I’m open to new ideas – but I just think renewables are moving so quickly that technologies like these will be hard pressed to catch up.
Also, for libertarian nuke lovers and haters of all things gubbmint, note US subsidies to this technology, and consider whether the average developing world village will be able to afford installing one without massive help.
GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — The U.S. Department of Energy said Thursday that it has awarded an Oregon company a grant to help it design and obtain federal approval for a kind of nuclear power plant – small modular units that can be built in a factory and shipped to installation sites.
The department said the matching grant awarded to NuScale Power LLC of Portland is part of President Barack Obama’s plan to develop power sources that do not contribute to global warming.
“Small modular reactors represent a new generation of safe, reliable, low-carbon nuclear energy technology and provide a strong opportunity for America to lead this emerging global industry,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement.
The amount of the grant is not yet set, but it comes out of a $452 million fund for supporting small modular reactor development, the department said. It will cover up to half the cost of producing a design that gains federal approval.
NuScale Chief Commercial Officer Michael McGough said modular reactors are the future of nuclear power, because they are more affordable, safer and faster to build than conventional plants. Instead of pumps to move coolant, the design uses gravity, making it more reliable.
This is the first video to include interviews conducted at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December.
I started out with a focus on what we were hearing about extreme events, then took a little jog when the latest extreme even presented itself – our current polar vortex, which is a pretty good textbook example of the kind of weather that we may be seeing more of, paradoxically, in this case, cold snap made more likely by increasingly lazy jet stream flow.
The video above contrasts arctic cold and snow in the east with mild temps and droughts in California.
Complete report on drought from California TV station KSBW below.
The so-called polar vortex caused hundreds of injuries across the Midwest today, as people who said “so much for global warming” and similar comments were punched in the face.
Authorities in several states said that residents who had made ignorant comments erroneously citing the brutally cold temperatures as proof that climate change did not exist were reporting a sharp increase in injuries to the face and head regions.
In an emergency room in St. Paul, Harland Dorrinson, forty-one, was waiting to be treated for bruising to the facial area after he made a crack about how the below-freezing temperatures meant that climate-change activists were full of shit.
“I’d just finished saying it and boom, out of nowhere someone punched me in the face,” he said. “This polar vortex is really dangerous.”
The meteorology professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, issued a safety warning to residents of the states hammered by the historic low temperatures: “If you are living within the range of the polar vortex and you have something idiotic to say about climate change, do not leave your house.”
Rush Limbaugh on Monday accused the media and liberals of creating the polar vortex to “lie” to the public about the “hoax” of climate change and global warming.
The conservative radio host told his listeners that “the left, the media, everybody” came up with “this phrase called the ‘polar vortex’” to connect the current cold weather conditions around the country to “the global warming agenda.”
“We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country,” he said, according to a transcript. “And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’ The dreaded polar vortex.”
Limbaugh said liberals are “in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming.”
“So they created the polar vortex, and the polar vortex, something’s happened, and that cold air which normally stays is in the North Pole, something’s happening, something deeply mysterious and perhaps tragic is happening,” Limbaugh said.
The weather system “actually sounds like a crappy science fiction movie to me,” according to the radio host.
Is it a side effect of global warming and should we expect more events like this?
This is a hotly researched topic. In short, yes, it could be. It seems counterintuitive that global warming could cause significant cold snaps like this one, but some research shows that it could. We know that different types of extreme weather can result from the overall warming of the planet, melting of the Arctic Sea ice, etc. This includes extreme distortions of the jet stream, which can cause heat waves in summer and cold snaps in winter.
Parts of Western Europe have been battered by the worst storms for two decades during the past week — are they related to the weather system in the United States?
They are related in a sense, but I wouldn’t say “caused by.” The storms in Europe are the result of a persistent pattern that has seen the jet stream parked near the United Kingdom and Ireland, which has brought a train of storm systems over the British Isles. This is the same jet stream, of course, that has plunged deep into the southern portions of the United States. So, the jet stream has been “stuck” in a position that is allowing cold Arctic air to spill into much of the United States and Canada. But it is in a position that is bringing warmer, moist air from the Atlantic over Northwest Europe, resulting in the stormy conditions.
One of Canada’s top energy analysts has warned investors and geologists that “the shale revolution” will not meet conventional expectations as a so-called game-changer in energy production.
Speaking at the Denver meeting of the Geological Society of America and later at Queen’s University and an energy conference in Toronto, David Hughes challenged the assumptions of industry cheerleaders by spelling out startling depletion rates for high-cost unconventional shale and tight oil wells.
“The shale revolution has been a game-changer in that it has temporarily reversed a terminal decline in supplies from conventional sources,” said Hughes in both talks given in late October and early November. “Long-term sustainability is questionable and environmental impacts are a major concern.”
The geoscientist, who now lives on Cortes Island, has studied energy resources in Canada for four decades, including 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a coal and natural gas specialist.
After reviewing data from unconventional oil wells, Hughes found that these difficult and high-cost operations deplete so rapidly that between 47 to 61 per cent of oil from plays like the Bakken, the first major tight oil play developed, is recovered within the first four years.
Hughes noted that the Bakken and Texas’ Eagle Ford plays, which currently produce two-thirds of U.S. tight oil and are supposed to take the country into energy independence territory, will actually peak in production by 2016 or 2017. Continue reading “Why Fracking is Not All That”
On December 30, a BNSF Railway train hauling grain near Casselton, North Dakota, slipped off the rails and blocked a neighboring track.
A short time later, a crude oil train going the opposite way struck the derailed cars, with explosive results. Several oil tank cars burst into flames, causing no injuries but spurring many nearby residents to evacuate until New Year’s Eve as a precaution.
The disaster marked the third high-profile oil train explosion in the past six months and has reignited a debate over the relative safety of rail and pipeline transport.
The derailment also brought a quick response from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which warned Thursday that crude from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale “may be more flammable” than other oil types (E&ENews PM, Jan. 2).
PHMSA and the Federal Railroad Administration have stepped up inspections of North Dakota crude ever since a train carrying Bakken oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, this past July, killing 47 people and leveling the town center in an oil-fueled inferno (EnergyWire, July 17, 2013).
I am not the least bit attracted to this idea. This was shot in December, but I bet they are not out on the water today.
Maybe 40 years ahead of the curve. Look for Duluth to become a hip destination. (actually, shhhhhh.. it already is)
That is, if we can keep Lake Superior from turning into a lukewarm, toxic soup.
Description:
For the second Sunday (or is it the third ?) in a row, Stoney Point on Lake Superior was graced with some fairly decent waves and relatively clean conditions.
But this weekend the forecast here in Northern Minnesota was for double digit below zero temperatures (…. more than Thirteen Below Zero) and maybe enough off shore wind to create wind chill factors of -30F and maybe down to -50 F ….tricky to measure that stuff on your standard thermometer…….and the steam fog from the lake amazed us and frustrated the camera focus making the recording of this day a challenge as well.
…knowing that the water still felt super warm by comparison at 38F, the crew gathered in the line-up and shared waves from sun up to sundown. Tempting hypothermia and the limits of cold weather surf survivability…..what a relaxing way to spend the last Sunday of 2013.
Is a computer green?
Not yet. I can imagine a day when they are built completely by solar powered nanobots, fabricated from graphene and carbon fiber that’s been distilled from the atmosphere using wind powered artificial trees.
Till then, Apple’s been working on lowering the energy and materials footprint for their flagship hardware platform – a lust object for those of us that labor in front of big screens. I’ll be using my current workhorse Mac-Pro for quite a while, but I like to drool over hardware as much as the next guy.
With OS X Mavericks, Apple has made a big effort on the software side to make its computers more energy-efficient and extend their lives. On the hardware side, they recently released a completely redesigned version of their top-of-the-line professional workstation, the Mac Pro. There too they tried to make things as streamlined and efficient as possible without compromising performance. The results are pretty impressive.
The first thing that is obvious – as you can see in the image below – is how much smaller the new Mac Pro is. The small black cylinder with connection ports in the back is not just a few percents smaller than its predecessors. You could fit a few new Mac Pros in the old one!
This results in a 74% reduction in aluminum and steel use, and 84% less packaging by weight compared to the old version. That’s pretty significant since, according to Apple, about 2/3 of the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of a computer like the Mac Pro come from production, not use.
On the shoreline at Lake Tahoe, where snow should be piled high by now, Valerie Chown and her family this week stumbled across a most unusual winter phenomenon.
There, on the beach, was a nude sunbather.
“It was crazy,” said Chown, 59, of Los Altos Hills, about the encounter at Secret Cove, where a few too many secrets were revealed, at least for this time of year.
High-country vacationers have been enjoying brilliant blue skies and 50-plus-degree temperatures throughout the holidays at Tahoe, where only patches of snow can be seen and ski conditions are simply atrocious. The Sierra sun has been so persistent that skiers and snowboarders are resorting to such summer activities as mountain biking, hiking, beach walking and, yes, sunbathing in the buff.
The very definition of Weather Whiplash
“It’s still beautiful,” said Chown as she watched her husband, son and daughter-in-law skip rocks on the lake, where the surrounding mountains reflected off the glassy blue surface. “You make the best of what you’ve got.”
Tahoe’s best soon won’t be good enough if it doesn’t hurry up and snow, according to experts. The mountains are mostly brown, ski resorts are only partially open and businesses are beginning to feel the pain of what, so far, has been an exceedingly dry winter.
The dismal snowpack is a statewide concern, especially after what was, in many areas including San Francisco, the driest calendar year in recorded history.
Cornell’s Charles H. Greene, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences, and Bruce C. Monger, senior research associate in the same department, detail this phenomenon in a paper published in the June issue of the journal Oceanography.
Negative Arctic Oscillation conditions are associated with higher pressure in the Arctic and a weakened polar vortex (yellow arrows). A weakened jet stream (black arrows) is characterized by larger-amplitude meanders in its trajectory and a reduction in the wave speed of those meanders.
“Everyone thinks of Arctic climate change as this remote phenomenon that has little effect on our everyday lives,” Greene said. “But what goes on in the Arctic remotely forces our weather patterns here.”
A warmer Earth increases the melting of sea ice during summer, exposing more dark ocean water to incoming sunlight. This causes increased absorption of solar radiation and excess summertime heating of the ocean — further accelerating the ice melt. The excess heat is released to the atmosphere, especially during the autumn, decreasing the temperature and atmospheric pressure gradients between the Arctic and middle latitudes.
A diminished latitudinal pressure gradient is linked to a weakening of the winds associated with the polar vortex and jet stream. Since the polar vortex normally retains the cold Arctic air masses up above the Arctic Circle, its weakening allows the cold air to invade lower latitudes.
Note Warm anomalies in Alaska, Siberia, Eastern Greenland. click to enlarge
