Robert Bryce, Energy Tribune;
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hearing William Tucker speak at a conference in Washington, DC. His explanation of E = mc2 was the best I had ever heard. Even better, Tucker explained how Einstein’s equation applied to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro. His lecture was a revelation. It showed that the limits of renewable energy have nothing to do with politics or research dollars, but rather with simple mathematics. During a later exchange of emails with Tucker, I praised his lecture and suggested he write an article that explained E = mc2 and its corollary, E = mv2.
To my delight, he informed me that he’d already written such an essay and he agreed that we could publish it in Energy Tribune.
I love this essay. And I’m proud that Tucker has allowed us to run it.
Continue reading Understanding E = mc2, and then send it to everyone you know.
I just read the article. Now, Obama and the rest of the moonbats need to read it. Will they read it? No; it does not fit their world views or political ideologies. It is sad that most people here in North America would not understand it anyway.
Great article, but its more of the same regarding greenies and their renewable energy fantasies. I would absolutely love if Kate came out and supported the new Net Neutrality proposal by the F.C.C., and maybe devote a post or two to debunking the lies and false information that the Republicans and Glenn Beck have been spreading about it.
As an avid blogger, I would expect her to be quite a supporter of this initiative…? Why haven’t we seen anything regarding this on the blog lately when its such a large issue in the states and in Canada? I may just not be keeping up to date on SDA enough though so I may have missed it.
I have no opinion on net neutrality, and there are plenty of others covering it. Thanks just the same. Now please remove your comments to reader tips, and stay on topic.
Just like “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
There is no FREE energy.
There is however economical use of existing resources. Hydro electricity being an example.
I’m in favour of using coal which can be used as fuel to produce and HC gas that can be used as natural gas or LP is used.
Gasifiers leave minimal waste and produce useable clean fuel at reasonable cost.
Of course you need to get your head around the fact that byproduct CO2 is not a pollutant.
That article changed my life. I have been a supporter of nuclear power for a long time now, but I was never able to articulate why. I never had good answers for the naysayers. Now I do.
An idea takes 100 years to enter history, imagine that! We thought we were already in the nuclear age, but it might be only just now beginning.
Plasma TV technology was invented in…. dum dum dum …1964!
People cannot grasp the reality of how long it takes to perfect a technology and gain acceptance.
On topic, I always simply respond to All Renewable Energy greenies with this “When you can smelt iron ore into steel with a solar panel or windmill give me a call”
Nuclear is the future, miniaturization is the next great frontier for this technology.
” The Sierra Club, which opposed construction of the Hetch-Hetchy Dam in Yosemite in 1921, is still trying to tear it down, even though it provides drinking water and 400 megawatts of electricity to San Francisco. Each year more dams are now torn down than are constructed as a result of this campaign. ”
The same ‘Sierra’ club Lizzie may ran before her Green Party fame.Obviously tey have been around too long.
It all seems so incomprehensible that we make up problems in order to make things seem normal again. A reactor is a bomb waiting to go off. The waste lasts forever, what will we ever do with it?
It would have been nice if the author had extended his article to debunk these made-up problems in the same simple quantitative manner that he used to explain the potential of nuclear energy.
Like I love to say, basic math has power to correct illusions about many things in life.
I just did not like his stab at guns, otherwise great essay.
“It showed that the limits of renewable energy have nothing to do with politics or research dollars, but rather with simple mathematics.”
Something that Steven Den Beste got tired of pointing out at his former USS Clueless blog.
That is a MUST READ essay.
I am going to forward it to everyone I know.
So, as an investor, where to start? China is building coal fired plants like there’s no tomorrow, and the shares of uranium miners have been showing signs of life as of late. Coal short term, uranium long term?
Thanks for the link ‘Kate’. Great essay.
Always nice to have ammunition when the moonbats start talking about giant fans.
I work in the nuclear industry and I have always believed that one of the downfalls of nuclear energy was the long term storage of the waste. A new dry fuel storage building has been built at Darlington and I think it will store the used fuel for the life of the plant. After that I don’t know. Of course the people who are against nuclear power for the same reason think we can bury hundreds of billions of pounds of CO2 forever. At least the spent nuclear fuel will become less radioactive over time and will probably eventually fuel the next generation of reactors.
I am an avid supporter of nuclear power and I think using nuclear power to provide energy for the oilsands projects would go along way toward dispelling the “dirty oil” mythology surrounding the development.
I will say one thing about nuclear power that doesn’t get much mention in the pros vs. cons discussion and that is the rarity of uranium. Uranium is one of the rarest elements in the earth’s crust. There are still some rich sources, including northern Saskatchewan. However, if the world were to switch wholesale to nuclear power, even utilizing European breeder technology which recycles nuclear fuel, we would still find ourselves facing a uranium shortage in a very short period of time. Sadly, there is no single magic bullet to solve our energy needs…unless we can someday perfect nuclear fusion.
> we would still find ourselves facing a uranium shortage in a very short period of time
How could you possibly know?
Just recently we thought we were running out of oil…
I chuckled a little at this:
It’s all realtive, I guess (no pun intended, but since I made it, what the heck. Let’s run with it.) I think it’s rather fortunate that it’s so far away. Fusion reactions on that scale happening right next door would be a bit unsettling.
We are running out of oil and it will hit us a lot sooner than global warming.
Not a bad effort.
A minor quibble is that the author fails to note that wind, hydro and chemical (fossil) power all get their energy via the suns e=mc2 reaction.
More significantly he blames the bomb for nuke’s bad rap. The meltdown problem with the tech currently used commercially is the main problem not just for the explosive hazard but perhaps even more for the exponentially higher level of toxicity of it’s byproduct.
A breeched dam or oil spill can only do so much damage, much of which dissapates within a few decades. Nuke wastes last ten thousand times longer.
Downplaying those hazards is a mistake. Better to aknowledge them and provide solutions to the operational hazards (pebble-bed etc.) and waste storage issues (yucca mountain, breeder technology etc.) and explain them in a Mann similar to what the author has largely achieved explaining e=mc2.
Rm: new tech has already boosted NG recoverable reserves past the 300 yr mark. Tech like thai will do the same for oil within a decade. Coal reserves are double that number. For practical purposes they are unlimited reserves.
I actually understood that!! LOL!
Dear RM (2:40)
Get a grip — We will not run out of oil — oil is mainly a mixture of hydrocarbons — there are lots of ways to produce it — South Africa during the embargo period produced synthetic oil from coal — lots of plants produce a variety of hydrocarbons or related compounds, which can be used to produce ‘synthetic’ oils — the problem is cost — as cost of oil goes up new supplies and new technologies will develop to meet demand — that’s basic economics.
Also, check out abiogenic oil — there are some who believe that oil/natural gas are continuously being produced in the Earth’s crust via hydrogenation of carbonate — a process shown to occur in the lab at pressures and temperatures analogous to those estimated to occur several miles below the surface.
Two points on reserve estimates, 1) they are notoriously unreliable because many countries like Saudi Arabia inflate their estimates for strategic reasons and 2) they are typically based on conservative extrapolations of current demand. The increasing industrialization of the developing world will almost certainly result in accelerating demand.
Peak oil doesn’t mean no oil. It simply means new supply cannot keep pace with growing demand.
Abiogenic oil is geofantasy. Can it happen? Probably, but not a single reservoir has ever been found. For one thing, below a certain depth, permeability and porosity fall pretty close to zero due to lithostatic pressure. Even if hydrocarbons were being produced, they can’t migrate and they can’t pool.
Gord Tulk – Not a bad effort.
Make a list of Nuclear Containment breaches, actual breaches, not the fake list of incidents that caused emergency shutdowns, world wide. Then compare that with the number of reactors ever constructed and the total years they have operated then look at the total amount of energy in Gw they created, then look at the total loss of mass of spent fuel rods. Then even look at the total amount of unreprocessed spent fuel rods.
The risks are minimal on all fronts, you have a much greater risk of dying from freezing to death in your home in Florida than being impacted by a containment breach, good thing for you that with Nuclear power you could heat your home, removing that risk as well.
The dangers have been overblown for decades by a persistent misinformation fear campaign by enviromentalists, the same ones who protest anything that might actually lead to progress and the support of more humans on the planet. Think about what they protest against.
> We are running out of oil and it will hit us a lot sooner than global warming.
People like you, who believe what they read in newspapers, are those because of whom the wars start.
The discovered deposits of oil today are several times what was considered doomsday scenario in the 70s when the idea of world running out of oil was first pronounced. I repeat – discovered. We don’t know shit about our planet’s surface, needless to say what’s underneath. Boo hoo!
Aaron, I have a Ph.D. in geology, do you?
>> The waste lasts forever, what will we ever do with it?
The earth is a giant nuclear reactor. The energy produced by nuclear reactions in the earth’s core are the reason that molten rock is spewed up by volcanoes. So I ask, what are we going to do about all those naturally occuring radioactive materials in the earth’s core that have been breaking down for millions of years. Move to another planet? 🙂
By the way, the really dangerous nuclear waste is the stuff that has a very short half-life, in the order of hours or days. Material with a half-life of 10,000 years is pretty benign.
It is wrong to assume that the leaders of the environmental movement do not understand the physics of nuclear power and the alternative energy sources. Suzuki knows all the stuff in this article.
The reason they promote solar and wind as solutions and employ scare tactics on the innumerate public to discourage nuclear is not ignorance.
Their motivation is funding and social engineering.
I. A. :
it is not the frequency but the scale of the disaster that matters. BTW how confident are you that the FSU,romainia NK Pakistan et al are doing an excellent job on the prevention front. Unlike a dam bursting in NK a reactor meltdown and the airborne emissions could be fatal for people living far away from the site.
Don’t get me wrong i am a very big proponent of new nukes (and I think that small scale fusion technology may prove out someday too). But those new facilities need to have passive rather than active systems for dealing with controlling the core. The new westinhouse reactors would be an example.
“Aaron, I have a Ph.D. in geology, do you?”
So effing what? Please explain why Thai and frac and the dozens of other technologies that are only in the early phase of commercial development will not unlock – on economically viable terms – literally centuries worth of fossil fuel supplies?
RM, everyone is special forces colonel on the Internet anyway.
That’s not the point – point is, are you disputing, that today’s discovered oil deposits are much larger than in the 70s, and that we don’t have clear understanding what is underneath our feet?
Minuteman…
Why not drop a few kilos of the nasty long half life stuff down an abandoned well? If it is down a couple kilometers, who really cares.
Why not encase it in concrete and drop it into a subduction zone?
Why not launch into space?
All three solutions would be easy with current technology and would essentially make it impossible to get.
RM… the way I like to put is that we are not running out of oil/hydrocarbons,,,,we are running out of the cheap and easy stuff. As the price start to constrain the use of HC, economics forces WILL push the development of new technologies to replace or synthetically produce the HC.
heck IMO we would be better off to synthetically produce gasoline/kerosene than switch to a hydrogen economy. H2 have energy density, storage and transportation issues.
Maybe the saving grace for all those uneconomical giant fans is to find some way to convert the tens of thousands of birds they kill into some useful biofuel.
One other thing about wind; you could call it indirect solar. There is a number, I do not know what it is, it is the percent of the suns energy reaching the earth that is converted into wind. Windmills, at whatever theoretical maximum efficiency, will only ever be able to harvest a fraction of the power available to solar.
Why waste effort and research dollars on indirect solar, when by definition, there is greater power available from direct solar?
Its all about nuclear in my opinion, here sits the greatest boon to mankind, gathering dust because of the greens. Interesting that a compelling argument against fossil fuels, AGW, materializes.
By Accident or by design?
Aaron, I have a Ph.D. in geology, do you?
Do you? Prove it. Post a copy right here, sport.
Most Phd Geologists that I have had to deal with are loons. A lot of them post “the end of times” drivel like you do. Brilliant people but they tend to get bogged down with their egos, pecadillos and eccentricities. They have very little “people” smarts. Your comment is indicative of a La-de-dah-I’m-a-Phd complex. Like Certified Mnagement Consultants.
By the way. I’m a geologist too and your construct posted above is false. The numbers disprove your post that we are running out of oil. Easily found and extractible oil, that is and like others here who postulate on the economics of oil, you are still wrong.
By the way, I actually work as a geologist in the oil and gas industry and I am constantly amazed at the numbers of geologists who continue to “find” more of the stuff, when we are supposedly running out. I’ve seen your mentality proclaimed year after year not only on hard rock “end of times” but the same in the oil and gas industry.
You think that we are running out of “stuff” only because you have given up looking for it.
One other thing about wind; you could call it indirect solar.
If you want to get semantic, most power sources on the planet are indirect solar.
Why waste effort and research dollars on indirect solar, when by definition, there is greater power available from direct solar?
Not that I think either is a great or economical solution, but some locations have much more reliable wind than sun conditions, especially in the higher latitudes.
Why waste effort and research dollars on indirect solar, when by definition, there is greater power available from direct solar?
~Kevin Lafayette
Good idea.
They could put solar cells on the blades of windmills, cover the outer faces of hydro dams with solar cells and put windmills on top of the dams!
Yeah! Now we’re cooking with gas.
RM There is no shortage of uranium. It is estimated the earth’s crust contains about 2 ppm. The uranium in Sask is unusually rich. There is at least one mine that has to shield the shaft for the workers when a fuel rod can be handled with gloves. Australia has lots and also Russia but is less economical than Sask.
RM: As a Ph.D in geology, so you say, I’m sure you are familiar with waterflood programs. I made a proposal to Red Eds’ energy dept re: a carbon capture project in NW Alberta that would affect about 6 companies with a program having the same effect as a waterflood program, only faster.
It was too much for them to wrap their brain around and so they opted to…opt out of any such idea.
PS, RM, it would have been a self contained field for the companies involved.
Kate: Great article. I have that one bookmarked to forward. Thanks
Whatever we do, lets not store nuculear waste on the moon, ’cause it’ll explode and stuff in Space 1999.
Gord Tulk
I am glad to hear you support nuclear, but what does the North American conversion to Nuclear Energy as the dominant provider of base load electricity have to do with Russia and Pakistan?
I mean really, do you lie awake at night worrying that a cloud of radiation will waft in the window because we do not have some form of Global Governance to ensure a nuclear design engineer in Pakistan did not make a mistake?
BTW the IAEA would be the ones responsible for that, as far as North Korea or Tehran, too late North Korea has Nuclear Bombs and Iran is very close. Neither has a working Nuclear Power Plant.
I am more afraid of a nuclear device on a long range missle than a domestic power reactor failure. Nations tend to not want to irradiate their own country, only the neighbour’s.
Ok as a sop to the green people here is a clip on how to help heat your house with beer cans. Whether you still care to after the contents are consumed may be a debatable point.
http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/126913/detail/
jt, my name is Robert Marr. You can look my up at the University of Calgary, Dept. of Geoscience. Have at ‘er.
The article doesn’t really have much to do with Einstein’s equation, but otherwise he does a pretty good job of explaining the difference between producing energy by chemical means vs via nuclear reaction. Still, as others have pointed out, he glosses over the containment and disposal concerns. He also doesn’t mention cost. Nuclear isn’t presently much more cost-effective than wind and solar, and is more expensive than hydro or fossil-fuels. Lastly, he doesn’t mention the fact that nuclear (much like hydro) has to be situated near a large supply of water. You can use smaller rivers too, but then you run the risk of destroying their ecosystems by massively increasing the water temperature.
Of course, the cost equation will change over the next few decades, since the price of fossil fuels is likely to continues it’s climb. We could also further reduce the cost of nuclear power by improving our waste reprocessing capabilities, thereby reducing both fuel and disposal costs. Finding suitable locations to put power plants might eventually become a problem, but we could build hundreds of them before that happens. Safety concerns will always be the biggest issue, largely because the fears of most people tend to be based on emotion and ignorance rather than on a rational analysis of the data.
Nuclear may not be a panacea – no source of power is. However, it’s safe to say that if people really ARE worried about fighting AGW and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, we need to start building reactors as soon as possible. Unfortunately, as with most things in life it comes down to a question of trade-offs and priorities, and most people aren’t willing to expose themselves to the perceived threat of nuclear power no matter what sort of benefits it may have. As long as we continue to have a fearful gut-reaction to the word “radiation”, we’re going to have a hard time making progress.
PiperPaul
LOL Space 1999 I hardly ever meet anyone who remembers that series! Pleased to do so now.
Ya no nuclear storage on the moon, but an Eagle would be awesome to fly around and an alien shape-shifter would be a fun friend to have.
Eagle 5 to Moonbase Alpha.
Speedy, there is no shortage of uranium at current usage levels. My point was, a wholesale switch from fossil fuels to nuclear would quickly deplete reserves.
just a nitpicking thingie- “..But what does it really mean? (The answer is not “relativity.”)..”
With a minor perspective shift, It really does!
Oil shale in the U.S. was estimated at 2-3trillion barrels a couple yrs ago. Tho expensive to extract today, who knows 5yrs from now?