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Post by John Morgan on Aug 2, 2013 12:58:22 GMT 9.5
Imagine the waste stream from solar panels covering 1% of non-ice land surface area going to landfill every 20 years.
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Post by John Morgan on Mar 16, 2013 6:49:40 GMT 9.5
Karl Friedrich Lenz has responded to this article at his blog, k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9040 His take on the 50 million truckloads is, (1) its a good problem to have, (2) choose closer deserts, and (3) airlift the panels with helium blimps instead of trucks.
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Post by John Morgan on Mar 15, 2013 8:57:13 GMT 9.5
Thanks for a great article Geoff.
Not mentioned was all the diesel consumed by those 50 million B-double loads to get the panels to their destination. And remember, those loads don't start from your local solar shop. They don't start from a container loading dock in Sydney. They all start from a factory somewhere in mainland China (in all likelihood).
By the time they travel to the middle of Australia, do they ever produce enough energy to be a net greenhouse gas saving?
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 20:01:28 GMT 9.5
cyrilr, agree about high temperature synthesis or SOFC electrolysis. Cycling that stuff doesn't work, and capital utilization requires maximum throughput.
I don't like the idea of using direct membrane separation of CO2. That implies high pressure forcing of very large volumes of seawater through molecularly tight membranes. The energy cost would be enormous.
The reason the PARC membrane process looks feasible is that that is not what is going on. In that process, an electric field across the membrane produces H+ on one side and OH- on the other. The seawater is merely passed past the membrane, not through it. Much lower power requirements, low pressure operation and higher throughput than a desalination plant.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 16:22:52 GMT 9.5
Darryl, the mass concentration of CO2 (and the dissolved carbon species in equilibrium with it) in seawater is about 140x the mass concentration in air. Your NRL figure, the figure cited by the Navy paper, and by the PARC researchers are all in agreement. They're all in the range 97-110 mg/L.
I hold a particularly dim view of insinuations of scientists "fudging results to keep bread on the table", and the individuals who make them. Prove it or retract it.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 13:37:48 GMT 9.5
I got a nice email from Matthew Eisaman, the lead author on the PARC article, which I thought I would reproduce here:
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 18, 2013 12:32:08 GMT 9.5
Darryl, the Navy paper cites the seawater concentration of CO2 (or its dissolved species equivalent) as 100 mg/L, two orders of magnitude higher than the air concentration of 0.7 mg/L.
The energy cost for pulling CO2 from seawater by the PARC process was measured as 242 kJ/mol, which is more than twice as efficient as the Navy process. I didn't really talk about the Navy process, the PARC extraction system is better and is the basis of the costings I gave, which look pretty good.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 17, 2013 13:24:38 GMT 9.5
David, I'll refer you to the PARC paper I linked in the article. Those researchers ran experiments with RO brine, I assume for just such reasons. It worked fine.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 17, 2013 11:41:38 GMT 9.5
edireland, great comment, some very interesting ideas.
I did mention SOFCs in passing for hydrogen synthesis, but thought a high temperature gas reactor driving the sulfur-iodine water splitting cycle made more sense - energy is both produced and consumed in the thermal domain, without incurring losses from conversion to electricity, or the cost of turbines & generators.
But if the reverse water gas shift can run more efficiently in an SOFC then there may be cost savings in the fuel synthesis. I thought these ceramic electrolytes required temperatures around 800 C, which is hotter than a conventional LWR, hence the HTGR. There seems to be a lot of opportunity for integration of an HTGR with sulfur-iodine water splitting and syngas production.
The idea of running the process on excess production capacity, like desal, would certainly bring the cost down, even in the more expensive civilian electricity scenarios.
And the bacterial protein production from syn-methanol, well, that just blows my mind. There's the base of a food chain that is entirely decoupled from solar energy, like the extremophile communities feeding off sulfur from submarine ocean vents. Maybe we could call it soylent green and feed it to people.
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Post by John Morgan on Jan 16, 2013 22:53:06 GMT 9.5
Cyril, in Table 1 I consider the cost of synfuel made using electricity at a cost of 5.4 c/kWh (the median cost of established nuclear electricity from Nicholson, Biegler & Brook's review). The synfuel cost is $1.47 /litre. Most of this is electricity. From my cost model (really the Navy's cost model), the electricity component is $1.04. The balance is in capital, O&M, etc. This is in complete agreement with the cost you suggest.
It gets interesting if you can run the process with electricity costs corresponding either to the low end of current Chinese builds, or what the US navy could charge itself (see Table 1 again).
I agree with your last point. As I wrote in the conclusion "for a long time the most environmentally effective application [of clean energy] will be to displace coal power, and gas".
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Post by John Morgan on Nov 15, 2012 22:16:15 GMT 9.5
Way back when the Energy White Paper was the Draft Energy White Paper I wrote a post for BNC that highlighted this text in Box 6.3: and asked: What, precisely, is this timeframe, and when does this option on a non-nuclear future expire? Whatever it was when I wrote that article, its one whole year less now, so we’d better figure it out soon.
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Post by John Morgan on Jul 11, 2012 17:55:29 GMT 9.5
I think the great achievement of Barry's advocacy has been to normalize the discussion of nuclear power. The debate with Ludlum was a calm and (mostly) reasonable discussion, without the heat the topic can engender, and without political partisanship. Its difficult to imagine such a discussion happening five years ago. And this is great - people aren't open to changing their minds if they feel defensive or if they think they're being badgered. But if the positions are put calmly they can absorb and consider what is said. And, as the recent IQ2 debate (which I wrote about here) showed, a lot of people are prepared to change their positions given just a little basic information. So this approach has good prospects for building public support. I liked the closing question to Ludlum - same as I put to Ian Lowe at IQ2. In future I think an answer in units of degrees should be insisted upon, for a passing grade.
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 27, 2012 8:56:44 GMT 9.5
Just saw the thread rearrangement - much better, I think!
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 26, 2012 22:30:52 GMT 9.5
I think the web view looks a lot like the World Wide Web circa 1996 - lots of rather garish graphical elements, horrible typography (e.g.., the "quote modify delete " field, background clashing with text (e.g. "BNC Discussion Forum - Know More, Fear Less!" at the top of this thread), clashing colors, aggressive gradient fills, etc. I don't have to deal with that on the iOS app. The layout and design is nice and clean. The app has a nice view of the latest posts across all threads and an unread count. It doesn't require constant pinch-to-zoom resizing like the web view (probably less of an issue on the iPad than my iPhone but I think it would still drive me nuts). Its fast. And its easy access while I'm away from my computer.
Drop three bucks on it. Bill me if you hate it.
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 26, 2012 22:13:13 GMT 9.5
Another point on layout - the first view of these discussion boards when you arrive at the website is the Nuclear Power section, with a bunch of thread title with the usual nuclear scare words. I think this may be off-putting to your target audience, i.e.:
"Environmentalists who disregard or oppose nuclear energy, and instead believe that renewables are sufficient (or that continuing to rely on fossil fuels is a rational energy policy)."
I would order the topics something like:
Blog Posts Climate Change Energy Science, Engineering and New Technology
I think that the focus of this blog and discussion is climate change, despite the obvious interest in nuclear technologies. It makes sense that that should be the focus when first viewing the loaded page.
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 26, 2012 21:56:03 GMT 9.5
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 26, 2012 21:51:35 GMT 9.5
I think blog posts should get their own high-level category e.g.. at the same level as "General", possibly organized into folders by year. That way we'll always know where to go to for the commentary on the latest post, the posts won't get sprinkled through the various categories, and you won't have to figure out where some some post with a non-obvious categorization wound up.
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Post by John Morgan on Apr 23, 2012 22:41:02 GMT 9.5
It will be interesting to see how this works out. Could be very useful. On the other hand I see a possibility to dilute the commentary at the blog, which is one of the great strengths of bnc as an online community. I don't know how you manage that. For now, let a thousand flowers bloom (if you dare www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/226950.html). Here are some category suggestions: Engage - I would like to think we are doing more than just talking to ourselves. Some area for discussion on how to turn our aims into reality through outreach, like Ben Heard is trying to do, seems important. Australian Politics (with a climate change and energy focus) - Locally topical. I think its important to have somewhere to talk about what achievements/shenanigans our servants are delivering to us. Geoengineering Discussion regarding the blog - e.g. suggestions for posts, community management, metadiscussion etc. Split "Solar and Wind"into two categories. Commerical nuclear energy today - spelling. 'Natural' gas (methane) - don't see the need for quotes - it is indeed as natural as milk and honey, fratricide, arsenic and cyanide. cheers, john
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