Mindless Anti-nuke Recognizes the Materials Problem with So Called "Renewable Energy."

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is a "Policy Forum" article published in Science, this one: Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future (Benjamin Sovacool et al, Science Vol. 367, Issue 6473, pp. 30-33)

Despite all the cheering for so called "renewable energy," it is a fact that the trillions of dollars squandered on it has done nothing to address climate change.

This a reality, this is a fact, from the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory:

Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa (Accessed 01/04/20)

Week beginning on December 22, 2019: 412.21 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 409.24 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 388.17 ppm

Last updated: January 4, 2020

The rate of increases in the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide, 2.4 ppm/year, over the last ten years is the highest such rate ever observed at the observatory over a ten year period, stretching back to the first such period ever recorded, that between 1959-1969 when the average rate was 0.85 ppm/year (based on yearly historical figures, not weekly year to year comparisons). As recently as the period between 1990-2000 the rate was 1.54 ppm/year, despite what was (then) a record year in 1998, when, owing to the out of control fires in Southeast Asia - fires set during an El Nino year to clear rain forests to plant palm oil plantations to make biodiesel for Germany's "renewable fuel portfolio standards" - the increase was 2.93 ppm in a single year.

Benjamin Sovacool is a prominent anti-nuke who has to be one of my least favorite commentators on energy and the environment, who nonetheless publishes frequently in scientific journals, about energy, even though he has, quite obviously, a very low appreciation of the physical sciences.

He has a BA in Philosophy; an MA and a Ph.D in something called "Science Policy" from Virginia Tech. These are not a physical science degrees; they are not an engineering degrees. They seem to be political science degrees.

Here is Doctor Sovacool's 2006 Phd Thesis: THE POWER PRODUCTION PARADOX: REVEALING THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL IMPEDIMENTS TO DISTRIBUTED GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES .

This is not a physical science thesis. The majority of the references in the thesis seem to be to "personal interviews." Sovacool sure can talk. Probably some of the people might have engineering degrees, but the transcripts of the interviews seem not to really involve much that is really hard engineering. It is possible that the "anonymous expert" who is a "high ranking executive" at a "large independent power producer" is an engineer, but basically the interviews I scanned from him consists of the same platitudes we've heard for half a century during which we have effectively done nothing. You do not need a Ph.D. to generate platitudes.

It has few references to physical science papers, although it does have at least one reference from blabber from Amory Lovins, who has consistently made loud predictions about energy and the environment since the 1970's, none of which have actually had much connection with what actually happened.

I have had one, and exactly one, personal interaction with Sovacool, when he logged onto a site where I was writing posts to inform me that his attitude toward nuclear energy is "complex."

This was in response to a criticism of his awful mentality, whereby his fantasies about "nuclear wastes" and "nuclear accidents" did very little to address the dangerous fossil fuel waste problem, which accounts for between 6 and 7 million deaths per year, as air pollution, and will certainly result in considerably more from climate change.

The worst nuclear disaster - an experimentally observed event at Chernobyl - will not result, in the next 100 years, as many deaths as will occur from air pollution in the next two days.

I responded to Sovacool's remarks on his "complexity" with derision.

The real problem with so called "renewable energy" is not that it has, at tremendous expense, failed to address climate change. The real problem is that the name for it is a lie. So called "renewable energy" is not "renewable" because its energy to mass ratio is absurdly small - which is why it was abandoned in the 19th century. While the technology may have changed since the 19th century, the mass intensity has not.

I have written a fair amount about that fact in this space. The subject of critical materials is garnering increasing attention, as well it should.

Some comments from Dr. Sovacool's Science paper:

Climate change mitigation will create new natural resource and supply chain opportunities and dilemmas, because substantial amounts of raw materials will be required to build new low-carbon energy devices and infrastructure (1). However, despite attempts at improved governance and better corporate management, procurement of many mineral and metal resources occurs in areas generally acknowledged for mismanagement, remains environmentally capricious, and, in some cases, is a source of conflict at the sites of resource extraction (2). These extractive and smelting industries have thus left a legacy in many parts of the world of environmental degradation, adverse impacts to public health, marginalized communities and workers, and biodiversity damage. We identify key sustainability challenges with practices used in industries that will supply the metals and minerals—including cobalt, copper, lithium, cadmium, and rare earth elements (REEs)—needed for technologies such as solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle (EV) motors, wind turbines, fuel cells, and nuclear reactors. We then propose four holistic recommendations to make mining and metal processing more sustainable and just and to make the mining and extractive industries more efficient and resilient.

Between 2015 and 2050, the global EV stock needs to jump from 1.2 million light-duty passenger cars to 965 million passenger cars, battery storage capacity needs to climb from 0.5 gigawatt-hour (GWh) to 12,380 GWh, and the amount of installed solar photovoltaic capacity must rise from 223 GW to more than 7100 GW (3). The materials and metals demanded by a low-carbon economy will be immense (4). One recent assessment concluded that expected demand for 14 metals—such as copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium—central to the manufacturing of renewable energy, EV, fuel cell, and storage technologies will grow substantially in the next few decades (5). Another study projected increases in demand for materials between 2015 and 2060 of 87,000% for EV batteries, 1000% for wind power, and 3000% for solar cells and photovoltaics (6). Although they are only projections and subject to uncertainty, the World Bank put it concisely that “the clean energy transition will be significantly mineral intensive” (7) (see the figure).

Gee. I'm glad he found that out. I've been aware of it for well over a decade. In 2010, 2.1 trillion dollars ago in so called "renewable energy" "investments," for the week beginning January 3, 2010, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 388.06 ppm. Yesterday it was 413.22 ppm.

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

January 03: 413.22 ppm
January 02: Unavailable
January 01: 412.64 ppm
December 31: 413.20 ppm
December 30: 413.08 ppm
Last Updated: January 4, 2020

A graphic from Dr. Sovacool's paper, which I'm sure will be highly cited:



I'm not sure that any of this is accurate, by the way; it's not like we've developed superior magnets to the neodymium iron boride magnets or their dysprosium laced analogues for use in wind turbines. Perhaps Dr. Sovacool is counting on diesel powered ships to truck out to wind farms off the coast after the turbines have become waste in less than 20 years, and third world people to "recycle" these magnets, I don't know. (I have zero respect for his scientific knowledge.)

Other figures in real scientific literature are at odds with his graphics here.
He does pretend, in this paper, to care about the people who dig this stuff so we can all be "green."

Many of the minerals and metals needed for low-carbon technologies are considered “critical raw materials” or “technologically critical elements,” terms meant to capture the fact that they are not only of strategic or economic importance but also at higher risk of supply shortage or price volatility (8). But their mining can produce grave social risks. A majority of the world's cobalt, used in the most common battery chemistries for EVs and stationary electricity storage, is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (see the map), a country struggling to recover from years of armed conflict. There, women and sometimes children often work in or around mines for less pay or status than their male and adult counterparts, without basic safety equipment (see the photo). Owing to a lack of preventative strategies and measures such as drilling with water and proper exhaust ventilation, many cobalt miners have extremely high levels of toxic metals in their body and are at risk of developing respiratory illness, heart disease, or cancer.

In addition, mining frequently results in severe environmental impacts and community dislocation. Moreover, metal production itself is energy intensive and difficult to decarbonize. Mining for copper, needed for electric wires and circuits and thin-film solar cells, and mining for lithium, used in batteries, has been criticized in Chile for depleting local groundwater resources across the Atacama Desert, destroying fragile ecosystems, and converting meadows and lagoons into salt flats. The extraction, crushing, refining, and processing of cadmium, a by-product of zinc mining, into compounds for rechargeable nickel cadmium batteries and thin-film photovoltaic modules that use cadmium telluride (CdTe) or cadmium sulfide semiconductors can pose risks such as groundwater or food contamination or worker exposure to hazardous chemicals, especially in the supply chains where elemental cadmium exposures are greatest. REEs, such as neodymium and the less common dysprosium, are needed for magnets in electric generators in wind turbines and motors in EVs, control rods for nuclear reactors, and the fluid catalysts for shale gas fracking. But REE extraction in China has resulted in chemical pollution from ammonium sulfate and ammonium chloride and tailings pollution that now threaten rural groundwater aquifers as well as rivers and streams. Several metals for green technologies are found as “companions” to other ores with differential value and unsustainable supply chains (9).

From my perspective, better late than never, even if in the 14 years since his Ph.D. thesis was published close to 100 million people have died from air pollution while he prattled on about "nuclear waste."

The United States has about 75,000 tons of used nuclear fuel, what in common parlance of people like Dr. Sovacool, is called "nuclear waste," although there is no intrinsic reason that it needs to be "waste." About 95% of this used nuclear fuel is unreacted uranium, slightly enriched with respect to natural uranium. About 1% of it is recoverable transuranium actinides, chiefly plutonium, and about 4% is recoverable (and valuable) fission products.

The world is consuming right now, with an ever increasing proportion of it coming from dangerous fossil fuels, about 600 exajoules of energy per year, up from less than 420 in 2000.

A kilogram of plutonium, completely fissioned, has about 80 trillion joules of recoverable energy. It follows that the unreacted uranium in used nuclear fuel, converted to plutonium in "breed and burn" reactors, represents, displacing all the dangerous oil, all the dangerous coal, all the dangerous natural gas, all the steel mines serving wind turbines, on the entire planet, at 600 exajoules per year, all of humanity's energy demand for about 9 and a half years. We have millions of tons of depleted isolated uranium available.

One million tons of uranium, converted to plutonium, is sufficient to supply all of humanity's current energy demand for well over a century. The ocean contains 4.5 billion tons of uranium, continuously being recycled out of Earth's mantle. The technology for extracting it is well known.

The energy content of this uranium is sufficient to last several orders of magnitude longer than human civilization has existed.

To this we may add the thorium partially isolated and dumped by lanthanide miners to serve the so called "renewable energy" industry.

I am unimpressed, that after nearly a decade and a half of spreading fear and ignorance, that Dr. Sovacool seems to be rethinking his rhetoric, although I very much doubt that this comment from his paper indicates that he has developed much of a shred of respect for humanity:

Traditional labor-intensive mechanisms of mining that are possible to undertake with less mechanization and without major capital investments are called artisanal and smallscale mining (ASM). Although ASM is not immune from poor governance or environmental harm, it provides livelihood potential for at least 40 million people worldwide, with an additional three to five times more people indirectly supported by the sector (10).

He still seems to believe that "distributed pollution" is better than concentrated pollution, and that the best way to serve the "40 million people" worldwide who dig this crap under appalling conditions, is to keep them poor to serve the "green" fantasies of bourgeois graduate students working on "social policy."

(He talks about making 965 million electric cars...what is he smoking over there in Brexit land?)

How about we educate and provide for those 40 million people and mine less?, not more in a pixilated scheme to chase after the "renewable energy" nirvana that has not come, is not here, and will not come? Crazy idea? Really?

You know what the problem really is? It's that incredibly poor people have not agreed to remain poor so that Americans can drive around in "green" Tesla cars. The per capita energy consumption of Chinese citizens is roughly a tenth that of an American, but we seem to have a problem with the fact that there are more Chinese than Americans, and that most of these Chinese are human beings who want to live decent lives. The same is true of Indians. And of Gabonese. And of Malians. And citizens of the "Democratic" "Republic" of the Congo.

The key to sustainable energy is an extraordinarily high energy to mass ratio, one higher than the high ratio available from dangerous fossil fuels, which we continue to use - in our short term mentality - because of their high mass to energy ratio. Only nuclear fuels, actinides and (if it ever becomes commercially feasible to use it) tritium and deuterium have such ratios exceeding those of dangerous fossil fuels which, must be banned if there is really any concern for ethics. The key to sustainability is also contiguous, in my opinion, with human development goals, decent lives for all the citizens of the world.

It's a matter of ethics but so far as energy it is also a matter of physics and applied physics (engineering), the laws of which are not subject to repeal by legislatures, even those legislatures goaded by "social scientists."

If I sound angry, it's probably because I am.

I hope you're having a happy New Year thus far.

[reACTIONary]

1. You do not need a Ph.D. to generate platitudes....

... True. But it helps.

[NNadir]

3. True, that. I've personally met and spoken with thousands of Ph.D. level scientists over my...

...my career.

Some of them are absolutely brilliant of course; many are polymaths. This is particularly true of most - but not all - academics.

I have also known brilliant Ph.Ds in industry.

But there are a fair number of them who make you wonder how they managed to learn to work a pencil. I have heard incredibly stupid stuff from people holding that degree. This is particularly true when they go outside their narrow area of work.

The degree inherently involves a certain esoteric focus; it does not imply broad knowledge. One of my least favorite arguments that I encounter is the Appeal to Authority arguments that go like this: "My friend said you're wrong and my friend has a Ph.D."

One hears these kinds of arguments from time to time; one doesn't want to believe that people make them, but one hears them.

Because Ben Carson is a trained neurosurgeon does not make him competent to address human health needs. His social and moral development is at best, primitive.

[msongs]

2. needs more pretty multicolor graphs and graphics. nt