Computer simulations said “Yes,” Reality said “No”

Energy is the lifeblood of civilization – the more the better. One of the great hopes for the last 50 years has been clean energy from fusion, and many very fine physicists have dedicated careers to this holy grail.  Perhaps the greatest hope for fusion has been the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

At the National Ignition Facility the plan is to compress a small bead containing hydrogen to the extreme temperature and pressure at which fusion will occur.  This compression would be accomplished with an extraordinary array of high-powered lasers that would all converge on to a tiny 2mm bead.  If all works well the enormous amount of energy to power the lasers would be more than replaced by the energy released by the fusion reaction.  The hope is to repeat this process with a new hydrogen bead 16 times a second, yielding a continuous supply of useful heat to generate electricity.

Scientist at the National Ignition Facilty expected that hydrogen ignition (the point where fusion occurs and more energy is released than invested) would occur last year.  But it didn’t.  According to ScienceNews…

A lot of that confidence came from computer simulations… Each simulation consisted of more than a million lines of code filled with numbers and equations describing every push and pull that nuclei in the fuel capsule would encounter once the laser fired. All the data included in the simulations were based on well-tested theories and rigorous experiments, including measurements from hundreds of thermonuclear bomb explosions. The world’s fastest supercomputers required days or weeks to spit out the results.

Many of these simulations predicted that NIF’s 192-beam laser would comfortably achieve ignition. They showed that a short, powerful laser pulse coming from all directions would compress the pellet enough to create heat and pressure more intense than that in the sun’s core, forcing hydrogen nuclei together to form high-energy helium nuclei and neutrons.

No such luck.

Ignition was a failure.  I am not condemning the scientists at the National Ignition facility.  In this type of endeavour failure is just a stepping stone to success.  In fact, I  have great admiration for the folks working on this project and I hope funding and research continues.

Complex simulations

Here’s the thing: those millions of lines of code were modeling something that is relatively simple.  Hydrogen nucleosynthesis is well understood.   The models had to simulate just a single compression and ignition event. There were only a few variables compared to the thousands of variables for something as complex as, say, the climate of the planet Earth.

I have a lot more faith in talents and mental horsepower of the quiet anonymous physicists modeling the relatively simple fusion of hydrogen than I have in some of the self-important bumbling climate modelers working on the vastly more complex climate of the planet.

Just consider the grand poobah of climate modelers, James Hansen.  Ira Glickstein did a nice job of pulling back the curtain on Hansen’s modeling skills with this …

James Hansen’s 1988 models vs reality, From Ira Glickstein, WUWT, 3/20/2013)

The folks at the National Ignition Facility run their experiments, perhaps sometimes chastened by the results, but wiser and closer to their ultimate goal.

Hansen’s experiments are run by nature and take decades, but when he is wrong he is hardly chastened.  Hansen retired from his position at NASA a few days ago.  The Washington Post reported that Hansen said he was retiring so he could “spend full time on science.”  Does that mean he wasn’t spending his time on science at NASA?  His friend, Bill McKibben was probably closer to the mark when he said Hansen ”decided to step down so he could engage in lawsuits and protests full time.”

Hansen was also predictably lauded by his friend Gavin Schmidt.  I guess McKibben and Schmidt haven’t seen the above graph.

Use wind turbines to compress air for compressed air cars?

Remember Tata Motors’ plan for a car that ran off of compressed air?  There was a lot of talk about this back in 2009.  They planned to bring such a vehicle, based on Motor Development International’s (MDI) technology, to market by 2011.  But there were many technical problems, with some potential show stoppers.  The compressed air car was not seen as terribly efficient because of various conversion losses, using electric or gas-powered motors to compress the air.

What if?

But what if the compressed air could be acquired without and electric or gas motor?

I have always wondered if this might be an ideal use of wind turbines.  Electrical energy from wind turbines, like electric energy from photovoltaics, suffers from the lack of a practical storage method.  Let’s say you want to run your electric car off of energy from a wind turbine.  Kinetic energy of the wind is converted to mechanical (kinetic) energy of the turbine, which is converted to electrical energy in the generator (suffering from grid losses as it is delivered to your charging station), which is converted to chemical energy in your battery, which then converted back into electrical energy for the magnetic coils of the motor, which is converted back into mechanical energy to turn your wheels.

What if the mechanical energy of the turbine  instead used to compress air or another gas?  A compressed air car pulls up to the storage tank of the turbine compressed air, fills up and drives away.  No generator, no transmission lines, no battery and no electric motor conversions involved.  This would take advantage of the best features of wind turbines and compressed air cars, eliminating some of the losses that make each of them less efficient.

Fluid compressing wind turbine system

I started thinking about this again today when reading about a proposal by Winhyne Energy Group to build a turbine system in Wyoming in which the turbine would compress a fluid instead of turning a generator.  The compressed fluid would them either turn a generator, or be stored to power the generator when the wind was not available.

Here is a schematic of a single turbine/single generator system…

Turbine compressed fluid system designed by Lancaster Wind Systems, Inc.

Couldn’t something similar be done to compress a gas?

New life for compressed air vehicles

While Tata Motors’ bold claims of bringing a compressed air vehicle to market by 2011 fizzled, the hope is not dead.  Last year Tata said it was done with its first phase of development and it “ has now been successfully completed with the compressed  air engine concept having been demonstrated in two Tata Motors vehicles” and that they were now in the second phase  and and that MDI and Tata “are working together to complete detailed development of the technology and required technical processes to industrialize a market ready product application over the coming years.”

Note that the recently announced Peugeot compressed air car, to be marketed by 2016, is not really the same thing.  This is a hybrid system has a gasoline or diesel engine and does not have an air tank that you “fill up” with compressed air.  Rather, is captures braking energy to compress air, which can then be used for acceleration.  This concept offers great fuel saving potential in cities where frequent stop and start driving causes large energy losses to braking.

An unfortunate event at WattsUpWithThat

Update 5:40 pm.  It appears that my comment has been reinstated at WUWT.  Thank you to WUWT.  All’s well that ends well.

I have been critical of RealClimate on a few occasions for deleting my comments (see here and here).  These comments were technical in nature and relevant to the posts.  But they were critical of the points being made at RealClimate.

I did not think I would see the day when something similar would happen at WattsUpWithThat.

There was a post yesterday at WUWT concerning the Organization Studies journal paper “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change.”  I wrote about that paper myself yesterday.

This morning I attempted to post a comment on the WUWT post.  I included many quotes form the original  Organization Studies journal paper.  I wanted to highlight those quotes by using the HTML ”blockquote” tag, which indents the quote.  I was typing in simple text editor, and unfortunately misspelled “blockquote.”  Then I copied and pasted that misspelling multiple times throughout my comment.

Then I copied and pasted the whole comment into the comment box on WUWT. When I pushed the “post comment” button in WUWT, I was able to immediately see my mangled comment.  The content was fine, but the formatting of the indents was strange.

Here is my comment, verbatim, with the proper blockquote fomatting…

I criticized this post by saying…

It is clear to me that the folks at IBD (and the folks here at WUWT who authored this post) either did not actually read “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change” or did not understand it.

JustTheFacts responded with some quotes form the original journal paper and noted…

one might deduce that I had read some portion of the paper. In terms of understanding the paper, the data in Table 4 on page 1492 and the conclusions are quite clear, well educated professional experts with scientific training/geoscientists are quite skeptical of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) narrative.

Yes, yes , you are almost right about table 4. The point of the paper was the that these in Alberta leaned to the skeptical when it comes to global warming. That is why Alberta was chosen. That table is labeled “Frames’ relative positioning (percent) within their organization and industry.” Alberta was the laboratory, so to speak, in which the minds of the “deniers” (their word, not mine) could be probed and examined.

The important part of the paper, from the author’s perspective, is about “Framing experts’ identities,” where they try to figure out why these experts think the way they do. That is the type of approach that social scientists take – they want to see what makes you tick. That is why the social sciences probably should not be called sciences at all. It is easier for them to make up stories about why people think the way they do based on their “identities” and “relative positioning” rather than examining the scientific merits of their arguments. If you really think that this paper supports your (and my) view on expert opinion concerning global warming, I suggest you re-read the ”discussion and conclusion.” Here are some highlights…

Nor is this merely a binary debate of whether climate change is ‘science or science fiction’. There are more nuanced intermediary frames that are constructed by these professionals. Indeed, by differing in their normalization and rationalization of nature, they vary in their identification with and defensiveness against others, and in their mobilization of action.

Get it? They say deniers (their word, not mine) are “defensive.”

Or this. These professionals…

…engage in identity and boundary work – to varying degrees – to legitimate themselves as experts and delegitimate opponents as non-experts, while establishing the cognitive authority of their version of science versus others’ non-science. Defense can result from different worldviews and from identity threats.

Or this.

Our findings give greater granularity in understanding which professionals are more likely to resist, why and how they will resist, and who is more likely to be successful…

… an interest-based discourse coalition may be formed that has the potential to overcome the defensiveness.

Get it? Resistance may not be futile – but we’re working on it.

JustTheFacts, I have seen you do some good work here on WUWT. But you blew it this time. Please take this as constructive criticism.

There are lessons to be learned

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/science-or-science-fiction-professionals-discursive-construction-of-climate-change/

So I went back, found a misspelled blockquote tag, corrected it,  added an apology to the top of my comment and reposted comment.

Rats!  When  the second version showed up I again discovered that there must be more than one blockquote error.  Mea Culpa.  I repeated the same process: correction, another apology, and posted again.

Still not right.

Note that none of these corrections changed the content in any way (other than the apology at the top), only the HTML blockquote tags were modified.

At this point, there were three versions of the same comment, all awaiting approval.

Eventually, one of them was approved, but had a moderator’s comment saying that two of the versions had been removed and that I should stop “spamming the thread.”  I figured a human being reading my posts would understand that I was not “spamming the thread” because of the prefaced apologies.  On the other hand,  an automated routine might interpret my comments as spam.

I responded with an explanation.  Here it is, verbatim…

Moderator,

thank you for removing my previous posts. Please note that I messed up the blockquote tags, which made the post difficult to read. After several attempts I almost got it right. Almost. The attempts to get it write (sic) were prefaced with an apology.

However, I was not “spamming the thread.” I sure hope that the “spamming the thread” note was an automated response – not the response of a human being.

Moments later, the approved version of the comment disappeared and was replaced with this form Kajajuk (who I assume is the moderator)…

Kajajuk says:

February 18, 2013 at 11:04 am

[dude . . you are drunk . .come back tomorrow . . mod]

Then my explanation was replace with this from Kajajuk…

Kajajuk says:

February 18, 2013 at 11:08 am

[snip . . i mean it, go home . . mod]

Now, I have seen other cases comments with formatting or content mistakes on WUWT  and have found them handled with good humor.

In this case, the content of my comment was  detailed and valid.  It was easy, or should have been easy for the moderator to see that.   My comment added a perspective that I did not see on any of the other comments.  But my comment was also highly critical of post.  In fact, if my analysis of the Organization Studies journal paper is correct, then the WUWT post author has made an embarrassing mistake.

As I said, I have seen some good work from JustTheFacts (the author of the WUWT post), but he got it very wrong this time.

Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change

The headlines blazed!!

Forbes said…

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

IBD said…

Global Warming Consensus Looking More Like A  Myth

WattsUpWithThat copied the the IBD headline.  And we are off and running.

The headlines of these blog articles all refer to the paper, “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change,” in the journal Organization Studies.

Essentially, Forbes, IBD and WUWT were all saying  “Yippee!!  Here is a survey that shows most science and engineering professionals lean to the skeptical side when it comes to the question of global warming.”

Lessons to be learned here, and they are not pleasant.

I was given a hard copy to the Forbes article about the paper while visiting with a friend at a coffee shop. He knows of and shares my skepticism concerning much of the global warming alarmism. He shared the Forbes article as confirmation that skepticism was gaining ground. The Forbes article certainly presented it that way.

I thought “this would be a good topic  about which to write a blog post.”  (I also selfishly thought maybe I could scoop WUWT in this one.)  So, I got out my computer, logged onto the the coffee shop’s wi-fi and looked up the article.  Much to my chagrin, I found that the Forbes article (and subsequently the IBD article and even the WUWT article) greatly misrepresented the journal paper.

For those of you who have not actually read the journal paper, here is what it is really about: some social scientists are trying to peer into the minds of “deniers” (their word choice, not mine) to see what makes them tick.  What better laboratory could they find than engineers in Alberta that are likely associated with the gas and oil industry!

The authors of the paper are not saying “a bunch of smart scientist and engineer types think global warming is largely over-blown – maybe you should consider their perspective.” Rather, they are saying “Those poor engineer types up there in Alberta live in a world that revolves around oil and gas and their psyches are not able to grasp the true dangers of global warming because of the social and political structure in which they live.  What are the proper tactics to bring them around to the right kind of thinking?” (Not their actual words, but my interpretation of their words.)

Lesson #1

Maybe we ought to actually read journal papers before we start writing blog posts to interpret them for others.

Lesson #2

This journal article is an illustration of the primary problem in the global warming debate, and debates concerning other controversial scientific subjects (like GM plants and animals).  That is, many are fooled into thinking that weighing the credentials (or the social background, or the professional background, or the political affiliation, etc) of the advocate of a particular perspective is an adequate shortcut around the more arduous task of weighing the arguments of the advocate.  To wit, we don’t have to waste time listening to the reasoning of scientists and engineers from Alberta, we can simply dismiss them because the circumstances of those poor souls prevents them from being able to reason fairly.  This is the seductive path of lazy thinkers.

Lesson #3

Bad things could happen at WUWT when Anthony Watts takes a well deserved week-end break.

Lesson #4

My guess is that the authors of “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change” are having a good laugh at the expense of Forbes, IBD, and WUWT

Containment is easier for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)

Check this picture out.  It is a crane lifting a 40 meter wide, 4.5 cm thick dome for the top of a nuclear reactor containment building under construction in China.  The containment building is extraordinarily massive, the dome alone weighs 655 tonnes (1.4 million pounds).

Believe it on not, the containment building’s purpose is to capture a steam explosion.

Steam Explosion

Water boils at 100°C at one atmosphere of pressure, but the boiling temperature goes up at higher pressures.  For example, the water in your car radiator will go to higher than 100°C without boiling because the radiator is pressurized to about 2 atmospheres when the car is warmed up.  What happens if the pressure is suddenly released by a puncture or someone foolishly removing the radiator cap?  See the video below for a steam explosion…

Carnot engine efficiency increases with increasing temperature, so there is a great advantage to running a nuclear reactor (or any heat engine) at high temperatures, which requires very high pressures to keep the reactor’s water from completely boiling.  Conventional boiling water reactors and pressurized water reactors operate at around 70 atmospheres and 160 atmospheres to achieve temperatures of 285°C and 315°C respectively.  If water escapes from the reactor for any reason it will instantly expand to about 1600 times its liquid volume as it explodes into steam.  The containment building is supposed to capture that exploding steam.  It is so massive because it must restrain the steam under great pressure without exploding itself.

Containment building

But this type of massive containment building would not be necessary for a Liquid fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR)!  This type of reactor concept does not use water to transfer heat away from solid pieces of fissioning metals.  Instead, thorium is dissolved in liquid fluoride salts, where it is converted to uranium233, which fissions and generates heat.  One of the beauties of the LFTR is that the liquid fluoride salts can go to incredible temperatures before they boil – temperatures vastly exceeding the operating temperature of the reactor.    Consequently, the reactor operates at atmospheric pressure – no high pressure needed.  In the event of a liquid leak there would be no explosive effect like the water instantly boiling into steam in a conventional reactor.

The LFTR would operate at around 700°C, reaching a much higher carnot efficiency than boiling water reactors or pressurized water reactors.  Yet the fluid medium of the LFTR would not boil until reaching the extraordinary temperature of about 1400°C.

read more…

See the Energy from Thorium website for much more information about this revolutionary concept, or read “Thorium: Energy Cheaper Than Coal,” by Robert Hargraves.

Its even worse than Al Gore said

I was amused to read the meme about global warming being like the explosion of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day on the planet.  Both James Hansen and Al Gore have made this claim.

Guess what? They could be right!

And here is another thing: The CFL bulbs in my basement are like the detonation of a pound of TNT every day!

First, the 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs meme

Presumed extra CO₂ forcing: This value is highly debatable, but I will play along with a commonly quoted warmist value: 0.6 Watts/m² = 0.6 Joules /( s  m² )
Surface area of the Earth: 5.1 x 10¹⁴ m²
Seconds in a day: 86,400 s / day
Yield of Hiroshima bomb: 15 kilotons of TNT
Kilotons of TNT to Joule conversion: 4.2 x 10¹² Joules / kilotons of TNT

So, presumed total forcing due to CO₂:
{0.6 Joules /( s  m² )} x {5.1 x 10¹⁴ m²} x 86,400 s / day
≈ 2.6 x 10¹⁹ Joules / day

The yield of Hiroshima bomb in Joules:
{15 kilotons of TNT} x {4.2 x 10¹² Joules / kilotons of TNT} = 6.3 x 10¹³ Joules

Number of Hiroshima bomb equivalents per day:
{2.6 x 10¹⁹ Joules / day} / {6.3 x 10¹³ Joules} ≈ 400,000 / day

Detonation of TNT in my basement

Number of CFLs in main basement room: 6
Power of each CFL: 16 Watts = 16 Joules / second
Operating time each day: 6 hours = 21,600 seconds

energy released by the CFLs in my basement:
6 x {16 Joules / second) x {21,600 seconds} ≈ 2.1 x 10⁶ Joules

Equivalent mass of TNT:
{2.1 x 10⁶ Joules} / {4.2 x 10¹² Joules / kilotons of TNT} = 5 x 10^-5 kilotons of TNT
=  0.5 kilograms of TNT ≈ 1 pound of TNT

But it gets even worse

As if it weren’t bad enough having the equivalent of a pound of TNT blowing up in my basement every day – there is something worse. Much worse.

The sun irradiates the surface of the planet with enough energy for my own personal Hiroshima atomic bomb blast every 40 days or so.  And your own personal blast. And a blast for every single man, woman and child.  The equivalent of 7 billion Hiroshima blasts every 42 days!

Average insolation at the surface of the Earth: 250 W/ m² = 250 J / s /m²
Surface area of the Earth: 5.1 x 10¹⁴ m²

Total solar power at the surface of the Earth:
{250 J / s /m²} x {5.1 x 10¹⁴ m²} ≈ 1.25 x 10¹⁷ J / s

So how long does it take for the equivalent of 7 billion Hiroshimas?

Energy of 7 billion Hiroshimas / total solar power at the surface of the Earth
= {7 x 10⁹} x {6.3 x 10¹³ Joules} / {1.25 x 10¹⁷ J / s} ≈ 3.6 x 10⁶ s ≈  42 days

So there you have it, we all get our own personal Hiroshima every 42 days.

James Lovelock says nuclear better than wind.

James Lovelock has worn many hats.  He worked with NASA to make instruments for studying extraterrestrial planetary atmospheres and surfaces.  He invented the electron capture detector for studying traces of various chemicals in gas.  He has been awarded multiple prizes from many academic and environmental groups.

However, he is best known as the founding father of the much-loved (by environmental groups) ”Gaia Theory.”  According to GaiaTheory.org…

“The Gaia Theory posits that the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating system. It suggests that this living system has automatically controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability. In a phrase, “life maintains conditions suitable for its own survival.” In this respect, the living system of Earth can be thought of analogous to the workings of any individual organism that regulates body temperature, blood salinity, etc.”

This seductive reasoning ignores the reality that life evolves, as best it can, to survive in a given environment, and while life may change the environment it does not “automatically control” it to “maintain its own habitability.”  But my point here is not to argue with the Gaia theory.

Lovelock was an icon in environmentalist circles, but since he started publicly endorsing nuclear energy a few years ago his aura seems to be fading.  He has been condemned as being senile or worse (see here or comments here).

In a recent comment (see discussion at Bishop-Hill.net) Lovelock condemns a single proposed wind turbine in a bucolic English setting, calling it “industrial vandalism.”  But more importantly he goes on to say…

“we should look to the French who have wisely chosen nuclear energy as their principal source; a single nuclear power station provides as much as 3200 large wind turbines.”

I am not one to condemn wind turbines for aesthetic reasons.  In fact, I find that modern wind turbines have their own beauty in their graceful structure.  But Lovelock is certainly right in his comparison of the utility of wind turbines with nuclear energy.

Lovelock closes his comments with this homily…

I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.