Capture

This is one of my less-successful attempts.



  ¶ 4/18/2013 09:54:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Petition to restart the Integral Fast Reactor program

As many readers of this blog probably know, the Integral Fast Reactor project was killed by a very narrow Senate vote in 1994, with the connivance of the Clinton administration.

This was all done very much behind the scenes.  The public at large had no knowledge of what was going on (I sure didn't), and what happened was probably driven by a few relatively narrow special interests.

Times have changed.

In an effort to dis-intermediate government a bit, the Obama administration (Energy sec'y:  Steven Chu) has a new feature on the White House website called "We The People".  It allows people to create petitions asking the White House to examine certain topics.  If a petition receives 5000 endorsements, it gets a closer examination.  This isn't anything like a guarantee of action, but at least it's something.  If nothing else, it forces someone close to the seat of power to get familiar with the issue.

There is currently an active petition to "restart the Integral Fast Reactor nuclear power technology program".  As of this posting, it has 465 out of the required 5000 signatures.  I recommend that all readers of this blog, who are US citizens, take the following steps to sign the petition:

1. Create an account at WH.gov using this page.  You will be asked for an e-mail address.
2. Read the registration e-mail to get your account information (I am currently waiting for this e-mail; I suspect human intervention is involved).
3. Log into the WH.gov site.
4. Sign the petition.

5000 signatures are required by October 29.  That is about 300 signatures a day.  We need to push this.  Be part of it.

  ¶ 10/13/2011 10:12:00 PM 3 comments links to this post

 

Thorium remix

I highly recommend this 2 hour mashup of various LFTR- and nuclear-related video clips, most of it taken from lectures and interviews with Kirk Sorensen.  It begins with the "LFTR in 5 minutes" sequence but broadens it with major and up-to-date bits about many matters, including Fukushima Dai'ichi.

  ¶ 10/12/2011 04:28:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

It's not looking good for Europe - North Sea gas falls 25%

From The Grauniad:

North Sea gas production has slumped by 25% in the second quarter of the year, an alarming increase in the rate of decline that will cut tax revenues and could put more pressure on government to agree controversial shale gas developments.

Figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) also show a 36% rise in coal imports, but a leap from 6.3% to 9.6% for the amount of electricity generated by wind and other renewables.

The department records that the output of oil and associated gas liquids fell by 16% in the three months to the end of June, compared with a year earlier – the biggest decline since records began 16 years ago.

This left Britain importing 3.6m tonnes of oil in the second quarter, compared with 2.8m tonnes in the same period of 2010, even though total oil demand fell by 1.7%.

But the largest fall was in the amount of gas produced from the southern North Sea, where operators have been arguing that projects may have to be shut down because of a rise in government taxes in the last budget.

A drop like that is serious bad news.  Britain in particular is in a precarious position fuel-wise, with little storage for gas and dependency rising as old nuclear power stations are closed and not replaced.  The alternatives are Russia and LNG, and Japan's shutdown of even undamaged nuclear power stations has driven up demand for both LNG and fuel oil.

Wind generation rose... by a whole 3.3% of demand.  This is not good, this is not good at all.

  ¶ 9/29/2011 09:49:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

We did NOT almost lose Detroit

I highly recommend this rebuttal (from 1976!) to the book "We Almost Lost Detroit" which addresses the claims about the Fermi I fast-breeder reactor and the accident which took it out of service. In short, nothing much happened, and the design basis accident for the plant was so overwhelmingly large compared to the actual event that it's hard to see how something could have.  ¶ 9/19/2011 03:27:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

9/11, ten years later

On this day ten years ago I was fighting my way through morning rush-hour traffic, going to an out-of-town plant to work on some production issues.  After getting through the worst of it, I stopped for refreshment and another motorist told me that a small plane had flown into the World Trade Center.  I switched from the CD player to the radio, and listened the rest of the way as the horror unfolded.  By the time I got live TV coverage, the towers had collapsed.  The TVs at rest stops showed the smoking rubble all day.

At my destination, people were desperately filling up every gasoline container they could find.  I saw two men with a trailer full of brand-new 5-gallon cans, filling them all.  I filled my car with enough fuel to get me through the week and home again.  I had hoped to get a New York Times the following morning.  I don't think I saw one that whole week.

The lack of contrails in the sky was eerie.

The agents behind the first (failed) WTC attack, and the suicide nature of the successful one, suggested strongly that it came from Islamists, specifically Al Qaeda.  This was later proven; the attackers were from the Middle East, all Muslim, 15 of the 19 from Saudi Arabia.  Our so-called "friends" there killed roughly 3000 people that day, mostly Americans, on American soil.  Yet there was zero political response to this in Washington; while illegal Pakistani immigrants received a lot of attention and many returned home abruptly, the Saudi royal family was treated with kid gloves.

Nothing has changed in that respect.  The US government has, against all reason, expanded allowances for Saudi immigration.  Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was admitted to the US in 1999 (after the first WTC attack) and granted US citizenship in 2009!

US immigration and citizenship policy is somewhere between reckless and suicidal.  The question everyone should be asking is "Why?", followed immediately by "How do we fix it?"

It's easy to see why.  The answer is "oil money".  We have done precious little to wean ourselves off oil since 9/11 (Congress and the Bush administration continued policies of guzzler promotion for years after the attacks), and all those dollars flowing to Riyadh and Caracas and Kuwait flow back as political influence.  We're not buying oil with dollars or grain, we're handing over control of our government.

It's imperative to cut US dependency on oil.  The price of oil wouldn't matter to the economy if there wasn't an effective "petro-state tax" on most people just to get to work.  I did what I could in 2004, when I cut my fuel needs by about 1/3.  But today I'd find it hard to do that again.  I'd need to get up to 60 MPG or so, and there are precious few vehicles sold in the USA which can do that.  The Volt (sold out for months) is good for a couple iterations of this game and the latest Prius is in the ballpark, but the Fusion hybrid barely ekes out the mileage I often get today.

We've done practically nothing.  We've continued to hand money and power to the people who've proven they will use it to do us harm.  If it were only our elites I'd say it was treason, but sentiment among ordinary Americans is the same.  See no evil, and drain the retirement account to fill up the pickup to take the toy-hauler and the 4-wheelers out for a weekend on the trails.

Fixing this requires a complete 180 in attitude.  Oil must be treated as a necessary evil, but an evil.  Guzzling vehicles and wasteful driving must be subject to both fines and social opprobrium.  We need the PNGV or something like it back pronto, expanded production of all supply-chain components for hybrids and PHEVs (preferably all sited in the USA), feebates, higher gas taxes, the works.  We can't manage a full war footing yet, but we need urgent action NOW.  That attitude shift would help fix the flow of dangerous immigrants as well.  We should have no Faisal Shahzads or Umar Abdulmutallabs or even Richard Reids coming into the USA.

I don't see this happening.  Anyone who advocates any of the necessary changes is immediately stigmatized as "anti-American" (like R. James Woolsey?) or "islamophobic" (which is only half a step from "racist").  There's a stone wall, maintained by both major political parties, against making the changes we urgently needed to make starting on that clear sunny day ten years ago.

If this country doesn't wake up and get a clue, we're doomed.

Labels: 9/11, editorial, GM Volt, government incompetence, petroleum dependence, PHEV, PNGV, taxes

  ¶ 9/11/2011 12:39:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

Michele Bachmann believes in magic

Or maybe she's lying, or batshit crazy.  But there is no way that she can possibly cut gasoline prices to $2/gallon, as she said she would if elected, without some massive collapse in demand (like a collapse of the US economy).

Remember what happened to prices in the Asian Flu of 1998?  Gas prices would go down again... temporarily... if that was us.

If the Republicans put this loon on the 2012 ticket (in any position), it means the party does not have a candidate, an idea, or a shred of respect for the American public.  I hate Obama with a passion and would like to see him impeached, but I'll vote for him over Bachmann.

  ¶ 8/19/2011 08:44:00 AM 2 comments links to this post

 

Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story

I'd like to call attention to the article with the above name (about 7 years old now) hosted at The Center for Reactor Information.  It lays out the brief history of the Integral Fast Reactor, including how it came within a hair's breadth of surviving the 1994 vote to kill it.  It also gives a brief listing of its selling points, including (contrary to claims often made by anti-nuclear activists) that its fuel cycle is unable to produce weapons-grade material and is effectively proliferation-proof.

This is an article suitable for non-technical readers and ought to be spread widely.  Some of its figures are out of date (wind power is now pushing 2% of US electric supply, not ¼%), but this is good for further analysis to show just how difficult it is to scale up renewable energy to the quantities we need.

Labels: alternate energy, energy, government incompetence, IFR, nuclear power

  ¶ 7/31/2011 10:50:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Quote without comment

Bureaucracy is a tool to keep the world as it is, not to change it. So, in perfect Tainter-style, the system works hard to avoid innovation, not to promote it. It is almost impossible to be financed to study resource depletion; that would highlight problems that would require changes and that's a no-no. Instead, it is still possible to obtain research grants as long as there is no risk that the results will threaten the status quo. Hydrogen as a fuel is a good example. It is high-tech, fashionable, sophisticated, popular, environmentally friendly, and it doesn't work. This last characteristic makes sure that its development will bring no changes whatsoever.

—Ugo Bardi.  ¶ 7/22/2011 07:44:00 AM 1 comments links to this post

 

A personal endorsement

There are a lot of companies and websites who want space on your sidebar.  I've received dozens of requests for link exchanges over the years.  I've turned them all down, not even putting my blogroll there.  I just didn't think anything was worth that much attention.

That just changed.

Flibe Energy is now featured there.  This is not a commercial endorsement; I have no relationship to Flibe Energy or anyone in it, personal, financial or anything beyond commenting a few times on the energyfromthorium blog.  I just see nuclear energy as the best, and probably only, prospect for keeping industrial civilization going for the next several decades without fouling its own nest, and LFTR as having the best potential for efficiency, safety, scalability and cost.

Labels: fission, Flibe, LFTR

  ¶ 7/21/2011 12:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

End-running the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

I admit that there's a lot I don't know about things nuclear, and especially about the byzantine regulations which have essentially blocked new ideas for decades (which makes the area ripe for innovation, as Bill Gates has noted). But, aside from being introduced to the concept of MSR/LFTR itself, nothing I've learned has surprised me as much as learning in the post about the third TEAC conference that... well, I'll just quote it.

Also presenting was Col. Paul Roege, U.S. Army, who delivered the event’s other piece of important news. The Pentagon, Roege said, could be able and willing to offer licensing capability for companies building LFTRs or other forms of innovative nuclear power reactors. Most thorium advocates agree that the NRC is unlikely in the near term to license alternative reactor designs – even ones, like LFTRs, that have been thoroughly proven out in operation. Given the military’s need for clean, modular, transportable energy sources for forward operating bases, the swiftest routes to a license could be through the Army, which has the regulatory authority to approve new reactors for military bases without NRC involvement.

In the traditional licensing process, Roege said, “Innovative reactors are at the end of the line. That obstacle could potentially could be overcome if we pursue military applications.”

Note this well: "the Army... has the regulatory authority to approve new reactors for military bases without NRC involvement."

It smells a bit like hope to me.  ¶ 5/23/2011 02:42:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

 

The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry

I don't know how I missed this gem attributed to Freeman Dyson.  I don't have much time for books these days, but quotes like this usually find their way into my stream of reading rather quickly.  Pithy, and oh so timely (and corrected for spelling and grammar).

The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation, real though all these problems are.  The fundamental problem of the industry is that nobody any longer has any fun building reactors.  It is inconceivable under present conditions that a group of enthusiasts could assemble in a schoolhouse and design, build, test, license and sell a reactor within three years.  Sometime between 1960 and 1970, the fun went out of the business.

The adventurers, the experimenters, the inventors, were driven out, and the accountants and managers took control.  Not only in the private industry but also in the government laboratories, at Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge and Argonne, the groups of bright young people who used to build and invent and experiment with a great variety of reactors were disbanded.  The accountants and managers decided that it was not cost effective to let bright people play with weird reactors. So the weird reactors disappeared and with them the chance of any radical improvement beyond our existing systems.

We are left with a very small number of reactor types in operation, each of them frozen into a huge bureaucratic organization that makes any substantial change impossible, each of them in various ways technically unsatisfactory, each of them less safe than many possible alternative designs which have been discarded.  Nobody builds reactors for fun anymore.  The spirit of the little red schoolhouse is dead.  That, in my opinion, is what went wrong with nuclear power.

  ¶ 5/19/2011 07:53:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

 

Everyone complains about their job

Well, everyone I've known has had a complaint here and there.

But I haven't seen a site quite like Employvent for letting the whole world feel your pain.  That is all.

  ¶ 4/30/2011 11:30:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

Quote without comment

From poster "donb":

We already have quite a few "paper reactors" that look promising. Likely they need more design simulation. But we will not know how good any of these reactors really are until those paper designs are expressed in operating hardware.

I think our shortage of prototype reactor hardware is much more critical than any shortage of reactor simulation tools.

  ¶ 4/16/2011 09:53:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

Lessons from Japan

Regarding the on-going crisis of the nuclear plants in Japan, I received this (which I have abridged and reformatted as a numbered list):

So, what do we learn?

1. Don't use nuclear power.
2. If you do, don't build in an earthquake zone.
3. If you do, don't build on a tsunami-prone seaside.
4. Make sure the emergency cooling system works, even in an emergency.
5. Make sure the reactor is fail-safe in a power cut.

Of course, if you started with #5, #'s 1-4 would be superfluous.

I think the real lessons look more like this:

1. Don't be careless with nuclear power.
2. If you use nuclear power, don't stop your research and development efforts.
3. If you have to build in an earthquake zone, build to withstand all possible tremblors, landslides and tsunamis.
4. Make all your plants passively safe (if any are not, see #2).

Nuclear power has saved Japan an immense amount of money for imported fossil fuels, as well as the pollution from burning those fuels and dealing with e.g. ash.  Even if several of these plants have to be scrapped, a small radiation release will not contaminate land (as Three Mile Island proved) and will not prevent rebuilding.  Japan's nuclear balance sheet probably still shows a fat profit.

The biggest problem may not be the loss of the plants themselves (I understand that they are among the oldest in Japan), but the lack of ability to replace them quickly.  The plants which make the large forgings for reactor pressure vessel heads are booked years in advance.  If R&D had pushed forward over the last 40 years to yield e.g. small modular molten-salt reactors, it would be much quicker and cheaper to replace the lost plants.  There might not even have been an issue, because the oldest, least-robust plants might have been replaced already.  But that, sadly, isn't the world in which we find ourselves.

Edit 2011-03-14:  William Saletan says much the same thing.

  ¶ 3/12/2011 05:18:00 PM 6 comments links to this post

 

In which I am 3 times as bold as Thomas Friedman, and years ahead

In the NY Times, Thomas Friedman finally makes a concrete suggestion for increased gas taxes:  boost them by $1/gallon at 5¢/month.  He had made a similar suggestion about 2.5 years ago, but it was fairly vague.

Maybe someday he'll catch up to my 2006 suggestion to increase the tax by $3/gallon at a nickle a month for 5 years.  Who knows, he might even suggest it before it gets done.
  ¶ 3/10/2011 05:59:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

The future isn't what it used to be

A little selection from the 1972 Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future.   ¶ 3/03/2011 10:14:00 AM 4 comments links to this post

 

Run trucks on LNG, or on electrified rail?

A discussion elsewhere brought this issue up, and these numbers should be posted for reference.

Replacing diesel with LNG requires roughly the energy equivalent of methane, plus whatever it takes to purify the gas and convert it to liquid.  The info on liquefaction energy is hard to find; Linde Engineering doesn't even mention energy cost in its promotional material on its LNG plants.  But I found a paper on Russian stuff which supplies a graph on page 15.  This indicates about 250 Wh/kg at typical temperatures.  This figure will increase for smaller, less-efficient systems, so figure 0.5 kWh/kg for a truck-stop sized unit.  1 kg of natural gas has 13.83 kWh of energy (47,200 BTU) so it takes about 2.9 kg of LNG to replace a gallon of diesel.  This gas takes 1.4 kWh to liquefy.  If this is done with electricity supplied from a CCGT powerplant at 50% efficiency delivered, it takes another 0.59 kg of gas per gallon-equivalent; if the power is generated on-site from e.g. a Capstone C60 gas turbine at 30% efficiency, it takes another 0.99 kg of gas per gallon-equivalent.

Replacing 70% of the 3037,000 bbl/day of distillate used for transport in 2007 (46.6 billion gpy @ 138,000 BTU/gal average for US distillate per EIA) would need 114 to 127 billion kg of natural gas, depending on the liquefaction overhead.  This is 5.4 to 6.0 quads of gas.  The USA produced ~21 trillion cubic feet in 2009; at 1020 BTU/scf, this is 21.4 quads of gas.  Substituting for just 70% of diesel with LNG (no gasoline) would require increasing NG production by at least 25%.  This may be possible, but it will require much higher NG prices (which are coming anyway).

Electrification needs less.  If a dual-mode semi-truck averages 1.5 kWh/mile and traffic is 20% greater than the 2001 figure of 135.4 billion miles, annual electric power requirements would be 244 billion kWh, or about 6% of US demand for a complete replacement of diesel (not just 70%).  Supplying this from NG using CCGT's at 50% efficiency delivered to the vehicle would require 3.53 billion kg of natural gas, or 1.67 quads.  This is far more efficient, and the electric system can also use electricity from anything else on the grid.  Finally, moving trucks to dual-mode rail eliminates pavement damage and cuts road-repair costs.  The electric rail system is a better target for policy than converting semis to LNG.

  ¶ 2/21/2011 08:04:00 PM 11 comments links to this post

 

EIA purges history, hoses the public

I just went to the EIA website to look up some historical data.

Surprise!  According to the EIA's new data, the world began in 2005!  At least, that's the limit of the info I can get on natural gas.  The rest of the site is equally horrid, in a MySpace kind of way; it looks glitzy, but it is now geared at the level of a 9th-grade school report rather than providing detailed data for the public's in-depth analysis.

This is a huge disappointment.  There's no good reason for existing sections to be suddenly removed, breaking all the references painstakingly created over the rest of the web.  And why remove 56 years of data from public view?  Did it suddenly become invalid?  Maybe somebody is trying to sell it?  We, the public, paid for that data; for it to suddenly become someone's proprietary product isn't just a sin, it's a crime.

I'm still trying to find out what the EIA did with the historical data, and the detailed breakdowns such as the heating value compared to raw physical quantities.  Maybe if other people ask similar questions, they'll fix things faster.  Pester the webmaster or ask the information people where the information all went; enough mail, and they'll have to start questioning the wisdom of this move.

Update:  The data still exist at www.eia.gov (link to historical data page), but a lot of queries get re-directed to the dumbed-down pages at www.eia.doe.gov and there's no obvious way to find your way back.  Ask the webmaster about this.  Pointedly.

Labels: EIA, memory hole

  ¶ 2/21/2011 04:51:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

 

Rail electrification costs from Alan Drake

Just copying info received, for reference.

Message 1:

New Haven to Boston (AMtrak > Gov't contracting) electrified @ 2000 at $2.3 million/mile for mainly double track, some triple track. Populated almost all the way and very curvy (route along CN shore for much of way), both of which add costs ($200,000/mile for flagging !!)

I use $2 million/mile for single track and $2.5 million for double track with "round up" for large projects.

Combining electrification with HV transmission should reduce costs for both (certain % common towers).

Russia electrifies at $700,000 to $900,000/km (double track). Fewer people but extreme remoteness and extreme climate do add costs. No EIS required#

# Sierra Club is supportive of modified/simplified EIS for rail electrification, recognizing that rail ROW is already heavily impacted.

Message 2:

I stored this data (but forgot to mark where from, something I now do).

Russian Federal Railways) approximately $750,000 - 800,000 per kilometer to put a two-track line under AC wire (25kV, 50Hz).

the New Haven-Boston electrification cost about USD2.3m per route-mile (double track ie approximately USD0.7m per track-km) for "plain" track (no movable bridges, etc), broken down approximately as follows:

Design: $190,000
TPS--substations (@ $5/unit): $125,000
TPS--auto-transformers ($1.5/unit): $9,500
OCS @ $640,000/track mile: $1280,000
Signal Compatability/SCADA: $140,000
Flagging Protection: $200,000 [Outrageous]
Property Acquisitions: $30,000
Project Management: $90,000

Design/Build Cost Total: $2.3 million per route mile.

[OCS = "Overhead Contact System" = Catenary wires and supports.
"TPS" = "Traction Power System" = 4 25hv 60hz 80mvA substations and 21 autotransformers for a total of 360 track miles, 157 route-miles]
--------
Double track requires two OCS/track mile @ $640,000/mile. Single track one. The rest is about the same. Maybe less design and project management costs.

Again, gov't contracting costs.  ¶ 2/19/2011 11:44:00 PM 3 comments links to this post