NNadir
NNadir's JournalUm...you know what?
There are subset of people - not very bright, not very informed and always dogmatic, willing to bet the future of humanity on their stupid, and primitive worship of the sun god - even though, as I point out repeatedly, the world just squandered, between 2005 and 2015 1.111 trillion dollars (Source: GLOBAL TRENDS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY INVESTMENT, 2017 Key Findings, FS UNEP Collaboration Center) on solar energy, with the result that solar, combined with the equally stupid scam, wind energy, and geothermal and tides thrown in, doesn't produce even 2% of the 574 exajoules of energy humanity now generates and consumes each year.
(Source: International Energy Agency, Key Energy Statistics)
Yet, this class of mindless assholes prances on, even more stupid, even more evil, even more indifferent and delusional day after day after day, making mindless and often failed predictions that "by such and such a year" (always after they'll be more than 100 years old) the world will be powered by "100% renewables."
It doesn't matter if they're liars or self deluding fools or scammers for the gas industry, the effect is the same.
Recently in this space,in Trumpian liar doublespeak, that an example of this mindless set announced that knew more than all of the world's scientists and energy experts, and of course, me don't know what we're talking about, but he, of course does:
and has been consistently underestimated by national energy officials/agencies and solar skeptics like you.
Ditto with the declining cost curve.
So when are you going to stop shilling for nukes, whose costs are NOT going down - despite the over-promises of the government and industry.
All of the criticisms you level against solar promoters goes double for nukes.
Then he went on to announce that I think I'm the smartest guy in the room, while citing a minor official whose publication list largely consists of inventorying the equipment in the NREL laboratories in this classic pot and kettle argument:
Fuck you very much - have a nice life.
There was a time in my life, when I used to confront these stupid little hecklers repeatedly, here and elsewhere.
It's a waste of time though.
These kinds of people are oppressively stupid, ignorant, and indifferent. They think it's a good idea to distribute arsenic because they're dumb enough to think that distributed pollutants are better than concentrated pollutants because they spend all of their time going through the circle jerk of stupid renewable energy websites where the authors are every bit as dumb and illiterate as they are.
They're like Trump voters, inasmuch as no amount of information - for example that the 1.111 trillion dollars squandered on the solar scam in the last decade as mentioned above did nothing to keep the world from surging over 410 ppm this week - will make them admit that they just might be wrong. They're faith based and as such, incapable of exhibiting any flexibility of mind.
I, by contrast, am informed by the primary scientific literature, with which I spend 10 to 20 hours a week. This practice has caused me to change my mind about things, many times. I used to be, many years ago, a dumb fuck anti-nuke "renewables will save us" asshole, for which I apologize to all future generations.
Like I said, to repeat, there was a time in my life, when I used to confront these stupid little hecklers repeatedly, here and elsewhere.
It's a waste of time though.
I now have an "ignore" list, and I use it to prevent myself from wasting time on stupid fucks who are working - as I can clearly see - to destroy the future in prideful ignorance. The "cut and paste" moron is on it, along with the dickhead who thinks that the climate change gas concentration will go down because of "world's largest" solar installations and trivial junk in Maine, the concrete blockhead who giggles stupidly all the time, and, um, the present company.
In my opinion, these dopes are best ignored. They have nothing, absolutely nothing, intelligent or useful to say.
Welcome to my ignore list.
As you say, "Have a nice life."
Direct exposure of polychlorinated biphenyls to the radiation field of used nuclear fuel.
Halogenated organic molecules, both those being actively produced as well as those which represent legacy production represent one of the most important (and dangerous) environmental issues today.
For many years, it was dangerous to eat bluefish caught from the Hudson River because of discharges over many decades of the mid 20th century of PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) from the General Electric plants (for capacitor manufacture) at Hudson Falls and Fort Edward.
Millions, hundreds of millions of transformers were manufactured which contained PCB's.
In 2003 it was reported by scientists at the Department of Materials and Nuclear Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park that...
(Source: Cynthia G. Jones ,† Joseph Silverman , and Mohamad Al-Sheikhly *, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2003, 37 (24), pp 5773–5777
Because of the unusual strength of carbon-halogen bonds, particular those of fluorine, chlorine, and, in aromatic compounds utilized widely until recently as flame retardants, bromine, consider energy is required to break these bonds in order to mineralize (convert to salts like sodium fluoride, sodium chloride...etc and carbon dioxide) these compounds.
The best and in many cases the only way to break these bonds is radiolysis, and the higher the energy of the radiation, the better. As a practical matter, gamma rays, x-rays, and to a lesser extent UV radiation is required.
This was widely understood by previous generations, who explored this approach for quite some time, but has been forgotten because of fear and stupidity about radiation and its potential to save lives other than by being the largest source of climate change gas free energy ever developed.
While searching the scientific literature recently on the subject of the radiolysis of organohalogens I came across a cool paper from 1993 where scientists at the Idaho Engineering Laboratory directly exposed PCB's to the intense radiation field of used nuclear fuel directly from a reactor.
What is needed is a process that would degrade the PCBs and allow the solvent to be recycled rather than destroyed. Towards this end, radiolysis offers many attractive features such as (a) minimization of gaseous and particulate effluents, (b) potential of recovering the bulk solvent for recycling, (c) ability to verify that the hazardous constituents have been reduced to acceptable limits, and (d) possibility of in situ destruction in selected applications due to the highly penetrating nature of ?-rays.
Now for the fun part of the paper which surprised even me.
Environ. Sci. Technol., 1994, 28 (12), pp 2191–2196
Although in this experiment, the PCB's were completely and totally mineralized, it's not something I would recommend industrially, since used nuclear fuel is also a neutron source, and on an industrial scale, chlorine might be transformed into 36Cl which is radioactive and would only prove useful for tracer experiments.
This said, among many the fission products, 137Cs, is an excellent source of ?-rays. In particular, certain titanates, which have been used as ion exchange materials in removing 137Cs from water are excellent materials for the degradation of water supplies contaminated with organohalogens and other organic pollutants.
Were we to get over the stupid enterprise of waiting like D'Estragnon for Godot, for the grand so called "renewable energy" industry to produce 100% of the world's energy, even though trillions of dollars and decades of effort and cheering have not caused it to produce 5% of the world's energy, we would be reprocessing used nuclear fuels, collecting the very valuable materials therein, including highly radioactive materials like 137Cs to solve problems about which, including but not limited to climate change, we are content to do nothing.
Esoteric, but interesting.
Have a nice Sunday afternoon.
Meet the Chemists Working to Improve Our Planet.
In celebration of Earth Day, the American Chemical Society is offering these videos.
I haven't watched any of these videos myself, and therefore can't recommend them, but I plan to do so.
Chemists Working to Improve Our Planet
We have to do something.
March for Science being held this Saturday.
Scientists from around the country will be converging on Washington DC to protest the attacks on science by our "government," and other protofacists around the world.
Local satellite protests will be held.
I plan to attend the NJ March: NJ March for Science
The motto of the marches is "Science, not Silence."
All who deplore attacks on science should try to attend.
It's, um, bullshit of the usual kind. Solar thermal plants on an industrial scale are...
...grotesque failures.
This kind of efficiency hype announced as a "record" will do exactly what the entire failed expensive and useless solar industry always does, generate more complacency than energy.
The solar industry after 50 years of mindless and frankly destructive cheering can't even produce 1% of the world's primary energy.
Now you're going to make hydrogen from it, and you're screaming for joy at 16.2% efficiency?
In order to produce in the form of hydrogen the world's energy supply, which is 570 exajoules per year, the solar thermal industry would need to produce 3518 exajoules as primary energy.
The piece of garbage solar thermal plant trashing the Mohave desert right now, the Ivanpah tragedy covers 3,500 acres and doesn't produce as much energy as a small garbage incinerator.
It produced just 0.0639 exajoules of energy in three years, or 0.0213 exajoules per year.
It's in a desert.
In order to produce 3500 exajoules, we would need about 1.6 million similar plants, all of them in deserts, and all of them paradoxically near water to split. They would need to occupy 23 million km2, which is very close to the entire surface area of North America.
How ridiculously stupid!
These reports, which amount to nothing more than big lies, are useless. They present failure as a victory.
Nature Materials Science: How solar PV will be doing in 2030.
The following graphic comes from Nature Materials 15, 117–120 (2016)
The graphic's caption says that so called "renewable energy" could provide 132 exajoules by 2030, when presumably we'll be pushing 420 ppm (or more) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Current human consumption is about 570 exajoules per year.
The solar industry soaks up (at current rates) over 100 billion dollars per year.
By 2030, we can expect this industry to produce about 4 exajoules.
We're saved.
The Spread of Antibiotic Resistance Genes From Biogas Digestors.
At a relatively late age, I've decided to learn more about a subject in which my knowledge is relatively weak, specifically genomic molecular biology. Toward this end, I picked up a monograph that draws on certain similarities between the study of proteomics - about which I know a reasonable amount - and genomics, specifically with respect to the 3 dimensional geometry, specifically, this one: RNA 3D Structure Analysis and Prediction.
In contemplating my ignorance of genomics, predicated on the ridiculous and ignorant idea that somehow it was "simple" I was struck by the remarks of the structural biologist Michael Levitt of Stanford University who wrote a telling set of remarks than (and considerably more sophisticated remariks I will ever be able to aspire to make) in the introduction to the monograph. To wit:
(M. Levitt, pg 1, RNA 3D Structure Analysis and Prediction, Westoff and Leontis, Eds, Springer, 2012)
As Dr. Levitt knows on a highly technical level, and as I now now on a far more primitive level, there is nothing simple about the molecular biology - in his case structural molecular biology, in the broader sense functional molecular biology as derived from structure - of genomics.
With an eye to ameliorating some of my ignorance, I have begun to scan and dig a little deeper into some types of papers that I previously skipped over when perusing my favorite scientific journals, such as the paper I will now discuss, this one:
Antibiotic Resistance Genes and Correlations with Microbial Community and Metal Resistance Genes in Full-Scale Biogas Reactors As Revealed by Metagenomic Analysis (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2017, 51 (7), pp 4069–4080)
I am a critic of so called "renewable energy" in general, particularly the solar and wind industries which I regard as expensive failures that have proved difficult to afford and wasters of (most critically) time in a time of very real crisis. This said there is one form of so called "renewable energy" for which I am working to have some sympathy, specifically the use of biomass. The reason is that no matter how hard I think there seems to be no tool quite as well suited to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere - something that it is increasingly clear that future generations may need to do under extremely dire circumstances - as biomass, since it is self replicating in such a way as to be capable of providing huge surface areas, a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of gas exchange for dilute gases like carbon dioxide.
A little known fact about why China was open to receiving Richard Nixon in the late 1960's and early 1970's was because they needed a technology in which (at that time) the United States was a world leader, the industrial technology of nitrogen fixation, since there was a very real risk of famine in China owing to the depletion of its soils in the period leading up to, and during, the Cultural Revolution.
Up until that time, China relied on recycling the key materials associated with the real "green" revolution of the 20th century - that of agricultural production - fixed nitrogen and phosphorous. This involved the long and ancient process of spreading the fields with human and animal waste. However this system can never actually be closed, some of the nitrogen and some of the phosphorous is lost as run off, and thus artificial replenishment is critical where ever a large population needs to be supported: This is true of China, but moreover, the world.
Today, China is a world leader in nitrogen fixation technology - the Haber process - but the Haber process is - and there's no facile solution for this - a huge environmental problem, and in any case, phosphorous must be mined or recovered. Thus China, facing the need to displace coal among other things, has a large infrastructure devoted to the historic practice of spreading human and animal wastes on its fields - after recovering some of the energy from these wastes as biogas produced in large digestors.
We're saved.
After digestion, the phosphorous and much of the nitrogen remains behind and these are spread on the fields. But something else remains: genes, specifically the genes of microorganisms.
The intellectual Lilliputians at Greenpeace are unfamiliar with the contents of any science books, and they like to imagine that gene exchange is something they can seek to ban by appeals to fear and ignorance; similar to the appeals to fear and ignorance they direct against nuclear energy.
Bacteria however, don't give a shit what the morons at Greenpeace think, and they go along happily exchanging genes without reference to people assembling at protests wearing monkey suits to trivialize important events, just as they have done for billions of years.
And some of the genes they exchange are antibiotic resistance genes, which represents a huge threat to human health as most of the spectacular increases in human life spans in the 20th century were connected not only to nutrition, but to the rise of antibiotics. However these two issues, antibiotics and nutrition have some negative feedback loops as the Environmental Science and Technology paper just cited makes clear. The difference between human and animal shit in China in 2017 and that in 1967 is the presence of antibiotics in the former.
Some text from the paper:
Spreading of ARGs in the environment is a result of the extensive antibiotic use in humans and animals.6 It has been reported that farm antibiotic use is correlated with the rise and spread of ARGs in human bacterial pathogens.7,8 In addition, metals were shown to select for not only metal resistance genes(MRGs) but also ARGs.9,10 Berg et al. demonstrated that Cu exposure coselected for resistance to clinically important antibiotics (e.g., vancomycin).11 ARGs can be spread among different microbial populations via horizontal gene transfer.26Thereby, bacteria with antibiotic resistance can be formed, which could easily infect humans by contact or consumption of raw vegetables.12 Mobile genetic elements, including plasmids, integrons, and insertion sequences, are crucial for horizontal gene transfer of ARGs in the environment.13,14 ARGs were speculated to be uncorrelated with microbial communities due to high mobility caused by horizontal gene transfer.15,16
Two of the authors are from the PRC, one is from Hong Kong, and one is from that offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark, which is a world leader in so called "renewable energy," but is still, nonetheless, an offshore oil and gas drilling hellhole.
The Danes have lots of biodigestors. They're very "renewable conscious" in Denmark and collect biogas even as they drill for what is called "natural" gas in the Baltic Sea.
From the text:
(WWTP is an abbreviation for "Wastewater Treatment Plants" and HTS, depending on context can mean either "High Throughput Sequencing" or "High Throughput Screening." MRG are "metal resistance genes"
If you're as interested in learning about the technology of genetic analysis as I am, this paper is a fun and interesting read, although I won't claim to understand how everything described in it works.
What's important is the conclusion, the spreading of biodigester residues on crops and fields has a very real risk of spreading antibiotic resistance, particularly because of the facilities with which bacteria exchange genes. (There are nice graphics in the paper that draw this out.)
By the way, my own belief is that there are brute force approaches to capturing and utilizing the carbon contained in biomass that are superior to digestors, which are cute, and all "renewally" and therefore fashionable.
This is high temperature thermal reforming.
But that's another issue.
The paper is interesting, a little bit fun, but also a little bit scary, given all the other huge problems we've dumped on the up and coming and all future generations. We'll just add the destruction of the efficacy of antibiotics to the list, along with climate change, mass extinction of biodiversity, material depletion...on and on and on...
Have a nice Sunday.
Racist Nightmare: Those Iranians Are Making Nanorobots.
While looking into some volatile zirconium compounds I stumbled across an interesting paper that would make the Orange Nightmare's comb over stand on its faux orange ends:
Computational design of a new pedal-like nanorobot based on nitrogen inversion
(Journal of Structural Chemistry. Vol. 57, No. 6, pp. 1079-1084, 2016.)
The authors are from (gasp) Iran: Samadizadeh, M. & Gorgani, S.S Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Basic Science, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran. 2Young Researchers and Elite Club, Central Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran; sarasoleimani240@yahoo.com.
And the original text was written um, in Russian.
Of course, to disguise what they're really up to them start off with all kinds of innocent sounding stuff:
Nanomachines are largely in the research-and-development phase [5], but some primitive molecular machines and nanomotors have been tested. An example is a sensor having a switch approximately 1.5 nanometers across, capable of counting specific molecules in a chemical sample. The first useful applications of nanomachines might be in medical technology [6, 7], which could be used to identify and destroy cancer cells [8, 9]. Another potential application is the detection of toxic chemicals, and the measurement of their concentrations in the environment. Indeed, the fabrication of simple nanorobots can be used to create more complex systems. Although nature provides living structures with a large number of molecular machines with high standard structures and complicated functions, chemists are more interested in developing and progressing simpler sets which are entirely synthetic [10]...
I tell you what, since our so called President is better at making excuses, threats and blame assignment, these Iranians can help America by giving him yet another absurd comment, that Iranian nanorobots are controlling his brain.
Seriously, it's a cool paper, relying on Aziridine molecular motions.
I hate having a mindless racist in the White House. It's already such a vast stain on our history.
High Yield Collection of Uranium From Seawater Using Graphene Oxide Functionalized with Protein.
One of my favorite scientific journals is Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research where (in a predecessor version) one of the most cited papers of all time (8717 citations as of this writing) was published, this one: A New Two-Constant Equation of State
(A beautiful and industrially extremely important equation it is...)
It's been many years since I missed an issue of this journal, which is always fun since it's very broad and one never knows what's going to turn up there, and reading it one feels like a kid in a candy shop as they say, or a kid in a toy store.
A recent issue contained a special treat at the interface of materials science - a career my youngest son will be pursuing in a very wonderful engineering university - proteomics which has been an important - but not necessarily the major - part of my career, and the chemistry of uranium, which is one of my favorite elements whose properties I study non-professionally, since it represents the last, best hope of the human race to save itself from itself.
The paper was written by Chinese scientists and a link to it is here: Bovine Serum Albumin-Coated Graphene Oxide for Effective Adsorption of Uranium(VI) from Aqueous Solutions
An excerpt from the introductory text from the paper:
It would appear that the Chinese scientists who authored this paper are unimpressed by the dunderhead impressions of professional anti-nukes like, say, those fellows over at the Union of Concerned "Scientists" who imagine that any risk from nuclear energy is vastly more important than the observed risk of dangerous fossil fuel and dangerous biomass combustion waste. Dangerous fossil fuel and biomass waste kills more people than died in World War II from all causes every seven or eight years, like clockwork, seventy million people every decade, not even counting climate related deaths.
This said, the subordinate clause in the first sentence of this excerpt is only true in the case where humanity continues to observe and embrace a "waste" mentality. Converted to plutonium, the uranium already mined, including but not limited to "depleted uranium" coupled with the thorium currently being dumped by the mining enterprises that support the useless wind and electric car industries is sufficient to supply all of the humanity's energy needs - all currently supplied by the dangerous fossil fuel industry as well as the environmentally dubious forms of so called "renewable energy" - for centuries.
I made this point elsewhere: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
However, if we look over millennia under the questionable assumption that humanity won't kill itself by embracing highly questionable fantasies, it may be necessary in the far off future to isolate uranium from seawater or natural water supplies in which it is found owing to geology or because of enterprises like fracking which mobilize NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) including (but not limited to) uranium.
The uranium in seawater is inexhaustible even if humanity were to survive on this planet for as long as the sun exists.
I also made this point elsewhere with some reference to the crustal and mantle uranium flux:
Sustaining the Wind Part 3 – Is Uranium Exhaustible?
One of the pleasures of taking my son on college tours as well as accepted student tours has been the opportunities to meet and hear from a number of academic materials scientists and engineers. Some people regard graphene as an academic curiosity that will prove industrially difficult to manufacture, but in at least one department - not the one my son will choose to attend since he had much better offers elsewhere - that holds patents on what is said to be an industrial graphene production processes.
(I haven't looked into the details, so I can't say if these processes are truly viable industrially.)
In the cited paper, graphene oxide is functionalized by bonding a protein to it - bovine serum albumin, obtained from cow's blood. As a vegetarian, I can tell you that it might not be necessary to kill cows to get this stuff, the industrial preparation of pure (or relatively pure) proteins from cultures of genetically modified - everything from E. Coli to Chinese Hamster Ovary - cells is common practice, and is important in the preparation of many modern drugs. Thus, were one to desire to industrialize this chemistry - it won't happen - it is at least feasible, not desirable but feasible to produce this or other similar proteins without requiring cows or other animals or plants.
The process chemistry described in the paper is unattractive from an environmental perspective:
GO?BSA. A total of 20 mg of GO, 60 mg of BSA, 35 ?L of Py, and EDCI/HOBt/DMAP (molar composition = 1.5:1:0.5)were dissolved in 6 mL of a distilled water/DMF reaction mixture (distilled water/DMF = 4 mL/2 mL) for 5 h at room temperature. Then the solution mixture was washed with amass ratio of ethanol/distilled water = 3/1. Finally, the solution mixture was freeze-dried for 3 days.
In any case there are many metal complexing proteins that are certainly superior to BSA, the transferrins come to mind, and one can imagine designing proteins, or peptides or even other potentially biologically accessible complexing agents (such as porphyrins, the core of both chlorophyll and hemaglobulin) that will do a better job.
But in any case, were we to stop being stupid about "depleted uranium" and decided to use it rather than dump it, the issue would not be relevant for many centuries, during which we might invent far more sustainable chemistry.
Nevertheless, the claimed recovery of uranium from simulated seawater for this process is remarkable, roughly reported as 390 mg per gram. This is orders of magnitude higher than other chemical approaches to doing the same thing, many of which have already been tested on a pilot scale.
Esoteric, probably not practical, but certainly interesting.
Have a nice Friday morning tomorrow.
It would be a mistake to assume that I am interested in winning the "mind" of a person...
...clearly lacking one.
I am unapologetic in regarding anti-nukes as anything but stupid and evil, and, am in fact, completely incapable of regarding them in any other way.
This is a function of the fact that I give a shit about the 70 million deaths every decade from air pollution while they burn oil, gas and coal to carry on about, um, say, Fukushima.
Among the many intellectually and ethically challenged ideas that seems to purvey the despicable anti-nuke mentality is the notion that people should kiss their asses to make them do the right thing.
In reality, one should do the right thing because it, um, is the right thing, and not for any other reason.
Have a nice Friday tomorrow.
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