The Ergosphere

Petition to restart the Integral Fast Reactor program

2011-10-13T22:12:00.001-04:00

As many readers of this blog probably know, the Integral Fast Reactor project was killed by a very narrow Senate vote in 1994, with the connivance of the Clinton administration. This was all done very much behind the scenes. The public at large had no knowledge of what was going on (I sure didn't), and what happened was probably driven by a few relatively narrow special interests. Times have

Thorium remix

2011-10-12T16:28:00.002-04:00

I highly recommend this 2 hour mashup of various LFTR- and nuclear-related video clips, most of it taken from lectures and interviews with Kirk Sorensen. It begins with the "LFTR in 5 minutes" sequence but broadens it with major and up-to-date bits about many matters, including Fukushima Dai'ichi.

It's not looking good for Europe - North Sea gas falls 25%

2011-09-29T21:49:00.000-04:00

From The Grauniad:North Sea gas production has slumped by 25% in the second quarter of the year, an alarming increase in the rate of decline that will cut tax revenues and could put more pressure on government to agree controversial shale gas developments.Figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) also show a 36% rise in coal imports, but a leap from 6.3% to 9.6% for the

We did NOT almost lose Detroit

2011-09-19T15:27:00.003-04:00

I highly recommend this rebuttal (from 1976!) to the book "We Almost Lost Detroit" which addresses the claims about the Fermi I fast-breeder reactor and the accident which took it out of service. In short, nothing much happened, and the design basis accident for the plant was so overwhelmingly large compared to the actual event that it's hard to see how something could have.

9/11, ten years later

2011-09-11T12:39:00.004-04:00

On this day ten years ago I was fighting my way through morning rush-hour traffic, going to an out-of-town plant to work on some production issues. After getting through the worst of it, I stopped for refreshment and another motorist told me that a small plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I switched from the CD player to the radio, and listened the rest of the way as the horror

Michele Bachmann believes in magic

2011-08-19T08:44:00.004-04:00

Or maybe she's lying, or batshit crazy. But there is no way that she can possibly cut gasoline prices to $2/gallon, as she said she would if elected, without some massive collapse in demand (like a collapse of the US economy). Remember what happened to prices in the Asian Flu of 1998? Gas prices would go down again... temporarily... if that was us. If the Republicans put this loon on the

Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story

2011-07-31T22:50:00.003-04:00

I'd like to call attention to the article with the above name (about 7 years old now) hosted at The Center for Reactor Information. It lays out the brief history of the Integral Fast Reactor, including how it came within a hair's breadth of surviving the 1994 vote to kill it. It also gives a brief listing of its selling points, including (contrary to claims often made by anti-nuclear activists)

Quote without comment

2011-07-22T07:44:00.001-04:00

Bureaucracy is a tool to keep the world as it is, not to change it. So, in perfect Tainter-style, the system works hard to avoid innovation, not to promote it. It is almost impossible to be financed to study resource depletion; that would highlight problems that would require changes and that's a no-no. Instead, it is still possible to obtain research grants as long as there is no risk that

A personal endorsement

2011-07-21T12:30:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of companies and websites who want space on your sidebar. I've received dozens of requests for link exchanges over the years. I've turned them all down, not even putting my blogroll there. I just didn't think anything was worth that much attention. That just changed. Flibe Energy is now featured there. This is not a commercial endorsement; I have no relationship to Flibe

End-running the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

2011-05-23T14:42:00.003-04:00

I admit that there's a lot I don't know about things nuclear, and especially about the byzantine regulations which have essentially blocked new ideas for decades (which makes the area ripe for innovation, as Bill Gates has noted). But, aside from being introduced to the concept of MSR/LFTR itself, nothing I've learned has surprised me as much as learning in the post about the third TEAC

The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry

2011-05-19T19:53:00.003-04:00

I don't know how I missed this gem attributed to Freeman Dyson. I don't have much time for books these days, but quotes like this usually find their way into my stream of reading rather quickly. Pithy, and oh so timely (and corrected for spelling and grammar).The fundamental problem of the nuclear power industry is not reactor safety, not waste disposal, not the dangers of nuclear proliferation

Everyone complains about their job

2011-04-30T23:30:00.002-04:00

Well, everyone I've known has had a complaint here and there.But I haven't seen a site quite like Employvent for letting the whole world feel your pain. That is all.

Quote without comment

2011-04-16T21:53:00.001-04:00

From poster "donb":We already have quite a few "paper reactors" that look promising. Likely they need more design simulation. But we will not know how good any of these reactors really are until those paper designs are expressed in operating hardware. I think our shortage of prototype reactor hardware is much more critical than any shortage of reactor simulation tools.

Lessons from Japan

2011-03-12T17:18:00.006-05:00

Regarding the on-going crisis of the nuclear plants in Japan, I received this (which I have abridged and reformatted as a numbered list): So, what do we learn? Don't use nuclear power. If you do, don't build in an earthquake zone. If you do, don't build on a tsunami-prone seaside. Make sure the emergency cooling system works, even in an emergency. Make sure the reactor is fail-safe in a power

In which I am 3 times as bold as Thomas Friedman, and years ahead

2011-03-10T17:59:00.005-05:00

In the NY Times, Thomas Friedman finally makes a concrete suggestion for increased gas taxes: boost them by $1/gallon at 5¢/month. He had made a similar suggestion about 2.5 years ago, but it was fairly vague. Maybe someday he'll catch up to my 2006 suggestion to increase the tax by $3/gallon at a nickle a month for 5 years. Who knows, he might even suggest it before it gets done.

The future isn't what it used to be

2011-03-03T10:14:00.004-05:00

A little selection from the 1972 Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future.

Run trucks on LNG, or on electrified rail?

2011-02-21T20:04:00.002-05:00

A discussion elsewhere brought this issue up, and these numbers should be posted for reference. Replacing diesel with LNG requires roughly the energy equivalent of methane, plus whatever it takes to purify the gas and convert it to liquid. The info on liquefaction energy is hard to find; Linde Engineering doesn't even mention energy cost in its promotional material on its LNG plants. But I

EIA purges history, hoses the public

2011-02-21T16:51:00.002-05:00

I just went to the EIA website to look up some historical data. Surprise! According to the EIA's new data, the world began in 2005! At least, that's the limit of the info I can get on natural gas. The rest of the site is equally horrid, in a MySpace kind of way; it looks glitzy, but it is now geared at the level of a 9th-grade school report rather than providing detailed data for the public's

Rail electrification costs from Alan Drake

2011-02-19T23:44:00.002-05:00

Just copying info received, for reference. Message 1: New Haven to Boston (AMtrak > Gov't contracting) electrified @ 2000 at $2.3 million/mile for mainly double track, some triple track. Populated almost all the way and very curvy (route along CN shore for much of way), both of which add costs ($200,000/mile for flagging !!) I use $2 million/mile for single track and $2.5 million for

Too true

2011-02-14T12:57:00.001-05:00

US embassy cables: Saudi oil company oversold ability to increase production, embassy told

2011-02-09T04:17:00.000-05:00

Cable dated:2007-12-10T05:54:00 C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 RIYADH 002441 SIPDIS SIPDIS DHAHRAN SENDS DEPT OF ENERGY PASS TO MWILLIAMSON, GPERSON, AHEGBURG, AND JHART CIA PASS TO TCOYNE E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/10/2017 TAGS: EPET, ENRG, ECON, SA SUBJECT: FORMER ARAMCO INSIDER SPECULATES SAUDIS WILL MISS 12.5 MBD IN 2009 REF: RIYADH 1950 Classified By: Consul General John Kincannon

Nuclear energy and evolution vs. nihilism

2011-01-12T15:54:00.002-05:00

There's no such thing as an infinite power source. The Sun isn't infinite. Hell, the entire visible universe isn't infinite. Even if we get off this ball of mud and power ourselves using the longest-lived of red dwarf stars, the best we can hope for is a few trillion years before the lights go out. If you're a nihilist, stop reading here and log off. Killing yourself over the pointlessness

Quote without comment

2011-01-04T00:58:00.002-05:00

Honors and AP classes are for kids who are intellectually curious, and have been since they were elementary school students. Intellectually curious kids read, explore, study and remember facts on their own because they are intrinsically motivated to find things out. Higher learning cannot take place in a brain that’s essentially a vacuum.— BadaBing posting at JoanneJacocbs.com.

Smoking guns and being late to the party

2010-12-28T18:45:00.003-05:00

As long-time readers of this blog probably know well, I like to do my own analysis of things. This is partially because I think things should be checked and re-checked to make sure the original work is correct (one of the standard methods of science), but also because I don't spend huge amounts of time digging into what other people have done before I go and crunch numbers myself. Yes, I know.

Coal-to-liquids: claims vs.reality

2010-12-22T13:06:00.002-05:00

It's quite common to see claims that coal-to-liquids is capable of replacing the USA's imports of oil. Reality check: Net US imports for 2009 ran about 9.7 million bbl/day.At 6.1 GJ/bbl this is 21.6 EJ (20.5 quads) per year.If refineries convert crude to product at 90% and CTL operates at 45% efficiency, it would take 43.2 EJ (41.0 quads) per year of coal to replace oil imports.The USA only

Scamwatch: social networking edition

2010-12-05T23:02:00.003-05:00

Social networking sites have to pay their hosting bills somehow. It's entirely legit to sell ads. Yet that doesn't excuse taking ad revenue from scammers. I've recently been more annoyed than usual by a "free electricity" scam being pushed at me via ads. The ads no longer tout "magnetic generators", but that is probably to stay under the radar. The link for this scam goes through

Batacitor brings on end of the world! Film at 11.

2010-11-29T15:30:00.001-05:00

This is huge. I have trouble emphasizing HOW huge this is. "Earthshaking" is an understatement. It is "the end of petroleum's stranglehold on transportation" huge. Green Car Congress reports on a joint announcement by Nanotek Instruments and Angstron Materials of a supercapacitor which has energy storage over 80 Wh/kg. This is in the performance region of nickel metal hydride materials and

Why the Integral Fast Reactor had to die

2010-10-22T06:04:00.002-04:00

Over at The Oil Drum, I left this comment, not really grasping the enormity: Fast breeders can turn any isotope of uranium into energy (as well as burning all the transuranics), so you might want to look at this 2008 paper: During the 50 years that the Federal Government controlled the U.S. uranium enrichment enterprise, DOE generated over 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride (

Worthwhile post on small nuclear reactors

2010-10-12T13:09:00.002-04:00

Rod Adams has a post on small nuclear reactors, including some notes on the 1961 SL-1 reactor accident (now coming up on its 50th anniversary).

Voting fraud under the Obama DOJ threatens the nation

2010-09-24T23:16:00.001-04:00

This is the testimony of Christopher Coates before Congress on September 24 2010, regarding the dismissal of the Obama "Justice" Department's open-and-shut voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panthers and other matters. It goes into detail about the history behind this strange action: a voter-discrimination case against one Ike Brown, who discriminated against white voters in Noxubee

Steven Den Beste misses the mark on thorium

2010-08-31T23:42:00.005-04:00

Over on Hot Air, Steven Den Beste claims that thorium reactors are a huge proliferation risk. Unfortunately, heoversimplifies and gets it wrong, andis going to be taken as gospel by lots of people anyway Here's the real dope, in a nutshell:Thorium (Th-232) can be bred to fissile uranium 233 (U-233) by hitting it with a neutron, allowing the Th-233 to decay to protactinium (Pa-233) and then to

Peak coal, 2011?

2010-08-02T23:55:00.001-04:00

Using a multi-cyclic Hubbard analysis, researcher Tad Patzek has concluded that the world will experience "peak coal" as soon as next year (h/t GCC). Several things are obvious:This is going to be one heck of a shock to the system.Efficiency will become much more important.Alternative means of exploiting coal which is otherwise not recoverable, such as underground coal gasification (UCG), will

Analysis from posts

2010-08-01T14:55:00.003-04:00

GCC has a post on biomass-to-naptha schemes, upgrading pyrolysis oil to hydrocarbons. The projected cost is $2.11-$3.09 per gallon. My analysis follows. 2000 dry tons/day = 730,000 tons/year. The yield is 48 gallons/ton for the hydrogen production scenario and 79 gallons/ton for the merchant hydrogen scenario. (I calculate the carbon fraction captured in the product to be about 26% and 47%,

Do not buy mailing lists from Cision

2010-07-21T19:24:00.004-04:00

I have just been told that my recent bout of spam from a plethora of different organizations (impossible to block by address) has a common source: a database company named Cision. Do not deal with Cision. They sell addresses harvested by unethical means, and people will get angry with YOUR organization if they start getting unwanted mail because you bought one of their dirty mailing lists.

2 Californias or 1/30 of a Texas to replace offshore oil

2010-07-06T15:02:00.006-04:00

(cross-posted at The Oil Drum, if the doomers dare to run it.) Words have power, and I don't understand how someone with as long a record as Chris Nelder could be so careless with them. Mistakes in calculations are one thing, but a wordsmith ought to know about misleading headlines and burying the lede. This is why I can't explain his essay, 195 Californias or 74 Texases to Replace Offshore

More doomer propaganda about carbon-free energy

2010-06-28T23:52:00.003-04:00

Of all the fallacies of logic used by propagandists, the fallacy of composition is the one they seem to love the most. Guest poster Hannes Kunz is, I fear, a propagandist. Kunz starts at the top of the section titled "Renewable energies - the fake fire brigade" (stealing RR's phrase). He lumps all "renewable" energy supplies (some of which are not renewable, as RR himself has explained at

The enforcement of orthodoxy at The Oil Drum

2010-05-09T00:30:00.003-04:00

You may have wondered why I haven't been posting much lately. Well, I've actually not been idle. I've had a very important multi-author post ready to go at The Oil Drum since roughly last August. You haven't seen this post, you say? That's right. You haven't. Why? The road to that point is a bit rough. I'm going to digress a bit before I get there. Just hold on through the bumps and keep

Kitson-Still: still obsolete

2010-04-10T10:03:00.003-04:00

One of the favorite hobby-horses of a regular GCC commenter is the Kitson-Still locomotive (here's the Wikipedia page). Built by Kitson and Company in 1926, it used the Still double-acting steam/diesel engine. One major advantage was the ability of the steam section to apply full torque at zero speed; this allowed the designers to avoid a multi-speed gearbox and clutch, which made the system

Who will admit Haiti's real problem?

2010-01-15T10:03:00.005-05:00

Even before the earthquake, Haiti was a disaster area. Massive shantytown slums surround cities. Deforestation runs rampant as people push into protected watershed areas trying to feed themselves. Roughly a million people only eat due to the World Food Program. And long before these issues came to the fore, Haiti was known for being a hotbed of HIV. No amount of reconstruction will address

Was Cadillac listening?

2010-01-12T15:25:00.001-05:00

That was me, then:A quieter car, which requires fewer trips to the gas station and can start its climate control at full bore with the flick of a switch (even a remote switch), is a better car and ought to command a better price. And late last year:The self-inflicted wound on GM's part is that the Volt is a Chevy, not a Cadillac. A $40,000 pricetag on a Caddy isn't an issue. The ultra-smooth

The rot goes all the way to the top

2010-01-07T14:24:00.002-05:00

From Bloomberg, via Yahoo: Geithner’s New York Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure Hugh Son Thu Jan 7, 6:00 am ET Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the

Revisiting Green Freedom

2010-01-04T20:28:00.001-05:00

A discussion at Futurepundit which wound its way around to hydrocarbons produced with nuclear energy produced this comment, which really merits its own post... I went over the Green Freedom overview again. It's not specific about power and efficiency, but the figures given are no cause for optimism: $4.60/gallon at the pump (page 8). The investment of $9.6 billion for 18,400 bbl/day of

NOW will they agree to screen passengers for jihadist sympathies?

2009-12-25T19:31:00.005-05:00

From the Associated Press, via Yahoo: By LARRY MARGASAK and LARA JAKES, Associated Press Writer Larry Margasak And Lara Jakes, Associated Press Writer – 50 mins ago WASHINGTON – U.S. officials say a Northwest Airlines passenger from Nigeria said he was acting on behalf of al-Qaida when he tried to blow up a

Security through obscurity

2009-12-17T20:56:00.003-05:00

Security through obscurity, isn't. And in other news, water is wet, fire is hot, and it's impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so inventive. I'll just let the Associated Press tell this bit of the story about Predator drones: The problem, he said, is that when the drones were first being developed they were using commercial equipment, which as time goes on could become

Thermodynamics bleg

2009-12-07T15:04:00.004-05:00

I'm looking for properties tables (enthalpy, entropy, Cp, Cv, that stuff) for carbon dioxide in the range of 5-30 MPa and up to 1400°C. The NIST data that I've got only goes up to 1100 K (823 C) which is well short of what I need.Does anyone know where I can find this, either on-line or in print?

Quote without comment

2009-11-16T23:21:00.001-05:00

From user Zenster commenting at Gates of Vienna: The nearly unanimous inability for anyone, be it the media, army command, law enforcement or this nation's political administration, to identify the Fort Hood massacre as a terrorist attack is symptomatic of the free ride that Islam gets, like some societal lamprey, on the body of functional cultures. Most disgusting of all is how vigorously

Beyond disgusted

2009-11-14T23:13:00.002-05:00

Part IV of Dittmar's essay has been up at The Oil Drum for the last few days. I've been reading it as fast as I can stomach it. To say that I'm disgusted by that tripe is a gross understatement. I am bitter, locked in disputes with the editors over the rebuttal to Chapter I which has been finished for a month but has still not been rhetorically neutered to their specifications. My co-authors

Potent things come in small packages

2009-10-29T17:29:00.006-04:00

I have been reading the PhD dissertation of Vaclav Dostal for information and inspiration, and I came across a graphic which shows the difference between the bulk of a steam turbine system, a helium turbine (proposed for high-temperature nuclear reactors) and a CO2 turbine system (a cheaper alternative to the helium turbine). Here it is: In raw numbers, the CO2 power turbine is 0.6 meters

Stimulus flops - who knew?

2009-10-29T17:15:00.002-04:00

It turns out that the stimulus has produced many fewer jobs than claimed. In some cases, stimulus money produced no jobs at all or simply prevented employees from jumping ship for better pay. When the histories are written, I suspect that the stimulus (and TARP, and the Federal Reserve's immense expansion of the money supply at a near-zero interest rate) will turn out to have gone mostly to

Religious whinging in Florida

2009-10-29T17:02:00.003-04:00

The Associated Press reports via Yahoo News that a Florida man, fired from Home Depot because he would not adhere to the company uniform, is suing for religious discrimination. It appears to me that the company has an airtight case. FTA:"This associate chose to wear a button that expressed his religious beliefs. The issue is not whether or not we agree with the message on the button," Craig

Speculation on limits to growth

2009-10-05T09:07:00.002-04:00

If I may offer a science-fictional scenario for techno-cornucopianism, the limit for earth-based society is when it becomes something like a living system which can reproduce its components from the local resources. The elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) are available just about everywhere in various proportions, and it is essentially impossible to run out of silicon,

YOU LIE!

2009-09-20T15:25:00.004-04:00

In the news today is President Obama's health-care plan: Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all.So some people are going to be forced to buy insurance they don't want, or fined if they don't (even if they can't afford it, as in

Energetics of cultivation: draft animals vs. combustion engines and the Haber process

2009-09-19T13:52:00.002-04:00

Abstract The energy use by the agricultural sector of the economy has been widely discussed and debated in the peak oil community. The amount of energy used directly at farms is not very large; typical claims for the fuel required to cover a field with a plow or other implement are in the range of one gallon of diesel per acre per pass. Assuming seeding, harvesting and 3 other passes per year,

The death of Cantarell

2009-09-11T12:03:00.002-04:00

This graph says a great deal, and it is very worrisome:

Evading Yahoo's irritating demands

2009-08-22T17:38:00.004-04:00

I have what I believe is a way to get around the Yahoo Mail redirect which demands personal information for the password recovery. It is a simple process: Delete Yahoo cookies.Go to the Mail login page.Delete Yahoo cookies again.Then enter user name and password as normal. This appears to go straight to the Mail page and I haven't been redirected yet.

Dammit, Yahoo, can't you take a hint?

2009-08-15T00:36:00.003-04:00

Aside from the total capitulation of the core of the business to Microsoft, Yahoo's fate appears to be sealed by the fact that they Just Don't Get It. Take this impertinent quiz forced onto unwilling Yahoo! Mail users. It asks a bunch of personal questions so that someone can get into the e-mail account. Excuse me, but isn't that what the password is for? What if somebody doesn't want to allow

EPA economy ratings vs. the GM Volt: A square peg in a round hole

2009-08-12T22:15:00.003-04:00

What a difference a number makes. The projected EPA economy rating of the GM Volt has set off a storm of criticism across the Internet. While a number of blogs played the story straight (1, 2), the Good Math blog attacked it as nonsense, which got picked up by Reddit. Critics say that the actual fuel economy seen by drivers could be as low as 50 MPG, or as high as infinity. So who's right?

The Federal Reserve acknowledges peak oil

2009-07-09T11:01:00.001-04:00

Coming late to this, but in case you missed it, Lou Grinzo notes that another piece of the government has reconciled itself to the inevitable—even if it is written in almost Greenspannish understatement. Go read it.

Steorn: Epilogue

2009-07-06T11:22:00.002-04:00

In an announcement which should have surprised no one (least of all me), a jury of international experts has declared that Steorn's "free energy" device has shown no evidence of working. FTA:“The situation was we had engaged them in February 2007 and went through a process with them,” Mr McCarthy said. Two years have passed however and the jury clearly decided that enough was enough.It posted an

The 2012 oil crunch vs. Cash for Clunkers

2009-06-15T14:38:00.001-04:00

Via the UAE comes a warning from Saudi Arabia: crude oil prices are likely to spike above last year's record high. "If others do not begin to invest similarly in new capacity expansion projects, we could see within two to three years another price spike similar to, or worse than, what we witnessed in 2008." This is no surprise to anyone who's been following the peak oil news, and it seems very

Yahoo! Mail Classic "upgrades" making it unusable

2009-05-30T19:48:00.001-04:00

How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"? Let me count the ways: Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason. For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order. For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no option to change this without also changing the order of presentation. Now it's changed back. Yahoo

Stick a fork in Freedom Car... it's done

2009-05-14T22:58:00.001-04:00

Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it. Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off. That didn't take long. (Pity Europe was 3 years ahead of us, but better late than never.) Hydrogen fuel-cell

Well, it's something.

2009-04-01T01:11:00.002-04:00

From Green Car Congress: The researchers found that Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells. “We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane.” —Bruce LoganThis

Washington bunraku theater

2009-03-26T09:40:00.006-04:00

The furor over the AIG executive bonuses is, as others have already noted, largely misplaced. Why should anyone care about the disposition of less than 1/10 of 1% of the total bailout money? The whole thing is less than a day's expenditures in Iraq; it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It does, however, suggest that there are real culprits, and the government and media are carefully directing

Electric generation chart

2009-02-19T19:36:00.008-05:00

Posted to be linked elsewhere. Nothing to see here, move along.

Mr. President, follow that just a bit further

2009-02-05T11:05:00.006-05:00

In news today, President Obama implies that faith used as a tool to divide people is being mis-used and says there is no faith in the world that is based on hatred. Will he then note that Islam states in no uncertain terms (Sura 98:6) that "those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings"? This is a

Saint Gasoline on art

2008-12-30T16:27:00.002-05:00

Saint Gasoline has produced an entertaining little exposition on the evolution of art. An excerpt:Then something happened in the past century that changed art. Artists sort of went apeshit. James Joyce made novels full of jibberish and vague allusions to Greek myths. Picasso painted portraits of people made out of squares and seemingly smashed into two-dimensions. And in the culmination of this

Not energy-related, but worth reading

2008-12-29T22:38:00.001-05:00

Mostly because it's Dave Barry's year in review, and it's laugh-out-loud funny (okay, that's redundant).

AC Propulsion removes white papers

2008-12-23T09:28:00.002-05:00

AC Propulsion used to have a very useful collection of white papers and other things on their site. I cited this stuff all the time. The other day I went to cite some of their V2G work related to reactive power... and it was all gone! The entire resources directory had disappeared; there wasn't even a pointer to a new location for the information. This probably happened during the revamp of

Efficiency standards: No public comment?

2008-11-07T11:51:00.000-05:00

This is the season of bailouts. A great many people did foolish things with other people's money, and now Congress is putting the US taxpayer on the hook for it. The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is the biggest of these, but far from the only one. With Congress handing out fiat money, the auto companies have also begged for and been granted a $25 billion slice of the pie. The only thing

Looking for plans/instructions

2008-10-23T09:53:00.000-04:00

Sometime in the distant past, I recall seeing ads for plans to convert an automotive A/C compressor to a steam or air motor. These were supposedly simple enough that they could be done with a drill press. Now that I'm interested in playing with something like this, I can't find a bit of info on it. Anyone know where it's hiding, or did I hallucinate the whole thing?

On the hazards of ignorance of thermodynamics

2008-10-01T00:07:00.001-04:00

Wherein the author continues a discussion as an essay Over at The Oil Drum, a discussion subthread about gas turbines as energy converters ended with this late-arriving statement by Cyril R.: Non-combustion gas turbines are not proven. They're mostly in pilot/research stages. You say that the conditions in non-combustion lower temp operation are more reasonable than in higher temp combustion gas

Nature abhors anything below sea level

2008-08-28T22:32:00.000-04:00

Among the living, or the dead?

2008-06-05T23:21:00.000-04:00

We interrupt our regular schedule of energy blogging and rants for this special bulletin. Does anyone know if Möbius Stripper is on-line even the tiniest bit? It's been two years since the last post on Tall, Dark and Mysterious, and I miss the acerbic humor and take-no-hostages approach to the follies of edu-land. We now return you to Whatever The Hell I Feel Like Posting Next.

Useful questions re: CAES

2008-05-31T01:20:00.002-04:00

CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) is being promoted as a way to smooth the delivery of intermittent supplies of power from e.g. wind. This would increase its ability to displace other supplies of electricity and reduce carbon emissions from the same. Of course, pumping lots of air around is going to have secondary effects (you cannot do just one thing). A question I have not seen addressed

Inspired by Picasso

2008-05-28T23:30:00.000-04:00

Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." He was right. Correct answers to the wrong questions get you nowhere. The crisis in commodities is feeding back into the cost of energy. The amount of raw materials (both steel and fuel) required to bring new oil fields into production is growing rapidly. Sooner or later, you'll get more energy return in less

Sauer-Danfoss: A rant

2008-05-06T00:24:00.000-04:00

I've been suffering with the products of a company called Sauer-Danfoss. This company makes industrial controllers and displays, programmed with a proprietary graphical system resembling ladder logic. Here is my litany of complaints (addressed as an open letter, because I would like the world to know what a pain this stuff is; maybe S-D will take bad press as a good incentive to improve their

Quote without comment

2008-01-26T08:55:00.000-05:00

Biology is under attack in the US right now — there are a great many people who are utterly ignorant of the subject who have decided that no, sir, they don't like it, they don't want to be a descendant of no monkey, and Jesus tells 'em everything they need to know. It's gotten so bad that one of our major political parties, while not making it a central issue of their campaigns, has made

Losing context

2008-01-05T02:35:00.000-05:00

I've been so consumed with a very few blogs and activities of late, and realized that there were at least a dozen that I'd been neglecting (easy to do, because they're bookmarked on a computer not currently connected to the Internet and with a screwed-up USB automounter). I thought about making quick visits to a few, and.... realized that I couldn't remember their URLs, or even more than a

An irritation of trolls

2007-12-13T22:50:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, the English played a game of creating collective nouns. It is from this that we get "a gaggle of geese", "a murder of crows", and so forth. The Internet creates a need for terms to describe new things and phenomena. I nominate "an irritation of trolls" for a 21st-century collective noun. There are a number of them plaguing blogs such as Green Car Congress and The Energy Blog

Presentations on thermal conversion

2007-04-14T11:11:00.000-04:00

Robert Rapier received 3 PDF files on Changing World Tech's thermal conversion process (TCP, formerly thermal depolymerization) from a correspondent. Since they have become hard to find on the web, I have put them up at The Ergosphere's formerly-undisclosed location, ergosphere.wordpress.com.

This thing is still on?

2007-03-31T00:34:00.000-04:00

(Title references this, BTW.) I logged in to post comments elsewhere, and got a surprise: the dashboard page, which I never thought I'd see again. At least per superficial appearances, no action on my part was required to keep going past... what, exactly? Was the blog converted? Is this now a Google account? I have not the foggiest idea. If I can still post, and if Google recovers some

Two easy pieces

2007-02-11T00:50:00.000-05:00

The difficult parts of the emerging renewable energy economy are the high-efficiency biomass converters and new energy storage. (The biomass-to-electricity converter is a sine qua non for the Sustainability scheme.) These are essential; without high efficiency the energy yield of biomass is too low to support a high standard of living, and without storage the use of intermittent supplies (such

Goodbye to Blogger?

2007-02-11T00:05:00.000-05:00

On my sign-in just now, I got a notice that I can go straight to my Blogger dashboard without converting to the new Blogger and making a Google account — but I can only do this once. After this I must have a Google account if I want to post to The Ergosphere. I don't want a Google account. I want nothing to do with their data-retention policies, their data-mining, or anything else. I want to

The art of propaganda

2007-01-26T01:16:00.000-05:00

Being sick and somewhat out of sorts, I only half-listened to the SOTU speech (text) on Tuesday. But what I heard did nothing to change my opinion of our lame duck President. I heard plenty of weasel-phrases, and the anemic goals reminded me of "the soft bigotry of low expectations". Twenty percent over ten years? This is just over three times the rate of last year's 0.6% OECD reduction. The

The pols sit still for the message

2007-01-18T01:24:00.000-05:00

Maybe there's hope after all. Via Yahoo news (h/t: The Oil Drum) comes word that Peter Barnes, founder of Working Assets Long Distance, made a presentation on greenhouse-gas abatement to the Vermont legislature. That the legislature received the presentation is itself progress, but the specifics are noteworthy: A statewide carbon cap, implemented via a systm of tradeable permits. The permits

Exhausting the non-options

2007-01-08T02:06:00.000-05:00

Men will behave reasonably when all other options have been exhausted. Nowhere does this appear to be more true than in interest-group politics. Agricultural interests, trying to prop up their commodity prices, may finally create the condition of crop scarcity that they've always sought to secure their profits. Per the NYTimes, they may also have created a scarcity of the materials for ethanol

2006 post summary

2007-01-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

Subject index Administrivia 2006-01-06 Pleasing the crowd 2006-01-06 And speaking of tip jars.... 2006-02-17 Ergosphere subject index, 2005 2006-02-27 Test 2006-03-21 On hiatus 2006-04-13 I have returned 2006-04-25 Coming soon 2006-05-02 Spam attack 2006-06-17 We apologize for the inconvenience 2006-11-22 Worth the wait Allies 2006-01-07 Thomas

Why unit analysis matters

2006-12-19T00:41:00.000-05:00

"The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." Every time I start to forget this, something comes along to remind me. Sometimes forcefully. I forget what prompted me to write Unit Analysis. This time, it was a clown who can neither calculate the area of Earth's disc without getting off by a factor of a million (you'd think the ridiculous number would tip him off),

Very important read

2006-12-16T23:17:00.000-05:00

I have just finished a very thoughtful article at Energy Pulse, Playing with Fire – The 10 Tcf/year Supply Gap -- Part I. I highly recommend that everyone read this article to see what kind of trouble we're looking at.

Open letter to the USA: Be careful what you ask for

2006-12-07T23:58:00.000-05:00

Because even if you get it, you may not like paying the bill. The US energy situation is suffering — actually suffering — not from too little oil, but arguably too much. The costs of getting what we have are far greater than the pump price, and going upwards. But that's not the biggest problem. The main problem the USA has isn't an immediate lack of oil or natural gas. It's a lack of

More progress I just learned about

2006-12-04T23:16:00.000-05:00

It looks like my spec for 50% efficiency in the gas-to-electricity step in Sustainability may have been pessimistic; Fuel Cell Today had an article last year which claimed the possibility of 80% efficiency (see page 4). (I claim overwork as an excuse. Yeah, that's it.) Further, this is not from a SOFC, it's with a turbine-compounded MCFC. With this sort of efficiency, it would be feasible to

Renewable energy and the auto industry

2006-12-03T00:27:00.000-05:00

Of all the surprises I've had this year, the biggest was probably these words from the head of GM: First, electricity offers outstanding benefits... beginning with the opportunity to diversify fuel sources upstream of the vehicle. In other words, the electricity that is used to drive the vehicle can be made from the best local fuel sources—natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, and so

It comes almost too fast to keep up

2006-12-01T00:30:00.000-05:00

Evidence accumulates that the biofuel recycling step in Sustainability is not only feasible, but here today: Greenfuel just announced production of commercial-quality biofuels from CO2 scavenged from an Arizona powerplant (h/t: Cervus @ GCC). Further, they mentioned that the CO2 capture efficiency is as high as 80% during daylight hours. This is astounding, and it strongly suggests that a

Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy

2006-11-25T23:54:00.002-05:00

What, me worry? One of the biggest threats the USA faces today is a serious shortage of energy. Vulnerabilities in our system have been made glaringly obvious several times; since the 1970's the USA has had social and economic upheaval due to the actions of foreign oil producers, and two hurricanes in 2005 showed just how fragile our remaining domestic supplies of oil and natural gas are. The

Worth the wait

2006-11-22T00:12:00.000-05:00

I'm working on an extensive piece which has kept me busy for the last three weeks. It's huge. It's currently up to 6690 words, and still not quite done (but getting very close).

Micro-AE experiment

2006-10-17T00:50:00.000-04:00

I've not had the available facilities to do much in the way of alternate energy stuff, but a happy coincidence made an experiment possible. Some time ago, I bought a cheap AM/FM radio which claimed you could power it 3 different ways:With solar energy (its lens across the top proclaims "SOLAR POWER").With the little crank-generator on the side.With external or internal 3 volt power (two AA

Open letter about the ethanol lobby

2006-10-15T01:48:00.002-04:00

While "The money-grubbing mendacity of the ethanol lobby" has been linked to Alpha Centauri and back, it doesn't make the concise case for discounting ethanol as a solution to the USA's petroleum woes. The people coming here through searches are probably looking for that, so here it is as a public service. There are plenty of reasons that we can't replace - or even meaningfully displace -

Great strides

2006-10-14T23:49:00.000-04:00

More evidence proof that events are getting ahead of me: GE has a SOFC fuel-cell stack which hits 49% efficiency. The GE stack is estimated to cost $254/kW for a 5.4kW system (under $1400 for 5.4 kW), exclusive of fuel reformer and electronics. It's not clear if the efficiency is for the stack alone (probably) or for the complete system, or what the cost and efficiency loss of fuel preparation

Another "holy crap!" moment

2006-10-11T23:35:00.000-04:00

After investigating a couple readers who had clicked in via a Google search for "ethanol lobby", I was floored to see that The Ergosphere has the #1 hit for that phrase. How the hell did that happen?! What's depressing is that my polemic gets lots of links, but more technical pieces like the one on carbon cycles and sustainabilty that's coming in the next few days will probably reach few readers.