Science Editorial: It's not as easy as it looks.

An editorial, probably open sourced, in the current issue of Science:

It’s not as easy as it looks

H. Holden Thorp, Science • 23 Dec 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6575 • p. 1537

The Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Observatory Added 424 ppm to the Graphic of Daily Readings.

I wonder why that is...



Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Nineteen years ago, when I first started writing at DU, carbon dioxide concentrations measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory were 372.68 ppm. I'm not sure what the corresponding graphic showed as the upper number on the ordinate, but I don't think it was 424 ppm.

Over the years I was continually informed here - although I never actually believed it - that solar and wind energy would save the day.

Tell me, is the day saved?

Play stupid games; win stupid prizes.

Belarus begins fueling its second nuclear reactor.

Annoying Peeve: Naming substances after the institution at which they are discovered sucks.

So today I'm reading a paper with this title: Selective Recovery of Rare Earth Elements from Mine Ore by Cr-MIL Metal–Organic Frameworks (Charith Fonseka, Seongchul Ryu, Youngwoo Choo, Mark Mullett, Ramesh Thiruvenkatachari, Gayathri Naidu, and Saravanamuthu Vigneswaran, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2021 9 (50), 16896-16904)

MIL? What the hell is MIL? Metal ionic liquid? Methylisoleucine? I looked up the synthesis in the supplementary data, nothing "MIL-like" was there either.

No, I had to poke around.

MIL is "Matérial Institut Lavoisier"

Another example of this stuff - metal organic framework (MOF) people do this a lot is UiO-66, a famous MOF named after the University of Oslo.

This kind of thing is not helpful to young people, or, speaking only for myself, old people either.

Pet Peeve over.

Wanna see a picture of 47 years of accumulated used nuclear fuel?

Here's the picture:



Here's the source: Defuelling of Pilgrim completed in record time

The Pilgrim nuclear plant shut in 2019. At one point, well before 2019, the plant was rated by the NRC as having the worst operations of any nuclear plant in the United States. The plant was the subject of a massive amount of protests, with the participation of people who couldn't have cared less that between 16,500 and 19,000 people die every day from air pollution, more than any Covid variant killed on its worst day. They imagined that the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant might kill someone someday and their imagination outweighed reality.

Reality: The source for the current and historical air pollution death rates: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249).

Timeline of Anti-Pilgrim Nuclear Plant Protests

My favorite picture from the protesters is of one of their pamphlets:



Yeah, in fact, I do know what plutonium is. The question is "does the author of the pamphlet know what plutonium is?"

Here's what plutonium is: It's an actinide element in the periodic table with an energy content of 80 trillion joules of energy per kg. It is the key intermediate in converting the vast quantities of U-238 into tremendous amounts of clean and sustainable energy. One kg of plutonium is the energy equivalent of 3 thousand metric tons of coal.

It is clear that the author of the "Do you know what plutonium is?" is expecting everyone reading the pamphlet to be as ignorant as he or she is.

Unlike coal, after 1945, plutonium has a spectacular record of not killing people in anything like the spectacular death rate associated with coal, and gas, and oil.

Of course, plutonium was involved in the destruction of the city of Nagasaki in 1945, a little under 77 years ago. It is said - the numbers will never be precise - that on the order of 100,000 people died from the blast at Nagasaki. The most probable figure for the number of air pollution deaths per day, relying on the cited Lancet data linked above is about 18,300 people per day. This means air pollution kills at a rate equivalent to a Nagasaki every 5 to 6 days, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.

People however, are more inclined to let their imaginations run wild with respect to Nagasaki, and have been doing so for more than 3/4 of a century while right before their eyes, one takes place every 5 to 6 days from causes having nothing to do with nuclear weapons.

The "Do you know what plutonium is" pamphleteer couldn't have cared less.

Here is a 2015 report associated with the performance and the proposed closure of the Pilgrim nuclear plant: The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station Study A SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND CLOSURE TRANSITION GUIDE BOOK

According to table 4.1 on page 32 of this report between the years 2010 and 2014, the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant operated at a capacity utilization (called "efficiency" in the table) averaging 90.88%. At the New England wholesale electricity prices prevailing over those years, the plant produced 26,962,366 MWh of electricity at a value of $1,516,736,547. Wholesale electricity prices during that period averaged $56.42/MWh, just over 1/7th the consumer electricity price in Germany as of 2020.

According to the report, in 2014 the plant employed about 600 workers, generating salaries of about $55,000,000/year, with average worker pay at the plant of $1,805/week (over $93,000/year) compared to an average salary in the surrounding Plymouth County of $872/week (over $45,000/year) and the State of Massachusetts of $1,171/week, (about $61,000/year).

We live in a bourgeois consumer culture and everybody likes to talk about money and energy, particularly if they can dump the true costs on future generations, which is exactly what the solar and wind industry do in my oft stated opinion.

Let's talk about waste however, not the so called "nuclear waste" which is what many people (not me) call the casks pictured at the beginning of this post, representing the side product of 47 years of operations at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant, once described as the worst run nuclear plant in the United States, but the equivalent fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide, that would have been generated were the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant never operated.

First this, some data for calculation purposes:

For many years I worked closely with French people, and I loved it when they got smug and superior, because they can. In the spirit of smug and superior, our friends the French like to post, in real time, the carbon cost of electricity in their country, because they proudly can. Their real time CO2/kwh accounting is here: eCO2mix - CO2 emissions per kWh of electricity generated in France. Nuclear power dominates French electricity production but they also have some dangerous natural gas plants, probably because they have some wind plants as well.

As of this writing, France is producing electricity at a carbon cost of about 55 grams of CO2/kWh (19h 18 min EST US December 23, 2021). By way of comparison, California, featuring thousands of square miles of wind turbines, at roughly the same time is generating electricity at a climate cost of 318 grams/kwh (0.318 t/MWh), almost six times as much carbon being dumped on future generations with no solution in sight.

In the realm of smug and superior, to rub it in, our French friends give the carbon cost on the web page (if you scroll down) of other forms of energy, and to rub it in even further they do it in English. Here's what they report:

The contribution of each energy source to C02 emissions is as follows:

0.986 t CO2 eq/MWh for coal-fired plants
0.777 t CO2 eq /MWh for oil-fired plants
0.486 t CO2 eq /MWh for gas-turbine plants
0.352 t CO2 eq /MWh for co-generation & combined-cycle plants
0.583 t CO2 eq /MWh for other gas-fired plants
0.494 t CO2 eq /MWh for household waste

"t" stands for tons, metric tons. This is consistent with figures one sees around in other places, more or less.

The report linked above gave capacity utilization averaging 90.88% for the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant, a 680 MWe plant, between 2010 and 2014, which is not great for a nuclear plant, but is certainly acceptable. An unreferenced number for the capacity utilization for the plant over its entire lifetime that popped up in a Google search I conducted and gave the figure of 70.6% capacity utilization, which is crummy for a nuclear plant, but believable, inasmuch as the plant came on line early in the nuclear adventure and, again, the plant was noted by the NRC for being poorly run. Nevertheless, this miserable figure, 70.6%, is more than double the average capacity utilization of a wind plant.

If we accept this 70.6% capacity utilization, we can calculate that the plant produced over its 47 year lifetime, 0.712 Exajoules (EJ) of electricity. If we assume 33% (typical Rankine cycle) thermodynamic efficiency, the plant produced 2.15 EJ of primary energy. (Currently the entire US consumes about 107 EJ of energy annually.) 0.712 EJ translates into 198 million MWh.

Using this figure of 198 million kWh we can now calculate the carbon dioxide avoided by the plant produced by using the numbers the French posted to mock us.

If coal had been burned in lieu of operating the Pilgrim nuclear plant, 195 million tons of carbon dioxide would have been dumped on future generations with no known procedure for removing it.

If a gas turbine had been operated in lieu of operating the Pilgrim nuclear plant, 96 million tons of carbon dioxide would have been dumped on future generations with no known procedure for removing it. (Note that when the Pilgrim nuclear plant began operating, gas turbines were not readily available, as the use of thermal barrier coatings to protect superalloys from melting had not been fully developed or commercialized.)

If a combined cycle gas plant had been operated in lieu of operating the Pilgrim nuclear plant, 70 million tons of carbon dioxide would have been dumped on future generations with no known procedure for removing it. (Note that when the Pilgrim nuclear plant began operating, gas turbines, and thus combined cycle gas plants were not readily available, as the use of thermal barrier coatings to protect superalloys from melting had not been fully developed or commercialized.)

If a Rankine cycle gas plant - the traditional type of gas plant at the time the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant went on line - had been operated in lieu of operating the Pilgrim nuclear plant, 115 million tons of carbon dioxide would have been dumped on future generations with no known procedure for removing it.

If a plant burning household trash had been operated in lieu of operating the Pilgrim nuclear plant, 98 million tons of carbon dioxide would have been dumped on future generations with no known procedure for removing it.

Using the numbers above it is possible to estimate how much uranium and plutonium, the latter generated in situ, was consumed over 47 years of operations at what was once described as the worst operating nuclear plant in the United States.

The neutrino free energy yield of U-235, the majority of the fission that took place in the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant during its history, comes in at about 193 MeV, which translates to an energy value of 78.4 trillion joules/kg.

Using this number, we can estimate the mass of the fission products in the fuel if it produced 2.15 EJ of primary (thermal) energy, about 28 metric tons of actinides were subject fission. The rule of thumb is that used nuclear fuel is about 4% fission products, and about 1% transuranium actinides, dominated by plutonium, the rest is unreacted uranium. Thus the amount of uranium originally in the fuel was about 690 tons, consumed over almost 5 decades. The used fuel contains close to 7 tons of transuranium actinides, chiefly plutonium.

At 80 trillion joules/kg for Pu, the energy value of this plutonium is about about 0.55 EJ. In 2019, the entire State of Massachusetts, including the energy used to power cars and trucks, heat homes, etc, amounted to 97 trillion BTU or 0.1 EJ. Thus the plutonium in the so called "nuclear waste" at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power plant is enough to power everything in Massachusetts for about 5 years. The rule of thumb is that used nuclear fuel contains about 95% unreacted uranium, chiefly U-238. If the U-238 within were transmuted to plutonium in a "breed and burn" setting, the energy value of the 650 tons of remaining uranium is thus about 511 years, half a millennium.

Many of the fission products in the used nuclear fuel are as valuable as the plutonium (and other transuranium actinides) and the unreacted uranium. For example, in the thermal fission of U-235, about 3% of the fissions yield isotopes with a mass number of 103. All of the radioactive isotopes with mass 103 decay with short half-lives, and within a few weeks or months, all have decayed to the only stable isotope of rhodium, rhodium-103. Correcting for the U to Rh mass, this means that the fuel contains about 361 kg of rhodium. Rhodium is one of the rarest elements on Earth, yet is an essential component of many technological devices. World supply from ores is rapidly running out. The current price is about $377,000/kg. This means the value of the rhodium in the used nuclear fuel at the shut Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant is about $130,000,000.

Most of the volume of the containers in the picture shown at the beginning of this post is shielding. It is very effective, since the man standing next to the cannisters to give perspective is quite alive. The density of uranium oxide, which is the main component of the used fuel rods is 10.97 g/cm^3 or 10.97 mT per cubic meter. Stripped away, all 47 years of used nuclear fuel about 4 meters on edge.

It is absurd to think of storing 100 million tons of carbon dioxide, never mind 200 million tons (in the coal case) in a volume that size, not even accounting for the issue of coal ash.

Anyone, and I do mean anyone, carrying on about so called "nuclear waste" is completely insane in my view.

If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a merry one.

I'll bet you couldn't even imagine having a name this cool:

My son just dropped a cool paper on me.

It's this one: Carolyn E. Schaefer, Kunal Kupwade-Patil, Michael Ortega, Carmen Soriano, Oral Büyüköztürk, Anne E. White, Michael P. Short, Irradiated recycled plastic as a concrete additive for improved chemo-mechanical properties and lower carbon footprint, Waste Management, Volume 71, 2018, Pages 426-439.

Over the years, I've sent my son papers I thought cool. As he surveys the faculties at the graduate schools to which he's applied, he's reading their papers and came across this one.

Now he's sending me papers. I am thrilled to have lived to this day.

About what's in the paper:

For the record, even though most of us think plastic is recycled, very little of it actually is. Significantly better than 80% ends up in landfills.

Ideally, plastic represents an opportunity to sequester carbon, if and only if, the carbon for it is captured from air, possibly via the intermediacy of seawater. The route for the conversion of CO2 to plastic is the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to give methanol, followed by chemistry known as "MTO," Methanol to olefins. Olefins, properly known as alkenes, are the monomeric precursors to many plastics.

Plastic is only sustainable in a closed cycle. In an open cycle it is extremely dangerous, as we are realizing, too late actually, under current conditions.

In this paper, the authors propose irradiating waste plastic with gamma radiation obtained from used nuclear fuels in order to harden it for use as a concrete reinforcing agent.

It's a pretty cool paper. Plastic so treated would reduce the carbon input of concrete (which is rather huge) while permanently sequestering carbon in structures.

I wish you happy holidays.

Those serious about fighting climate change, who seriously know how to do it, have an activist...

...website too.

https://www.generationatomic.org/

They quote Hansen at the bottom of the page: "Facts, not prejudice."

Interested in the per capita CO2 emissions of every country in the world since the 18th century?

It can be found here: Gilfillan D ; Marland G ; Boden T ; Andres R (2020): Global, Regional, and National Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions: 1751-2017. CDIAC-FF, Research Institute for Environment, Energy, and Economics, Appalachian State University, ESS-DIVE repository.

Obviously some of this data from centuries ago is estimated.

The file to download:

nation_1751_2017.csv

As for modern times:

This would be a great place to compare the per capita carbon output of Germany, powered by so called "renewable energy" (and, um, coal and gas) and nuclear powered France.

France peaked at 2.69 MT/person-year in 1979, and as of the last data point 2017, was at 1.35 MT/person-year.

Germany started out (post unification) at 3.18 MT/person-year in 1991 and made it all the way down to 2.37 MT/Person-year. Germany of course, is one of those countries that switched the dominance of dangerous coal to dangerous natural gas, with wind and solar lipstick on the pig. They will, however, be burning coal this winter.

France won't be burning coal this winter.

Does this tell anyone anything?

No?

Why am I not surprised?

By the way, your country, the good ole USA, is not pretty. It's pretty ugly, in fact, but don't worry, be happy, you at least have Elon Musk to worship, and of course, the Sierra Club to help you cheer for tearing the shit out the benthic zones of our continental shelves to make industrial parks.

St. James Infirmary.