77 Years Of Being Wrong Just Isn't Enough [View article]
Even more ironically if the Fed kept money issuance in its own hands, and did not allow banks to create money on its behalf and then lend it back at a fat margin, then the interest saved would eliminate most of the deficit and the 'need' to cut back on benefits to the less well off.
The notion of borrowing from the banks was fine whilst they had better credit ratings than sovereign states, but since it was the banks which went bust and the state that had to bail them out then it is a fancy way of funnelling money to the financiers and well-heeled.
The money raised by this legerdemain is used to fund asset bubbles and an ever widening GINI coefficient, and financial engineering crowds out productive investment.
501s have disappeared into this black hole with artificially low interest rates decimating savings whilst money was pumped in to cover speculative losses on the real estate bubble.
Get a clearance from the Government to print money then lend it back to them at a fat interest rate. That is how to shift a few trillion from the lower income groups to those at the top of the tree, and nice work if you can get it.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
I'm not sure how you reconcile every single one of Japan's reactors standing up to a category 9 earthquake, way beyond their design criteria, and shutting down safely without incident as ' couldn't have performed any worse'.
It was a 15 metre tsunami which caused the problems at Fukushima, not the earthquake.
Serious defects in design were exposed, but designs of reactors now take account of the lessons learnt, and retrofitting is happening.
Which means that unlike in the past, when motorists could not do much about a price rise, they now have an alternative.
Its early days, and the price is only competitive with the subsidies, but GM for instance reckon that they can take several thousand out of the next generation Volt, due in 2015, so broadly speaking PHEVs and BEVs are getting to the same kind of total ownership cost as conventional vehicles.
So for the first time we have some sort of effective cap on potential transport price rises, as there is now an alternative, which there wasn't before.
Some might imagine that the volumes are too low to do that, but price changes are always decided by marginal demand, and any sustained rise in oil prices is likely to trigger much increased supply.
It also happens to be very practical to retro-fit existing cars, so, say, a supply blockage for oil would no doubt lead to substantial business for in that respect.
Fuel cell cars will also start to join the party in the next couple of years, so personal transport is in an exciting state of flux.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
Dunno about shale, but China have the ability to turn out DME from coal and other sources, and are also looking at using underground gasification for coal supply. http://bit.ly/15UOSGu DME does just fine instead of diesel.
Geothermal and waste CO2(!) is possible to use, and Mitsubishi were working with the Icelandics to do so: http://bit.ly/15UOSWL
Of course, nuclear could take the place of the geothermal.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
Bike lanes I like, biofuels not so much, save perhaps for aircraft where it is about the right order of magnitude, which it ain't for powering the road transport fleet. It would still be nice if we can figure out a better way of keeping aircraft flying than biofuels though - most of these 'green' sources are far too environmentally damaging.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
Hi Alan. We agree on the future for the pricing of fossil fuels, although the recent Japanese work on methane hydrates forms a pretty big question mark on that, as does Chinese work on producing DME from coal, but differ in that I don't see that that makes the future look particularly grim.
Oil is used overwhelmingly for transport.
Electric cars are viable way before it hits $200/barrel. They will be able to have pretty decent range within 5 years, too.
Since turnover time in the car fleet is around 15 years it would seem that there is plenty of time to really take a chunk out of oil demand within the time frame we are talking about and still stay mobile.
The energy cost of running the US light vehicle fleet on electric is around 100GWe, about the same size as the present US nuclear fleet, out of a base generation capacity of ~500GWe
Using 70's technology it took around 20 years for both France and Sweden to move their whole electricity industry where it was not supplied by hydro to mainly nuclear.
Of course anti-nuclear forces have raised construction costs in the OECD greatly, but even at those rates they are affordable. By 2025 we should have ready a new generation of factory producible smaller reactors, on which China leads the way.
Enough power to run the US light vehicle fleet seems to be readily obtainable, without considering solar which is some parts of the US should be properly viable well within the time frame.
For most of the world the problem is a lot simpler, as they have not allowed regulation to inflate costs out of sight, so that nuclear runs at around $3000kw installed. Those are the countries which will have the highest population growth, and where demand for transport and energy will grow.
The OECD is fairly static in both, and so their high construction costs are of less relevance to the overall world economy and energy demand and supply.
So no doubt the changeover will not be smooth, but we seem to have all the technology, or are far advanced in developing the technology, we will need to manage the transition.
I don't presume to point you to information, Alan, but for the benefit of others some of what I base my remarks on can be found at the DOE site, which discusses the transport changes for the next few decades.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
Nuclear power has considerable advantages over most construction for disaster preparedness.
They are high cost, centralised units, and in the case of present reactors, have a high pressure vessel which by its nature must be strong.
That means that at comparatively little additional cost they can be strengthened and safeguarded, in a way which would be impractical and vastly expensive for housing, or renewable energy etc.
For instance in respect of terrorism, in the US there are only 100 or so nuclear plants to guard, and the structure is massively strong, and the critical parts quite compact.
It is one heck of a lot easier to hit one of the umpteen chemical plants, the NG network and so on.
For solar power, what happens if there is a major volcanic eruption, as has happened many times in the past? Solar power production plummets, as haze hits it hard, just when it is most needed.
Hurricanes can also take out both solar and wind, in conditions where nuclear plant will be just fine, with only the transmission affected.
There is not really space to go into the alleged 'problem' of 'waste' here.
Suffice it to say never was a virtual non-issue so magnified beyond all reason.
For the most radioactive elements like fuel rods, they need keeping under water for around 30 years, after which they do just fine in dry cast storage.
The rhetoric about the waste lasting 100,000 years and being a deadly legacy for future generations also relies on its impact on blowing an issue out of proportion to deceive a less than knowledgeable public.
Sure, some fraction of the waste remains radioactive for a long time. The reason it does that is because it is not very energetic to start with.
If you are a misguided terrorist and approach a nuclear core, the stuff which will kill you has a half life of seconds or minutes. IOW it is pumping out a lot of energy quickly.
Other stuff with a half life of a couple of decades or so can also cause problems if not contained properly.
That is not to say that some of the waste can be handled without a degree of circumspection, but the issue is misrepresented by ignoring the fact that the radioactivity of the long lived waste is not constant, but decreases to very low levels, so it is not the same hazard over long time periods
Of course, fundamentally the answer is the reason for my second set of inverted commas over: 'waste', as it is perfectly good fuel for only slightly more advanced reactors, which can use all but a tiny fraction of it.
Naturally the anti-nuclear brigade are doing all they can to prevent the development of these reactors, in spite of the fact that they would solve the waste issue that they profess themselves so concerned with.
The tiny fraction which would remain after use in these advanced reactors would decay to the level of radioactivity of the ores from which it came within 300 years.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
All the reactors in Japan stood up perfectly well to the earthquake and went into shutdown correctly.
Those at Fukushima failed due to being hit by a 15 metre tsunami. Guarding against that is as simple as taking care that it is not in an area where such events are going to occur.
They dismissed the historical record of tsunami of that magnitude there and built to a lower standard.
Whilst it is not possible to build to overcome every natural hazard, so a large meteorite impact or something would overwhelm them, Fukushima in fact proves that we have the engineering to withstand massive 9.0 magnitude earthquakes and huge tsunami.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
The loss of power was in itself proof that the power and cooling systems were not diversified enough.
The plant stood up well to the earthquake, but the tsunami flooded the generator. The batteries did their job, and picked up the slack, but were only specified for 8 hours.
When they run out of juice, cooling stopped. The next major blow was that the zirconium claddings for the fuel rods gave off hydrogen, which was to be expected. No proper provision was made for venting it, so that is why the structure blew.
The site was inadequately designed and specified, quite apart from issues running and maintaining it.
The fact that it passed safety standards current at the time simply shows how inadequate those standards were.
Compare the new safety standards to see how much they missed by.
The site was built chosen with the assumption that they did not have to allow for tsunami of anything like the height which occurred, and which had previously happened in the historic record.
Generation and control should have been distributed so that back-ups were available from multiple sources, located either proofed against water, or off site.
The list goes on.
The good news is that reactor standards have been improved hugely due to this incident, which has had no health consequences to the general population and only very limited increased risk for a few dozen of the workers.
Why Black Is The Real Green In Energy Production [View article]
Of course, we could use nuclear, which happens to be around a million times as energy dense as fossil fuels and has tiny carbon emissions.
The confirmed death toll from civil nuclear power is around 100 in the decades of its existence, as against around 3 million a YEAR or so from fossil fuel pollution:
Nice job by the fossil fuel industry in spreading FUD. It is rather as though Rockefeller had been successful in keeping kerosene for lighting instead of new fangled and 'dangerous' electricity, as he tried to do.
If the fossil fuel industry had to abide by anything remotely like the waste disposal regulations that they have landed the nuclear industry with, it would cease immediately.
What in the world are you talking about? All fuel cell cars have a substantial battery buffer, which provides plenty of power. How long does it take to accelerate? Not long, is the answer, so a comparatively modest battery can provide the transient power needs for both acceleration and capture regenerative braking.
Of far more import are the much more real limits to energy density in current batteries. Including all the CF tanks and other weight, a fuel cell car still hits around 1.5kwh/kg, way, way more than even the best batteries.
Now maybe batteries will close that gap, but fuel cell technology is far from standing still too, and I don't know and you don't know whether they will.
Why you should chose to grossly inflate comparatively trivial power density issues for fuel cells and pretend they are some sort of show stopper is beyond be.
Both fuel cell and battery technologies are very handy to have, and I wish them both every success. Together they can get rid of the pollution from combustion engines, and dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
'Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles are a non-starter as they still need batteries and an electric drive train, and the production and usage of hydrogen is expensive and inefficient. Hydrogen is a product of either fracking (don't get me started on that!), electrolysis (inefficient) or bugs (really?).
The batteries a fuel cell car uses are around 1.5kwh worth, in no way comparable to the huge 85kwh pack in the top Tesla, or even the 24kwh in the Leaf.
Of course they use an electric drive train, as they are just as much electric cars as a battery one. This leads to a far lower parts count than combustion engine cars, and potential build savings.
Both fuel cell cars and battery vehicles with hydrogen provided by natural gas reforming and using the figures from the present efficiency of the US grid use around 1MJ/mile on a well to wheel basis.
Much electricity comes from fossil fuels, and if the aim is a high proportion of renewables, then hydrogen is an essential component of every real-world scheme, including the hugely ambitious German effort to switch to renewables. Excess wind and solar are on a use it or loose it basis, so if it has to be stored the realistic alternatives make use of hydrogen as well as other storage mechanisms.
Just like electricity, hydrogen can be produced by a host of alternatives, and is vital to store renewable energy.
Electrolysis even discounting more efficient alternatives such as high temperature production using the waste heat, a right-now technology, is around 70% efficient with compression costing maybe another 5% or so.
This compares with a grid efficiency in the US of 33% including 7% transmission losses.
77 Years Of Being Wrong Just Isn't Enough [View article]
The notion of borrowing from the banks was fine whilst they had better credit ratings than sovereign states, but since it was the banks which went bust and the state that had to bail them out then it is a fancy way of funnelling money to the financiers and well-heeled.
The money raised by this legerdemain is used to fund asset bubbles and an ever widening GINI coefficient, and financial engineering crowds out productive investment.
501s have disappeared into this black hole with artificially low interest rates decimating savings whilst money was pumped in to cover speculative losses on the real estate bubble.
Get a clearance from the Government to print money then lend it back to them at a fat interest rate.
That is how to shift a few trillion from the lower income groups to those at the top of the tree, and nice work if you can get it.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
It was a 15 metre tsunami which caused the problems at Fukushima, not the earthquake.
Serious defects in design were exposed, but designs of reactors now take account of the lessons learnt, and retrofitting is happening.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
'EPRI: lifetime cost of ownership of plug-ins is roughly comparable with conventional vehicles'
http://bit.ly/11tOF8C
Which means that unlike in the past, when motorists could not do much about a price rise, they now have an alternative.
Its early days, and the price is only competitive with the subsidies, but GM for instance reckon that they can take several thousand out of the next generation Volt, due in 2015, so broadly speaking PHEVs and BEVs are getting to the same kind of total ownership cost as conventional vehicles.
So for the first time we have some sort of effective cap on potential transport price rises, as there is now an alternative, which there wasn't before.
Some might imagine that the volumes are too low to do that, but price changes are always decided by marginal demand, and any sustained rise in oil prices is likely to trigger much increased supply.
It also happens to be very practical to retro-fit existing cars, so, say, a supply blockage for oil would no doubt lead to substantial business for in that respect.
Fuel cell cars will also start to join the party in the next couple of years, so personal transport is in an exciting state of flux.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
http://bit.ly/15UOSGu
DME does just fine instead of diesel.
Geothermal and waste CO2(!) is possible to use, and Mitsubishi were working with the Icelandics to do so:
http://bit.ly/15UOSWL
Of course, nuclear could take the place of the geothermal.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
It would still be nice if we can figure out a better way of keeping aircraft flying than biofuels though - most of these 'green' sources are far too environmentally damaging.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
That sounds about right.
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
Why Is Britain's Ministry Of Defense Predicting $500 Per Barrel Oil Prices? [View article]
We agree on the future for the pricing of fossil fuels, although the recent Japanese work on methane hydrates forms a pretty big question mark on that, as does Chinese work on producing DME from coal, but differ in that I don't see that that makes the future look particularly grim.
Oil is used overwhelmingly for transport.
Electric cars are viable way before it hits $200/barrel.
They will be able to have pretty decent range within 5 years, too.
Since turnover time in the car fleet is around 15 years it would seem that there is plenty of time to really take a chunk out of oil demand within the time frame we are talking about and still stay mobile.
The energy cost of running the US light vehicle fleet on electric is around 100GWe, about the same size as the present US nuclear fleet, out of a base generation capacity of ~500GWe
Using 70's technology it took around 20 years for both France and Sweden to move their whole electricity industry where it was not supplied by hydro to mainly nuclear.
Of course anti-nuclear forces have raised construction costs in the OECD greatly, but even at those rates they are affordable.
By 2025 we should have ready a new generation of factory producible smaller reactors, on which China leads the way.
Enough power to run the US light vehicle fleet seems to be readily obtainable, without considering solar which is some parts of the US should be properly viable well within the time frame.
For most of the world the problem is a lot simpler, as they have not allowed regulation to inflate costs out of sight, so that nuclear runs at around $3000kw installed.
Those are the countries which will have the highest population growth, and where demand for transport and energy will grow.
The OECD is fairly static in both, and so their high construction costs are of less relevance to the overall world economy and energy demand and supply.
So no doubt the changeover will not be smooth, but we seem to have all the technology, or are far advanced in developing the technology, we will need to manage the transition.
I don't presume to point you to information, Alan, but for the benefit of others some of what I base my remarks on can be found at the DOE site, which discusses the transport changes for the next few decades.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
They are high cost, centralised units, and in the case of present reactors, have a high pressure vessel which by its nature must be strong.
That means that at comparatively little additional cost they can be strengthened and safeguarded, in a way which would be impractical and vastly expensive for housing, or renewable energy etc.
For instance in respect of terrorism, in the US there are only 100 or so nuclear plants to guard, and the structure is massively strong, and the critical parts quite compact.
It is one heck of a lot easier to hit one of the umpteen chemical plants, the NG network and so on.
For solar power, what happens if there is a major volcanic eruption, as has happened many times in the past?
Solar power production plummets, as haze hits it hard, just when it is most needed.
Hurricanes can also take out both solar and wind, in conditions where nuclear plant will be just fine, with only the transmission affected.
There is not really space to go into the alleged 'problem' of 'waste' here.
Suffice it to say never was a virtual non-issue so magnified beyond all reason.
For the most radioactive elements like fuel rods, they need keeping under water for around 30 years, after which they do just fine in dry cast storage.
The rhetoric about the waste lasting 100,000 years and being a deadly legacy for future generations also relies on its impact on blowing an issue out of proportion to deceive a less than knowledgeable public.
Sure, some fraction of the waste remains radioactive for a long time.
The reason it does that is because it is not very energetic to start with.
If you are a misguided terrorist and approach a nuclear core, the stuff which will kill you has a half life of seconds or minutes.
IOW it is pumping out a lot of energy quickly.
Other stuff with a half life of a couple of decades or so can also cause problems if not contained properly.
That is not to say that some of the waste can be handled without a degree of circumspection, but the issue is misrepresented by ignoring the fact that the radioactivity of the long lived waste is not constant, but decreases to very low levels, so it is not the same hazard over long time periods
Of course, fundamentally the answer is the reason for my second set of inverted commas over: 'waste', as it is perfectly good fuel for only slightly more advanced reactors, which can use all but a tiny fraction of it.
Naturally the anti-nuclear brigade are doing all they can to prevent the development of these reactors, in spite of the fact that they would solve the waste issue that they profess themselves so concerned with.
The tiny fraction which would remain after use in these advanced reactors would decay to the level of radioactivity of the ores from which it came within 300 years.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
We know perfectly well how to avoid most of the deaths from tornadoes, but don't spend the money to do so.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
Those at Fukushima failed due to being hit by a 15 metre tsunami.
Guarding against that is as simple as taking care that it is not in an area where such events are going to occur.
They dismissed the historical record of tsunami of that magnitude there and built to a lower standard.
Whilst it is not possible to build to overcome every natural hazard, so a large meteorite impact or something would overwhelm them, Fukushima in fact proves that we have the engineering to withstand massive 9.0 magnitude earthquakes and huge tsunami.
How To Play The Nuclear Energy Comeback [View article]
The plant stood up well to the earthquake, but the tsunami flooded the generator.
The batteries did their job, and picked up the slack, but were only specified for 8 hours.
When they run out of juice, cooling stopped.
The next major blow was that the zirconium claddings for the fuel rods gave off hydrogen, which was to be expected.
No proper provision was made for venting it, so that is why the structure blew.
The site was inadequately designed and specified, quite apart from issues running and maintaining it.
The fact that it passed safety standards current at the time simply shows how inadequate those standards were.
Compare the new safety standards to see how much they missed by.
The site was built chosen with the assumption that they did not have to allow for tsunami of anything like the height which occurred, and which had previously happened in the historic record.
Generation and control should have been distributed so that back-ups were available from multiple sources, located either proofed against water, or off site.
The list goes on.
The good news is that reactor standards have been improved hugely due to this incident, which has had no health consequences to the general population and only very limited increased risk for a few dozen of the workers.
Why Black Is The Real Green In Energy Production [View article]
The confirmed death toll from civil nuclear power is around 100 in the decades of its existence, as against around 3 million a YEAR or so from fossil fuel pollution:
http://bit.ly/14y5djs
Nice job by the fossil fuel industry in spreading FUD.
It is rather as though Rockefeller had been successful in keeping kerosene for lighting instead of new fangled and 'dangerous' electricity, as he tried to do.
If the fossil fuel industry had to abide by anything remotely like the waste disposal regulations that they have landed the nuclear industry with, it would cease immediately.
And that is without carbon credits.
Tesla's Matrix Moment [View article]
All fuel cell cars have a substantial battery buffer, which provides plenty of power.
How long does it take to accelerate?
Not long, is the answer, so a comparatively modest battery can provide the transient power needs for both acceleration and capture regenerative braking.
Of far more import are the much more real limits to energy density in current batteries.
Including all the CF tanks and other weight, a fuel cell car still hits around 1.5kwh/kg, way, way more than even the best batteries.
Now maybe batteries will close that gap, but fuel cell technology is far from standing still too, and I don't know and you don't know whether they will.
Why you should chose to grossly inflate comparatively trivial power density issues for fuel cells and pretend they are some sort of show stopper is beyond be.
Both fuel cell and battery technologies are very handy to have, and I wish them both every success.
Together they can get rid of the pollution from combustion engines, and dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Tesla: Invest In The Future [View article]
The batteries a fuel cell car uses are around 1.5kwh worth, in no way comparable to the huge 85kwh pack in the top Tesla, or even the 24kwh in the Leaf.
Of course they use an electric drive train, as they are just as much electric cars as a battery one.
This leads to a far lower parts count than combustion engine cars, and potential build savings.
Both fuel cell cars and battery vehicles with hydrogen provided by natural gas reforming and using the figures from the present efficiency of the US grid use around 1MJ/mile on a well to wheel basis.
Much electricity comes from fossil fuels, and if the aim is a high proportion of renewables, then hydrogen is an essential component of every real-world scheme, including the hugely ambitious German effort to switch to renewables.
Excess wind and solar are on a use it or loose it basis, so if it has to be stored the realistic alternatives make use of hydrogen as well as other storage mechanisms.
Just like electricity, hydrogen can be produced by a host of alternatives, and is vital to store renewable energy.
Electrolysis even discounting more efficient alternatives such as high temperature production using the waste heat, a right-now technology, is around 70% efficient with compression costing maybe another 5% or so.
This compares with a grid efficiency in the US of 33% including 7% transmission losses.