So If Not Solar/Wind/Battery, What?
NUCLEAR POWER, especially as deliverable by Small Modular Reactors
Let’s begin at the end, the end of one of the bec’s most-read posts:
The ultimate question about this entire project remained not only unasked but unimagined: Why are any wind farms needed in the Gulf of Mexico when the intermittent, unreliable, and expensive energy they produce, along with damage to the Gulf itself, are all replaceable and avoidable by simply constructing a Small Modular Reactor nuclear power station, providing constant, low-cost, reliable electricity to the Gulf Coast?
That was my exiting question that followed a long list of questions about the wisdom of placing wind turbines in the Gulf of Mexico, a deeply-flawed idea that will result in a deeply-flawed project. And though the wind farm in the Gulf has been twice scaled back in size, its impact on both habitats and the energy mix will be very damaging.
Solar, wind, and the batteries they need to work are terrible ideas.
Yes, you have panels on your roof and they reduce your energy bill. Yes, you like your Tesla. Fine. Those devices serve you as an individual household. But at scale these devices do not solve the “existential threat” problems we’re told need solving: CO2 emissions that will warm the planet. Indeed, at scale, these devices not only do not deliver solutions, they cause terrible damage to human aspirations: the grid, the economy, the resources of the planet.
“Net Zero” is part of the s/w/b debacle. It sounds nice, though: “Let’s produce all our energy in a way that results in ‘net zero’ carbon emissions!”
Good luck with that… you’ll wreck a lot of lives in the process. See Sri Lanka as the loud siren screaming in your ear: “Avoid Net Zero! Don’t do it!”
From the Wall Street Journal:
The Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist who did more to feed the world than any man before or since, set Sri Lanka on the path to agricultural abundance in 1970. It was built around chemical fertilizers and crops bred to be disease-resistant. Fifty-two years later, Sri Lanka has pulled off a revolution that is “antigreen” in the modern sense, toppling its president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.
Fossil fuels are essential to life. To disregard their positive impacts is not simply irresponsible, it’s deadly. Are there trade-offs and negatives? Yes, sure, as with everything. But the difference between deep-thinkers and thin-thinkers is that we acknowledge those trade-offs and address them. The thin-thinkers, like Davante Lewis and Dustin Granger and JP Morrell and the rest, won’t address the true downsides of “Green” energy. They ignore the environmental damage; they dream away the economic costs; they “green wash” the dirty realities of solar panels and wind blades that can’t be recycled, of dead whales on the beach near a wind farm, of dead raptors cut to shreds by wind blades traveling at speeds of 200 mph at their tips. They ignore the impact on the grid, on the pricing of energy, of the new construction needed to deliver power from the solar farm to the city. They disregard the massive land use, the habitat degradation. Never mind that it’s impossible to produce enough batteries to store an hour’s worth of a city’s energy needs during a climate event. Never mind that the wind turbines in the Gulf of Mexico cannot be “towed into port ahead of a storm.” Ignore the logistics and the logistical problems go away, right?
Let’s pause a moment to look at a characteristic of oil processing often missed.
Chemistry determines these distillates of oil. Neither whim nor demand. This is the process outcome for oil, no matter how many barrels you shove into the pipes, this is what comes out:
A barrel of oil undergoes a process that creates the output you see above: this is what you do to oil. This is what happens to oil when it gets processed. It’s not like we can order up one of these without ordering up the whole of them! That’s how oil works… and it’s an amazing miracle!
Similarly shown here, too…
We can’t choose to process only marine fuel, for example. No… a barrel yields these and then you take your marine fuel back to harbor.
We need fossil fuels to power the machines we all rely upon. We need diesel for industry and farm equipment and we need jet fuel, as commercial airlines can never be powered by heavy batteries. We need fertilizers to feed a hungry world. We need plastics and medical devices and medicines, all produced by fossil fuels.
The BEC acknowledges that the better uses of fossil fuels don’t include burning it to simply turn some wheels; that’s a valid point. But if the answer is to “electrify everything” and solar/wind/battery are unreliable sources of electricity, then how do we produce enough electricity to power our needs while also reserving our uses of fossil fuels for the essentials they provide?
How can we move forward?
Rolls Royce is not alone in the Small Modular Reactors market, but we’re limiting our focus to Rolls Royce to streamline this presentation to you. And, let’s admit it, we all love Rolls Royce. They get rich people around in style, but, more significantly, they have produced jet engines that every one of us has relied upon for commercial air travel. Rolls Royce has been at the forefront of industrial production for more than a century; they’re an impressive group of designers and manufacturers. They’ve been expertly building small nuclear reactors for ships and submarines for six decades.
Consider this presentation… we think you’ll be as amazed as we are, especially with the granularity of planning: ‘These devices are compact, so is there room enough to use your tools during a repair?’ Yes, they’ve anticipated every part of every step, and every element of the complex is a module that can be transported by train and truck, delivered and assembled on-site, lowering costs and elevating predictability:
And in this presentation, you’ll hear about the trade-offs of SMRs from someone not associated at all with Rolls Royce:
Remember: solar/wind/battery will always be fully dependent on fossil fuels. Their needed materials cannot be mined, processed, transported, or manufactured, delivered, installed, and implemented without fossil fuels. We are locking in fossil fuel dependency if we commit to solar/wind/battery, which will always need a back-up energy source for when they are not producing.
What backs up the solar and wind?
We will always need fossil fuels. Forever.
The electrification of everything places a burden on the production of electricity, and solar and wind are very bad at producing reliable, constant, affordable energy, while batteries can never store the energy people need to survive, especially during conditions when the sun isn’t shining, the wind isn’t blowing, or extreme weather knocks out those systems.
Fission energy produces orders of magnitude more energy with orders of magnitude fewer inputs than any engine ever devised—6 orders of magnitude more thermal energy than combustion.
BF Randall
The Louisiana Public Service Commission now leans 3 to 2 in favor of “renewables.” The question will be: “Which renewables?” And if nuclear power is not at the top of the list, the commission does all of us a great disservice.
Never forget: Big Oil owns Big Renewable and governments around the world are dumping trillions of dollars into the Big Renewable bin. There’s a ton of money incentive to commit to only solar/wind/battery. Our preference is to avoid those ersatz energy production sources entirely; they have practically no useful benefits at scale, they distract from needed investment in true solutions, they create more problems than they solve, and the “solutions” they are perceived as bringing aren’t solutions in the real world, though they appeal to feelings and quick-glance consideration of a deeply complicated and significant issue.
Canada signed a joint action plan with the US to advance secure supply chains for Green Energy-critical minerals and has similar cooperation agreements with Japan and the European Union. The mining industry is about to take off, the 2nd most-polluting industry in the world.
John Lee Pettimore