When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

SpaceNut · 2017-04-28 19:30:04

The first step is to look at the atmospheric dispersion concentration and then see if a site set up to remove it would do what we would want.

Global Patterns of Carbon Dioxide

https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/i … lo_lrg.pdf

SpaceNut · 2017-04-30 20:29:38

Interdisciplinary studies reveal relationship between solar activity and climate change

The solar flux is considered the fundamental energy source of earth's climate system on long time scales. In recent decades, some studies have noted that the tiny variations in solar activity could be amplified by the nonlinear process in climate system.
Therefore, the astronomy factors, such as solar activity, present intriguing and cutting-edge questions to better understand climate change.
One of the major achievements by the multidisciplinary team is that a robust relationship between solar wind speed and North Atlantic Oscillation was found not only on a day-to-day time scale but also from the perspective of year-to-year variation, suggesting a much faster mechanism of solar influence on atmospheric system compared to the ozone destruction.
Moreover, the team improved the collision and parameterization scheme and qualitatively evaluated the effects of solar energetic particle flux on cloud charge. Hence the team proposed that the solar wind and electric-microphysical effect was the key mechanism of solar activity on climate.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 … 17.1321951

SpaceNut · 2017-04-30 20:33:56

Heavy precipitation speeds carbon exchange in tropics

Rising carbon dioxide levels, ocean acidity may change crucial marine process

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-01 03:14:26

SpaceNut wrote:

Heavy precipitation speeds carbon exchange in tropics
Rising carbon dioxide levels, ocean acidity may change crucial marine process

All this has happened before and it will happen again, it is not the end of the World, nor is it "Judgment Day", or the "Rapture" Some people like to believe they will live to see the end of days, it kind of feeds their egos, that they are important enough to be part of the "Final Generation!" People have been thinking this way for over one thousand years, Global Warming and Climate Change are just their latest excuses. I on the other hand fully expect to die without seeing the End of the World or the End of the United States, which is the Left Wing's form of "the Rapture!" They predict with every generation, the Decline and Fall of the United States, and with the end of each left wing generation, they die disappointed!

GW Johnson · 2017-05-02 10:22:59

Tom:

I never said anything about "judgement day" or "the rapture" or anything like that. You did, trying to politicize it it with your left-wing/right-wing nonsense. The fundamental problem, and the associated decisions, are objective and logical, not political at all.

The only people trying to obscure the facts are certain giant business interests who will have to undertake change in their basic business models, or else lose profit. That's not politics, that's just greed and laziness on their part. The greed has demonstrably been unconstrained by ethics for a couple of centuries now in US society, at least. So I wouldn't believe much of what they have to say. Yet those rich entities have long bought politicians to get what they want out of the government. So don't believe the politicians, either.

The sooner you get that "it's not political" concept past your political-tinted-to-the-point-of-opaqueness glasses, the sooner you can actually understand what has been posted here. So far, you do not.

I pointed out with real data that if the land ice melts to one extent or another, that sea levels will suddenly rise by one closely-related extent or another (density-corrected conservation of volume). And because so many of our fixed assets and our population live very close to current sea level, the effects of that sudden rise are likely quite severe, to potentially rather disastrous. I showed you a non-political logical means to decide what to do, that works even in the face of imperfect information. That trade matrix technique is a very common decision-making tool used in business and industry.

For you to deny the objective facts of ice volume at risk is illogical in the extreme, and thus evidence that you prefer political belief over objective truth. That way lies madness. History before there was science so very clearly shows this.

It's not really about the scientists and their temperature estimates and their climate models. I distrust that stuff myself. It's about the volume of the melting ice: how much more is going to melt? That's how much the seas are going to rise, and just as fast as that ice melts. And it IS melting, when it wasn't a couple of centuries ago.

It simply makes common sense to attempt to ward this off, or at least try to slow it down. While our knowledge is imperfect, there is enough that is well-known to be confident of what we should do: stop unburying and burning long-buried carbon, at "best possible speed", whatever that turns out to be. Simple as that. It might or might not work, but it makes no sense at all not to even try.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-02 10:42:21)

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-02 12:16:03

GW Johnson wrote:

Tom:
I never said anything about "judgement day" or "the rapture" or anything like that. You did, trying to politicize it it with your left-wing/right-wing nonsense. The fundamental problem, and the associated decisions, are objective and logical, not political at all.
The only people trying to obscure the facts are certain giant business interests who will have to undertake change in their basic business models, or else lose profit. That's not politics, that's just greed and laziness on their part. The greed has demonstrably been unconstrained by ethics for a couple of centuries now in US society, at least. So I wouldn't believe much of what they have to say. Yet those rich entities have long bought politicians to get what they want out of the government. So don't believe the politicians, either.

Those politicians don't believe in profit either, they believe in wasting your money on themselves and their cronies, and if they run out, they just grab some more from your pocket, does that make them any better than those "greedy businessmen and businesswomen who are only interested in making a profit? They cannot legally steal your money unless they pay some politician to steal if for them!
The businesses that I want to see more profitable are the small to medium-size businesses, the ones that create most of the jobs. The policies the Democrats advocate hurt small to medium sized businesses the most with their taxes and regulation. When I think of a business, I am thinking of a small to medium sized business, not the giants like Exxon Mobil for example. The giant businesses can always bribe politicians to go steal your money for them and spend it on their "pork", which they sell to the government. Liberals don't like energy companies or defense contractors, they love universities and the entertainment industry however, they love to control the information that reaches the voters through their control of the media, we re seeing that being played out with the endless attacks by the Media on Trump. The Media wants to control this country by controlling what you perceive, and that way they can control what and who you vote for! When the news isn't objective a democracy becomes undemocratic and a republic unrepresentative!

The sooner you get that "it's not political" concept past your political-tinted-to-the-point-of-opaqueness glasses, the sooner you can actually understand what has been posted here. So far, you do not.
I pointed out with real data that if the land ice melts to one extent or another, that sea levels will suddenly rise by one closely-related extent or another (density-corrected conservation of volume). And because so many of our fixed assets and our population live very close to current sea level, the effects of that sudden rise are likely quite severe, to potentially rather disastrous. I showed you a non-political logical means to decide what to do, that works even in the face of imperfect information. That trade matrix technique is a very common decision-making tool used in business and industry.

You mean like a wall of water suddenly crashing into the skyscrapers of Manhattan from those suddenly melted glaciers on land and all the freshwater releases into the ocean is going to weaken the Gulf Stream causing all that water to suddenly freeze into solid ice? That is the plot to the Day after Tomorrow That is the sort of thing that will kill people, they will either die when that wall of water crashes into them or they will die when all that water freezes solid. Now do you really believe that is going to happen?

For you to deny the objective facts of ice volume at risk is illogical in the extreme, and thus evidence that you prefer political belief over objective truth. That way lies madness. History before there was science so very clearly shows this.

How do people down in a slowly rising ocean? You can have a few hurricanes, but most people will say it was the hurricanes that killed them, not global warming. We have things called weather satellites that warn of approaching hurricanes and if they get out of the way of those, they won't die, if they are suborn and refuse to move, then you can say it was their stubbornness that killed them!

It's not really about the scientists and their temperature estimates and their climate models. I distrust that stuff myself. It's about the volume of the melting ice: how much more is going to melt? That's how much the seas are going to rise, and just as fast as that ice melts. And it IS melting, when it wasn't a couple of centuries ago.

What's wrong don't you like warmer weather? Then why do you live in Texas? it would be much easier for you to move North than to halt global warming. You get into a car, pack a moving van and drive North and to higher ground if you must.

It simply makes common sense to attempt to ward this off, or at least try to slow it down. While our knowledge is imperfect, there is enough that is well-known to be confident of what we should do: stop unburying and burning long-buried carbon, at "best possible speed", whatever that turns out to be. Simple as that. It might or might not work, but it makes no sense at all not to even try.
GW

The best way to develop alternatives is not to force them on people before they are ready, it is not to arbitrarily increase MPG standards in cars, that is what liberals call a "solution". We need to develop the technology first and the technology itself, when it is ready, will encourage the switchover, not government coercion.

GW Johnson · 2017-05-02 13:52:20

Tom:

(1) what you said in your first attempted "refutation" about small vs large business has nothing at all to do with what I actually said. I do partly agree with you about small business providing more jobs than big business, yet suffering more under idiotic regulations. That does not mean we do away with regulations: that leads to piracy and economic slavery.

It means we put some real rational thought into what we regulate, and how we regulate it. I have not seen 1 politician in half a century capable of evaluating that. Most bureaucrats are rather stupid, too. Part of the EPA's problems and bad reputation derive from the fact that lawyers now outnumber all other professions among their payroll. If you have ever actually read any EPA regulations (I have), then you know that too many lawyers are the fundamental problem there.

BTW, there is no such thing as some vast monolithic "Media" engaging in some conspiracy against us, or against Trump. There is only editorial bias among the major outlets: NBC is as flagrantly biased for the Democrats as Fox (Faux?) News is biased for the Republicans. But the basic facts of the stories are the same, if you actually bother to compare.

(2) Your second and third attempted "refutations" are patently ridiculous, as was the plot (and the not-science behind it) in the movie you mentioned. I never said anything about walls of water or anything suddenly freezing. What I said was two-fold: it will be very difficult and expensive to move critical fixed assets to higher ground (especially if we have to do it quickly, as within one lifetime, or at worst within a decade or so), and (2) people will migrate (they WILL NOT stay and drown!!), and there is no place to put them, nor will there be food to feed them. The bigger the migration, the more inept and unprepared we as a species will be to handle it, as recent events have proven.

(3) Your 4th attempt at "refutation" was also stupidly ridiculous. It has nothing to do with anything I said about climate change. Without asking where I have been, you just told me to move north. I did spend two winters and a summer in Minnesota about 20 years ago. Those were 100-year record setters for cold and snow. Yeah, I've seen both hot and cold, up close and personal. I tolerate the heat because for me shoveling snow was worse.

(4) Your 5th and last attempt at "refutation" also has only tangential relation to what I wrote, which was to quit using long-buried carbon as fast as we can. I DID NOT say how! YOU claimed I said government mandates, I did NOT say that, as your copied quote of my text clearly shows!

Actually, and your politics will make you hate this, both solar PV and natural gas are already cheaper than coal, and both are very much cleaner than coal, in both the traditional pollution, and in the carbon emissions pollution. And they are ready to deploy. That is why they are already displacing coal in the marketplace, just as they should.

And before you yammer about subsidies, the fossil fuel people have had subsidies for about 150 years now. So with subsidies for wind and solar, the playing field is more-or-less level, just as it is. Either leave them be, or take them all away.

As for MPG standards, as long as they are not specific as to how, they do play a valuable role in incentivizing engineering innovation. If overdone (and perhaps they are), cheating gets encouraged. So perhaps we should revisit how much and how fast, but I'd think we really do want to keep them in place, in one or another form, in order to help push along the transition away from fossil fuel, as I put it "at best possible speed".

That last has nothing to do with politics (although it does violate your "totally unregulated free market" fantasy, which is an evil we've seen before in history). It's just something practical to do when faced with an oncoming trouble.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-02 14:12:21)

kbd512 · 2017-05-02 17:11:35

If anyone here is actually serious about reversing "climate change", then there are two fundamental things you will accept:

1. We need to actively develop methods to reduce, eliminate, or even reverse the effects of Lenz's Law. This has been demonstrated in a variety of ways and appears to only be incidental to the geometry of the parts in an electric generator.

2. Nuclear fission using Thorium with a pinch of Uranium added to transmute the fertile Th232 into fissile U233 material is the way forward for the foreseeable future. When fusion power is forever and always just another half a century away, Thorium power was available half a century ago. Astonishingly, we never "lost" the technology, unlike the plans for the Saturn V and the recipe for making the ceramic fuel elements for a nuclear thermal rocket. Thorium may be absolutely terrible for producing nuclear weapons, but it's absolutely fantastic for producing nuclear power in a molten salt solution with a dash of Uranium added to get the neutronics going.

1kg solar panels = 3kWh/day, 1,095kWh/year (assuming 12 hours at full output, which never happens here on Earth)
1kg coal = 8kWh
1kg oil = 12kWh
1kg U235 = 24,000,000 kWh

For those who can't count, 24,000,000 kWh is greater than 8kWh, and not by a little but by so much that there is no real comparison to be made.

Since neither I nor anyone else can seem to convince our enviro-wackos that nuclear fission makes their little solar toys look like the lab experiments they truly are, I'm working with another gentleman in an attempt to generate the power we need using homopolar generators. We have a prototype that produces 24 times more voltage than the prototypical Faraday disc and a larger unit with more segments would produce 48 times as much voltage. If we could only figure out how to get the amperage down and how not to fry the conductive bearings between the counter-rotating discs, maybe we'd have something. Until we get some more funding or electrical engineering expertise, since neither of us are electrical engineers, enjoy your smog producing gas and coal fired power plants.

SpaceNut · 2017-05-02 19:54:28

Well I now have something new to read about to which I have not heard of.....homopolar generators and Faraday disc Thanks kbd512....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homopolar_generator

The Faraday disc was primarily inefficient due to counterflows of current. While current flow was induced directly underneath the magnet, the current would circulate backwards in regions outside the influence of the magnetic field. This counterflow limits the power output to the pickup wires, and induces waste heating of the copper disc.

This is called eddy currents in transformers and to stop this we laminate the iron core materials for the 60 cycle low frequency.

This next image reminds me of a 3 phase or poly phase vcr stepper motor driver system.

Untried Homopolar Generator Experiments

THE DESIGN OF BRUSHES FOR THE HOMOPOLAR GENERATOR AT THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

HOMOPOLAR "FREE-ENERGY" GENERATOR TEST

The construction of the Pure homopolar generator reveals physical problem of Maxwell’s equations

Hope this helps....What you are looking at is crossing the lines of use of motor theory....

SpaceNut · 2017-05-02 21:07:39

The massive crack in the Antarctic ice shelf is hanging on by a 12-mile 'thread'

Theories for why its cracking:
1. Ocean water level is droping.
2. Ocean water level is rising.
3. Ice Sheet mass is increasing, getting thicker.
4. Ice sheet thickness is getting thinning.

There is not enough information to know whether the expected calving event on Larsen C is an effect of climate change or not, although there is good scientific evidence that climate change has caused thinning of the ice shelf, according to Project Midas. In the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced extraordinary warming of more than 4 degrees, the European Space Agency said.

DIng, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding... we have a winner temperature rise and Ice thinning.....

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-03 05:17:33

Are you ready to settle on the Antarctic peninsula? After all, its warmed by a whole 4 degrees! Since its in the water anyway, I don't think it will cause the ocean to rise.

louis · 2017-05-03 05:33:13

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/featu … c-ice.html

Ice grew around Antarctica. This is what I mean about science getting mixed up with politics and a kind of eco-religion.

We need to ignore the debate about what's happening...and rather just say "How do we keep to existing or recent environmental parameters?" The most obvious answers are we control human population growth and stop erosion of habitat. You stop erosion of habitat by developing indoor and subterranean farming. That in turn requires us to develop new energy sources e.g. solar power satellites and beamed energy, hot or cold fusion and safer fission.

Tom Kalbfus wrote:

Are you ready to settle on the Antarctic peninsula? After all, its warmed by a whole 4 degrees! Since its in the water anyway, I don't think it will cause the ocean to rise.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-03 05:51:01

GW Johnson wrote:

Tom:
(1) what you said in your first attempted "refutation" about small vs large business has nothing at all to do with what I actually said. I do partly agree with you about small business providing more jobs than big business, yet suffering more under idiotic regulations. That does not mean we do away with regulations: that leads to piracy and economic slavery.
It means we put some real rational thought into what we regulate, and how we regulate it. I have not seen 1 politician in half a century capable of evaluating that. Most bureaucrats are rather stupid, too. Part of the EPA's problems and bad reputation derive from the fact that lawyers now outnumber all other professions among their payroll. If you have ever actually read any EPA regulations (I have), then you know that too many lawyers are the fundamental problem there.
BTW, there is no such thing as some vast monolithic "Media" engaging in some conspiracy against us, or against Trump. There is only editorial bias among the major outlets: NBC is as flagrantly biased for the Democrats as Fox (Faux?) News is biased for the Republicans. But the basic facts of the stories are the same, if you actually bother to compare.

Funny that you can list only Fox News as being on the conservative side, but you have NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, kind of unfair that we have so many TV stations pushing the leftwing point of view and only one Fox news to counter that, technically not a monopoly, but it is very close to being monolithic, and here you are trying to diminish that one TV station that is on our side by calling it "Faux" News, seems like you desire a monopolistic News Media that allows various left wing politicians to sweep dirt under the rug instead of solving our problems. Once you get rid of Fox News, how would we be different from Cuba? You will get your one-party state with politicians that can do anything they want, now competition, no challengers, the News Media won't cover them or worse, they will try to smear them like the attempted to do to Trump by calling him a "Fascist" and saying he has no chance to get elected in order to depress his voters into not showing up at the polls!
marine.le_.pen_.jpg
I wonder how bad Marine Le Pen is? The Media says she's a racist, but the Media also said Trump was a racist, I wonder if I can trust the Media? How much of it is actually her and how much of it is just the Media trying to smear her and call her a fascist? If the Media called Trump a Fascist and he's not, how do we know anything about her? What if she is a fascist? Well then there are some French people who will compare her to Donald Trump, they will say that the Media did a smear job on Trump and they are doing the same to Marine Le Pen, and they will go to the polls and vote in Marine Le Pen as the next French President, and it will in part be the Media's fault if that happens and she turns out to be a Fascist! You ever hear of "The Boy who Cried Wolf?" The Media has been "crying Wolf" at every Republican candidate for President since George W. Bush! So why shouldn't we take our chances with someone the Media calls a "Fascist?" How can we tell the real ones from the smear jobs the media produces? The Media wants us to elect one certain candidate and they will call everyone else a fascist, or a racist, or someone who is unkind to animals, or someone who is too rich when they are a Republican but that ignores their wealth if they are Democrats! I am sick of it, and I want my country back! I am sure many French People feel the same way about France!

(2) Your second and third attempted "refutations" are patently ridiculous, as was the plot (and the not-science behind it) in the movie you mentioned. I never said anything about walls of water or anything suddenly freezing. What I said was two-fold: it will be very difficult and expensive to move critical fixed assets to higher ground (especially if we have to do it quickly, as within one lifetime, or at worst within a decade or so), and (2) people will migrate (they WILL NOT stay and drown!!), and there is no place to put them, nor will there be food to feed them. The bigger the migration, the more inept and unprepared we as a species will be to handle it, as recent events have proven.

Where do the Japanese get a lot of their food? You see this map of Japan? What do you think the Japanese would do if the ocean levels rose? Japan looks very rugged, does it look like they grow a lot of their food on land? A lot of their food comes from the ocean, they have fishing fleets, what do you think would happen if the ocean levels rose? They would just have more places to fish, that is all. I don't think the Japanese would starve, they can build factories on higher ground, export cars and import wheat from other places, and meanwhile their fishing fleets would go out and pull in nets full of fish. Fish are a major part of their diet, more water equals more fish to eat, I don't see them starving!

(3) Your 4th attempt at "refutation" was also stupidly ridiculous. It has nothing to do with anything I said about climate change. Without asking where I have been, you just told me to move north. I did spend two winters and a summer in Minnesota about 20 years ago. Those were 100-year record setters for cold and snow. Yeah, I've seen both hot and cold, up close and personal. I tolerate the heat because for me shoveling snow was worse.

Well maybe the folk in Minnesota would like to shovel less snow as well. Global Warming could give them milder winters. As for moving, if you can move from Texas to Minnesota, don't you think other people can move away from the coast, or are all those coastal people a bunch of poor mud hut dwellers? Lets take a look at some of those properties on the coast.

Here is a nice home in Maine with a view of the Ocean, does he look poor to you?

Here is another property on the coast, such poor unfortunate people, having to live in a place like this. How much do you want to sacrifice to save their homes?

(4) Your 5th and last attempt at "refutation" also has only tangential relation to what I wrote, which was to quit using long-buried carbon as fast as we can. I DID NOT say how! YOU claimed I said government mandates, I did NOT say that, as your copied quote of my text clearly shows!
Actually, and your politics will make you hate this, both solar PV and natural gas are already cheaper than coal, and both are very much cleaner than coal, in both the traditional pollution, and in the carbon emissions pollution. And they are ready to deploy. That is why they are already displacing coal in the marketplace, just as they should.
And before you yammer about subsidies, the fossil fuel people have had subsidies for about 150 years now. So with subsidies for wind and solar, the playing field is more-or-less level, just as it is. Either leave them be, or take them all away.
As for MPG standards, as long as they are not specific as to how, they do play a valuable role in incentivizing engineering innovation. If overdone (and perhaps they are), cheating gets encouraged. So perhaps we should revisit how much and how fast, but I'd think we really do want to keep them in place, in one or another form, in order to help push along the transition away from fossil fuel, as I put it "at best possible speed".
That last has nothing to do with politics (although it does violate your "totally unregulated free market" fantasy, which is an evil we've seen before in history). It's just something practical to do when faced with an oncoming trouble.
GW

GW Johnson · 2017-05-03 09:56:26

Tom's post 138 doesn't rate the dignity of a reply. Once again, because he has nothing worthy to say, he resorts to putting unsaid words in my mouth, posting complete irrelevancies such as Marine Le Pen's photo, and quoting a false political belief about a media conspiracy as if it were fact. This has the appearance of debate, but none of the substance.

Louis quite correctly brings up the growth in certain Antarctic sea ice sheets as a counterexample to the public hysteria over the Arctic sea ice decline. I would point out (1) that other sea ice sheets at both poles are shrinking, and (2) variation is expected in the real world. Taking both poles together, there is a strong net decrease in sea ice cover, local increases notwithstanding.

Louis also points out that there has been a mis-use of the climate science to support a sort of activist pseudo-religion. That's quite true. I observe that the misbehavior is mostly coming from non-scientists (politicians, activist members of the public, giant business interests, etc). The misbehavior has been pushing both ways on this issue. I see little difference between such misbehavior on this climate change issue, and the misbehavior that occurs on any public issue. Misbehavior it is. So what else is new?

Kbd512 correctly points out that we should be building more nuclear power, and suggests we should be building thorium reactors instead of uranium reactors. I quite agree, and would add that there are fewer (but not zero) problems with thorium reactor wastes, and there is much more thorium fuel available. The problem is that there are no proven commercial thorium reactor designs available for contractors to actually go out and build.

This is the result of a decision made by the government in the early 1950's to go uranium, because it provided weapons materials, when thorium did not. So, we shot ourselves in the foot on this one long ago. It can be corrected, but not quickly. As far as I know, only the Indians and the Germans are seriously working on thorium reactors. And that's a policy mistake the rest of us have been making, for whatever reasons.

There is the serious issue of public acceptance, especially with the well-publicized nuke plant disasters that have occurred from bad design, bad siting, and mishandling. Those are very well-known, and have essentially poisoned the public's attitudes. Not so widely publicized are the waste dump problems such as Hanford Works and that Russian installation that blew up in 1957. You cannot eliminate all of that with thorium, because you also need the uranium technology to breed the thorium-232 into fissionable U-233.

Where I disagree with Kbd512 is his dismissal of solar and wind as "lab toys". They are not. According to AAAS's journal "Science", the world is approaching terawatt scale in solar installations, and I don't know how much wind. These being intermittent, they seem best suited as 20% of total electricity generation, until the storage problem is solved at MW scale. That has been demonstrated as commercial power generation in a market situation in Europe.

Solar PV already outcompetes coal in the US in cost per generated KW, even when you don't consider side effects. But the outcompeting is even more dramatic if you factor in dealing with the poisonous effects of waste coal ash.

Kbd512's own quoted data shows that oil, coal, and natural gas are "lab toys" compared to nuclear, if the only thing you look at is energy available per unit mass of fuel material. But there's just a lot more to it than just the energy density of the source. That includes many things, only one of which is dealing with the side effects.

Actually, I think the policy approach that both G.W. Bush and B. Obama shared is the right thing to do: proceed with "all of the above". That's already underway with natural gas outcompeting coal for electricity generation with fewer side effects. And with the continuing growth of wind and solar electricity generation: still a long way to go before that 20% intermittency barrier is reached.

The talk about Trump bringing back coal jobs is a political lie to justify unregulating coal ash and mine tailing pollution, so that the remaining companies can make more profits before their business sector disappears entirely. The jobs were mostly lost to automation some years ago. The more recent downturn in the coal business has put mostly robots out of work. It happened largely because natural gas (and wind and solar) are cheaper, not because of over-regulation.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-03 10:31:41)

kbd512 · 2017-05-03 12:28:26

GW,

You said you want to get away from fossil fuel consumption ASAP. I take no issue with measures to reduce pollution. Only molten salt solar concentrator (not PV panels) and molten salt nuclear technologies optimized for electrical power generation will achieve that goal on any time table that doesn't reach well into the next century. I should have been more specific about solar, but I thought it was clear I was referring to PV panels since 1kg of a solar concentrator array produces no usable electrical output without a corresponding heat engine.

PV doesn't out-compete anything. It was regulated into existence in the same way that coal was regulated out of existence. The state and federal government, even the power companies now, have subsidized PV to the point where it can compete with coal and natural gas. I'm not advocating for coal or gas, either, just so we're clear. Nuclear always was and always will be absolute undisputed king of power output, presuming the person doing the evaluation can count. No solar array on this planet functions at all without nuclear power. The only argument seems to be where we put the nuclear reactor.

Terraformer · 2017-05-03 15:12:50

Power output, yes. On cost, it's very difficult to beat hydropower, which has been the cheapest source of electricity since we started using electricity. Alas, we're limited in the availability of hydropower, and it has environmental impacts downstream (taking energy out of a system *will* have effects on it).

There's a petition to build a tidal barrage across the local bay (Morecambe). I'm not sure what the effects on the bay would be. It won't be generating any power if the bay silts up.

kbd512 · 2017-05-03 16:37:26

Terraformer,

There aren't fewer people on Earth every minute of every day, there are more people on Earth every minute of every day. The total head count is rising awfully fast. We keep implementing these non-problem-solving solutions when real problems exists because "solving" other non-issues, things we couldn't possibly doing anything about at this point unless all of humanity decided to live like we did in the stone age, is clearly preferable to solving difficult engineering problems.

The "climate change" shenanigans are a great play thing for unscrupulous people to talk about endlessly while offering no real solutions that don't involve needlessly killing or impoverishing a lot of people. Since politicians can always be counted on to kill people and steal their money, maybe these "climate change" con men are on to something. I think I need a private jet and limo like Al Gore has so I can mess around with whores in sleazy motels rather than actually trying to solve any problems.

If the problem is as severe as GW states in his blog, then let's solution that problem ASAP. In terms of total resources required for producing a given amount of electrical power using accepted methods of construction, molten salt fission reactors are the only stand-out technology going since no one is willing to accept that Pons and Fleischmann were on to something. It's as simple as that. Let's stop pretending that these nuclear technologies don't work or that everyones' brains fell out of their heads at some point and they forgot how to implement them.

GW Johnson · 2017-05-04 10:27:58

Well, as I said in post 132 above, the subsidy thing bites both ways. Both fossil fuel and renewable energy have them. One of the fossil fuel subsidies is the "depletion allowance", in place for about 150 years now. Those were originally intended to help start a new industry.

quote from post 132 above:

"And before you yammer about subsidies, the fossil fuel people have had subsidies for about 150 years now. So with subsidies for wind and solar, the playing field is more-or-less level, just as it is. Either leave them be, or take them all away."

I would also point out that wind and solar now employ more people than the entire remaining coal industry, according to published figures. And that rooftop solar as distributed generation is a very practical means to alleviate grid transmission losses without having to entirely rebuild the grid with superconducting technology, that still lacks practical materials for such a massive change.

Nuclear technology and designs that are actually available to build are pressurized water uranium or mixed fuels only. The other technologies atre still experimental, and not approved for general construction. The older water-cooled designs fielded at Fukushima were not as fault-tolerant as current designs, but the real flaw there was simply bad siting. They looked at historical records instead of geological records, and designed for magnitude 8 quakes and 5 meter tsunamis. The plant survived the magnitude almost-9 quake, but was demolished by the unplanned-for 15-20 m tsunami.

Of the rest of the world's nuke plants, similar bad siting decisions apply to many, and far too many have no effective containment about their piles of spent fuel rods. That is why these accidents keep occasionally occurring, and that is why nuke power has the undeserved bad reputation with the public. Coal, oil, and gas have actually killed or injured more people than nuclear, when you look at the statistics. These statistics are actually understated, since they do not include radiological effects of fossil fuel extraction and use, particularly coal, which provides about 1/3 of the US natural background.

The way Fleischmann and Pons were treated was a crime. It was clear they were on to something, but there was no agreement then (or since) about what that "something" was. The experiments provided very irreproducible results, then, and since.

There is something to be found and characterized, and it may (or may not) lead to something useful. This should be resolved (and that is not happening). But plain common sense suggests that we should not hold our breaths waiting for cold fusion to save us with easy clean energy.

The way forward from here is to replace coal with natural gas as fast as market forces and electricity needs allow, install as much wind and solar as the 20% intermittency factor allows, and execute a crash program for MW-scale energy storage to eliminate that intermittency limitation. Roof-top residential solar, as a distributed generation means to eliminate grid transmission losses, is a very big piece of this. The side benefit is large growth in real construction and installation jobs, more so than any of the fossil fuel sectors offer.

Transportation fuels (where petroleum gets used, primarily) is a tougher nut to crack. Extending these by blending with biofuels is a way to substitute a little bit surface carbon-cycle carbon for some of the long-buried carbon. Not all carbon is the same, something the rabid activists on both sides of this issue usually completely forget. It's not "any" carbon that is hurting us, it is adding long-buried carbon back into the surface cycle that is actually hurting us.

Plus, there are cleanliness of combustion and cleaner lube oil benefits to the use of these biofuels that actually extend engine life by reducing wear and by reducing soot blow-by. I have done this sort of thing professionally (and personally) for decades now. It works and it has real tangible benefit. Because of all the decades of anti-biofuel propaganda (motivated by fears of profit loss and market share loss), few of the public believe, however. But it is true, and I have done this in traceable ways.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-04 10:40:43)

kbd512 · 2017-05-04 15:42:37

GW,

Liquid core nuclear reactors eliminate most of the problems with fuel re-processing and storage issues, along with high pressurization and explosion hazards from hydrogen gas production in solid fuel light water reactors, even if a few new ones are created. Liquid solutions are much easier to chemically process than solid fuels. Instead of a crash program to create a battery technology suitable for utility class electrical power storage, how about we just figure out how to design and implement liquid core reactors since we actually know that technology already works? We've pursued utility electrical power storage batteries for decades now with nothing practical to show for it, much like hot fusion. Maybe, just once, we could focus our engineering efforts on problems that don't require materials or technologies that don't exist. We can and should still pursue new technologies, but the 1970's liquid core reactor technology was proven to be functional before I was born.

In any event, I think practical applications for batteries and super capacitors are more in line with the requirements of electronics and motor vehicles than grid power storage.

The issue I see with motor vehicles is our "use and then throw away" mentality combined with the "planned obsolescence" business model. A motor vehicle should be something you buy once and then repair as required. Only the power train should require routine upgrade or parts replacement. The chassis and body panels should all be constructed of high grade stainless steels, not plastics or low carbon steels prone to corrosion.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-05 08:35:43

kbd512 wrote:

GW,
Liquid core nuclear reactors eliminate most of the problems with fuel re-processing and storage issues, along with high pressurization and explosion hazards from hydrogen gas production in solid fuel light water reactors, even if a few new ones are created. Liquid solutions are much easier to chemically process than solid fuels. Instead of a crash program to create a battery technology suitable for utility class electrical power storage, how about we just figure out how to design and implement liquid core reactors since we actually know that technology already works? We've pursued utility electrical power storage batteries for decades now with nothing practical to show for it, much like hot fusion. Maybe, just once, we could focus our engineering efforts on problems that don't require materials or technologies that don't exist. We can and should still pursue new technologies, but the 1970's liquid core reactor technology was proven to be functional before I was born.
In any event, I think practical applications for batteries and super capacitors are more in line with the requirements of electronics and motor vehicles than grid power storage.
The issue I see with motor vehicles is our "use and then throw away" mentality combined with the "planned obsolescence" business model. A motor vehicle should be something you buy once and then repair as required. Only the power train should require routine upgrade or parts replacement. The chassis and body panels should all be constructed of high grade stainless steels, not plastics or low carbon steels prone to corrosion.

You know most liberals and leftists are fine with the old style nuclear reactors that produce weapons grade plutonium just so long as its produced by an unstable regime that isn't friendly to us! Where I live, liberals don't like Indian Point because its not run by fundamentalist Shiite Iranians who chant "Death to America", and who want to make nuclear bombs, instead it is run by people who want to sell us electricity. I discover that many a liberal's antinuclear stance falls by the wayside then the people who want to build that nuclear plant are people that hate America! I used to be more even-handed between the Republicans and Democrats, I even voted for Bill Clinton twice, but with the election and reelection of Barack Obama, I found out that Democrats really hate America and would like to see it destroyed! Barack Obama has gone out of his way to see that America's Enemies have access to the technology that would allow them to build nuclear bombs, Barack even paid them some money in the guise of paying Iranian ransom demands in the amount of $100 million per hostage! You know what those nuclear bombs threaten the most? America's big liberal cities, that' who, those cities have high concentrations of people, and for a country like Iran or North Korea, which is likely to have only a few nuclear weapons to start, it would only make sense for them to target those cities. They could try targeting our fixed missile silos, but they would not get them all and would not end up doing much damage to our country, as they will get the full retaliation from every missile silo, submarine, and bomber they have not destroyed. the only thing that makes sense for their perspective, if they are willing to die, would be to destroy our cities, or as many of them that they can target, starting with the largest ones first as they have few nuclear bombs! They are going to die anyway if they are going to nuke us, but if they don't mind that and are willing to sacrifice their lives, the only targets that make sense would be our big liberal cities that supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton!

I find the Obama Administration to have been very pronuclear when it comes to our enemies, they didn't mind if they used poor and dangerous designs, they didn't care if they released radioactivity through nuclear accidents, the point was that the Iranians and North Koreans get their hands on some Plutonium so they can deter us from invading, because Donald Trump is going to be "so worried" over what the North Koreas are threatening to do to our big liberal cities on our west coast, that have shown how much they hate Donald Trump, particularly in Hollywood! So what do you think our President is going to do about the North's nuclear weapons tests? Do the people of Hollywood, who voted for Obama and Clinton, have something to worry about?

Last edited by Tom Kalbfus (2017-05-05 08:36:06)

GW Johnson · 2017-05-05 09:45:55

Kbd512:

I understand that liquid core designs (and several other innovative nuclear technologies) were proven feasible a long time ago. The trouble is that none of these yet exist as an off-the-shelf design that you can trust to the likes of a Brown-and-Root to build properly. That's a shortfall urgently needing to be addressed.

There is just a world-of-effort's difference between an experiment proven feasible, and an off-the-shelf design ready for mass replication in the commercial market. Unfortunately, a lot of folks who have never actually applied new technology innovations don't understand that ugly little fact of life, including a lot of scientists. Even those of us who have applied new technologies often underestimate that difference, just because our preferred expectations are too optimistic. Murphy's Law always says otherwise.

I think it was a series of very bad policy mistakes over multiple decades that led us to this impasse. I suggest that another worthy "crash" effort would be to turn some of these nuclear power innovations into off-the-shelf designs. That's what DOE is really for. Too bad its use got so over-politicized. Too bad so many decision makers ignored the science and followed the politics. (Which fault applies to both parties, by the way, Tom.)

I also think we should resurrect and implement fuel reprocessing for the plants that are out there now. It's a dangerous job and requires better plant designs than were used long ago, but the benefits are compelling. There is great promise to reduce the nuclear waste stream by about a factor of 10. And, it greatly extends the uranium supply.

I don't dismiss so readily working on energy storage for the grid. It actually serves two very important functions. One is addressing the intermittency of renewable energy, which we were discussing just above. The other (which most folks seem to forget too readily) is a way to replace "peaking" plant capacity requirements. If the storage is cheaper to build than the capital investment of a fast response natural gas turbine plant, then we all come out ahead.

The one that is really "ready-to-build" is unfortunately rather restricted to appropriate geography that is not very common. That would be elevated pumped water storage with water turbine generation. It's only practical if you have an elevated place locally on which to construct the ordinary-sized reservoir. If the project has to build giant constructions, it will never be built because it is unaffordable and financially infeasible. There are only a few sites where this could be done: in mountainous country. Useless on the Great Plains.

Generally speaking, I agree that things like lithium ion batteries and super-capacitors have more feasible applications to vehicles. There are some battery concepts of great bulk and mass that use lithium metal instead of lithium ions to achieve substantially higher energy density and longer life, with less fire hazard. These would have no application to vehicles because of size and mass, but could possibly serve as fixed-in-place grid storage. Nobody yet knows, because right now this is an academic-lab play-toy. But it is worthy to pursue with that grid storage end in mind.

I quite agree that the planned obsolescence business model has been shooting us in the foot as a society. I personally like things that are built to last. The cactus-killing implement I build and sell is one of those. The cars I own vary from a decade to 5 decades old (not very many at all hold up like that). My farm tractor is well over 7 decades old. My shredder dates closer to WW1 than WW2. I'm with you, man!

Tom:

Kbd512 and I were discussing the merits and demerits of nuke power concepts and various means to improve and clean up energy generation, transmission, and use. That discussion was technical and financial, dealing with practicality, when you jumped in with an extreme political diatribe, based on a political belief system that only overlaps reality at around the 5% level. That was entirely unnecessary. You are evidently an example of the right-wing activist-extremist that complements the left-wing activist-extremists like Al Gore. Neither does us any good.

GW

Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-05-05 10:09:59)

kbd512 · 2017-05-05 11:08:23

GW,

All I know with certainty is that what we're doing right now is not helping matters. The entire reason I decided to partner with another gentleman to produce a better electric generator is that it's abundantly clear that current electric generator designs are egregiously inefficient as a function of the CEMF produced. There are generators that can produce electricity at about 95% efficiency, sometimes slightly better than that using exotic superconductors, but all prototypical electric generators are subject to Lenz's Law and it's purely a matter of geometry.

There is no physical reason why an electric generator must use 746W of mechanical input to produce 746W of electrical output unless the generator design is voluntarily subjected to Lenz forces. I think that's inexcusably poor design, but most electrical engineers seem to either be content to live in ignorance of how conductors and magnets actually work or ignore what they already know; mostly the latter. It's been like contending with religious dogma not in agreement with the physical world. The Faraday paradox should be vigorously investigated, not something that's simply left as a footnote of unexplained phenomena in physics textbooks.

I could care less whether or not we use PV arrays, molten salt reactors, gas, coal, or hamsters if our electric generator technology is efficient enough under load, but since so much of the electrical engineering world is insistent upon using the electric generator designs with the worst possible efficiencies under load, I will insist on using the most efficient methods for mechanical power production. Right now, that's nuclear fission and solar concentrators. If nuclear fusion was available or far more energy dense batteries were available, I'd take no issue at all with abandoning fission reactors. Once again, the technology doesn't exist. I want to stop waiting for tomorrow and start working with what we have and what we know to solve the problems that exist today.

Oldfart1939 · 2017-05-05 11:47:22

Using Uranium reactor for power production isn't going to come to a screeching halt anytime soon. Regards to Fission technology, Thorium based reactors have been around for a while, but haven't been utilized industrially for massive power production. The biggest power producer in the United States is still Grand Coulee Dam in Washington on the Columbia River, and it's still capable of further expansion! I also like Solar for household use, since "Sun Power is Free," but--Solar panels aren't. Much of power generation is regionally biased. Somehow, I can't see Solar power making big inroads in Maine and Vermont, or upper peninsula Michigan. On the other hand, Arizona, Southern Califoricata, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico and even up into Colorado, it's a viable technology. For middle America--coal fired powerplants are still the cheapest option, but nuclear should be reconsidered using Thorium based reactors.
One of my friends who is a Ph.D. physicist at Lawrence Livermore National laboratories--National Ignition Facility has commented to me over the campfire while drinking beer that we're sill a long way for Fusion Power.

Tom Kalbfus · 2017-05-06 01:21:05

GW Johnson wrote:

Kbd512:
...
Tom:
Kbd512 and I were discussing the merits and demerits of nuke power concepts and various means to improve and clean up energy generation, transmission, and use. That discussion was technical and financial, dealing with practicality, when you jumped in with an extreme political diatribe, based on a political belief system that only overlaps reality at around the 5% level. That was entirely unnecessary. You are evidently an example of the right-wing activist-extremist that complements the left-wing activist-extremists like Al Gore. Neither does us any good.
GW

Do you want to die GW? What's so political about not wanting to die? Nuclear weapons are dangerous, and allowing irresponsible people to have them just because they the America is going to make us more likely to die, this is not a matter of opinion it is a fact. So I wa being a bit sarcastic to make a point about these knee jerk anti-nuclear activists, and its true, thy are not so antinuclear when it comes to out enemies having nuclear reactors, even if they are rich in oil. They don't want any new reactors built in the USA, but Iran, they understand those reactors are mainly for weapons production, though they say otherwise, they give lip service to the idea that they are to produce electricity. Iranians aren't interested in Thorium reactors, because you can't produce atomic bombs from them, they want the kind which they can produce atomic bombs from, though they deny it. Obama pretended it was to produce electricity, because he didn't want to do anything to stop them, and maybe to you its just politics same as the Presidential election, it is some kind of sport, yeah for the Democrats, boo for the Republicans, butin the end, If Iran gets the bomb, real people regardless of their political persuation, regardless of whether they love America not, they could die! You understand? Iranians hate America, and th only way they can express that hatred is by killing Americans, Democrats, Republicans, liberal, or conservative, it doesn't matter to them! I don't want these people building any nuclear reactors, whether they say its for commercial purposes or not, I don't trust them!

Terraformer · 2017-05-06 04:13:10

What? Iranians don't hate Americans, they just have some people in government who aren't very nice.

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#126 2017-04-28 19:30:04

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#127 2017-04-30 20:29:38

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#128 2017-04-30 20:33:56

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#129 2017-05-01 03:14:26

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#130 2017-05-02 10:22:59

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#131 2017-05-02 12:16:03

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#132 2017-05-02 13:52:20

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#133 2017-05-02 17:11:35

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#134 2017-05-02 19:54:28

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#135 2017-05-02 21:07:39

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#136 2017-05-03 05:17:33

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#137 2017-05-03 05:33:13

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#138 2017-05-03 05:51:01

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#139 2017-05-03 09:56:26

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#140 2017-05-03 12:28:26

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#141 2017-05-03 15:12:50

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#142 2017-05-03 16:37:26

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#143 2017-05-04 10:27:58

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#144 2017-05-04 15:42:37

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#145 2017-05-05 08:35:43

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#146 2017-05-05 09:45:55

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#147 2017-05-05 11:08:23

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#148 2017-05-05 11:47:22

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#149 2017-05-06 01:21:05

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#150 2017-05-06 04:13:10

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

Board footer