...we can tear them apart for lithium.

Whence the cobalt for this "green" battery exercise will come remains unclear.

Fuck up part of the Frank Church Wilderness area, and/or the area just east in critical habitat for many species in Idaho.

Last edited Wed Apr 29, 2026, 12:29 PM - Edit history (1)

...making magnets for useless wind turbines, world energy production at 700 Exajoules per year, humanity could run on the uranium and thorium already mined for centuries.

I've done this calculation many times.

An antinuke "renewable energy will save us" type complaining about mining anything is like a MAGAT complaining about corruption.

A kilogram of plutonium fully fissioned, excluding neutrinos, has an energy density of about 80 trillion Joules. A kg of coal, about which our antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes couldn't care less, depending on grade, about 25 million Joules. It follows that a kg of plutonium is the equivalent of more than 3,000 tons of coal.

This suggests that to cover all of the world's energy demand at about 700 Exajoules, higher than the WEO figures for 2024, around 650 EJ, less than 9000 tons of plutonium would need to be fissioned each year, less in improved exergy recovery exploiting waste heat through process intensification.

If we take the weight of a wind turbine tower, ignoring the coal coked to make the steel, as 200 tons, for a MW+ scale turbine the amount of plutonium required is about the weight of around 50 wind turbine towers.

Transmuted into plutonium, the depleted uranium at Fernald Ohio is enough, in theory, to meet world energy demand for about a thousand years.

I often note that the ocean contains about 4.5 billion tons of uranium, continuously cycled from the mantle by rivers, although our happy antinukes have stoppered most of the world's major rivers with dams.

There are thousands of papers, I have oodles of them in my files, on the recovery of this oceanic uranium, if it were needed, albeit at a higher cost than mined uranium.

Uranium is inexhaustible. Dysprosium is not.

It is the extraordinary energy density of nuclear fuels that makes them environmentally superior to fossil fuels, about which again antinukes couldn't care less, as well as all the so called "renewable energy" junk that antinukes peddle to attack nuclear energy.

The above, of course does not apply to our existing nuclear fleet, which is largely based on 20th century technology, since antinukes have successfully vandalized the intellectual and manufacturing nuclear infrastructure in the Western world, although China has made huge strides in building such an infrastructure.

However all of the above is feasible, if not immediately accessible.

It is technically feasible to live in a world with very low requirements for mining, but mining interests have won the day by selling a snake oil like scheme to keep the fossil fuel industry in place, with wind and solar lipstick on the pig, where it is choking us to death, this by selling the absurd idea that mining millions of tons of metals for so called "renewable energy" is "green."

It isn't.

Have a nice day.

Stop telling lies.


https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=189043

The deployment of solar PV, wind power, nuclear power, electric cars and heat pumps since 2019 avoided annual global fossil fuel energy demand of more than 35 EJ in 2025. This is equivalent to around 7% of fossil fuel demand in 2025, or the combined total energy demand of Latin America. The deployment of these technologies displaced over 23 EJ of coal, more than 9 EJ of natural gas, and around 3 EJ of oil in 2025. The coal displaced exceeds India’s total coal demand in 2025, while natural gas displacement is equivalent to almost half the global LNG market. Electric cars account for roughly two-thirds of the annual oil displaced, with part of the emissions reductions impact of this displacement offset by increases in coal and natural gas use to meet additional electricity demand.

Together, solar PV, wind power, nuclear power, electric cars and heat pumps avoided around 3 Gt of CO₂ emissions in 2025, equivalent to around 8% of global energy-related CO₂ emissions annually. In some markets, the impact has been even more pronounced. In China, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil, the deployment of these technologies since 2019 avoided the equivalent of more than 10% of energy-related CO₂ emissions in 2025.

Globally, the rollout of solar PV made the largest contribution, avoiding 1.5 Gt of annual CO₂ emissions, equivalent to around half of India’s total annual CO₂ emissions in 2025. Half of the emissions avoided by solar PV were in China. Avoided emissions from deployment of wind power amounted to 1.1 Gt of CO₂, equivalent to the combined annual emissions of France, Germany and Italy. Nuclear power, electric cars and heat pumps followed at 210 Mt, 100 Mt and 90 Mt of CO₂ respectively. While the avoided emissions from electric cars and heat pumps are lower than from the other technologies studied, they may increase in coming years as the stock of these technologies continues to expand.

I happen to have noticed that after spending trillions of dollars on solar and wind junk, more than is being spent on any other form of energy, they have done zero, zip, nada, zilch to address the use of fossil fuels.

As a result the world is literally burning.

You only dislike it when the authorities disagree with you.

Tell me, if two people offer their opinions, one an expert who has studied the topic for years, and the other, some random person offering an uninformed opinion, whose opinion would you give more weight to?

Now we can forget about coal and mountain top strip mine the mountains for lithium until there are no mountains no more.

John Denver will turn in his grave when he hears the news. Who's gonna break it to him and then rewrite the words to this song?

At least that’s what I’ve read about the new solid state technology due to come on line in the next couple of years.

A lot - a hell of a lot, thousands upon thousands of papers - have been written about sodium batteries, but after decades of publishing about them, I'm personally unaware of a commercial plant for manufacturing them.

Any and all batteries are subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics meaning they waste energy and thus destroy exergy.

The enthusiasm for batteries is all based on the fantasy that so called "renewable energy" is sustainable and "green." It is neither. The mining requirements alone make both so called "renewable energy" unsustainable, not to mention the land requirements. Almost evergy grid scale battery installation on this planet is partially charged by fossil fuel combustion, and fossil fuels, not batteries are the real backup for so called "renewable energy."

The situation with respect to hydrogen is even worse. We have exercises on greenwashing fossil fuels as "hydrogen: running here regularly, often focusing on China. China is the only country to have more than 1000 coal plants, more than the next 20 most coal dependent countries combinrd and still we have ads run here claiming that electrolysis in China is "green."

Batteries are not "green" because electricity is not "green" anywhere on Earth except maybe France, and if one believes that hydroelectricity is "green" - which I personally don't - in countries like Norway and Costa Rica and Uruguay.

Perhaps the label “Green” is a misnomer, and “Greener” or “less harmful than burning fossil fuels” is more accurate.

I drive a plug in hybrid, and 90% of my driving is in EV mode. As I mentioned my electricity comes from hydro, so regardless of whatever fossil fuels were used to manufacture my vehicle, I burn very little in my daily use.

I noticed you didn’t propose an alternative to renewables to mitigate the effects of burning fossil fuels, do you have one. You made no specific mention of wind or solar either.

IMO, renewables are, at the very least, a valid interim measure until technology advances and lifestyle changes can provide a viable long term, sustainable energy grid that can reduce or, hopefully, eliminate dependence on fossil fuels.

If one is familiar with me, one knows that I believe the only sustainable form of energy is nuclear energy.

I also drive a hybrid car, about which I feel guilty, since I know my lifestyle is not sustainable.

Although you have held them for decades (and I have been so foolish to read them) they remain in conflict with science.

https://www.pnnl.gov/explainer-articles/renewable-integration

Adolf Hitler asked Ferdinand Porche to design a People's Car, in German a "Volkswagen."

The result was the Volkswagen Bug. There's a picture of Hitler admiring the car on the internet.

When I was a young hippie type, I and many of my friends drove bugs. They were cheap and had impressive gas mileage for that time. Is the logic of the antinukism now that all hippies who drove Volkswagen Bugs were Nazis?

If the Orange Peophile in the White House says that a golf ball is a sphere - assuming he knows what a sphere is - does that mean that it is an tetrahedron?

There's also a picture on the ORNL website of smiling Jacquiline and John Kennedy with Al Gore's father, in the control room of a nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge in 1959 with Alvin Weinberg . I would be an appalling idiot if I claimed this as a reason to support Molten Salt reactors. The reactors stand or fail on their technical performance, not on what politicians thought or think of them.

George W. Bush has solar cells on his ranch, but I'm not such a moron as to use this to assert that solar cells are unsustainable garbage. They're unsustainable garbage in my view whether Bush uses them or not.

That former Secretaries of Energy Steven Chu and Jennifer Granholm both supported nuclear energy has no bearing on whether nuclear energy has a low carbon impact. The carbon impact may be why they supported it but the number itself has no relationship to their opinion of it.

We seem to be having a festival of desperate whining today, pulling out logical fallacy after logical fallacy to support the unsupportable.

Again, in case we missed it the first time, trillions of dollars have been squandered on solar and wind, vast mines constructed to make them, and vast stretches of former wilderness industrialized to install them. They have had no effect on the rise in concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide. I monitor this pretty much every damned day.

The "hydrogen will save us" moron engages in this type of rhetoric "guilt by association" all the time,. It does not change the fact that China is adding over 90 new coal plants to the more than 1000 they have now.

In the last two weeks, the rate of increase at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory has slowed.

I suspect the slowing of the rate of carbon dioxide increases in the last two weeks to be attributable tobthe closure of the Straits of Hormuz and higher oil and gas prices. If I'm right about that does this make the Orange Pedophile in the White House an environmentalist? Does this make his war a good thing?

This unserious nonsense is tellling.

I am, however perfectly sincere. Your opposition to renewables is just as irrational as our President’s.

Although I’d rather be known as a “Floating Offshore Wind Turbines” kind of guy. Hydrogen will help though; just ask the innovators in China and Northern Europe.

If I’ve mentioned your alignment with the anti-renewable, pro-nuclear Trump it is to point out the resemblance and similar weakness of your reasoning with respect to those energy technologies. Any feeling of guilt by association is your own issue.

BTW I may not know much but I do know something about Volkswagen Beetles, being one of the many who went through multiple greasy copies of “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive” and numerous cross country trips fighting to stay above 25mph on the highway against headwinds or high altitude. They helped me develop a Small is Beautiful and Simpler is Better attitude that lends itself to thinking about clean renewable energy (windmills!). ‘Cause I’m still pretty hip, daddio.

...associate yourself with that description, you are free to do so.

Every hydrogen moron on the planet is selling fossil fuels.

Unlike hydrogen morons, wherever and whomever they may be, I oppose fossil fuels.

For the record, before I was educated I was a hydrogen moron.

I have zero tolerance for bait and switch nonsense, particularly when it displays ignorance of one of the most beautiful laws of science, the second law of thermodynamics.

Hydrogen morons around here go on and off my ignore list since their appalling ignorance sometimes infuriates me, because it's such an obviously obscene scheme as it exists, easy to dismiss.

As I often point out, hydrogen is an important industrial reagent on which the world food supply depends. I have personally performed many chemical reactions with it which I am trained to do. Putting in the daily lives of people not trained to handle it, especially when they exhibit such a low level of knowledge is a recipe for disaster.

As for self descriptions of people, I don't credit them at all. The orange pedophile in the White House has described himself as a very stable genius, which of course laughable.

Have a nice day.

..could waste time waxing romantic about whether someone is making sodium batteries somewhere.

I'm not interested in batteries, except to demonstrate that they are asinine in a world largely powered by fossil fuels, since they are devices that destroy, in most cases exergy, although in some devices like a hybrid car they can recover it.

I spend about two to thee hours a day in the primary scientific literature. The search engine I use is Google Scholar, although there are six major scientific journals I monitor regularly. I often reference these here.

Even so, I said "to my knowledge." Confessing that one doesn't know something is a sign of wisdom, to my way of thinking, a perfectly reasonable practice, and I think anyone who thinks that it isn't is probably relatively fairly unfamiliar with what knowledge might be.

The most intelligent people I know can readily say "I don't know."

So what's the point, that sodium batteries are saving the world?

If I were running around pretending to treat, say, Jim Hansen, as an oracle, quoting his views on the climate disaster while ignoring what he says about addressing it, I'd be careful about claiming who is and is not a fool.

That's just me though.

I have a clear opinion of what a fool might be and I'm hardly restrained, within the limits of this place, about recognizing one when I see one. I'm quite sure I run into them all the time.

Have a nice day.

A rational response to the crisis we face is to use all tools at our disposal. Your support of nuclear power is fine, it’s part of the “solution” (if there is a solution.) It is not a panacea, nor is it innocuous, any more than renewable sources, or batteries are.

However, every expert believes that renewables (enabled by energy storage technologies like batteries) will be a more significant contributor to the cause than nuclear power will be.

I would deny the authority of anyone to assert what every energy expert thinks, because I read broadly on energy science, having spent much of my free time doing so.

There are many people who have raised questions about so called "renewable energy" and its material and land use. I've probably referenced hundreds of them here over the years

Even the antinuke Benny Sovacool, who advocated ripping the seafloor apart for minerals for this junk has begun to question himself. Recently he discovered that the California desert is actually a vibrant ecosystem. I found that surprising, because he's generally an insufferable ass in my opinion.

There is however, I agree, no panacea. It is too late for nuclear energy to do what it might have done to save what is left to save or restore what might be restored.

This world, the burning world in which we live, is the final monument to the success of antinukes. People like my son are working to pick up the pieces.

My opinion which is not subject to reversal by whining, is that nuclear energy, invented by the finest minds of the 20th century and vilified by some of the smallest minds of that century and this, was, is, and always will be, the cleanest, if imperfect, form of energy there is.

No amount of chanting at this point, at the end of my life, is likely to dissuade me from this view, developed after decades of reading and thinking for which I will not apologize.

Somehow these technologies never work out and we continue to burn fossil fuels.

What's worse, some of these pie-in-the-sky technologies continue to be promoted long after there is ample proof they don't work.

We already have the technologies we need to quit fossil fuels. We just have to do it.

As for energy storage systems, there will always be incremental technological advances. Nevertheless we are already pushing close to the limits imposed upon us by the physical universe itself.

"We already have the technologies we need to quit fossil fuels. We just have to do it."

Clean energy technologies appear to be at an inflection point where they are becoming economically competitive with fossil fuels. They are approaching "critical mass" in energy markets.