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Australian Wildfires

Moving some posts re the Australian wildfires to a separate topic Luciano Bacco‍

Luciano Bacco:

Climate Crisis. The reason Australia is red. Australian wildfires have cloaked the country in a demonic red glow. As the new decade begins underneath a blood-red sky, the need for solutions is even more pressing.
https://www.inverse.com/article/62058-why-do-wildfires-turn-the-sky-red?link_uid=9&utm_campaign=inverse-daily-2020-01-03&utm_medium=inverse&utm_source=newsletter

And:
https://interestingengineering.com/a-magpie-in-australia-mimics-emergency-responder-sirens-because-things-are-that-bad?_source=newsletter&_campaign=a0bglamBn02qr&_uid=YQdJzWvdOG&_h=c5182a5a087e2b004ca4aca7c1e307f54e8a1507&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=mailing&utm_campaign=Newsletter-04-01-2020

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/australian-bushfires-new-south-wales-koalas-sydney-a4322071.html#spark_wn=1

Parents

0 Roger B over 4 years ago

The problem with ‘clean‘ energy as with ‘CO2 neutral’ is determining exactly what is meant by these terms.
As I have posted before:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What does CO2 Neutral mean?
1) Don’t burn anything that contains carbon?
2) Burn things containing carbon and then stick the carbon back in the ground somehow?
3) Burn things containing carbon and buy carbon credits (indulgences)?
The technology for 2) does not exist in an industrial form yet and probably won’t by 2050. It might be available by 2100. If the whole world is trying to become CO2 neutral there won’t be enough carbon credits to go round for 3) to be practical so that leaves 1).
1) means don’t burn coal, oil or gas (possibly wood as well) for:
a) Electricity generation
b) Process heating
c) Domestic heating
d) Transport
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So what is ‘clean’ energy? The popular view would be that this means Wind, Solar and Wave/Tidal power generation. All these sources have a fundamental problem, their low energy density, which means you need to invest a large amount of resources to collect this energy. Finding good data on these resources is difficult. It is much easier to find for conventional power sources, the amount of concrete and steel required to build Hinckley Point C is readily available on line.

Based on the data I could find at the time to produce 3GWe from wind using a capacity factor of 30% required more concrete and steel than Hinckley Point C. The expected life of a wind turbine is 20-25 years with one or two gearbox and bearing replacements. The planned life of Hinckley Point C is 60 years with an expected life of 80 years so wind, without considering how to deal with the intermittency, will require 3 times as much basic building material.

The ‘clean’ technologies of choice also require a variety of currently not so commonly produced elements such a Cobalt, Lithium, the Rare Earths. These all require mining and processing which are certainly not clean processes.

What about fuel for nuclear power plants? This has the advantage of a very high energy density. With current reactor designs the fuel consumption is around 10T per GW year which after reprocessing leaves around 750 kg of high level waste. The rest is reusable uranium and plutonium. Newer reactor designs will allow for better use of the fuel as they, hopefully, will not be required to produce weapons grade plutonium (if the fuel is in the reactor for too long other plutonium isotopes are formed which inhibit its use for nuclear bombs).

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/nuclear-fuel-cycle-overview.aspx

Nuclear certainly has it’s problems but they are quite small readily contained problems. Most of the actual deaths from the nuclear power plant accidents were due to unnecessary evacuations not radiation. The current radiation dose limits do not have any scientific basis, as has been said many times LNT is just a theory. No ill effects have yet been determined in populations who live in areas where the natural background radiation is more than ten times the official limits. The widely published number of future deaths (100,000+) for Chernobyl based on collective dose (derived from LNT) is just a made up number.

Best Regards

Roger
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0 Roger B over 4 years ago

The problem with ‘clean‘ energy as with ‘CO2 neutral’ is determining exactly what is meant by these terms.
As I have posted before:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What does CO2 Neutral mean?
1) Don’t burn anything that contains carbon?
2) Burn things containing carbon and then stick the carbon back in the ground somehow?
3) Burn things containing carbon and buy carbon credits (indulgences)?
The technology for 2) does not exist in an industrial form yet and probably won’t by 2050. It might be available by 2100. If the whole world is trying to become CO2 neutral there won’t be enough carbon credits to go round for 3) to be practical so that leaves 1).
1) means don’t burn coal, oil or gas (possibly wood as well) for:
a) Electricity generation
b) Process heating
c) Domestic heating
d) Transport
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So what is ‘clean’ energy? The popular view would be that this means Wind, Solar and Wave/Tidal power generation. All these sources have a fundamental problem, their low energy density, which means you need to invest a large amount of resources to collect this energy. Finding good data on these resources is difficult. It is much easier to find for conventional power sources, the amount of concrete and steel required to build Hinckley Point C is readily available on line.

Based on the data I could find at the time to produce 3GWe from wind using a capacity factor of 30% required more concrete and steel than Hinckley Point C. The expected life of a wind turbine is 20-25 years with one or two gearbox and bearing replacements. The planned life of Hinckley Point C is 60 years with an expected life of 80 years so wind, without considering how to deal with the intermittency, will require 3 times as much basic building material.

The ‘clean’ technologies of choice also require a variety of currently not so commonly produced elements such a Cobalt, Lithium, the Rare Earths. These all require mining and processing which are certainly not clean processes.

What about fuel for nuclear power plants? This has the advantage of a very high energy density. With current reactor designs the fuel consumption is around 10T per GW year which after reprocessing leaves around 750 kg of high level waste. The rest is reusable uranium and plutonium. Newer reactor designs will allow for better use of the fuel as they, hopefully, will not be required to produce weapons grade plutonium (if the fuel is in the reactor for too long other plutonium isotopes are formed which inhibit its use for nuclear bombs).

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/introduction/nuclear-fuel-cycle-overview.aspx

Nuclear certainly has it’s problems but they are quite small readily contained problems. Most of the actual deaths from the nuclear power plant accidents were due to unnecessary evacuations not radiation. The current radiation dose limits do not have any scientific basis, as has been said many times LNT is just a theory. No ill effects have yet been determined in populations who live in areas where the natural background radiation is more than ten times the official limits. The widely published number of future deaths (100,000+) for Chernobyl based on collective dose (derived from LNT) is just a made up number.

Best Regards

Roger
Cancel
Vote Up 0 Vote Down

Cancel

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Australian Wildfires

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