Tag: nuclear power

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 1

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We’re in an odd moment technologically speaking.  The only thing anyone talks about is AI.  It’s the alpha and the omega.  It will bring on the singularity or it will usher in a golden age where we all live like the Eloi in H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine.”  On second thought maybe that would be the singularity since being lunch for troglodytes doesn’t sound like much of a golden age (unless you’re a troglodyte that is).

But I think it’s time to start looking beyond the glory of AI and begin to think of what comes next.  After all, in a manner of speaking AI is kind of like this century’s electronic calculator.  It made engineering work much more efficient but it didn’t eliminate the need for humans to look for answers to problems that needed to be solved.  It just made the process faster.  So once all the tech companies get through firing their engineers and computer scientists the industrial world is going to find that they’re still going to need to design “stuff” and solve new problems that are supposed to make the world a better place.

And contrary to present expectations AI isn’t going to plan and design the next bridge that spans a couple of miles across a bay or between mountains.  Sure, the engineers will use AI to find out the state of the art in civil engineering but eventually a human being will have to sign off on the drawings and take the legal responsibility that the bridge won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people.  And only an idiot would assume that the answer that AI gives him is worth risking prison time without making sure that he knows that the answers are correct.

So, let’s put AI into the category of modern tools and instead look at what problems are in our near future to solve.

Regardless of what everyone has said for the last thirty years, solar and wind energy are not the future energy sources we need.  But there will come a time when hydrocarbons will not be sufficient.  So, I would say that a replacement for oil and gas is the largest technical problem that humanity will face toward the end of this century.  But that means it’s already long overdue to start working out the details of what that will look like.  There may be several technologies that will exist.  I’ve questioned (and not just in a fictional setting) whether geothermal might become a significant source of global energy but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say that nuclear fission will be the main energy source.

But just because fission has been a stable part of the energy grid in places like France for more than half a century doesn’t mean that the form currently employed is even close to what will power the world for the next century and more.  The science and technology of fission power is in its infancy.  The research in the United States that was going on in the 1950s and 1960s was strangled in its crib by the whole anti-nuclear movement of the time.  There will need to be a rebirth of nuclear power technology that will combine government, industry and academia.  And it will require energy policy to be handled by intelligent people in government.  And that is something we haven’t seen in half a century in this country.  Because it is a massive effort.  Eventually we will have to decide whether battery technology is a better storage medium for things like transportation than something like synthetic hydrocarbons or hydrogen.  And these questions should be answered based on efficiency and other important factors like safety.  But definitely not decided by idiots like Al Gore, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Let’s see what’s next after power in Part 2.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24JAN2025 – Nuclear Power

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“Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.”
Interesting choice of words.
If only there were a way of capturing all those extra neutrons and making fuel grade Uranium from more common ore. We could call it a “Breeder reactor”.
Nah. It will probably be decades until we could do that.
Like negative 7 decades.

There is no scientific reason not to use nuclear power. As you pointed out, the French have been doing it for 70 years. (They sell power to Germany.)
And if the French can do it….
The roadblocks are 90% political and 10% engineering.
Nuclear waste can be dealt with if we give American engineers a chance to attack the problem. But with no new activity going on, we can’t solve the problems.

Spending billions on a waste storage project in Nevada and then letting a corrupt politician kill the project was clearly the wrong way to go.
BTW, Nevada, I’d like that money back.

The Next Big Thing

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According to Elon Musk the big project is man going to Mars.  According to Donald Trump it’s Big AI.  So, which do I think is the next Manhattan Project?  Well, neither of those.

Mars will have to wait until there is a compelling reason to send men there.  Sure, send some really advanced drones and bring home some Mars rocks (or Martians if you can find them).  Heck, send a lander to Titan or Ganymede.  I’m all for that.  Even capture an asteroid made of gold and platinum and break off chunks and throw them into the desert or the ocean.  All good clean fun.  But that’s not the Manhattan Project.

And neither is AI.  That’s just more of the same.  That’s management reducing the payroll to a minimum.  Sure, it’s a stunning tool that will enhance the ability of all kinds of projects.  And it will make a lot of us redundant too.  So, I don’t look at it as some big breakthrough for humanity.  At least not as advertised at the moment.  Maybe when we get the AI implants, I’ll change my mind.

No, the Manhattan Project for the 2030s is the changeover of the American power grid to nuclear plants.  We have a window of opportunity while the current fossil fuel reserves are still relatively robust to begin systematically designing and optimizing fission plants to make them as close to foolproof as humanly possible.  We have about fifty years to achieve this before we run out of fuel and based on how the French have been using them for about seventy years without a catastrophe I’m confident that within thirty years more than fifty percent of the American power capacity could be converted to fission plants.  And after that it would be a short time until the only other plants would be hydroelectric and some exotics like solar panels in the desert.

Now the real problem is managing the wastes and breeding more fuel.  A lot more work needs to be done on optimizing the life cycle of the radioactive materials in both the fuels and the wastes.  Long term storage and recycling materials for reuse are still underdeveloped areas of study.  Just dumping depleted fuel rods in an underground mine under a mountain in the Nevada desert is a pretty crude plan for the materials produced by the reactor.  Often the byproducts of the reactor can be reclaimed and even transmuted into useful fissionable material.

But we are still in the infancy of nuclear technology.  Combustion is almost as old as hominid life on the planet.  Neanderthal possessed fire.  Now we have to make the leap to domesticating the neutron.  What’s needed is a push in the right direction.  A pilot project sponsored by the federal government to design a plant that can be tested under the most disastrous set of circumstances imaginable and proven safe.  This will provide the American public with the confidence that their bogeymen from the Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl events are long dead and buried.

Right now, it wouldn’t have to be some trillion-dollar boondoggle.  Use reasonable resources to build the test case.  Tap into the existing designs and the recent innovations that are going on in China and India and then let the big brains at the big engineering firms show what they can do.  Who knows, maybe Elon Musk could be convinced to put his Mars mission on hold to bring forward the future of human energy production.  Surely, he would consider that a worthy project.  And it would make his dopey electric cars a lot cheaper to charge.

Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough – Not So Much

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There was a giant uproar, “On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed information that had leaked out earlier this week: its National Ignition Facility had reached a new milestone, releasing significantly more fusion energy than was supplied by the lasers that triggered the fusion.”

Specifically, the breakthrough was,

“In terms of specifics, the lasers of the National Ignition Facility deposited 2.05 megajoules into their target in that experiment. Measurements of the energy released afterward indicate that the resulting fusion reactions set loose 3.15 megajoules, a factor of roughly 1.5. That’s the highest output-to-input ratio yet achieved in a fusion experiment.”

But, not so fast!!!!!

“As we noted above, the 3 MJ released in this experiment is a big step up from the amount of energy deposited in the target by the National Ignition Facility’s lasers. But it’s an enormous step down from the 300 MJ or so of grid power that was needed to get the lasers to fire in the first place.”

So, the real situation is that if we expend 300 MJ of electricity, we get 3 MJ of heat in return.  Then we can take that heat and heat a hot water loop and extract some fraction of that energy as electricity.  Woohoo!

“Reaching ignition in a controlled fusion experiment is an achievement that has come after more than 60 years of global research, development, engineering, and experimentation.”

Sixty years of R&D and they’re still two orders of magnitude away from breaking even!  Calling this a breakthrough is beyond pathetic.  But instead, the idiots in charge of our national energy policy ignore fission plants.  Plants that produce gigawatts of electric power day in and out.  Honestly, we’re led by idiots practicing to be imbeciles.

Well, what can I say?  These people are completely predictable and completely clueless.  But at least they keep Ph.D. candidates employed for decades on end.  Well, the road to perdition is at least clearly paved.  Send in the clowns.

Nuclear Power is Coming Back

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Even that animated haircut Gavin Newsom realizes that shutting down the nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon would get him bounced out of his job as governor of the stupidest state in the union.

He’s put the closure on hold until 2030 when he’ll be safely out of politics and doing harm in some other capacity.

And this same realization is coming to all the other geniuses who thought windmills and solar panels could replace the gigawatts of power we currently use to fuel a modern civilization.

“Across the United States, according to the fifth annual ecoAmerica survey, support for nuclear energy has risen to 60% (up from Gallup-reported 51% in 2015. Business Wire says support for nuclear has never been higher, though the survey also reported a majority still harbor fears about nuclear solid waste disposal, health and safety, security and weaponization, and cost.”

And overseas other nations are changing their minds about nuclear power.

” The British – who are even calling for fracking and renewed oil and gas exploration and development in the North Sea – are bullish on nuclear energy today despite plans to close five of its eight old reactors. France, Japan, China, India, Finland and Hungary are also building new nuclear plants, and Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic want to go nuclear.”

Germany, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and Austria have still maintained their pledges to shut down their existing nuclear plants but even the Germans with their dominant Green movement, are probably starting to wonder if reality will allow them to do this in the face of the loss of Russian natural gas.

The hippies dealt the US nuclear industry a seemingly lethal wound after Three Mile Island.  But now the hippies are in nursing homes and maybe their just as stupid children may be forced to decide which they hate more fossil fuels or nuclear power.  They’re going to have to choose one.  Tilting at windmills won’t keep the lights on.

We Interrupt This Disaster to Bring You a Sliver of Hope

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In my less gloomy moments, I try to think about the things we’ll need to do once (or I should say if) we ever pry control of the country away from the woke bug men.  And one of the highest priorities is to master plan the energy economy for this country for the next two hundred years.

Every twenty years or so we have an energy crisis.  Regardless of whether the total oil and gas reserves of this planet can be estimated in decades or centuries, it is criminal for the people in charge of this country to leave the energy decisions in the hands of boobs like Al Gore and Barrack Obama.  These individuals couldn’t perform an energy budget for their own houses never mind the planet.  And as for that cretin in the White House now I wouldn’t trust him to be able to find his own head with both hands.

It’s an undeniable fact that almost every college in America is completely controlled by Leftists.  They not only control the Humanities and Social Science departments but even the hard sciences and engineering are captured.  This is a terrible situation for any number of reasons but it’s also disastrous for the limits it puts on the technological progress that can be made to escape from the group think going on over energy policy.

If all of the engineering students are being shunted into windmill and solar panel design then we’re going to be stuck when the current generation of nuclear and petroleum engineers retire.  Now granted, it’s not like the knowledge will die with these men.  And there are other countries like France and even India where progress is being made in nuclear plant design.  But since the first nuclear pile in the world was built in this country it’s an affront to our history to think that we’ll reach such a sad state that we’ll have to hire foreigners to man our nuclear industry.

I suppose things will have to get a lot worse before they’ll get better.  Maybe it’ll take a major grid meltdown where thousands of people die of frostbite to wake up the woke from their love affair with Gaia.  But whatever it takes I’m pretty sure it will happen eventually.  And afterward the important thing is that the non-leftists must speak convincingly and carefully to the public at large and tell them in no uncertain terms that the future will include nuclear energy in an ever-expanding role.  It doesn’t have to be a sudden switch.  The global warming alarmists have exaggerated the impact of fossil fuels.  But the reality is that once an audit is made of petroleum resources it’s very likely that we will need a new energy source for our great grandchildren.  Waiting until the need is critical is foolish.  There will be associated technologies that will take decades or even centuries to mature to the point where we currently are with oil and gas.

After all, we will probably want to begin transitioning from gasoline to hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.  Building out that infrastructure, both for generation and distribution will require a lot of time and money.  And the whole life cycle of uranium and the other radio-isotopes have to be planned very carefully to optimize safety and cost and minimize waste.

Back in the 1970s there was the Three Mile Island accident in the United States.  The hippies of the Baby Boomer generation were able to destroy the nuclear power industry thanks to the cowardice of the politicians of the time.  And the Chernobyl disaster in the 1980s further sealed its fate.  But the energy density of fission reactors I’m sure will eventually beckon to our descendants and that is where the energy future lies.

As I said, in my more hopeful moments these are the things I see as priorities for our future.  This stands in stark contrast with the idiocy of the Greta Thunbergs of the world.  And it’s probably true that a painful failure of their world view will be a necessary part of moving on to a rational energy policy.  Maybe the way it happens is a Red State takes it upon itself to pioneer a nuclear industry and leave the rest of the country behind.  There’s my guess.

I now return you to your program of doom and gloom already in progress.

How Could I Not Read an Article Called, “Germany’s Energy Fiasco?”

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The author is a German professor named Hans-Werner Sinn.  His bio says he is a German economist who served as President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research from 1999 to 2016. He currently serves on the German Economy Ministry’s advisory council.  He is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich.

What’s refreshing is he writes using facts when he discusses the realities of energy production.  Germany has almost completed its program of shutting down both its coal powered and nuclear-powered electrical generation facilities.  But since wind and solar account for 6.7% of the total energy requirements for the country it uses gas to heat most of its homes and businesses.

And even though 29% of electrical generation comes from wind and solar, whenever these resources fail (which is often) the full load of the electrical grid is powered by gas powered plants.  Therefore, Germany has built a large number of gas-powered plants to supposedly allow the transition to 100% renewables.  So currently, Germany is hopelessly dependent on Russian gas for heat and power.  And even if the whole German land mass was covered in solar cells and the sky was filled with wind turbines they would still need a large amount of gas to heat their homes and run their industry.

Germany’s posturing about boycotting Russian gas is just that.  Posturing.  If Russia were to cut off gas from Germany the country would grind to a halt in less than a week.  And several other European nations are in a similar situation.  This makes Biden’s threats especially hollow.

Reading Sinn’s essay, I am struck that the Greens in Germany have slit their own throats.  Germany had 17 nuclear power plants and an abundance of coal in the ground.  They threw these things away to pay the Russians for gas that produces more of the “dreaded” green house gases than they used to produce.

Good.  Let them stew on their current situation and possibly discover wisdom.

Personally, I hope the Russians do shut off gas to the West for a few weeks.  I think it’s valuable for people to get what they say they want.  It has a clarifying effect.  Sometimes it’s even educational, depending on the intellect of the recipient.

What Will Real Energy Innovation Look Like?

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Back when Barry Soweto pretended to be an American president, he spent his terms in office trying to convince us that solar and wind powered electric generation installations were the future of the American energy strategy.  Because he was just an actor playing a part, he can be partially excused for espousing a policy that is pathetically absurd.

If you covered the planet with wind turbines, land and sea, besides killing off the bird population of the planet you would not solve the energy problems of the human population.  Wind by itself is a fluctuating power source.  As are photo-voltaic solar panels.  On their own they will not provide the kind of consistent supply of electric power that we expect from our electrical utilities.  That is why California, the land of fruits and nuts, that despises fossil fuels, has recently installed many gas turbine generators to augment the unreliable and inadequate “renewable” wind and sun-based generation.

None of this is to say that wind and sun-based power is valueless.  In places where there is substantial wind and plentiful sunny days there is power to be harvested.  But it should be used in an intelligent manner.  Storing that energy in a recoverable form would allow it to be accumulated into a valuable commodity.  For instance, if it was the power source for an electrolytic process for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen then that hydrogen could be stored and used later as a vehicle fuel, chemical raw material or for combustion to fuel electrical generation.

Or sun and wind generated power could be used as a source of power for water desalination plants.  The output of the plant would be controlled so that at night when only wind power was available a lower out put would be maintained and likewise in the day when clouds limited the amount of solar energy available.

But with these environmental energy sources careful attention should be made to the cost of maintaining the generation infrastructure.  I have been told that the replacement cost of the solar panels had been ignored in the Obama era installation of these panels willy-nilly across the roofs of unsuspecting Americans.  Just because the government decides to “give” you something for free doesn’t mean that the cost of these items make them sensible investments.  And the cost of maintaining wind turbines also must be reckoned in the calculation of their desirability as an energy choice.

And there are other energy sources that must be explored.  Geothermal energy has only seen limited exploitation because of the scarcity of obvious geothermal hot spots.  But if resources are made available to study how a more general approach could be taken there might be great gain to be made on this front.

But the most obvious source of energy has been available to us for almost a hundred years.  Nuclear fission thermal power stations provide enormously dense energy supplies in almost limitless capacity.  The fact that there are safety and waste management challenges in such a complex and new technology is hardly surprising.  The fact that people around the world have allowed themselves to be panicked into abandoning this technology says more about the low morale of the current human population than it does about the difficulty of harnessing this amazing natural resource.  After all radioactivity is the source of the sun’s power and in fact the nuclear fusion that powers the sun is a much more technically challenging process for humans to harvest than the heat coming off of a fission pile.  To think that radioactive energy is any more mysterious than electrical or chemical energy is to be a primitive undeserving to utilize modern technology, one who should be relegated to living in a cave and warming himself by wearing furs and daubing himself with mastodon lard, too stupid to harness the frightening technology of fire.

The good news is that more confident humans at some time in the near future will return to nuclear power.  If the West fails to be the ones to do it then they will see themselves eclipsed and will deservedly sink into the lower echelons of third world nationhood.  Hopefully before that happens the modern humans among us will rally the people and admonish them to man up.

Declassified Footage of the 1961 Soviet 50 Megaton Hydrogen Bomb (Tsar Bomba)

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If you’re interested in what the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated was like this 40 minute documentary will more than satisfy curiosity.  I was reading an article that stated after this detonation Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb told President Kennedy’s advisors that he was interested in producing a 10,000 megaton hydrogen bomb.  Kennedy declined. Even my bloodthirstiness might not be up to that challenge.

I will admit they knew how to do things in a big way back then.

The Country Leading the World Into a Nuclear Power Future – Finland?

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Apparently the Finns have taken a decisive step toward making nuclear power the basis for their electric energy generating capability right through the next century.  The Finns have done the work to not only move into the next generation of nuclear power plant design but they are currently building the first modern large scale long term (permanent) repository for spent fuel rods.

If only Americans were as realistic and logical, especially all those global warming kooks who want to get away from fossil fuels but are too stupid to realize we already have the technology that will replace fossil fuels in the future.