...at least a primitive sense of the laws of thermodynamics in order to graduate from high school, if not the somewhat arcane third law, certainly the very simple zeroth, first and second laws.
If one is illiterate about energy - and I certainly encounter a number of people who fit into the class of energy illiterates, some of whom are as proud of showing their illiteracy as Donald Trump is proud of displaying his illiteracy - one might profit by at least opening a high school level chemistry or physics text to learn that any process that converts one form of energy into another will be irreversible, that is, the second law.
If one actually gives a shit about the future of humanity on one level, and the future of the planet at a higher level, one can go even further and access college level texts, graduate level texts, or even (gasp) the primary scientific literature.
However if one has no time for any of the above, one can simply repeat lazy dogma when a bourgeois fantasy is exposed for what it is, ethical indifference of the worst possible sort. It is ethical indifference because people are quite literally, all over the world, literally dying from heat stroke. Rivers are disappearing, crops are failing, forests are burning, glaciers collapsing and what excites the attention of the type who chant insipidly on topics about which they clearly know nothing at all? The statement of the fact that a battery is a device that wastes energy.
Facts matter.
Had this been required for a very long time, that it be a requirement that to graduate from high school one would need to be familiar with at least the zeroth, first and second law of thermodynamics, everyone would know that a battery is a device that wastes energy. It's a law of physics, an incontrovertible law. The California legislature cannot repeal it. In this case, I suspect the planet would not be burning up, but it is burning up, this while bourgeois airheads carry on about their material fantasies of electric cars and how they can make this stupid fantasy address their appalling need to live with in absolute or at least maximal convenience.
I am not the type to be surprised to hear anti-nukes speak in defense of dangerous natural gas plants; their "solar and wind will save us" bullshit depends on access to natural gas, as the folks who funded Putin's brutal war, while declaring themselves "green" for willfully destroying nuclear infrastructure that was valuable to all humanity - this would be the Germans - are finding out. Of course, as they've pissed off the guy to whom they've sent all that money by not applauding the brutal war on which he's spending their money they paid him, they have to burn coal this summer, because their large amount of wind infrastructure hasn't been doing shit in this brutal low wind European summer. The Germans have no fucking idea how they're going to heat homes this winter, when their large amount of solar infrastructure will be as unreliable as their large amount of wind has been all fucking summer.
But let's return to thermodynamics:
Now, as it happens, I discussed combined cycle gas power plants with my son as he launched his nuclear engineering Ph.D. program, not because I have any interest in defending fossil fuel plants - I am quite clear that I want every fucking combined cycle dangerous natural gas plant on this planet shut - but because I regard process intensification as a vitally important issue. It doesn't make a fuck load of difference to me if they have higher thermodynamic efficiency than straight up Rankine coal plants such as the Germans are running this low wind hot summer. What matters to me is that the primary energy source, fossil fuels, is killing the planet. They shut their nuclear plants to burn coal. That's a fact.
Again, facts matter.
Again, people are dying in the streets from extreme heat, all over the world, and many of these people, particularly in poorer countries, will also face famine because of withered crops and the unavailability of water. I wonder, even if electric car worshipping types couldn't care less, how the cobalt digging slaves in the Congo River basin are doing in extreme temperatures.
Speaking of slavery you know, in this space, I recently directed attention to a scientific viewpoint in the recent issue of Environmental Science and Technology on the subject of human slavery, something about which I care, even though I'm powerless to do much about it: Toward an Emissions and Modern Slavery Impact Accounting Model. Predictably, none of the anti-nukes who populate this space had a peep to offer on the subject, but over the years, I've seen that any criticism of electric cars or batteries induces fits of rage.
It says a lot, at least to me.
In the original post on this scientific viewpoint on human slavery I didn't bold anything in the excerpts, but let me do so now in repeating an excerpt here:
...Despite this chain, research untangling the complex relationship between inequality, modern slavery, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change–what we call the modern slavery-climate change nexus–has only just begun. (1,5,7,13) Often research misses this complexity, focusing instead on the modern slavery-environment nexus which is understandable given the prevalence of modern slavery in the supply chain of industries including fishing, (14) brick making, mining/quarrying, manufacturing, (12) forestry, (5) agriculture, renewable energies, and wildlife trafficking. (8,15) Because GHG emissions and modern slavery result from inequality and have a profound effect on climate change, we advocate moving toward a fairer society by (1) highlighting the value of a multi-region input–output (MRIO) model that integrates both modern slavery and greenhouse gas emissions data cross regionally to quantify and untangle the interlinkages between the two and how they impact across supply chains, (2) demonstrating the practical implications of such a model, and (3) working toward integrated international agreements that traverse the modern slavery-climate change nexus...
What we care about says who we are.
Now, since the thermodynamic efficiency of combined cycle gas plants has been discussed, a combined cycle plant couples a Brayton cycle device to a traditional Rankine cycle device. A Rankine cycle device is generally a steam driven plant. The
overall thermodynamic efficiency of a plant is driven is driven by how it it operates. A Rankin device's overall (24/7, 365 days per year) efficiency will decline if it is repeatedly shut down because some highly subsidized redundant and generally unreliable system - say a huge wind infrastructure in a summer of extreme heat driven doldrums - suddenly works for a few hours in the day. One need not understand the laws of thermodynamics on a profound level say, so as to determine the entropy of a system via the use of probability distribution functions or understand the Helmholtz functions. One can simply put a kettle on a gas stove, boil water, turn the gas off for a time, and see if the water instantly returns to boiling when the gas is turned back on. One would have to be a liar to say that it does.
Almost all of the nuclear plants operating on this planet are BWR's and PWR's, and everyone of these is a Rankine cycle device. This means, depending on ambient temperatures, they operate at about 33% to 35% efficiency. AGCR's, a reactor design prominent in Great Britain, are essentially Brayton devices, and their thermodynamic efficiency because of their higher temperature operation is about 41%, better than the Rankine coal plants with which the Germans are killing people by burning lignite in them.
Now, I note that solar energy is not environmentally unacceptable because its thermodynamic efficiency is low. For decades announcements of light to electricity efficiency of a little more than 20% have all been hailed as "breakthroughs." The solar industry is neither environmentally nor economically viable because it is unreliable, because it cannot operate without redundant systems. The low thermodynamic efficiency impacts the material and land destruction required to use it, but it's not the main issue. The lack of reliability is the issue. Fifty years of similar battery bullshit "breakthrough" hasn't changed this either. Overwhelmingly, wherever money has been squandered on solar and wind, these unreliable systems are backed up with dangerous fossil fuels.
It's fucking killing the planet.
Of course, it really doesn't matter how efficient nuclear plants are since their source of primary energy, nuclear fission, doesn't kill people when the plants operate normally. This contrasts with dangerous fossil fuel plants that we find anti-nukes applauding which kill people whenever they operate, normally or otherwise.
Still, to maximize the benefit to humanity, thermodynamic efficiency of nuclear power plants should take a high priority.
To my mind - and this is the point I made to my son as we sent him off to his Ph.D. program - we should not focus on (at the simplest level) Carnot efficiency, but rather on maximizing exergy from primary heat energy, this by deriving chemical potential energy - my preferred form being DME - from this heat via thermochemical cycles, with electricity being a
side product.
As for "fast battery charging" "breakthroughs," they, like solar cells with efficiencies higher than 20% are a dime a dozen. The search terms (fast charging battery review) produces over 20,000 hits, going back to the dawn of this century, a period in which the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere rose nearly by 50 ppm while everybody chanted nonsense about solar, wind and energy storage.
My son is already a Master's level materials scientist. I note that the development of combined cycle systems was a function of developments in materials science, specifically thermal barrier coatings and refractory alloys. There is no reason whatsoever that this technology could not be applied to clean energy - of which there is only one form, nuclear energy - allowing us to abandon filthy energy, the fossil fuel industry on which the useless solar and wind industries depend and indeed to abandon the land and material intensive and unsustainable wind and solar industries.
I have heard bourgeois anti-nuke types here whine incessantly about the cost of the Vogtle nuclear plants one of which will fuel next month. These same people don't ever whine about the cost of climate change, about which they have never before, and do not now, and never will give a shit.
I expect that the Vogtle plants will operate until nearly the dawn of the 22nd century, perhaps with an interlude of refurbishment such as is being carried out on many of Canada's Candus, meaning they will have operated 80 years. The Vogtle plants will be operating when every single wind turbine blade on every disgusting wind turbine on this planet will have been in landfills for more than half a century, when every solar cell now installed will be leaching crap into water supplies around the world after burial with the rest of the electronic waste, including spent batteries, even if
some of them are able to find the energy to be recycled. (No distributed energy system is subject to
complete recycling, and all recycling schemes involve heat, which is not generally accessible from wind and solar junk - I hope to not be disgusted by reference to the destruction of huge land areas for solar thermal junk.)
My son agreed in his first meeting with his advisor, by the way, that he will begin his lab training by familiarizing himself with additive manufacture of refractory alloys, another term for additive manufacture being "3D printing."
This is a key technology that will revolutionize nuclear infrastructure building.
It's not at all futuristic: This year, for the first time, 3D printed nuclear components were installed in a nuclear plant.
First use of 3D-printed nuclear fuel debris filters . I'm happy as a clam to hear about my son working in this area, since I have long thought about 3D printed ceramic reactor cores. We are well on our way there:
First-of-its-kind 3D printed nuclear fuel component to enter use
Now, it's very clear - and Vogtle, despite being a gift to future generations rather than the liability that every piece of so called "renewable energy" junk will be when today's toddlers are finishing college is evidence - that the American nuclear energy construction infrastructure has been badly damaged by appeals to fear and ignorance by bean counting bourgeois anti-nukes who value their electric car fantasies above human decency and even human lives.
The answer to this willful destruction is the term that my President uses in a different context: "Build back better."
I really don't care what anti-nukes think. Neither does my son. Neither do his peers, his advisors, and his new friends among his fellow graduate students, most of whom are where they are because climate change is the most important issue before humanity, as opposed to how fucking convenient and fast it is to charge an electric car.
Antinukes can pick lint out of their navels and whine about criticisms of their battery bullshit to the end of their days. Irrespective of it, the damage they have done to the future is winding down, to be sure; reality - dire reality, awful reality - is before us. The German Emperor, the Renewable Energy Kaiser, has been shown to be naked, except for the stains of coal soot.
Have a great weekend.
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