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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:26:50 GMT 9.5
My lord this "study" isn't worth the shine on a dog turd. More coming
"The statistical methods used were similar to those used in previous international studies of nuclear workers.18 We quantified radiation dose-mortality associations by using a stratum specific model for mortality rates, Ik, of the form Ik=exp(αk)(1+βZ), where k indexes strata, Z is the cumulative dose in Gy, and β is excess relative rate (the relative rate minus 1) per Gy."
Translation: we made up a bogus correlation hypothesis using math salad - boldly stating that which remains to be proven - and explicitly assume LNT in order to prove that LNT is correct. Conclusion: see hypothesis.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:22:05 GMT 9.5
More quotes from this excellent study:
"We derived individual annual estimates of whole body dose primarily due to external exposure to penetrating radiation in the form of photons from personal occupational exposure monitoring data. Unless otherwise stated, any reference to dose in this paper implies absorbed dose to the colon expressed in gray (Gy). We derived the estimated colon dose to facilitate comparison with analyses of associations between radiation dose and solid cancer done in other major cohorts"
Translation: we couldn't be bothered to look at individual organ dose, so we took the whole yearly body dose, without consideration of dose rates, and guessed what the organ dose would be based on someone else's bogus studies, who of course also did not look at dose rates and whose data quality is not clear, but who cares!
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:18:42 GMT 9.5
More quotes:
"INWORKS was established to provide a basis for deriving quantitative estimates of the association between protracted low dose, low dose rate exposure to ionising radiation and mortality. INWORKS builds on the work done for the International Collaborative Study of Cancer Risk among Radiation Workers in the Nuclear Industry by taking advantage of data from the most informative cohorts involved in that study.19 Criteria for selection of the study cohorts included completeness and quality of data, start of facility operations, and exposure primarily to high energy, low linear energy transfer penetrating radiations."
Translation: we pretend to have a rich and sophisticated database to infer risk to low dose rate radiation, but it doesn't actually distinguish between dose rates, and instead lumps in all doses into total doses in cohorts. Just pretend that dose rate was a criteria for distinguishing even though we didn't say it was.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:15:38 GMT 9.5
Another quote from this delightful study:
" INWORKS pools cohorts of nuclear workers monitored with radiation badges in France, the UK, and the US, countries that have assembled some of the largest and most informative cohorts of nuclear workers in the world"
Translation: first we pretend that dose rate doesn't matter, and only total dose matters, and we can't be bothered to distinguish for dose rate despite our excellent database. So instead we bin together large amounts of workers so that this won't be obvious to the casual observer and we can smudge out the data in large cohorts so no one will even ask us about this.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 4:12:21 GMT 9.5
Quote from the study: "The study of Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs serves as the primary basis for the quantitative risk estimates used in radiation protection. Although that study concerns a high dose rate setting, findings from it inform contemporary assessments for low dose and low dose rate radiation exposures."
Translation: the atomic bomb study was all irrelevant high dose rate exposure, but we, professional researchers, all pretend this is relevant to lower dose rate exposures because we can't be bothered to study actual (and available) low dose rate data".
Gee whiz! We have data showing people who drink 100 glasses of alcohol a day showing rather clearly it is bad for you, therefore this informs the risk of people that take half a glass of wine with their dinner! Yah! This is SCIENCE!
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 22, 2023 3:48:09 GMT 9.5
Thanks Roger, great to hear from you again!
You're probably preaching to the choir here - and so am I - but after endless years of reading endless research on dose response, some commonalities can be easily distilled:
1. Data quality especially in the low dose range is poor. The supposed "gold standard" of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors is absulute sheit in terms of data quality in the lower dose cohorts. Neither the data nor the binning would be accepted by scientific rigor. This is suspicious since large resources were spent on these studies and the conclusions derived are rather strong (ie LNT). When it's noise rather than signal it is time to be honest and say we can't use the low dose data. Cancer just happens a lot and when the dose is low there's not much cancer due to radiation and a lot of cancer due to "normal" causes. 2. Nuclear power industry does not cause much dose. There's tons of shielding by design and then more by operations so even nuclear workers don't get much dose. Dose is measured very accurately using calibrated devices so unlike other industries handling carcinogens we have very good data here. 3. Cancer is an old people's disease. As time goes on we see more cancer incidence. This has nothing to do with radiation and certainly not with nuclear power, which causes little dose even to people working with it. 4. Dose seems almost completely irrelevant. Dose rate seems the only thing that really matters. This is also supported by point number 1. Anything below 2 mSv/day is noise at worst and beneficial at best. This is true even for very high total dose rates - the Co-60 irradited Beagle dogs being an excellent controlled lab experiment. 5. Alarmists and critics don't like controlled lab experiments on animals. They prefer statistical studies on humans that have endless uncontrolled variables that create noise. They then use the noise to claim there's a high risk to humans. They implicitly claim that humans are special and other mammals somehow are not relevant. 6. Alarmists don't like studies that show positive effects. That can't be right, right? Let's ignore those, and only accept the ones (using statistically bogus data) that show negative effects, at high dose rates only. Radiation must be bad for you, so if any study shows positive effects, we reject those, then use the remainder to prove that radiation is bad for you. Circular logic, my dear Watson? 7. Having ignored # 6, let's pretend that dose rate doesn't matter, since we have cherry picked only high dose rate studies of bogus statistical endurance. Sift through the pile and only retain the sheit. 8. Having ignored everything above and using the sheit, let us claim that there is a linear relationship with dose and ignore dose rate. 9. # 8 doesn't add up even on it's own terms, so let's add a bogus correction factor called dose rate correction factor to pretend that dose rate doesn't matter in order to pretend that only total dose matters and the relationship is linear, even by self-admission it just isn't. Yeah the dose rate doesn't matter, but we had to use a dose rate correction factor to make the data work to our bogus model that says so. 10. In case anyone (people with less than half a functioning brain) are not deceived, let us focos on particulars such as solid cancer or leukemia, rather than total mortality (ie life expectancy ie actual risk). We can't talk about total life expectancy/risk because that would undermine our entire argument about there being higher risk, even using the bogus approach taken above.
The inescapable conclusion is that the people involved who push LNT are involved in a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage. It is just people with ulterior agenda's. There's no real science going on in the "establishment" that maintains the LNT lie.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 20, 2023 17:24:11 GMT 9.5
A good website for data on the British national grid. grid.iamkate.com/The UK is an interesting example of a successful coal power phaseout using mostly wind power, and a little sun. Impressively, and surprisingly (to me, as a renewables critic) with little increase in natural gas and no increase in nuclear. Even more impressive when you look at electric prices, they have not risen much (recent rise is due to the geopolitical situation with Russian gas etc). CO2 emissions per kWh have dropped from 500 g to 150g. A 70% reduction in 10 years is quite impressive as well. Of course they also increased interconnectors and it isn’t entirely clear how this is accounted for, but that’s a minority of their power supply. In all I am very much impressed by the UK efforts, at least in terms of electricity supply.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 19, 2023 2:12:54 GMT 9.5
So you are wearing out an expensive EV battery at increased rates due to extra cycles.
This is the same as having a stationary battery in terms of costs. No, even worse since with stationairy you can use more durable, heavier batteries that dont cycle out so much.
Scheduling charge times to balance the grid is smart. Actively discharging and thus cycling expensive EV batteries is not.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 17, 2023 21:55:47 GMT 9.5
Very misleading “study”. At under 100 mSv, cancer risk from such tiny doses is hard to detect, as other causes for cancer would swamp the data, creating poor signal to noise. More importantly, it doesn’t consider that total mortality (including cancers) is lower for nuclear workers. They have higher life expectancy than non nuclear workers. So total risk is lower.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 14, 2023 18:45:57 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 14, 2023 18:45:31 GMT 9.5
Pumping water up a hill is a fairly cheap and simple method of bulk energy storage. Unfortunately the needed geology and topology for this makes it rather limited on the global energyscape. Pumping air instead of water is clearly much less limiting. Everyone has air. Of course, storing air in large pressure vessels on the surface is an economic non-starter, but it is easy to excavate or solution-mine large underground caverns. Problem with air is that it's compressible. Pumping it results in wasteful heat generation, and the machinery has to operate across a wide pressure range, meaning off-design points. Existing plants such as at Huntorf and Mcintosh simply dump the compression heat, and provide expander heating by burning natural gas, which is inefficient and generates CO2 emissions. Canadian company hydrostor has fixed the problem by regenerating the produced heat in a thermal store, and using a water pond and compensating column to operate isobarically. www.hydrostor.ca/They claim it is very cheap. Though they use excavated caverns which are more expensive, and their thermal store seems expensive too. (spherical storage tanks are not economical). So I'm not really buying their claims. A solution-mined salt cavern would be a lot cheaper. Large salt formations are common enough. The brine created from solution mining could be used for the water compensating pond. Brine is denser than water, so the operating pressure is increased accordingly. For the thermal store, would it be possible to increase the number of stages so as to allow cheap hot water storage (<100C)? Pit thermal energy storage (PTES) such as being used in Denmark is currently the lowest cost thermal storage option.
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 11, 2023 1:53:59 GMT 9.5
The school example of a Pyrrhic victory. Those involved have conspired, wittingly or no, to effectively disable the nuclear revolution in the USA. They can congratulate themselves on tramping under the green shoot, proving the sceptics and stereotypes were right all along, and obliterating a new chance for nuclear power. Congratulations, murderers!
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Post by cyrilr on Aug 10, 2023 19:52:54 GMT 9.5
Could be useful for small remote energy storage apps. This material is too expensive for large scale energy storage. Gotta think rock, gravel, sand level of cheapness to compete. Or really cheap salts like common chlorides and nitrides. I’m analyzing a thermocline system of solar salt (nano3-kno3 eutectic) in a cheap excavated pit with cheap quarzite rock and sand as filler. It is coming in at about 2 cents per kwh levelized cost. Very promising.
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Post by cyrilr on Jul 8, 2023 20:21:27 GMT 9.5
Nations Aim To Zero Out Shipping Emissions By Midcentury Max Bearak 2023 Jul 06 NYTimes www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/climate/cargo-ship-emissions-agreement.htmlCargo ships burn bunker oil, so thick it must be heated to liquify for pumping. The agreement is to replace these ships, over time, by those burning hydrogen or ammonia, hopefully so-called green products, i.e., produced without the use of fossil fuels. Given the challenges of storing hydrogen on ships, I suspect it will be better, for the time being, to use green hydrogen to catalytically upgrade the bunker oil. That way there is increased use of green hydrogen in shipping as well as cleaner burning fuels, without the non starters such as massive hydrogen tanks that displace valuable cargo space. The logical conclusion of this would be a transition to green LNG. I doubt the step from there to hydrogen will be made at all, barring some breakthrough in hydrogen storage - perhaps MOFs or hydride storage.
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Post by cyrilr on Jul 7, 2023 4:39:36 GMT 9.5
Too expensive. Better to do demand side management - especially cooling loads (aircons and freezers) that can be turned on or off. Ice storage is much cheaper than lithium batteries. This would work way better with baseload sources, since there's more predictable load as well as no seasonal variations. So storage needs would plummet. Not gonna happen in California. They're stuck with sunshine and rainbows & will have to make to, most likely by importing more energy (directly as well as indirectly, by chasing away industry). I guess it isn't a problem to pay thousands of dollars more in energy if you have million dollar beachfront property.
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Post by cyrilr on Jul 3, 2023 19:16:44 GMT 9.5
world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Finnish-SMR-targets-district-heating-marketBasically a lower temperature version of nuscale (they need to watch out for IP). Don’t see the point of this; district heating is under 100c so it could be done with a pool type reactor. That’s simpler and cheaper and more accessible. Plus it allows the spent fuel heat to be used productively. District heating does have some issues. High infrastructure cost, paired with low annual utilization, hurts the economics. I live in northern Europe, but my boiler is idle 5 months a year. Shutting down a nuclear reactor 5 months a year is a poor business proposal.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 24, 2023 5:09:48 GMT 9.5
Yes, I understand that is how it works from the operator viewpoint. Simply pointing out this is not how it works from the system viewpoint, specifically, the final cost to the consumer (generation+storage+transmission fees) and system CO2 emissions, fuel use, etc. That is the problem I am pointing out. We are all caught up in our own myopia here - and the mainstream media and glossy consulting firms like Lazard are adding to the problem.
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Post by cyrilr on Jun 23, 2023 18:49:46 GMT 9.5
LCOE is not an appropriate metric for intermittent non dispatchable power sources like solar and wind. System cost and thus final energy delivered to the consumer is what matters. Wind and solar have no capacity, and the low capacity factor results in high grid connect and integration costs.
It is more appropriate to think that the LCOE of solar is an ADDED cost to the consumer. So not an LCOE of $30/MWh but added cost of $30/MWh. Even that is being too kind; cost of the grid upgrades alone dwarfs the cost of the PV system. All countries pushing solar have increasing cost of energy. It gets worse the higher the penetration of solar as more and more energy must be curtailed.
And in all of this circus, we see no fossil plants being actually shut down. Indeed the fossil plants will run at lower efficiency and thus more fuel use due to throttling a lot to accomodate the intermittent energy.
It is time we drop the tired LCOE lie and start taking a systems perspective.
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Post by cyrilr on May 25, 2023 23:19:12 GMT 9.5
Biofuels are part of the problem. This has been known and understood by most energy experts for years. We need to stop pretending we can burn our way out of our energy problems. Our problems are caused by burning too much. We need to stop burning stuff. Only non combustion based energy solutions scale up to the point of sustainability.
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Post by cyrilr on May 20, 2023 18:08:06 GMT 9.5
I'm sceptical about such small reactors in general and in particular this technology. Small fast reactors have a very big economic problem in the large startup fissile loading, all at high enrichment too. The first core is technically part of the CAPEX and that really hurts the business case. Similarly many other costs are not very sensitive to scale, things like licensing, security, biological shielding, containment... in fact most things have such a large economy of scale that this makes small reactors really expensive. Nuscale is finding this out at UAMPS, and they have a lower fissile loading and a higher unit rating, as well as sharing many expensive systems and components across multiple reactors. Oklo will be much worse. Might be ok for some niche applications like remote terrestrial powering where the alternative is expensive diesel (brought in at expensive transport costs), but for grid powering this will be a very tough business case.
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Post by cyrilr on May 20, 2023 17:35:08 GMT 9.5
So curtailment is growing faster in % than deployment. Proves my points nicely. Forcing large amounts of intermittent, low capacity factor wind and solar on the grid means the grid gets to max cap. A 20% capacity factor solar farm has 4x the grid demand as an 80% capacity factor baseload plant. And consequently roughly 4x the grid cost. The needed grid investments are a hidden cost for renewables, just like the backup generators (fossil powered), batteries, and so on. The GKG study for Germany, which didn't even consider grid cost or issues at all, and was idealized, optimized in generation deployment which isn't realistic, still had like 70+% curtailment with wind and solar plus batteries. Basically even with batteries the model optimized for throwing away 2 out of every 3 kWh generated by wind and solar. Ain't going to happen. What will happen is continued fossil fuel burn as it gets exponentially more difficult to put more and more wind and solar on the grid so at some point we just stop doing that. All this stuff has been known for donkeys years. When are people going to get smart and realize that modern industrialized civilizations can't be powered by sunshine and rainbows?
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Post by cyrilr on May 8, 2023 23:31:29 GMT 9.5
Australia electricity prices remain lower than Europe. To convert the Euros, multiply by 0.61 and then note euenergy.livealthough these prices are higher than in the USA. Comparing those numbers it appears Australian electricity prices are much higher than in Europe, even if we multiply by .61. For example Queensland 27 * 0.61 = 16.5 cents/kWh. Nuclear France is at 9.6 cents/kWh now. A lot of Europe has the dumb renewables policy and that has increased cost. Even France has been building out renewables even though it doesn't save any emissions (which is dumber than dumb). The German prices are excluding the feed in tariff structure among other things, it doesn't reveal the real costs.
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Post by cyrilr on May 8, 2023 5:12:46 GMT 9.5
Electricity Cost per kWh by State in Australia electricitywizard.com.au/electricity/electricity-cost/electricity-cost-per-kwh/wherein, quite aways down, one finds the averages per state. Note that the majority live in Queens., NSW & Vics with about the same prices while somehow ACT is noticeably less. Far out on the tail end of the NEM, SA has the highest prices despite having plenty of wind potential. All of those prices are among the highest in the world, anywhere. Proves my point nicely. Pretty much any country that has pushed renewables has doubled or tripled their cost per kWh. Simultaneously what has also doubled or tripled is renewables propaganda in the media. I swear if I hear one more "solar and storage is now cheaper than baseload" from these intellectual featherweights I will have an aneurism. What will it take to plug people back into Planet Earth?
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Post by cyrilr on May 7, 2023 20:37:05 GMT 9.5
That’s an understatement. Australia’s plan seems to be to increase wind and solar so that there’s more coal available for export. www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2019/sep/the-changing-global-market-for-australian-coal.htmlThe net results: 1. Higher global CO2 emissions (increased global coal consumption) 2. Higher electricity costs (wind and solar have no capacity so are added costs not real substitutes) 3. Higher consumption of non renewable resources (metals, plastics and concrete to make the wind and solar generators, batteries, grid expansion) Explain to me who is winning here?
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Post by cyrilr on May 6, 2023 19:38:23 GMT 9.5
So the AP300 is a scaled down version of the AP1000, a mostly 30 year old design. The AP1000 is a scaled up version of the AP600, a 50 year old design. The AP600 is a scaled down version of a large PWR from 60 years ago. Which is a scaled up version of a submarine reactor from 70 years ago.
So the AP300 is a scaled down version of a scaled up version of a scaled down version of a reactor that is a scaled up version of a 1954 submarine reactor.
And people are surprised Westinghouse went bankrupt?
What surprises me is this supposed bankrupt company sure is spending a lot of money on new developments. And that people get in bed with them. And that they proudly vlaim they “only” need 4 years to license an already proven design using WWII tech.
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Post by cyrilr on May 2, 2023 20:59:55 GMT 9.5
I keep getting back to this “wowsers” graph: ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energyNo sign of energy demand slowing. Only positive thing I can find requires zooming in a lot, showing that coal is levelling out. Everything else keeps on growing. Even more worrisome: there have been several energy “transitions” already: 1. Biomass to coal 2. Coal to oil 3. Oil to gas 4. Gas to nuclear 5 nuclear to wind and solar EXCEPT: these were not “transitions” - they were ADDITIONS. Coal didn’t stop us from using biomass - we use more of it. Oil didn’t stop coal - we use more of it. Etc etc. Every time there has been a new energy source, we kept using the old ones, indeed more of them. Why would this renewables “transition” be any different?
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Post by cyrilr on May 2, 2023 20:54:00 GMT 9.5
What we call heat pumps is completely irrelevant.
Even Shakespeare knew that.
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 30, 2023 18:18:58 GMT 9.5
Decent analysis, except for the claim of lower global primary energy consumption by 2050. Considering tech development (more server farms etc.) and the general growth in affluence and population, we absolutely have to plan for a lot more Global primary energy consumption, not less. Yes, electrifying everything we can will bring efficiency improvements, but that isn’t nearly as big as the increase in demand from new tech, affluence and population growth. Heck over a billion people have little or no access to electricity at all!
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 27, 2023 0:01:51 GMT 9.5
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Post by cyrilr on Apr 22, 2023 0:51:58 GMT 9.5
Not impressed. Australia is leading the world in terms of % of solar in its grids yet it hasn't used less fossil fuels. Basically flat for the last 15 years. www.iea.org/countries/australiaIf this is the leader in solar energy and among the sunniest and lowest population density countries in the world, it doesn't bode well for solar energy. Intermittency related problems increase exponentially at higher penetrations. This is only starting to become a problem. 4 hour fancy Tesla batteries are nice PR but nowhere near enough to get off of fossil fuels. Plus they add over 20 cents/kWh to your power, not to mention millions of tonnes of battery wastes.
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