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Book review of Jaczko’s “Confessions of a rogue nuclear regulator”
Book review of Jaczko’s “Confessions of a rogue nuclear regulator”
Preface. After presenting a lot of evidence for why nuclear power plants are inherently unsafe, Jaczko concludes: “There is only one logical answer: we must stop generating nuclear waste, and that means we must stop using nuclear power. You would think that it would make sense to suspend nuclear power projects until we know what to do with the waste they create”.
Jaczko isn’t the first to sound the alarm on the safety of nuclear power plants. There’s also the 128 page report by Hirsch called “Nuclear Reactor Hazards Ongoing Dangers of Operating Nuclear Technology in the 21st Century”, or my summary of this paper at energyskeptic “Summary of Greenpeace Nuclear Reactor Hazards”.
I read this book hoping Jaczko would explain why he shut Yucca mountain down. The 2013 book “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste” by William M. Alley & Rosemarie Alley, Cambridge University Press goes into great detail about why Yucca Mountain is the ideal place to put nuclear waste.
I have a lot of problems with Yucca being shut down. How is it safer to have 70,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and 20,000 giant canisters of high-level radioactive waste at 121 sites across 39 states, with another 70,000 tons on the way before reactors reach the end of their life?
Spent fuel pools in America’s 104 nuclear power plants, have an average of 10 times more radioactive fuel stored than what was at Fukushima, most of them so full they have four times the amount they were designed to hold.
All of this waste will harm future generations for at least a million years, all of these above ground sites are vulnerable to terrorists, tsunamis, floods, rising sea levels, hurricanes, electric grid outages, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other disasters.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
45 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels
45 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels
Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html
Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.
Here are the topics covered below in this long post:
- Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
- SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
- SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
- Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
- Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
- Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible
Utility scale energy storage has a long way to go to make renewables possible
What follows comes from my book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation” , which is also where you’ll find the references backing up what I’ve written below.
I often get letters from people about energy breakthroughs in biofuels, solar, electric trucks, and so on. This post is about the “record breaking amount of battery storage add in 2018” (go here to read the article).
To enhance your own evaluation of the constant barrage of happy news in the media, here’s why I didn’t get excited or cheered up and go back to thinking the future was bound to be bright and shiny.
First, let’s go over the four possible ways to store electrical energy. We don’t need to store much now, because we still have natural gas, which kicks in to balance solar and wind power (but not coal and nuclear, which are damaged by trying to do this), and for much of the year provides 66% of electricity generation (along with coal), because wind and solar are so seasonal.
So if the grid is to be 100% renewable someday, which it has to be since the 66% of power coming from fossil fuels now to generate electricity is finite, then utility scale energy storage is essential Let’s look at what it would take each of the four methods to store just one day of U.S. electricity generation, 11.12 Terawatt Hours (TwH).
The only commercial way to store electricity is pumped hydro storage (PHS), which can store 2% of America’s electricity generation today. But we’ve run out of places to put new dams. Only two have been built since 1995. There are only 43 PHS dams now, and we’d need 7800 more to store one day of U.S. electricity.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
Preface. Some of the points I found most alarming or interesting:
- After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth.
- Concrete is a thirsty behemoth, sucking up almost a 10th of the world’s industrial water use. This often strains supplies for drinking and irrigation
- If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter, accounting for 4 to 8% of the world’s CO2
- Puts roofs over the heads of billions, fortifies defenses against natural disasters, and the structure for healthcare, education, transport, energy and industry. When combined with steel, it is the material that ensures our dams don’t burst, our tower blocks don’t fall, our roads don’t buckle and our electricity grid remains connected.
- But they also entomb vast tracts of fertile soil, constipate rivers, & choke habitats
- we may have already passed the point where concrete outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush and shrub on the planet.
- All the plastic produced over the past 60 years amounts to 8bn tonnes. The concrete industry pumps out more than that every two years.
- The amount of concrete laid per square meter in Japan is 30 times the amount in America (the same as California using as much concrete as the entire U.S.)
- Many engineers argue that there is no viable alternative. Steel, asphalt and plasterboard are more energy intensive than concrete. The world’s forests are already being depleted at an alarming rate
Watts, J. 2019-2-25. Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth. The Guardian.
After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself
Part 2. How long do civilizations last on average? 336 years
Part 2. How long do civilizations last on average? 336 years
I stopped trying to find out why each civilization failed in Wiki because it’s not always clear and historians bicker over it, though it’s clear drought, invasions, civil wars, and famines played a role in most of them. Yet what’s seldom mentioned is that deforestation (Perlin “A forest journey”) and topsoil erosion (Montgomery “Dirt: the erosion of civilization”) were often the main or one of the key reasons for collapse.
But what’s clear is that societies always collapse, and our civilization will fail as well, since it depends on a one-time only supply of fossil fuels.
Kemp, L. 2019. Are we on the road to civilization collapse? Studying the demise of historic civilisations can tell us how much risk we face today says collapse expert Luke Kemp. Worryingly, the signs are worsening. BBC
In the graphic below, I have compared the lifespan of various civilizations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure. Given this definition, all empires are civilizations, but not all civilizations are empires.
Civilization [Duration in years]
- Ancient Egypt, Old Kingdom [505] The power of pharaoh gradually weakened in favor of powerful nomarchs (regional governors)…. The country slipped into civil wars mere decades after the close of Pepi II’s reign. The final blow was the 22nd century BC drought in the region that resulted in a drastic drop in precipitation. For at least some years between 2200 and 2150 BC, this prevented the normal flooding of the Nile. The collapse of the Old Kingdom was followed by decades of famine and strife.
- Ancient Egypt, Middle Kingdom [405]
- Ancient Egypt, New Kingdom [501] Egypt was increasingly beset by droughts, below-normal flooding of the Nile, famine, civil unrest and official corruption
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hydropower dams and the ways they destroy the environment
Hydropower dams and the ways they destroy the environment
Preface. Hydropower comprises 71% of renewable energy worldwide. Nations like the U.S. and Europe have dams that have reached the end of their lifespan, so more are being torn down than built. In the U.S. 546 dams were removed between 2006 and 2014.
This contains excerpts and paraphrasing of three news stories
- 11 Jan 2019 the costs of environmental damage and dam removal need to be added into calculations for whether to build a dam or not
- 19 November 2014 NewScientist article by Peter Hadfield “River of the dammed“,about the Chinese Three Gorges project
- 2012: the greenhouse gas emissions of hydropower
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Moran, E. F. et al. 2018. Sustainable hydropower in the 21st century, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Before developing countries build more dams, they need to take the following into account when estimating the cost
- Deforestation
- Loss of biodiversity, especially fish species
- Social consequences, such as the displacement of thousands of people and the financial harm done
- That climate change, especially drought, and evaporation from higher temperatures, which will lead to less water stored for agriculture and electricity
- The cost of removing a dam is extremely high, so high dams wouldn’t be built if this cost were included. Many new dams in Brazil and other nations will have a short lifespan — just 30 to 50 years
Hadfield, P. 2014. “River of the dammed“. NewScientist.
Dams typically last 60 to 100 years, but whether Three Gorges can last this long is questionable given the unexpectedly high amounts of silt building up. Since fossil fuels are finite, as is uranium, to keep the electric grid up many see building more dams for hydropower as absolutely essential. Hydropower is also one of the few energy resources that can balance variable wind and solar as well.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Book review of Wrigley’s “Energy and the English Industrial revolution”
Book review of Wrigley’s “Energy and the English Industrial revolution”
Preface. I’ve made a strong case in my book “When trucks stop running” and this energyskeptic website that we will eventually return to wood and a 14th century lifestyle after fossil fuels are depleted.
So if you’re curious about what that lifestyle will be like, and how coal changed everything, this is the book for you.
One point stressed several times is that in all organic economies a steady state exists. Or as economists put it, that there were just three “components essential in all material production; capital, labor, and land. The first two could be expanded as necessary to match increased demand, but the third could not, and rising pressure on this inflexible resource arrested growth and depressed the return to capital and the reward of labor.”
Then along came coal (and today oil and natural gas), which for a few centuries removed land as a limiting factor (though we’re awfully close the Malthusian limits as well, population is growing, cropland is shrinking as development builds over the best farm land near cities, which exist where they do because that was good crop land).
In today’s world, energy set the limits to growth, but in the future land once again will. So will the quality of roads, how many forests exist whose wood can be gotten to towns and cities, and so on. So if you’re in a transition town group or in other ways trying to make the future better, perhaps this book will give you some ideas.
If this world is too painful to contemplate, read some books about the Amish, which would be an ideal society for me minus the religious side of it.
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A. Wrigley. 2010. Energy and the English Industrial revolution. Cambridge University Press.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Book review of Heinberg’s “Afterburn: society beyond fossil fuels”
Book review of Heinberg’s “Afterburn: society beyond fossil fuels”
Preface. This book has 15 essays Heinberg wrote from 2011 to 2014, many of them available for free online. These are some of my Kindle notes of parts that interested me, so to you it will be disjointed and perhaps not what you would have chosen as important — but it gives you an idea of what a great writer Heinberg is and hopefully inspires you to buy his book.
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Heinberg, R. 2015. Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels. New Society Publishers.
The most obvious criticism that could be leveled at the book “The Party’s Over”, which came out in 2005, is the simple observation that, as of 2014, world oil production is increasing, not declining. However, the following passage points to just how accurate the leading peakists were in forecasting trends: “Colin Campbell estimates that extraction of conventional oil will peak before 2010; however, because more unconventional oil—including oil sands, heavy oil, and oil shale—will be produced during the coming decade, the total production of fossil-fuel liquids (conventional plus unconventional) will peak several years later. According to Jean Laherrère, that may happen as late as 2015.”
In the “Party’s Over”, I also summarized Colin Campbell’s view that “the next decade will be a ‘plateau’ period, in which recurring economic recessions will result in lowered energy demand, which will in turn temporarily mask the underlying depletion trend.
Economics 101 tells us that supply of and demand for a commodity like oil (which happens to be our primary energy source) must converge at the current market price, but no economist can guarantee that the price will be affordable to society. High oil prices are sand in the gears of the economy. As the oil industry is forced to spend ever more money to access ever-lower-quality resources, the result is a general trend toward economic stagnation. None of the peak oil deniers warned us about this.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why and how Jellyfish are taking over the world
Why and how Jellyfish are taking over the world
Preface. The more climate change kicks in, the more we over-fish, pollute, acidify and warm the ocean, create vast dead zones, and trawl ocean bottoms, the better the jellyfish do.
It is quite possible that the ocean ecosystem will shift to favor jellyfish over other sea life.
We’ve already fished out 90% of all large fish in the ocean. And it’s only a matter of time before we find the other 10% with sonar, radar, LORAN, GPS, and spotter aircraft.
The United Nations has predicted all commercial fish species will be extinct by 2048. In 2002 we were fishing 72% of fish stocks faster than they could reproduce. 90 fish stocks around the world have had no recovery in population even 15 years after they collapsed.
Few small fish left, few big fish left – that opens up a lot of space for jellyfish to move in and take over. We’re creating a feedback loop that favors jellyfish.
Even if we stopped overfishing, polluting, and so on, once we tip the ecosystem into one controlled by jellyfish, they will become the “new normal” and that will quite likely be impossible to change.
And they’re awfully hard to kill. Chemical repellents, biocides, nets, electric shocks, and introducing species that eat jellyfish won’t do it. If you shoot, stab, slash, or chop off part of a jellyfish, it can regenerate lost body parts within two days. Not even the past 5 major extinction events which killed up to 90% of all life on earth killed off the jellyfish.
More jellyfish articles:
- Attack of the blob. Jellyfish are taking over the seas, and it might be too late to stop themBy Gwynn Guilford @sinoceros October 15, 2013
- 2019 A jellyfish ‘epidemic’ has Australian scientists wondering whether climate change is to be blamed
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
IEA 2018 World Energy Outlook: Peak oil is here, oil crunch by 2023
IEA 2018 World Energy Outlook: Peak oil is here, oil crunch by 2023
Preface. I’ve been working on a post about the latest IEA 2018 World Energy Outlook report, but the excerpts from the cleantechnica article below states most clearly why there is likely to be a supply crunch as soon as the early 2020s and the investment implications.
Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve gleaned from other summaries of the report.
Although many hope that oil companies will drill for oil when prices go up and close the supply gap looming within the next few years, very little oil has been found to drill for for several years now. The IEA 2018 report also says that shale oil will not rescue us, and likely to peak in the mid-2020s.
Oil companies do have money, but they haven’t been drilling because there’s no cheap oil to be found, so instead they’ve been spending their money buying their shares back.
From crashoil.blogspot.com: World Energy Outlook 2018: Someone shouted “peak oil”
This excerpt is in Spanish translated to English by google. It shows a civilization crashing 8% decline rate that the IEA hopes will be brought to an also civilization crashing 4% rate with new oil drilling projects.
“How is this alarming graph interpreted? According to the text, the red is what they call “natural decline” and corresponds to how oil production would decrease if the companies did not even invest in maintaining the current wells; As explained in the report, it is 8% per year. The pink area corresponds to the “observed decline” and is what the IEA inferred how production will actually decline if companies invest what is needed for the correct maintenance of the current deposits. This decline corresponds to 4% per year.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Pedro Prieto: many solar panels won’t last 25-30 years, EROI may be negative
Pedro Prieto: many solar panels won’t last 25-30 years, EROI may be negative
Preface. Pedro Prieto and Charles Hall wrote the definitive book on the EROI of solar power, “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment” and has built many commercial facilities himself and witnessed the failure of solar panels long before the supposed 25-30 years they were guaranteed to last.
This is being seen in England where there’s been a loss of 25% of power in the UK due to imperfections known as hot spots on solar panels:Photovoltaics hot spots are areas of elevated temperature which can affect only part of the solar panel. They are a result of a localised decrease in efficiency and the main cause of accelerated PV ageing, often causing permanent damage to the solar panel’s lifetime performance. Dr. Dhimish discovered that of the 2580 panels he looked at, those that had hot spots generated a power output notably less than those that didn’t. He also discovered that location was a primary contributor in the distribution of hot spots (Solar power – largest study to date discovers 25% power loss across UK October 29, 2018 https://phys.org/news/2018-10-solar-power-largest-date-loss.html).
You may want to read my review of “Spain’s Solar Revolution” for background on what this post discusses, since what Pedro Prieto wrote assumes you’re familiar with the book.
Pedro writes:
“Our study concluded that, when analyzed what we called “extended boundaries energy inputs”, about 2/3 of the total energy inputs were other than those of the modules+inverters+metallic infrastructure to tilt and orient the modules.
So even if the cost of solar PV modules (including inverters and metallic infrastructure) were ZERO, our resulting EROI (2.4:1) would increase about just 1/3.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The U.S. Military on Peak Oil and Climate Change
The U.S. Military on Peak Oil and Climate Change
Preface. I find that of all the government branches, the military is the most realistic about the implications of Peak Oil and Climate Change. The Department of Defense is also the largest consumer of energy in the federal government, spending about $20 billion on energy in 2011, and within the military, the air force consumes the most energy, $10 billion (84% liquid fuel, 12% electricity). DuPont consumes as much energy as the Department of defense, so they’re not the only mega-consumer of petroleum (NRC 2013).
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CNA. May 2009. Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security. Center for Naval Analyses. 74 pages.
[ Excerpts from this document follow ]
The destabilizing nature of increasingly scarce energy resources, the impacts of rising energy demand, and the impacts of climate change all are likely to increasingly drive military missions in this century.
GENERAL CHARLES F. “CHUCK” WALD, USAF (RET.) Former Deputy Commander, Headquarters U.S. European Command (USEUCOM); Chairman, CNA MAB
Retired Air Force General Chuck Wald wants to see major changes in how America produces and uses energy. He wants carbon emissions reduced to help stave off the destabilizing effects of climate change.
“We’ve always had to deal with unpredictable and diverse threats,” Gen. Wald said. “They’ve always been hard to judge, hard to gauge. Things that may seem innocuous become important. Things that seem small become big. Things that are far away can be felt close to home. Take the pirates off the African coast. To me, it’s surprising that pirates, today, would cause so much havoc. It’s a threat that comes out of nowhere, and it becomes a dangerous situation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration
Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration
Preface. This overview of challenges for wind and solar written in 2010 is still true today. We are far from being able to reach even a 50% renewable grid (excluding hydropower from the total) given the lack of storage, the problem that the best wind and solar are far from towns and cities – too far to justify extending transmission lines, we lack a “smart grid” system due to the many challenges of processing huge amounts of data, and so on.
California is up to 29% renewable power, but it is terribly seasonal, and not dependable for more than half of the year, when the majority of power needs to come from fossil fuels, mainly natural gas.
I liked this paper because it is less technical than most papers on this topic, probably because it was written for policymakers.A
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Meier, Alexandra von. 2010. Challenges to the Integration of Renewable Resources at High System Penetration. California Energy Commission, California Institute for Energy and Environment. Publication number: CEC-500-2014-042.
Renewable and distributed resources introduce space (spatial) and time (temporal) constraints on resource availability and are not always available where or when they are wanted. Although every energy resource has limitations, the constraints associated with renewables may be more stringent and different from those constraints that baseload power systems were designed and built around.
These unique constraints must be addressed to mitigate problems and overcome difficulties while maximizing the benefits of renewable resources. New efforts are required to coordinate time and space within the electric grid at greater resolution or with a higher degree of refinement than in the past.
This requires measuring and actively controlling diverse components of the power system on smaller time scales while working toward long-term goals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks
The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks
Preface. I’m fascinated by system risks, so I’ve included this, though there’s no awareness at all of peak oil or limits to growth or that energy, not money, is the basis of civilization and foundation of every single widget made and transported. But since the next economic collapse may well be due to the financial system, and since money is how most people view the world, here are my Kindle notes. David Korowicz has the best articles about systemic risk, I review three of his publications here.
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Ian Goldin & Mike Mariathasan. 2015. The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do about It. Princeton University Press.
We are so accustomed to globalization that we take for granted the products and services we consume from around the world.
Our information technology (IT) services may run on Israeli software provided from Mumbai as we consume entertainment from Los Angeles filmed in South Africa on computers manufactured in China or Taiwan assembled from parts from more than 20 countries.
Individual and local choices have global impacts and vice versa: what happens outside our borders has direct daily consequences for each of us, every day. These connections are complex, frequently opaque, and often beyond our control. Yet together they are shaping how the world develops. As we will see, there is a growing likelihood that events in one place will have cascading effects in other areas, jumping across national borders and sectors
Globalization can generally be understood as the process driven by and resulting in increased cross-border flows of goods, services, money, people, information, technology, and culture. 2 These flows are multi-dimensional, and the number of connections between them is unprecedentedly large and growing exponentially. It is becoming deeper in that these connections penetrate a growing range of human activities. Increasingly not only people but also things are being connected—cars, phones, merchandise, and a rapidly widening range of inanimate objects and sensors.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
