Japan Is Dropping a Gargantuan Turbine Into The Ocean to Harness 'Limitless' Energy

[NNadir]

22. For the record...

...I didn't take Donald J. Trump seriously when he announced he was "a very stable genius," either.

I suppose I'm generally taken to be as stupid by "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, when they launch into Trump like self-descriptions.

People can tell who Donald Trump is by what he says and what he does. There aren't too many really bright people who believe that Trump is a very stable genius.

I suppose I should take it as an improvement that people who drag out every idiotic anti-nuke shibboleth (cost, Nimby, speed, etc, etc.,) mindlessly and endlessly feel embarrassed to confess that they are what they are.

Recently, the United States government sold the benthic ecological zone off the coast of my State to wind investors for 4.4 billion dollars.

Offshore Wind Auction Raises $4.4 Billion to Topple Record

Companies nab wind farm rights near Long Island and New Jersey Tracts could fit hundreds of turbines 27 miles from shoreline

That's before they build a single turbine. It does not include the cost of the turbines themselves. Nor does include the cost of cleaning them up and removing 20 years after they come on line. (This of course, assumes that there will be no equivalents of Hurricane Sandy tear them to pieces in less than 20 years in a climate destablized world.) Nor does it include the cost of the back up plants that will be necessary to back this disgusting industrial plant up.

And yet...and yet...and yet...the two Vogtle reactors at 15 billion dollars each, are "too expensive."

Look. The anti-nukes here are free to assume I'm stupid. I can't control their fondness for their own abysmal ignorance. I've had an anti-nuke here carry on for years that he or she is not an anti-nuke simply because I defined him or her as an anti-nuke after he or she whined insipidly a tunnel collapsed at the Hanford weapons plant.

If one is still carrying on about the bogeyman at Three Mile Island, 43 years after the reactor melted, I have no use for garbage announcements that one is "not an anti-nuke."

It is curious, that anti-nukes never mention how much it cost to clean up the coastal city destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, any more than they give a shit about the deaths from that event from seawater. Of course, many, many, many cities are known to be at risk because people are unashamed to spend trillions of dollars on solar and wind, announcing that they're quick to build and cheap to build without ever bothering to look at the energy production tables in the WEO. The "quick to build" wind and solar industry, with a huge blank check that will be come due to future generations - the kids who are toddlers today will need to pay to remove the wind junk off the coast and New Jersey and Long Island as they start their careers - produced, after half a century of cheering, a total of 10.4 Exajoules of energy in 2020, compared to over 29 Exajoules for the hated nuclear industry.

NIMBY is a function of ignorance. An asshole complaining about NIMBY as a legitimate reason to not save the world from the consequences of ignorance does not impress me at all, particularly when they continuously drag out idiotic rhetoric that anti-nukes have been chanting for half a century.

I note that anti-nukes complaining about NIMBY, after dragging out every shit for brains chant over the decades, are, as I often say, arsonists complaining about forest fires.

People of course are free to tell me transparent lies and make delusional statements endlessly. After all, we live in the age of the celebration of the transparent lie.

As for the bogeyman at Three Mile Island, one can easily look up the electricity rates in PA.

Here's a recent announcement by the PUC of price increases:

Beginning June 1, electric distribution companies report the following changes in their PTCs for residential customers:

Citizens’ Electric, up from 7.3995 cents to 9.3667 cents per kWh (26.6%);
Met-Ed, up from 6.832 cents to 7.936 cents per kWh (16.1%);
Penelec, up from 6.232 cents to 8.443 cents per kWh (35.4%);
Penn Power, up from 7.082 cents to 8.694 cents per kWh (22.7%);
PPL, up from 8.941 cents to 12.366 cents per kWh (38.3%);
Wellsboro Electric, up from 7.7569 cents to 9.592 cents per kWh (23.7%); and
West Penn Power, up from 5.667 cents to 8.198 cents per kWh (44.6%);

PUC Alerts Consumers of June 1 Price Changes for Electric Generation

Somehow I don't really believe that these price increases to rates that are, in "percent talk," about 20% the cost of electricity in Denmark and Germany, are connected with the Three Mile Island clean up.

Whatever was spent for the "clean up" of the melted reactor, didn't save very many lives, because few lives were at risk. (Perhaps in the 1980's, when the question was less clear, some of the expense may have been justified.)

President Jimmy Carter walked through the Three Mile Island while it was melting over 20 years after he went into the core of a melted reactor as a young Naval Officer. The "clean up" certainly didn't do anything to save his life.

President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

Yet we still here people raising the point of Three Mile Island at a point in history where in mid June, we are about to see today temperatures approaching of 37°C (99°F) in Sioux Falls South Dakota, and higher temperatures later this week.

If some disingenuous anti-nuke wants to prattle on about "clean ups" of messes, even they show disinterest in the cost of cleaning up the flowback water in Pennsylvania for the gas that is used to support the fossil fuel fig leaf wind industry, I would be impressed if they considered the cost of "cleaning up" the planetary atmosphere. It won't happen. They're all little bourgeois bean counters, head up the ass materialists who refuse to invest in future generations.

Their idiot rhetoric will be recorded by history, I believe, and it won't be pretty, assuming there is history.

Oh and to answer the stupid "how many reactors" for 100 billion dollars question, it depends on what reactors are built, their size and type.

The successor company to Babcock and Wilcox, the company that built the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, with one of the reactors saving lives over the decades and the other not costing very many lives - if any - just signed on to deliver portable nuclear reactors: BWX Technologies selected to build Project Pele microreactor

The first full-scale transportable microreactor prototype will be completed and delivered in 2024 for testing at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

The US Department of Defense (DOD) Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) announced in April its decision to proceed with the project to build and demonstrate a TRISO-fuelled prototype mobile microreactor at the INL site following the release of a final environmental impact statement (EIS) for the reactor. Two companies - BWXT and X-Energy - were selected in 2019 to develop a final design for the prototype reactor.

BWXT has now been awarded a contract by SCO to complete and deliver the reactor in 2024. The prototype will be built under a cost-type contract worth around USD300 million, depending on options selected, by BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC in facilities in Lynchburg, Virginia and Euclid, Ohio. Some 120 employees are expected to work on the project over the next two years, the company said.

"We are on a mission to design, build and test new nuclear technology to protect the environment while providing power, and we are thrilled with this competitively bid award after years of hard work by our design and engineering team," BWXT Advanced Technologies President Joe Miller said. "The entire nuclear industry recognises that advanced reactors are an important step forward to support growing power needs and significant carbon reduction imperatives."

SCO has partnered with the Department of Energy to develop, prototype and demonstrate a transportable reactor in what has been described as a whole-of-government effort, also drawing on the expertise of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, US Army Corps of Engineers, NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration. Transportable reactors that can deliver clean, zero-carbon energy where and when it is needed can provide a resilient power source for DOD operational needs, but can also potentially be used in the civilian and commercial sectors for disaster response and recovery, power generation at remote locations, and deep decarbonisation initiatives.

I imagine we can build lots of these and should build lots of them, because we are currently experiencing disasters all over the world because we "invested" in the so called "renewable energy" fantasy - led by anti-nukes who never have given a shit about dangerous fossil fuels beyond weak lip service - instead of doing something practical.

My son is entering a nuclear engineering program, and the mantra is not to do what has been already been done, but to be creative, mindful, and intelligent to build reactors to address a wide variety of missions, only one of which is to drive the destructive fossil fuel/wind/solar industry out of business.

By the way, he told me this weekend that he's been through the entire series put out by the Health Physics Society that I referenced here: I hope to find the time to watch this video series on the history of the Linear No-Threshold Model. I'm glad he did. (I haven't found time yet.) I told him that one thing he'll need to do as a nuclear engineer is to be armed with facts when assholes begin spouting nonsense rhetoric, but I also warned him that the members of the anti-nuke cult are very much unimpressed with facts.

Nevertheless, facts matter.

Have a nice day.