What this assists in demonstrating is that a modern and advanced society depends on cheap and abundant energy. Also, it’s also clear that next to energy its clean water that is required to support most industrial applications. Even in the industrial revolution factories were built close to coal and water.. and nothing much has changed. So, unless you are a crazy degrowther then we need to go back to these basics if we want the things a modern society provides and its spin off….. prosperity!
Yep… They are following the science of industrial logistics… energy resources and production materials and capacity all together..
It’s hard to understand why we moved our manufacturing from the great Lakes region (now the rust belt) with plenty of energy and water to China that has almost none!.... well it was for plentiful cheap labor and the lure of a new market….. that did not work out well for us eh?
Now we are trying to reshore it back but with the idiot impediment of the climate change emergency while China and the rest get on with prosperity,.
Cheap labour is the reason most often given, but another, possibly more significant reason is the avoidance of regulatory restraints designed to protect the environment, which includes human health and worker safety.
I'm reminded of the documentary film 'Manufactured Landscapes' in which we see a village in China that is devoted to recovering metals from discarded circuit boards, and in earlier times, cathode ray tubes. The water for this village has to be imported because of severe pollution of the ground water, plus the health effects of exposure to elements such as cadmium and lead are completely discounted in the cost analysis. Only the obvious costs, such as material inputs, transportation and labour are factored into that equation. No regard at all for the health or environmental consequences, which is typical of emergent economies that follow a foreign investment model.
A comprehensive cost analysis would no doubt discover that the all-in costs of offshoring production in many cases results in no savings at all, just a shifting of the cost burdens involved.
We have plenty of reshoring models that explore all the cost deltas and China has moved on with some stronger environmental rules over time. The two largest drivers are total supply chain costs versus loaded labor cost and with the introduction of INDUSTRY 4.0 we see the labor driver differential reducing and reshoring now happening and increasing 50% each year with 85% of the supply chain reviewing it as an alternative. Our biggest challenge is our stupid policy for NetZero in the western nations unless of course you are lucky enough to be in the USA with the new Admin.
"China has moved on with some stronger environmental rules over time."
They really had no choice. The air in some of their cities is simply unbreathable on some days.
One question I have regarding re-shoring is skilled labour. Do we have enough, and is there enough incentive for young people to pursue those careers? The cost of the necessary education is also a factor, given that higher education has been transformed to a profit center to the point where it's cheaper to get your degree in Russia or China if you can handle the language difference. It's definitely cheaper if you're Russian, Chinese or Iranian, where the govt. covers a large part of the cost, plus provides career paths on graduation.
China is building canals/pipelines to move vast amounts of water from the SE, where it is in excess, to the NW where it is in short supply. And building high temperature thorium molten salt reactors which can use air cooling efficiently, for their vast dry NW region.
In Canada & the US, they often don't allow gas & oil pipelines to be built, no matter how much economic sense they make. Ecofascism run amok. Funny all the Rockefeller money funding the anti-pipeline movements in the West. But not in the Middle East or East.
"It’s hard to understand why we moved our manufacturing from the great Lakes region (now the rust belt) with plenty of energy and water to China that has almost none!'
The technology of steel production changed and US steel producers failed to keep up is what I've read. Basically the sunk cost fallacy writ large.
Clean water is easy if you have plentiful clean energy. And we do, unlimited in fact, it's called nuclear energy. So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far? Sounds a lot like ulterior motives to me.
"So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far?"
Perhaps because they've been lied to so many times about how safe nuclear technology is, when by definition, new technology has hidden risks that are often only discovered after disaster strikes, Chernobyl and Fukushima being prime examples. Hard to argue that the newer designs are inherently safer when you have those catastrophes as a backdrop.
Chernobyl isn't a prime example, in fact it isn't even an example. That was an illegal Soviet military reactor with no containment and a high positive void coefficient of reactivity. About as bad as you can get, but still only about 50 deaths, rather minor environmental effects compared to things like Deepwater Horizon or the Palestine dioxin release.
Fukishima killed nobody, had negligible environmental effects, and was easily avoidable by simple things like keeping a few fire trucks on site (which all Japan NPPs do now.
Deaths per TWh published by many agencies:
Coal: 161
Oil: 36
Biomass: 12
NG: 4
Hydro: 1.4
Wind: 0.15 (actually way underestimated because it ignores the severe grid integration requirements of wind & solar)
Nuclear: 0.04 (including Chernobyl = a military reactor, illegal for commercial nuclear power)
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy (Live Lecture)
Illegal in what way? This is the first I've heard of it and I studied the event at the time it happened as well as years later. If you're talking about the test that led to the accident, perhaps. That is controversial, but the RBMK-1000 reactor itself was an approved design and there were several others in operation at the time. Some still are - seven I believe.
I honestly don't understand how you can not count that as a nuclear disaster. You minimize the deaths, of which I'm sure there were many more - that was the Soviet Union remember, not exactly the most forthcoming of governments, but that aside, look at the amount of land that was contaminated and to this day is still unusable (currently 2,600 km2). Of course the town of Pripyat (pop. 49K) had to be abandoned.
As for Fukushima, the effects of dumping radioactive water in the ocean are as yet unknown, but the economic effect on the city and its people is clearly significant.
Anyway, I was answering the question of why (I think) people are opposed to nuclear energy, not why I'm opposed. I'm not actually, but I think I gave a reasonable account of why others are.
Illegal by IAEA regulations, #1 being there is no f'in way you get a commercial reactor design approved without containment. When the Soviet Union broke up, the IAEA had to deal with a number of those RBMK reactors in former Eastern Bloc countries still operating. Some were ordered closed, some were allowed to operate over a short term after numerous added safety modifications, standards and procedures were required.
That's nonsense. People who stayed on the "evacuated" land have lived longer and more healthy than those who left. The evacuation, like the Fukushima evacuation was mostly just propaganda and not rational.
Watch bionerd, a radiation biologist, as she wanders around Chernobyl nuclear plant area, including Greenpeace's much hyped "Red Forest", eating Greenpeace's daunted "radioactive apples" and then visits a naturally radioactive beach resort in Guarapari, Brazil for 3 days. https://www.youtube.com/@bionerd23/videos
" brazil 2012: sunbathing on radioactive beaches "
End result after 2 days at Chernobyl doing the worst of the worst: she got a 100 uSv dosage, after 2.5 days at Brazil beach she got a 300 uSv dosage. She admits if she had the time to lay on the beach like a typical tourist she would have got about a 900 uSv dosage. At Chernobyl you are getting primarily a gamma & beta radiation external dosage. On the beach you are getting a stronger dosage of both PLUS an internal Alpha particle dosage from breathing and ingestion of Thorium daughters, i.e. Radon, (similar but more potent than plutonium). People have lived on that beach for thousands of years, no detectable bad effect on their health.
The "dumping of radioactive water" is more Fear Porn garbage that just proves the entire 100% irrationality and propaganda of the uber-wealthy, anti-nuclear, mercenary NGOs (No Good Organizations). Just because of a bit of tritium in the pure water effluent. There is millions of tons of tritium containing water falling as rain every day on Earth, same tritium as the Fukushima water. You have ~200lbs of water in your body that has 5200 decays every sec, much worse than that Fukushima water, it has potassium-40 which decays with a beta particle of 1310kev & a gamma ray of 1460kev vs Fuku tritium a weak beta of 5.7kev which can only penetrate 6mm of air. Other than that is just pure water, harmless. Total tritium in all of the Fuku water is 860 TBq. With a half-life of 12yrs. That is about how much tritium is released into the ocean EVERY YEAR by two reprocessing plants and 148,000 TBq of Tritium naturally falls in rain. Fossil fuel power plants release 100,000 TBq of radiation into the air, land & water every year. Which is a minuscule portion of the total carcinogens, mutagens, POPs, particulates, heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium), and much more they release.
People are not that opposed, surveys generally show about 50% of more approval. The opposition is due to incessant propaganda, financed secretly to the tune of many $billions/yr.
Again, the question was: "So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far?"
The short answer is that people are driven by their emotions, not by arguments presented by nuclear advocates, no matter how rational they appear to be. The other reason could well be that they dislike the dismissive attitude of people who advocate for nuclear energy.
This was so interesting and enlightening even a bird dog trainer could understand it. Gave me a true appreciation for the amount of energy required to manufacture semiconductors. TSMC, Intel, ASML, AMAT, LRCH etc have always intrigued me. Incredible how dependent our world is on energy abundance.
Thanks for the bottom-up analysis. Here's a top-down, gross analysis from my book, New Nuclear is HOT!
Energy drives the economy. There is no substitute for energy. This chapter will show that on average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
demands 1 kWh of heat energy,
uses 0.27 kWh(e) of electric energy,
emits 0.21 kg of CO2, and
requires 0.96 kg of mined minerals.
Note a $1000 PC likely requires a TON of mined natural resources.
By a "TON of mined natural resources" do you mean total materials removed from the Earth or total materials that are milled or total materials that are actually utilized (like the copper, aluminum, iron, petroleum etc.).
This can reach the penultimate of absurdity in the case of Nuclear Energy where the Nuclear Deniers and Ecofascists count the pass-through cooling water as "water consumption" of a NPP. That's like claiming a ship uses the amount of water that passes through its propeller.
Also I would agree with Zubrin, there is no such thing as natural resources, there are natural materials, or more accurately just materials. Resources are things technology has made useful. And that changes over time. Eventually coal, oil & gas may all lose their value as resources.
Most of those materials are recycled as fill, in UG mines they take the mill waste and pump it UG to fill in the mined out areas and a floor for current mining operations. Other waste rock is used to fill in the mined out pits, and sometimes sold for construction applications.
Sorry to flood your comments section with essays, but another thought has occurred to me. The principles you outlined regarding the entropic effects of material production also apply to the realm of education. Consider how long it takes to become a surgeon or a physicist compared to the length of time one spends actually applying that knowledge.
Also, I have occasional contact with medical specialists, and I'm constantly amazed by the things they don't know, or aren't aware of. This is also an entropic effect, where the time devoted to applying present knowledge limits the amount of time available to acquire new knowledge. One doctor I spoke to understood the principle very well, in fact complained that she was just too busy with her practice to study the research papers I was sending her, even though they had a direct impact on her practice. Then there's the entropic effect of aging itself, which for most of us (myself included) makes it increasingly difficult to focus our attention as well as retain the knowledge we've already acquired. That's best expressed by that old sarcastic remark: 'I've forgotten more than you could ever possibly know' which has more than a grain of ironic truth to it.
An excellent article on the cost/benefit relationship of digital technology, which of course extends to all other technologies to one degree or another. The only detail I would add to the analysis is the massive amount of power needed to run AI systems.
However, this is really only half the equation. One has to look at the overall impact of new technology, the 'hidden ground' to get the full picture. It's probably best to give some examples rather than try to measure the effects, which are hard, if not impossible to fully quantify.
ex.1 A bridge is expensive to build in terms of the energy required to manufacture the steel and cement and then assemble it, but consider the impact over the 100 year life of a major bridge. The obvious first saving is in transportation costs. A 50km drive to work vs. say 5-10 km. If the bridge is tolled this will also result in car-pooling, which is an additional saving. Many bridges cross major waterways, which then opens up new areas for development, thus adding to the available stock of housing as well as potential new industrial sites. It's fairly simple to calculate the fuel savings involved, but the potential for urban expansion over the life of the bridge, plus the increased amount of personal time saved, reduction in stress from less driving, as well as reduction in road accidents and all their attendant costs are much harder to quantify.
ex.2 This one may not be obvious to anyone born in the 'internet era' but is probably one of the most important. When I was a student, I had to travel to the library to do my research because most of the books I needed were classed as reference and couldn't be borrowed. Even if I could borrow them, I still had to go there, so factor in the energy and time needed for that. Then there were the books I had to buy, none of which were on the NYT's best seller's list and the price, anywhere from 50 to 100 bucks, reflected the limited market for such specialized publications. Today, I have over 200 books in PDF format which cost me exactly zero, other than the cost of my computer and net connection, which long ago were amortized. I also have over 200 research papers that I would really have had to dig for, if I could find them at all. Now I can get them as soon as they're published.
The point is that today's internet technology is equivalent to living next door to the Library of Alexandria in ancient times. No months long journey across sketchy territory, which many scholars had to make, it's all right there on my desktop. This represents a revolution on the scale of the introduction of movable type, which McLuhan wrote about in 'Gutenberg Galaxy' an example of the effects (hidden ground) of media technology which few analysts today recognize.
ex.3 This is really an extension of ex.2 which spoke to the individual advantages of instant access to information, but consider the broader implications of the effect on the creative process itself. Wider availability of information means more people working in concert to solve problems. Ideas which may have taken decades to materialize as useful technology can now be realized in far less time. H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.’ Neo-Malthusians and nihilists would argue we're losing that race, but I would argue the opposite. We're right now on the verge of several major breakthroughs in technology that have the potential to change the entire energy and intellectual equation to the same degree as Gutenberg's printing press did in his day.
Clearly a cost analysis of energy consumption vs. benefits gained is important, but we mustn't overlook the baby in that bathwater, which is the exponential increase in our understanding of nature, plus our ability to apply that knowledge to meaningful ends.
Along the same lines, Gene of GreenNuke has pointed out that microprocessors, and as you suggest, AI, have enabled breakthrough efficiencies accross many industries that is almost impossible to calculate (unless you have AI server time, lol), therefore the massive input of energy and entropic costs in microprocessor production may somehow be recovered.
In retrospect, since this is an engineering site, I shouldn't have avoided using the term 'positive feedback' which is often confusing to people without the necessary scientific or mathematical training. Non-linear or exponential effects also capture the idea, but are not as precise in their meaning.
The basic model, when applied to the world of electronics, is the transistor when used as an amplifier. The law of diminishing returns still applies to the manufacturing process of course, but the actual effect of the devices thus produced should be subject to a different metric. Basically there are two independent variables. One, the cost of production, and two, the actual multiplier effect of the product in question. Nuclear energy is probably the best example, which has massive entropic costs from mine head to actual power plant, but which are more than offset by releasing the negative entropy provided by nature herself.
Also worth noting is that we do not, as yet, have a comprehensive theory of the fundamental forces involved, so the efforts to complete that picture, which also have massive entropic costs, may yield results far in excess of the energy consumed in producing them. That of course is the entire point of that research, to overcome the diminishing returns of the old technology as it approaches the point of saturation.
Thanks, although it probably could have been shorter. The main point is to recognize that new technologies have synergistic effects that generate non-linear outcomes. I think a thesis on the topic has already been written: Marshal McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy.
I came up with this idea many years ago. I wouldn't call it a Law, but it is a useful principle when analyzing the effects of technology. I doubt that I'm the first to frame the issue in this way (if I can imagine it, someone's probably already done it), but nonetheless here it is.
Successful technology first appears as a novelty, is then adopted as a convenience which soon becomes a necessity, and finally an obstacle. Best examples I can think of are the automobile, commercial air travel and cellular phones.
I'm still trying to understand where the internet lies on that spectrum. I was an early adopter when it was still a novelty. When HTTP appeared it quickly became a convenience and, 25 years later, is now clearly a necessity. Obviously it's an obstacle when the power goes out, systems get hacked, or as a tool of the Surveillance State, but this is offset by the increased speed and depth of communication, of which this site is one example among many. That said, with the current ease of mass communication, lunatics such as myself can gather a following just as easily as the more rational actors, scientists and technicians that also depend on it. I leave this as an open question as it's probably still too early to say.
I'm also somewhat obsessed with the question of what comes next. From print to telephone, radio and television the process is more or less understandable, but in this new medium, unlike all previous media, the information travels in both directions. This is an entirely new phenomenon with unpredictable outcomes. So I'm left with two questions: what is the actual effect on the advancement of civilization, and what, if anything, replaces it once it reaches the point of saturation and becomes an obstacle? Or is this the end of the road, limited only by our ability to use it effectively?
What this assists in demonstrating is that a modern and advanced society depends on cheap and abundant energy. Also, it’s also clear that next to energy its clean water that is required to support most industrial applications. Even in the industrial revolution factories were built close to coal and water.. and nothing much has changed. So, unless you are a crazy degrowther then we need to go back to these basics if we want the things a modern society provides and its spin off….. prosperity!
Hello Nigel, you speak fluent common sense, comment appreciated.
Along the same lines see how China has positioned their EV and battery plants next to coal fired power plants:
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/china-coal-nuclear-ev-map
Regards,
TC
Yep… They are following the science of industrial logistics… energy resources and production materials and capacity all together..
It’s hard to understand why we moved our manufacturing from the great Lakes region (now the rust belt) with plenty of energy and water to China that has almost none!.... well it was for plentiful cheap labor and the lure of a new market….. that did not work out well for us eh?
Now we are trying to reshore it back but with the idiot impediment of the climate change emergency while China and the rest get on with prosperity,.
Cheap labour is the reason most often given, but another, possibly more significant reason is the avoidance of regulatory restraints designed to protect the environment, which includes human health and worker safety.
I'm reminded of the documentary film 'Manufactured Landscapes' in which we see a village in China that is devoted to recovering metals from discarded circuit boards, and in earlier times, cathode ray tubes. The water for this village has to be imported because of severe pollution of the ground water, plus the health effects of exposure to elements such as cadmium and lead are completely discounted in the cost analysis. Only the obvious costs, such as material inputs, transportation and labour are factored into that equation. No regard at all for the health or environmental consequences, which is typical of emergent economies that follow a foreign investment model.
A comprehensive cost analysis would no doubt discover that the all-in costs of offshoring production in many cases results in no savings at all, just a shifting of the cost burdens involved.
We have plenty of reshoring models that explore all the cost deltas and China has moved on with some stronger environmental rules over time. The two largest drivers are total supply chain costs versus loaded labor cost and with the introduction of INDUSTRY 4.0 we see the labor driver differential reducing and reshoring now happening and increasing 50% each year with 85% of the supply chain reviewing it as an alternative. Our biggest challenge is our stupid policy for NetZero in the western nations unless of course you are lucky enough to be in the USA with the new Admin.
"China has moved on with some stronger environmental rules over time."
They really had no choice. The air in some of their cities is simply unbreathable on some days.
One question I have regarding re-shoring is skilled labour. Do we have enough, and is there enough incentive for young people to pursue those careers? The cost of the necessary education is also a factor, given that higher education has been transformed to a profit center to the point where it's cheaper to get your degree in Russia or China if you can handle the language difference. It's definitely cheaper if you're Russian, Chinese or Iranian, where the govt. covers a large part of the cost, plus provides career paths on graduation.
China is building canals/pipelines to move vast amounts of water from the SE, where it is in excess, to the NW where it is in short supply. And building high temperature thorium molten salt reactors which can use air cooling efficiently, for their vast dry NW region.
yes.. they have a government that gets it...
In Canada & the US, they often don't allow gas & oil pipelines to be built, no matter how much economic sense they make. Ecofascism run amok. Funny all the Rockefeller money funding the anti-pipeline movements in the West. But not in the Middle East or East.
yep.. time to change our leadership .. although Trump is shaping up to move it along.... Canada is a different story and needs far more work.
"It’s hard to understand why we moved our manufacturing from the great Lakes region (now the rust belt) with plenty of energy and water to China that has almost none!'
The technology of steel production changed and US steel producers failed to keep up is what I've read. Basically the sunk cost fallacy writ large.
Clean water is easy if you have plentiful clean energy. And we do, unlimited in fact, it's called nuclear energy. So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far? Sounds a lot like ulterior motives to me.
"So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far?"
Perhaps because they've been lied to so many times about how safe nuclear technology is, when by definition, new technology has hidden risks that are often only discovered after disaster strikes, Chernobyl and Fukushima being prime examples. Hard to argue that the newer designs are inherently safer when you have those catastrophes as a backdrop.
Chernobyl isn't a prime example, in fact it isn't even an example. That was an illegal Soviet military reactor with no containment and a high positive void coefficient of reactivity. About as bad as you can get, but still only about 50 deaths, rather minor environmental effects compared to things like Deepwater Horizon or the Palestine dioxin release.
Fukishima killed nobody, had negligible environmental effects, and was easily avoidable by simple things like keeping a few fire trucks on site (which all Japan NPPs do now.
Deaths per TWh published by many agencies:
Coal: 161
Oil: 36
Biomass: 12
NG: 4
Hydro: 1.4
Wind: 0.15 (actually way underestimated because it ignores the severe grid integration requirements of wind & solar)
Nuclear: 0.04 (including Chernobyl = a military reactor, illegal for commercial nuclear power)
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy (Live Lecture)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1QmB5bW_WQ
forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillion Kwh)
Coal – global average 170,000 (50% global electricity)
Coal – China 280,000 (75% China’s electricity)
Coal – U.S. 15,000 (44% U.S. electricity)
Oil 36,000 (36% of energy, 8% of electricity)
Natural Gas 4,000 (20% global electricity)
Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy)
Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)
Wind 150 (~ 1% global electricity)
Hydro – global average 1,400 (15% global electricity)
Nuclear – global average 90 (17% global electricity
"That was an illegal Soviet military reactor..."
Illegal in what way? This is the first I've heard of it and I studied the event at the time it happened as well as years later. If you're talking about the test that led to the accident, perhaps. That is controversial, but the RBMK-1000 reactor itself was an approved design and there were several others in operation at the time. Some still are - seven I believe.
I honestly don't understand how you can not count that as a nuclear disaster. You minimize the deaths, of which I'm sure there were many more - that was the Soviet Union remember, not exactly the most forthcoming of governments, but that aside, look at the amount of land that was contaminated and to this day is still unusable (currently 2,600 km2). Of course the town of Pripyat (pop. 49K) had to be abandoned.
As for Fukushima, the effects of dumping radioactive water in the ocean are as yet unknown, but the economic effect on the city and its people is clearly significant.
Anyway, I was answering the question of why (I think) people are opposed to nuclear energy, not why I'm opposed. I'm not actually, but I think I gave a reasonable account of why others are.
Illegal by IAEA regulations, #1 being there is no f'in way you get a commercial reactor design approved without containment. When the Soviet Union broke up, the IAEA had to deal with a number of those RBMK reactors in former Eastern Bloc countries still operating. Some were ordered closed, some were allowed to operate over a short term after numerous added safety modifications, standards and procedures were required.
That's nonsense. People who stayed on the "evacuated" land have lived longer and more healthy than those who left. The evacuation, like the Fukushima evacuation was mostly just propaganda and not rational.
Watch bionerd, a radiation biologist, as she wanders around Chernobyl nuclear plant area, including Greenpeace's much hyped "Red Forest", eating Greenpeace's daunted "radioactive apples" and then visits a naturally radioactive beach resort in Guarapari, Brazil for 3 days. https://www.youtube.com/@bionerd23/videos
" brazil 2012: sunbathing on radioactive beaches "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvgAx1yIKjg
" Chernobyl wild zone: radioactive rabies, autumn fruit and foxes "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ZvHMGXdbE
End result after 2 days at Chernobyl doing the worst of the worst: she got a 100 uSv dosage, after 2.5 days at Brazil beach she got a 300 uSv dosage. She admits if she had the time to lay on the beach like a typical tourist she would have got about a 900 uSv dosage. At Chernobyl you are getting primarily a gamma & beta radiation external dosage. On the beach you are getting a stronger dosage of both PLUS an internal Alpha particle dosage from breathing and ingestion of Thorium daughters, i.e. Radon, (similar but more potent than plutonium). People have lived on that beach for thousands of years, no detectable bad effect on their health.
The "dumping of radioactive water" is more Fear Porn garbage that just proves the entire 100% irrationality and propaganda of the uber-wealthy, anti-nuclear, mercenary NGOs (No Good Organizations). Just because of a bit of tritium in the pure water effluent. There is millions of tons of tritium containing water falling as rain every day on Earth, same tritium as the Fukushima water. You have ~200lbs of water in your body that has 5200 decays every sec, much worse than that Fukushima water, it has potassium-40 which decays with a beta particle of 1310kev & a gamma ray of 1460kev vs Fuku tritium a weak beta of 5.7kev which can only penetrate 6mm of air. Other than that is just pure water, harmless. Total tritium in all of the Fuku water is 860 TBq. With a half-life of 12yrs. That is about how much tritium is released into the ocean EVERY YEAR by two reprocessing plants and 148,000 TBq of Tritium naturally falls in rain. Fossil fuel power plants release 100,000 TBq of radiation into the air, land & water every year. Which is a minuscule portion of the total carcinogens, mutagens, POPs, particulates, heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium), and much more they release.
People are not that opposed, surveys generally show about 50% of more approval. The opposition is due to incessant propaganda, financed secretly to the tune of many $billions/yr.
Again, the question was: "So why are the very people who claim to be most concerned about the environment, also the people most opposed to the cleanest energy source that is available to us, by far?"
The short answer is that people are driven by their emotions, not by arguments presented by nuclear advocates, no matter how rational they appear to be. The other reason could well be that they dislike the dismissive attitude of people who advocate for nuclear energy.
Most of them have evolved into degrowthers
This was so interesting and enlightening even a bird dog trainer could understand it. Gave me a true appreciation for the amount of energy required to manufacture semiconductors. TSMC, Intel, ASML, AMAT, LRCH etc have always intrigued me. Incredible how dependent our world is on energy abundance.
Thanks Dave, steady under wing and shot 😉
TC
Thanks for the bottom-up analysis. Here's a top-down, gross analysis from my book, New Nuclear is HOT!
Energy drives the economy. There is no substitute for energy. This chapter will show that on average in 2022 each $1 of economic production, gross world product (GWP),
demands 1 kWh of heat energy,
uses 0.27 kWh(e) of electric energy,
emits 0.21 kg of CO2, and
requires 0.96 kg of mined minerals.
Note a $1000 PC likely requires a TON of mined natural resources.
The book is on Amazon, amazon.com/New-Nuclear-HOT-Robert-Hargraves/dp/B0CWZTXXVV/ref=sr_1_1,
The individual chapters are free via searching Hargraves.substack.com.
Great information on your Substack, I was poking around, book looks good as well.
From your numbers above, it is easy to surmise that the entropic cost is very high and efficiency low with current tech.
Robert, the new generation nuclear technologies, what is their efficiency roughly and how much of an improvement can we realize?
TC
By a "TON of mined natural resources" do you mean total materials removed from the Earth or total materials that are milled or total materials that are actually utilized (like the copper, aluminum, iron, petroleum etc.).
This can reach the penultimate of absurdity in the case of Nuclear Energy where the Nuclear Deniers and Ecofascists count the pass-through cooling water as "water consumption" of a NPP. That's like claiming a ship uses the amount of water that passes through its propeller.
Also I would agree with Zubrin, there is no such thing as natural resources, there are natural materials, or more accurately just materials. Resources are things technology has made useful. And that changes over time. Eventually coal, oil & gas may all lose their value as resources.
I meant "removed from the earth"
Most of those materials are recycled as fill, in UG mines they take the mill waste and pump it UG to fill in the mined out areas and a floor for current mining operations. Other waste rock is used to fill in the mined out pits, and sometimes sold for construction applications.
What a great read, thank you! The concept of embodied energy is truly
fascinating.
I’m still waiting to see a solar-powered solar panel factory.
Classic comment 😆
Sorry to flood your comments section with essays, but another thought has occurred to me. The principles you outlined regarding the entropic effects of material production also apply to the realm of education. Consider how long it takes to become a surgeon or a physicist compared to the length of time one spends actually applying that knowledge.
Also, I have occasional contact with medical specialists, and I'm constantly amazed by the things they don't know, or aren't aware of. This is also an entropic effect, where the time devoted to applying present knowledge limits the amount of time available to acquire new knowledge. One doctor I spoke to understood the principle very well, in fact complained that she was just too busy with her practice to study the research papers I was sending her, even though they had a direct impact on her practice. Then there's the entropic effect of aging itself, which for most of us (myself included) makes it increasingly difficult to focus our attention as well as retain the knowledge we've already acquired. That's best expressed by that old sarcastic remark: 'I've forgotten more than you could ever possibly know' which has more than a grain of ironic truth to it.
There are a number of interesting interpretations of the second law, some perhaps more valid than others and depending on your field of endeavor.
There are a number of review articles that you may like on this very subject.
Best.
TC
An excellent article on the cost/benefit relationship of digital technology, which of course extends to all other technologies to one degree or another. The only detail I would add to the analysis is the massive amount of power needed to run AI systems.
However, this is really only half the equation. One has to look at the overall impact of new technology, the 'hidden ground' to get the full picture. It's probably best to give some examples rather than try to measure the effects, which are hard, if not impossible to fully quantify.
ex.1 A bridge is expensive to build in terms of the energy required to manufacture the steel and cement and then assemble it, but consider the impact over the 100 year life of a major bridge. The obvious first saving is in transportation costs. A 50km drive to work vs. say 5-10 km. If the bridge is tolled this will also result in car-pooling, which is an additional saving. Many bridges cross major waterways, which then opens up new areas for development, thus adding to the available stock of housing as well as potential new industrial sites. It's fairly simple to calculate the fuel savings involved, but the potential for urban expansion over the life of the bridge, plus the increased amount of personal time saved, reduction in stress from less driving, as well as reduction in road accidents and all their attendant costs are much harder to quantify.
ex.2 This one may not be obvious to anyone born in the 'internet era' but is probably one of the most important. When I was a student, I had to travel to the library to do my research because most of the books I needed were classed as reference and couldn't be borrowed. Even if I could borrow them, I still had to go there, so factor in the energy and time needed for that. Then there were the books I had to buy, none of which were on the NYT's best seller's list and the price, anywhere from 50 to 100 bucks, reflected the limited market for such specialized publications. Today, I have over 200 books in PDF format which cost me exactly zero, other than the cost of my computer and net connection, which long ago were amortized. I also have over 200 research papers that I would really have had to dig for, if I could find them at all. Now I can get them as soon as they're published.
The point is that today's internet technology is equivalent to living next door to the Library of Alexandria in ancient times. No months long journey across sketchy territory, which many scholars had to make, it's all right there on my desktop. This represents a revolution on the scale of the introduction of movable type, which McLuhan wrote about in 'Gutenberg Galaxy' an example of the effects (hidden ground) of media technology which few analysts today recognize.
ex.3 This is really an extension of ex.2 which spoke to the individual advantages of instant access to information, but consider the broader implications of the effect on the creative process itself. Wider availability of information means more people working in concert to solve problems. Ideas which may have taken decades to materialize as useful technology can now be realized in far less time. H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe.’ Neo-Malthusians and nihilists would argue we're losing that race, but I would argue the opposite. We're right now on the verge of several major breakthroughs in technology that have the potential to change the entire energy and intellectual equation to the same degree as Gutenberg's printing press did in his day.
Clearly a cost analysis of energy consumption vs. benefits gained is important, but we mustn't overlook the baby in that bathwater, which is the exponential increase in our understanding of nature, plus our ability to apply that knowledge to meaningful ends.
Great comment ebear.
Along the same lines, Gene of GreenNuke has pointed out that microprocessors, and as you suggest, AI, have enabled breakthrough efficiencies accross many industries that is almost impossible to calculate (unless you have AI server time, lol), therefore the massive input of energy and entropic costs in microprocessor production may somehow be recovered.
Interesting topic for a thesis!
TC
In retrospect, since this is an engineering site, I shouldn't have avoided using the term 'positive feedback' which is often confusing to people without the necessary scientific or mathematical training. Non-linear or exponential effects also capture the idea, but are not as precise in their meaning.
The basic model, when applied to the world of electronics, is the transistor when used as an amplifier. The law of diminishing returns still applies to the manufacturing process of course, but the actual effect of the devices thus produced should be subject to a different metric. Basically there are two independent variables. One, the cost of production, and two, the actual multiplier effect of the product in question. Nuclear energy is probably the best example, which has massive entropic costs from mine head to actual power plant, but which are more than offset by releasing the negative entropy provided by nature herself.
Also worth noting is that we do not, as yet, have a comprehensive theory of the fundamental forces involved, so the efforts to complete that picture, which also have massive entropic costs, may yield results far in excess of the energy consumed in producing them. That of course is the entire point of that research, to overcome the diminishing returns of the old technology as it approaches the point of saturation.
Thanks, although it probably could have been shorter. The main point is to recognize that new technologies have synergistic effects that generate non-linear outcomes. I think a thesis on the topic has already been written: Marshal McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy.
Typical LWRs have electric/thermal efficiency near 33%. Thorcon's 700°C MSR results in efficiency of about 46%, with ocean water cooling. [typo fixed]
Wow! That's high, what do they use a supercritical CO2 turbine?
I came up with this idea many years ago. I wouldn't call it a Law, but it is a useful principle when analyzing the effects of technology. I doubt that I'm the first to frame the issue in this way (if I can imagine it, someone's probably already done it), but nonetheless here it is.
Successful technology first appears as a novelty, is then adopted as a convenience which soon becomes a necessity, and finally an obstacle. Best examples I can think of are the automobile, commercial air travel and cellular phones.
I'm still trying to understand where the internet lies on that spectrum. I was an early adopter when it was still a novelty. When HTTP appeared it quickly became a convenience and, 25 years later, is now clearly a necessity. Obviously it's an obstacle when the power goes out, systems get hacked, or as a tool of the Surveillance State, but this is offset by the increased speed and depth of communication, of which this site is one example among many. That said, with the current ease of mass communication, lunatics such as myself can gather a following just as easily as the more rational actors, scientists and technicians that also depend on it. I leave this as an open question as it's probably still too early to say.
I'm also somewhat obsessed with the question of what comes next. From print to telephone, radio and television the process is more or less understandable, but in this new medium, unlike all previous media, the information travels in both directions. This is an entirely new phenomenon with unpredictable outcomes. So I'm left with two questions: what is the actual effect on the advancement of civilization, and what, if anything, replaces it once it reaches the point of saturation and becomes an obstacle? Or is this the end of the road, limited only by our ability to use it effectively?
My typo. 46%
That sounds more like it.