Yes!!!! " All of the sensible" should be brought to our electrical grid, not the boutique politically driven add-ons. And bring on nuclear! Too many times I've heard the statement, "Wind turbines might not produce much power, but they're a symbol of what we should be doing." No, they're a symbol of ignorance and corruption.
President Trump's Stargate project which will fast-track AI data centers is set to receive funding up to 500 billion from the likes of Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Sam Altman (Open AI). The building of these mega centers will require mega kilowatts of energy to keep them operating and supposedly this includes erecting the power plants to power the centers ONLY. A proposal could be made that would require the investors to also fund improvements to be made to the existing electric grid and/or power plants that supply power to the citizenry of the country.
I apologize, I understand everything, but how is it possible that a safer nuclear power can be developed with these criminal control agencies in the midst of crazy billionaires (who appear normal only because of the flattery of power that the masses always tend to), with a rotten science increasingly incapable of doubt and interchangeable politicians (a mirror of the worst society) etc..?
Yes, and a worker was killed at one of the BORAX experimental reactors. But commercial nuclear power outside the Soviet Union has a perfect safety record. And the UN Chernobyl Forum, composed of fourteen independent international agencies, reached the same conclusion as UNSCEAR.
"yet in the US over the last few decades more people have been injured due to wind energy than nuclear!"
In the entire seven-decade history of commercial nuclear power in the entire civilized world, nuclear power remains safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile. Nobody was injured, made ill, or killed by Three Mile Island or Fukushima.
The only nuclear-power-related deaths in history — 28 men, according to UNSCEAR — were caused by the incompetently operated unlicensed and inherently unsafe reactor at Chernobyl, built in a country that had neither safety culture nor licensing criteria. Nothing like it will ever be built again, for sure not in USA, but not even in an uncivilized country.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
"All nuclear facilities are required to re-process past and future fuel."
The Nuclear Waste Act of 1986 required utilities to pay 0.1¢/kWh to "deal with" spent fuel. DoE was required, under that act, to take custody of spent fuel, but they never did. Utilities sued and won, so they no longer pay. The fund now stands at $43 billion, but the Act explicitly forbids using any of the fund for spent fuel processing. The best way to process spent fuel is the pyroelectric method developed at Idaho and Argonne national laboratories.The 400 tonne per year pilot plant described by a detailed engineering study from Argonne and the Landmark Foundation and Merrick & Co ought to be built ASAP, followed by larger ones, which would reduce the estimated 0.085¢/kWh cost for the pilot plant by economies of scale.
Spent fuel is only 5% used, so if fission products were separated, the mass of material would be reduced by a factor of 20. Fission products need custody for 300 years. The 300,000 years! that useful idiots shout about consists entirely of about eleven kilograms plutonium-239 per tonne of spent fuel. Plutonium is fuel, not waste. Pretending to be able to store it in Yucca Mountain, or anywhere other than the bottom of the Marianas Trench, is daft. A much better idea is to turn it into electricity and fission products.
Among fission products, only caesium and strontium require 300-year custody. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Caesium and strontium constitute 9.26% of the mass of fission products, or 0.46% of the mass of spent fuel.
DoE estimates that even to store today's spent fuel inventory without processing, eight Yucca Mountains would be needed. The only physically and economically realistic solution is to store only caesium and strontium. The best way to store them is in "salt divers" that would melt their way to the bottoms of six-kilometer deep salt domes under Louisiana.
Then there's to problem of buying uranium from Russia. In metal-cooled fast-neutron reactors, all actinides from thorium onward are either fuel or future fuel. USA has a million tonnes of future fuel in the form of spent fuel and depleted uranium, above ground. Heavy metal is consumed at the rate of about one tonne per GWe year. Activists insist an all-electric American energy economy would have appetite for 1,700 GWe. In fast-neutron reactors with spent fuel processing, one million tonnes of uranium could power the American economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff
I haven't heard any talk about hardening the electrical grid lately. Is that because everyone thinks wind and solar won't need the grid? It is worrisome that a few nuts with guns can take down a large section of the grid by destroying a bunch of transformers.
A grid to bring power from solar panel and windmill plantations that are necessarily behind the back of nowhere to where it's actually needed would need to be much bigger than our present grid. The National Needs Study estimated 138,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines are needed, and some say that's far too small. In the best year ever during the last several decades, 1,370 miles were built. And nobody knows how to start or operate a grid to which is connected only small unreliable generators with random phase, voltage, and frequency. Heavy rotating synchronous generators are necessary for reference and stability.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Geri: It's good that it's not publicly discussed, as that seems to feed the fantasies of some disturbes persons. However, behind the sacenes I can assure you that they are well aware of that and have taken steps to minimize such things from causing a disaster.
In the last 70 years the level of thinking and IQ has dropped immensely in the United States...it is scary to think that our "scientists" or "technicians" would be capable of doing the work without human error. Thirty years ago, I thought about the possibility of s nuclear chain reaction, which could not be stopped...and it would eat up every atom and molecule and the planet would disintegrate...like the Superman Comic book cover at eleven. The planet Krypton was exploding! I thought as a child, what caused this to happen? As an adult, I came to the conclusion that TECHNOLOGY advanced too rapidly...and it could not be handled.
Barbara: Your fears are entirely physically impossible — but the intention of anti-nuclear activists was that you have them. Who paid the shouters? The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and Getty Oil. Bloomberg gas still pays the Sierra Club to shout at you about nuclear power.
I've asked for guidance...and I don't believe mankind was intended To get into nuclear energy. There has to an answer without the risk. I agree that the current offerings all fall short.. I wonder, if Tesla's energy information would have been the answer?
In the entire seven-decade history of nuclear power in the entire civilized world, commercial nuclear power remains safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile. Nothing humanity has ever done at industrial scale is safer. The EBR-II reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, which Nobel Physics Laureate Hans Bethe described as "the best research reactor ever built" was proven in 1986 to an invited international audience to be inherently "walk-away" safe. Then the Cliton administration terminated the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled its cavity in the building with concrete to ensure another one couldn't be built there. When Cliton's "science advisor" Frank von Hippel was told that would cost more than finishing the research program and mothballing the reactor he said "I know' it's a symbol. It has to go." John Kerry cast the deciding vote in the Senate to kill it.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
San Onofre in California was shut down, because it is sitting on a fault. there is another reactor 30 miles or so from NYC, which is sitting on a fault...which could cause serious damage.. Then, there was a massive tsunami in Japan in 2011, which was pouring radioactive water by the tons daily into the Pacific...and 12 years later there were still ongoing problems. I read about the Dead Zones in the Pacific. Now, I am not a scientist, but I am into our Creator...and I am not getting nuclear is positive!
San Onofre was shut down because Mitsubishi Heavy Industries sold Southern California Edison Company defective replacement steam generators and NRC wanted them to spend $billions to apply for a new license for everything on the 84 acres they lease from the Marine Corps. The Navy wants their land back anyway. California's then-Senator Barbara Boxer almost broke her arm patting herself on the back for her part in closing it, and then had a hissy fit when SCE asked the California PUC for an 18% rate increase to buy coal-fired power from the Navajo and Pima at Four Corners. The San Andreas fault is 200 miles from San Onofre, and strike-slip faults cannot cause tsunamis; only megathrust faults or giant landslides can cause them. And there are no megathrust faults nearer than Cape Mendocino. Tsunami energy density, and therefore wave height, decreases with distance, so a tsunami caused by an earthquake at the very end of the nearest megathrust fault would be barely measurable at San Onofre.
TEPCO was warned about the tsunami hazard at Fukushima Daiichi eight years before the earthquake, but didn't waterproof the basements containing the auxiliary generators and switchgear, or move them to high ground. Nearby Fukushima Daini had waterproof basements. Like Fukushima Daiichi, the Fukushima Daini reactors shut down gracefully and automatically as soon as the earthquake struck. Unlike Fukushima Daiichi, its auxiliary generators weren't flooded so they kicked in and kept the cores cool until they were restarted. The complex suffered minor damage to water intakes but was back in service within weeks. There were six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Three were damaged and probably won't be repaired. The remaining three were not damaged, and TEPCO will probably have permission to put them back into service in a few years.
"In every battle between physics and platitudes, physics always wins."
I would make just one recommendation to the Secretary of Energy. “Get our government out of picking winners and losers in the energy business. Let the free market make the choices.”
If we start to actually run out of fossil fuels, the price will automatically rise and alternatives will become more desirable and economical. Actually, the desirability will be a function of competition for alternatives. Why is our government screwing around trying to influence the future based on their opinions?
For instance, who logically is going to offer electric charging stations for EVs in the future? I say it will be Exxon or maybe BP or Shell Oil. To stay in business they will need to keep making money even as oil becomes rare. That makes sense to me. Our government trying to make this all happen 80 years early makes no sense to me. It shows a total lack of rational thought, but what do we expect from our government?
See how easy this is? Rational thought actually works, and saves Trillions of dollars of wasted tax dollars.
In the long run — about two centuries — hydrocarbon fuels will be depleted. The last decade's history of battery-powered EVs has shown them to be unworkable as a total solution. The long-term solution is metal-cooled fast-neutron reactors with fuel processing. Hydrocarbon fuels can be made from hydrogen plus CO2 using the hundred-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process — hydrogen alone is too dangerous, too difficult to store, and its energy density is too low. The most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water is the thermochemical copper-chlorine process, which needs heat at the same temperature as a nuclear reactor core. The best way to obtain CO2 is to extract it from seawater, where its concentration is 140 times greater than in the atmosphere, using the bipolar membrane electrodialysis method developed at PARC. The US Navy is already working on this process to make jet fuel at sea, so aircraft carriers' deployment duration is limited by food and toilet paper.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
That was my point, two centuries is a very long time. What justifies picking winners and losers today and wasting our tax dollars forcing a change to possibly losers in the long run?
In two centuries a lot will be discovered so we have no idea where the future will take us concerning energy. I believe our government is trying to scare us into doing silly things on an escalated schedule for no rational reason. But, that is just one man’s opinion. What I believe doesn’t matter a bit.
There are three types of people in the government who are pushing the green agenda: (1) Useful idiots, (2) Power seekers who see it as a lever to increase their power, and (3) Lobbyists and corrupt politicians who are lining their pockets with subsidies and mandates.
Yes!!!! " All of the sensible" should be brought to our electrical grid, not the boutique politically driven add-ons. And bring on nuclear! Too many times I've heard the statement, "Wind turbines might not produce much power, but they're a symbol of what we should be doing." No, they're a symbol of ignorance and corruption.
SM: Well stated, as usual. TY.
President Trump's Stargate project which will fast-track AI data centers is set to receive funding up to 500 billion from the likes of Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Sam Altman (Open AI). The building of these mega centers will require mega kilowatts of energy to keep them operating and supposedly this includes erecting the power plants to power the centers ONLY. A proposal could be made that would require the investors to also fund improvements to be made to the existing electric grid and/or power plants that supply power to the citizenry of the country.
Thomas: Good suggestion.
I apologize, I understand everything, but how is it possible that a safer nuclear power can be developed with these criminal control agencies in the midst of crazy billionaires (who appear normal only because of the flattery of power that the masses always tend to), with a rotten science increasingly incapable of doubt and interchangeable politicians (a mirror of the worst society) etc..?
Franco: Just giving up makes no sense. Our hope is to get good people (like Chris Wright) calling the shots.
Not sure of the accuracy of information by UNSCEAR, but the US Army experienced three deaths in their Nuclear Power Program, 1954 to 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Nuclear_Power_Program
Yes, and a worker was killed at one of the BORAX experimental reactors. But commercial nuclear power outside the Soviet Union has a perfect safety record. And the UN Chernobyl Forum, composed of fourteen independent international agencies, reached the same conclusion as UNSCEAR.
As a nuclear chemist now retired I spent 13 years at DOE. I fully support your Recommendation #3.
Also, I recommend elimination of all subsidies for all energy sources. Free markets will increase competition and let the best products win.
Ken Lang
"yet in the US over the last few decades more people have been injured due to wind energy than nuclear!"
In the entire seven-decade history of commercial nuclear power in the entire civilized world, nuclear power remains safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile. Nobody was injured, made ill, or killed by Three Mile Island or Fukushima.
The only nuclear-power-related deaths in history — 28 men, according to UNSCEAR — were caused by the incompetently operated unlicensed and inherently unsafe reactor at Chernobyl, built in a country that had neither safety culture nor licensing criteria. Nothing like it will ever be built again, for sure not in USA, but not even in an uncivilized country.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
"All nuclear facilities are required to re-process past and future fuel."
The Nuclear Waste Act of 1986 required utilities to pay 0.1¢/kWh to "deal with" spent fuel. DoE was required, under that act, to take custody of spent fuel, but they never did. Utilities sued and won, so they no longer pay. The fund now stands at $43 billion, but the Act explicitly forbids using any of the fund for spent fuel processing. The best way to process spent fuel is the pyroelectric method developed at Idaho and Argonne national laboratories.The 400 tonne per year pilot plant described by a detailed engineering study from Argonne and the Landmark Foundation and Merrick & Co ought to be built ASAP, followed by larger ones, which would reduce the estimated 0.085¢/kWh cost for the pilot plant by economies of scale.
Spent fuel is only 5% used, so if fission products were separated, the mass of material would be reduced by a factor of 20. Fission products need custody for 300 years. The 300,000 years! that useful idiots shout about consists entirely of about eleven kilograms plutonium-239 per tonne of spent fuel. Plutonium is fuel, not waste. Pretending to be able to store it in Yucca Mountain, or anywhere other than the bottom of the Marianas Trench, is daft. A much better idea is to turn it into electricity and fission products.
Among fission products, only caesium and strontium require 300-year custody. Half the rest are innocuous before thirty years, and the remainder aren't even radioactive. Caesium and strontium constitute 9.26% of the mass of fission products, or 0.46% of the mass of spent fuel.
DoE estimates that even to store today's spent fuel inventory without processing, eight Yucca Mountains would be needed. The only physically and economically realistic solution is to store only caesium and strontium. The best way to store them is in "salt divers" that would melt their way to the bottoms of six-kilometer deep salt domes under Louisiana.
Then there's to problem of buying uranium from Russia. In metal-cooled fast-neutron reactors, all actinides from thorium onward are either fuel or future fuel. USA has a million tonnes of future fuel in the form of spent fuel and depleted uranium, above ground. Heavy metal is consumed at the rate of about one tonne per GWe year. Activists insist an all-electric American energy economy would have appetite for 1,700 GWe. In fast-neutron reactors with spent fuel processing, one million tonnes of uranium could power the American economy for more than 500 years without mining, milling, refining, enriching, or importing one new gram of uranium.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff
I haven't heard any talk about hardening the electrical grid lately. Is that because everyone thinks wind and solar won't need the grid? It is worrisome that a few nuts with guns can take down a large section of the grid by destroying a bunch of transformers.
A grid to bring power from solar panel and windmill plantations that are necessarily behind the back of nowhere to where it's actually needed would need to be much bigger than our present grid. The National Needs Study estimated 138,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines are needed, and some say that's far too small. In the best year ever during the last several decades, 1,370 miles were built. And nobody knows how to start or operate a grid to which is connected only small unreliable generators with random phase, voltage, and frequency. Heavy rotating synchronous generators are necessary for reference and stability.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
Geri: It's good that it's not publicly discussed, as that seems to feed the fantasies of some disturbes persons. However, behind the sacenes I can assure you that they are well aware of that and have taken steps to minimize such things from causing a disaster.
In the last 70 years the level of thinking and IQ has dropped immensely in the United States...it is scary to think that our "scientists" or "technicians" would be capable of doing the work without human error. Thirty years ago, I thought about the possibility of s nuclear chain reaction, which could not be stopped...and it would eat up every atom and molecule and the planet would disintegrate...like the Superman Comic book cover at eleven. The planet Krypton was exploding! I thought as a child, what caused this to happen? As an adult, I came to the conclusion that TECHNOLOGY advanced too rapidly...and it could not be handled.
Barbara: Your fears are entirely physically impossible — but the intention of anti-nuclear activists was that you have them. Who paid the shouters? The Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and Getty Oil. Bloomberg gas still pays the Sierra Club to shout at you about nuclear power.
Barbara: The short answer is that such an event is like worrying that you will be hit by a meteor. It is not worth your time to worry about.
I've asked for guidance...and I don't believe mankind was intended To get into nuclear energy. There has to an answer without the risk. I agree that the current offerings all fall short.. I wonder, if Tesla's energy information would have been the answer?
In the entire seven-decade history of nuclear power in the entire civilized world, commercial nuclear power remains safer than Teddy Kennedy's Oldsmobile. Nothing humanity has ever done at industrial scale is safer. The EBR-II reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, which Nobel Physics Laureate Hans Bethe described as "the best research reactor ever built" was proven in 1986 to an invited international audience to be inherently "walk-away" safe. Then the Cliton administration terminated the research program, destroyed the reactor, and filled its cavity in the building with concrete to ensure another one couldn't be built there. When Cliton's "science advisor" Frank von Hippel was told that would cost more than finishing the research program and mothballing the reactor he said "I know' it's a symbol. It has to go." John Kerry cast the deciding vote in the Senate to kill it.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
San Onofre in California was shut down, because it is sitting on a fault. there is another reactor 30 miles or so from NYC, which is sitting on a fault...which could cause serious damage.. Then, there was a massive tsunami in Japan in 2011, which was pouring radioactive water by the tons daily into the Pacific...and 12 years later there were still ongoing problems. I read about the Dead Zones in the Pacific. Now, I am not a scientist, but I am into our Creator...and I am not getting nuclear is positive!
San Onofre was shut down because Mitsubishi Heavy Industries sold Southern California Edison Company defective replacement steam generators and NRC wanted them to spend $billions to apply for a new license for everything on the 84 acres they lease from the Marine Corps. The Navy wants their land back anyway. California's then-Senator Barbara Boxer almost broke her arm patting herself on the back for her part in closing it, and then had a hissy fit when SCE asked the California PUC for an 18% rate increase to buy coal-fired power from the Navajo and Pima at Four Corners. The San Andreas fault is 200 miles from San Onofre, and strike-slip faults cannot cause tsunamis; only megathrust faults or giant landslides can cause them. And there are no megathrust faults nearer than Cape Mendocino. Tsunami energy density, and therefore wave height, decreases with distance, so a tsunami caused by an earthquake at the very end of the nearest megathrust fault would be barely measurable at San Onofre.
TEPCO was warned about the tsunami hazard at Fukushima Daiichi eight years before the earthquake, but didn't waterproof the basements containing the auxiliary generators and switchgear, or move them to high ground. Nearby Fukushima Daini had waterproof basements. Like Fukushima Daiichi, the Fukushima Daini reactors shut down gracefully and automatically as soon as the earthquake struck. Unlike Fukushima Daiichi, its auxiliary generators weren't flooded so they kicked in and kept the cores cool until they were restarted. The complex suffered minor damage to water intakes but was back in service within weeks. There were six reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Three were damaged and probably won't be repaired. The remaining three were not damaged, and TEPCO will probably have permission to put them back into service in a few years.
"In every battle between physics and platitudes, physics always wins."
— Nobel Physics Laureate Richard P. Feynmam.
I would make just one recommendation to the Secretary of Energy. “Get our government out of picking winners and losers in the energy business. Let the free market make the choices.”
If we start to actually run out of fossil fuels, the price will automatically rise and alternatives will become more desirable and economical. Actually, the desirability will be a function of competition for alternatives. Why is our government screwing around trying to influence the future based on their opinions?
For instance, who logically is going to offer electric charging stations for EVs in the future? I say it will be Exxon or maybe BP or Shell Oil. To stay in business they will need to keep making money even as oil becomes rare. That makes sense to me. Our government trying to make this all happen 80 years early makes no sense to me. It shows a total lack of rational thought, but what do we expect from our government?
See how easy this is? Rational thought actually works, and saves Trillions of dollars of wasted tax dollars.
In the long run — about two centuries — hydrocarbon fuels will be depleted. The last decade's history of battery-powered EVs has shown them to be unworkable as a total solution. The long-term solution is metal-cooled fast-neutron reactors with fuel processing. Hydrocarbon fuels can be made from hydrogen plus CO2 using the hundred-year-old Fischer-Tropsch process — hydrogen alone is too dangerous, too difficult to store, and its energy density is too low. The most energy-efficient way to separate hydrogen from water is the thermochemical copper-chlorine process, which needs heat at the same temperature as a nuclear reactor core. The best way to obtain CO2 is to extract it from seawater, where its concentration is 140 times greater than in the atmosphere, using the bipolar membrane electrodialysis method developed at PARC. The US Navy is already working on this process to make jet fuel at sea, so aircraft carriers' deployment duration is limited by food and toilet paper.
Details in my book "Where Will We Get Our Energy?" Everything quantified. No vague handwaving. 350 bibliographic citations allow readers to verify I didn't simply make up stuff.
That was my point, two centuries is a very long time. What justifies picking winners and losers today and wasting our tax dollars forcing a change to possibly losers in the long run?
In two centuries a lot will be discovered so we have no idea where the future will take us concerning energy. I believe our government is trying to scare us into doing silly things on an escalated schedule for no rational reason. But, that is just one man’s opinion. What I believe doesn’t matter a bit.
There are three types of people in the government who are pushing the green agenda: (1) Useful idiots, (2) Power seekers who see it as a lever to increase their power, and (3) Lobbyists and corrupt politicians who are lining their pockets with subsidies and mandates.
Yes! There is big money in fooling the public…our tax money and deficit spending money. Either way, you and I are paying for their fun.
Jim: In theory yes, that makes sense. In reality, there are numerous other influences going on.