This essay was posted on Daily KOS under Jakko Jan. 12, 2023.
Weebly is a pain in the ass. I don't just write a document: I craft it, and Weebly just won't let me format as I like. This is the best I can do.
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I posted four diaries (one was a duplicate) at Daily Kos in April 2019: This is what we do about climate change, Parts 1 and 2, and Here is what we do about climate change: a technology (and politics) review. Not a lot of you read them—the shortest was 11 pages and the longest 77, and apparently posting in the middle of the night is a bad idea—but those of you who did appreciated my efforts to understand and explain the technologies that could help get us out of this mess, and your encouragement lit a fire under me: I’m now at 419 pages.
Weebly is a pain in the ass. I don't just write a document: I craft it, and Weebly just won't let me format as I like. This is the best I can do.
*************
I posted four diaries (one was a duplicate) at Daily Kos in April 2019: This is what we do about climate change, Parts 1 and 2, and Here is what we do about climate change: a technology (and politics) review. Not a lot of you read them—the shortest was 11 pages and the longest 77, and apparently posting in the middle of the night is a bad idea—but those of you who did appreciated my efforts to understand and explain the technologies that could help get us out of this mess, and your encouragement lit a fire under me: I’m now at 419 pages.
--photo saikiran kesari via unsplash
I think we can still turn this already-crashing-down-around-us disaster around if we start now. With Republicans in control of the House, to block us at every turn, and fossil-fuel beholden “centrist,” and “moderate,” Dems in the way, as well, we’re going to lose two more critical years; and if the world goes fascist—what is wrong with people!?—we’re dead. But other than that … .
We need a revolution, and we need direct democracy. But other than that … .
It’s going to take tech. Going back to the Pleistocene is not going to work. You really want to live that way? Or that short? So I’ve spent the last four years researching and writing a literature review of those technologies, and of the politics, IMNHO, needed to get us there. Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change: A Review of the Technologies and Politics that Could Leave the Future a Future, (PTBOCC) is now, as above, 419 pages. Don’t freak; the main text is only 363 pages; the rest is “Afterword,” including 484 (and counting) Endnotes for those who want to follow my research, and for those who say, “Prove it.” And 50-odd color images and almost as many sidebars shorten the text, too.
I’ll turn this comment (to “A 60 Minutes story you need to see- “Scientists: Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction” by Lefty Coaster ) into a Daily KOS diary, and include a writing sample, soon to be one of my “Rants,” from my website, www.ptbocc.com. You can download a free PDF of PTBOCC there, or here, or via the title above. You can leave me constructive comments: please do.
I read through all of the comments to Lefty Coaster’s diary (and left a lot of my own) and a lot of you are discouraged almost to despair. I should be, too, but what’s the point? Remember that cartoon of a heron swallowing a frog, and the frog has its hands around the heron’s throat, throttling it? “Never give up.” We owe it to the kiddos to never give up. ‘Sides, what the hell else we got to do? We can fix this. We need to grow up, grow a brain, get out of our own way—or get capitalism and greed out of our way--but the tools we need are at hand. I hope that reading about them encourages you to never give up.
And you get to learn another of my pennames.
We need a revolution, and we need direct democracy. But other than that … .
It’s going to take tech. Going back to the Pleistocene is not going to work. You really want to live that way? Or that short? So I’ve spent the last four years researching and writing a literature review of those technologies, and of the politics, IMNHO, needed to get us there. Pumping the Brakes on Climate Change: A Review of the Technologies and Politics that Could Leave the Future a Future, (PTBOCC) is now, as above, 419 pages. Don’t freak; the main text is only 363 pages; the rest is “Afterword,” including 484 (and counting) Endnotes for those who want to follow my research, and for those who say, “Prove it.” And 50-odd color images and almost as many sidebars shorten the text, too.
I’ll turn this comment (to “A 60 Minutes story you need to see- “Scientists: Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction” by Lefty Coaster ) into a Daily KOS diary, and include a writing sample, soon to be one of my “Rants,” from my website, www.ptbocc.com. You can download a free PDF of PTBOCC there, or here, or via the title above. You can leave me constructive comments: please do.
I read through all of the comments to Lefty Coaster’s diary (and left a lot of my own) and a lot of you are discouraged almost to despair. I should be, too, but what’s the point? Remember that cartoon of a heron swallowing a frog, and the frog has its hands around the heron’s throat, throttling it? “Never give up.” We owe it to the kiddos to never give up. ‘Sides, what the hell else we got to do? We can fix this. We need to grow up, grow a brain, get out of our own way—or get capitalism and greed out of our way--but the tools we need are at hand. I hope that reading about them encourages you to never give up.
And you get to learn another of my pennames.
Frog Heron Never Give Up
The following 7 pages (in Word) is the chapter of PTBOCC on Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, one of the start-ups exploring aneutronic fusion. I think it’s a particularly good sample of my writing, my style, and my meticulous research. I hope it prompts you to go check out my website, www.ptbocc.com , read my book on line, and leave me constructive comments (meanies will be deleted), or download it and read it on your device on the plane, on the toilet, in the tub (carefully!), when the other guy is driving … .
I’ll bet that Daily Kos’ –algorithm?—messes up my careful formatting, maybe even deletes my images, and that messes up the whole writing sample thing. If I don’t like the way this looks when published, I’ll put a PDF on the cloud, and a link to it in the first comment.
Courage!
I’ll bet that Daily Kos’ –algorithm?—messes up my careful formatting, maybe even deletes my images, and that messes up the whole writing sample thing. If I don’t like the way this looks when published, I’ll put a PDF on the cloud, and a link to it in the first comment.
Courage!
Illustrated explanation of how a DPF works here, animation here, and watch The New Fusion Race series on YouTube.
--Images courtesy of LPP
If LPP [i] can make p-B-11 work in DPFs, they think they can get to scientific proof, net energy, by 2024 or 2025, and for another $1 million or so; then they have to attract big money, $100 million, to engineer the device for mass production. They get no help from government—they got a little DARPA money, one time—but solicit investors through Wefunder on occasion; I bought a few shares a couple of years ago. Wish I had invested in Microsoft or Apple when they were just getting started; maybe my little investment in LPP will put all my grandnieces and ‘nephews through college. Or not. It’s worth it to help find out if this tech works, given its possibilities. LPP chief scientist Eric Lerner says they are a very small team (four people?), and more money and help would speed them up. And we need these guys on line as soon as we can get them there. Just sayin’. …
The Green New Deal is going to be unaffordable, eh? Here’s a carbon-free emergent technology that might take my electric bill from 14.1 cents per kWh, to half a cent.
This bit could also go under Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and I’ll talk more about it there, but we’re talking about LPP DPFs here, so. … An old Boeing 737-300 (two engines) produces 7.2 MW on cruise. Five-MW LPP DPFs should be small and light enough that one or two of them could power a smallish electric airliner, several might power a big one, and that old dream of an aircraft that can stay aloft indefinitely might come true. Aviation emits 2 ½ to 4 percent of greenhouse gases, enough to deserve a concerted attack. Making air travel carbon neutral would help. LPP DPF reactors might.
Compare the half-million-dollar projected cost of an LPP DPF to the $12 to $42 million cost of a single jet engine. The CFM56 engines on a Boeing 737-800 weigh 5,257 pounds each. I can’t find a reference to their power in MW; comparing thrust, about half again as much as the 737-300, so roughly 10 MW or 5 MW per engine? Even with full water jacket, an LPP DPF might weigh 6,000 pounds, and other neutron absorbers like polyethylene might make them lighter. Fuel costs should be almost nothing. We are right on the edge of very powerful, ridiculously lightweight electric motors; the entire “power train” might weigh little more than a comparable fan jet engine. And if a DPF operating full time as a power plant might burn five kilograms of decaborane a year (Eric Lerner, personal communication. Much of the above is from PC with Eric; the rest from their email newsletter and YouTubes), you would need a few grams, at maybe $1 a gram, to fly across the Atlantic and back.
That Boeing 737-800 carries 6,875 gallons of fuel = 45,856 pounds = $29,219 at the $4.25 per gallon price I found online in Spring 2020. That is barely enough fuel to cross the Atlantic one-way (newer 737-800s, 3,000 nmi/5,600 km range) and not enough to fly back west against head winds, which is why they don’t fly 737s transatlantic. With a passenger load of 147:
$29,219 total fuel, 82.6 percent (2019, pre Covid) average passenger load factor, $29,219 / 147 / .826 = $240.64 per passenger just for fuel.
$21,050/hour “rental rate” … .
Airlines, your airchines would cost far less, you would save $29,000 in fuel on that one flight, you would have unlimited range so headwinds wouldn’t matter, and you could size the plane to the load instead of the range. And you’d have 23 tons more payload on a little 737. Travelers, think how much all of that should reduce the cost of air travel.
And on the one, one-way transatlantic flight you would avoid 137,500 pounds of CO2 at 20 pounds per gallon of fuel burned: some references say 21, in which case 144,375 pounds, or 72 tons.
And I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about eating pineapple flown from Hawaii.
Full disclosure: In emails I exchanged with Eric Lerner, he was a bit worried about using DPFs to power airplanes or hospitals. Should a crash or earthquake break the shell and the reactor vessel open, a small amount of a very radioactive form of carbon 12 could be released. Thing is, its half-life is so short that you can open a reactor to work inside it nine hours after shutdown, so 54 minute half-life? You will have to be careful of a little toxic beryllium dust, so you would want a respirator and a HEPA vac, maybe a bunny suit and a shower after in an abundance of caution. I would think that having to wait nine hours before closely approaching reactors after a plane wreck (or use a Geiger counter to be sure it’s safe) would be a lot more survivable than flinging tens of tons of flaming jet fuel around. Just put those 6-foot-diameter water-filled cannon balls at the front of the fuselage, please. You don’t want them blasting through the cabin should the plane come to a sudden stop.
Another advantage to an electric aircraft that’s increasingly important in today’s world? Nothing much there for a heat-seeking missile to lock on to.
How much power does a locomotive produce? Googled it:
Power of a Train - The Physics Factbook - Hypertextbook
"Most electric locomotives weigh between 100 and 200 short tons (90 and 180 metric tons) and provide about 6000 to 7000 Hp. (4500 to 5200 kW)."
—Pennsylvania Railroad Diesel Locomotive Pictorial Fairbanks-Morse Locomotives. [Boldface original.]
Fifty-two hundred kW, 5.2 MW. A 5 MW LPP DPF will be perfect to power an electric locomotive. We won’t even need biodiesel. Rail is already very clean transport; make its operational energy carbon free, and make new trains out of clean steel—zero carbon—being developed by Boston Metal (read on!) and the iron horse could be perfectly clean and green—and much quieter. And to think it started out so inefficient and filthy and noisy.
If a DPF will power a locomotive, it will do nicely for a tugboat, a Coast-Guard cutter ... .
And a little more google (don’tchya love havin’ Mr. Know-It-All right on the corner of your desk?) says that a big cargo container ship might need 100 MW, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, twice that, 208 MW. One-hundred MW is either one TAE CBFR, or 20 LPP DPFs, either of which should fit in the floor space of one or two 40-foot cargo containers. A really big ship, like the Emma Maersk, carries 15,000 twenty-foot containers, so 7500 forties. Emma Maersk is powered by the biggest piston engine ever built, the 107,390-horsepower (80,080 kW—80 megawatts!) Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C, which weighs 2300 tonnes, is 44 feet tall and 90 feet long and costs $27 million. I think a TAE CBFR will probably fit in that space. If not, 80 MW is only 16 LPP DPFs, which might cost only $8 million.
For any motorheads reading, the RTA96-C is an in-line 14 (smaller versions with fewer cylinders are available) supercharged two-stroke diesel, with cylinders bored 38 inches, strokes 8 feet(!), 1820 liters per cylinder, 25,840 L / 1,556,002 cubic inches total, runs at a whoppin’ 102 rpm, and burns 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil (making ~41,250 pounds of CO2) per hour. And it produces 5,608,312 foot-pounds of torque. Bit more than your F-350. …
I’m a little surprised that Jay Leno doesn’t have one powering a motorcycle.
Or Wild Bill Gelbke. Google “The road dog motorcycle,” or Roadog-Wikipedia. 17 feet, 3280 pounds, hydraulic kickstands … .
IF they get the support they need now, some of the groups investigating aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion might bring it on line soon enough that, if we got on it, we could begin to make rail, air travel, and shipping carbon-free by 2030 or 2035. With battery-electric automobiles and biofuels, that cleans up all of transportation. That’s worth a little public funding, although you would think shipping and rail and the auto manufacturers could chip in some, too. And the airlines and Boeing and Airbus … .
One big cargo ship running on high-sulfur bunker fuel makes sulfur oxide pollution equal to 50 million cars. Fifteen—that’s 15—big ships make as much SOx, sulfur oxide, pollution as all the world’s 760 million cars; and 90,000 (!) ships burn 370 million tons of bunker oil each year, producing 3 percent of global GHG emissions. So the shipping industry is switching from bunker oil to diesel and LNG (liquefied natural gas) right now—which is projected to create a diesel shortage and a spike in prices, and in prices of everything shipped by road, rail or ocean—in an effort to clean up its act. Inside Climate News says that the most common engine used with LNG can produce 82 percent more GHGs than “conventional marine fuel oil”—bunker oil—because the frackers lose a lot of gas getting it from ground to engine, and because the engines let around 4 percent of it pass through the cylinders unburned, and as we all know by now methane is a potent GHG.
It would be nice if we could skip these expensive little half steps, leave the diesel and the gas in the ground, and go right to carbon-free transport. It’s imperative that we stop all that SOx pollution, and it looks like shipping operators have to alter, not replace, at least some of their engines (some can burn diesel or heated bunker oil), which will save them money, so of course that’s what they’ll do. For now. If DPFs work as LPP hopes, rail, shipping, and air travel will swarm to them like flies to…well. … Unless the fossils get in the way.
BTW, ship owners: if your megacarrier leaves port carrying 4.5 million gallons of fuel, at 8.29 pounds per gallon, that’s 18,652.5 tons of additional cargo capacity you’d have if you carried a few pounds of decaborane (p-B-11 fuel) instead. Your “engines” would weigh less, too. What would an additional 20 thousand tons of payload do for your bottom line?
One reason I will never finish this book is that I keep coming across new information. “A team including Core Power Ltd (UK), Southern Company, TerraPower and Orano USA has applied to take part in cost-share risk reduction awards under the US Department of Energy's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Programme to build a proof-of-concept for a medium-scale commercial-grade marine reactor based on molten salt [fission] reactor (MSR) technology.” –wnn, world nuclear news, Nov. 4, 2020.
To break that monster of a sentence (I aughta know!) down, Core Power is working with TerraPower and others to develop a small modular mMSR, marine molten salt reactor, to power the maritime shipping industry (it would be useful elsewhere, too). They are asking the DOE (who probably will) to share the costs and risks. Their reactor is designed for larger vessels, but they say they could use them to make clean fuel for smaller ships and boats. Hydrogen fuels?
And yes, we’re talking fission again. But we’re also talking shipping, so … .
Light water reactors have worked well for the U.S. and other navies, but molten salt reactors will be more efficient, less expensive, smaller for the same power, and much safer for perhaps less disciplined, less-highly-trained operators. A mMSR could decarbonize the shipping industry, and eliminate its sulfur oxide and particulate pollution and oil spills. The team hopes to begin testing (components?) in 2021, but don’t think they will have a prototype running until around the end of the decade. We need them on line ASAP. They have the money and the expertise. …
So how much CO2 could we avoid by switching the shipping industry to nuclear power?
If burning a gallon of #6 residual fuel oil—8.2 pounds—creates 24.85 pounds of CO2, 370 million tons of oil is 1,121,280,488 tons, 1.12 giga—billion—tons—of CO2. Per year. IF I didn’t burn out a vacuum tube (I’m an early 1950s model) figuring out the formula. Going to diesel might reduce that a whoppin’ 10 or 12 percent. Not remotely good enough.
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[1] “Aneutronic Fusion,” Wikipedia, last revision May 29, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
[1] Loz Blain, “HB11's hydrogen-boron laser fusion test yields groundbreaking results,” New Atlas, Mar 28, 2022, https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-laser-fusion-demonstration/
[1] “DPF – Woldwide, Workable Fusion,” !AltEnergy.com, accessed June 8, 2020, https://www.ialtenergy.com/dpf.html
[1] FocusFusionSociety, “Nuclear Fusion: DPF Animation,” YouTube, Nov 12, 2009, 1:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVif4hUAJ8c
And if you’re interested:
LPP (Lawrenceville Plasma Physics) Fusion, Latest News, last accessed June 8, 2020, https://lppfusion.com/
Wefunder, LPP Fusion: “Green Fusion Energy Generator: the power of the sun recreated on Earth,” Wefunder.com, last accessed June 8, 2020. https://wefunder.com/lppfusion
Paul Evans, “Big polluters: One massive container ship equals 50 million cars” New Atlas, April 23, 2009, https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/
Phil Mckenna, “Shipping Lines Turn to LNG-Powered Vessels, But They’re Worse for the Climate,” Inside Climate News, Feb, 1, 2020, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012020/shipping-lines-liquefied-natural-gas-methane-leaks
Dan Ronan, Associate News Editor, “Cargo Ships May Switch to Diesel Fuel by 2020,” Transport Topics, May 8, 2018 , https://www.ttnews.com/articles/cargo-ships-may-switch-diesel-fuel-2020
Rock Logic With Sean Kenny, “the global shipping crisis and molten salt reactors,” YouTube, July 12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-p0thPrGMg
core-power, m-MSR Technology, “The m-MSR at a glance. Unique Advantages, Inherent Safety, Advanced Atomic is best represented by the Molten Salt Reactor.” (m-MSR= marine molten salt reactor) No date: accessed July 12, 2021. https://corepower.energy/technology/
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