LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.
-
-
In fact, difficult to avoid some politic considerations to explain the current energy crisis in Europa.
At Bruxelles's place it exists a kind of monotheistic wait of thinking to drive the entire Europa.
Even if some countries aren't agree with that, most of them depend from foreigner " blocks" to ensure their defense or energy supply.
I don't think this current crisis will wake up them however.
-
Professor Bockris was way ahead of his time - turning Hg into Au - all you have to do, after all is knock off one proton in a cold-fusion reaction but he was ridiculed at the time being called an 'alchemist'. Does anybody here have the financial resources to repeat his experiments? Or should we try Ni into Cu, or Ag into Pd. I think the underlying principles using LENR technology are the same.
-
Great news - but maybe not so relevant here - Elon Musk is planning to build a new TESLA factory in Coventry, next to the airport and will be powered purely on renewable energy generated on-site. So hopefully a new or nearly new second hand TESLA will become affordable to petrol or diesel guzzlers in a short period of time! This would seemingly also by-pass the need for hydrogen or clean HME-powered motor cars.
-
The energy crisis that we find ourselves in has been slowly building since the 1970s. The economy is essentially a thermodynamic machine. Everything that humans call wealth, is the production of surplus energy used to rework matter. If you plot global GDP against global energy production, you get a virtually straight correlation between the two. The world has developed high living standards only through the intensive use of energy.
Gradually, over a period of several decades, the energy cost of producing energy has been rising. Between the late 70s and late 90s, we replaced US land based conventional light sweet crude, with North Sea oil, Alaskan oil, GOM, Arctic oil. This solved the oil shortage problems of the 1970s, but it did so at a higher price and poorer 'Energy Return on Energy Investment'. This allowed Western economies to grow again, but at a lower rate than they had up until the mid 1970s. Inequality between rich and poor grew during this period, as rising production costs restrained wages. By the late 90s, global oil production from conventional sources could no longer grow. Manufacturing industry shifted from the OECD to China. Officially, this was all about exploiting Chinese Labour. But it was also driven by the allure of low cost Chinese coal based energy. This was exploited using cheap and often forced labour and provided some of the cheapest electricity in the world. Rising oil demand from China and stagnant global production, set the scene for high inflation leading up to 2008. This was driven by rising oil prices. This inflation and central banks reaction to it (rising interest rates) was the direct cause of the financial crisis.
Since 2008, interest rates have been held close to zero and central banks everywhere have flooded economies with fiat currency. The idea is to stimulate economic growth. Politicians and economists tend to view the economy as a financial system, in which the only relevant input for growth is money supply. It hasn't worked because economies are in reality physical systems in which people make goods and services and exchange them. They run on surplus energy. Money is just the medium of exchange. What monetary inflation has achieved is to push the stock market to absurd heights, completely disconnecting company valuations from any realistic future earnings estimate. It has also depressed bond yields to very low levels. This directly enabled the US tight oil and Canadian syncrude revolutions, which have been responsible for all growth in global oil production since 2008. The inherently poor EROIE of shale and syncrude has led to an industry that has spent billions of dollars, producing millions of dollars of oil. So long as interest rates and bond yields remain beneath inflation, these zombie companies can keep running. They can borrow almost unlimited amounts of money, confident that inflation will erode the value of debt without ever having to repay it. But nothing can defeat the declining energetics of fossil fuel production. In real terms, the average American and European has been getting poorer since the early 2000s.
In November 2018, global oil production hit what looks increasingly likely to be an all time peak. This was driven the declines in OPEC production. Spare capacity in Saudi Arabia and UAE, could no longer compensate for the decline rate of all other OPEC producers. US oil production now faces bottlenecks that are hampering its recovery. However, the Permian is the only shale basin with growth potential. Increasingly, growth in the Permian must offset declines in other shale basins. All other producing regions in the world are either close to peak (Saudi and UAE) or past it (Europe, Russia, China, East Asia, etc).
The oil crisis is occurring at the same time as an apparent peak in Chinese coal production. This is placing cost pressures on just about everything that is being made in China. The recent antagonism between Russia and the Western world, has aggrevated global energy supply shortfalls. Energy intensive products like fertiliser and diesel, could have been manufactured in greater volumes elsewhere in more abundant times. Now that is all but impossible, as there are no abundant low cost oil and and gas resources whose production can be increased quickly enough and cheaply enough to make up for loss of Russian supply.
Renewable energy is often touted as something that can be used to substitute for fossil fuels. This is looking increasingly unlikely as the world heads into a situation where fossil fuels are in short supply. Renewable energy sources are low in power density. Each unit of energy produced by a Wind farm or solar farm, depends upon a much greater mass input of industrial materials than legacy fossil or nuclear energy systems. Producing them at low cost depends upon well functioning global supply chains and abundant fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, needed to produce the gigatonnes of steel, concrete, glass, copper and polysilicon needed for these things to be built at scale. The recent competitive costs of wind and solar projects are an artifact of cheap Chinese coal, low interest rate money at both manufacturing and customer ends, abundant diesel needed to maintain supply chains and above all huge economies of scale. As the world enters the depletion phase of fossil fuels, all of these supporting factors are going into reverse. Supply chains are disintegrating, along with the diesel supplies that sustain them. Cheap coal is a thing of the past, even in China. Political antagonism is rising between states. The capital costs of large renewable energy projects are now rising at rates far above official inflation. Renewable energy systems also tend to reduce fuel consumption in legacy fossil power stations. They do not replace them. They also impose additional requirements, such as grid strengthening and battery banks for frequency control. These facts, taken together and contrary to popular hype, make it extremely unlikely that renewable energy sources can provide more than a niche solution to our civilisation ending problem of declining surplus energy.
It is in this environment that we must rapidly find a nuclear energy solution capable of producing the high EROEI surplus energy that fossil fuels are no longer capable of providing. It would be helpful if this were applicable to transportation as well as electricity supply. This solution may be fission, fusion, LENR, all three, or maybe some hybrid solution involving all of them. In some respects this is good news for LENR and fusion. Never has a breakthrough in these areas been more desperately needed. The bad news is that as surplus energy declines, long-term R&D projects are likely to be scaled back. Which is why the solutions that might help are things that we can develop quickly and easily and relatively cheaply. My own thoughts are that the institutional barriers that stand in the way of nuclear fission need to be removed in a hurry. But LWRs would quickly run into uranium fuel shortages. Fusion has made impressive progress, but is not yet in a position to provide stand alone power plants. It is doubtful in fact that magnetic confinement fusion could ever develop the power density needed to build an economicically competitive power plant, especially when embodied energy is accounted for.
What Fusion has succeeded in doing is provided a compact source of high energy neutrons, but has thus far fallen short of breakeven. This could be especially valuable if we can develop designs that combine Fusion and fission in a single reactor. Each of those 14.1MeV neutrons, could ultimately produce several fission events. Fast fission from a 14.1MeV neutron will release an average of 4.2 neutrons. In a fast reactor, at least one of those secondary fission neutrons would produce fast-fission of 238U, which would yield three additional neutrons. What this neutron rich environment allows us to do, is build fast reactors that can function as travelling wave reactors. Essentially, these reactors can be fuelled with depleted uranium, breeding all of the fuel it needs as it shuffles through the core. There is no need for chemical reprocessing and the TWR converts a large proportion of total uranium energy into heat. Without fusion neutrons, a fast reactor would need to achieve a burn up of 300GW-days per tonne to achieve this. It isn't practical with existing cladding materials. The addition of a fusion neutron source could allow a TWR to function at lower discharge burn ups. This makes it a near term solution, that is cheap and compact enough to build anywhere, using modular construction techniques. Lattice confinement Fusion is in my opinion the key technological advance allowing this, because it uses the fission reactors own gamma and neutron flux to produce Fusion, thus amplifying neutron flux and dramatically hardening the neutron spectrum. The reaction itself never needs to reach breakeven.
-
Professor Bockris was way ahead of his time - turning Hg into Au - all you have to do, after all is knock off one proton in a cold-fusion reaction but he was ridiculed at the time being called an 'alchemist'. Does anybody here have the financial resources to repeat his experiments? Or should we try Ni into Cu, or Ag into Pd. I think the underlying principles using LENR technology are the same.
It has since been evolved into microwaving crushed bottle glass. The inventors are quite rich, obviously.
-
Wealthy Progressives: We Love Wind Power, Except When It's Near Us | National Review
Fortunately, next generation offshore turbines will not be near anyone. They are developing floating ones. They can be placed far offshore. That's good because there is more steady wind out there, and it cannot be seen from the shore.
-
It would appear that NASA and the US Navy have cottoned on to the Lattice Confinement Fusion Fast Fission idea.
Very soon, this will begin displacing other energy sources.
-
Fortunately, next generation offshore turbines will not be near anyone. They are developing floating ones. They can be placed far offshore. That's good because there is more steady wind out there, and it cannot be seen from the shore.
From the article you can see that they are also trying to torpedo the project over the *buried* power line coming ashore, so this is about more than being unsightly. Also, it reports on 200 other projects throughout the US facing local opposition. As I said, it is often, if not most of the time, the very same people who demand renewables, that are the very same ones who prevent them being built.
Hypocrisy, IMO, is the biggest reason wind/solar are nowhere near their potential. But alas, human nature being as fickle as it is, it has to be factored in:
A dozen giant wind turbines are on track to start spinning roughly 50 miles offshore from some of the country’s ritziest beach towns. That is unless last-ditch efforts by local residents can stop one of the country’s first offshore wind projects.
South Fork Wind will power 70,000 homes around East Hampton, N.Y., when it starts generating electricity next year. Construction began recently after a six-year approval process from federal, state and local governments.
One of the few remaining snags could be a group of residents of the exclusive hamlet of Wainscott who don’t want the cable carrying power from the windmills to be buried under a street that runs to the beach. Even though digging has begun, they are still waging legal battles on several fronts that could delay construction or further complicate the project.
…More than 200 wind and solar projects face local opposition, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which backs green projects through a pro bono partnership with the law firm Arnold & Porter. That is up from roughly 165 in September. The Sabin Center worked for a group of residents who argued in favor of South Fork.
-
Even though digging has begun, they are still waging legal battles on several fronts that could delay construction or further complicate the project.
To many idiots live on this planet...
Same for German car mafia that wants to sell SUV's or 2000kg for one ass with 200 horse power consuming 4x the gasoline needed and produce 8x the allowed nitric acid (oxide) output. Not to talk of the fertilizer you burn in your Diesel...
Idiots also support dictators like Erdowahn (Tukey) heading (flying) there for holidays. Even bigger idiots build factories in Russia,China... Just for today's money.
-
They are developing floating ones. They can be placed far offshore. That's good because there is more steady wind out there, and it cannot be seen from the shore.
This also greatly expands the surface area available with ideal sustained winds. So much so, I expect that wind could easily produce all the energy we consume. Population centers tend to be close to oceans, so this works out nicely.
Prevailing ocean trade winds have been mapped since the 18th century, for sailing ships. Their locations and seasonal variation are well know. The data is reliable. Of course the wind does not always blow in these places, but it does more often than other places. Atlantic packet sailing ships in the 19th century were able to keep remarkably predictable schedules by following trade winds. (A packet ship was one that departed on a regular schedule, whether it had a full cargo or not.)
The problem is, floating wind turbines are expensive! I suppose they will get cheaper if they are manufactured in large numbers.
Another idea that has been batted about from time to time would be to anchor large special purpose vessels in the Gulf Stream, and have the moving water turn turbines. There is far more water flowing through the Gulf Steam than all of the rivers in North America. Around 30 million cubic meters per second. The Mississippi river flow is approximately 17,000 cubic meters per second.
-
Another idea that has been batted about from time to time would be to anchor large special purpose vessels in the Gulf Stream, and have the moving water turn turbines. There is far more water flowing through the Gulf Steam than all of the rivers in North America. Around 30 million cubic meters per second. The Mississippi river flow is approximately 17,000 cubic meters per second.
I admire your enthusiasm. I use to be that way about all the green tech you mention. Unfortunately most were tried and found to be too expensive due the high maintenance costs. Water is rough on equipment. So I switched to being a practical environmentalist, which means I realize we should always strive to go fully green, but until green really kicks into gear, reconsider nuclear.
With a little luck, and a lot of money, hopefully that nuclear will be spelled LENR.
-
which means I realize we should always strive to go fully green, but until green really kicks into gear, reconsider nuclear.
Why not just burn banknotes or furniture instead?
Look at the cost of Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Look at the cost of the Fukushima accident. Nuclear plants are economic lunacy.
-
Why not just burn banknotes or furniture instead?
Look at the cost of Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Look at the cost of the Fukushima accident. Nuclear plants are economic lunacy.
I think Calliban did a good job of addressing those issues.
-
I think Calliban did a good job of addressing those issues.
Does he know more than the engineers at Westinghouse Electric? They drove the company into bankruptcy trying to build the Vogtle plant, and they still owe Georgia Power $3 billion. If Calliban knows how to build a nuclear plant without going 5 times over budget and delaying for 10 years or so, he should come to Georgia and finish up the job. He is the only person in the U.S. or Japan who knows how to do this. That raises another issue. If we want to build more nukes, who is going to build them? There are no engineering or construction companies left that can do it. Or would do it. They all know it would probably bankrupt them.
The Fukushima accident bankrupted Tokyo Electric Power, the largest and wealthiest power company on earth. It permanently drove 90,000 people from their homes, farms and business. Does Calliban know of some easy way to fix this problem? Nukes are inherently dangerous.
For the money that has been squandered on Vogtle, we could have constructed 5 or 10 times that capacity in solar + battery generation. With no need for uranium fuel, and no dangerous clean up or spent fuel after the plant is retired. It could have been done in a few years, on schedule. It would have taken up little or no space, since there are plenty of large, flat buildings in Georgia, such as warehouses and shopping malls. It would eliminate most of the need for a long distance distribution network, since most of the generation capacity would be in Atlanta or other large cities.
No sane power company or engineering company would build a nuke now. The technology is dangerous, obsolete, and far too expensive. It would be like building piston steam locomotives, or vacuum tube computers.
-
Display More
Does he know more than the engineers at Westinghouse Electric? They drove the company into bankruptcy trying to build the Vogtle plant, and they still owe Georgia Power $3 billion. If Calliban knows how to build a nuclear plant without going 5 times over budget and delaying for 10 years or so, he should come to Georgia and finish up the job. He is the only person in the U.S. or Japan who knows how to do this. That raises another issue. If we want to build more nukes, who is going to build them? There are no engineering or construction companies left that can do it. Or would do it. They all know it would probably bankrupt them.
The Fukushima accident bankrupted Tokyo Electric Power, the largest and wealthiest power company on earth. It permanently drove 90,000 people from their homes, farms and business. Does Calliban know of some easy way to fix this problem? Nukes are inherently dangerous.
For the money that has been squandered on Vogtle, we could have constructed 5 or 10 times that capacity in solar + battery generation. With no need for uranium fuel, and no dangerous clean up or spent fuel after the plant is retired. It could have been done in a few years, on schedule. It would have taken up little or no space, since there are plenty of large, flat buildings in Georgia, such as warehouses and shopping malls. It would eliminate most of the need for a long distance distribution network, since most of the generation capacity would be in Atlanta or other large cities.
No sane power company or engineering company would build a nuke now. The technology is dangerous, obsolete, and far too expensive. It would be like building piston steam locomotives, or vacuum tube computers.
Canadians are planning 4 small nuclear plants (of 300 MW), at an estimated $5 billion (CAD) each.
4 provinces push ahead with plan to build small nuclear reactors to supply power | CBC NewsFour provincial governments are pushing ahead with a plan to develop nuclear power in Canada. Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick and Alberta have released…www.cbc.ca -
Sometimes I ask myself strange questions.
If I was the president of a country, how should I deal in order to try to lead my people ?
Also, how would my people behave if it was just one person ?
It's simple, a teenager !
Anyone who has been faced with dealing with their own teenager(s) must know how hard it's to make sense of an adult body with a kid's brain.
Display MoreFrom the article you can see that they are also trying to torpedo the project over the *buried* power line coming ashore, so this is about more than being unsightly. Also, it reports on 200 other projects throughout the US facing local opposition. As I said, it is often, if not most of the time, the very same people who demand renewables, that are the very same ones who prevent them being built.
Hypocrisy, IMO, is the biggest reason wind/solar are nowhere near their potential. But alas, human nature being as fickle as it is, it has to be factored in:
A dozen giant wind turbines are on track to start spinning roughly 50 miles offshore from some of the country’s ritziest beach towns. That is unless last-ditch efforts by local residents can stop one of the country’s first offshore wind projects.
South Fork Wind will power 70,000 homes around East Hampton, N.Y., when it starts generating electricity next year. Construction began recently after a six-year approval process from federal, state and local governments.
One of the few remaining snags could be a group of residents of the exclusive hamlet of Wainscott who don’t want the cable carrying power from the windmills to be buried under a street that runs to the beach. Even though digging has begun, they are still waging legal battles on several fronts that could delay construction or further complicate the project.
…More than 200 wind and solar projects face local opposition, according to Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, which backs green projects through a pro bono partnership with the law firm Arnold & Porter. That is up from roughly 165 in September. The Sabin Center worked for a group of residents who argued in favor of South Fork.
-
My own country should be able to challenge the Georgia on this topic ahahahha
Finns still remember our EPR
If Calliban knows how to build a nuclear plant without going 5 times over budget and delaying for 10 years or so, he should come to Georgia and finish up the job.
-
Canadians are planning 4 small nuclear plants (of 300 MW), at an estimated $5 billion (CAD) each.
$5 billion CAD each!?! That's an outrageous sum of money. Completely crazy. The cheapest source of power these days are solar cells, which have the initial cost of ~$1 million USD/MW. (https://www.solarreviews.com/b…-solar-farm-do-i-need-one) Anyway, $5 billion CAD = $4 billion USD. 300 MW of solar capacity costs $300 million, 13 times less. Even taking into account the capacity factor, solar or wind is far cheaper. On the plus side, you have to take into account the fact that solar uses no fuel. Uranium fuel is cheap, but not free.
I guess if these are experimental devices that cost is justified, but if that is anything close to the expected production cost, it is like burning money.
Solar energy does not work well in Canada, but they have tons of wind resources, mid-continent, there in Saskatchewan.
Wind turbines, combustion plants or nukes in Canada or the northern U.S. states are winterized. They were not winterized in Texas, and the nukes stopped working, which is why the power went out. Texas seldom has such cold weather. If the Texas plants and distribution grid had been built farther north and winterized, they would have been fine.
-
My own country should be able to challenge the Georgia on this topic ahahahha
Finns still remember our EPR
Only 13 year late. You beat us on that. Vogtle is 6 years late and $16 billion overbudget. Still, it is not finished yet, so it might take 13 years!
EPR is running, though. Vogtle is a gigantic doorstop for now.
Finnish EPR starts supplying electricity : New Nuclear - World Nuclear News
This does not say how far overbudget it is. It must be overbudget. The interest alone for 13 years probably puts it beyond original estimates.
I wish that nuclear plants were cost effective and safe. In principle, nukes are great. Compact, pollution free, with abundant fuel. In practice the technology never matured for various reasons, and Fukushima showed that it was never as safe as the engineers thought. Perhaps it could have been improved, made cheaper and safer, but it is too late now. Competing technologies such as wind have passed by it. They are getting cheaper too, and they have plenty of leeway left to get cheaper still. Nuclear power is one of history's might-have-beens. It resembles automobiles powered by hydrogen. That was a good idea in principle. It probably would have been better than gasoline combustion. Maybe even better than battery powered electric cars. It has some advantage over batteries, such as range. But, batteries improved. Hybrid cars gave a boost to the motors and batteries. Battery power gained technical and marketing momentum. Manufacturers cannot afford to make three kinds of vehicles gasoline, electric and hydrogen cars. So, even if hydrogen is marginally better than battery cars, batteries won for other reasons.
Here is an interesting look at hydrogen transportation, from 1992:
