Follow our live coverage of the Climate Ambition Summit
– Event marks five years since the adoption of the Paris Climate agreement
– UK submits pledge to slash emissions by 2030#climateambitionsummit #climatecrisishttps://t.co/BNes2joaAF
— Independent Climate (@indy_climate) December 12, 2020
Here’s everything you need to know about India’s commitment to the Paris climate agreementhttps://t.co/mDUYRN1Gn7
— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) December 12, 2020
Climate Reality Project had a great slideshow on nations’ contributions:
I am behind on what I’ve wanted to post over the past month. I kind of got stymied when I went to write about photovoltaics. I wanted to explore the latest technologies in the U.S., but most articles stopped around 2017. Hmmm…wonder why? I’ll work at finding more recent advancements worldwide and get back to it. Then I’ll tackle microgrids and Biden’s policy positions.
After that, I’m not sure, but there is plenty of fun, new technology out there to look at.
SiubhanDuinne
I am incredibly happy that John Kerry is coming in as Special Envoy on the Climate (not sure if that’s the right title). That Biden has made this basically a Cabinet-level position shows he has a real commitment to tackling the problem. I hope, on this issue at least, that we can slide right back into the international community.
rikyrah
We will be rejoining on January20th, around 12:15 pm?
trollhattan
Biden’s “Day 1 to-do” list must stretch to Mars and back, but I’m hoping among the mix is axing the PV tariffs instituted by you-know-who. PV tech gradually improves but more importantly for now, cost/watt has plunged because of ramped up production. Tariffs distort solar cost-benefit analyses, raise project costs, and spike other projects unnecessarily.
And can we get offshore wind opposite of each Trump coastal property? Close enough to be VERY visible.
TaMara (HFG)
@trollhattan: I’d vote for that.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: The PV tariffs would have been a great idea back in 2004-2006 when the Chinese stole the tech from the US and then decided to put all our domestic manufacturers out of business via dumping; something which they succeeded at 100%. There are no more American manufacturers of solar panels. We led the world in PV production until the late 00s.
Now, that’s done. Production is not coming back. So the tariffs are now just acts of spite, just throwing sand in the gears trying to give the fossil fuel industries a bone in exchange for campaign contributions.
I would like to see PV manufacturing bought back to the US; it’s kind of a matter of national security in addition to just being the right thing to do. But I don’t know if it could be made profitable. Solyndra showed, more than anything else, that Americans can’t play on a tilted playing field, and the Chinese government was perfectly content to keep selling at below cost until we were out of business. I’d like to see that process stopped, going forward. That’s what you use tariffs for, to protect your native industries. In the case of PV production, we have no native industry to protect.
Doug R
Trudeau is jacking up the carbon tax and of course Alberta premier Krooked Kenney is howling.
schrodingers_cat
Why is Modi’s visage on Balloon ? juice. Eeww. That genocidal despot is a liar’s liar. Trust him on nothing.
trollhattan
@Doug R:
Don’t know how widely known in the States it is that Canada has their very own Oklahoma, but there you go. You’d think it would be more relevant here, given the pipeline wars begin there.
Another Scott
@The Moar You Know: Dunno. Silicon PV panels is very old technology and kinda at the point of diminishing returns. There’s newer, more efficient PV (III-V concentrators, CIGS, perovskites, etc., etc.) either here or close that need more investment and have the promise of a better, brighter future for US industry. (IMHO.)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of PV inputs (raw materials, etc.) that the USA does not control via having domestic supplies. There’s going to have to be world trade in these things, which means we won’t fully control our destiny there.
I don’t know way to pick the right the balance between tariffs and thriving domestic industry and reasonable costs and rapid innovation. It’s not an easy problem, especially when MotUs want to get involved and create monopolies for themselves to collect those sweet, sweet monopoly rents…
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike G
Australia’s shenanigans —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92t8np88fEI
Bill Arnold
@schrodingers_cat:
Modi attached himself to Donald J. Trump and DJT’s Grand Old Treason Party. Dumb move on his part.
TaMara (HFG)
@Mike G: “here, hold my stubie” will get me through the day.
Geminid
There are a lot of current developments to be found if you google “photovoltaic news.” Same with clean power, or wind power. One neat technology. I read about earlier this year was a solar panel that used excess heat to destabilize water. What I see when I read in this area is that the transition to clean energy is happening now, and government at the state level is starting to make a difference. I think there will be legislation passed by the new Congress that will push it along some more. The IPCC October 2018 report called for a net zero carbon world by 2050. This is still attainable, but in U.S. we will be moving more slowly than we could.
Matt McIrvin
It’s amazed me that solar-energy tech has gotten so much cheaper so fast that it continues to expand in the US despite the Trump administration doing everything they can to stop it. The effect on the balance sheet is just too attractive. With a truly sympathetic administration we could have another clean-energy explosion.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: We should figure out what kind of turbine makes the most noise and be sure to use them there.
Reboot
I wish more people commented on climate threads.
I wonder if this topic gets less engagement because it’s planet-wide and difficult to personalize in a way that other issues aren’t–unless, say, you’ve begun thinking of moving out of coastal areas that regularly get daytime floods and even worse floods during our ever-lengthening hurricane season, or out of regions that now have longer-lasting fire seasons (or if you’re someone who is unable to move, due to personal or economic reasons).
Matt McIrvin
What blows my mind is that, in the US, total renewable electricity generation has already surpassed coal–I’m looking at old projections and that wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten years. Of course a lot went to natural gas, which is not great, but much better than coal.
Cermet
As an anti-nuke (till this), I was both surprised and impressed with the NASA’s engineer that designed a low waste, ultra safe thorium based nuclear reactor. That it can’t be used by sub’s or ships is its death knell but there is an extremely low carbon energy source that runs 24/7 (it does not need to be shut down at all during re-fueling) nor can it ever melt down even with power loss. It produces a few percent of the waste a regular fission plant creates and no ultra (hundereds of thousands, much less millions of years) long term daughter products.
sab
@Reboot: I think climate threads are a lot like Mayhew/Anderson’s health insurance threads. Too technical for people to feel comfortable commenting, but very informative for many lurkers.
West of the Rockies
@trollhattan:
And it all begins with a professional disinfection of the White House. Maybe they can resurrect Marie LaVeau to do a weapons-grade smudging, too.
TaMara (HFG)
@Reboot:
@sab:
Limited comments won’t deter me. ? My goal is to offer folks resources on climate solutions they can explore at their own pace. And to counter any “it’s too late to do anything” narratives.
And as the new administration gets going, I’ll start looking at resources for folks to engage politicians to push for faster and more aggressive initiatives.
Uncle Cosmo
@Cermet: Link? In the absence of which, I’ll presume you refer to a liquid fluorine thorium reactor (LFTR) which has a helluva lot of promise** but IIRC still has some engineering hurdles to overcome, e.g., corrosion in the plumbing.
** Among other things, as a means of making constructive use of the primary waste product of rare-earth extraction, which is thorium-232.
Dan B
@Reboot: I agree that ‘renewable energy is difficult to personalize. There are a couple of storylines I can think of off the top of my head, as an amateur mass communicator (consult your local pro). 1. A conflict between groups opposed to new tech and people who are getting good paying jobs in wind and solar. Ie: Petroleum Institute / Koch,etc. vs. Wind power workers. The story gets used as a basis to cover the ways we can generate high wage jobs, the great new technology, how we reduce bird kills, etc. Vs. The ways API spins plus how much of oil is automated. People are afraid of their white collar jobs will be absorbed by AI. There’s a story about potential alliances between green energy job creation and white collar types who want regulations to manage AI to avoid its potential for destructive disruption.
2. Stories about people who are advancing the technology, not just the tech but the motivation of the people advancing it, plus the people promoting it. We could have endless controversies about the biggest promoter of green energy in the world: Giant Evil Amazon! (Disclosure. Local Seattle behemoth. I will do without before I ever buy anything from Amazon.)
Both storylines rely upon stories about people – harder to find than cool, but often dry, stories about people. Greta Thunberg is a people story that brings life to our fears and hopes about climate crisis. John Kerry is a great man who couldn’t tell a compelling story to save his life. I’m thrilled he’s Climate Czar but he needs a communication pro. Generalizations only connect with technocrats, sorry.
I’d bet that there are some juicy stories about communities around the world that have made great strides with green energy and fought battles to achieve their dream. Finding them is hard work when they are not yet top of mind.
Comments?
Stuart Frasier
@Another Scott: There are no raw materials needed for silicon solar panels that are not abundant and cheap in the US. For utility scale solar generation, the only real figure of merit is cost.
Dan B
@Uncle Cosmo: Joe Rome has some breakdowns of Thorium reactor return on investment vs. Wind, PV, and Smart Grid deployment. You could say he was not sanguine, especially when you crunch all the numbers. Even factoring in the dreaded intermittently.
Intermittently is like range anxiety with electric vehicles. Electric vehicle owners don’t have it. Funny. How’s that?
Kent
One thing that has occurred to me after watching how easily Trump was able to levy tariffs at will, largely out of pique. Is that tariffs could be more or less used as a proxy carbon-tax without Congressional approval.
The US could base tariffs on the carbon consumption by industry and country. So, for example, if cars made in China use coal fired electricity in the manufacturing process, and cars made in Korea use carbon neutral wind power then the tariffs on Chinese-made cars would be much higher than for Korean-made cars. Set some high default tariffs for countries and industries that are not transparent in their carbon footprints and then provide for an audit and certification process for individual industries and countries to have their carbon footprint audited and tariffs reduced.
I’m sure that would all run very afoul of WTO and other trade agreements. But in principal it would work. Imports that have a higher carbon footprint would be taxed more than imports with a lower carbon footprint.
Dan B
@TaMara (HFG): Sounds great!
I’m glad to explore different ways to tell the stories. And my Mike and I watch YouTube’s on electric vehicles, PV, wind, hyperloop, etc. For fun! Some are much better than others. And some are ‘Just for Car Nuts’ otherwise known as “gearheads”.
Michael Cain
I am depressed about it today. Rejoining the accords or not, I anticipate that the Senate Republicans and the current Supreme Court will be able to block any attempts to seriously regulate carbon dioxide. I expect the SCOTUS to reverse Massachusetts v. EPA within two years. Coal may well die on its own; natural gas and petroleum are going to be much harder with regulation.
Matt McIrvin
@Cermet: I think the environmentalist focus on opposition to nuclear power in the 70s and 80s was mis-aimed, and that we shouldn’t be closing down existing nuclear plants if we have any reasonably safe way to keep them open… but I also am extremely skeptical of “nukes will save us” takes today just because the experience curve of nuclear tech is not great. The technology seems to want to be extremely large-scale and capital-intensive, and that makes advancement sluggish–you have to keep the same old plants open for decades just to make back your investment.
(Incidentally, if we ever develop commercially viable fusion power, its problems of this variety will be even worse.)
I’ve been hearing the same stories about next-generation nuclear tech about to emerge since I was a small child. And the loudest nuclear advocates’ response to this is to blame environmentalists and safety regs and insist that renewables are a scam, which is the kind of thing you say when you’ve got nothing. I would like to be wrong, because reliable baseload power is indeed useful–though utilities seem to be better at doing with less of it than they used to be.
Dan B
@Kent: Wonderful concept! If there’s some chance it could fly, come on trade attorney Jackals, it would be great to contact progressive rep’s. We’ve got one who might pass it on to the soon to be Climate Czar.
Dan B
@Another Scott: I’d like to know more about perovskites. Sourcing of raw materials? And there’s another PV tech that generates power using UV so cloud cover is not an issue, at least not a serious issue. Our PV panels drop production from the tiniest cloud.
Dan B
@Michael Cain: I hope we get Warwick and Ossoff. Then we can expand the court so we can deal with the load it’s under.
Also I’d like to have 600 Rep’s and 150 Senators for the same reason.
A boy can dream, right?
Another Scott
@Stuart Frasier: Yes, just about anyone can produce raw silicon (“silicon metal”), what with it being about 28% of the Earth’s crust, but (almost?) all the high-purity Si and wafer production (needed for PV) is foreign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_silicon_producers
Sure, the US could get in that business again, but the existing huge players would continue to have an advantage on cost.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Matt McIrvin: It might be good to ask Yutsano how he feels about nuclear waste management. He’s living near Hanford. The horror stories about near disasters. The illnesses of “downwinders” are legion. And cost overruns demand several encyclopedias. Add in criminal contractors and there’s five thousand lifetimes of stories.
It’s sad that Eastern Washington is far from media centers.
Geminid
@Geminid: that’s desalinate sea water, not destabilize.
Another Scott
@Dan B: I only know enough about Perovskites to be dangerous. It’s a gigantic materials family with lots of potential applications.
Some of the promising ones for PV contain lead, which obviously isn’t desirable from a health perspective…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perovskite_solar_cell is probably as good a place as any to start.
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@Dan B: dreaming is great, as long as you have a Plan B.
Dan B
@Geminid: I wondered if there was a PV technology that would ‘break’ water.
I’m hoping that desalination will scale.
Steeplejack (phone)
Holy shnikeys, here is the feel-good thread of the year!
Dan B
@Geminid: Plan B: cowering, ignoring reality, flights of fantasy, depression. Do I have it covered?
Oh, squawking to anyone who’ll listen, organizing.
Kent
I also live in Washington State. And I know people who have spent their careers on Hanford cleanup. Hanford is a legacy of WW2 and Cold War nuclear weapons manufacturing. Conducted under a lot of military secrecy and lack of modern standards and techniques in the mad rush to develop nukes . It is not characteristic of modern nuclear power generation. It is a mess, no doubt, but pretty much beside the point in the conversation about modern nuclear power.
Geminid
@Dan B: The panel’s I read about used a simple system using heat of the panel to take the salt out. I wish I could link, but I read this months ago. As far a breaking water goes, electrolysis can use excess wind and solar electricity to produce hydrogen. That can power turbines to pick up the slack when solar and wind conditions are poor. California does this with natural gas generation now.
Kent
Electrolysis is the process of splitting water into Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Desalination is the process of removing salts from water.
They are completely separate and both are extremely energy intensive. No one has yet developed low-energy processes to do either one. But if we managed to discover low-energy processes to do either one it would be a world-changing breakthrough.
J R in WV
I once sold an old flatbed truck I used to haul hay for our farm critters to a welder who moved back to WV after the Nuke power plants he worked on were all completed. I asked him to sign a note, because he needed to make monthly payments. He intended to use the truck (’65 GMC 2 ton IIRC) to haul timber to his tiny sawmill and to deliver lumber to custumers.
When it came time to sign the note document, he took out his drivers license to see how to draw his signature~!!~ Welder… on nuke power plants ** !
Tucson and SE AZ in general has tons of solar panels. Walmart parking lots are roofed with them. Davie Montham AFB has a bank of solar panels at least a 100 yards thick that runs the length of the AFB long, several miles at least. So the military-industrial complex seems to be fully engaged in alternate power.
Not sure what the Navy is going to do about rising sea lever and their port facilities and shipbuilding yards, though. Same old Navy, no foresight whatsoever, still…!
ETA ** of course, blueprints are pictures, and numbers are simpler than text. Still, scary, for realz !
West of the Rockies
@Dan B:
A “downwinder…” Is that what Jenna Ellis is when seated by Tooty Guiliani?
trollhattan
@West of the Rockies:
More of a “side-winder” I should think, not to be confused with a sidewinder, Rudy’s desert-dwelling reptilian cousin.
Bill Arnold
@Reboot:
trollhattan #3 covered elimination of tariffs on renewable technologies, which is I think the most important short term change after Biden is in office; they are RW politically-driven subsidies to the fossil carbon extraction/distribution industries.
Winning this election/defeating Trump/inaugurating Biden was/is one of the most important climate change battles in the world. Another was trying use the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage a global political reset (The Great Reset; these are people who think it’s a win if only a billion or two humans die, as opposed to 4-8 billion). Limited success on the later, though the pandemic shook things up and exposed a lot of psychopaths and has lowered air-travel levels and reduced commuting. (And air pollution, somewhat.)
rikyrah
RIP, Charley Pride????
https://twitter.com/JoshBreslowWKRN/status/1337856807713312769?s=20
Dan B
@Geminid: I thought the challenge with wind and PV electrolysis was gettin the $ to pencil out. It works okay where there is a lot of sun or where you need long range transportation and charging infrastructure is extremely constrained. It might be worth exploring for air transport fuels but most hydrogen is from cracking natural gas. That is a high carbon process from fossil fuels or pricey, at the moment, from renewables.
KSinMA
@Geminid:
Thank you! :)
Geminid
Another area in which slow progress is being made reducing the carbon footprint of cement production. Some estimates say that 8% of global CO2 emissions come from cement production. That’s also a fun subject to look up.
rikyrah
He belongs IN JAIL??
Thread
Yutsano
@Dan B: The really big reason why Hanford is such a mishegas is that in the 1940s no one knew jack about waste management for nuclear products. Their solution was to bury it in 55 gallon drums at various depths in the earth AND ONLY BOTHER TO TRACK MOST OF THEM. Barrel discoveries still happen to this day which is one of the reasons for the closure delays.
The other big reason is Hanford clean-up is a huge trough for corporations. Batelle, among others, works with the Congressional leadership in the area, local, state, and federal, to keep that sweet sweet lucre going. The main economic engine keeping things running is rampant corruption. There are no clean actors out there at all. Some of the reasons Republicans win is because they promise to keep Hanford money flowing to the corps. Newhouse is dirty af but until he somehow loses it will never come out.
Cermet
@Uncle Cosmo: Yes; here is one link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5c6FiVMe4
There is a more technical one but can’t relocate it.
These have a great deal of promise but alas, the military would never use them so doubt they’ll be built any time soon.
Dan B
@Kent: You’re right that Hanford’s issues are largely a result of non-regulated bomb production. The issue that seems relevant to me is the continuing f’ups of contractors who are either incompetent or corrupt. Waste disposal would work fine if we didn’t have the human element or if we had a guarantee of perfect management. Since nuclear waste is so dangerous anything less than perfection poses grave risks. Cheryl might know more about risk management but it is a necessary conversation whenever we are talking about nuclear power. I haven’t seen anything about cost comparisons over the full lifetime of Thorium reactors, including management of low level waste. It seems as though the proponents don’t want to discuss them or don’t have clear answers yet.
Meanwhile we have a nuclear waste nightmare that was predicted to be cleaned up 30 years ago at 1/4 the cost, and decades to go at current predictions.
Yes, apples vs. oranges maybe but nuclear waste is not food waste.
Cermet
@Matt McIrvin: Good points and partly why I opposed nukes in the past – never safe enough, the waste is terrible and the cost just climbs every time a new design is attempted (uranium plants, of course.) However, this NASA engineer really addresses these issues. Cost? That is never what we would expect but one must add in the cost of AGW and the plant isn’t gonna be that expensive. Unlike a regular nuke plant, these simple can’t melt down in any manner so far less costly in that respect.
Cermet
@Dan B: Thorium reactors produce vastly less waste and it isn’t as long lived (but still, some is measure in 10 k years so not exactly short. But vast improvement compared to the nukes we have.)
Geminid
@Dan B: a short term solution to air travel is to use “net carbon neutral” oil. Occidental Petroleum is starting a direct air capture plant in the Permian Basin to produce CO2 that will then be injected into oil fields to recover additional oil (CO2 injection makes oil flow better).They say the plant will capture over 500,000 tons of CO2 a year. At least two kinds of objections to this are raised. First, the federal tax credit companies earn for carbon sequestration has been laxly enforced as to auditing whether companies are putting the CO2 in the ground and that it stays there. Second, this may make it possible to save the environment, but not destroy the oil companies. But while many are skeptical of carbon capture generally, British climate scientist Myles Allen says that it will be difficult to reach the IPCC goal without significant use of carbon capture. He served on one of the IPCC’s working groups. Miles Allen lays out his thinking in the March 2019 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. They are the folks with the doomsday clock on the cover, and they publish good reporting on climate change issues.
Dan B
@Geminid: Oops, sorry. I glossed over the “excess energy production”. My bad. Even in Seattle excess PV does happen. Our difference is lots of hydro, at the present, that can ramp up rapidly, and lots of fresh water, at the moment – we have had droughts from lack of snowpack and our typically low rainfall summers. Seattle has had water and power rationing in the past. Climate change makes these more likely even if they’re still infrequent.
Doesn’t Israel do the same desalination?
Do you know of any studies of worldwide potential? And how does the issue of dumping the concentrated brine in the ocean get addressed? Are there any byproducts of the brine that could be monetized?
fake irishman
@Geminid:
Yep! This is a good one. Hydrogen production is an important one on the industrial side too that is easing around too.
What’s cool about this decarbonization is that its starting to go economy-wide. About 2015 everyone looked up and went “oh, the power sector is starting to get cleaner, like much cleaner.” Then that process started going a lot more quickly than anyone thought possible.
Now, suddenly people are looking up and going “wait, we actually have tools we think we can deploy at scale for major industrial processes that really cut into carbon emissions.”
Same thing in transport.
Over the past two years or so occasionally — not often — but occasionally, I wake up in the morning and go “you know, maybe we can actually do this thing.”
Uncle Cosmo
IIUC, that’s not precisely true. For decades there have been very low-tech methods to desalinate water using sunlight to evaporate salt water and then condensing the vapor. The problem is that the evaporators take a lot of acreage and don’t scale to the volume of water that would need to be treated for any significant use.
Even my stockbroker (not the most progressive guy on the planet) told me that the 21st century equivalent of wars for oil would be wars for water, It might turn out that the most significant use for small-footprint fission power plants would be desalinating water in a world where fresh water is at a premium.
Geminid
@Dan B: I don’t know that much about desalinization, but I do know that Israel has at least one plant, and I think some Arab Gulf states have them also. The DuPont plant in Waynesboro Virginia developed a membrane used for desalination, but if it still used someone is producing it elsewhere.
pluky
@Uncle Cosmo:
Probably means the Flibe Energy reactor.
Need to scroll down a bit in the wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
fake irishman
Things I’d love to see taMara look at in addition to microgrids, cement and hydrogen, as she or others have suggested, would be looking at carbon containment and best practices in agriculture, how well battery systems and other storage processes will work to smooth out the grid.
It might also be nice for her to not only highlight times to exert public pressure through the legislature (at both the STATE and federal level) but opportunities to comment on proposed rules and regulations from the EPA, Dep. of Agriculture, Dept. of Transportation, Commerce and others. Dave Anderson has done some good yeoman work in that area as well.
Looking forward to more!
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack (phone):
Oh, that is so sweet.
Cermet
@Uncle Cosmo: Thorium reactors are ideal for small scale plants. But all costs to build any type of plant needs to include AGW issues. I never believed nukes were effective in that respect but researched it and a nuke is almost as effective as a wind farm in that respect. Include the required wind farm’s bakup gas gen’s (for 24/7 power) and the nukes beat it. Capital costs are way different but after four years it catches up to wind on debt/income issues, and after five years nukes can beat even a wind farm. Again, didn’t believe it till I saw the numbers.
I’d expect a thorium reactor could beat a uranium based nuke in cost to build and show similar cost/profit numbers; add in long term AGW and nukes win and thorium might do better still. That thorium is not used for navy ships is why amerikan industry woun’t touch them. If you can’t sell to the navy, they woun’t invest the capital – makes perfect sense.
fake irishman
@Uncle Cosmo:
Tangential point to discussion of water shortages and cleaning up the powergrid: shutting down large coal plants opens up availability to scare water in arid regions (don’t need massive cooling ponds for wind turbines).
lowtechcyclist
I think it made perfect sense back then, when there was every reason to be concerned with the safety issues of nuclear plants, and the garbage they produced even when their operation was safe, while global warming was still such a distant cloud on the horizon that most people didn’t even know about it. (Remember “nuclear winter” fears from the 1980s?)
I really have no idea how much or little nuclear power can be part of the mix to produce carbon-free energy in the next decade or two, but if it can play a role, I’m all for it.
For me, the underlying equation is pretty simple: if we succeed in forestalling global warming before it’s too late, and messy nuclear power is a significant part of that mix, at worst it’ll make a mess of a discrete set of locations around the world. But if we fail to stop global warming, no place is going to escape its effects.
Aleta
@rikyrah: That’s terrible. My friend who’s a specialist in a type of pain-relieving and stress- relieving body work responded to Covid by generously offering zoom sessions for donations only … but the checks sent by many people are not getting through to her.
Kent
@Uncle Cosmo:
You are talking about low-tech but still high-energy methods. The energy in question is solar energy. It still it requires a LOT of it to desalinate a gallon of water.
trollhattan
On a cloudy Saturday close to the year’s shortest day, California ISO reports 48% of electricity is currently renewables, roughly 2/3-1/3 solar and wind, and about 28% natural gas. That seems encouraging considering it’s about ten percent of the nation’s population. The path to doing better is clear.
germy
Kent
Desalination is much more practical or energy-efficient for brackish (slightly-salty) water than for actual sea water. Here in the US it is currently being used in places like San Antonio to make use of aquifers that are brackish but far less salty than sea water. https://www.tetratech.com/en/projects/san-antonio-desalination-plant
Matt McIrvin
@Dan B: Yeah, one of the many problems with hydrogen is that you’d probably need some kind of regulatory regime to make sure it comes from relatively green sources, because that’s not the cheapest way now.
Also, it’s just an inconvenient fuel–you need huge tanks because it’s not very energy-dense. But that’s mostly an issue with using it for transport.
Matt McIrvin
@Cermet: A lot of the environmental sins of nuclear plants get diluted on a per-watt basis just by the sheer amount of power they produce.
Nuke fans, when dunking on solar power, like to emphasize that solar kills way more people per watt–again, that’s from the huge power output of nuke plants, which produces a big denominator, combined with the fact that solar creates a lot of jobs, for people who might have to climb on things and operate machinery, etc., which inevitably results in some accidents. So then they can go on about “deadly killer solar” and such instead of pushing for better OSHA regs. It’s a little disingenuous.
Dan B
@Another Scott: Interesting and discouraging Wikipedia about Perovskites. Lead does seem essential to their best efficiency and mitigation by lead absorbing materials and self healing polymer coatings are stopgap if you have a lead containing product to process at the end of its lifespan. Niche material at the moment.
If low toxicity materials can be developed that would be great but tin, germanium, and bismuth, antimony (if I got those right) have 7% and 1% efficiency vs. 46% for lead perovskites is a cliff.
P.S. My Mike guy went mini-ballistic when I told him about this thread. He understands that our current technology is good enough and needs massive deployment plus smart grids. I told him we can have those necessary conversations and still dream about cool new tech.
Now to refresh my memory of PV that works in Cloudy conditions (which we are not having today – don’t tell anyone Seattle has sunny days in winter!).
Yarrow
@rikyrah: So sad. And he died of Covid. Terrible.
Redshift
Hey, TaMara, I assume you’ve seen that David Roberts has left Vox and struck out on his own. I’ve signed up for his newsletter, and I should probably actually get a paying subscription, because he’s one of my favorite sources.
Matt McIrvin
@Dan B: Yeah, years ago I remember people talking about how we needed some kind of fundamental breakthrough to make solar a really viable energy technology, but that’s just no longer true. Better energy-storage technology would help, but even there, existing tech can probably get us quite a ways if deployed in volume. And, if I recall correctly, the experience curve on battery tech seems to be pretty good too.
Dan B
@Kent: Sorry my comment wasn’t clear. I was amused by the autocorrect that churned out “breaking water”. Ha!
Gemini reminded me that desalination powered by excess PV makes sense in high sun / low water locales. I believe San Diego and Israel use this and there are probably others. It’s another chink in the trope of “renewable are intermittent = unreliable”. When you can use the peaks for other purposes it makes economic sense to install extra.
Deploy, deploy, deploy! Research. Deploy, deploy, deploy! Find extra uses!!
Baud
I take it we’re not going to have any new threads until we solve the climate crisis.
Get to work, people.
Dan B
@J R in WV: I thought the Navy was working on addressing sea level rise at their ports. Norfolk already has King Tide flooding issues. If their planning is too little too late I wouldn’t be surprised. But I thought they were concerned*.
*As in Susan Collins? Hope not!
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin:
I have a sneaking hunch that the cost of building a fission plant today is so great the money might be better spent buying everybody on-site storage batteries and continuing installing renewables.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Yeah, I keep coming back and checking.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I ?Baud.
Dan B
@West of the Rockies: Oh, if only Rudy tooted plutonium on Jenna!
Would she crawl into the Potomac and emerge as God-jenna-la?
The possibilities!!
P.S. My best friend is a downwinder. They lived west of Spokane. She’s had cancer. Het nephew was paralyzed by spinal tumors as an infant. The Downwinders stories have been kept quiet in much the same way as the horrors of the cleanup at Hanford. Far away from the centers of power = easy to keep quiet.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I couldn’t solve the climate problem, but I did put up a new thread. Maybe that’s the next best thing?
Dan B
@Yutsano: Yes, the “human element” plus the “radioactive elements” is a recipe for disaster, or at least ugliness. I always wonder why Thorium reactors are touted as a great solution to our water and energy issues when we haven’t cleaned up our other messes yet. They may be one part of the solutions we need but they seem to be proposed by people with blinders.
The small crises out of Hanford seem endless. They’re like the US’s slow motion Chernobyl. Do they get media outside Seattle and Portland? I don’t know.
Redshift
@Cermet: I’m inherently skeptical of thorium reactors, because it’s been “the miracle technology that the big boys refuse to accept” for as long as I can remember. But I’d be happy to be wrong.
I’ve never had a problem with nuclear power (my dad was a nuclear engineer), but the argument I’ve found pretty convincing is that nuclear isn’t going to be a major contributor to solving climate change because we just can’t build reactors fast enough.
Redshift
@Dan B: Yeah, I’ve read news stories about Norfolk, the Navy has definitely been working on that for some time, no matter how many climate change deniers get elected.
Another Scott
@Cermet: OTOH, TheBulletin:
TANSTAAFL.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Cermet: Thanks for the Molton Salt video. Do these have to be built to determine the economics? If they are using “spent” plutonium what are the relevant safety issues? It looks like they use plutonium at 95% which is extremely dangerous to handle, especially transport. Who would allow this material to be shipped through their back yard, or in Seattle’s case, the downtown?
My questions are mostly technicalities that could be addressed but they haven’t been yet. It would be nice. At this point it seems like we’re driving blind towards a promised treasure chest of energy so cheap it won’t have to be metered.
And it seems like a very exciting project for engineers. Please include skeptical, but reasonable, economists.
The last puzzle is that Bill Gates has promoted these. Why hasn’t he invested a few million in research with a promise of a few hundred million if it looks promising? Or has he quietly?
Bill Arnold
@Redshift:
That’s the main really good argument, that rollout of electricity production using renewables, and storage and long-range HVDC transmission (and etc) is faster. (The other is that to some difficult-to-quantify (but probably greater than zero) amount, the existence of nuclear power encourages nuclear proliferation and increases the probability of thermonuclear war.) Safety is in the noise relative to the numbers of humans and species that will be removed from the earth by business-as-usual global heating or by lackadaisical reversal of injection of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, similar historically to large-scale hydropower (with a chance of large events such as dam bursts). (A back-of–the-envelope calculation assuming RCP 6 reduces human population by half means about 250 tons of carbon per human life. A large coal plant runs millions of tons per year.)
Dan B
@Cermet: I thought that less dangerous waste was the “byptoduct”. Is it the difference between Novichok and Xyklon or Novichok and Strychnine?
Guess it comes down to deciding if humans are mature enough to handle nuclear waste or if avoiding spreading it to small reactors in great numbers is a measure of maturity.
My rudimentary knowledge of nuclear physics had my spidey sense tingling. It didn’t add up that “burning” plutonium would result in isotopes with a half life of ten years, or 1,000.
Would it make any sense to “burn” the leftover plutonium at the locations where it is stored? Would processing* the plutonium create high risks, or even moderate risks of accidental release?
*I’m assuming that plutonium / graphite fuel rods don’t just politely dance from storage to their new Molton Salt home.
Geminid
@Redshift: the Navy is in the process of raising its piers at Norfolk Naval Base one meter. That area has a compound problem: in addition to the rise in sea level, the land is subsiding. The last glaciers pressed down the land further north and squeezed the land in the Norfolk area up, and now it is subsiding. The pier raising and the solar panels at Monaghan Air Base described by a commenter above are fruits of the Obama administration’s climate change initiatives. In his March 2019 article in The Journal of the Atomic Scientists, economist Robert Pollin described the Obama program as Green New Deal 1.0. Pollin’s article is titled, “We Need a Better Green New Deal.” Pollin is a U.Mass. economist, and decided in 2008 to study what kind of economic sacrifices would be required in a transition to clean energy. But he has found that in a transition three jobs will be created for every fossil fuel job lost. The Pollin article- actually an interview of him- is the single most informative article I have read on this subject.
Dan B
@Geminid: You mentioned “saving the oil companies”. CCS seems like snake oil for saving Big Oil. Does more carbon get sequestered than gets generated when the oil is burned? How easy is it to audit and how easy is it to cook the books and greenwash? If we had reliable answers it would be easier to decide.
I believe we’ll have to do CCS and soil regeneration, grassland restoration, and many other carbon sequestration projects. CCS is expensive and unintended consequences underground seems like a handy plot for a scary SciFi story.
Thorium Reactors seems like it may be a sop to “save” the nuclear power industry but they are very politically weak at the moment while the oil industry is powerful.
Whaddya do about big oily?
Whaddya do about that lout?*
*sung to whatever tune you like… or not.
Geminid
@Dan B: Bill Gates has put money into direct air carbon capture technology, including a pilot plant in western Canada.
Dan B
@fake irishman: Thanks for your genuine optimism. We can do this! Will we? What’s the best strategy? How do we best counter the API / Koch Industries propaganda?
Dan B
@Cermet: Getting the Navy to do some test projects on Thorium and various Molton Salt reactor designs might be a good project for Czar Kerry, if the Senate doesn’t strangle the purse strings. Doesn’t seem like they would, lots of opportunity for making contractor$ happy.
J R in WV
@Dan B:
Well, I know about Hanford and the terrible conditions downstream/downwind of that site. But I’m pretty interested in enviro disasters, worked in the environmental arena for the final decades of my career, so I’m atypical.
You can’t depend on any source for energy related pollution data, because the whole industry is awash in money and criminal coverups!
ETA to add ” data” in the last sentence…
Michael Cain
@Dan B:
Manchin. Sinema. Tester. My state’s own new junior Senator Hickenlooper. Possibly Warnock and Ossoff themselves. I’m not saying that they won’t eventually support abolishing the filibuster and expanding the courts but we need them all. And they’re all likely to have a price, quite possibly specific to their state, for that support. Eg, after this past summer/fall, Hickenlooper would love to bring tens/hundreds of millions of dollars home for national forest fire mitigation, rehabilitation and recovery, and future fire fighting.
Dan B
@Matt McIrvin: More than a ‘little disingenuous. More jobs = more people = more accidents. Who knew? /s
And wind kills birds! Less than housecats and pesticides, etc. If you paint one blade black the bird strikes drop dramatically.
Who knew? Who coulddaknown?
Dan B
@Matt McIrvin: There’s a woman who produces YouTube videos for something like tteElectric Car Institute, or something. She’s trans or her wife is trans and she’s really good at the splainin’. She just had a video about some amazing advances in battery technology by QuantumScape. The CEO is a turban wearing Sikh, yea! They’ve spent years addressing some of the problems in developing solid state liIon batteries.. Tesla’s batteries are also very cool.
But look up QuantumScape. Cool if it can be scaled.
Michael Cain
If I might offer a different — and pretty much “inside baseball” — recommendation for energy projects in the western states. No nuclear experiments at Hanford or the INL, where there are already enormous nuclear messes. Any thermal power technology is problematic, since they all place additional demands on stressed water supplies. Offer instead to give the states a much bigger say in managing the transmission networks of the Bonneville and Western Power Authorities to make renewable non-thermal sources more practical.
lowtechcyclist
Is this the article you’re talking about? I’ll give it a read.
Geminid
@Dan B: If you google “carbon capture” the first thing you’ll see is an ad by BP or Exxon telling you the great things they are doing in this area. If you go on to read the independent reporting- and there is a lot- you can judge better how well-founded is your skepticism regarding carbon capture. But Myles Allen’s March 2019 article in the Journal of the Atomic Scientists gives a good big picture appraisal of these technologies and their importance. There is so much happening in the areas of solar and wind power, restorative agriculture, afforestation, micro-grids, carbon capture, materials science etc. And good reporting on these subjects is at our finger tips. I smiled when I saw the commenter above suggesting further areas for Tamara to look into. Why should the Front Pagers have all the fun? This stuff is fascinating, and it gives one grounds to be optimistic, not pessimistic.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: that’s the article. Man, I’m glad somebody can link!
Dan B
@Geminid: That study sounds great! 3 jobs created for every fossil fuel job lost. It makes sense because oil and gas have automated so much of their operations. Robots for green jobs will have to be much more complex than we are likely to have for decades, at least.
pluky
@Geminid: also the basement rock is fragmented from a meteorite strike about 35mya. adds to the subsidence
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_impact_crater
Geminid
@rikyrah: And RIP Charley Pride: “Kiss an angel good morning….”
Another Scott
@pluky: Neat. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dan B
@Geminid: Thanks for your reading suggestions and great comments! Would that the world bloom with a thousand Pollinses. It probably does with hundreds of thousands of people creating the new Green Economy.
Dan B
@Geminid: Reading Myles Allen right now!
Only nit pick in Pollin is he talks about reforestation as “the bioremediation”. I realize it’s shorthand but it would be nice to have soil and pasture restoration at the top of the list since poorly done reforestation can be disaster. Forests don’t work in more places than they do but soil restoration and pastures work in many more areas. I believe that soils in the Willamette Valley south of Portland contain more carbon than the magnificent forests on the mountain slopes that border the valley.
Pedantry I suppose.
Geminid
@Dan B: New Mexico will be a good test of the economic impact of a clean energy transition. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham won election in 2018 on a clean power platform, and last year the state legislature passed a clean power program. A key element was the shutdown of the huge Four Corners coal plant, with job re-training and other measures to lessen the economic impact on nearby communities. This opens the path for building out solar and wind generating capacity. Besides beautiful scenery and nice people, New Mexico has abundant sun and wind. I drove out there on I-20 Spring of 2019, and I was struck by the lack of wind turbines in that state. They were all over West Texas, sitting on ridges above oil pumps and cattle. I camped at Santa Rosa Lake State Park. The tent sites were on the crest of a ridge, and it was the windiest place I’ve ever camped. I felt like i was about to be blown into the lake. But if I make it out this coming year I think I will see more wind turbines.
Uncle Cosmo
@Cermet: Part of the theoretical attraction of molten-salt thorium breeder reactors is that once fractionation of the molten salt stream into separate elements is feasible, the various radioactive products can be treated variously: The really hot stuff tends to have the shortest half-lives, so they get put aside to cool off, which they do rather rapidly. The long-lived stuff tends not to be very active & in fact is usually transuranics, and you send them back through the core to suck up neutrons and either fission or transmute to species that will fission, Of the mid-range stuff (half-lives of 100-400 years) some of the isotopes are useful (e.g. in medicine); some of the rest you can send back through the core to suck up neutrons till they become a non-radioactive (or fast-decaying) isotope. The rest – a very small amount – you sequester in a stable form (perhaps melted into solid glass) for 10-12 half-lives.
Uncle Cosmo
@Dan B:
Oh, very droll. You do understand, I hope, that a whole slew of medically-useful radioisotopes are bred in nuclear reactors? Anyone who’s had a cardiac treadmill stress test has had (a minute quantity of) one slipped into his veins – molybdenum-99, which decays into technetium-99, an element that no longer exists in nature. (In fact, a few years back there was a fairly critical shortage of molybdenum-99.)
In my stress test, the treadmill (during which, between huffs & puffs, I regaled the MD with the physics behind the stuff he’d injected) was followed by an injection of radioactive thallium-201 and 45 minutes lying on an examining table while a gamma-ray camera zapped around above my chest to evaluate blood flow in and around my heart.
Yay for nuclear medicine!
Dan B
@Another Scott: Thanks for a very clear article about Thorium reactors. The byproducts seem worse than Plutonium:
Easy nuke bomb making – check.
Extra deadly radioactive waste – check.
Incredibly expensive to manage – check.
Prone to failure – check.
It would seem that small reactors to desalinate seawater would require seriously expensive tending.
Uncle Cosmo
@germy: ROTFLMAO!
For some reason it reminds me of the old Brezhnev-era joke when the CCCP issued a stamp featuring the General Secretary’s mugshot & almost immediately thousands of Soviet citizens complained that the stamps wouldn’t stick to the envelopes. Scientists investigated and discovered that the glue worked perfectly – but people were spitting on the wrong side.
And to get back at the Limeys –
** British usage.
Dan B
@Uncle Cosmo: The debate goes on. Your description of constantly recycling the most deadly isotopes sounds good. The article from the Bulletin that Scott excerpted seems like it’s not so easy in real life. The article stated that U 233 contaminated with U 232 were byproducts but you suggest they could be fed back into the reactor and “burned”.
I’d love it if that worked in practice and the article in the Bulletin was off the mark.
Dan B
Tamara;
Thanks for this post! I thought I knew a lot about renewable energy but this collection (medly?) of Jackals has much wisdom to share. I hope you’ve got some ideas to pursue.
Dan
Another Scott
@Dan B: AFAIK, the thorium reactors that TheBulletin author was talking about more conventional water-based-coolant reactors. Not the liquid salts/fluorine/etc. stuff in more “advanced” designs.
The old book We Almost Lost Detroit was about the “Fermi” LMFBR (liquid-metal fast breeder reactor) that used liquid sodium cooling (and uranium (not thorium)).
Lots and lots of issues in using things like that (sodium burns in air, and releases hydrogen in contact with water)…
The thorium fuel cycle is well understood and has lots of issues. Sure, the issues can be addressed, but, again, TANSTAAFL.
To be clear, people know how to create materials and processes to do this interesting physics and get amazing amounts of power from these nuclear reactions. But the economics, and management’s nature to get things done quickly to start making money (and get their bonuses and promotions), means that safety is too often compromised.
Cheers,
Scott.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
High Velocity – 1976
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Why is Cameron there?