Wise up to nuclear folly (Amory Lovins)

[jpak]

http://www.greenfutures.org.uk/features/default.asp?id=2479

Nuclear power is often described as a big, fast, and vital energy option – the only practical and proven source big and fast enough to do much to abate climate change. In this view, various ‘micropower’ and ‘negawatt’ (electricity saving) alternatives may be accepted as necessary and desirable within a balanced low-carbon electricity mix, but are seen as relatively small, slow, immature, uncertain, and futuristic.

A credulous press accepts this supposed new reality and creates an echo-box to amplify it. Some politicians and opinion leaders endorse it. Yet its vision of a vibrant nuclear power industry, poised for rapid growth and with no serious rivals in sight, is the opposite of the actual reality – that nuclear is a once-significant but now dying industry already fading from the marketplace, overtaken and humbled by swifter rivals.

The more concerned you are about climate change, the more vital it is to invest judiciously, not indiscriminately, in cutting carbon emissions. It is essential to buy the fastest and most effective climate solutions. Nuclear power is just the opposite. Claimed broad ‘green’ support for nuclear expansion, if real (which it’s not), would therefore be unsound and counterproductive. Efforts to ‘revive’ this moribund technology only waste time and money. You’d expect the City to appreciate all the warning signs – there’s not a penny of private money in the nuclear investments that are being made in countries such as China, Korea and France. As for public money, the UK industry has had two expensive bailouts already; making the same mistake a third time would astonish future historians.

Standard studies, comparing new nuclear plants with central power plants burning coal or natural gas, conclude that their marked disadvantage in total cost might be overcome if their construction became far cheaper, or if their construction and operation were even more heavily subsidised, or if carbon were heavily taxed, or if (as nuclear advocates prefer) all of these changes occurred. But such efforts to make nuclear plants appear competitive are futile, because central thermal power plants are not their real competitors. None of them can compete with windpower (and some other renewables), let alone with two far cheaper resources: cogeneration (or combined heat and power – CHP), and efficient use of electricity (ie technologies for wringing more work from each kilowatt-hour).

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[greenman3610]

1. excellent post

for more upbeat info on the possibility of
beating oil addiction, see

oilendgame.com

and for video of a Lovins address
for Resources for the Future

http://www.rff.org/Events/Amory-Lovins.cfm

[NNadir]

2. This would be the same Amory Lovins who predicted in 1984 that power

consumption was maxed out and would soon levelize?

The oracle at Snowmass/Aspen is a cultural relic and is increasingly irrelevant because, even if it is not the case high on the mountain, the emergency on the Plains is real and involves real lives, as does, the emergency in low lying Bangladesh.

I'll bet that he lives off the grid, but that's easy to do when grateful supplicants make green sacrifices at your altar.



And of course, when I speak of the green sacrifices, I am not speaking of the plants in his greenhouse in his 4000 square foot temple of wisdom. This mountaintop wizard is no ascetic.

Lovins, in my mind, has a point in emphasizing conservation, although one does wonder how many tons of greenhouse gases, exactly, were involved in trucking all that stuff to the altitude of Snowmass, especially during the peak hours, when the servants are driving into to town from the areas in which they can afford to live on the narrow crowding Pitkin County roads like route 82. The rest of his shtick is just an idle dream of an idle isolate who is idly rich and who is idly lacking a clue.

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/pdf_pubs/science2000.pdf

Twenty five years after his first pronouncement of the great renewable future, renewable energy other than hydroelectric still produces just a hair over an exajoule worldwide. And the electric consumption of the United States?

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table63.xls

Rather than levelize in 1984 as Mr. Lovins so confidently predicted in his 1977 book, it seems to have increased by 60%. For an oracle, he was notably deficient in predicting the computer age.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Great, more drivel from the RMI

The RMI building cost $500K ($961,000 in today's dollars): Lovins is incapable of understanding why Indian farmers earning less that a dollar a day don't live in something similar. He probably also thinks the average chinese textile worker can afford a $30K PV array.

Moron.

[megatherium]

4. I think he's the same Amory Lovins who has repeated hydrogen

canards, such as the assertion that the Hindenburg disaster wasn't due to the hydrogen, it was due to the allegedly explosively flammable skin of the craft. He attributes this to one "NASA scientist Dr. Addison Bain":
http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid985.php
But Addison Bain turns out to be a charletan (his doctoral degree is from a degree mill, an unaccredited school):
http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn032505.html
and the Hindenburg disaster was caused by the explosion of the hydrogen gas inside it.

[struggle4progress]

5. Bain's theory is not that Hindenburg hydrogen did not burn but rather ..

.. that the airship fire was initiated by ignition of the aluminum powder and lacquer in the skin, and (more precisely) that an electrical spark first ignited the fabric paint, rather than first igniting the hydrogen. This is NOT the same as claiming the hydrogen never burned.

From my own childhood experiments, I can attest that powdered aluminum burns very nicely under the proper conditions: this fact has led to its pyrotechnic use, for example, as well as certain other sometimes important applications, notably thermite.

Whether Bain's theory is correct or not, he at least had the credentials and connections to test the theory with actual historical samples, as reported by the American Physical Society: http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0700/070004.cfm

The Lovins page you cite does not claim that the airship hydrogen did not burn: it simply claims that Bain believed the actual Hindenburg deaths were not directly attributable to a hydrogen explosion but had more proximate causes, such as burning diesel fuel.

Now, I personally consider this an effort at slicing the facts rather too thinly, and am not particularly impressed with Lovins' recitation of this theory, but it scarcely seems worth the anger you apparently direct at it: PBS has identified Bain as a "former NASA hydrogen specialist" (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/flash/hindenburg_script.html ), and your claim of charlatanism seems excessive; in particular, whether California Coast University is a diploma mill, or whether the management degree CCU alleged awarded Bain in 1998 is of any real value, seem irrelevant to any discussion of his expertise on hydrogen or the quality of his ideas about the Hindenburg catastrophe.

[megatherium]

6. I never said the hydrogen did not combust. I said the claim Bain

made was that the skin of the Hindenburg was responsible for the disaster. But this claim is false. See:
http://www.bobpark.org/WN05/wn031805.html
http://spot.colorado.edu/~dziadeck/zf/LZ129fire.htm

If you do a Google search on the cause of the Hindenburg disaster, you will see nothing but links to pages, usually by hydrogen enthusiasts, repeating the Bain theory. But it seems that this theory is bogus, as is its promoter (regardless of his association with NASA). Lovins is promoting hydrogen as a solution to our energy crisis. I thought it would be useful to highlight Lovin's uncritical use of the Bain theory.

I will explain why this angers me. I have a PhD in mathematics from a legitimate (top 50) pubic university. To earn my degree, I had to produce original research of a quality that would merit publication in a respectable mathematics journal. Indeed, my dissertation appears essentially verbatim in such a venue. This is why a PhD is supposed to command respect: the degree is supposed to represent mastery of a subject to a level where its holder can perform original scholarship. Bain apparently obtained his degree from an unaccredited diploma mill. These operations have legitimate sounding names but no faculty or classrooms. (Parks says Bain's school has no courses or classrooms.) You pay for the degree, but it has no value. By representing himself in this fashion, Bain destroys any semblance of trust. This is not irrelevant to his discussion about hydrogen: he used his title of doctor to bolster his authority in making claims which appear to be specious.

[struggle4progress]

7. You say the "disaster was caused by .. explosion of the hydrogen gas"

It is clear that the zeppelin burned rapidly, but (as far as I can tell) there was no blast wave of the sort associated with genuinely explosive combustion: the ship neither "popped" or exploded, and the existing photographic record shows the fire proceeding across the craft from the side where combustion was initiated. This suggests that oxygen migrated into the gas bags only from the burning open end and that hydrogen-air mixtures concentrations near the explosive limit did not exist within the body of the bags.

The question raised by Bain is, I think, how the fire started:

The Hindenburg: Was Hydrogen Really To Blame?
Based On An Article by Mariette DiChristina, Popular Science, Nov. 1997
http://www.esdjournal.com/articles/blame.htm

... Through his contact with Van Treuren, Bain discovered that pieces of the Hindenburg's skin still existed. He traveled all over the country buying whatever original materials, papers and books he could from collectors. He was even able to obtain a small clipping of the swastika painted on the Hindenburg's side from a collector in Chicago, Cheryl Gantz, who heads up the Zeppelin Collectors Club.

Bain approached researchers at NASA who all agreed to donate their free time to work on "Project H". Their first task was to examine the materials to determine what was in the fabric that covered the Hindenburg. By using an infrared spectrograph and a scanning electron microscope, the scientists were able to discover the chemical signatures of the organic compounds and elements present in the fabric.

The Hindenburg was covered with a cotton fabric that had been swabbed with a doping compound to protect and strengthen it. Unfortunately, the doping compound contained a cellulose acetate or nitrate (used in gunpowder). This compound was followed by a coating of aluminum powder (which is used in rocket fuel). Additionally, the structure was held together using wood spacers and ramie cord; the furnishings were make of silk and other fabrics; and the skeleton itself was duralumin coated with lacquer. Added together, all of these made the craft itself highly flammable. In DiChristina's article, Bain was quoted as saying that perhaps "... the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel."

In support of Bain's theory that the fire was started by the fabric's flammability in a charged atmosphere were two letters that he discovered in a German archive. The letters were written in 1937 by Otto Beyerstock, an electrical engineer who had incinerated pieces of Hindenburg fabric during electrical tests conducted at the direction of the Zeppelin Company. Beyerstock ruled out the idea that hydrogen could have started the fire. He asserted that the same outcome would have occurred if a similar craft flew under the same atmospheric conditions but with noncombustible helium instead of hydrogen as the lifting fuel. As a matter of fact, Bain discovered that such a fire did occur in California in 1935 when a helium-filled airship with an acetate-aluminum skin burned near Point Sur ...

This investigation by Bain appears to predate the management PhD (whatever value that degree has or does not have), and it seems to have involved real research, real sample and data collection, and genuine collaboration with expert colleagues, and there have been other academic scientists (such as Van Vorst at UCLA) who support this theory. Whether this theory ultimately turns out to be correct or incorrect, I conclude that your use of the word "charlatan" is unfair as a description of Bain. In mathematics, of course, error is a cardinal sin, but the physical sciences are NOT mathematics and honest error in the sciences is a normal part of the game.

A PhD is a nice string of letters to set after one's name, of course, but what it signifies is rather variable. I once met a first-rate x-ray diffraction expert whose PhD was in psychology. Some people do excellent work without the degree: the influential twentieth century mathematician van der Waerden comes to mind. And there are plenty of hacks who can claim the letters. Like you, I have a PhD in mathematics, and part of my dissertation was published, though (perhaps with some justification) hardly anyone I have met in daily life has shown even a polite interest in that aspect of my intellectual life. So if Bain felt he needed the letters after his name for credibility, I should simply consider him somewhat misguided in that respect.

I'm not even slightly a hydrogen enthusiast myself, and I do not consider that the Hindenburg issue sheds much light on the issue of hydrogen-fuel safety, nor am I terribly impressed by Lovins' interest in this particular topic. But Lovins' misjudgment on this one matter does not really reflect much on the whole body of his efforts ...

[megatherium]

11. My characterization of Bain was based on Bob Park's description of him.

Park is an acerbic writer who has been on the warpath against fraud in science, as well as pseudoscience. I certainly should apologize for my reliance on him. And you are right that Lovins shouldn't be judged on this one matter. (Lovins is deservedly well-respected for his work on energy, although his positions on hydrogen or nuclear energy are under vigorous debate.)

And my apologies for mis-stating the role of hydrogen in the Hindenburg. What I had read about the Bain theory is that it didn't explain the rapidity of the combustion, that had to have been the hydrogen. It appears the hydrogen burned very quickly (as is of course seen in the film of the disaster; it should be remembered that the dirigible was a very large craft) -- but not explosively. I suspect this was because it wasn't under high pressure. (I presume the hydrogen was under minimal pressure, not much more than one atmosphere, to keep the density of the dirigible as low as possible. The dirigible's rigid structure enabled this. But I don't know what the pressure was to be honest.) At any rate, you have convinced me that Bain is sincere and qualified on this matter, whether his theory is right or wrong.

Again my apologies for this subthread. I thank you for your respectful tone in responding to my posts, which were clearly over the line.

[struggle4progress]

8. Can you document that CCU is an "unaccredited diploma mill"?

[megatherium]

10. CCU received accreditation through DTEC

(Distance Training and Education Council), in January of 2005, so I stand corrected. My negative impression of CCU was based on the March 25 edition of Bob Park's What's New column. (Park wrote this column for the American Physical Society; he is a retired University of Maryland physics professor, and author of Voodoo Science.) Perhaps Park's negative assessment of CCU was based on a earlier GAO report. See:
http://www.nspe.org/etweb/10704diplomamills.asp
http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/dm4.html

On edit: Again, this was very unfair to Bain, and I appreciate your clarifications.

[jpak]

9. Ah yes, the Peanut Gallery doesn't like it when someone upsets their

little nukie cart...

They ain't got nothin' 'cept the Olde Ad Homenim Attack to counter Lovin's arguments...

<snip>

If it costs roughly one US dollar to generate ten kilowatt-hours of new nuclear energy, at its 2004 subsidy levels, then for the same money we could displace more of the carbon emissions from coal-fired electricity generation by:

* Wind power – a dollar buys 12-17kWh of dispatchable windpower;

* Gas-fired industrial cogeneration – a dollar buys 9-17kWh (adjusting for its carbon emissions);

* Cogeneration at residential building-scale – 20-65kWh (again, adjusting for carbon emissions);

* Heat from waste cogeneration – 24-89kWh;

* End-use efficiency – anything up to at least 100kWh of savings. Much, indeed most, of the carbon displacement should come from end-use efficiency, because that’s both profitable – cheaper than the energy it saves – and fast to deploy...

<snip>

:)

[hunter]

12. This gas fired cogeneration will inevitably lead to US LNG imports...

... or coal gasification, which will be even worse for the climate.

Lovin's ideas may have been appropriate in the 'seventies -- when they would have extended the time we had to come up with a better solutions, but we passed that exit a long time ago.

We are digging ourselves into a hole, and Lovin's ideas don't get us out of the hole, they only slow the rate of digging.

[jpak]

13. Gas fired cogeneration beats central station hands down

That was his argument - and that is what Denmark is doing today.

It's wasteful to use large central station gas-fired power plants to produce electricity with no waste heat recovery when heat homes (or businesses) with gas (or oil or heat pumps) as well.

Cogeneration would reduce gas (and overall energy) consumption - not increase it....and if US had listened to Lovins back in the '70's we could have a long slow drag with natural gas and not the crisis that looms large today...(thank you Ronald Reagan and the entire Bush family).

Lovins' ideas still have merit.