Saturday night on DailyKos.com: What Would Have Happened If The Dangerous Fossil Fuel Accident ...

[Kolesar]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/10/183223/55
What Would Have Happened If The Dangerous Fossil Fuel Accident in S.F. Bay Involved DME, Not Oil?

by NNadir

Sat Nov 10, 2007 at 03:32:23 PM PST

I'll tell you what would have happened: Most of the DME would have evaporated before it hit the water. That which got into the water would have completely dissolved, maybe killing some phytoplankton and a bucket full of fish within 100 meters of the spilling ship.

The DME would have rapidly established equilibrium with the atmosphere and in a short time, probably less than half a day, it would have mostly diffused into the atmosphere. The half-life of DME in the atmosphere is about 5 days. Within two months, less than 0.02% of it would remain, the missing material having decomposed to give carbon dioxide (ultimately) and water.

That should conclude this diary, but let me say something else because every single dangerous fossil fuel accident brings me to the point of rage. None of these accidents are necessary and all of them result from stupidity and conservativism, conservatives being a set of people who think that nothing should be done the first time or that dogma, not data, justifies ignorance. And let's be clear. Not all conservatives in the energy discussion are REPUBLICANS.

NNadir's diary :: ::
Some of the energy conservatives, regrettably, are Democrats, worshippers of the paid (off) corporate greenwasher Amory Lovins. Lovins is a conservative where energy is concerned, the equivalent of Pat Robertson. He has no scientific imagination whatsoever. In fact he couldn't care less about sciencee. He couldn't care less about humanity either. In short, he a yuppie brat car culture apologist. He says what he says for money and for no other reason.

CNN isn't covering the dangerous fossil fuel spill, of course, preferring to talk about earth shattering issues like whether or not OJ knew the thugs with him had a gun, and the missing cop's wife case, and let's not forget, and the woman who strangled herself at the airport while in police custody, and LSD laced chocolate ducks, and, of course, Dr. Gupta's answers to your sleep questions. Did I forget the Navy doctor sex tapes case. A Navy Doctor filmed midshipmen having sex and was convicted of something or another. CNN's on the case.

However, if unlike an anti-nuke who couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel accidents, you are interested in the tale of the dangerous fossil fuel accident in San Francisco Bay - say if you couldn't care less about the LSD laced chocolate ducks - here's the tale: Of course there's the requisite picture of an oil soaked duck.

About DME, dimethyl ether, the wonder fuel: I have written about DME here many times now and will not repeat much about it, beyond a brief review. DME is the subject of an international effort - mostly centered in Asia - to provide clean burning alternatives to dangerous fossil fuels. DME is an energy storage medium that is conveniently usable in liquid form (under mild pressure). It can be manufactured using any form of energy. The forms of energy that can be used to make DME are, in order of decreasing external costs, from the least damaging to the environment to the worst damaging to the environment are: Nuclear energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, solar energy...biomass...dangerous natural gas, dangerous petroleum, and very, very, very dangerous coal.

The bulk of the DME infrastructure being built now is designed to run on DME produced from dangerous natural gas and very, very, very dangerous coal. It is possible though that South Korea and China will be producing DME at least partially from nuclear energy, and probably from some biomass as well.

Sweden plans to have a wood based DME infrastructure.

Now.

Anti-nuke yuppie brats, the kind of brats who spend all day driving around in the
GL 550 gathering up "organic" locally produced vegetables and locally grown organic free range turkeys for the Thanksgiving Meal being served for a guest list of 50 people. Yes you can fit 50 people, including your drunk perverted pre-embalmed Uncle Dave - the one who should have went to prison but was never even indicted - in a McMansion on Thanksgiving. That, in fact, is how people justify McMansions: "I have a big family."

The "big family" that justifies the McMansion come each year on Thanksgiving and Christmas, unless there are two McMansions in the family, in which case they either fight over guests or leave one McMansion unfilled for a holiday.

As for the organic, "locally grown meal," the one Uncle Dave flies in from Bakersfield to eat, the idea of all this driving in the GL550 or whatever, is to show that one is "environmental." Locally grown produce, organic, all that stuff...

Now.

Lots and lots and lots of anti-nukes have gotten pissed off when I point out that they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel accidents - including those that happened this morning. They go on and on and on and on and on about nuclear accidents that happened two or three decades ago though. Somehow though, it seems that the only time they notice is when I point out them out.

I, however, insist that simply because dangerous fossil fuel accidents are common, almost every day affairs, that's hardly a reason not to notice them.

In my diaries, however, is that the less-than-literate anti-nukes whine about me "taking advantage" of the dangerous fuel accident, like say, the Chinese coal mining accident that killed almost 200 people or say, or the
dangerous fossil fuel waste crisis that struck the East Coast this summer or so on or so on.

The anti-nukes, of course, who couldn't care less about any of these cases, accuse me of "irreverence" and stuff like that. They say I am not showing "respect..." blah, blah, blah.

Then they ignore the dangerous fossil fuel disaster - be it from an accident or normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel plants - completely, forget about it, go into full "couldn't care less mode." Of course, they are willing, at the drop of a hat, to talk about Three Mile Island, where ZERO people died, or Chernobyl, where fewer people died than will die in the next ten days from dangerous fossil fuel waste.

Now.

There was an exception to my claim about dangerous fossil fuel accident indifference on the part of anti-nukes recently, when an anti-nuke wrote a diary about the Exxon Valdez accident.

Whoopdedoo.

I'm very impressed. The diary said that Exxon should pay money. That's typical. Amory Lovins, godfather of all "renewables will save us" anti-nuke "thinking," is you call the reading of gospels, "thinking" will greenwash any company for a fee. Companies he has greenwashed include Rio Tinto (Cyanide based gold mining in the Amazon), Walmart (plastic shit importing company that is wholly dependent on the car culture) and Royal Dutch Shell (Dangerous fossil fuel company, also dependent on the car culture). Why does Amory Lovins greenwash these companies?

For money, that's why. These companies pay him $20,000/day to talk about how green they are on the RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) website. It's always about the money in the anti-nuke industry, always. This pernicious industry never met a fossil fuel practice for which they couldn't apologize and/or ignore, given enough money. I mean, even at $20,000 per day, isn't it a hell of a lot cheaper to hire Amory Lovins than it is to say, risk losing business to electrified mass transit?

Amory Lovins, who will soon no doubt be appearing in Toyota ads to tell us about "green cars," works for the corporate car culture in another way. He tries to greenwash cars in general, mostly by hyping useless fantasy crap like his hydrogen hypercar that will be in showrooms by 2005, unless someone points out that this is 2007. The marketing of "green cars" has to be one of the most duplicitous bits of doublespeak in history. The MARKAL study of the 2000 watt world explicitly calls on people to live on less than three horsepower, not three hundred, three.

You gotta love car marketing. Car ads, going back to the 1910's, have always tried to evoke "freedom," first from railroad barons, and now from freedom from long sexless stretches of life where one can't drive big giant SUV's over pristine geological formations in the desert.

Now. I can't stand Greenpeace. I think it's an organization of self-important, self congratulate yuppie consumer brats who like to drive around with clown suits making religious claims about the environment, claims that, ironically enough, consist or rote and completely absurd attacks on the worlds largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy. One guy from Greenpeace, that would be Patrick Moore, changed his mind about nuclear energy and now, gets (Ohmygod!) money for talking favorably about nuclear energy. Now, Patrick Moore has no special credibility with me. Associating one's self with Greenpeace in fact, degrades one's credibility in my view. Thus the statement "A former Greenpeace leader is in favor of nuclear energy" is meaningless to me. I couldn't care less.

But, nevertheless, we have these marvelous diariesthat insist that the paid (off) anti-nuke industry gives a shit about what people say for money. Of course, the number of diaries on this site criticizing the anti-nuke Amory Lovins for his relationship with car culture companies - stuff that pays for his McMansion in Snowmass - is zero, unless you count my diaries.

Let's look at another bit of hypocrisy. People say that I am agressive and abusive, and that I am full of derision, sarcasm and contempt. Well, I don't realy object to that characterization by the way. But, if you are familiar with my diaries, you will see that I am only returning what anti-nukes have been handing out for decades. The ever more agressive and abusive "peace" loving commentators in my diaries, prove to be anti-intellectual thugs really who come here to tote illiterate dogma, invective, and a shit load of weak logical fallacies, including lots of red herrings about whether or not I have stopped taking heroin, have stopped beating my wife, have stopped robbing banks, have stopped taking over small central American countries to impose military dictatorships and have stopped torturing nearly extinct species of penguins to death with shards of broken glass infected with ebola virus and methocillin resistant bacteria. Note that the behavior of a pro-nuclear activist towards penguins has nothing to do whether the external cost of nuclear energy is lower than all of its alternatives. When James Watson recently muttered aloud his racist thoughts, DNA did not suddenly prove to have square planar geometry. It is still a double helix.

In fact, the anti-intellectual thugs who have been calling me a "nuclear shill" almost from the day I first came here have mostly, nothing to say about energy, because they couldn't care less about energy. If they had something to say about energy, they would say it. But instead, knowing nothing of me, of my life, or my family, what I have loved, who I have loved, and what or who I have hated they declare all sorts of stuff about my motivations. And what is implicit in this bit of unjust and vicious posturing: The notion that the anti-nukes are good people because they're anti-nukes, just as Pat Robertson declares himself good because he's a "Christian."

Anti-nukes are trying to poison my kids, by the way, with dangerous fossil fuel waste by trying to destroy the Oyster Creek nuclear station near where I live.

Let me repeat myself, since Amory Lovins has been taking payoffs to repeat himself for 31 years - ever since his first stupid publication in Foreign Affairs in 1976 stating the world was on the verge of a "solar revolution" and wouldn't need nuclear power:

Greenpeace is an anti-science religion in my view, an organization that, like the 17th century Catholic Church, and the modern day fundamentalist religions, attempts to pretend the data must fit the dogma and rejects totally the idea that theory must explain the data as it is measured. Greenpeace's purpose is not to discover things, to learn things. Greenpeace is merely a coffee clatch, probably of stoners, that exists to allow yuppies to lie to themselves, nothing more, nothing less. Greenpeace is morally offensive.

Now someone will pipe in and say "nuclear energy produces carbon dioxide" blah, blah, blah. Bullshit. In grams of CO2 per kwh nuclear is superior to all other forms of continuous energy, all of them. This is a function of the enormous energy density of uranium (and thorium). Now of course, someone will say "NNadir is a liar." All of them, with the exception maybe of one or two who can't read very well, will be people who never bother to open a single reference work from the primary scientific literature relating to external costs. In a recent diary, I gave a reference from a paper by a pro-wind researcher stating that the carbon dioxide cost of direct use wind power was comparable to nuclear power, and lower, by a factor of 10, to wind power that could be stored by compressed air. I can produce similar papers from solar power researchers showing that the best solar PV cells produce less energy per gram of carbon dioxide than nuclear energy. Biomass is much, much, much worse than nuclear, wind and solar. This by the way, is not a rap against wind and solar. They are both better than dangerous fossil fuels and only a fool would be against them, particularly in an age of extreme crisis.

The anti-nuke's (surprising) diary about the Exxon Valdez included the following number of calls for the banning of dangerous fossil fuels: Zero. Note that there have been many spills as bad as Exxon Valdez or worse. In fact, according to Katie Alford's fine book, "Divorce your car," the annual motor oil spills from cars in the United States amount to a much greater quantity of released oil than the Exxon Valdez disaster, and let's be clear, it was a disaster, an irretrievable disaster.

In contrast to the anti-nuke, I - the mean old pro-nuke NNadir - am unrelenting in my call for the banning of dangerous fossil fuels. I believe it could be done, which is very, very, very different from saying it will be done. It probably won't be done, at least until it is far too late, "far too late" probably being a synonym for now. Why won't it be done? Laziness is one part of the equation. Denial is another. The main thing, though, is ignorance mostly. As it was from the dawn of language, ignorance KILLS.

Now.

I am loathe, if you know me, to get off topic, even slightly but let's look at the view of things nuclear and the things that "inform" this conversation.

For several decades we've been hearing anti-nukes screaming about "suitcase nuclear weapons." Allegedly every terrorist or (in the old days) Soviet agent was going to bring one of these weapons into New York and Boomerino! Somewhere in my endless diatribes, maybe on this website, maybe on another, I have been pointed out that while such a bomb is conceivable, it is impossible to imagine any circumstances under which it would be done. This is because any critical mass that would fit into a suitcase would necessarily consist on mono-isotopic californium metal. Californium is a known metal, and visible amounts of it have been isolated and characterized. However, the preparation of a single atom of californium involves the interaction of 1600 atoms of uranium with neutrons, a process that releases enormous amounts of energy. The process of producing a tenth of a kilo of californium-252, a potential critical mass, even if possible, would involve the operation of thousands of reactors, access to all of their output, and very, very, very elaborate reprocessing - that could not be concealed by the way - of many hundreds of thousands of tons of used nuclear fuel. It will not happen, and that has been immediately clear for years and years and years and years.

Yet, there has been endless talk from the ridiculous media - egged on by equally ridiculous anti-nukes and, of course, the nuclear scaremongering White House, inhabited by the "fool in chief" - about suitcase bombs.

Finally, after two or three decades of such scaremongering someone says, well, um, gee, ah, it wouldn't, couldn't, hasn't and won't work(ed). On the other hand, while we were all agonizing over this big, big, big, big issue, 500 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste were dumped into the atmosphere.

Which, I ask, of these two big "concerns" has killed anyone, dangerous fossil fuel waste or suitcase bombs? Which is most likely to kill someone in the next twenty years, the next hundred years, the next five minutes, the next five seconds?

Think about it and get back to me.

Poll
What happened to NNadir's series on Fritz Haber?

OJ stole it at the point of a gun.
20% 4 votes
The part about the oak grove in California brought him to tears and he coudn't continue it.
5% 1 votes
It's here, but you can't see it because of the LSD laced chocolate duck you ate at Halloween.
20% 4 votes
He decided he couldn't care less about the fixed nitrogen effects on the environment.
0% 0 votes
It's buried in one of the abandoned phosphate pits on the decimated island of Nauru.
5% 1 votes
You want it? It's in King Kong's back pocket. Take it up with Kong, I dare you.
0% 0 votes
Amory Lovins is in Walmart's back pocket, much as NNadir's in Kong's back pocket.
5% 1 votes
Lovins used to be in Enron's back pocket in the happy days in Aspen, but it turned out that Enron stopped paying the RMI invoices.
10% 2 votes
I'm Joe McCarthy, the
5% 1 votes
Really? Little Bobby's Godfather was Joe McCarthy? I didn't know that.
5% 1 votes
That explains a lot about energy politics, it really does.
5% 1 votes
Um, that's character assassination NNadir. I'm totally surprised that you, unlike Amory Lovins, would stoop to character assassination.
0% 0 votes
The Haber series was ruined when lutefisk caustic got spilled all over the paper it was written on.
10% 2 votes
I have LED lightbulbs, so this vicious diary has no bearing on me.
5% 1 votes
NNadir is a liar. He in not loathe to change the subject.
5% 1 votes

| 20 votes | Vote | Results

[jpak]

1. Gee, now its up to 50 guests!!!1111

better hop in the GL five-five-oh and order another free range organic turkey....and another gallon of Allen's for Uncle Dave...

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: