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On Fracked gas is only cheap because extractors do not clean up after themselves
@Marc - the point of the story is that the wastes are being produced and disposed of using systems that were not designed for the purpose. There is little to no testing or monitoring going on, so no one really knows if there is a major problem or just a minor problem. It would require a serious "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" attitude to declare that there is no problem at all.
The oil and gas industry has declared that the states are perfectly capable of regulating their industry - they say that is because some states have been doing it for many decades. However, what happens when they move to a new state or when they increase their rate of drilling so fast that it overwhelms the regulatory infrastructure?
I can tell you what happens to nuclear projects - the regulators dig in their heels and tell us to wait patiently in line until it is our turn. They expect us to tell them at least 2 years before we are ready to turn in our application for a design certification or a combined construction and operating license. They then ensure that everyone knows they will not be rushed and they will take at least 42 months to review the application - including ensuring a mandatory wait time for hearings even if there is no contest.
Why is it that the oil and gas industry gets essentially a pass and is able to dump their wastes for years without even testing to make sure that they are not violating current federal standards? What is the rush?
My deeply held suspicion is that the oil and gas industry is engaged in a price war designed to put as many reactor-years of delay as possible into the nuclear renaissance by convincing as many utility decision makers as possible that cheap gas is going to be available for a long time to come. Every single reactor-year of delay is worth at least $365 million to the gas industry.
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
No, not sorry at all. I do not dispute that burning fossil fuels has been a great boon to human development. However, the boon has not been very equitable even for those people who lived nearest to the places where reservoirs have been discovered.
As the rate of burning increased, the rate of unequal sharing in the bounty stored over millions of years also increased and the rate of unequal sharing of the negative effects also increased. What is so hard about charging a fee for disposing of the wastes just like we pay a sewer bill and a trash pick up bill?
The owners of the earth's atmosphere - in human terms - are everyone with a set of lungs since we believe in our founding principles that all of us are born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What is possibly more important for life than owning a share of the atmosphere that we must breathe at a minimum of every few minutes every day of our lives?
Please explain how the FAA could function as a privatized entity. Who would do the inspections? Who would pay to install the incredibly complex equipment required to control traffic? Who would run the system?
The primary reason there is any doubt that social security and medicare will continue to be solvent is because the taxing scheme is the most regressive part of our system. Only in that scheme does the tax begin at a rate of 15.2% on the very first dollar earned (without a dime paid on unearned income) and end as soon as the total income reaches a reasonably comfortable $103,000 per year.
People like Gates and Buffett have completely paid their SS bill within the first day or two of the year. Weird, considering the wealth that our society has enabled them to achieve.
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
@Ed - the traders in this case are absolutely required because they are dealing in something that is completely fabricated to begin with.
Why should anyone have a "right" to emit? Why can't we just agree that the emission imposes some kind of burden on the commonly owned atmosphere and that anyone who needs to do that should pay a little something for the privilege?
With regard to a government that does its constitutional responsibilities, no more and no less, how do you feel about the interstate highway system, universal education, social security, and the FAA?
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
David - though not mentioned in the specific NY Times article linked in the tweet, there is no doubt that the NRDC was a primary proponent of the cap and trade proposal. At the time of that tweet, it had been just a few months since I personally heard Tom Cochrane talk about his organization's support.
As I described several times on Atomic Insights, I HATE the "trade" part of cap and trade. I trust bankers about as far as I can throw the typical marble columned bank. Traders are even worse - they are the people whose greedy behavior put the entire world's economy at risk and probably have caused hundreds of people to commit suicide rather than to face ever mounting debts without a job.
I am not a politician and care nothing about policies that receive "bipartisan" support even when they are completely misguided. I am a technologist, an amateur economist, a writer and a businessman. I make and defend proposals that I think are technically correct no matter how few people agree with them.
It might surprise you to find a liberal tax and spend kind of guy who strongly favors nuclear energy. Oh well. (By the way, for any conservative readers who might see this, please understand that at least tax and spend is better for future generations than a policy based on "spend, don't tax and borrow as much as possible".)
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
Who "tweeted" that they "rejoiced" a climate legislation impasse? I am pretty sure it was not me.
Please do not confuse my uncompromising advocacy of nuclear technology with an uncritical support of "the nuclear industry." I have a great deal of respect for most nuclear technologists, but I distrust the motives of many of the leaders of the companies who claim to be part of the nuclear industry. Most of them are simply part of the establishment - a group of people who have prospered mightily by restricting the growth of nuclear energy to a tiny slice of the overall energy market, thus driving the price of competitive energy fuel sources far higher than they should be.
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
Stephen - what was the energy source used in the model run? It really makes a difference if the modelers assumed "unlimited energy" but the energy source remained a mix of hydrocarbons and atomic fission roughly similar to today's mix.
I have spent a lot of hours submerged deeply under the ocean's surface with many times as much depth of water below me as above me. H2O is NOT a resource limit - clean, fresh H2O might be. However, while under that massive amount of water, I also learned first hand that the only difference between H2O that contains 35,000 ppm of NaCl and H2O that is essentially pure, with no contaminants at all, is a bit of heat energy that can be extracted from a normal steam cycle without losing any power generating efficiency at all. It would have been thrown away anyway as part of the normal heat rejection required in all heat engine systems.
You are right that we need to use a smaller fraction of the earth's material resources than we do today if we want to hope to carry the world's human population indefinitely. I remain absolutely convinced - based on my understanding of science and technology and based on what I have seen with my own two eyes - that the best way to achieve that goal without massive strife and elimination of living people is to rapidly develop enough nuclear energy to drive down the price of all other energy sources.
You see, if coal, oil, and gas prices fall dramatically, the only reservoirs that will be tapped are the easy ones. We will stop making the huge investments in attempting to extract the last remaining drops from deep sea, from fragile Arctic locations, and from hard to reach areas on other land masses.
On Working for my grandchildren - why I am a pronuclear activist
@Stephen:
The way I understand the statistics I read, one of the best and most humane ways to stabilize human population to prevent the growth that scares you is to improve prosperity and increase the world's access to energy.
The places in the world where population growth is still a real challenge are generally very poor and have little in the way of controllable power sources that can perform tasks that people in the developed world take for granted. In those places additional children are often assets rather than expensive investments. If a farmer has access to a plot of land, but no tractor and no ability to hire help, a big family might be the answer.
My advocacy for energy sufficiency is not an advocacy for unchecked growth, but I am fundamentally opposed to achieving stability through deprivation. It does not work and it is the source of a great deal of human suffering.
One other reason that I am such an atomic activist is that the overall material investment in nuclear energy facilities is far lower than what is required for any other kind of available energy source. The energy density contained in uranium, thorium and plutonium really allows us to achieve a far greater amount of available energy and power with a far lower mass requirement.
I carry a simulated commercial nuclear fuel pellet in my pocket almost all the time. I sometimes pull it out when I need inspiration - that tiny, 9 gram mass that is about the size of the tip of my pinkie represents the pellets that release as much heat as burning a ton of coal. That comparison is valid today - with our primitive, once through then out fuel cycle. As we improve fuel utilization the ultimate limit is that the pellet could replace as much as 20 tons of coal.
Near my home there is a pass through the mountains with a rail line near a hiking trail. I recently spent a few hours on that trail. During the first hour, three trains, each pulling more than 100 cars full of 100 tons of coal per car pass through on their way to power plants. At least some of that coal is likely to have come from what used to be a mountain before it was blown up in order to expose the coal seam.
If you are worried about carrying capacity, work with me to reduce and gradually eliminate the need for that kind of material waste.
On The Curious Case of the Texas Wind Industry
Chris - has it ever dawned on you that the oil and gas industry loves wind turbines because they help them capture additional sales? Do you really believe that companies like Chevron and BP advertise weak and intermittent alternatives knowing they might be working towards a replacement for their primary bread winning products of oil and natural gas?
It does not surprise me in the least that Texas is building wind turbines faster than most other states - for a group of "conservatives" they have always been quite skilled at capturing as many federal tax subsidy dollars as possible. Right now, wind projects get about 30% of their cost paid directly by the federal government.
Those federal subsidies for transmission projects will also help Texas in its mission of taking more than its share of the federal taxpayer provided pie.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever operated a grid or even watched a grid being operated? Do you really believe that it is easy to accommodate power sources that vary wildly on a schedule that cannot be controlled or even very well predicted by either humans or automated control systems?
After all of the wind that has been installed, has Texas really reduced its oil and gas consumption very much?
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
On The Global Pursuit for Nuclear Fuel
Dan - are you sure about the ultimate product of South Korean pyroprocessing? I subscribe to a mailing list of IFR experts from Argonne. I might be confused, but I am pretty sure that they talk about that technique as being much more suitable for producing metal alloy fuel than any kind of oxide fuel - including mixed oxides (MOX).
The South Korean process could be different, but I would like to learn more.
On The Natural Gas Debate: Will It Do More than Renewables to Reduce Carbon Emissions?
I found it somewhat amusing that the sponsor of The Economist's debate was Statoil, a company that loves the idea of people arguing over just how much the natural gas industry should grow in stature. That company certainly would not enjoy the vision that I see for natural gas as a terrific raw material that should be conserved for the use of countless future generations who will want to have some reasonably accessible CH4 available for materials production. (Chemicals represent a very small portion of the sales for most natural gas companies, even though that is that part of the product line that cannot be readily replaced by a much BETTER heat source - like atomic fission.)
Just in case you are not familiar with what Statoil does, The Economist has this little blurb about the company on the homepage of the hosted debate about methane. It is in grey text and might be overlooked, but it is informative:
"Statoil is an international energy company with operations in 34 countries. Building on more than 35 years of experience from oil and gas production on the Norwegian continental shelf, it is committed to accommodating the world's energy needs in a responsible manner, applying technology and creating innovative business solutions. Statoil has its headquarters in Norway and employs 20,000 people worldwide. It is listed on the New York and Oslo stock exchanges."
I know that many involved here think it is just wonderful that companies like Statoil provide a little bit of money to support open discussion about energy, but they really do stack the deck when they try to focus people on their own product line and the weak, intermittent alternatives that make their products seem rather benign.
When it is possible to run a natural gas fired power plant inside a sealed building, I will start to believe it is a clean source of energy. When the natural gas industry can produce reasonable estimates of a resource base that might last more than a few decades at current rates of consumption, I might start to believe that burning it as fast as possible is a smart and sustainable course of action. When I can manage to forget the maneuvering that I did as the Engineer Officer on a nuclear powered submarine, I might also begin to believe that only natural gas can power responsive systems that can maintain a rock solid voltage and frequency response in the face of ever changing demands on an electrical grid.
On Gullible Reporting by UPI...
Paul O - you are pulling my leg, right? Do you really believe that the Arjun Makhijani of the IEER and the Helen Caldicott founded group called the Physicians for Social Responsibility deserve the appellation of "expert" when it comes to energy.
Of course, the link you provided is a press release issued by those groups. I guess they have the free speech right to call themselves experts in any topic; there is no legal requirement for proof.
On Portlandia to help wean Los Angeles from coal
Name one single instance in the entire world where a solar installation led to a coal plant shutdown. Heck, you would be hard pressed to find a place where a solar installation produced enough energy during the course of a year to materially reduce the required running time of any existing coal plants.