NNadir
NNadir's JournalUS output of "coal residuals" in 2020.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this paper I encountered this evening, this one: Environmental Impacts of Coal Combustion Residuals: Current Understanding and Future Perspectives Amrika Deonarine, Grace E. Schwartz, and Laura S. Ruhl, Environmental Science & Technology 2023 57 (5), 1855-1869.
What's interesting is just the statistics that came up for 2020 in the United States, a country holding an enormous discussion, powered to a large extent on computers powered by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, about "going green."
We talk and type a lot.
The introductory text with the statistics:
The bold was added by me. Mt millions of tons. Note this figure only refers to solid coal waste; the gaseous coal waste, chiefly carbon dioxide but also including powerful carcinogens and toxic heavy metals, dwarfs the mass of the solid waste, driving climate change.
We are doing nothing serious about climate change. We couldn't care less:
February 15: 421.20 ppm
February 14: 421.32 ppm
February 13: 421.18 ppm
February 12: 421.20 ppm
February 11: 421.15 ppm
Last Updated: February 16, 2023
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2 (Accessed 02/17/23)
Why should we? Afterall it's nuclear energy that's "too dangerous," not climate change, not air pollution.
To wit:
I hear a lot from very stupid people about "dangerous nuclear waste," which is what morons call used nuclear fuel. In the United States, after close to 70 years of commercial nuclear power, about 80,000 MT of used nuclear fuel has accumulated in the United States, 95% of which is unburned uranium with an enormous potential for reuse and production of vast amounts of energy. If one asks any one of these people to show that the storage for 3/4 of a century of this so called "dangerous" material has injured as many people as will die in the next six hours from air pollution - that would be around 4500 people - they stomp their feet, cry, whine, launch into stupid childish diversions, and complain to anyone who will listen (and often agree) that the question is "unfair." They know nuclear energy is "too dangerous," well, because it's been chanted endlessly and repeatedly.
"Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed is the fruit of thy womb..."
The fruit of the womb of the antinuke faith is coal.
Here's the electricity profile of anti-nuke heaven, "green" Germany, over the last 30 days:
Electricity Map, 30 day averages, Germany (Accessed 02/17/23, 1:40 AM EST (US))
At one point, Germany was routinely and reliably producing about 20 GW of nuclear power. They shut this capacity to burn coal, after about 20 years of having financed Vladimir Putin by buying dangerous natural gas from him while saying how "green" Germany is.
The popular hysteria that led to this benighted decision has been subject to some rethinking by the public in a country that has a history of having engaged in lemming like adventures ultimately involving Russia and Ukraine, but let's not be too harsh, since I've already been harsh by noting that rote anti-nukes can actually produce zero data to demonstrate a history of used nuclear fuel being as dangerous as the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, decade by decade, century by century production of dangerous fossil fuel waste while we all wait, like Estragon for Godot, like the Pope for the return of Jesus, for the return of the grand "renewable energy" nirvana that we abandoned in the 19th century, possibly for a reason.
This account of recent German opinion changes in their views of energy production (in German) can be found here:
Energiemix in Deutschland
The Germans therein reportedly say they don't like coal (Kohle); they like dangerous natural gas. They live on coal, but they like dangerous natural gas, while they wait for the "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come.
They like gas, but now they think, well, maybe, perhaps, could be, sort of, they made a mistake by closing their nuclear plants.
They do miss the days when their former Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who initiated the "nuclear phase out" could cheerfully embrace Vlad while exercising executive functions for his current employer, Gazprom.
History will not forgive us; nor should it.
Happy Friday.
Some slime molds.
Creatures that don't conform. Lucy Jones, Emergence Magazine.
I was directed to this article by my Nature Briefing email feed this morning.
The article will probably appear at this link tomorrow.
There's a pretty big deal going on for the future of Canadian Nuclear Fuel.
Often, when I meet people and the topic turns to nuclear energy, which I support, people without rote hostility to humanity's last best hope start telling me all about thorium. They read about it on the internet. (This happened most recently when I went to give blood and the guy checking me in, who had something of a scientific background, started chatting with me about "science" as a result of some ACS paraphernalia I had with me.)
I'm not really a thorium kind of guy; I favor the uranium/plutonium (transuranium) fuel cycle. I don't have anything against thorium, I just think the uranium based cycle is better.
This said there is one place where thorium is a very desirable fuel for a part of the existing nuclear fleet, the marvelous fleet of heavy water reactors, first developed and commercialized in Canada as the CANDU, and now found in other parts of the world, notably India, Romania and South Korea. In these reactors, owing to their very high neutron economy owing to the very low thermal neutron capture cross section of deuterium with respect to protium (hydrogen's dominant isotope), thorium is a thermal breeder, it makes more fissionable fuel than it consumes.
I have long supported the inclusion of thorium in CANDUs, which is an important goal of India's nuclear program, since India has huge thorium reserves. Canada of course, has huge uranium reserves. Used as unenriched fuel, the use of uranium in CANDUS is fairly inefficient, giving low burn ups. Including thorium can drastically raise burnups in CANDUs (A "burnup" corresponds to miles per gallon in automobiles.) Moreover, reprocessing CANDU fuel that has run on thorium will recover uranium that is enriched (with fissionable U-233) and ready to be recycled even after dilution with depleted uranium. The end result will be the important and essential production of plutonium and neptunium; something essential to addressing climate change in the fastest possible way.
Hence, I was pleased to come across this note: Preparations begin for thorium-HALEU fuel regulatory review.
The Chicago-based fuel innovation company is developing ANEEL fuel - the name is taken from Advanced Nuclear Energy for Enriched Life - for use in pressurised heavy water and Candu reactors. High-burnup irradiation testing and qualification of the fuel is currently under way at the Advanced Test Reactor at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL), using test pellets manufactured by the company in partnership with Texas A&M University and INL. The company is also collaborating with US company Centrus as a supplier of HALEU.
The high-burnup advanced fuel can improve the accident tolerance characteristics and economics of heavy water reactors while reducing the amount of waste generated by as much as 87.5%, the company says, and is proliferation-resistant...
..."The initiation of the CNSC pre-licensing process marks a significant leap towards unlocking ground-breaking performance with heavy water reactors by utilising thorium and HALEU," Clean Core CEO Mehul Shah said. "Once approved for use in Canada, ANEEL Fuel will make CANDU reactors safer, cleaner, and cost effective, while supporting Canada's long-term clean energy goals. Future use by a Canadian licensee also sends a clear signal to current and potential users of heavy water reactors who could benefit from cheaper carbon-free nuclear power that mitigates the concerns of weapons proliferation and waste disposal."
This is very good news for future generations.
The win a heart thermodynamics contest is closed; some answers that would have won a heart.
The "contest" was here: Contest: Win a heart by stating a law of thermodynamics uniquely in this thread.
Thirteen hearts were awarded for statements that more or less defined a law of thermodynamics.
I thank everyone who participated.
Some sample answers that weren't given but would have won a heart.
"Mass is energy."
Although Einstein is said to have stated that the only laws he expected that would never be overturned were those of thermodynamics. Nevertheless his famous E = Mc^2 led to a modification of the first law of thermodynamics, by requiring the addition of the phrase, "In a normal chemical reaction..." to the statement "...energy is neither created nor destroyed." (Other variants refer to work performed, nuclear power plants perform work for example.)
Another would be "movement to a final inevitable state can be accelerated."
This would refer to the use of catalyst to lower "Ea" in the Arrhenius equation:
Another would be, "...To a first approximation, all gases behave the same..."
This would be the ideal gas law:
Another would be, "The actual behavior of gases depends on the size of gas molecules (or atoms) and the attractive forces between them."
This would be the Van der Waals equation:
...or...
"...the behavior of gases depends on the shape of molecules..."
...which would refer to the either the Soave-Redlich–Kwong (SRK) equation or it's further refinement, the Peng Robinson equation...
...or...
..."the fate (final make up) of a system is determined by its temperature"...
One could go on and on and on...
Thanks again to all who participated...
I'll now give away the remaining hearts I've purchased to people I admire on DU, although I'm tempted to give some to people who in my opinion need a heart, specifically people who elevate their personal paranoia about being exposed to (gasp) low level radiation over the deaths of 18,000 people per day from air pollution. Such people, in my opinion, lack a heart.
A very novel nuclear reactor concept, dual liquid metal reactor, U-Cr, eutectic with Pb coolant.
Earlier this evening I produced this thread, which featured an account of Polish government policy connected with educating nuclear professionals and including a short video of a speech given by faculty members to the entering students (in English):
Polish universities launching nuclear courses, as PKN Orlen plans 79 SMRs
Inspired by the commitment of the Polish Government to clean up Poland's currently filthy grid by moving in the opposite direction of the German nuclear to coal reality to a coal to nuclear plan I looked a little deeper into the academic Polish nuclear engineering work, having been, for sometime, a fan of the Polish nuclear engineering mathematician, Jerzy Cetnar, who wrote a paper on addressing certain indeterminate forms (infinities) that can appear in the Bateman equation that governs the evolution of nuclear fuels.
I thus came across this paper, which is in many ways totally novel and extremely interesting to me, since I'm a liquid metal fast reactor fuel kind of guy: Hanusek, T, Macian-Juan, R. Analyses of the shutdown system and transients scenarios for the dual fluid reactor concept with metallic molten fuel. Int J Energy Res. 2022; 46( 12): 17230- 17246.
I've downloaded the full paper and will find the time to study it's many novel concepts, and though I won't have much time to discuss it in detail here, a few excerpts and pictures might be in order.
From the introduction:
A diagram of the reactor's overall design:
The caption:
Note that the reactor features the potential for in line fuel reprocessing, a feature that makes fluid phased reactors, in this case liquid metal fuel, superior to solid fuels.
The reactor at high temperature can run without refueling for close to 10,000 days, well over 20 years but the initial reactivity needs to be ameliorated early in the fuel cycle:
The caption:
A reactor is critical at keff = 1, and should be maintained close to that level in operation.
The authors thus discuss this issue:
In order to control the value of keff during reactor operation, two methods can be employed. The most common is the use of burnable poisons. In the case of circulating fuel reactors, a second approach can also be utilized, namely the addition of a small portion of nuclear fuel online during operation in such a quantity that the usage of burnable poison can be limited or even avoided. This second option was already demonstrated during the operation of the molten salt reactor experiment.19 In this article, the authors decided to feed the reactor during operation with fuel as needed to maintain criticality...
In this paper, it is proposed to have the control elements outside of the core by managing the neutron reflection properties of the liquid lead coolant.
This reactor concept which is new to me kind of blows my mind. You learn something new every day, and then you die.
I definitely need to discuss this one with my son. It's too cool for words.
Have a nice work week.
Polish universities launching nuclear courses, as PKN Orlen plans 79 SMRs
I'm a big fan of the Polish engineering mathematician Jerzy Cetnar; Poland, now wholly dependent on coal is committed, unlike it's neighbor to the West, to cleaning up its act.
Polish universities launching nuclear courses, as PKN Orlen plans 79 SMRs
An excerpt:
The ministry estimates 100 specialist jobs are created by each power plant with an SMR and, with plans to build a fleet of GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s BWRX-300 SMRs, that means "at least several thousand jobs".
The aim is to get the first SMR built by the end of the decade so "in the near future, we will need engineers and high-class specialists to operate the planned nuclear power plants … educating specialists in this field is one of the most important challenges for the development of nuclear energy in Poland".
The ministry adds that as well as nuclear specialists, there will be growing demand for "chemists, electrical engineers, chemical technology specialists, security and environmental protection specialists, cybersecurity specialists, scientists, and crisis response services". There is also the challenge of filling the necessary specialist roles during the construction process...
...Poland has ambitious plans to embrace nuclear energy. The government chose Westinghouse's AP1000 for the first part of the country's six-reactor plan to build up to 9 GWe capacity by 2040. South Korean's Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power have agreed a separate plan for a nuclear power plant in Patnow with Polish companies ZE PAK and Polska Grupa Energetyczna.
There are also various initiatives to bring SMRs to Poland, in various stages of progress - EDF last month signed an agreement with Respect Energy about developing nuclear power projects based on the Nuward SMR technology. In July 2022, Orlen Synthos Green Energy - a joint venture between chemical producers Synthos Green Energy and PKN Orlen - submitted its application to Poland's National Atomic Energy Agency for an assessment of the SMR technology. At the time the stated aim was for at least 10 of the reactors in operation by the early 2030s. On the same day last July, copper and silver producer KGHM Polska Miedz SA submitted a similar application for NuScale's VOYGR SMR.
Weekly CO2 Concentrations at the Mauna Loa/Maunakea Observatory Above 420 ppm Again.
As I have noted in this space on a number of times before, for many years, I have been monitoring the weekly and monthly average CO2 concentrations at the Global Monitoring Laboratory for many years, entering data found on the data pages into spreadsheets for calculation purposes.
In general, as the following graphic shows, over a year, these concentrations are generally sinusoidal in nature, represented by a composite function by superimposition on a roughly quadratic axis despite the inherent noisiness of the localized data.
I derived a crude equation for the quadratic using very simple calculus here: A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.
... This admittedly crude "model" roughly suggests that the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide concentrations, given the trend, will be around 520 ppm “by 2050,” in 28 years, passing, by solving the resultant quadratic equation, somewhere around 500 ppm around 2046, just 24 years from now.
I’ll be dead then, but while I’m living the realization of what we are doing to future humanity fills me with existential horror...
The current winter seems to suggest that the general trends I suggested are not holding; recent increases both on the year to year monthly and weekly data for much of 2022 and 2023 have been relatively mild. In 2019, the average weekly reading compared to the same week of 2018 was 2.90 ppm higher; in 2020, the average reading was 2.58 ppm higher. In the times of peak Covid, 2021 and 2022, it fell respectively to 2.18 and 2.12 ppm.
In 2023, for the first five weeks of the year, it is running at 1.28 ppm over 2022.
There are several possible reasons for this. One, of course, is that despite my repeated criticism of what I regard as a wasteful fantasy, that a so called "renewable energy" nirvana has at last broken out. I doubt it.
The "renewable energy" nirvana in Germany has amounted to funding Vladimir Putin's coffers by replacing nuclear with gas energy, and when embarrassed into being less cushy with Putin, gas with coal.
As of this writing, 3:18 pm EST (US), 19:18 Berlin time, Feb. 12, 2023, the German electric grid is powered largely by coal. It's 61.4 "Gigawatts" of wind capacity is actually running at an instantaneous power of 6.01 GW, 9.12% of capacity utilization.
The carbon intensity of German electricity is an appalling 674 g CO2/kwh, which in "percent talk" is 624% higher than France's 108 g CO2/kwh, despite Hollande's and Macron's deference of maintenance of the once magnificent French infrastructure in hopes of drinking some German Koolaid. (Macron has reversed this policy in his second term, in the category of "too little; too late.)
A more probable cause of the recent mild increases in carbon dioxide increases thus far in this winter has been relatively warm weather in Europe, and the American Northeast, some polar vortexes notwithstanding. We have had here in New Jersey where I live on every light patina of snow sticking all winter up to now. Internationally this may have overwhelmed the German need to switch from gas to coal.
My house is heated with dangerous natural gas; the waste of which is dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere. My wife - who handles our finances informed me that this winter's gas bill is about half of what it was last year.
It's February. In my ten day forecast the temperatures will fall below freezing (briefly) for only two days.
Another possibility is a systematic error. The observatory at Mauna Loa was closed by lava flows from the Mauna Loa volcano on November 29, and the measurements are now being taken at the University of Hawaii at Mauna Kea. There may be some unknown difference in the instruments or data collection procedure, perhaps with respect to addressing background. This I think is unlikely.
It may be statistical noise.
Last year's peak concentrations were recorded during the week beginning May 29, 2022, at 421.63 ppm. By the week beginning July 3, 2022, it had fallen below 420 ppm (419.73 ppm). A local minimum was reached during the week beginning October 2, 2022, 415.27 ppm.
We are now once again above 420 ppm.
Week beginning on February 05, 2023: 420.26 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 418.57 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 396.84 ppm
Last updated: February 12, 2023
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed Feb 12, 2023.)
This week, yesterday, we saw the first daily reading above 421 ppm.
February 11: 421.15 ppm
February 10: 420.33 ppm
February 09: 420.24 ppm
February 08: 420.12 ppm
February 07: 419.55 ppm
Last Updated: February 12, 2023
Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2
Despite some locally strange data in the last few weeks, nothing about this situation is particularly pretty.
Have a pleasant work week. If you're involved in this Superbowl thing, have fun.
Contest: Win a heart by stating a law of thermodynamics uniquely in this thread.
I have some DU hearts to give away before Tuesday.
I learn things by reading, and thinking about what's written, at DU (and other places). I also learn by writing at DU, which requires having references in most cases, and when I look these references up, I learn.
Thus I'm proposing this contest, which may or may not any or much generate interest, but it's worth a shot.
I think people can and should inform their ideas about energy by having at least a primitive knowledge of thermodynamic laws. Without such knowledge one can embrace ideas that are either simply unworkable at best, dangerous at worst.
As the name of this forum implies, energy and the environment are tightly related; the production of primary energy always, in any form, involves risk. We can minimize, but not eliminate risk to the environment and to humanity, by increasing exergy, exergy being the technical term for energy that put to used rather than rejected to the environment.
In my opinion it is useless to discuss energy and its effect on the environment without understanding how energy flows, in short "dyamics," of "heat" (thermo), heat having been critical to the original discovery of what energy actually is as a currency, in the work of James Joule, for whom the unit of energy, the Joule, is named. "Thermodynamics" thus means the flow of energy.
The contest is this: Post a thermodynamic law here in a way that no other poster in this thread has stated and I'll give you a DU heart.
It can be a mathematical formula, but a statement in plain English is preferred, since these are accessible to anyone. Googling is allowed, but a winner of a star must produce the statement for the first time in this thread. Multiple entries are allowed up to three stars. The contestant should give the name of the law of thermodynamics to which she, he, or they are referring with the statement.
As an example - I will not give myself a heart - a statement of the 2nd law of thermodynamics is one I use all the time at DU: "Storing energy wastes it."
By the way, there are laws of thermodynamics beyond the famous "first law," "second law," "third law" and "zeroth law." Any thermodynamic law will do so long as it is named. The contest runs for 25 stars awarded but may be extended.
Those swell hot peppers you eat and its effect on the treatment of sewage sludge.
With my particular somewhat dissident environmental viewpoint, I hear a lot from people, who in my opinion can't think very clearly, about so called "nuclear waste." When I ask these people to demonstrate that used nuclear fuels in the 70 year history of their accumulation have killed as many people as will die in the next three hours from dangerous fossil fuel (and biomass) combustion waste, aka, "air pollution," they generally go away (preferred) or change the subject. The dead toll in a three hour period, any three hour period, from air pollution is, on average, about 56,000 people, more people than Covid killed on its worst day.
We are not doing a damned useful thing to address air pollution or its related manifestation climate change other than to tell ourselves sweet lies.
The second largest waste related cause of fatality on this planet is septic waste. About 800,000 people are killed each year, most of them children, from diarrheal diseases and other diseases related to exposure to fecal waste; about 1.7 billion people lack access to any kind of improved sanitation.
WHO: Sanitation Fact Sheet.
Facts matter.
In the Western World, we do have improved sanitation systems and most of them, including septic systems, rely on biological remediation of wastes.
I personally have a specialized aerobic septic system installed in my house; it's somewhat eccentric, like me, but it's generally a novel approach. Most biodigestion systems of fecal matter are anaerobic, relying on bacteria and fungi to which air is toxic.
It is thus with interest that I came across this paper this morning:
Mitigation of the Toxicity of Capsaicin on Anaerobic Codigestion of Food Waste and Waste Activated Sludge Using Calcium Peroxide: A Comprehensive Analysis Using Computational and Biological Approaches Mingting Du, Xuran Liu, Qing Xu, Qi Lu, Chenxi Li, Qizi Fu, Dandan He, Jingnan Yang, Abing Duan, and Dongbo Wang ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2023 11 (4), 1448-1458.
In the happy days when I was a lab rat, my colleagues and I had occasion to work with pure capsaicin. We had a small five or ten gram bottle. If someone opened it anywhere in the lab outside of the hood, and even at times inside the hood, everyone in the room knew it. The bottle had all kinds of warning labels on it.
Capsaicin is the chemical of the biologically synthesized in hot peppers that makes them "hot." Extremely spicy peppers are relatively rich in this chemical.
Many of the spices used by humanity were not originally utilized for their taste, but rather for their ability to preserve foods in the times before refrigeration. The fondness for the taste followed on this use. At the edge of starvation, preserved food cannot taste bad.
I don't have a lot of time tonight. I have some important meetings tomorrow and am struggling with insomnia, but here's an excerpt of a somewhat surprising - although it might have been obvious if one reflected for a moment - on the effect of capsaicin on sewage treatment:
Capsaicin, the pungent and principal component of capsicum species, is widely used in food cooking and then accumulated in FW. (9,10) Due to dietary habits, some regions of the world, such as southwestern China, Southeast Asia, and Latin American countries, have high levels of capsaicin in FW. According to the report, the capsaicin concentration in FW is up to 25 g/kg. (11) Recently, some efforts have been made in investigating the effect of capsaicin on anaerobic digestion. Li et al. found that when the capsaicin concentration increased from 0.7 to 11.1 g/kg kitchen waste, the maximum methane production decreased from 13.5 to 9.9 mL/(g·VS·h). In addition, when the capsaicin concentration was less than 1% by weight, the methane production was obviously inhibited. (12) Further investigation indicated that the mechanism of inhibition is altered key kinases and induced apoptosis. (11) Previous studies have verified that capsaicin could be degraded slowly by some microbes in nature. (13,14) It is reported that capsaicin could be metabolic by Aspergillus oryzae by ?-hydroxylation, alcohol oxidation, hydrogenation, and isomerization during fermentation. (14) Zhu et al. found that the main oxidative biotransformation pathways of capsaicin by cytochrome P450s from two pests were alkyl hydroxylation and dehydrogenation. Studies have shown that capsaicin can degrade in natural processes, but it does not completely mineralize. Its degradation intermediates may cause some toxicity to the anaerobic digestion process. Therefore, it is necessary to completely degrade capsaicin to mitigate its inhibition on anaerobic codigestion.
Calcium peroxide (CaO2), one of the solid peroxides, is strongly basic when dissolved in hydrous media. In the water phase, CaO2 would release oxygen and Ca(OH)2, while generating hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), hydroxyl radicals (OH), and superoxide radicals (•O2–) as intermediates; thus, it is considered a “solid form” of H2O2. (15) Owing to these unique chemical properties, CaO2 has been widely applied in soil decontamination, solid waste treatment, and micropollutant removal. (16,17) For example, it is reported that the •OH and •O2– produced by CaO2 promote the quality of the dissolved organic matter in the liquid phase. (18) Our previous study found that when the addition of CaO2 increased to 0.14 g/g volatile suspended solids (VSS), the methane yield increased by 45.7% and further indicated that CaO2 accelerated the decomposition of refractory organic matter including humics and lignocellulose in waste activated sludge (WAS). (19) Furthermore, Fu et al. found that CaO2 not only accelerated the removal of tetracycline but also increased the relative abundance of microorganisms involved in the degradation of complex substrates. (17,20) Considering the negative effect of capsaicin on AcoD of FW and unique features of CaO2, it is hypothesized that adding CaO2 to the anaerobic digestion of FW would not only eliminate the inhibitory effect of capsaicin but also further enhance the yield of methane. Furthermore, it is essential to explore the interaction mechanism of capsaicin and CaO2.
Therefore, the purposes of this study were (1) to explore the mechanism of limited CaO2 addition on the degradation of capsaicin; (2) to identify the radical oxygen species and evaluate the contribution of main derivatives of CaO2 (i.e., Ca2+, OH–, •OH, and •O2–) to the capsaicin degradation; (3) to propose the degradation pathways of capsaicin and to verify the molecular reaction mechanism of capsaicin with CaO2 using density functional theory (DFT) calculation; and (4) to evaluate the effect of key enzyme activities in AcoD after CaO2 pretreatment. This study provided in-depth insights into the degradation mechanism of capsaicin by CaO2 and proposed an efficient strategy for simultaneous detoxification of capsaicin and increase of methane production during AcoD...
A figure from the paper:
The caption:
The m/z numbers are of relevance to mass spectroscopy analysis, my absolutely favorite analytical chemistry technique.
There's a lot of cool stuff in this paper; regrettably I will not have time to discuss it.
I wish you a pleasant Friday.
Nickel requirements to grow to 40 times 2020 levels for, um, "green" cars.
The paper I'll briefly discuss is this one:
Cellulose Nanocrystals’ Role in Critical Mineral Beneficiation: Dual Aggregate-Dispersant Behavior Supports Environmentally Benign Nickel Processing Shaihroz Khan, Mohammad Shoaib, Nahid Molaei, Omar Bashir Wani, Zhirong Chen, Thu V. Vuong, Eric W. Roth, Lindsey K. Fiddes, Ivan Kuzmenko, Emma R. Master, and Erin Rae Bobicki ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2023 11 (4), 1294-1304
It's about how my "green" generation has consumed all of the world's best ores with all of our intentions of being "green." .Don't worry be happy, we have ideas on how future generations can work poor quality ores because as we've been saying, "by 2030" or is it "by 2040" or is it "by 2050" or is it "by 2099" - I forget the latest announcement from the coal and gas fans at Greenpeace - it they'll live in some kind of so called "renewable energy" nirvana that we were happy to predict, but never had the ability to quite make happen for ourselves.
As of 2021, the big deal wind and solar fantasy that was supposed to do everything, produced, after the expenditure of trillions of dollars, produced just 12 Exajoules of the 624 Exajoules humanity produced and consumed in that year.
All that infrastructure to produce 12 Exajoules will be landfill in 20 to 25 years.
Too expensive apparently, and "too dangerous" to serious consider things that work, and anyway, we didn't need no fucking engineering ability; we're MBA's, "green" MBA's.
It's the soothsaying that matters, not reality itself.
Anyway, excuse the rage, some text from the paper:
Figure 1a:
The caption:
These authors don't seem to take that "hydrogen will save us" business we hear all about all the time all that seriously; a popular expression of contempt for the laws of physics, so kudos for them are in order. I don't take the "hydrogen will save us" bullshit seriously either. I'm aware of the laws of thermodynamics.
Anyway
The ores we leave behind for future generations, their waterways and lungs choked with micro and nanoplastics, their rivers dry beds worthy of Mars, the glaciers gone, half the world's species extinct are cheerfully described in the paper thus:
That serpentine is a problem.
Some reality about how Nickel "beneficiation" for all of our shiny new "green" stuff is performed:
To combat the challenges associated due to serpentine, some operations run at lower solids concentrations, but this increases costs by requiring higher process volumes to treat slurries and strains increasingly scarce water resources, and also increases the tailing volumes. (19) Several strategies have been used or proposed to mitigate serpentine slime coating on pentlandite. High-intensity conditioning applies hydrodynamic forces to overcome adhesion forces and detach the slime from the mineral surface. (20,21) Microwave pretreatment dehydroxylates serpentine and converts it into negatively charged olivine at pH 10. (12,15,22,23) Carbonation converts serpentine to negatively charged magnesite and silica. (7) Acid attack disintegrates serpentine during grinding before collectorless flotation. (24,25) CO2 conditioning prior to air-based froth flotation converts monohydroxide complexes to carbonates that increase electrostatic repulsion between serpentine and pentlandite and improve nickel recovery and grade. (11) The most commonly used technique to mitigate slime coating is to introduce dispersants into the flotation pulp to alter steric and electrostatic interactions and thus colloidal interactions between particles. (8,20,24,26) Valuable minerals can be effectively separated from gangue using selective dispersants...
By the way, serpentine is a green mineral, where the green I'm not talking about bullshit arm breaking self congratulations about how our electric cars magically run on the trivial energy supplied by solar and wind, nor our worship of wind turbine industrial parks established in trashed wilderness, but simply "color," you know, the electromagnetic wave with a wavelength at around 510 nm.
"Roasting" is a great word too. It sounds like Thanksgiving. The chemical reaction for "roasting" - and yes it involves heat - is:
NiO, nickel oxide, is green, the color, not the bourgeois self congratulation term.
About that SO2: That's dumped into the planetary atmosphere when we roast Nickel sulfide floated out of ores so we can be "green." SO2 is generally not stable in the atmosphere; often it oxidizes to SO3, whereupon the SO3 reacts with water in clouds to form sulfuric acid that comes down in the rain.
Don't worry, though, be happy.
The paper has a wonderful scheme to process those low quality ores in Canada using nanocellulose particles. Cellulose is of course, made by plants. It's, um, RENEWABLE!!!!!!!!
That is if plants don't end up in short supplies because of extreme temperatures and a lack of water.
Ah, they'll figure it out, those kids "by 2050," "by 2060" or whatever. We couldn't care less, we'll be dead then and anyway it will be their problem if they don't live up to our expectations to do what we did not bother to do ourselves.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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