Discovering a brilliant way to efficiently generate hydrogen is hard enough. Then there’s everything that comes after, such as getting consumers accustomed to what’s needed for it to work, such as fuel cells — which convert hydrogen into usable electricity.
This is comparable to what Elon Musk struggles with in selling Tesla’s electric cars. He has to persuade the public not only to buy a new kind of car, but all that goes with it: the infrastructure of batteries, charging stations, high-voltage home plugs and new kinds of auto mechanics.
“Whenever you make something that’s two steps removed from an infrastructure, that’s the big problem you have going to market: You have to change an entire infrastructure,” Mr. Nocera said. “If we had fuel cells in your house and your car, then everybody would be trying to implement the artificial leaf right now.”
The other obstacle is the marketplace. Only a few years ago, he said, “the magic number was $3 ‘gas gallon equivalent.’ ” In other words, could he produce the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline and keep costs around $3? Even as he closed in on that number, the old fossil-fuel industry pulled the rug out from under him with a surge in cheap natural-gas extraction, driven by hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Seemingly overnight, the magic number became “a buck fifty,” he said.
But therein lies a glimmer of hope. Hydrogen can be produced by fracking, although it comes at a cost of carbon pollution. Still, widespread fracking might lead to widespread hydrogen use. In fact, the United States Senate revived a Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Caucus in 2012. “Fracking could drive the establishment of an infrastructure for using hydrogen at the home,” Mr. Nocera said. “And then the next thing everybody might say is, yeah, but that hydrogen is making CO2. Then the artificial leaf would show up. So it’s kind of weird. Fracking is killing me right now, but in the long run it could be an asset.”
In brief, the perfect fuel exists. What doesn’t exist is everything between this new fuel and, say, your electric coffee bean grinder. “And this is my ultimate vision and I believe it will happen sometime,” Mr. Nocera said, unable to resist. “Your house will be its own gas station.”
Interesting, but perhaps too many “ifs” and “coulds” to be realistic.
(And I do hate “information” pieces like this with overloud and inappropriately “heavy” musical scores—I have plenty of Russian classical music to listen to if I want the real thing)
Peter’s musical scores are definitely better.
still amazing what you can do with 20 freaking people working on a 3 minute video
The music is a cross between art music minimalism and rock&roll, like most flashy Hollywood stuff; its existence primarily owed to the characteristics that such can be written very, very fast in order to keep up with the post team (or the scenario where the post team is done and everybody is mouth breathing down your neck), and that ‘less is more’ with regard to production quality in the recording of synthesized and sample driven music.
In the span of 50 years, harmonic language has devolved from the rich, complex and wildly colorful neoromantic, pastoral, and impressionistic derivations back down to something that would be familiar to 13th century singers of the Montpelier Codex.
As intellectually crass as the music is, it’s designed to appeal to a young person’s emotions. Why is that important (in our general endeavor; not so much pertaining to this video)? Because most folks lack the science education (or will) to understand the details of climate science and the probability distribution of the projected scenarios on their own accord; they are completely dependent on climate experts. So if you want to nudge the average joe over into the green camp, or if you want to rally the troops, an extremely effective propaganda mechanism for doing such is to appeal to their emotional side.
One of the most effective examples of this i can think of is minute 8:15 to the end of the following video where the music and the narration lead up to the ‘hook’ phrase that we’ll adopt clean energy ‘not because greener is better, or low carbon is better, but because better is better’, which is right up there with ‘one small step for mankind…’, or ‘ask not what your country can do for you…’:
http://youtu.be/pSdnycHfLnQ
Wow! Thanks for the lesson. I am an old guy who has trouble whistling, and the music I listened to as a “young person” was by folks like Herb Alpert, Bert Kampfert, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Khachatourian, with some Monk and Redbone on the side. I have not “gotten” much of the music since.
I’ve always thought that the visuals and dialogue ought to stand on their own without the need for much music. I truly hate movies where the dialogue is drowned out by “dramatic” music, and the fact that too many guns and loud noises have destroyed my top end doesn’t help much.
I have a few problems with that video.
First of all, an actual leaf does a lot more than produce hydrogen and oxygen. It also scrubs CO2 from the air and fixes it into glucose. On the other hand, I can see how hydrogen might be a good answer to certain drawbacks of electricity. We could run our agricultural machines, aircraft, sea-going vessels on hydrogen.
Secondly, he says that we burn a trillion dollars of carbon fuel every “couple of years”. The U.S. alone burns about a trillion and a half dollars of fossil fuels every year. The world probably burns a trillion dollars of fossil fuels every few months! Just a few years worth of global fossil fuel spending would pay for a global renewable energy system. Fixing our energy system should be easy as hell!
The reason it is not – why it seems impossible and incredibly complicated – is, I feel, because we don’t treat it a public sector issue. Instead, it is for some reason, inexplicable to me, just assumed to be properly addressed by the private sector. Madness. But there I go again…..
Agree Ginger. For several reasons, producing hydrocarbons that utilize CO2 is a better goal. Looking way ahead, the fuel can be put back in the Earth rather than burned when the need to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration is obvious to all.
http://solarfuelshub.org/
Hydrogen can be made from coal. My nightmare scenario for the “clean fuel-cell vehicles of the future” is to have tens of thousands of oxygen-blown coal gasifiers turning several million tons per day of coal slurry into carbon monoxide, hydrogen and other light gases, then separating the scrubbed gas stream into H2 for vehicle fuel, CH4 for pipeline gas, NH3 for fertilizer, and just burning the CO in gas turbines. The technology has been here for decades, just waiting for a market to justify it. FCEVs would be that market.
Behold – clean coal:
http://youtu.be/oz1l6pnO3AA
I have asked before that no one use the term “clean coal”. It is bad for my blood pressure to see it.
Like Carlton cigarettes and Twinkies: ‘now with 30% less tar!’
The coal gassification plant is already costing $5B+, and it appears their business model includes selling their bottled up CO2 to the oil/gas industry so that they can inject it down into wells to encourage their product to show up at the surface. Doesn’t sound to clean to me, unless they decide that their not going to pull it back up to use for the next well, but instead leave it down there.
* too clean
Maybe I’m confused, but I always thought “carbon capture” meant locking CO2 up some way that didn’t result in ocean acidification or releasing it to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Even “leaving it down there” still doesn’t account for the CO2 that will result from burning the oil that it is being used to pressurize—when that recovered oil is burned, we will have a bigger carbon footprint than ever, considering that we started with coal and had to burn a lot of it up front to gasify the rest. “Clean coal” is just dirty BS, and Obama is pandering to the ff interests and the members of congress they own—he can’t be serious in thinking that coal has any place in our future.
E-Pot’s “nightmare scenario” IS truly scary. Even though they may paint the plant a pretty green, it’s going to be freakin’ dirty by any measure, and would make a good movie set for some future movie about post-apocalyptic Earth.
1st, it’s not Mr Nocera, it’s Dr Nocera of MIT and Harvard, one of the foremost chemist in the world.
2nd, this technology (Nano-Materials Based Solar Catalytics), more than any other, holds the promise of actually reducing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. Such research is moving quickly, but before the sequester, materials based energy research was moving at an incredible pace. It should be fully funded and expanded immediately.
Research is “moving quickly”? Mr DOCTOR N and others have been talking about this for several years, and all we are still seeing is the “magic trick” of the bubbles forming on the “leaf” in the glass of water. When are we going to see something practical?.
60 Minutes had a segment on 25 years ago (!) showing a tiny fuel cell hydrolyzing water into O2 and H2 using sunlight.
I think I remember that. Wasn’t that the same show where they stuck electrodes in potatoes to generate electricity? Neither technology has gotten very far.
It was a very long segment, talking about the safety of hydrogen; using hydrogen to replace natural gas in (preexisting natural gas lines) for domestic cooking, heating; and – use of hydrogen as a renewable energy storage product, the working example being hydropower facilities in France hydrolyzing water to H2 at night when demand was down, and storing it in large tanks to burn in gas turbine generators.
I have tried to google up the episode, but I can’t find it.
Thanks for trying—I DO kind of remember seeing that H2 stuff, and thinking about the Hindenburg when I did. My feelings about hydrogen have been forever tainted by that disaster, as well as doing too many demonstrations blowing soap bubbles with H2 and igniting them with a candle on the end of a meter stick as they floated away—-a rather satisfying and quiet little “whoosh” and puff of flame that was always well-received (and strangely relaxing).
(In case you were wondering, I was kidding about the potato battery)
I mean no disrespect, but considering the enormous revolution in molecular chemistry that has taken place since that 60 minutes segment you saw was produced, the implication you seem to be making about this technology is about as valid as the “in the 70’s they were talking about a new ice age” argument.
25 years ago the theoretical promises about solar energy were just that.
It CAN be done now. In many cases it’s the market place and scale that is preventing its implementation. Solar catalytics are now much closer than you may realize
Trust me, much MUCH sooner than you’ll see LFTR or fusion energy.
That is most likely true but begs the issue about solar catalytics. Dr. N said three years ago that we would see working applications “in three years”. When is “much sooner” going to happen?
I asked Dr Nocera that very question at a meeting on energy technologies of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans last year. He started going on about his most recent work using “Willow Glass” by Corning, but I could tell by his expression that others had approached him with that same question. I don’t personally know Dr. Nocera, but have been told that his enthusiasm for his work can sometimes get the best of him. Still, I know for certain that Daniel Nocera’s vision is on very solid chemical ground.
Though almost a year old now, a good summary of close to the current state of the art can be found here…
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/07/artificial-leaf-synthetic-photosynthesis
The barriers to LFTR are mostly regulatory (meaning, political); the barriers to the artificial leaf are mostly chemical and materials-related. They always have been. Regulatory barriers can be abolished with a stroke of the pen; chemistry is much less friendly.
The barriers to viable LFTR are formidable.
-Scaling up from 10 MW experiments to 1 GW commercial plants is hardly trivial.
-There is only a vague theoretical framework for decommissioning LFTR.
-Research for nuclear is notoriously expensive as are construction costs for any new nuclear (much less an entirely new and untried technology).
-New and or varied and expensive regulatory regimes would have to be established in 100 or more nations simultaneously.
…All of this before the inherent local, regional, national and international political hurdles LFTR would inevitably be forced to clear
Meanwhile, the growing list of solar technologies will continue enjoy broad political support and will continue to technologically advance at rates that nuclear can only dream of.
Reply re-parented for readability:
http://climatecrocks.com/2014/04/02/artificial-leaf-update/comment-page-1/#comment-55140
I see. So how much do you know about the current state of the chemistry of catalytic materials?
Replying to stephengn1 (comment-page-1/#comment-55137), re-parented for readability:
Are you under the impression that the steam turbine and alternator has to be invented all over again for LFTR? 90% of this stuff is off the shelf. Even the metallurgy has been pretty much a known quantity since the post-mortem.
We haven’t even built a commercial one yet, and you’re already demanding decommissioning plans? We’d have 60 years to figure out what we didn’t already know.
The MSRE has been drained, the system is cold. The vessel can sit for a century in its current condition and all it will do is tick down the isotope inventory day by day. There’s been research going into the decommissioning since the 1980’s, and the process was supposed to be complete in 2009 (I can find no further information on this). Extracting U and Pu from salt is just chemistry, and requires nothing like Purex; precipitation with carbonate is as complicated as it gets. If you want to recover the base salt for re-use, you may need to do electrowinning or vacuum distillation to separate the fission products.
Due to the regulatory burden. Again, a stroke of the pen. Simply putting a lot of lawyers on unemployment would be a huge boon for the country in general.
That’s just silly. Australia and New Zealand ban nuclear power outright. It has zero effect on Russia, India and China.
Tell people they can either accept it, pay someone else to, or pay high and escalating carbon taxes; I’m sure they’d much rather buy a share of some base load rather than pay fees for RE’s fossil-fired backup. Even Japan is sheepishly admitting that they over-reacted to Fukushima and lifting evacuation orders. I’m quite ready to have it in MY back yard (actually, at the former reactor site a half-hour away).
As often as I find what E-Pot says to be objectionable, I must pretty much support him here. We abandoned MSRE and LMFR 40 and 50 years ago and adopted the PWR as the “standard”. Perhaps a big mistake, because the MSRE and LMFR showed a lot of promise, just as the LFTR does today (and I do believe both the Japanese and Chinese are making plans to build one).
The LFTR is in many ways safer than other reactor designs, and the concerns stephen brings up can be addressed (and many were back in the day of the LFTR’s ancestors). If the programs hadn’t been killed (for the wrong reasons), we might be living in a world of LFTR’s right now.
PS to E-Pot. I have finished reading The Atomic Accident, and as I said, it’s a great read—-almost like a novel. Opens with 403 entertaining pages of description of all the “nuclear meltdowns and disasters” we have had with reactors, weapons, and reprocessing plants. Most is old news to those who have studied the issue, but Mahaffey has dug up a lot of new supporting info—-the footnotes are some of the best stuff in the book. He wove into all of it the subtle message that in the middle of all the mayhem, few lives were lost and little long-term damage was done—as I said early on, the book is really pro-nuclear power.
He then devoted a mere 22 pages in closing to making the case that nuclear power is something we should be promoting right now to combat AGW, and he does it well. Unfortunately, the uneducated layman that reads this book is probably going to remember the 403 pages of things like “the day we A-bombed North Carolina” and the “dead workers that glowed in the dark and had to be buried in lead coffins” rather than the positive aspects of nuclear power.
“Are you under the impression…. 90% of this stuff is off the shelf.”
Then it should be easy to point to a working 1 GW model somewhere on the planet, right? Oh? You can’t? The Chinese have 140 PhDs working on a 2 MW model now. Might be ready in 3 years or so (capital M on that might) But that’s child’s play, right?
“you’re already demanding decommissioning plans? We’d have 60 years to figure out what we didn’t already know.”
Ah, we’ll figure that out later and flail in the darkness now. Worked so well at Hanford and WIPP after all. How did decommissioning go on the oak ridge prototype again? How much did it cost?
“Due to the regulatory burden.”
China has a high regulatory burden? They’re spending 350 million to produce 2 measly MW right now. Now compare that to ANY materials research program any where in the world
“That’s just silly. Australia and New Zealand ban nuclear power outright. It has zero effect on Russia, India and China.”
Ah I see, you oppose standardization via international treaty. If Russia wants to dump waste into to sea when no one is looking, well that’s their business. Can’t possible affect the reproductive success of anyones granddaughter, right?
“Tell people they can either accept it…”
Yes, of course, The implied threat of the use of police force always found in any nuclear proposal.
“…than pay fees for RE’s fossil-fired backup.”
As well as the false choice of either fossil or nuclear when solar with storage will be available
“Even Japan is sheepishly admitting that they over-reacted to Fukushima and lifting evacuation orders.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. The Japanese government says it’s ok. Governments never lie, right?
“I’m quite ready to have it in MY back yard”
You should not have to be reminded of this – You are one person
Here’s three 1.3 GW nuclear-heated steam plants dating from 1988. There are a great many more examples, but with the 2-link limit I’m husbanding my hrefs.
Nuclear energy is mostly a carbon-free way to boil water (maybe later, heat up the air). Once you’ve boiled the water there’s not very much different in the balance of plant.
The MSRE was rated at 10 MW thermal, but was limited to 7.4 MW by an undersized radiator system. That’s the beauty of MSRs; if they get too warm, the fuel salt expands, the fuel density in the core drops below critical and just shuts it all down.
I’m not sure how many PhDs worked on the MSRE, or the ARE before it. I’d be surprised if it was 140. They didn’t need to fill out so much paperwork then.
They’ve already removed the fissiles, which is the hard part.
You tell me. My digging didn’t turn that up.
Do you always put words in people’s mouths?
Apparently you DO always put words in people’s mouths!
I’m well-acquainted with the cost of solar WITH storage. Solar is only “inexpensive” without storage. Wind as it stands has a much higher capacity factor than PV, and would still stand on either storage or fossil-fired generation for some 60% of average demand. You’d have to get to 80% of demand supplied that way to cut carbon emissions far enough to stabilize the atmosphere. Sweden is there, with France and Ontario well down the list but doing admirably for not even trying; Denmark talks a good game but isn’t really in the running.
A-yup. And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.
You should not have to be reminded of this, either, stephen. – You are one person, and you sure seem to have a hardon for nuclear power. Do you get this worked up over GMO’s, vaccines, and fracking directly polluting groundwater too?
I said I “pretty much” support E-Pot, because he was on the right track even if he didn’t give perfect answers (and some were quite “imperfect”). Go look up the history of reactors in the ’60’s and ’70’s (when I was rather strongly against them and, along with several Nobel winners and a few hundred others, signed a UCS letter that became a full page ad in the Washington Post). If nowhere else, look at Wikipedia for what will likely be a fairly informative piece. Knowing what I now know about nuclear power and AGW has caused me to modify that earlier position—-you, on the other hand, sound as if you are suffering from a case of cognitive dissonance.
I don’t want a reactor literally in my backyard or anyone else’s (and I doubt E-Pot does either), but DO think we need them and can site them in “good” places.
I’m serious. If they do redevelop that site and they need someone to live next to the security perimeter (just so long as I don’t have to be buzzed in and out of my own place, or clear my sailing with the guards), I’ll move. Let the fraidy-cats sell their beachfront to me for a song.
GMOs hold great promise and I do not object to them if they are created wisely and truly toward the greater good. Vaccines have proven their worth. Fracking is a variation on a unsustainable theme and a furtherance of a behavior that is proving harmful to our species and all others.
I support an all renewable future.
Nuclear is a centralized form of energy production. It is inherently undemocratic and elitist. Nuclear’s history is replete with lies and government aided secrecy. Nuclear has never been proven to be safe to an acceptable degree. Nuclear has never provided more than 5% of the worlds total energy demand, yet there are a growing list of areas in the world that have been made uninhabitable by nuclear waste and nuclear corruption.
I firmly believe that if the world had abandoned fossil and had instead chosen a 100% nuclear future, that we would now be facing a crisis all the same; a different crisis to be sure; a genetic crisis – massively increased birth defects, certainty of cancers, severely decreased fertility.
New nuclear designs are much better, but all will remain problematic in many regards
The power of the sun is unlimited. It can and has provided all the energy mankind has ever required many times over since our arrival on this rock. Wind is originally solar. Wave is originally solar. Even fossil is originally solar. All that is required for the sun to continue to supply man with many multiples of the energy he needs is engineering and political will.
If anything, renewables are “elitist and undemocratic”; they are scarce and drawn from the same lands which formed the historical basis of wealth for feudal rulers.
More at http://climatecrocks.com/2014/04/02/artificial-leaf-update/comment-page-1/#comment-55269
Mahaffey sounds like a clever guy who knew exactly what he had to write to sell the book.
I’m not sure LFTR is our best option right here and now. If the TransAtomic white paper is accurate, their reactor (also a fluoride MSR, but not thorium-based) has a ready fuel supply of roughly 65,000 tons ready to go. It uses uranium with a fissile content as low as 1.8%, which happens to be the description of “spent” LWR fuel.
A Transatomic MSR would take about 65 tons of spent LWR fuel to start it, and burn about 30 tons during a 60-year lifespan (95 tons total). I can’t think of anything better to do with our “high-level waste” than to turn it into carbon-free energy. If we needed more than another 500-odd GW of carbon-free electricity I’m sure we could think of something. Transatomic claims up to 96% burnup, which would leave some transuranic leftovers for something like S-PRISM to clean up. There’d be a few tons a year needing to be taken care of, enough to run a dozen or so fast-spectrum burners.
Don’t give up on hydrogen, I think it has an immense role to play (replacing fossils in air travel, marine use etc.) in the survival of our race. As a retired system engineer, building large mainframe systems through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, I can relate to Mr Nocera’s excellent computer analogy (as more and more company’s downsized and distributed computer systems, giving empowerment to the actual users), I worked through this process numerous times at enterprises I worked at. I can see a hydrogen revolution in the near future, development is on-going and gathering momentum very enthusiastically, it is a young and thriving area.
http://www.airliquideadvancedbusiness.com/en/hannover-fair-hydrogen-fuel-cells-april-7-11-hannover-germany.html
http://wupperinst.org/en/projects/details/wi/p/s/pd/400/
Interesting piece on hydrogen from the National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/04/140403-fuel-cells-hydrogen-wal-mart-stationary/
I was reading stephengn1’s comment and did a double-take:
How on earth do you get so many value judgements on what’s essentially a compact, carbon-free method for making steam?
We had an all-renewable past (in the sense he means), and life was so straitened by energy and material scarcity that people stampeded toward fossil fuels just as rapidly as they could build machines to make use of them. For all their problems, they made life far better.
Stephen doesn’t seem to understand that a renewed state of scarcity is inevitable if he gets his wish. Obviously, whoever came up with the carefully-tuned language about “renewables” and the emotionally and politically loaded words “undemocratic and elitist” has an agenda. Who would benefit from this agenda?
Going back to the “all-renewable” past, the beneficiaries were the feudal lords. They controlled the land, and the land produced all the food, fiber, and energy. They skimmed monopoly rents off the fruits of the land and controlled people by directing scarce resources to their supporters.
Both fossil fuels and today’s RE are tied to the land. Perhaps you can make some small amount of electricity with PV fastened to an apartment’s balcony railing, but you cannot meet your own needs any more than you can feed yourself from those few square feet. Currently, wind power comes in “farms” which are themselves mostly sited on real farms. Who controls the land, controls the energy. Scarcity of energy (energy poverty) will funnel more money and power to those in control. By definition, these people ARE the elite.
Nuclear energy is hobbled by the same elite interests, managing the gate to keep their competition down to a cosmetic, non-threatening level. (Rod Adams documents that they’ve been trying to protect their monopoly rents from nuclear competition since 1960.) What’s “democratic” about prohibitions and regulation making it impossible for a small city to buy its own nuclear plant and meet its own needs for electricity and heat? The EBR-II provided electricity and heat for the Idaho National Laboratory for 30 years, out of a minuscule space with zero carbon emissions. A single NuScale reactor could do the same for a town of 20-30,000; an mPower, 100-150,000.
But if all the “progressive” voices declare in chorus that nuclear energy is “undemocratic and elitist”, and endorse legislation which makes it impossible for small, democratic groups to own and operate it for their own benefit, they make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, except for all the democratic voices they drown out because they’re insufficiently “progressive”, and all the diversity of vision they eliminate in the pursuit of conformity to their own.
Would you check your belief against available evidence, or is it an unshakable faith? There’s little hint of increased birth defects in the descendants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, and many normal children of people who’ve survived acute radiation sickness. Millions of people have had significant radiation exposure from medical diagnoses and treatment, and they’re not popping out 3-eyed babies either.
Except for geothermal, which is mostly energy from a supernova near the Solar system’s primordial cloud which seeded it with actinides. The decay of those actinides in Earth’s core and mantle supplies the bulk of the driving force for plate tectonics, which recycles subducted carbon and keeps the biosphere going. Without nuclear energy, weathering would remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere, green plants could not grow, and we would not be here.
Coal, oil and natural gas are also stored solar energy. That stored energy is currently the enemy of all life on earth. Nuclear energy is one of the few things we have which can displace them and help clean up the mess we’ve made.
“How on earth do you get so many value judgements on what’s essentially a compact, carbon-free method for making steam?”
These are not value judgements. They are facts derived via deductive reasoning.
Question: Who controls the ability to harness and disseminate the energy created via fission?
Answer: due to inherent security concerns, only a select few with close ties to national governments
Question: Who controls the ability to harness solar energy?
Answer: Anyone with enough money to buy increasingly cheaper solar energy products
“We had an all-renewable past (in the sense he means)…”
This objection fails to account for vast technological advancements.
“Stephen doesn’t seem to understand that a renewed state of scarcity is inevitable if he gets his wish.”
A falsehood that again fails to consider technological advancements in the collection of renewable forms of energy
“Obviously, whoever came up with the carefully-tuned language about “renewables” and the emotionally and politically loaded words “undemocratic and elitist” has an agenda. Who would benefit from this agenda?”
Um, people who want democracy and oppose would be oligarchs – If you can call that an agenda. Oh, and it’s not “renewables”, it’s renewables
“Going back to the “all-renewable” past, the beneficiaries were the feudal lords. They controlled the land, and the land produced all the food, fiber, and energy.”
Right, solar power will bring back feudalism. Yes, I believe you.
“Both fossil fuels and today’s RE are tied to the land.”
Everything humans do is tied to land. We are not creatures of the air.
“Perhaps you can make some small amount of electricity with PV fastened to an apartment’s balcony railing, but you cannot meet your own needs any more than you can feed yourself from those few square feet.”
Another obvious falsehood since it is, in fact, being done.
“Currently, wind power comes in “farms””
Not always.
“…which are themselves mostly sited on real farms. Who controls the land, controls the energy. ”
Um, farmers?
“Scarcity of energy (energy poverty) will funnel more money and power to those in control. By definition, these people ARE the elite.”
Another falsehood. Right now, solar and wind projects and are bringing desperately needed energy to the poorest of the poor – the rural poor of the developing world
“Nuclear energy is hobbled”
By hobbled he means necessarily regulated.
“But if all the “progressive” voices declare in chorus that nuclear energy is “undemocratic and elitist”…”
It is INHERENTLY elitist and undemocratic by it’s very nature. No government is insane enough to allow ordinary citizens the ability to produce their own grid scale nuclear energy. The attainment and disposal of nuclear materials MUST be tied to governments because of entrenched security concerns
“Except for geothermal, which is mostly energy from a supernova near the Solar system’s primordial cloud which seeded it with actinides. The decay of those actinides in Earth’s core and mantle supplies the bulk of the driving force for plate tectonics.”
If your thesis is that there is an active nuclear engine at the center of the earth, or enough radioactive decay to power “the bulk of the driving force of plate tectonics” I eagerly await a citation of actual science. Personally I find such an idea laughable.
I heard the sounds of a dead horse being beaten and came over to watch (remembering that no horse is ever too dead to beat).
I found stephengn doing a great if not quite perfect job of puncturing E-Pot’s balloon, and I too am eagerly awaiting the “science” behind E-Pot’s “nuclear engine” as the source of Earth’s heat. His fixation on nuclear energy is truly amazing.
I DO suspect that E-Pot will simply just NOT respond, as he has so many times in the past when caught out. If he does, perhaps he will add a postscript on Desmids and bacterial genetics? I am still waiting to be educated by him on that topic.
Reply re-parented here, from which I will only quote the conclusion:
“10.1 Introduction
Radioactive heating of the mantle and crust plays a key role in geodynamics as discussed in Section 4.5. The heat generated by the decay of the uranium isotopes 238-U and 235-U, the thorium isotope 232-Th, and the potassium isotope 40-K is the primary source of the energy that drives mantle convection and generates earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.”
This was settled science by the time I took junior-high earth science, which is where I recall learning it. My textbook was written before the acceptance of plate tectonics, BTW. How the hell can you be so completely IGNORANT of something so basic that it was taught to barely-teenagers four decades ago?
It’s no wonder that progress against the denialists of climate science is so painfully difficult. They view the opposition as anti-science and pig-ignorant, and to a horrifying extent, they’re right!
With friends like you, the climate doesn’t need enemies.
There are three main sources of heat in the deep earth: (1) heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; (2) frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the center of the planet; and yes, (3) heat from the decay of radioactive elements
But to say with certainty that #3 is the primary source of that heat stretches all credulity. We don’t even know the precise abundances of radioactive elements (potassium, uranium and thorium) in the deep earth.
Stephen! You have spoken truth to E-Pot, but in the process queered my deal with him! Did you not see what I said?
“I will make E-Pot a deal—If he will educate me about desmids and bacterial genetics, I will explain in detail “why heat generated by (radioactive) decay is the primary source of the energy that drives MANTLE convection and generates earthquakes and volcanic eruptions” does not quite mean what E-Pot thinks it does.
Now he has no incentive to educate me with all the things he learned about bacterial genetics in his intro biology course, and I will remain forever ignorant.
PS You might have added to #3) that, although there likely was much heat released from radioactive decay in the early part of the earth’s history, that heat had been added to earth’s heat inventory a very long time long ago, and it is difficult to extrapolate its “share” because, as you say, we really don’t know what’s down there.
Re-parenting a reply to stephengn1, for readability (and risking deletion for length, but I haven’t the time to make this shorter):
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” – William James
In essence, you’re saying that nuclear energy has been nationalized/socialized. Isn’t this a GOOD thing in the leftist ranking of moral values?
Past US nuclear policy was geared toward producing abundance. This would have, as an almost-accidental side effect, eliminated the mining of steam coal and slashed US carbon emissions. (This is exactly the effect it had in France.) Are you saying that it’s impossible to hire people with the necessary ties? After all, a 1 GW(e) plant produces enough electricity to supply the complete electrical and transport energy needs of about 450,000 people (1.5 kW electric, about 700 W equivalent crankshaft power used for ground vehicles). You’d think that those 450,000 could find a few hundred qualified people to do that work for them, and hire them.
Current US nuclear policy is geared toward preventing competition with fossil fuels. This SHOULD be a major concern of Climate Crocks, but is not. The political stance of Mary Sinclair appears to have much to do with this.
It’s so amusing to have you try to lecture me, an owner of both solar and wind energy products, on how they give us all control over our energy. In practice they make us slaves to failures of electronics, deterioration of batteries, vagaries of season and weather, and otherwise remind us why so many Jacobs and Wincharger units were abandoned just as soon as the REA’s lines arrived in the 1930’s and ’40’s. There’s a Jacobs unit on a tower maybe a mile from where I sit right now. It hasn’t produced a watt since I first laid eyes on it, roughly 3 decades ago. I believe the tail vane system is broken, and no owner so far has found it worth fixing.
I won’t beg the question of why I have any of this stuff. I am a hobbyist, and I maintain that the most expensive watt is the one you need and can’t get. Having some small source of my own juice is a form of insurance. I once waited all day for a bucket truck to replace a transformer fuse after a suicidal squirrel went out in a flash of glory (I found the squirrel), and keeping the freezer from thawing is just a good idea.
You mean, like the discovery of nuclear chain reactions in 1942, rapidly followed by the launch of the USS Nautilus in 1954? THAT sort of technological advancement? (It’s hard to talk about technological enhancements in wind power. Wind has been used to grind grain and pump water for centuries. In 1941, a 1.25 megawatt wind turbine went into grid service. 73 years later the biggest wind turbines in the world are still just a few megawatts, and the wind itself is no more dependable than it ever was.)
The minimum EROEI (energy return on energy invested) to maintain industrial society is about 7:1. Despite all the technological advancements thus far, we haven’t managed to raise the EROEI for PV+storage much beyond 2. As Gail Tverberg will tell you at length subsidies and mandates for these technologies make matters worse, not better.
Then show me where electrical power based on such renewables is cheap and abundant without resorting to use of carbon-based fuels. (Hydro has had little technological advancement in decades; it’s hard to improve on 85% efficiency.)
Obviously, the oligarchs providing the behind-the-scenes financing for anti-nuclear groups like Friends of the Earth find the anti-nuclear agenda to their liking.
Not when it involves burning rain forest to plant palm-oil plantations for “renewable” biodiesel and mining of forests to ship wood pellets to Denmark for “renewable” electricity, it isn’t.
Do you think you’re going to own the outside of your apartment building?
When you can produce the energy needs for a million people from a few hundred acres of land, the strength of the landowners vs. everyone else is slashed.
Really? Show me where. Average US electric consumption is about 450 GW, or about 33 kWh/capita/day. Show me some apartment dwellers generating that much at, say, 2 occupants per bedroom. Don’t forget to count north-side units!
Just as the Winchargers brought electricity to the Great Plains in the 1920’s. But it took the Rural Electrification Administration to bring them out of agrarianism and let them run more than a few light bulbs. If a cell phone and a LED light is enough for you, let’s see you cut back to that.
By “hobbled” I mean forced to document every step of the manufacture of many reactor parts even though this has no verifiable impact on safety or even reliability, and puts most potential suppliers out of the market. By “hobbled” I mean being subject to hostile “intervenor” actions for many changes, and having to pay for their “input”. By “hobbled” I mean having to shut down for radioisotope releases many times smaller than the every-day emissions from coal and even gas plants.
One aspect of “hobbled” is the cry of “but it’s nuclear!” whenever people like me ask you to treat nuclear energy according to the same standards as everything else.
The insanity inherent in your catch-phrases keeps leaping out at me. There is NOTHING “democratic” about grid-scale electric power, period. It operates by the laws of physics which govern alternators and motors, inductors and capacitors and transformers. You do not get to vote on them. You work within their constraints or you don’t operate at all. If only an elite is smart and knowledgeable enough to keep the grid going, it’s “elitist”. It’s also essential to technological society. The exact same thing is true of chemistry, mechanical engineering, ad infinitum. You open schools to educate these elites and then hire them to do those jobs that most people can’t do. You benefit by getting something you could not get from your own efforts.
Despite the decades-old disinformation campaign against nuclear energy in the West, a majority of Americans support it. It’s an elite which agitates and uses anti-democratic tactics like lawsuits (which the public doesn’t get to vote on) and “intervenor” actions to shut it down. This elite doesn’t work for a living, but gets support from tenured salaries or foundation grants to pursue their agenda.
“10.1 Introduction
Radioactive heating of the mantle and crust plays a key role in geodynamics as discussed in Section 4.5. The heat generated by the decay of the uranium isotopes 238-U and 235-U, the thorium isotope 232-Th, and the potassium isotope 40-K is the primary source of the energy that drives mantle convection and generates earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.”
This was settled science by the time I took junior-high earth science, which is where I recall learning it. My textbook was written before the acceptance of plate tectonics, BTW. How the hell can you be so completely IGNORANT of something so basic that it was taught to barely-teenagers four decades ago?
It’s no wonder that progress against the denialists of climate science is so painfully difficult. They view the opposition as anti-science and pig-ignorant, and to a horrifying extent, they’re right!
With friends like you, the climate doesn’t need enemies.