this post, hence the red mark. The papers marked in orange are papers that involve my professional development; recently I've been thinking a great deal about cell sorting, and although my professional interest in cell sorting has nothing to do with phosphorous recovery, the general concept is of interest, and the Raman spectral application broadens perspective.

While this approach may cover well over 50% of my original technical posts, sometimes I am stimulated to write posts in response to things I see or hear in the media, in particular in those cases where a media report is spectacularly misleading, misinterpreted. Often I become aware of these misinterpretations here. An example is a recent case involving research into the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, a subject of which I'm aware as I have some professional, if indirect, interest. A rather silly interpretation of the retraction or possible retraction (for scientific fraud) of a paper in support of one hypothesis behind potential treatments was blown out of proportion by a staff writer at DailyKos, and migrated here to the superior website where it was taken up. Since I knew the statements in the DailyKos article were very overblown, and since there's often trouble when non-scientists use their ability to communicate to spread nonsense like wild fire - for example with the "Fukushima tuna fish" described above; I had a neighbor who swore he'd never eat tuna again - I felt it behooved me to offer a correction, lest people advocate cutting Alzheimer's funding for a particular hypothesis which has significant support beyond the fraudulent literature that was taken as additional evidence for the hypothesis.

That post is here:

Some remarks on purported fraud concerned with αβ oligomer hypothesis in Alzheimer's research.

I hope in these kinds of posts I clearly define the limits of my knowledge, but nonetheless suggest the types of critical thinking should apply based on what one can find out. As I have managed to maintain complete access to the full scientific literature, and basically can access writings on a large number of topics in the primary scientific literature, and have long experience in reading and interpreting them, I can be helpful in this sense.

On occasion I write posts about subjects about which I know very little, or nothing at all, but which intrigue me in such a way as to inspire me to want to find out about them. Here's an example of such a post:

Chemical Principles of Topological Semimetals (It seems the graphics links in that post have died...oh well.) I was inspired to learn more about Dr. Shoop's work after attending a lecture she gave, and thus wrote about it here. People like Dr. Shoop make me feel stupid, which is a good thing. Feeling stupid is an opportunity and a motivation to learn, to expand one's knowledge.

Some of my posts merely report the data, albeit with some bitter commentary. I have diligently followed the DATA!!! reported weekly at the Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory for many years, entering it into spreadsheets that I use for calculations of exactly how disastrously inadequate whatever we think we are doing, or should do about climate change is.

For several years, I have regularly and constantly reported the new records set, and indeed to rising rate at which we are destroying the planetary atmosphere.



Here's one in the series of these types of posts, for which I often cut and paste the text of a previous post into the latest version:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory 421.13 ppm.

It's tiring, and because as I understand energy technology at a very deep level, and because I understand the chemistry and physics of carbon dioxide in particular, and other greenhouse gases in general, it's depressing, because I fully understand that world wide the generally accepted proposals for doing "something" is actually making things worse, not better. The accumulation of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is accelerating, not decelerating.

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.



(The bold was added here; it was not in the original.)

This brings me to the subject of the kind of "environmentalist" I am. I am a "John Muir" type environmentalist, inasmuch, unlike the modern day assholes who perverted the organization he founded, the Sierra Club, I oppose the industrialization of wilderness, in particular to produce, in a sloppy, ineffective, wasteful and very dirty way. As opposed to Muir's purposes, the modern day Sierra Club membership, perverting Muir's vision, never saw a wilderness they didn't want to trash with wind turbines, all of which will be landfill within 25 years. As I repeat often, "as the day repeats its colors" the responsibility for cleaning up the destruction and the mess of this bourgeois fantasy based affectation will fall to today's toddlers just as they are finishing college and entering their careers.

This, to my mind, defines "injustice." One thing that should define Democrats in my view is contempt for injustice.

I recently posted reference to an interview of another kind of environmentalist with whom I'm in accord, Jim Hansen, the climate scientist and activist. During the interview, it was pointed out that modern "environmental" organizations are prevented from doing anything meaningful because they are a big, big, big business, driven by donors who have drank the disastrous and deadly antinuke Kool-Aid that is killing people. No purveying of ignorance, no money. (How this differs from Exxon, if not on scale, then certainly in spirit, escapes me.)

An URGENT Chat with the Godfather of Climate Science|An Urgent Chat With the Godfather of Climate Science.

I will return to the work of Dr. Hansen below when I discuss my cut and paste approach to responding to pertinacious, interminable antinuke dogma.

Recently, as the world burns; as people drop dead in the streets, in fields, and sometimes in their homes from extreme heat; as crops fail from a lack of water; as ancient huge rivers dry up and disappear; as the glaciers that represent the water supply of billions of people melt, a new type of antinuke has appeared at DU, the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, a type of person who pretends not to have a visceral hatred of nuclear energy but baldly asserts, despite dragging out every idiotic objection to nuclear power ever raised by chanting oblivious fools. They are a generic bunch of overt frauds, Trumpian in the scale of dishonestly describing themselves.

Now there is no value in attempting to convince these sorts to change their ossified and rather small minds about doing anything involved with "thinking anew." They do not think. They chant. Maybe they join bourgeois oblivion squads like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, where they get their incantations to repeat. I don't know and I don't care.

The German "Climate" Antinuke Envoy from Greenpeace says:

Germany’s decision to burn coal this winter ‘a hard pill to swallow,’ climate envoy says.

This is an asshole who applauded the closing of nuclear plants to burn coal. It's not a "bitter pill." It's a deadly pill. The German decision to embrace so called "renewable energy" was never about climate change. It was always about irrational fear of nuclear energy. They are burning coal, lots of it, and killing people by doing so.

And let's be clear, the "I'm not an anti-nuke" antinukes who write here to make excuses for the failure of so called "renewable energy" to do doodle squat about climate change, or who engage in tiresome and fallacious soothsaying about what so called "renewable energy" will do "by 2030," or "by 2040" or "by 2050," after all of the soothsaying about "by 1990" and "by 2000," "by 2010" and "by 2020" yuppie baby boomer "aspirational" "deadlines passed with things worsening by the minute, have seldom been interested in climate change, or the preservation of wilderness, or the death of seas or any serious environmental issues. What bothers them, and frankly many people, including asinine "ministers" in the German government. These people are terrified that a single radioactive atom will show up in their tiny and largely brains, killing them.

"A single atom...in a tiny brain." For a long time I kept antinukes, including "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes on my magnificent ignore list. However when I opened the DU website without bothering to log in, I noticed a few of them whining in my posts.

This year, 2022, glaciers all over the world have been collapsing, and major glaciers, including the so called "Doomsday glacier" are approaching collapse. Some of these collapses, notably in Italy, but especially in Pakistan - where the collapses have caused disastrous flooding - have involved fatalities.

Sometime ago, an "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke called up one of my old posts to report that nuclear power was "too dangerous" because a tunnel with some old railcars on which abandoned slightly radioactive chemical reactors were being stored collapsed.

Now, the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke is in my opinion a very uninteresting person, who likes to whine along the lines of "I never said that..." when confronted with my sarcasm directed at his, her, or their stupidity and ignorance. I really don't study stupid people deeply to see what they did and did not say, I am far more interested in what highly intelligent people, Dr. Shoop referenced above, or Dr. Hansen, also referenced above say. One of the sarcastic remarks I made to this particularly stupid "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke involved the "single radioactive atom in a tiny brain" terror of antinukes.

"I never said that! I never said that!" whined the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke, as if I give a rat's ass about what antinukes say. Hell, I know what they have to say; they've been dogging me with their selective attention and gaslighting for years. They are rather like Republicans in this respect: Whining about a collapse of an old tunnel at Hanford is exactly equivalent in my mind to Republicans whining about the teaching of "Critical Race Theory," or any of the other specious bullshit they raise.

Nevertheless, I'm actually happy that the "I'm not an antinuke" whined about my sarcasm, because it inspired me to ask a question which is this, "How many radioactive atoms from Hanford might actually migrate into the brain of an antinuke, and more importantly, what would be the physiological consequences of these atoms in the antinuke?"

This brings me to a second reason I write posts, which is to deepen my understanding.

I have long been aware that every human being on this planet, indeed every living thing on this planet has been radioactive for billions of years, owing to the natural radioactivity associated with the essential element potassium and its congener (which follows potassium into living tissue) rubidium, also naturally radioactive. I have also long been aware of the chemistry of plutonium, which I regard as the key element to save the world, as well as many aspects of its geochemistry. I am, in fact, an expert on the chemistry of used nuclear fuels and their components, which some people, absurdly in my opinion, call "nuclear waste."

My status as an expert in all things nuclear has been acknowledged by some members of DU when I was asked to write this post:

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine. (Here I explored the "Fukushima syndrome" that drove Germany to fund Putin's war in Ukraine.)

Nevertheless, the dumb "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke's whining did indeed inspire a lot of research on my part, not because the "I'm not an antinuke" antinuke is equipped emotionally, intellectually or ethically to be educated - he, she or they clearly isn't/aren't so equipped - but because the question led me to call up lots of papers that inspired calling up additional papers until I found myself learning things that I didn't know before:

I write to learn, as I noted in my DailyKos comment so many years ago.

The post I wrote on the subject of radioactive atoms migrating into the tiny brains of "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes is very arcane, long and probably uninteresting to most people, but it was a joy to write it, as it brought together several concepts from my professional life in pharmaceutics and my environmental interests, centered on the importance of advancing nuclear energy as quickly as is possible. It involved geochemistry, physical chemistry, physiological chemistry and indeed, general inorganic chemistry. So I do owe a vote of thanks to this particular dumb antinuke for inspiring the research which ultimately deepened my understanding of otherwise familiar concepts. That post is here:

828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

Finally, there is a third reason I write posts, when current events inspire me to coalesce crude ideas that have floated around in my mind but I have not strictly evaluated on a quantitative basis. I used to live, a very long time ago, in California, and there are parts of me that still love the place. The recent drought and the extreme temperatures and fires there have broken my heart, and I have long been disturbed by the destruction of the Colorado River Delta, the death of Owens Lake, and related issues connected with water supplies in that State.

The physics and chemistry of supercritical water have long been an interest of mine, mostly connected with environmental remediation of damaged water supplies, but I have long been aware of its potential for desalination, but I never made a quantitative estimate of what would be involved. The events in California owing to climate change inspired me to write here on the subject, and thus to do some calculations and learn new details on the topic.

That post is here: The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

These are some of the posts for which I have learned new things in the preparation of them. In a moment, I will close with comments about why Democratic Underground is the best liberal blog on the planet, vastly superior to some more prominent and popular blogs, because Democratic Underground's operation reflects Democratic values.

First, about repetition...



There are certain things that I repeat simply by cutting and pasting text I've saved in a word file, to quickly address the rote stuff I hear about energy.

Some examples:

The death toll associated with not embracing nuclear energy:



Jim Hansen's famous paper with a colleague showing that nuclear energy saves lives:



The vast expense for the useless so called "renewable energy will save us" fantasy.



The trivial amounts of unreliable energy we got from this expenditure on the useless solar and wind industries compared to the energy produced by the vilified nuclear industry, also showing the scale of use of deadly and dangerous fossil fuels:



Data with which show by calculation how many people the German antinukes, who funded Putin's war on the Ukraine with their dangerous fossil fuel purchases, are killing with their switch from nuclear to coal.





For my 30,000th post, which this is, I chose to look back at what I have done here, and why I did it. "What was in it for me," the Baby Boomer quest, was that writing at DU gave me the opportunity to make myself learn, sometimes as a reaction, and sometimes in hopes of doing my little part to allow us, Democrats in general, to change for the better, for now we are the party of Lincoln, the party which must and can think anew.

Now in closing, let me remark on what makes Democratic Underground Democratic: The founders and the operators of this website have embraced Democracy. They do not and have not, in general, despite their "ownership" of the site behaved in an autocratic fashion. I'm often obnoxious. Sometimes I step over the line. However, when I am so there is no autocratic fiat by which I am banned or my posts are hidden. Rather the admins here have created the wonderful "jury system" whereby the membership can decide on these issues of disagreement with a rule of law. DU's rules are defined. When one is called to a jury here, one must first read the rule to rule.

Secondly, there is the MIRT system, whereby DUers are called upon to rule on whether new members actually belong here or whether they are trolls. Although admins serve continuously on this task, the members of this function rotate. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve on MIRT.

In short, Democratic Underground, embraces with Democratic values, in spite of no fixed requirement to do so.

This may contrast with say, DailyKos, which has an "owner" and which functions as an autocracy at worst, and oligarchy at best.

I am honored that in spite of my disagreement with certain elements of our dogma, I have been allowed to persist.

"Still, I persisted..."

Many years ago, long before I met my wife, when I was young, I spent an afternoon with a nice young woman, a refugee from a wealthy and sophisticated family, drinking wine laughing over a book of Kliban cartoons, whereupon we ended up taking a bath together and doing other fun stuff. It was nothing serious and went nowhere after that, but she liked me, she said, because she thought - even though I was something of a dummy in those days, looking back - she thought I was a pretty smart guy.

She, and I, loved this particular cartoon:



I leave it to others to decide whether I am "Judy with a tiny head" or a "callous sophisticate" or neither.

I thought I'd take the occasion of my 30,000th post, as meaningful as the number itself may or may not be, to reflect on what DU has meant to me, and equally important, what it has done for me.



Have a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

September 20, 2022

Well, rather than read and reread my responses, people could find things out for themselves.

I do.

As for the claim that solar and wind cut into the use of fossil fuels, one would think that after trillions of dollars squandered on them the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going down, but the opposite is true. The accumulation is accelerating.

I derived a crude quadratic equation reflecting this rate here:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

Anyone who wants me to be impressed will show me data that gives different boundary conditions. However they don't because they can't.

Of course, fossil fuels were never the focus of the wind and solar scam. The goal was to attack nuclear energy, which has been successful in Europe, in particular in Germany with the result that energy poverty is arising because the Germans can't get Putin to take more of their money to use to kill Ukrainians.

I note that, in contrast to the Germans, most of the former USSR's former client states are embracing nuclear power. (The report linked cites Polish literature.)

One would think that if solar and wind were so damned quick to build, half a century of cheering for them and throwing huge sums of money at them would have led to them producing more than the roughly 11 exajoules they produce each year, and something like the roughly 30 exajoules nuclear, even with its infrastructure being defunded, has been producing each year for decades in an atmosphere of vituperation and selective attention.

As for my responsibility to answer questions, including deliberately loaded questions, I read for myself, find out things for myself, and it's not my job to teach the anti-nuke community how to face reality. Experience teaches that they won't do it anyway.

I'm an autodidact. Anyone can be one if they spend the time.

Rather than badger me, I wonder if anti-nukes can look in the mirror and see if they're wearing any clothes.

Anti-nukes don't answer the question "If used nuclear fuel is so 'dangerous' how many people have been killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel in the 70 year history of commercial nuclear operations?" even though they report so called "nuclear waste" to be a big, big, big, big "problem." When they act this way, I wonder if they're insane.

Why is it my job to answer them about anything?

They also can't explain why after all this "wind and solar are cheap" poor people can't afford electricity in Europe, why Germany's industries are shutting down and people are being laid off.

Crippling’ Energy Bills Force Europe’s Factories to Go Dark



(Ref: NY Times, 9/19/22)

The planet is on fire. People have died all over the world from extreme heat. Rivers have disappeared. Glaciers that are the source of fresh water for billions of people are melting and disappearing Crops are failing from heat and a lack of water. Huge ecosystems are collapsing.

And I'm being asked to count beans on coal to nuclear conversions?

Should I include the payback for people not being killed because coal isn't burned because coal was replaced by nuclear?

The cost of rivers flowing because nuclear power produces reliable and constant power without driving climate change by relying on fossil fuel plants to start up?

How about the cost of forests not burning, also because nuclear plants don't need to fire up coal plants like the Germans do when the wind isn't blowing?

How about the cost of having water to irrigate crops also because nuclear plants don't drive climate change?

How about the cost of treating people disabled by air pollution, because nuclear plants can contain their by products on site indefinitely?

I linked a report. Anyone can read it. It's not my job to inform people whose main concern is the cost of the "clean up" of Three Mile Island and isolate it from the cost of the FACT that solar and wind are unreliable and inordinately expensive.

All the nickel and diming in on this issue frankly disgusts me.

A nuclear plant, no matter how much it costs, is a gift to future generations. This was true in my lifetime. My father's generation built the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, which came on line in 1969 and was generating electricity for me at a low price until 2018. It operated for 49 years without killing anyone. It could have gone longer, but bean counters determined that burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere was cheaper.

Again, for whom?

My son is on the front lines of nuclear engineering. It seems quite likely he may interact with some of the people who wrote this report, since the nuclear research community in the national labs is relatively small and his advisor holds a joint appointment to one of those labs. I'm not going to bother him with, "An anti-nuke wants to know..."

Anyone who wants to find out about external costs, the costs to the environment and to living things, including but not limited to human beings can do so. I did. Anyone who wants to talk about construction costs and construction costs only, using selective attention and ignoring the costs of the redundant systems on which the short lived solar and wind junk depend is entirely missing my point, and there's no real value in discussing anything with them. They don't hear what they don't want to hear. They may as well be on a different planet. I, by contrast, am living on the planet that's regrettably burning because of irrational fear and deliberate ignorance.

Am I being clear?

No?

I couldn't care less.

September 17, 2022

Three DOE National Labs (ORNL, ANL, INL) Report on the Conversion of Coal Plants to Nuclear Plants.

The full report is here: Investigating Benefits and Challenges of Converting Retiring Coal Plants into Nuclear Plants. (ORNL, INL, ANL).

The trend in modern nuclear engineering is to treat the nuclear island separate from the islands devoted to producing consumer energy, in all most every case, electrical energy up to now. There is no intrinsic reason for doing so, steam Rankine engines either from the coal plants on which the antinuke rhetoric supports, or current dedicated nuclear plants are low thermodynamic efficiency, around 33%. While one can applaud the basic idea considered in reusing the steam turbines and heat sinks from coal plants for the conversion of nuclear heat to electricity, given that coal plants have a reliability second only to nuclear plants (and ignoring that coal plants kill people during normal operations and nuclear plants, um, don't), we do need to consider that because of climate change, the heat sink systems need adjustment. The ideal solution is to capture waste heat as liquid fuels, raise efficiency by raising reactor temperatures, and reject unused heat directly to the atmosphere rather than water, except in the case where electricity is a side product of desalination.

I discussed a thought experiment about the latter case here:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

Nevertheless, the consideration of this case, apparently under discussion in coal heavy Poland using either the Kairos or NuScale technology (cf pp 28-32 in the report) does seem of value. Coal steam turbines are designed to operate continuously, meaning that the materials in those turbines, as well as the attached generators should be considered for further use.

The DOE News Item: DOE Report Finds Hundreds of Retiring Coal Plant Sites Could Convert to Nuclear

An excerpt:

I added the bold; my reason for supporting nuclear energy is not about saving a few bucks for the short term and screwing all future generations. My reason is ethical; it's about saving lives and leaving gifts for future generations, rather than liabilities.

The WNN news item:

US study assesses potential for coal-to-nuclear conversion

An excerpt:



Of course, there are trends in some places to replace nuclear energy with coal.

Recently I engaged a rather stupid antinuke in an online conversation for the purpose of letting him, her or they display exactly how stupid he, she, or they is/are. It succeeded. The anti-nuke in question whined about so called "nuclear waste," but refused with childish evasions to answer the question I asked: "How many people in the 70 years of commercial nuclear power operations have been killed by the storage of used nuclear fuel?"

My favorite part in this exposure - the anti-nuke claimed not to be an anti-nuke as they typically do these days, now that they helped to destroy the planet - was showing data reflecting that the officially anti-nuke country Germany has shut its nuclear plants to burn coal. (Our President is clearly wiser than their Chancellors.)

Anti-nukes aren't very bright, so I made sure to use graphic representations; apparently they have low reading comprehension:

Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 5 years:






Germany's electrical generation sources for the last 30 days:






Source: Electricity Map, Germany (Accessed 9/16/22)

For comparison purposes here's France for the last 5 years:





I noted that the type of coal the Germans are burning, their primary domestic coal supply, is lignite.

I then pointed to a rather well cited study in Lancet - one I've referred to a number of times - suggesting the mortality rates associated with primary energy types

Here's table 2:

Anil Markandya, Paul Wilkinson, Electricity generation and health, The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9591, 2007, Pages 979-990.

When presented with the question, after lots of dumb excuses for not answering it, the anti-nuke rather reminded me of this fun interchange with former Senator Al Franken when he asked a straight up question (in another context) that his rhetorical opponent refused to answer, because the rhetorical opponent was lying:



While Franken's exchange was amusing; I'm actually not amused by anti-nukes. The planet is burning. Rivers have disappeared. Crops and people have been killed by extreme heat. Glaciers on which billions of people depend for their water supply are melting permanently. Vast oceanic ecosystems are being wiped off the face of the planet.

It's not funny, nor is it amusing.

Ignorance kills.

Have a nice weekend.

September 15, 2022

Europe slashes fertilizer production

Here's an interesting news article: Europe slashes fertilizer production Sean Pratt, The Western Producer, September 14, 2022.

Despite everything one hears about hydrogen cars, hydrogen buses, hydrogen ships all from the solar and wind industries that people seem to think are providing all the world's energy - a thought that is similar to the delusion of a certain fat badly educated shyster with a spray on tan who will tell anyone who will listen that he won the 2022 US Presidential election - the majority of the hydrogen on this planet goes to making ammonia based fertilizers.

I've produced this graphic several times here:



The caption:

Source: 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

Ammonia and its derivatives, urea, ammonium nitrate, etc are still made beginning with the the Haber Bosch process discovered in the early 20th century. Although the process has improved in efficiency enormously over the years, it still relies on the hydrogenation of nitrogen gas at high temperatures and pressures using catalysts. It's energy intensive.

It appears that Europe has been closing its fertilizer plants, despite all the solar and wind junk they've installed, because Putin won't sell them natural gas, from which much of the world's hydrogen is made by steam reforming at a large thermodynamic energy loss.

From the article:



In other reports of this situation from other news sources, it appears that it will lead to a shortage of basic staple foods in Africa of around 30 million tons.

Don't worry; be happy. If any of this bothers you, cruise around the internet and find pictures of hydrogen buses and hydrogen cars - hell see if you can find a hydrogen lawn mower or weed wacker - and tell yourself lies that the bus and all this other fanciful stuff are all "green."

If you can't face the truth, tell yourself lies.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

September 12, 2022

Governor Gretchen Whitmer Announces Plan to Reopen the 50 Year Old Closed Palisades Nuclear Plant.

From the local Michigan News (Holland Sentinel): In surprise move, Whitmer announces plan to reopen shuttered Palisades nuclear plant.

by Michael Boatman September 9, 2022.

An excerpt:

From a trade magazine: Michigan Governor Urges DOE to Support Palisades Nuclear Plant’s Reopening

by Sonia Patel Power September 12, 2022



From World Nuclear News:

Michigan governor calls for nuclear plant to reopen

Subtitle:





The reason I am a Democrat is basically connected with my view of human rights, in particular the rights of women, my abhorrence of racism, my concern for the impoverished (a far less fashionable focus in our party than it used to be), but most importantly my view that we owe future generations a sustainable world, a task at which my now dying generation has failed miserably and for which history will not forgive us.

In this last category after many years of careful and deep study, some of which took place as I researched on line writings here and elsewhere, I have been deeply disturbed by the large anti-nuclear wing of our party since I have drawn the conclusion that opposition to nuclear power kills people. Moreover, I have a very low opinion of so called "renewable energy" which is both reactionary and unsustainable. I am fully aware that this makes me something of an outlier in our party. I have always described my dissatisfaction with my party on this score to be analogous to what an otherwise sensible "small government," low tax Republican of the old school (before the party went totally insane) might have felt when confronted with creationism and other aspects of religious fundamentalism. More recently I have compared anti-nukes to anti-vaxxers.

The realities of climate change are before us, and the precariousness of power systems dependent on the wind blowing and the sun shining, in Texas, in California, and most notably in Europe, particularly Germany are drawing the insufficiencies of this approach starkly. These systems are almost always backed up by redundant dangerous fossil fuel powered systems in almost every case despite dangerous and dubious enthusiasm for batteries and hydrogen that more or less remains in never-never land.

The recent support of Gavin Newsome and Gretchen Whitmer - not to mention Joe Biden and Secretary Granholm - for nuclear energy is thus a welcome change for me.

Perhaps the time will come when more Democrats will recognize the profound flaws and environmentally dubious nature of so called "renewable energy," but for now, I'll take what I can get. Protecting valuable working nuclear resources is enough, for now. Subsidizing so called "renewable energy" is an economically unsound idea since it values unreliable energy over reliable energy and allows unreliable energy to impact the economics of energy that works with high capacity utilization and low carbon emissions, of which there is only one form, nuclear energy.

We do, however, need to go far further, in particular, we have to rebuild our destroyed nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, if I may say, "build back better," to use a phrase coined by a rather prominent old man with remarkable and surprisingly youthful energy to do good.

This is a critical issue, pun intended.

Have a nice evening.

September 12, 2022

An interview with Jim Hansen.

September 11, 2022

France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch.

Back in July, I reported on and linked a video from the Decouple Podcast titled "Something's Rotten in the French Nuclear Industry."

The interview by Chris Keefer, a Canadian physician and nuclear activist, with Mark Nelson was, in my view, excellent, and I was especially appreciative of the spin on Shel Silverstein's "The Giving Tree."

Because the Hollande administration, and the early Macron administration (having subsequently reversed itself) were hostile to nuclear energy and skimmed its profits to invest in the failed but popular gas and coal dependent wind and solar industries, the magnificent French nuclear infrastructure fell into disrepair and faced a number of materials science difficulties that might have been managed had France maintained its reactors as Americans do.

Putin has disabused Europe of the notion that one can build expensive (and often useless, depending on the weather) wind and solar plants without access to dangerous fossil fuels, and at precisely the time that Europe most needs them, French nuclear reactors have been unavailable.

I don't know if this is true, but I was pleased to see this report from an English language French News Site: [link:France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch|France to restart all nuclear reactors by winter amid energy crunch].

If true, this should help Europe support Ukraine without leaving its citizens in the dark, weighted down by extreme energy prices. (European electricity rates recently hit the previously unimaginable figure of 1000 Euros/MWh, and people, notably the poor are suffering enormously.

Issues in the French nuclear industry were recently covered in a commentary in the scientific journal Nature:

Why France’s nuclear industry faces uncertainty

Subtitle:





This is not a pretty situation.

The issue with cooling water is serious. The French reactors were all built in a 15 year period, essentially eliminating the nation's dependence on coal, as the Nature article notes, 56 reactors came on line. As Mark Nelson notes however, the reactors were never subject to uprates, they just ran and ran and ran and as a result were taken for granted, treated as cash cows for "investments" in unreliable and fossil fuel dependent energy. Although the French ran a successful pilot liquid metal breeder reactor, the Phoenix, the commercial version, the Super Phoenix was a failure. (My son and I discussed sodium coolants this afternoon during our weekly call; I warned him against them.) Even though nuclear energy is the last best hope of having any shot of addressing climate change, reactors built in the 20th century were all basically light water reactors running on Rankine steam cycles with low thermodynamic efficiency and significant needs for liquid water cooling. Although coal plants and gas plants also need cooling, the water demand for Rankine light water reactors is somewhat higher.

The solution to this problem is actually to raise the operating temperatures of reactors to regions well beyond those which water is a working fluid, to increase the thermodynamic efficiency high enough so that the heat discharge requirements are lower. This however is not possible with French reactors as they exist.

But this is a long term solution, not an immediate solution.

Hostility to nuclear energy has left us with climate change, the severity of which is now readily evident all over the planet. As a result one of the many victims of the environmental collapse are rivers. Even under such dire conditions, the hostility has not entirely abated, although reality is forcing us to confront the ignorance behind this hostility.

It may be possible to jury rig a better heat exchange system for existing reactors, and certainly, one would hope that the reactors can run flat out at least in the winter, which looks dire for Europe without Putin's gas.

We'll see.

Interesting times...scary times...but interesting.

I do hope my French friends will pull through.

For the long term, because they hold the world's largest inventory of twice through plutonium from their use of MOX fuels, they do have, whether they are aware of it or not, the most interesting and potentially the most valuable plutonium in the world, with a well spread isotopic vector. I'm glad my kid speaks French. I'm advising him in his career to keep his eye on this stuff. It could save the world, this twice through MOX fuel.