Rudd rejects Labor nuclear push

Rudd rejects Labor nuclear push

THE Rudd Government has flatly rejected calls from an influential unionist and the former Labor premier Bob Carr to embrace a nuclear power industry as it grapples with how to cut carbon emissions.

Kevin Rudd told ABC radio this morning the nuclear option was not needed.

And in a short media conference, Treasurer Wayne Swan, when asked about the renewed nuclear push answed: “No, a capital N-O.”

The issue was reignited after The Australian reported this morning that Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes and Mr Carr had called on the Government to purge its prejudices and embrace a nuclear power industry.

Their advocacy came at the annual Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Washington after a debate on climate change.

“If we are going to be a green Labor Government, then we have to look at nuclear,” Mr Howes told The Australian.

“If we don’t start today, we are going to put ourselves in a very precarious position in 10, 15 or 20 years time.”

“I’ve told ministers in the Rudd Government this is my view and the view of my union. I can’t tell you how concerned I am about this. It’s the greatest challenge the union movement has faced since trade liberalisation in the 1980s, if not greater.

“The only option for us, in my view, is nuclear. If we are going to reduce our carbon output and still want to have heavy industry then we have to look at renewable and new sources of energy – and that means nuclear.”

Mr Carr described nuclear power as the critical bridge between the carbon era and energy from renewable sources.

“There is no other bridging technology to get us from this catastrophic burning of coal and oil into the era of cheap and infinite renewable power,” the former NSW Labor premier said.

“We all want to get there. But it’s decades off and we need a bridge. The best the Western world can do to stop the melting of the polar icecaps is to sponsor the production of the most modern nuclear power plants.”

But the Prime Minister said today: “We believe that we have a full range of energy options available to Australia beyond nuclear through which we can respond to the climate change challenge, and we’re confident we can do that,” he said.

Mr Rudd also reiterated that the coal industry must remain part of a long-term solution and that clean coal technologies must be further developed, but he was optimistic about its future.

“What the nation needs to set for itself and the world is a goal to bring about the commercial application and scale of clean-coal technologies,” he said.

The climate change issue will continue to dominate the political agenda over the next week, with the Government’s climate change expert Ross Garnaut to release his interim report next Friday.

A Government green paper is to follow.

As the Government moved to dismiss the nuclear option, Mr Howes continued his push.

“In the UK, there’s going to be the expansion of nuclear facilities there,” he told Fairfax radio today.

“France now has 80 per cent of its power generated from nuclear, all as short solutions, that is 20 to 50 year solutions until other technologies, such as fusion and hot rock, … are developed and are widely available as baseload power.”

Nuclear power would always be a sensitive issue, he said.

“But we have 40 per cent of the world’s uranium in Australia.

“Labor has overturned the three mines policy and I think it’s now a time for another healthy, sensible and rational debate about this issue without falling back to alarmist sentiments.”

Rudd’s and Labor’s position on nuclear power is based completely on ideology and dogma, in the absence of any evidence. What is their scientifically, factually motivated argument against nuclear energy?

If we “have a full range of energy options available to Australia beyond nuclear through which we can respond to the climate change challenge” then what the hell are they, actually?

Rudd can either put up or shut up. Meanwhile, no impact is being made in the use of coal at all.

So, what are these magical options that Rudd has up his sleeve? How mature are the technologies? How much energy do they generate, how easily can they be scaled up, how much do they cost when scaled up to replace coal plants, and how much carbon dioxide and other forms of pollution do they emit – and why aren’t we using them to replace coal fired power stations right now, without the bullshit?

If there’s some magical thing that Rudd is sitting on that is superior to nuclear energy – which there isn’t – then let’s see it. I’m calling him out on it, right now. Since no superior option exists for replacing coal-fired power stations, nuclear energy is what is needed.

Even the AWU realises that burning coal in this way is completely unsustainable – why does the Rudd government insist on remaining committed to coal?

If we check out The Australian’s poll we see – once again – that a clear majority of Australians think the same way.

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a popular book written by David J.C. MacKay, who is Professor of Natural Philosophy in the department of physics at the University of Cambridge. It’s currently available for download, but it is still at the draft stage.

Read some of this – isn’t it great! I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it really looks impressive to me, it’s saying the things that I really think need to be said.

How can we replace fossil fuels? How can we ensure security of energy supply? How can we solve climate change?

We’re often told that ‘huge amounts of renewable power are available’ – wind, wave, tide, and so forth. But our current power consumption is also huge! To understand our sustainable energy crisis, we need to
know how the one ‘huge’ compares with the other. We need numbers, not adjectives.

This heated debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one ‘huge’ compares with another ‘huge’, namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

“I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear. I’m just pro-arithmetic.”

Interesting posts roundup.

A few interesting pieces from the blogosphere over the last week or so:

Fellow Melbourne based blogger Robert Merkel is discussing some, well, nuclear power stuff over at Larvatus Prodeo.

Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy blog (affiliated with http://news.com.au ) is taking a look at Thorium as a nuclear fuel. It’s good to see some level headed discussion of nuclear energy systems in such a popular media outlet.

Finally, Sovietologist is taking a look at Russia’s proven nuclear “micropower”. I wonder what Lovins has to say about that?

Nuclear discussion quote of the day.

OK, I agree with the portion about how it is OK to stack solutions on top of each other on a graph, but I don’t understand at all why someone my age or younger would prefer small fossil fuel over any size low-GHG.

Please explain.

Karen Street

That’s from the comments thread accompanying Amory Lovins’ essay on GristMill,  in response to David Bradish’s debunking of Lovins’ claims posted at NEI Nuclear Notes.

I always considered this one of the most glaring problems with Lovins’s approach. How can small scale, decentralised or “micropower” generation possibly be preferable to nuclear energy when in practice, the overwhelming majority of the energy generated in such schemes is generated by burning dangerous petroleum fuel (natural gas, generally) and discharging the dangerous fossil fuel waste straight into the atmosphere?

Of course, if you’re really interested in decentralised “microgeneration”, and there are some reasons why some people might be interested in such technology, why not consider small scale, decentralised nuclear generation, like this, this or this?

“Breakthrough car only needs water to go”

“Petrol pricey? Japanese invent car that runs on water”

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) – Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water — rain, river or sea — was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).

“The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,” Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

“It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,” he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit — not consume — water.

(Writing by Chika Osaka, editing by Miral Fahmy and Chang-Ran Kim)

You can’t run a car on water.

It’s bogus, baloney, BS. Anybody that tries to tell you otherwise is trying to scam you.

I suspect that I don’t at all have to convince most of the regular readers of this blog of this fact, but I just needed to state that, for the record, if you will.

You can use electrolysis to generate hydrogen from outside the car, and have a tank of hydrogen in your car, but that’s not a water-powered car, it’s an indirectly electrically powered car, using hydrogen as an energy storage medium. No such technology is especially novel, and it’s certainly far from impossible.

There’s also the option of using the sulfur-iodine cycle to disassociate water into hydrogen, using thermal energy – however, in practice, this disassociation is, overall, not dissimilar to the electrolysis of water, other than in that it employs thermal energy directly as opposed to electricity, and can be considerably more efficient than electrolysis, especially when thermal energy is used directly from a heat source – such as a nuclear reactor – as opposed to driving a heat engine to generate electricity from the nuclear reactor, followed by electrolysis.

(Aside: The SI cycle was invented at General Atomics in the 1970s, and the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has conducted successful experiments with the process with the intent of using high temperature Generation IV nuclear fission power reactors to produce hydrogen on a large scale.)

For that reason, I will focus on electrolysis for this post, but just remember that in terms of stationary generation of hydrogen, the SI process could be substituted anywhere where electrolysis is mentioned.

The fundamental claim of the water-powered car is that electrical energy from the car’s electrical system is used to generate hydrogen via electrolysis of water in situ, which is burned in the internal combustion engine, generating energy.

Alternatively, it might be claimed that water can spontaneously be disassociated into hydrogen, without any energy input.

It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s simply a matter of basic physics.

Let’s start with this.

Thus, the standard potential of a water electrolysis cell 1.23 V at standard pressure and temperature. The positive voltage indicates the Gibbs Free Energy for electrolysis of water is greater than zero. The reaction cannot occur without necessarily adding energy. It is just not thermodynamically favorable.

Electrolysis is not perfectly efficient, of course. It does not convert 100% of the electrical energy into the chemical energy of the resulting hydrogen. The process requires higher voltages what would be expected based on the cell’s total reversible reduction potentials. This excess potential accounts for what is known as electrochemical overpotential. The extra energy supplied, corresponding to these overpotentials, is eventually lost as heat. The reaction overpotential for the oxidation of water to oxygen at the anode is the dominant overpotential in the process, and an effective electrochemical catalyst to facilitate this reaction does not exist.

Platinum alloy electrodes are the default state of the art for this oxidation. The reverse reaction, the reduction of oxygen to water, is responsible for a significant contribution to electrochemical inefficiency in hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells.

Developing a cheap and effective electrochemical catalyst for this reaction would lead to increases to efficiency in both water electrolysis and in hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells – but efficiency can only be increased incrementally towards the ideal 100% – it cannot ever exceed 100% efficiency, of course.

Catalysts are pretty cool, and extremely useful, but they don’t violate the laws of thermodynamics.

The formation of hydrogen gas at the cathode can be electrocatalyzed with almost zero reaction overpotential by platinum, for comparison. Platinum is, of course, an expensive metal, but it is widely used in these applications.

The theoretical maximum efficiency of the electrolysis of water is between 80–94%, whilst in real world, practical contexts, the efficiency achieved is typically around 60%.

It should be obvious to everybody, then, that you cannot generate hydrogen in an electrolytic cell and convert it back to energy in a fuel cell which you then use to generate more hydrogen.

If this could happen with perfect efficiency in all steps then you would have a perpetual cycle from which no useful work can be extracted. Since it can not, does not and will not occur with perfect efficiency in all steps, then it’s basically nothing at all, besides nonsense.

In real-world terms, with an efficiency of around 60% for the electrolysis, and efficiency of 30% or less for energy conversion in the automobile engine, you’re considering an overall efficiency of well under 20% – it simply does not and cannot work.

We have yet another company basically claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine.

It’s bogus. No, I don’t consider it “unscientific” to come right out and say that, with 100% certainty.
Thermodynamics-violating scams are at least as old, probably older, in fact, as the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.

Should we wait and see if more data, results, demonstrations or peer review become available? No. I, for one, wouldn’t bother.

Look at Steorn. Remember them, making headlines a year or two ago? They were going to have peer review of the technology, and public demonstration, and all sorts of proof to convince the naysayers. Have we seen any of it delivered? Nope!

As gas prices rise, and energy becomes a central political topic, more and more people are suckered into taking a second glance at “free energy” peddlers.

There’s no need to be “open minded” about any possible wonderful hitherto unknown scientific discoveries here – it’s entirely just the same old snake oil.

By all means, let’s be open minded, but no so open minded that our brains drop out.

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” – Arthur Eddington.

However, let’s just assume, for a moment, that you can do it.
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that water can magically be disassociated into hydrogen with no energy input.

1 litre – or 1 kilogram – of water will yield 119.2 grams of hydrogen. Combustion of hydrogen yields 143 kJ per gram – therefore, the energy content of water in this form is just over 17 MJ per kilogram.

Gasoline has an energy content of about 47 MJ/kg – therefore, the “fuel economy” of the hypothetical car that can somehow do what we’re describing here is intrinsically limited to being about 2.8 times worse than a conventional petrol engine.

Bright readers will note that the story referenced above refers to a speed of 80 km (50 miles). Yeah, sure – I’m not sure who’s to blame here – the journalists or those people making the claim. I think they’re both as bad as one another.

Maybe we’ll operate on the assumption that they mean 80 kilometers per hour. That means they’re claiming the “fuel efficiency” as 1 litre of water per 80 kilometers. That’s 1.25 L/100 km, corresponding to the equivalent of 68 miles per gallon or 3.46 L/100 km in normal petrol consumption terms. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad at all – aside from the fact, remember, that it’s impossible.

There is, however just one way, in principle, that a water powered car can conceivably work, without violating any of the laws of nature.

This would have to involve liberation of hydrogen from water via electrolysis, followed by energy generation by means of nuclear fusion of the hydrogen.

Suppose your car’s tank is fueled with 1 litre of heavy water. As for light water, I’ll come back to that in a moment. 1.1056 kg of heavy water corresponds to 55.17 moles of molecular deuterium.

I’m not sure, quantitatively, how much of an effect the isotope kinetic effect of deuterium will have on the electrolysis of heavy water. Probably a measurable effect indeed, but for the purposes of argument we’ll ignore it. The energy input required for the production of one molecule of hydrogen via electrolysis is equal to E = 1.23 V * 2 * e / 60%; where 60% is the efficiency, as previously mentioned, or 4.1 electron volts per molecule of hydrogen.

That’s a significant amount of energy relative to the heat of combustion of hydrogen, which is 3 eV per molecule of hydrogen, however it is completely insignificant relative to the 3.27 MeV liberated from deuterium-deuterium fusion to yield helium-3.

Of course, essentially all anthropogenic nuclear fusion technologies, in existence or under development, at present utilize the much easier ignited deuterium-tritium reaction – however, I will consider DD fusion only, since we’re considering a water powered car, not a car powered by water along with tritium or lithium.

That corresponds to 17.4 terajoules of energy output from a litre of heavy water – assuming that, say, 90% of the energy output is required to sustain the confinement conditions for nuclear fusion to occur in a plasma, then we have 1740 gigajoules of energy content.
The equivalent of something around 50,000 litres (13,000 gallons) of petrol.

Imagine being able to drive your car 1.76 million miles on a gallon of heavy water. (or 750,000 kilometers per litre.)

It can’t be done, of course.

There is, at present, no working, mature technology available that can usefully generate energy via nuclear fusion (with the exception of a Teller-Ulam bomb, and that’s of debatable usefulness.), let alone a fusion reactor capable of fitting within and operating within a car.

But there is absolutely nothing, in terms of the natural laws, that precludes it. It’s not at all physically impossible – it’s an engineering problem. Water-powered cars – real water-powered cars are a fantastically interesting thing to dream about, but we won’t be driving them in the foreseeable future.