C3

Best Climate Change Solution: Nuclear Technology, A Primer Education

Have friends who have blindly swallowed the anti-nuclear fearmongering propaganda?

They should watch this. (Or, click on image to watch on YouTube.)

 

 

 

 

Green New Deal Footprint: 100% Solar or Wind Renewable Energy Sources Require A Ludicrous Amount Of Land Space

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The Green New Deal, as supported by most Democrats, envisions a U.S. power consumption market that is 100% served by renewable energy sources - primarily solar and wind renewables.

Is it hypothetically possible that either solar or wind, or some combination of the two, could deliver 100% of U.S. energy needs in the future?

Sure, but in reality it would not be practical, nor achievable, nor a desired outcome. 

A very gigantic stumbling block to either wind or solar are the ludicrously huge land space requirements that are essentially insurmountable.

Using the total U.S. power 2017 consumption (estimated) as the goal to be met, either the wind or solar solutions would need to be able to generate 97.7 'quads' (97.7 quadrillion BTUs) on a yearly basis. That BTU figure converts to approximately 28,633 annual terrawatts, which in turn translates to an annual 28,633,000,000,000,000 watts consumed.

As the adjacent graphic indicates, whether it's a 100% wind renewable solution or a 100% solar solution, the approximate space needed in the continental U.S. would be astronomical for either, making these energy solutions politically and economically nonviable.

In contrast, even with current reactor technology, the land requirement for a nuclear solution (see green-filled rectangle on map) is a physical sliver of either solar or wind needs. In fact, the land needed by nuclear would amount to an approximate space as small as Connecticut.

And if the U.S. were to pursue a Gen-IV nuclear technology solution, such as molten salt reactors, the new reactors could be placed on the existing nuclear plant sites to use the old radioactive waste as fuel that is currently being stored at nuclear sites. Yes, Gen-IV technology can consume the old stored waste as fuel.

And because nuclear facilities produce energy 24/7/365, they do not require the same natural gas, pumped storage, or battery storage back up capability that wind and solar require, due to their being intermittent sources of energy. (The method of back up needed by renewables will also add to the the total land area requirements, which is not depicted on map image.)

Then there is the issue of new electrical transmission lines to be constructed. Because of geographical size of the solar/wind options, the number of new transmission lines to serve all the different wind/solar energy farms will be multiple times more than that required by the nuclear option.

Finally, as a plus, the Gen-IV technology is safe from melt down or potential containment vessel explosions due to its inherent design fundamentals. Conceivably, due to less risk, the total land needed for such technology might end up being less than the older nuclear plant sites.

Due to land requirements alone, it would behoove politicians of both parties to plan for and promote an industry standard design of the Gen-IV reactor technology to be adopted and installed as quickly as possible. It should become the nation's major source of electricity generation, along with smaller installations of solar and wind where locations favor their utilization - i.e., the sunny and windy regions. 

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Note: The land requirements for nuclear, solar, and wind were supplied from this NEI.org article. The adjacent table is a summary of the basic information used to calculate the land requirements assuming that all power consumption for all sectors would be in the form of electricity from non-fossil fuel sources, including transportation and heating. For the above U.S.map image, the square mile size of each U.S. state -- used to visualize the approximate land mass needed for each energy production source. Best case scenarios assumed for solar and wind capacity efficiency; industry average scenario used for nuclear capacity efficiency. Existing hydro power generation (about 2.9% of 2017 total) would slightly reduce amount of land required by wind, solar, and nuclear. Offshore wind farms could be utilized but they may ultimately be 2 to 3 times more costly; and will be exposed to greater natural weather and environmental stresses that cause more frequent operational maintenance/repair that will likely be difficult and lengthy.

 

 

 

Why The Democrats Socialist Dream of A 'Green New Deal' Will Ultimately Fail

 

 

Essentially, we rely on accessible and affordable fossil fuels for almost everything we use and consume. The progressive elites and green leftists demanding we forsake fossil fuels are completely oblivious to to how intertwined they are in everyday modern existence.

There are no replacement alternatives that would provide the same comprehensive benefits serving humanity.

Did You Know? That The "Experts" Don't Even Know How Much Oil Is Stored

MIT informs us that the "experts" are even clueless as to how much oil is being globally stored.

Yet, supposedly, the experts know how much fossil fuel is burned each year by each country, as well as supposedly knowing how many metric tonnes of CO2 emissions are being emitted to atmosphere.

Color it highly doubtful.

One thinks that the "settled" science of fossil fuel global warming - i.e. climate change - is based on a "huge amount of guesswork" and is actually very unsettled.

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Peak Oil Prediction: Another Miseable Failure By The Consensus Experts

Experts and their "consensus" predictions have been astoundingly bad in the climate science field - almost as bad as the never-ending "peak" oil predictions from the energy consensus experts

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Read here. New discoveries and new extraction techniques in recent years have made fools of those experts spewing the 'peak oil' mantra.

The actual evidence reveals how spectacularly wrong the consensus was:

"1. Contrary to what most people believe, oil is not in short supply and oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. From a purely physical point of view, there are huge volumes of conventional and unconventional oils still to be developed, with no “peak-oil” in sight.

2. The shale/tight oil boom in the United States is not a temporary bubble, but the most important revolution in the oil sector in decades.

3. In the aggregate, conventional oil production is also growing throughout the world...Huge parts of the world are still relatively unexplored for conventional oil

4. Over the next decades, the growing role of unconventional oils will make the Western hemisphere the new center of gravity of oil exploration and production."

A Primer On Both The Disaster Called "Renewable Energy" & The Promise of Thorium-Based Energy

Read here. Recently, we had a posting on renewable energy (ethanol) and one that mentioned the great promise of thorium-based energy. A new C3 reader saw those postings and informed us of his own writings on both subjects. We can't vouch for all the very interesting content on Christopher Calder's site but to our eyes it represents a great primer for laying out the problems with renewables and the hope for newer clean, reliable and abundant energy solutions.

From the Obama's and left-liberal's energy strategy, the "Let them eat cake" strategy:

• "According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, global food prices rose an incredible 40% in 2007.  The World Bank states that the cost of staple foods rose by 83% during the 3 year period from 2005 to 2008.  The International Food Policy Research Institute states that biofuels are responsible for rapid grain price inflation, and a detailed analysis by Don Mitchell, an internationally respected economist at the World Bank, stated that biofuels have forced global staple food prices up by 75%.....The United Nations states that its charity programs can no longer afford to feed the starving peoples of the world because of the high cost of staple foods.  Mr. Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, repeatedly denounced biofuels as "a crime against humanity."  The new UN food envoy, Mr. Olivier De Schuster, has called for United States and European Union biofuel targets to be abandoned, and said the world food crisis is "a silent tsunami affecting 100 million people."  Oil price increases have not shrunk the human food supply, but biofuel production has.  The more biofuels we produce, the less food we have to eat, because we grow biofuel crops using the same land, water, fertilizer, farm equipment, and labor we use to grow food."

On the promising energy solution that Obama, Al Gore, George Soros, Goldman Sachs and most leftist/liberals/progressives hate:

• "The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) solves all of the major problems associated with nuclear power.....LFTRs only requires input of uranium or plutonium to kick-start the initial nuclear reaction, and as the fissionable material can come from either spent fuel rods or old nuclear warheads, LFTRs will inevitably be used as janitors to clean up old nuclear waste.....The cost savings of using a liquid fuel is like the difference between making soup vs. baking a wedding cake.  Soup is cheap, and you can change ingredients very easily.  The reactor works like a Crock-Pot; you keep the fuel cooking in the pot until it is over 99% burned, so LFTRs produce less than 1% of the long-lived radioactive waste of light water reactors, making Yucca Mountain waste storage unnecessary....."Liquid fluoride thorium reactors operate at high temperature for 50% thermal/electrical conversion efficiency, thus they need only half of the cooling required by today's coal or nuclear plant cooling towers."  LFTRs will be manufactured on an assembly line, dramatically lowering costs and enabling electricity generation at a projected rate of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which is cheaper than burning coal for power."