A recent conversation about the dangers of false claims of expertise stimulated me to revise and republish a nearly 11 year-old post.

It provides documented proof that Jimmy Carter was not a “nuclear engineer” and never served on a nuclear submarine. He left the Navy in October 1953, about 15 months before Jan 17, 1955, the day the the world’s first nuclear submarine went to sea. //

Here is a quote from the first debate between President Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign as transcribed in the Sep 24, 1976 issue of the New York Times:

Q: Governor Carter, I’d like to turn to what we used to call the energy crisis. Yesterday a British Government commission on air pollution, but one headed by a nuclear physicist, recommended that any further expansion of nuclear energy be delayed in Britain as long as possible. Now this is a subject that is quite controversial among our own people and there seems to be a clear difference between you and the President on the use of nuclear power plants, which you say you would use as a last priority. Why, sir, are they unsafe?

‘Capabilities of Atomic Power’

CARTER: Well among my other experiences in the past, I’ve been a nuclear engineer, and did graduate work in this field. I think I know the capabilities and limitations of atomic power. //

Since you remember enough about the 1950s/early 1960s to have been traumatized by “duck and cover” drills, you are old enough to personally recall the public’s interest in the energy crisis that was precipitated by the October 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. Do you recall how interested some people were in stimulating investments in more nuclear power as a means of reducing America’s vulnerability to another attempt to use oil as a weapon?

My interpretation of the history is that Carter’s friends in the upper elites of the hydrocarbon economy took advantage of his political ambition and his tenuous connection to nuclear energy to help put him into position to sabotage “the plutonium economy.” He might have had other goals and priorities, but once his purpose had been served, he lost enough support to make him a single term president.

Do you happen to recall that the title of Carter’s campaign book was “Why not the best?” and that he explained that choice of title in homage to the influence that Admiral Rickover had on his performance in life? //

Yes, Carter had an affinity for the coal industry. When Carter was running for President, roughly 40% of US coal production was from companies that were oil company subsidiaries. Here is a supporting quote from an Oct 3, 1976 NY Times article titled “Breaking Up Big Oil.”

Right now oil companies control between 26 percent and 40 percent of coal production (the lower figure comes from the Haskell committee, the higher from the United Mine Workers). Seven of the 15 largest coal companies are subsidiaries of oil companies. As Big Oil’s coal ownership climbed, so did coal prices: 300 percent. There was probably a connection. The nuclear‐energy industry is also being swallowed by the oil industry, which owned about 30 percent of our uranium reserves 10 years ago and today holds between 50 and 55 percent. As for shale and geothermal lands, virtually all of those leased to date have gone to oil companies.

Note: Like many commenters on the energy industry, the author of the NY Times piece did not understand that uranium was (and remains) only a small portion (5-20% depending on how it’s counted) of the nuclear energy business. //

In my opinion, it is the height of vanity for someone with a general engineering degree and service on diesel power submarines who did not even finish nuclear power school — which is the first baby step in a lengthy process of developing nuclear energy expertise in the US Navy program — to assert that he “knew nuclear engineering.”

When Carter made his policy decisions, he was asserting that he understood more about nuclear engineering and safety than thousands of nuclear scientists and engineers who had, by then, spent a couple of decades adding professional experience to their formal education on the topic while Carter, who left the Navy in Oct 1953 and never again focused on nuclear physics or engineering, raised and processed peanuts, made a fortune, and served as the governor of Georgia.

California’s largest VRFB project to date, supplied by Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries (SEI), has been participating in wholesale market opportunities since 2018. Image: SDG&E / Ted Walton.
Four new grid-scale battery energy storage projects have been announced by California energy supplier Central Coast Community Energy (CCCE), including three long-duration flow battery projects.

CCCE, one of the US state’s community choice aggregator (CCA) energy supplier groups, said it has selected the projects in response to a request for proposals (RfP) it issued in June. In total, 21 proposals from 16 developers were submitted and two more energy storage projects are still being considered along with the announced four.

In what could be the biggest utility procurement of the technology so far in the world, vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) systems with eight-hour storage duration will be built ranging in size from 6MW / 18MWh to 16MW / 128MWh, together with a four-hour lithium-ion battery system. CCCE gave an estimated date of 2026 for all of the approved projects to be operational.

It was created as a major national security asset in 1975 after Arab oil producers halted exports to the U.S. for resupplying Israel’s military during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, which they lost.

The Reserve, however, was intended for real emergencies, not PR stunts. In 2011, Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was busy bombing Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi out of office, released 30 million barrels to cover supply disruptions.

George H.W. Bush released 17 million in 1991 for similar disruptions during the first Gulf War and his son released 11 million barrels to bolster regional supplies after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Joe Biden’s “genuine emergency” is of his own making — the continued plummet in job approval tied to the continued rise in gas prices.

That strategic reserve is an immense stash of oil purchased at lower prices by savvy previous presidents, including most recently Donald Trump, and pumped into salt caverns deep underground at four sites in Texas and Louisiana. Currently, it contains some 612 million barrels of oil of its maximum 714 million.

That can seem like a lot of oil; though it’s barely enough to fuel the country for six months. //

(A barrel of oil, by the way, contains about 42 gallons, which through refining produce roughly 20 gallons of gasoline, 12 gallons of diesel, four gallons of jet and rocket fuels, and other material like asphalt.) //

Biden’s all the time talking about an end to fossil fuels. All of which reduced supplies and market confidence while boosting fears of future shortages, which in turn boost prices.

When Biden was elected, the average gallon price of gas was $2.11. When he took office, it was $2.24, two months later $2.71, by May $2.89, July $3.12, September $3.17, today $3.39. Some California pumps now charge more than $5. //

Borrowing 50 million barrels from a strategic oil reserve for political purposes is a useless exercise, even if other countries do the same on a smaller scale. It’s not going to change anything. And the reserve will be refilled at higher prices.

First of all, it’s a drop in the barrel, literally. May seem large, But it’s merely eight percent of the reserve. That’s less than three days’ average U.S. domestic oil use and only 44 hours of OPEC production.

Energy storage can change electricity’s status as the ultimate ‘just-in-time’ product, where supply and use have to be matched in real-time, but this won’t be possible without increasingly sophisticated software solutions.

Four industry representatives with expertise in software spoke last week at an energy storage event hosted online by Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of global investment and advisory services firm Guggenheim Partners.

The introduction of scalable energy storage solutions is a new fundamental technical capability in electricity, the first time — with the exception of limited quantities of pumped hydro energy storage —that the model has been changed in over 100 years, Larsh Johnson, CTO of distributed energy storage company Stem Inc said.

Software enables that new storage, mostly from lithium-ion batteries, to react quickly, flexibly and be adaptable to changing market conditions, Johnson said. At the same time, more and more variable wind and solar resources are coming onto grids all over the world, requiring integration and balancing.

The energy industry has to deliver instantly and can’t always count on suppliers. Johnson compared the predicament to what online retail giant Amazon faced when rolling out its Amazon Prime Plus subscription model.

Amazon, he said, solved its problems with massive software investments. That software is underwritten by artificial intelligence (AI) that predicts customers’ future needs and behaviour while also projecting the retailer’s own supply and delivery constraints. Thus ensuring marketplace inventory and on-time deliveries.

“It’s the same with directing resources into real-time power markets,” the Stem CTO said.

Energy storage can provide workarounds to what Johnson called “some rigid power grid situations,” allowing energy to be flexibly transacted when it’s needed.

Not only that, but software is adaptable. With regulators and policymakers under continuous pressure to evolve their market design rules governing energy assets that may have useful lifetimes decades long, software can help shape those rules too.

Ben Irons, founder of Habitat Energy, a company specialising in software-backed optimisation of energy storage and renewable energy assets in markets including the UK, Australia and Texas, noted that “there’s no other traded commodity where you would see low prices every evening and high prices every night,” without seeing arbitrage and traders spotting the opportunity to trade.

Energy storage has revolutionised that, Irons said, adding that even five years ago, there weren’t “physical assets that could store electrical power in an efficient way at a reasonable price” the way lithium-ion can.

Regulations are expected to impact 75 coal-fired power plants //

Climate change isn’t what’s driving some U.S. coal-fired power plants to shut down. It's the expense of stricter pollution controls on their wastewater.

Dozens of plants nationwide plan to stop burning coal this decade to comply with more stringent federal wastewater guidelines, according to state regulatory filings, as the industry continues moving away from the planet-warming fossil fuel to make electricity.

The new wastewater rule requires power plants to clean coal ash and toxic heavy metals such as mercury, arsenic and selenium from plant wastewater before it is dumped into streams and rivers. The rule is expected to affect 75 coal-fired power plants nationwide, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. //

Those plants had an October deadline to tell their state regulators how they planned to comply, with options that included upgrading their pollution-control equipment or retiring their coal-fired generating units by 2028.

The national impact of the wastewater rule is still coming into focus, but at least 26 plants in 14 states said they will stop burning coal, according to the Sierra Club, which has been tracking state regulatory filings. Twenty-one of the plants intend to shut down, and five indicated they may switch to natural gas, the environmental group said.

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Officials have announced that Kemmerer, population 2,600, will be the site of a plant featuring a liquid sodium-cooled reactor //

The high heat-transfer properties of sodium will allow the Natrium plant to be air-cooled. That will enable the plant to be quickly shut down in case of an emergency, and the absence of emergency generators and pumps will save on costs, Levesque said.

Others are skeptical about the benefits of sodium compared with water for cooling as in conventional nuclear plants.

“The use of liquid sodium has many problems. It’s a very volatile material that can catch fire if it’s exposed to air or water,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists science advocacy non-profit.

The “Clean Energy Performance Program” is not needed to meet climate goals, and might actually undermine them.

Consider Waxman-Markey. That’s the name of the “cap and trade” climate legislation that passed the House but failed in the Senate in 2010. It had a climate goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020. Instead, the U.S. reduced its emissions by 22 percent.

Had cap and trade legislation passed in the Senate, emissions would have declined less than 22 percent, because Waxman-Markey so heavily subsidized coal and other fossil fuels. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time, “the Environmental Protection Agency projects that even if the emissions limits go into effect, the U.S. would use more carbon-dioxide-heavy coal in 2020 than it did in 2005.”

The same thing would likely have been true for the Clean Energy Performance Program, which lock in natural gas. Consider France. According to the Commision de Regulation de L’Energie, €29 billion (US$33) billion was used to purchase wind and solar electricity in mainland France between 2009 and 2018. But the money spent on renewables did not lead to cleaner electricity. In fact, the carbon-intensity of French electricity increased.

After years of subsidies for solar and wind, France’s 2017 emissions of 68g/CO2 per kWh was higher than any year between 2012 and 2016. The reason? Record-breaking wind and solar production did not make up for falling nuclear energy output and higher natural gas consumption. And now, the high cost of renewable electricity is showing up in French household electricity bills. //

What threatens the continued operation of nuclear power plants, and nuclear energy in general, is the continued subsidization of renewables, which the Clean Energy Performance Program would have put on steroids. Under the program, utilities would have received $18 for each megawatt-hour of zero-emissions energy it produces between 2023 to 2030, on top of the existing $25 per megawatt-hour subsidy for wind energy.

Under such a scenario, notes energy analyst Robert Bryce, a wind energy company "could earn $43 per megawatt-hour per year for each new megawatt-hour of wind energy it sells. That’s a staggering sum given that the wholesale price of electricity in New York last year was $33 per megawatt-hour. In Texas, the wholesale price of juice was $22 per MWh.” //

A better approach would be for Congress to seek nuclear-focused legislation to expand nuclear from its current 19% of U.S. electricity to 50% by 2050. It should take as a model the British government’s announcement yesterday that it would put nuclear energy at the center of its climate plans. Global energy shortages triggered by the lack of wind in Europe have led nations to realize that any efforts to decarbonize electricity grids without creating blackouts must center nuclear power, not weather-dependent solar and wind.

Nuclear is still one of the most controversial sources of energy on the planet, but it does have some key upsides, especially in the global push to tackle emissions.
The European Union stands completely divided on the issue of nuclear power as Scotland hosts the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow.
China is betting big on a nuclear future, aiming to bring over 150 new reactors online over the next 15 years. //

Other studies show that nuclear energy may not be the answer to climate change mitigation at all. A paper published in the journal Energy Policy August of this year argues that installed nuclear power capacity is simply too small now -- and still shrinking -- and will be too hard to scale up to have any kind of viable post-energy transition future, thanks to “technical obstacles and limited resources.” //

Beijing plans to bring 150 new nuclear reactors online over the next 15 years, which amounts to more nuclear capacity that the entire world has constructed in the last 35 years. “The effort could cost as much as $440 billion; as early as the middle of this decade, the country will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest generator of nuclear power,” writes Bloomberg.

This is an especially important development for China, given the size of the nation’s carbon footprint -- the biggest in the world. It’s also a development that only China could accomplish. “It would be the kind of wholesale energy transformation that Western democracies — with budget constraints, political will and public opinion to consider — can only dream of,” Bloomberg characterizes the plan. In fact, China may just be the only country in the world that can come up with the significant resources necessary to scale up nuclear so much so fast that it will put an end to the opinion that a nuclear renaissance will be “too little, too late.”

Energy in general is defined as the capacity for doing work. Power is the rate of doing work or the rate of using energy:
P=Work/t=Energy/t , where t is time.

Although casually the terms energy and power are often used interchangeably, we see that technically they have different meanings. The SI unit of energy and work (which are numerically the same) is the joule (J). A joule is the work done by a force of one newton for a distance of one meter. This unit is usually used in physics. Energy comes in many forms, such as heat, motion, gravitational, radiated solar power, and electrical. For different types of energy other physical units are also utilized. For example, the British Thermal Unit (Btu) is often used to measure the heat energy or compare fuels. One Btu is what's needed to heat one pound of water one degree F. The SI derived unit of power is watt (W). Watt is power required to produce or consume one joule of energy per second. This unit and its multiple kilowatt are usually utilized in ratings of various electric loads and sources of electricity, such as residential generators.

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Alex Epstein, founder of Center for Industrial Progress, joins Federalist Western Correspondent Tristan Justice to make “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” discuss the Biden administration’s out-of-touch climate goals, and explain why nuclear energy, which is often overlooked, could actually help solve American energy problems.

“We have restricted coal and natural gas in particular, as well as oil, so much on the promise that green energy would replace them and that has not happened. So when there’s an increased demand for energy, we need fossil fuels but you don’t have as many because they’re being restricted in terms of their production and transport,” Epstein said.

Epstein said the panic surrounding climate change and energy is “total distortion.”

“It’s really instructive that almost all the people talking about climate catastrophe in the future do not recognize the climate renaissance of the present,” Epstein said. “So I mentioned that if I would trust at all the solar and wind people if they acknowledge that solar and wind are a failure now, but they have some great argument about the future, but they claim their success now which means they’re definitely gonna be wrong about the future. Exact same thing with climate. If you acknowledge that we have the most livable climate ever, thanks to fossil fuels and what I call climate mastery, then I’ll listen to you if you say there’s a problem in the future, but if you portray today as unprecedented climate danger, then you are a total liar or just unbelievably ignorant.” //

Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created in 1975, there have been ZERO nuclear plants that have gone through the entire regulatory process (plants built after that were approved before NRC was established).

The Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) has developed a standard (AHRI 550/590 Standard) that defines the Integrated Part Load Value (IPLV) as a better performance characteristic for chillers. Over the lifetime of a chiller, it is running at 100% capacity only 1% of the time, or in other words, 99% of the time it is at part load conditions.

The IPLV is calculated using the efficiency of the equipment while operating at capacities of:

• A = EER @ 100% Load
• B = EER @ 75% Load
• C = EER @ 50% Load
• D = EER @ 25% Load

The allocation of time running at these four loads defined by AHRI is as follows:

A=1%, B=42%, C=45% and D=12%

IPLV = 1%A + 42%B + 45%C + 12%D

One of the nation’s largest symbols of carbon capture technology — the Kemper project — has collapsed into a pile of debris, highlighting the strategy of one of the nation’s largest utilities as it aims to decarbonize its fleet.

The project, which was half of a multimillion-dollar power plant in Mississippi intended to gasify lignite coal and store its captured carbon emissions, was imploded by Southern Co.’s Mississippi Power unit earlier this month because the equipment was no longer needed. The facility, Plant Ratcliffe, captured worldwide attention and was supposed to host the first commercial-scale carbon capture project on a large coal plant in the United States.

CCTV went to China’s first compressed-air energy storage facility to show what it proposes to do. Instead of using increasingly precious and expensive lithium-ion batteries, the plant uses cheap energy to compress air in huge tanks. Its official name is quite long: National Energy Large-Scale Physical Energy Storage Technology Research and Development Center.

When there’s peak demand for electricity, and prices get higher, the unusual energy storage facility uses that air to propel turbines and generate power. According to CCTV, the facility can deliver up to 40 MWh of energy per day, enough to power 3,000 houses. //

CCTV describes this strategy as if the plan was to use it with any means of producing electricity and eventually mentions that it can avoid wasting electricity produced by renewable energy sources. Ironically, this may be the main application of such a solution instead of the mega batteries used in Australia and California.

Meet Nate Laps, a former gas industry land agent who switched sides and now fights for landowners. He may well change how FERC and pipeline builders treat the people who live in the path of major energy projects.

Laps, 38, is brawling with two multibillion-dollar natural gas companies — Cheniere Energy Inc. and Spire Inc. — along with FERC itself.

Laps has bird-dogged Cheniere’s Midship pipeline through Oklahoma and Spire’s STL pipeline near St. Louis for years on behalf of his landowner clients. It’s no coincidence that both projects are in trouble with FERC for their treatment of landowners.

A simple cooling system driven by the capture of passive solar energy could provide low-cost food refrigeration and living space cooling for impoverished communities with no access to the electricity grid. The system, which has no electrical components, exploits the powerful cooling effect that occurs when certain salts are dissolved in water. After each cooling cycle, the system uses solar energy to evaporate the water and regenerate the salt, ready for reuse. //

After comparing a range of salts, ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) proved to be the standout performer, with a cooling power more than four times greater than its closest competitor, ammonium chloride (NH4Cl). The ammonium nitrate salt’s exceptional cooling power can be attributed to its high solubility. “NH4NO3’s solubility reached 208 grams per 100 grams of water, whereas the other salts were generally below 100 grams,” Wenbin says. “This salt’s other advantage is that it is very cheap and already widely used as fertilizer,” he adds.

The system has good potential for food storage applications, the team showed. When the salt was gradually dissolved in water in a metal cup placed inside a polystyrene foam box, the temperature of the cup fell from room temperature to around 3.6 degrees Celsius and remained below 15 degrees Celsius for over 15 hours. //

Reference: ” Conversion and storage of solar energy for cooling” by Wenbin Wang, Yusuf Shi, Chenlin Zhang, Renyuan Li, Mengchun Wu, Sifei Zhuo Sara Aleida and Peng Wang, 1 September 2021, Energy & Environmental Science.
DOI: 10.1039/D1EE01688A

National leaders around the world are announcing big plans to return to nuclear energy now that the cost of natural gas, coal, and petroleum are spiking, and weather-dependent renewables are failing to deliver.

“The number one objective is to have innovative small-scale nuclear reactors in France by 2030 along with better waste management,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.

Macron had previously promised to reduce nuclear from 75 to 50 percent of its power, noted Financial Times. “But the mood has now changed,” the paper writes today. “Macron said on Tuesday he would begin investing in new nuclear projects ‘very quickly.’”

Japan is set to fire up its nuclear power plants as it looks to expand its renewable energy offering amid a push to slash its emissions, its new industry minister has said today.

The efforts are a bid to cut 46 per cent of its carbon output from 2013 levels by 2030, while the country has also pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“I would like to promote the maximum adoption of renewable energy, thorough energy conservation and the restart of nuclear power plants with the highest priority on safety,” newly appointed economy, trade and industry minister, Koichi Hagiuda, told his first news conference.

It comes amid a cabinet shuffle in Japan, as its government makes way for new prime minister Fumio Kishida.

Dwindling investment in oil, gas and coal means high prices are here to stay //

FOR MUCH of the past half-decade, the operative word in the energy sector was “abundance”. An industry that had long sought to ration the production of fossil fuels to keep prices high suddenly found itself swamped with oversupply, as America’s shale boom lowered the price of oil around the world and clean-energy sources, such as wind and solar, competed with other fuels used for power generation, such as coal and natural gas.

In recent weeks, however, it is a shortage of energy, rather than an abundance of it, that has caught the world’s attention. On the surface, its manifestations are mostly unconnected.

But the imperatives of climate change and development will inevitably require greater supplies of electricity. It is increasingly clear that nuclear power plants must play a consequential role.

Nuclear power is, in many ways, the most promising source of zero-carbon electricity. Unlike solar, wind and water power, electricity from nuclear plants is predictable; generators run when the sun is not shining, the wind is not blowing and water levels are low. Nevertheless, the industry has a dicey reputation, and there are fewer commercial reactors in operation today in the United States than a generation ago. This year could see three commercial reactors decommissioned in the United States — with plans to shut down about 20 more in coming years.

The problem is a misunderstanding of risks. Humans are constantly exposed to radiation — from the sun, from the cosmos, from the very ground we walk on. Even the most fearsome and publicized nuclear reactor accidents have added relatively little to background levels.

After an earthquake and tsunami wiped out the nuclear plant at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, scientists concluded that the trauma of a mass evacuation had caused greater health effects than the radiation release. Within months of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, in the former Soviet Union, approximately 30 operators and firefighters on-site died of acute radiation syndrome, but investigators nearly two decades later found “no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality or in non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.” The alarming near-meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant in 1979 ultimately exposed neighbors to approximately one-sixth the radiation dose they would receive from having a single X-ray.

Of greater concern are the health risks to uranium miners of extended exposure to natural radiation. Their safety should be protected as the industry advances. But the general fear that has stymied nuclear power over the past generation is unreasonable. //

The model to have in mind is not the hulking plants at Chernobyl or Three Mile Island but the small, imminently reliable reactors that have powered the United States’ submarines and aircraft carriers across more than 134 million miles in 50-plus accident-free years of cruising. Nothing more clearly showcases the potential for safe, reliable nuclear power than these 83 floating demonstration projects, in which healthy sailors live in proximity to tireless fission power plants.

Carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases are the environmental challenge of our age. Nuclear power is one tool for ridding ourselves of them — while keeping the lights on.