I’m going to take a vacation from blogging for a little while. Partly a mental-health break, partly a need to get other stuff done. But there are many things I would love to blog about! So here is a list of recent stuff I’ve saved — you can fill in for yourself all the illuminating and entertaining words that would undoubtedly accompany a full-blown discussion.
- Algae! The Editors chide me for carelessly conflating ethanol and biofuels. Fair enough. If algae are a clean and efficient way to capture and store energy from the Sun, I’d be all for it.
- Meanwhile, we continue to heavily subsidize corn for ethanol, and as a result people are dying.
- Don’t like your government? Take to sea and create your own!
- At some point I will say more about Ben Rosen’s great blog, and especially Harold Rosen’s great entry for the Google Lunar X-Prize, about which Deborah Castleman blogs here. Private ingenuity will be crucial to the future of human spaceflight, especially when NASA can’t remember how to replicate its heat shields from the 1960’s.
- I was going to score some non-partisanship points by criticizing Barack Obama for peddling nonsense about autism and vaccinations, just as John McCain does. (Hint: there is no connection!) Then I noticed that Hillary Clinton does the same thing, sadly. And, worse, Clinton has bought into John McCain’s panderiffic notion of declaring a summer holiday on gas taxes — at least Obama has come out squarely against that. (Encouragement to burn more fossil fuels is probably not sound policy.)
- You might also be interested in Michael Berube’s rundown of the candidates stances on disability issues. McCain’s, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, consists of exhortations along the lines of “Hey, disabled folks! Suck it up!”
- John McCain doesn’t want you to forget that Barack Obama is the preferred candidate of Hamas. He’s also the preferred candidate of nearly everyone outside the U.S., but whatever.
- At The Corner, Michael Novak continues Jonah Goldberg’s project of portraying Fascism as left-wing. His evidence is that a friend of Albert Camus’s joined the Nazi Party because everything in the world had lost its meaning. Novak seems to miss the fact that this anecdote proves the opposite of his point — Camus’s friend became a Nazi because the Nazis provided “a meaning in the destiny of our nation,” not because they denied the existence of objective meaning. But keep trying!
- Gerard ‘t Hooft proposes a locally finite model for gravity. A related discussion of whether the universe is continuous or discrete appears in an article from FQXi, which is annoyingly only available in pdf. I actually think the universe really is continuous, not discrete, for reasons that might become clear if I can just get this paper finished.
- Tomorrow, April 29, is Duke Ellington‘s birthday. He was the master.
And here is the orchestra, with Paul Gonsalves on tenor.
- Oops, almost forgot this one: Cosmo Girl! suggests you should design your own religion, just like you design your favorite Starbucks coffee beverage. (Simile theirs.)
Be excellent to each other.
All the best in your off time. Great topics here: Algae, ethanol, politics, music, private spaceflight investment, and stirrings of a continuous universe. I like it. Well composed Sean.
Wayne
I am extremely disheartened that every single candidate for president gives credit to the supposed vaccine autism connection. I can only imagine that this is because they are being lobbied hard by families like this.
Fundamental discreteness breaks Lorentz invariance. Fairly model independent analysis (of RNG flow) makes this violation large at observable energies, even if it starts out small at high energies. So, unless there is an counter-argument (and there may well be), the idea is experimentally falsified. That’s not to say this is not worth thinking about, but progress will depend on overcoming this hurdle (among other things).
Sean: “Be excellent to each other.”
Party on , dude!
(Bonus points for the Bill and Ted’s quote, if you dare to claim them. 😉
I think the “discreteness” under consideration is of the set of degrees of freedom (e.g., dimensionality of Hilbert space), not of spacetime itself. The Hawking-Bekenstein formula seems to imply that what happens inside a black hole can be described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Some people want to extend this to the wavefunction of the entire universe, but I don’t think that’s the right direction to take.
Yeah, that wasn’t a comment on the ‘tHooft paper which I haven’t read, more on the PDF file which, like many other discussions on discreteness somehow manages to avoid the issue of Lorentz invariance.
As for the finite dimensional Hilbert space story, the entropy of any conventional system (say an ideal gas) is a finite number, proportional to the number of DOF (say the number of species of ideal gas). None of those systems has a finite-dimensional Hilbert space.
Cosmo Girl’s idea for choosing a religion seems a lot better than the top down, indoctrinate your children variety.
I sure hope algae are a clean and efficient way to capture and store energy from the Sun because we need something to make up for the flattening and eventual decline of oil supplies – even as demand continues to rise, for now. (Google for “peak oil” and peak just about anything else, including uranium.)
Interesting topics as usual from Sean. He’s the only reason I read this blog. Even if I disagree with him frequently. Like …
1) Who cares about algae? We have a solution to our energy problem. It’s called nuclear fission. It will last us at least millions of years (and that’s ignoring any technological advances), it’s cleaner than anything out there, and it’s cheap as well.
2) Running out of oil. Good. Hopefully that will mean the demise of our dangerous and addictive car lifestyles, and the return of cities that are designed for human beings.
3) “Private ingenuity will be crucial to the future of human spaceflight…” Ha ha ha! Ingenuity comes from government organisations or from monopolistic corporations. The private sector comes in right at the end when there is money to be made, and there’s little to no ingenuity involved in that.
4) So NASA can’t replicate 1960’s technology. See, Americans, this is a perfect example of wish fulfilment. You hate “the government” for long enough and intensely enough, it eventually becomes as bad as you fantasised it to be.
5) McCain, Clinton, and Obama. A nut, a psychopath, and a magical thinker. You Americans are in deep … err … biofuel.
Funny, I’m about to take a vacation and am hoping to catch up on posting!
I have to admit some surprise that you chose the Klein article to represent the food crisis. There are far better ones out there. Regardless, connecting the dots from ethanol to the rice shortages is shaky at best. A whole pile-up of things is causing the problems, with ethanol only a small (if at all significant) part of it. I’ve written a bit about the confusion over food prices here and about the rice shortages here. I’m also surprised at the shortsightedness of people who are so quick to condemn biofuels as a whole. Researchers of all types are rushing to make cellulosic ethanol a reality, among other 2nd gen biofuels. Making corn ethanol the boogeyman will dry up funding for future alternatives. We do need to hurry up with nuclear, but (unless all transportation becomes electric) we still need portable fuel.
Ijon Tichy, your impressions of (presumably) uranium supply are a common misunderstanding. You had better look at “Peak Uranium” on Wikipedia. Unless we build a viable breeder economy, our uranium will start running out rather soon as well. Maybe Thorium (one of my favorites) can help, maybe not.
BTW, I find your name interesting. What nationality if you please? Around Eastern Europe? tx
Anastasia, please look into and write about using industrial-grade hemp as a source for biofuel. See here at http://www.hempcar.org/. The hemp doesn’t need the pampering and energy input of corn, and the oil isn’t that hard to get out. I rode in the Hemp Car (a slightly modified diesel station wagon) a few years ago, it ran great.
The problem with blaming ethanol for starving people is that US exports of wheat and corn this past season were at near record levels. Here’s the official export data, at least look at the data before you jump to conclusions.
The reason people are starving is becaus (1) they are poor, and (2) harvests in the rest of the world are down. As the above article states, “The elevated level of 2007/08 U.S. wheat exports is unlikely to be maintained to these regions when supplies of other major competitors return to more normal levels.”
The often quoted “$0.51 per gallon” subsidy for ethanol is not a subsidy per se, it’s a reduction in the federal taxes collected on that portion of the fuel. And it does not amount to $0.51 that you pay at the pump for gasoline blended with ethanol it is on the ethanol portion only. Example: if you buy 100 gallons of pure gasoline, the feds will collect a tax of $51. If it is 4% ethanol, the tax will be reduced by $2.04 to $48.96.
The per gallon subsidies for biofuels are for biodiesel.
Poor people are starving because they are poor. So long as fuel is expensive, it will be turned into fuel because that is simple economics. Even if it is outlawed in the US the result will just be that the distillation will happen overseas (and that many more jobs will be lost from the US). Furthermore, the poorest of the poor overseas are the rural poor and these are helped by biofuels because it increases the value of their crops.
The starvation is just an arguing point (and a temporary one at best). The real ecological argument against biofuels is that it is bringing more farm area under cultivation. The 40 million acres that US farmers are paid to not farm are being farmed again (20% for last year, this year who knows), and rain forest is being turned into farmland in the tropics. This is what is really bothering the ecologists. They would prefer that we reduce our need for transportation to be so low that we can supply it with biofuels grown on the land we are already farming. Except that they’re against “factory farming”, so that would first require a massive population decrease.
Nor is the corn used for directly for human food. We feed “field” or “dent” corn to animals and then eat the meat. And another large proportion of it is sent to factories that turn it into “corn syrup”. I would think that turning it into fuel would be better than making meat and sugary soft drinks out of it, but politics, and ecology, makes strange bed fellows. I guess the poor people in the rest of the world are straving because they need more coke and hamburgers.
Ijon,
If we had a million years of uranium left, then my boss wouldn’t be paying me twice my former academic salary to find more of it.
Here are my arguments (well, really just a collection of facts) for millions (perhaps billions) of years of nuclear fission power:
1) Until very recently, the amount of effort and money that has gone into uranium exploration has been tiny, partly because of uranium’s historically low price. Simply increasing that effort will increase our proven reserves significantly (like it does for every other resource), and the recent evidence suggests this is what is happening.
2) You don’t believe me that proven resources can rise as a result of increasing exploration? From 2003 to 2005 the proven uranium reserves recoverable at less than $US130/kg rose by about 50%. Reserves are always associated with a price, because typically the more you’re willing to spend on recovery the more you can extract.
3) Based on excellent geological data, one can make estimates of additional reserves, and that value is currently around 8 times the proven reserves, although of course highly uncertain. Again, this is similar for many other resources.
4) Thorium is three to four times more abundant than uranium, and can also be used as a nuclear fuel. Even better, all of the thorium mined out of the ground is potentially usable in a nuclear reactor, compared with only 0.7% of naturally-occurring uranium.
5) Breeder reactors, a proven technology, can utilise U-238 (the non-fissile part of naturally-occurring uranium). They can also use depleted uranium. This multiplies uranium resources by a factor of 60. And this is only for once-through operations; recycling is what fast breeder reactors were really designed for, but I won’t talk about that here.
6) In the very long term we can extract uranium from seawater, and rivers annually replenish the seas with 32,000 tons of uranium (which vastly exceeds what any civilisation on this planet would need). Currently this is at least an order-of-magnitude more expensive than normal uranium mining, but we are talking millennia into the future. Feel free to believe that the technology (as well as costs) on this will stand still for thousands of years.
7) Reactor technology continues to get more efficient. The third-generation reactors that have already been built and are continuing to be built have longer lifetimes, use a higher burn-up to reduce fuel use, they’re cheaper to build, simpler to operate, and they’re safer as well. Fourth-generation reactors are now being researched & developed, and they promise even greater improvements.
8) The cost of nuclear power is very insensitive to uranium prices, because the cost of the fuel is such a tiny fraction of the total lifetime cost of a nuclear power plant. You could increase the price of uranium by a factor of 10, and add only 1 cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
So there’s our base-load energy needs taken care of virtually forever. Supplement it with hydro and other minor sources of power, and there is no energy problem whatsoever. All that remains is a political problem.
Meanwhile, keep pushing the diffuse forms of energy like wind and solar (diffuse is why they’ll always be more expensive than nuclear), keep scaremongering about nuclear, and the coal industry will thank you (silently), while poor people stay poor, developed nations stagnate (materially and psychologically), and the climate goes to hell.
Funny, point number 8 is a smiley face with dark glasses.
Neil B: Ijon Tichy is the main character in a series of silly but clever short stories by Stanislaw Lem. My recent ancestors are Croatian.
“industrial-grade hemp as a source for biofuel. See here at http://www.hempcar.org/. The hemp doesn’t need the pampering and energy input of corn, and the oil isn’t that hard to get out.”
As soon as America’s factory farms start planting millions of acres of conservation reserve lands in hemp the ecologists will complain about it for pretty much the same reasons as they complain about corn or anything else. Yes, you can plant small plots of hemp without having pests, but as soon as you plant 100 million acres of it, Nature will find a pest that will grow in it explosively and you will find that factory farms will have to use pesticides and genetic modifications to keep the game going.
Now stamp out that reefer and put your thinking cap on. What happens when you take a plot of land and don’t farm it? Does it end up growing a pure field of hemp? Of course it does not. In the plains, land ends up growing grass. Farther west, it becomes a forest. Along the way, you will have to do something to that crop to keep it a hemp crop and that “thing” is going to be the things that ecologists complain about with regard to factory farms.
As far as burning hemp (or other biomass) for energy as suggested in the link, most of the readers are probably not familiar with what one has to go through in order to get a permit to burn, in industrial quantities, things like this.
If it were possible to get air permits to burn corn stover at ethanol plants in the US it would be done already (just as the leftover sugar cane is burnt in Brazil). The reason it isn’t done here is because to do it, we would have to get an air permit. And the air permit would probably be impossible to receive, but we wouldn’t discover that until a half decade had gone by because that is what happens to new industrial pollution ideas in the US nowadays.
Permitting a corn ethanol plant is fairly easy. In your filings, you simply point to someone else’s corn ethanol plant and say that your process is similar to theirs, and since their pollution has been tested and is within the statutory limits, so will be yours. When you design something new, you can’t use this.
This is also why cellulosic is at least 10 years out. Eventually someone will get a permit for a cellulosic plant and then it will be built and then its actual pollution will be monitored and then the information will fall into the public domain. But until then, it is utterly impossible for the majority of small companies like ours (and the majority of potential builders) to build a cellulosic ethanol plant. We have to wait until some huge conglomerate, or a university, goes through the initial permitting process.
However, when cellulosic does become proven, this country’s corn ethanol plants will be converted over. The conversion is fairly simple, it’s mostly a change to the feedstock. Once you get the cellulose turned into sugar, the rest of the distillation is identical. And there will also be minor changes to the byproducts, but I think the same centrifuges will be good so there shouldn’t be any real deal breakers on it. Certainly the heart of an ethanol plant, the distillation towers and the fermentation tanks, will be unchanged.
And I hear a lot of people that say that corn ethanol can only provide 6% of the US needs for transportation fuel. Great, let’s wait until we are so much out of oil that US transportation is down to 5% of its current size. Conservation is forced on us by economics. Nobody owns a car, everyone uses a bus. No one flies. The military is grounded, etc. Then we can turn to ethanol and even export 20% of it. But don’t you think the transition is going to be easier if we get the ethanol started while we’re still a wealthy country?
Carl, please; you argue well, and back your points admirably. But none of that matters if you ignore the most basic tenet of discussion: brevity. It means you will still have an audience when you’ve finished your well-argued point. (“,)
Ijon, I think everyone’s squeamish about nuclear for the same reason: where do you put the bloody waste?
A couple of years ago on sci.physics I posted a suggestion that nuclear power plants should be built deep underground, so they could be effectively disposable in place (along with a load of low-level waste), readily sealable in the event of catastrophe, and the nuclear components safe from attack by terrorists and perhaps even hostile nations.
I hoped for a decent discussion but, sci.physics being what it is, soon became embroiled in a slanging match with the resident baboons. However, amid the clamour, we did cover some angles, such as the expense and casualty rate of building the tunnels (manageable, I think we concluded) and one alpha male made an interesting point that hadn’t occurred to me – nuclear power plants need a lot of water for cooling. So could tunnels of practical size, and the enclosed nature of the underground plant generally, cope with this waste heat disposal? Perhaps the heat could be put to good use?
Not sure if there’s a single topic to be off-topic from in this discussion; but the above seems generally in keeping with the energy theme, and I wonder what any experts think of the idea of nuclear power stations built deep underground, e.g. 10,000′ down in basement rock.
Man-made geothermal (of a type), John? Build it near a subduction zone, and it’d recycle itself, too…
Personally, I’d convert it into glass and drop it into the ocean, but the magical thinkers would have me hung, drawn and quartered for that. So you could be ridiculously safe and put the glass in a stainless steel container, surround that with stabiliser material, surround that with a thin casing made out of material that is corrosion-resistant, surround that with overpack for added stability, surround that with a thin sleeve for structural support, surround that with water-expanding backfill which is the last line of defence, and then bury the entire package in geologically-stable rock with little or no groundwater flow. But before I’d do anything like that I’d simply store it above ground, because the stuff is so damned valuable (think recycling!).
In terms of waste and safety, there’s some interesting comparisons you can make. A typical nuclear power plant generates a coffee-table-sized chunk of high-level nuclear waste every year. This is billions of times smaller than the waste that comes from a coal power plant with similar power output. And unlike nuclear waste, coal waste kills people every day of every year. Each year you run a single large coal power plant, 75 people die because of air pollution, and a similar number die eventually because of radon emissions and the release of chemical carcinogens into the environment. Nuclear is several orders of magnitude less deadly than coal, and about as safe as wind or hydro.
>4) Thorium is three to four times more abundant than uranium, and can also be used as a nuclear fuel.
This is a perfect example of a statistic that is both technically true and practically irrelevant. I just might write a blog entry just to explain why…
Also, glass devitrifies in the ocean. You’re much better of with a thermodynamically stable crystalline wasteform, like synroc.
LL: Yes, synroc, by all means, let’s take advantage of advanced ceramics technology (a good example of “down under” ingenuity). Looking forward to your blog entry about thorium.
Hi Sean, Hope you are not going to cave under all the flak you have been getting recently from Peter Woit and co. at his blog. I won’t say anything more about Peter because it has to do with his insufferable (online) personality and constant mischaracterizations of people (and science).
This blog is excellent as it stands. The line between allowing freedom of speech and allowing anarchy lies to some extent in the eye of the beholder, but it is CERTAINLY not a unanimously accepted truth that you have crossed it. So please blog when you can.
ST.
Put the radioactive waste back where it came from originally.