The Gayle & Max Dillard Science & Engineering Research Centre (SERC) at the US Abilene Christian University (ACU) in Texas will research and develop molten salt nuclear reactors.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing ACU’s August 2022 application to construct a 1 MWt low-power molten salt research reactor – MSRR – at the NEXT Lab. A detailed design engineering contract has been awarded to Zachry Nuclear Engineering, part of Zachry Group. Natura Resources aims to deploy its first molten salt reactor system in the new facility by 2026, followed by larger factory-built modular reactors for commercial operations in the early 2030s.

The Harris Ranch Tesla Supercharger station is an impressive beast. With 98 charging bays, the facility in Coalinga, California, is the largest charging station in the world. But to provide that kind of power takes something solar can’t provide — diesel generators. //

Just as these charging stations find they can’t run without some fossil fuel backup, the retirement of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas is being delayed to accommodate the energy demands of an electric vehicle battery factory that’s under construction.

Blackmon said that these stories illustrate well the lack of thought going into the demands that will be placed on the grid with increasing amounts of electric vehicle adoption.

As those demands pile on, U.S. energy policy pushes to remove coal, nuclear and natural gas from the grid.

Blackmon said he watched all summer as the Texas grid, which operates separately from the rest of the county, nearly collapsed with the incessant heat. //

Musk has also been taken to task for his solar promises. Energy expert Alex Epstein ran a fact check on Musk’s claim that we could power the world with a small area of the Sahara Desert and “some batteries.”

Epstein calculated that enough battery storage to create a reliable grid would cost $590 trillion for the batteries alone. It doesn’t include the cost of all the transmission infrastructure. And the batteries would have to be replaced every decade.

"The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function." - Edward Teller

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Al Bartlett

Below is a first-order (approximate) description of a fast (potentially very fast) doubling time system for remediation of civilization's environmental damage. The fast doubling time drives exponential growth that could, at enormous profit and in under 15 years, drastically reduce civilization's ecological impact while, incidentally, sequestering large amounts of CO2. It is not intended to overcome Dr. Bartlett's accusation that sustainable growth is impossible and cornucopian thinking is "The New Flat Earth Society". It is intended merely to argue that imminent environmental catastrophes may, with appropriate refinements and corrections of the described system, be averted within the time estimated for environmental catastrophes by some of the more pessimistic projections (usually several decades rather than a mere 15 years).

An important principle to keep in mind is that as baseload electricity costs decrease, recycling beats other sources of raw materials. This means that if one is targeting zero environmental footprint, the most compelling path is through lower baseload electric cost simply because recycling is more economical than waste.

Mike Goff, the prinicpal Deputy Assistant Secretary for nuclear energy at the DOE, shared a long list of reasons why he is more optimistic about the future of nuclear energy than he has been at any time in his 35 year career at national labs and as a direct DOE employee. //

He described his recent appearance at a Congressional hearing where 28 representatives asked questions with none of them asking “why nuclear?” Instead they asked how they could help nuclear, most of them wanted to help nuclear projects move faster. He said that the industry has a great opportunity to prove it can deliver. //

Regarding the operating fleet, he described how the DOE, industry and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) are cooperating to ensure that plants continue to operate safely and reliably. Several have already received subsequent license renewals that allow the plants to operate for up to 80 years, but there is no reason to believe that is the ultimate limit. There is already discussion about the activities needed to enable operation to 100 yrs. //

Then Goff made some statements that noticeably captured audience attention, based on both looking around the room and engaging in a number of conversations after the session. He told us that recent DOE studies show that the US needs 300 GW of total nuclear capacity by 2050. Getting there will require keeping as much of the existing fleet as possible while also building at a rate that exceeds the fastest achieved rate from the 1970s during the period from 2030-2050. //

Jim Schaefer, senior managing director of Guggenheim Partners, provided a strong message about the need for nuclear power for meeting decarbonization goals and the pressing need for the industry to improve its ability to deliver projects on time and on budget.

He leads a team of 100 clean energy-focused bankers that have completed 350 deals during the past 8 years. Most of those deals have been in solar, wind and battery storage. He and his team have realized that those technologies are not sufficient for meeting the goal of decarbonizing the grid. Investors and industry need to reallocate dollars towards clean firm technologies that can work all the time.

They have concluded that there is no doubt that hydrogen has a role; geothermal has a role; but that “advanced reactors are kind of it.” He said “Right now, to me, the greatest demand for any kind of energy product that has ever existed is the future need for advanced reactors.”

He sees growing recognition of this insight among investors, in DC, in the electric utility sector, and in the chemical and oil industries.

The US Department of Energy has reversed former President Trump’s ban on the import of certain electrical equipment from China.

Biden’s National Highway Transportation Safety Administration quietly published new proposed fuel economy standards for passenger cars and light trucks. If the new rule were implemented as written, new cars and light trucks would be forced to meet a 66-mile-per-gallon and 54-mile-per-gallon standard, respectively, by 2032.

This rule, along with the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed de facto electric vehicle mandate to require nearly 70% of all new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2032, is being implemented to further the Biden regime’s climate agenda.

Of particular interest is the rationale for the rule. The NHTSA repeatedly claims that by instituting these nearly impossible fuel economy standards, America will become more energy secure, thereby increasing national security. The central planners argue that by forcing new cars to use less gas, America would be less dependent on imports. //

However, America is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas. If energy security were truly important to Biden, he would be promoting policies that increase gas and oil production instead of reducing the production of two of the nation’s most valuable commodities. //

Regulating gas-powered cars out of existence while subsidizing electric vehicles is a boon to China, since it controls 80% of global EV battery production and holds much influence over nations awash with the rare earth minerals to produce those batteries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the event of a forced EV transition, as Biden has planned for 2032, America would become further dependent on China and would enrich the Chinese Communist Party.

Furthermore, by restricting oil and gas leasing on public lands, as the Bureau of Land Management seeks to do in Colorado, for instance, Biden is cutting the amount of domestic energy production and the amount of electricity that Americans can use to power their homes, businesses, and lives (because a certain share of power plants generate electricity using natural gas). //

According to Heritage Foundation chief statistician Kevin Dayaratna, even if America were to stop all conventional fuel use, global temperatures would be reduced by a mere 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100. At the same time, China has abandoned the Paris Agreement on climate and is expected to increase carbon emissions from its coal-fired power plants.

If a nuclear overnight CAPEX of $2000/kW is possible, as the South Koreans, the Chinese, and the GKG claim, why in the world would you run $4000/kW, let alone anything higher?

The answer is we've seen nuclear CAPEXes of $8000/kW and higher. Vogtle 3/4 is above $10,000/kW. Flamanville 3 is in the same range. This cannot happen in a properly functioning, competitive market. In such a market, there is only one price, the best price. If nuclear cost is as critically important to the planet as Figure 6 claims, we must figure out what turns a $2000/kW plant into a $10,000/kW plant and eliminate it. The GKG publication Why Nuclear Power has been a Flop attempts to do just that. //

Only truly cheap nuclear offers humanity what it must have: both cheap electricity and low CO2 emissions. Expensive nuclear offers humanity the choice of impoverishment or global warming.

If all goes well, it might take another five-to-10 years before ITER achieves the promised goal of a ten-fold “return on power” (500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of input heating power). //

Ironically, I am convinced that the ITER fiasco will actually accelerate, rather than slow down, progress toward the practical realization of fusion power. //

One indication is accelerated plans by China and Japan to build their own national “DEMO” plants, without necessarily waiting for the results of ITER to come in. Both nations have reactor projects underway, which could in effect substitute for the role of ITER and accelerate development on the basis of knowledge and technologies that did not exist when the final design of ITER was approved, in 2001.

South Korea is designing a “K-DEMO” reactor, intended to generate approximately 2.2 GW of thermal power and supply over 500 MW to the electricity grid.

A team of MIT researchers has figured out a way to create a supercapacitor simply by mixing cement, the binding ingredient of concrete, and a fine charcoal product called carbon black together with water.

Better yet, this mixture could allow a home to store a full day's worth of energy in its foundation, potentially paving the way to an efficient renewable energy storage solution that doesn't rely on mining rare Earth metals.

Matt Huber is a professor of geography at Syracuse University. He writes about energy, economies and the way that energy sources have influenced modern societies and economies.

One of his first books was Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (2013) which is very briefly described as follows:

Looking beyond the usual culprits, “Lifeblood” finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Matthew Huber, associate professor of geography and the environment, uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

In April 2022, Huber published a significant piece in Jacobin with Fred Stafford that explains how his research has revealed that most of the financial benefits associated with renewable power system development and electricity production “deregulation” have been captured by entities that the Left is supposed to dislike.

When we look at the actually existing decentralized renewable energy industry, we see many things the Left should abhor — deregulated markets, tax shelters for corporations, a rentier development model, and an anti-union industry dependent upon a transient and insecure workforce.

Though the environmental left may not want to accept it, the small-is-beautiful approach of decentralized energy provides ideological cover for a ruthless form of renewable energy capitalism. And even worse, it threatens our fight to halt climate change in its tracks.
-- In Defense of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Jacobin 40/04/2022

Huber believes that large, capital intensive power plants have been valuable investments as anchors in our electricity grid. Contrary to the characterizations offered by critics and advocates of radical transformation, he believes that the grid is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century and that we should add to its capabilities instead of seeking to completely rebuild it with a different generation model.

Plutonium-239 (Pu-239) is a nuclear fuel source that should play an important role in a sustainable, rapidly growing nuclear power enterprise. It is a natural byproduct that is created inside every fission reactor using uranium fuel. It is fissile with characteristics that are similar to U-235, the fissile material that provides most of today’s nuclear power.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, energy visionaries spoke and wrote about a coming Plutonium Economy that would gradually replace the existing Hydrocarbon Economy and give human society an inexhaustible fuel source. //

It’s easy to imagine that people whose wealth and power came from the Hydrocarbon Economy weren’t thrilled about the near-term prospect of having their comfortable lives disrupted by a powerful new competitor.

A sustained campaign aimed at demonizing plutonium began sometime in the early 1970s. Plutonium has been called the most toxic substance known to man. //

Jack Devanney says:
August 3, 2023 at 3:03 PM

Excellent post.

I would add that a combination of thorium and plutonium is pretty useless as a weapon.

In ThorCon’s case, we found that even if you pulled the fuel out at the ideal point when the plutonium was 94% Pu-239, as long as the fuel contained 10 times as much thorium as Pu-239, it would not go critical. no matter how much Pu you had. Thorium soaks up neutrons. To make a weapon from this stuff , you would need a Thorex plant which is even more difficult than a Purex plant.

The tragedy is with no HALEU, designs like ThorCon cannot spike the fuel with thorium and we lose this safeguard.

B.F. Randall
@Mining_Atoms
Word Fission power does not have a natural lobby or constituency. Fission consumes far too few resources--and produces far too much energy for a large supply chain. The world uranium market is only worth about $790 million. That's enough heat to provide all of humanity's energy nearly 6x current consumption (in a closed fuel cycle). The cow dung fuel market in India is valued at $4 billion.

@mdawese11
is doing precisely what everybody who understands objective reality and cogent energy policy should do: educate, persuade, lead. As Orwell said: restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent humans. Well done, Mark.
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Mark Dawes
@mdawese11
·
Jul 28
In the @DailyMailUK on why we need nuclear power to tackle climate change.

And why the positive response is to campaign with groups like @emergencyreact @Gen_Atomic for the environment.

Interest in nuclear energy as a climate change solution is rising, but no new commercial projects are planned in the U.S. right now

Creativity and Ideation
Each year, the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp equips a select group of students and early-career professionals with the tools and understanding needed to approach the clean energy challenges of today and tomorrow.

Berkshire Hathaway purchased $123 million worth of shares in Occidental Petroleum. Even more interesting, over the past 18 months, Buffett has bought $13 billion worth of Occidental shares, bringing his total investment in the oil-producing giant to more than 25 percent.

Buffett has also been busy gobbling up shares of oil-producer Chevron. Berkshire Hathaway currently holds close to $26 billion in Chevron stock.

At his recent annual meeting, Buffett made it clear that he thinks oil production remains central to U.S. prosperity. “In the United States, we’re lucky to have the ability to produce the kind of oil we’ve got from shale,” he said. He also declared, “We do not think it’s un-American to be producing oil,” and vowed, “We will make rational decisions” in reference to fossil fuel investment.

Moreover, Buffett seems to be suspicious of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which seeks to divest in fossil fuel companies while promoting nebulous social justice causes, even when these efforts reduce returns for investors.

In fact, Buffett has referred to ESG as “asinine,” and believes it belies Berkshire Hathaway’s sole purpose: increasing returns for clients.

"Onkalo" is a Finnish word for a cave or a hollow. It implies something big and deep: you don't know where an onkalo ends or whether it ends at all.

It's a fitting name for a huge grave made in Finland over the last 20 years. Onkalo, which lies 450m (1,500ft) deep inside the bedrock of Olkiluoto island in the southwest of the country, is the world's first permanent storage site for spent nuclear fuel.

The gently winding road to Olkiluoto is lined with pine trees stretching high up to the sky. Nature has come back to life here after five months of winter. The ground is covered by a carpet of small yellow flowers and the air is filled with birdsong. It's almost too beautiful a setting for a major industrial site.

Olkiluoto is home to three nuclear reactors, which stand side by side on the seaside. The third launched only this year, becoming the first new reactor to provide power in Western Europe in 15 years. These reactors, along with two others in Loviisa on the south coast, produce 33% of Finland's electricity.

A few minutes' drive away from the Olkiluoto reactors, construction of the world's first Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) for spent nuclear fuel is nearing completion.

As the U.S. permanently occupied base in Antarctica at McMurdo Sound expanded over the years, delivering fuel for heating, desalination of water, running diesel generators for electric power, and fueling aircraft and land vehicles accounted for fully half the total cargo delivered to Antarctica by the late 1950s. In August 1960, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was authorised to install a nuclear power plant at McMurdo to provide heat, water, and electricity. A contract was let to the Martin Company, which built a version of their portable modular nuclear reactor which was designated PM-3A. This reactor was delivered to Antarctica in December 1961 and went critical for the first time in March 1962. It began to supply power to the McMurdo station in July 1962. When fully operational, the reactor supplied 1.8 megawatts of electrical power and 14,000 gallons (53 cubic metres) of fresh water a day.

Unfortunately, the reactor proved unreliable in operation, with availability of only 72% due to frequent malfunctions and shutdowns. In 1972, it was decided to shut down the reactor and replace it with diesel generators. Over its ten year lifetime, the reactor suffered 438 malfunctions. Cleaning up the site and shipping radioactive material back to the U.S. took until 1979. This was, to date, the only nuclear reactor ever operated in Antarctica, although radioisotope thermal generators 1 have been used to power scientific instruments in remote locations.

Here is a history of “Nuclear Power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica”. The reactor used was developed as part of the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9S1P54n1FA

Between 1954 and 1977, the U.S. Army Nuclear Power Program developed a series of small, modular nuclear reactors intended to provide electrical power and heating to remote installations which would otherwise require continuous logistical support to supply fuel. One of the project’s first pilot installations was the PM-1 reactor installed at the U.S. Air Force’s Sundance Air Force Station radar base in Wyoming. Located on a mountain peak at 1800 metres above sea level, 150 km from the nearest railhead, the ability to run two years between refuelling was seen as a great advantage.

The PM-1 reactor was a pressurised water design, producing 1.25 megawatts of electrical power, plus space heating for the installation. The reactor, designed and built by the Martin Company, was shipped in 16 packages, each transportable by a C-130 cargo plane or by road or rail and assembled on site. The reactor was fuelled by uranium enriched to 93% U-235 and would run two years on a fuel load. The reactor and power plant was designed to operate with a staff of two: reactor operator and maintenance technician.

The reactor went critical on site on 1962-02-25 and the plant remained in operation until 1968. It served as a pilot plant for the similar PM-3A reactor installed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, as described in the post here on 2023-02-24, “Nuclear Power for Antarctica”. https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-power-for-antarctica/2796

Why is it so difficult to extract drinkable water from seawater? Doooh—stupid second law of thermodynamics!

In the 1960s, there seemed a sweet solution to all of the “shortages” that vex our demon-haunted, fear-first age of technological timidity. You build the nuclear power plants on the seacoast, using the effectively infinite heat sink of the deep ocean as the cold sink (avoiding the need for those scary cooling towers!). In addition to generating electricity too cheap to meter for the power grid, the thermal energy, which would otherwise go to waste, is used to desalinate sea water, which supplies abundant fresh water for human consumption, agriculture, and the adjacent Fission Falls Water Park. Part of the fresh water and electricity is input to the electrolysis plant, which generates hydrogen for mobile transportation applications. The brine-rich by-product of desalination which isn’t sold as artisanal Captain Neutron nuclear sea salt is disposed of by dilution in the deep ocean.

Any territory, however small and seemingly resource-poor, with a modest ocean coastline, could become an energy, agriculture, and transport superpower if only they could tunnel through the fear barrier. New Hampshire has 21 km of Atlantic coastline, which advocates of Porcxit 4 might bear in mind.

Steve Milloy @JunkScience
·
14,000 panel, 5.2 MW community solar array in Nebraska destroyed by hail storm last night.

This doesn't happen to baseload power plants.

https://notrickszone.com/2023/06/28/huge-nebraska-solar-park-completely-smashed-to-pieces-by-one-single-hail-storm/
9:42 PM · Jun 28, 2023

Shanghai @thinking_panda
·
In China, in the Shanxi province, there is a huge solar energy farm right on the mountain. Solar panels stretch for 80 kilometers. It looks as if the mountain was covered with a blanket.
(Shanxi is on the Loess Plateau which has nothing but silt and dust. Nothing grows there.)
4:23 AM · May 31, 2023 //

A professor of Geochemistry explained that solar isn’t all that “green.” Solar releases nitrogen trifluoride. What’s NF3’s impact on the environment? It is 17,000 times worse for the atmosphere than the dreaded CO2.

https://www.chemservice.com/news/learn-which-chemicals-make-solar-power-possible/

American Deplorable ™
7 hours ago
Working in Texas I saw a solar array that covered hundreds of acres that was located on the edge of the desert.

The dust storms there are legendary and have been for millennia.

I was told that the dust reduces the panels ability to create power by as much as 70% at times so the utility decided to hire a full time cleaning crew to keep the panels working.

A dozen two man crews equipped with a side by side vehicle, squeegees and spray bottles spend 12 hours a day, seven days a week cleaning the panels.

Absolutely insane. //

bintexas
6 hours ago

1. Climate change hail takes out a field of solar power panels

2. Double the number of fields to combat climate change

3. Climate change hail (aka springtime in the midwest) busts up two fields of panels.

I am detecting the makings of a perfect grift