Hydrogen from sunlight?

This could be some good news, but...

Artificial leaf harnesses sunlight for efficient fuel production

Generating and storing renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, is a key barrier to a clean-energy economy. 

Basically, you have a cell that with sunlight will produce oxygen and hydrogen.  You can do that today efficiently with many different technology like we see below (source) 

So the question is, can this new technology match what we already can do?

Reading the article in details, you can see that you need those raw components :

• Electrodes
• titanium dioxide
• nickel-molybdenum
• gallium arsenide
• Membrane
• Plastic (oil from fossil fuel)

All those need to be mined, extracted, processed with energy mostly from fossil fuels based technology.

Those cells will only work when the sun is shining. Can only convert 10% of sunlight and works for 40 hours... So, it's costly, inefficient and produce waste.  

Quite typical of "Green" energy I would say.

Will this be able to compete with existing technology to produce hydrogen?  Probably not without large subsidies.

Comments?

Nexen pipeline leak in Alberta

How to report the news!

I was reading those news headlines and was wondering how the news was reported.  This is a good example of ALARM-ISM or how to report the news  in a way to make it appear more emotional and catastrophic.

This spill happened around the week of July 13th 2015, in Alberta near Fort McMurray.

You can read headlines like those on :
CBC.ca :

Nexen pipeline leak in Alberta spills 5 million litres
Nexen Energy spill south of Fort McMurray covers about 16,000 square metres

 Here's the detail of the article with my highlights I want to discuss:

One of the largest leaks in Alberta history has spilled about five million litres of emulsion from a Nexen Energy pipeline at the company's Long Lake oilsands facility south of Fort McMurray.

The leak was discovered Wednesday afternoon.

Nexen said in a statement its emergency response plan has been activated and personnel were onsite. The leak has been stabilized, the company said.

The spill covered an area of about 16,000 square metres, mostly within the pipeline corridor, the company said. Emulsion is a mixture of bitumen, water and sand.

The pipeline that leaked is called a "feeder" and runs from a wellhead to the processing plant.

"All necessary steps and precautions have been taken, and Nexen will continue to utilize all its resources to protect the health and safety of our employees, contractors, the public and the environment, and to contain and clean up the spill," the company said in the statement issued Thursday.

Peter Murchland, public affairs manager for the Alberta Energy Regulator, said officials were notified late Wednesday and had staff onsite Thursday to work with Nexen.

"My understanding is that the pipeline and pad site had been isolated and shut-in earlier today, effectively stopping the source of the release," Murchland said

Nexen has contained the leak and started cleaning up the area, he said. There was no word on how long that might take.

"They go through a cleanup phase in accordance with the regulations set by the AER," he said. "And we'll have our subject-matter experts work alongside the operator, today and going forward, to make sure that safety and environmental requirements are met."

The regulator's staff are there to oversee the company's cleanup efforts. Murchland said there have been no reports about any effect on wildlife. The regulator has ordered the company to implement a wildlife protection plan.
Premiers talks focus on energy, pipelines

Greenpeace issued a statement Thursday condemning Alberta's history of pipeline spills.

"As provincial premiers talk about ways to streamline the approval process for new tar sands pipelines, we have a stark reminder of how dangerous they can be," Greenpeace said in a news release.

Canada's premiers are meeting in St. John's, where a major topic of discussion is a national energy strategy.

"This leak is also a good reminder that Alberta has a long way to go to address its pipeline problems, and that communities have good reasons to fear having more built," said Greenpeace communications officer Peter Louwe. "New pipelines would also facilitate the expansion of the tarsands — Canada's fastest-growing source of carbon emissions — and accelerate the climate crisis even more.

"We need to stop new pipeline projects before they're built and focus on building renewable sources of energy that are sustainable and won't threaten communities, our environment, and the planet."

In April 2011, a Plains Midstream Canada ULC pipeline leaked 4.5 million litres of crude oil near a First Nations community in northwest Alberta.

That leak was the largest in the province in 35 years. It contaminated more than three hectares of beaver ponds and muskeg in a densely forested area.

So let's take the highlights one by one

• largest leaks in Alberta history
• Largest by how much, double, triple?  Just saying largest is a bit misleading. The article talks about the second largest at the end which was for 4.5 million litres instead of "around" 5.  So not a big difference considering you probably estimated the 5 million.  
• five million litres
• There are many ways of measuring volumes.  But if you want to capture the imagination using litres is the way to go!  5 millions, OMG.  5 millions litres is also 5000 cubic meter, less alarming.  Or another way of putting it, it's 8 seconds of the discharge of the nearby Athabaska river.  You can also measure it in barrels of oil, which is around 42 thousand.  For a comparison,  the proposed keystone XL pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels per day (1).  So this would be a spill of less than 2h of this pipeline. Ok enough said on the volume!
• Covered an area of about 16,000 square metres
• Here's another way of using as large a number as you can. What other area measure can you use?  You could have used 0.016 km^2.   Or you could have compared it to the area of Alberta in percentage...  0.0000024% (3) of Alberta was temporarily covered by oil that will be removed soon... Oh sorry, this is not alarming enough!  
• There was no word on how long that might take. 
•  The company web page is keeping the public informed on a daily basis of the progress of the clean-up: http://www.nexencnoocltd.com/en/Operations/OilSands/PipelineFailure.aspx
• no reports about any effect on wildlife.
•  This is a very small area and any animals probably already left.  According to steps taken, there's a lot of monitoring and measures taken to keep the wildlife away.
• As of July 28th: Continued wildlife monitoring, A single deceased mallard was found in the release area. The mallard was heavily decomposed and it is believed that it was deceased prior to the release. Nexen has notified the applicable regulators.
• Greenpeace... how dangerous they can be
•  I don't have great respect for this organization, taking every opportunity to destroy the reputation of companies they don't like.  Did they offer their help to protect the environment?  They have budgets of million of dollar, they could have sent a crew of people to help minimize the spill... nope!
• Pipelines remains the safest way to transport oil 

• We are getting better and better at transporting it (4)

•  "We need to stop new pipeline projects before they're built and focus on building renewable sources of energy that are sustainable and won't threaten communities, our environment, and the planet." 
• Please wake up greenpeace... renewable like wind and solar cannot be used to replace oil in all those services it provides:

1. Finished Motor Gasoline (51.4% – a bit more than the national average)
2. Distillate Fuel Oil (15.3%)
3. Jet Fuel (12.3%)
4. Still Gas (5.4%)
5. Marketable Coke (5.0%)
6. Residual Fuel Oil (3.3%)
7. Liquid Refinery Gas (2.8%)
8. Asphalt and Road Oil (1.7%)
9. Other Refined Products (1.5%)
10. Lubricants (0.9%)

•  Maybe we can use a bit more electric cars, but we are not there yet.  Maybe we can produce all those product by other means, but nothing proven and economically viable exist.

 Conclusions:

1. We need to put things in perspective.
2. This spill is not that important and clean-up is under way
3. We are getting cleaner and cleaner
4. Demand for oil will only grow since we have a growing population that needs it to get out of poverty and since we don't have yet other resources to use instead.
5. We need to concentrate on better detection and automatic valve closure to prevent those inside a few seconds of detection.  This is where we need more R&D and regulations. 

 References:

(1) http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/04/large-barrel-oil-measure-way/ 

(2) http://www.nexencnoocltd.com/en/AboutUs/MediaCentre/NewsReleases/News/Release.aspx?year=2015&release_id=B20D782F81434D58889FAE403811D758

(3) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2816000+square+meters%29++%2F+%28area+of+alberta+canada%29+*+100

(4) http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/161057/

Plastic or reusable bag?

February 28th 2014, I posted this on Twitter...

You want to be #GREEN, use #plastic bags... forget about those "green" bags that use resources: http://t.co/Mt7A9d3Xlh
— Simon Filiatrault (@SimonFili) February 28, 2014

And got this response

@SimonFili I'm so confused... next you'll be telling me ethanol is not Green fuel but #nuclear is. #paradigmshifts
— Atomik Rabbit (@Atomikrabbit) March 1, 2014

This warrants a bit more explanation than just 140 chars twitter feeds contains.

The news I linked to is this:

Plastic bags can be recycled into diesel fuel

Here's some excerpt from this new:

• Given that each year an estimated 100 billion shopping bags are thrown away in the US alone, this is great news indeed.
• we can recover almost 80 percent fuel from it through distillation.”
• The process works by heating the plastic bags in an oxygen-free chamber to obtain the oil.
• through pyrolysis into different petroleum products, and have achieved their goal of producing a fuel that meets the standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel and biodiesel fuels.

So this is indeed great news, we can now recycle those plastic bags and renew them.

One may ask...
Does this become a renewable resource?

This is a complex question... like Atomik Rabbit commented... on Ethanol and Nuclear.

The important concept here to understand is about physical economy. Physical economy has nothing to do with money or maybe a little bit, since money is a mean to exchange work. But let's not get into this now.

Humans consume resources, that we understand.  What is less understood is that for each resources we use and "consume", we need energy to transform it.  I put consume in quote here because we don't really consume resources in the sense that the resources is gone (apart from energy), we only transformed it.

Take for example your toast in the morning.  You used energy to grow, extract, transform wheat in the form of bread, need energy again to cook it.  Then you consume the toast.  Did we loose that resource, the original wheat? No, we simply transformed it.  We did loose part of the energy in the process, because we probably used a mix of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, hydro to do the transformation.  Part of the energy used was also transformed, like burning fossil, you create CO2 which is used by plants through photo-synthesis to grow.  The more they have the happier they are.

Other source of energy like hydro, you simply moved water around in a endless cycle.  For nuclear, you use the energy stored in unstable atoms by a fission process and created new elements, this is another type of transformation, but the energy used in the process, is lost in a sense, you cannot simply re-used once the work is done.  You may have added energy in form of heat to the system, but in the end, this will be lost in space.

So the question is, what type of energy make sense to use and which process/type is better for the whole physical economy of the planet ?   This seems a complex question, but in the end, you can boil it down to a simple "black box"!  Energy in - Energy out.

Here we see that for any energy system, you will have:

• An input of energy
• To create the system: Metal, concrete and other basic elements
• To feed the system: Wind, Solar, Nuclear, Fossil sources
• And output of energy
• In the form of resources (heat and elements) and electrical energy

The system that make more sense from a physical economy point of view is where the ratio of Out/In is the largest. This equate to energy density. The more dense the energy source, the more OUT you will get for the IN you put in.  This transform in cost, normally cents/kWh.

You also need to take into account the following:

• Availability of the resource to feed the system
• Impact on other system (humans, nature, , etc)

From a physical point of view, Nuclear fission used today in over 450 nuclear power stations, is the most dense form of energy.  Wind and Solar is the less dense. There's a factor of 6 million between Solar and Fission.

So from a physical economy point of view, the more dense you are the better.  This graph tells it all. I needed an exponential Y axis to compare all sources since the difference is so great!

So to get back to the original question, is it good that we can recycle plastic.. I would say, sure it's good, but at what cost.  We have for now plenty of Fossil resources, but for how long?  So from a storage perspective, it's probably better to recycle plastic if the cost is not prohibitive, but it would not make sense to use energy from fossil fuels (low density) to recycle plastic... If we could use the high density electricity from Nuclear to recycle all the world plastic cheaply to use in transportation where we don't have a good solution yet on the electric side... that would make sense. 

There's also the pyrolysis process that can recycle about anything... A plant is in operation in Ottawa, Canada from the company Plasco Energy.

For the question about ethanol... For sure, this has been proven many time that using corn (that uses large amount of fossil) to produce ethanol does not make sense in any way... it's been called a crime against humanity by the UN food program.

You will find on this blog many article about energy, nuclear and other types... Again, we need to have the best ratio of IN/OUT in any human endeavor.  Having a ratio close to 1 for solar/wind, does not make sense.  The ratio is greater for coal and gas, but why would you want to burn a limited resource where you can use a higher density one like nuclear.  Unfortunately, the anti nuclear and all the regulations have push the price point of nuclear over that of cheap shale gas... but this cheap shale gas will not stay cheap and available for ever.  So like any greedy wall street banker can tell you... there's money to be made now on the shale gas, but from a physical economy point of view, we should keep this resources for all other usage outside electricity generation.

About the reusable bag thing...  Here's an interesting information from wikipedia:

One reusable bag requires the same amount of energy as an estimated 28 traditional plastic shopping bags or eight paper bags. "If used once per week, four or five reusable bags will replace 520 plastic bags a year" according to Nick Sterling, research director at Natural Capitalism Solutions. ^[1] A study commissioned by the United Kingdom Environment Agency in 2005 but never published found that the average cotton bag is used only 51 times before being thrown away.^[2]

So you need to use your reusable bag, 28x.  And people use it only 51 times!  So if you recycle those plastic bags and recover 80% of the energy to be re-used in diesels transport, than not sure you save a lot with re-usable bags.... Again, the whole IN/OUT black-box need to be calculated to see what makes more sense... But for sure, I like better the re-usable bags... Can put more stuff in them and better handles!


So here's my quick answer to a simple 140 char comment!

Comments are welcome.

Simon

My first IronMan - Ottawa September 3rd 2011

It's done, I am now an IronMan!

Thanks to David Vincent for the picture ;-)


History:

It all started in May 2004 by a small Duathlon in my home town of St-Jérôme.  Then jumping to sprint triathlon, Olympic distance and half-marathon. Then did 4 half ironman distance and one full marathon in Niagara falls.  You can find some details of those last 7 years on sportstats.ca and in my blog.

Preparation for this IronMan.

It take a lot of involvement, time and training to prepare yourself to swim, bike and run for a total of 226 km and be able to do that non-stop for more than 13 hours in my case.

This year, I prepared myself with those competitions:

• 2 half-ironman distance, the mooseman and tri-memphre, magog 
• 2 half-marathon, one in Ottawa and one in lake placid

On the training side, here's how my months and weeks looked like: January to July: I was using Endomondo to track my training.

From mid July I bought a Garmin 310XT and started tracking my trainings and competition on Garmin connect. Click to enlarge the graphics.

Last two weeks of July:

First 2 weeks of August:

Last weeks of August and first days of September including the IronMan:

Day of the event.

You always want to be rested and prepared, but going for that type of event for the first time, it's hard to get a good night sleep. So at 2 am on D-day, I could not sleep anymore. I stayed in bed up to 4, then got a small breakfast, oatmeal and a banana.  I arrived on site at 4:45 and started my fist visit or many to Porta-John.  It's funny how laxative a triathlon can be ;-)

Swim - 2 loops of 1.9km

At 6:00, my transition was ready, my special need bag, with extra shoe, sole, lunch and sugary water was on site.  At 6:30, I was on the beach and jumped into the water of Mooney's bay for the first part of the Ironman, a 3864M swim.  We had two loops around the bay to do, getting out on the beach between the

two.

Here's the playback from Garmin.  Not very precise, because I was wearing my watch on my wrist and not on my head under the cap, so GPS signal was flaky. You can click on "View Details" and playback the swim.




According to my Garmin, I did 1h23m for a pace of 2:09/100M. Not bad for me, I was a bit tired in the last 10-15 minutes.Someone was drafting me in the water for the last loop, always touching my toes... Very bugging. Looking at Sportstats.ca, you see longer time, that's because the mat, recording you chip time is located after the transition zone before you get on  the bike, so the swim time, include the transition time.

Transition #1, SWIM to BIKE

The first transition is the longest one, because you need to run from the beach to the transition zone, around 810M away. I took the time there, to stretch a bit, put a bike shirt with pockets for my food, drink a bit of "ensure".

Bike - 12 loops of 15km

Just before I started my bike, I stop for a quick pee. You don't want to be stopping to much while doing the bike, so better to get this one done ASAP.  The bike course was almost flat, but there was a couple of challenges. There was two little "bumps" where you needed to push a bit more, I used those sometimes to get standing to give a break to be bottom.  There was also the north turn around, which was slow, with many people and not much width to turn. The south turn around, near the bay, was a bit faster and the timing
mat was there. Every turn for iron distance was announced by a support person, so you knew how many loop you had left to do.



At mid point, around 90km, I stopped for a porta-john and the special need bag to refill my food bag and my main bottle of water + Gatorade + CarboPro.  starting from around that time, my left pad on my tribar, started to move down and I started to get sore on both big toes.  This is around the same time, that my wife Marie and daughter, Ariane, where on the course near the south turn around. So I decided to do a quick stop to fix my bike and while they where working in this, I stretched and massage my feet.


During those loop, we had some strong wind that picked up a bit more at the end. So in total, I stopped 4 times. Garmin got me at a total of 6:08:04 and moving time of 6:00:33, so around 8min total stop time.  This give a average moving speed of 30.3 km/h.

Transition #2, Bike to Run

This transition was a bit shorter than the first one, around 340M. I took the time again to stretch, change the shirt and drink a bit.

Run - 6 loops of 7km for 42KM

Now the fun begins, at that point of the IronMan, you begin to feel tired, but you still have hours to go.  It was quite hot when I started around 2:30 pm. My wife said she saw 32 Celsius in the car thermometer. Other said more than 40c with humidity. For sure, it fell HOT!  During past experience, I had some heat strokes and I knew the precursor signals, like headaches. I started feeling that in the first loop, but I was prepared... in my
special need bag, near the south transition point, I had a towel, soaked and cold.  So I took it and put it on my head and put my cap on top of it.  At every aid station, I was pouring fresh water on my head to keep the towel soaked.  This helped me control my temperature.

Even with this, every time my heart rate was going near or over 140, I started feeling the pain on the right side of my head, so at that point I decided to walk to get my HR below 140.  So I was watching my HR closely and keeping it under 140 by doing run-walk while keeping it between 120 and 140. The other problem I needed to watch closely was an irritation under the left foot, or more specifically Metatarsalgia. This problem started in the peak of my training.

While trying to do a 27km run a few weeks back, I started having intense pain and I had to walk from 14km and stopped at 21 limping.  This started some 3-4 weeks before my IronMan.  So there was no way I would force that feet to perform, I needed to be smart around it.

So my plan was to walk when I started feeling the pain, go slow, at around 6min/km pace.  I also had in my special need bag another pair of orthopedic sole and another pair of shoes. So I started my race with my newer shoes, DS racers, with normal sole. At around 30km, the pain started to be too intense, so I switch to the orthopedic sole and did one loop, then back to the old shoes for another loop and then orthopedic sole in my old shoes.  Switching shoes/sole, got me going up to the end, but I still needed to run/walk to manage the pain.

In the end, I completed the 42km in 5:30, with a moving average pace of 7:11/km.  

Overall, the experience was good. I need to work on some physical problem that prevents me from being 100%.

List of things to resolve and get better:

1. The feet problem
2. The lower back stiffness, check bike position
3. Heat stroke... Not sure how to tackle this one?
4. Better overall speed and time... More training!

Photos of the event

Video

You can see me crossing the finish line on youtube.

The green agenda... Politics and power or saving the environment?

According to many, the green agenda may not be what it seems... In a couple of words... Follow the money...

Fist this video:



More info on the book.

Second this "old" news:
Bio-fuel overall CO2 footprint  = 4x of standard diesel!
Reuters reports that it used freedom of information laws to obtain a copy of text that was stripped from a December 2009 European Union study on biofuels. The hidden portion of the study found that biodiesel fuel made from North American soybeans has an indirect carbon footprint of 339.9 kilograms of CO2 per gigajoule — about four times larger than standard diesel from petroleum.

Another myth... Wind power does not reduce CO2 consumptions.

There are hundreds of example like this video talk about and the one above.

Want to know more, check this site and this one.

Comments?

Energy from Thorium - Flibe Energy

A new startup company Flibe Energy took the challenge of building a new type of nuclear power station using Thorium which is Safer, Abundant, Cleaner (less waste). What was said on facebook by Kirk Sorenson, the new owner of the company, is that they want to reach criticality around 2015. This means, they will have a testing reactor inside 4 years.


But they are not alone... China, India and other nations are going ahead with their thorium energy plans, I wish them luck.


Here some clip and talks on the subject.... Enjoy

You may need to click for the second clip, problem with the play list.



Some more links to follow:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlibeEnergy
• Information on Thorium : http://energyfromthorium.com/
• Flibe Energy: http://www.flibe-energy.com
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/FlibeEnergy

Reproducing a  post from Energy from Thorium here for reference:

Thorium and the Liquid-Fluoride Reactor: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

One of the basic principles of the modern environmental movement is the simple mantra to “reduce, reuse, and recycle”. It is my intention to show in this essay that the technology of the liquid-fluoride reactor, coupled with the energy source thorium, make it possible to achieve these goals to a far greater degree than other nuclear energy technologies.

Introduction

Liquid-fluoride reactors are based upon the use of dissolved actinide fluoride salts in a carrier medium of low-absorption fluoride salt solvents. The most common formulations that have been considered and demonstrated for this mission are solvents based around low-melting point mixtures of beryllium fluoride (BeF2) and lithium fluoride (LiF) isotopically enhanced in the more-abundant component lithium-7. The actinide fluorides most commonly employed are thorium tetrafluoride (ThF4) and uranium tetrafluoride (UF4). LiF-BeF2 salt mixtures have very low neutron absorption properties, excellent heat capacity, stability under intense radiation, and the ability to dissolve appreciable amounts of thorium or uranium tetrafluoride.

Liquid and Solid Fluoride Salt Mixtures

Despite providing some degree of neutron moderation, LiF-BeF2 mixtures are not terribly good neutron moderators, thus liquid-fluoride reactors generally employ solid moderating materials in order to moderate neutrons to thermal energies. Graphite is most commonly employed, being abundant, relatively inexpensive, and chemically compatible with the salt. Graphite is not “wetted” by the fluoride salt and can be sealed in ways that limit the intrusion of fission product gases (especially xenon) into the structure of the graphite.
Thorium as a nuclear fuel is not as well-known as uranium, but has properties that have special merit for nuclear use. Thorium also has a number of drawbacks for its use as a common nuclear fuel, but fortunately, by using thorium in fluoride form, nearly all of these drawbacks can be eliminated or strongly mitigated.




Thorium is common in the Earth’s crust, consisting of about 10 parts per million of common continental crust, approximately three to four times more common than uranium. Thorium is not fissile and consists of a single natural isotope (232) but thorium can be converted to a fissile fuel by the absorption of a neutron followed by a short period of beta decay. After absorbing a neutron, thorium-232 is transmuted into thorium-233, which then beta-decays with a half-life of 22 minutes into protactinium-233, which is chemically distinct from the parent thorium. Protactinium-233 has a half-life of about 27 days, after which is beta-decays to uranium-233, which is fissile and has impressive properties. Uranium-233 produces enough neutrons from fission by a thermal neutron to sustain the continued conversion of thorium to energy, even accounting for normal losses, provided that the reactor is neutronically efficient.

Reducing the Production of Transuranic Nuclear Waste

One of the biggest concerns about today’s approach to nuclear power generation concerns our use of low-enrichment uranium (LEU) in solid-uranium-oxide-fueled light-water reactors. In these reactors, LEU fuel is irradiated by thermal neutrons and a significant amount of plutonium is produced from the uranium-238 that makes up 95-97% of the original fuel. Some of this plutonium is consumed as the solid-oxide fuel rod is further irradiated, but from the plutonium other isotopes of plutonium are formed by neutron capture, and then higher actinides like americium and curium are produced. From the small fraction of U-235 present in the fuel even some long-lived neptunium-237 is produced. After an irradiation period of 3-4 years, the fuel rod can no longer sustain addition irradiation and is removed and placed in a spent fuel pool for cooling as high-heating decay products move inevitably towards stability.




In our current approach to civilian nuclear power, these irradiated uranium oxide fuel rods are not reprocessed to separate and partition their different chemical components, but are instead bound for disposal in a deep geological repository in Nevada. There after several hundred years the transuranic actinides still present in the spent nuclear fuel will generate the bulk of the heating that dictates their spacing in the repository and its ultimate capacity. Furthermore, the transuranic actinides carry the vast majority of the radiotoxicity that repository licensers must deal with as they plan for the performance of the repository over the next ten thousand years.
Reducing the amount of transuranic waste that will be sent to any future repository would therefore be an important goal of a future approach to civilian nuclear power generation, and this is eminently doable by using thorium in a liquid-fluoride reactor. Transuranic waste production can be drastically reduced by a clever combination of the inherent properties of the thorium fuel approach and by the flexibility of the liquid-fluoride fuel form.
Thorium, with an atomic mass of 232, begins the nuclear energy generation process at least five neutron absorptions removed from the first transuranic isotope that could be generated. As previously mentioned, thorium-232 absorbs a neutron, transmuting to protactinium-233 and then uranium-233, which is fissile. In a thermal neutron spectrum, uranium-233 tends to fission 90% of the time it absorbs a thermal neutron. The other 10% of the time is converts to uranium-234. Another neutron absorption in uranium-234 leads to conversion to uranium-235, which is also fissile and represents another opportunity for destruction through fission. Uranium-235 fissions in a thermal neutron spectrum approximately 85% of the time, and the other 15% of the time is converted to uranium-236. Uranium-236 has a rather low neutron absorption cross-section, and only after absorbing a neutron is the first transuranic isotope of this approach produced: neptunium-237. Neptunium can be removed from the fluoride salt mixture readily by fluorination from NpF4, which is in solution to NpF6 which is gaseous. Thus, unlike our current approach to nuclear power where the majority of the fuel (97% U-238) is a single neutron absorption away from the production of the first transuranic isotope (Pu-239), in the thorium-based approach, the fuel is five neutron absorptions away from the production of a transuranic isotope, and in the course of those absorptions roughly 98.5% of the original fuel is removed by fission.
Thus, by using thorium in the fluoride reactor rather than uranium in the solid-oxide reactor, it is possible to REDUCE the amount of transuranic material generated by a very large factor.

Reusing Nuclear Fuel

As previously mentioned, today’s approach to nuclear fuel employs low-enrichment uranium is solid-oxide form in zirconium cladding, cooling and moderated by ordinary water. As an oxide, uranium is quite chemically stable and able to achieve high temperatures without melting down. Unfortunately, as an oxide, uranium is also subject to the low thermal conductivities common to most all oxides, and therefore high temperatures at the centerline of the solid fuel element become an inevitable consequence of heat transfer out the surface of the fuel element. In fact, the centerline fuel temperature of a uranium oxide fuel element, relative to the melting temperature of uranium oxide, is one of the key geometrical constraints.




As uranium oxide fuel is irradiated, fission products and transuranics accumulate in the ceramic oxide matrix. Intense radiation from the fission process and the decay of fission products also damages the fuel structure, causing dislocations and swelling in the crystalline matrix. Especially damaging to the fuel element are in the in-growth of gaseous fission products such as xenon and krypton, which further distend and crack the fuel structure. One of the isotopes of xenon (135) has a huge appetite for thermal neutrons and causes control transients during the changing of power settings within the reactor.
After a period of time the uranium oxide fuel element has been depleted of fuel, swollen, cracked, distended, inflated, and compromised by the fission process and must be removed before cladding failure leads to the loss of fission products and other radioactive isotopes to the water loop of the reactor system. Spent solid-oxide fuel rods must be replaced by new fuel rods and are sent to a cooling pond where decay heat can be removed. Although the spent fuel still contains large amounts of unused fuel in the form of both uranium and other actinides, that fuel cannot be accessed until a reprocessing program takes place that involves chemically changing the solid uranium oxide into a liquid uranium nitrate fuel form through the application of strong nitric acid. Then a combination of chemical processes in aqueous and hydrocarbon solvents takes place to separate gaseous fission products, other fission products, transuranics, and uranium from one another. The resulting waste streams from these processes can be utilized productively, but the cost is significant due to the aggressive chemical steps involved and the chemical intensiveness of the new forms.
Many, many recycles of the fuel would be needed to “burn-down” the uranium-238 present in the original spent fuel to energy (through fission) and the costs involved in reprocessing dictate that spent nuclear fuel is rarely subjected to more than one or two recycles before it is disposed.
Thorium and the fluoride reactor present an entirely different approach to fuel management that makes repeated recycling not only easy but economically advantageous. That is because nuclear fuel in the liquid fluoride form rather than in the solid oxide form has distinct advantages. It is already in a chemically stable form as a fluoride. There is no reagent to treat the fuel that will be favored over its current state. Thus it is protected from chemical attack, combustion, burning, or corrosion. But more importantly, as a fluid is it in a form where chemical processes can be employed directly to remove fission products or to add new fuel to compensate for burnup. Additionally, the ionic nature of liquid-fluoride salt renders the fuel essentially impervious to radiation damage. Despite the passage of large amounts of gamma radiation, neutron radiation, alpha radiation, etc. the fuel remains chemically unaltered and with a complete retention of its physical properties.
Gaseous fission products, including the important fission product poison xenon-135, are effortlessly easy to remove from liquid-fluoride salt. They simply come out of solution in the pump bowl during the pumping of the fluid through the loop. This has the additional benefit of keeping pressures low and allowing the reactor to change power states rapidly without concern for the effect of xenon on power changes.




In a modern incarnation of the liquid-fluoride reactor, there are two separate fluoride salts in action in the reactor core: the “fuel salt” and the “blanket salt”. The fuel salt is a mixture of uranium tetrafluoride in the lithium-beryllium fluoride carrier solvent. The uranium consists predominantly of uranium-233 but also contains U-234 and U-236 at equilibrium levels of concentration. Depending on the reprocessing approach it also contains fission products in the form of fluorides. The blanket salt is a mixture of thorium tetrafluoride in the lithium-beryllium fluoride carrier solvent. The blanket salt geometrically surrounds the fuel salt with a graphite barrier between them. Fission in the fuel salt produces neutrons, roughly half of which end up in the blanket salt, transmuting thorium to uranium by neutron absorption followed by beta decay. The uranium formed in the blanket is removed by the simple process of fluorination, whereby uranium as a tetrafluoride in solution is converted to a hexafluoride that is gaseous. Since thorium has no gaseous hexafluoride, it is left behind while uranium is removed in this simple, one-step process. Then the fuel salt is “refueled” by this same stream of fresh uranium hexafluoride by converting it from hexafluoride back into tetrafluoride through contact with hydrogen gas. Thus freshly generated uranium is continuously removed from the blanket salt and added to the core salt, where it subsequently undergoes fission that continues the process all over again.
By keeping fissile materials out of the blanket by continuous reprocessing, the blanket fluid can be kept relatively free of fission products. The fuel salt, on the other hand, will accumulate fission products as uranium fission continues. The most troublesome fission product, xenon, is effortlessly removed by pumping action, but other fission products will become of increasing concern. Samarium, neodymium, and other lanthanides are fission products whose neutron absorption cross-sections are significant enough to merit attention. In order to purify the fuel salt, the first step is to remove the uranium fuel by fluorination. Then the carrier salt (LiF-BeF2) can be distilled from fission product fluorides in a high-temperature still. The remaining fission product fluorides constitute the equivalent of “high-level waste” from fluoride reactor reprocessing. The extracted LiF-BeF2 is recombined with the uranium and reinserted into the reactor core for another cycle of power generation.




The fluid nature of the reactor fluids allow them to be used over and over again, removing only the products that have been generated during operation (uranium in the blanket, fission products in the fuel salt). This ability to continually REUSE the reactor nuclear fuels represents a profound advantage over the solid-fueled uranium approach.

Recycling the “Wastes” of Fission

Fission processes inevitably generate a variety of fission product elements and a large number of isotopes, most of which are neutron-rich and radioactive. The familiar double-humped distribution of fission products reflects the physical reality that each fission event results in two fission products, a “heavy” one and a “light” one. As each of these fission products tends to have many more neutrons than is needed for nuclear stability at its new “station” in life, rapid beta decay generally follows fission and most fission products assume a stable form quite quickly.
When all of the isotopes of an element reach stability it can logically be asked whether or not they are worth chemical extraction and recycling to other, non-nuclear uses.
Consider the case of xenon. Xenon is a noble gas and fission product that accounts for a fair fraction of the mass of fission products from uranium fission. Xenon has a variety of isotopes but the longest lived one (133) has only a half-life of 5.2 days. Therefore, proceeding on the rule-of-thumb that “ten half-lives and you’re gone” after 50 days of storage the xenon remaining from fission would be essentially non-radioactive. In a conventional solid-core reactor the xenon is bound up in the solid-oxide fuel rod and can only be extracted by chopping up and dissolving the fuel element, but in a fluoride reactor it is very easy to extract xenon. In fact, it will come out of solution with essentially no effort at all. Since xenon is a valuable gas, rather than vent the xenon to the atmosphere it can be separated from the krypton by cryogenic distillation and sold. NASA and commercial satellite operators, for instance, use xenon for ion engines for spacecraft. Future NASA missions to Mars that have considered using xenon have had to seriously consider whether the world supply of xenon was sufficient to make such missions possible. Xenon recovered from fission might increase xenon supply.
Another valuable material from fission is neodymium. Within the last 20 years, the discovery of a neodymium-iron-boron alloy that can be used to make super-strong, super-light magnets has caused neodymium demand to increase tremendously. Ironically, one of the markets that is in greatest demand for neodymium is the wind turbine market. They need large electrical generators due to the diffuse nature of the wind energy source, and they need these electrical generators to be as lightweight as possible so that they can be mounted on top of large towers. Neodymium magnets are particularly suited to this demanding application.
Neodymium is the third-most-common element generated from fission (by mass) and also achieves nuclear stability relatively quickly; its longest-lived isotope (147) has a half-life of 10.9 days. By aging the high-level waste from the distillation process in fluoride reactors appropriately, one could extract the neodymium trifluoride from the other fluorides and convert it to a metallic form through electrolysis or metallic reduction. The neodymium would then be available to sell to the burgeoning market.
Xenon and neodymium represent two recycling opportunities where a period of “aging” is needed before the isotopes stabilize and partitioning and marketing is possible. But there are other isotopes in the “waste” stream of a fluoride reactor where the radioactive form of the isotope is the desirable and economic product. An example of this case is the life-saving medical isotope molybdenum-99. Currently, molybdenum-99 is generated in specially-designed medical isotope production reactors in Canada and rushed to medical facilities across North America. Mo-99 decays to technetium-99m, which is then extracted and introduced into human patients in order to facilitate diagnostic procedures. The market for Mo-99 is quite large, but in solid-fueled reactors, the Mo-99 produced by fission is not accessible until the fuel is reprocessed. Since that is an infrequent event in solid-fueled reactors, the overwhelming majority of the Mo-99 produced in such reactors is never productively utilized; rather it simply follows its decay chain to Tc-99. In a fluoride reactor, on the other hand, the fluid nature of the reactor makes it possible to continuously extract Mo-99 along with the other isotopes of molybdenum. Molybdenum forms a volatile hexafluoride much like uranium does, and when the fuel salt is fluorinated, U, Mo, and several other elements come out of solution as gaseous hexafluorides. These can then be separated on from another by distillation at different temperatures, much like crude oil is refined. The molybdenum could then be shipped to medical facilities, where the Mo-99 would decay to Tc-99m that could be chemically extracted and given to patients who need it.
Xenon, molybdenum, and neodymium are three of the most common fission products but many others have value too. The fluid nature of the fluoride reactor makes RECYCLING of the so-called waste quite likely to be economically attractive in many circumstances.

Summary: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The environmental dictum of “reduce, reuse, recycle” has been considered in terms of the thorium-fueled, liquid-fluoride reactor and found to be a simple and unifying theme for the options that this technology makes available. Relative to a conventional, solid-fueled uranium reactor, one can drastically REDUCE the generation of transuranic actinides, REUSE the thorium and uranium fuel is a way that allows for complete consumption of the energy resources, and RECYCLE three of the most common fission products into economically useful and even life-saving applications. The thorium-fueled liquid fluoride reactor is worthy of significant further attention, investigation, and funding based on these and many other merits.

Nuclear notes related to Japan earthquake, tsunami accident

Here's some QA, documents and articles related to the Japan nuclear accident.  Talking to friends, I see that there is a lot of information to digest and article to read to get a good understanding of this event.

This graph from the globe and mail show how the radiation spiked in Japan.  Note the level compared to a full body CT scan.  Those level where recorded very close to the plant, where not one lives and where only worker where exposed to high level radiation. 

First a look at some articles I found interesting:

Putting some perspective on the nuclear question

• Japanese Earthquake Implications Quick Q and A
• Good starting point on how a nuclear power plant operates, radiation level and type and much more.
  
• Banana equivalent dose: A banana equivalent dose (BED) is a measure of the radiation exposure caused by eating one banana. It is a concept that was intended to explain the relative danger of radiation by comparison with everyday life activities. BED is a radiation dose equivalent unit; the corresponding SI unit is the sievert (and rem is also commonly used).
• The dose equivalent of eating a banana is about 0.01 mrem (or 0.1 µSv).

• Less cancer or congenital heart malformations after being exposed to low dose radiation a must read, real life data: http://bit.ly/gbUu2I

• An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan.Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 (half-life:5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv-a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv.

• Low-dose radiation is documented to be beneficial for human health but, for political reasons, radiation is assumed to be harmful at any dose. Detail of the study
• Journalist Wall of Shame covering the #Japan #nuclear and #earthquake crisis http://bit.ly/fbyxvg sensationalist, speculation, bad reporting
• Best read so far; William Tucker: Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl - http://t.co/S2mzc2D a must read
• Used #nuclear fuel is an energy opportunity, not a threat or a burden to future generations.  
• http://bit.ly/dLa7c9 
• #Nuclear engineer explains why milk poses a greater radioactive threat than groundwater tritium from Vermont Yankee http://bit.ly/hZWHQe

• Nuclear Overreactors: Let's cool the political meltdown over Japan's damaged nuclear power plants.
  http://www.slate.com/id/2288212/
•  Viewpoint: We should stop running away from radiation
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842
• You need to drink 5000 liters of contaminated milk before you reach recommended limit set by the EPA: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576233221749626458.html
• Talk About a Meltdown:  The hysteria over Japan’s nuclear reactors is ridiculous.
  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262182/talk-about-meltdown-jonah-goldberg 
 

Now for some good  interviews on the subject of nuclear in general and Japan in particular.

Let start with an interview on Blogginheads.tv between John Horgan Stevens Center for Science Writings, Cross-check and Rod Adams Atomic Insights Blog, The Atomic Show



This one is a bit older and is more a debate on nuclear power in Alberta, but the discussion is interesting. This is from http://skepticallyspeaking.ca/episodes/11-nuclear-power-round-2

Fascinating discussion on nuclear power with Dr. Jeremy Whitlock, reactor physicist and author of the website The Canadian Nuclear FAQ, and Elena Schacherl, founder and Co-chair of Citizens Advocating the Use of Sustainable Energy (CAUSE), which is a member of the Coalition for a Nuclear Free Alberta.




There is not perfect solution like any human endeavors, so having the perfect energy solution does not exist yet.  When you compare different energy source and related deaths, nuclear is one of the best in that regards.
This web site as a good compilation of information on that subject.

Energy Source              Death Rate (deaths per TWh)

Coal – world average               161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China                       278
Coal – USA                         15
Oil                                36  (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas                         4  (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass                    12
Peat                               12
Solar (rooftop)                     0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind                                0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro                               0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro - world including Banqiao)    1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear                             0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

 
To be continued...

Sensor Measurement Uncertainty and A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

At last we have some graphics to show that the temperature increase over the last 130 is not statistically significant.  When you can draw a straight line through your data and be inside the error bars, there is no way to safely confirm any temperature increase. Source

What is a temperature anomaly?
The term “temperature anomaly” means a departure from a reference value or long-term average. A positive anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was warmer than the reference value, while a negative anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was cooler than the reference value.

Grapgic: The global surface air temperature anomaly series through 2009, as updated on 18 February 2010, (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/). The grey error bars show the annual anomaly lower-limit uncertainty of ±0.46 C.


More technical on this study here.

Here's a good read from doctor Richard Lindzen : A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
Source

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.

For warming since 1979, there is a further problem. The dominant role of cumulus convection in the tropics requires that temperature approximately follow what is called a moist adiabatic profile. This requires that warming in the tropical upper troposphere be 2-3 times greater than at the surface. Indeed, all models do show this, but the data doesn’t and this means that something is wrong with the data. It is well known that above about 2 km altitude, the tropical temperatures are pretty homogeneous in the horizontal so that sampling is not a problem. Below two km (roughly the height of what is referred to as the trade wind inversion), there is much more horizontal variability, and, therefore, there is a profound sampling problem. Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem resides in the surface data, and that the actual trend at the surface is about 60% too large. Even the claimed trend is larger than what models would have projected but for the inclusion of an arbitrary fudge factor due to aerosol cooling. The discrepancy was reported by Lindzen (2007) and by Douglass et al (2007). Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.

It turns out that there is a much more fundamental and unambiguous check of the role of feedbacks in enhancing greenhouse warming that also shows that all models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity. Here, it must be noted that the greenhouse effect operates by inhibiting the cooling of the climate by reducing net outgoing radiation. However, the contribution of increasing CO2 alone does not, in fact, lead to much warming (approximately 1 deg. C for each doubling of CO2).

The larger predictions from climate models are due to the fact that, within these models, the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever CO2 does. This is referred to as a positive feedback. It means that increases in surface temperature are accompanied by reductions in the net outgoing radiation – thus enhancing the greenhouse warming. All climate models show such changes when forced by observed surface temperatures. Satellite observations of the earth’s radiation budget allow us to determine whether such a reduction does, in fact, accompany increases in surface temperature in nature. As it turns out, the satellite data from the ERBE instrument (Barkstrom, 1984, Wong et al, 2006) shows that the feedback in nature is strongly negative — strongly reducing the direct effect of CO2 (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) in profound contrast to the model behavior. This analysis makes clear that even when all models agree, they can all be wrong, and that this is the situation for the all important question of climate sensitivity. Unfortuanately, Lindzen and Choi (2009) contained a number of errors; however, as shown in a paper currently under review, these errors were not relevant to the main conclusion.

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from man made greenhouse gases is already about 86% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a doubling for CO2 is greater than 2C which implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far, even if all the warming we have seen so far were due to man. This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modelers defend this situation, as we have already noted, by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming (viz Schwartz et al, 2010), and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution (Smith et al, 2007). Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modelers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ up to 2015 (Keenlyside et al, 2008).

Climate alarmists respond that some of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past decade. Given that we are in a relatively warm period, this is not surprising, but it says nothing about trends.

Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal (a leading modeler refers to it as essentially guesswork). Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980′s, global cooling in the 1970′s, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more. This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.

With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.

References:

Barkstrom, B.R., 1984: The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 65, 1170–1185.

Douglass,D.H., J.R. Christy, B.D. Pearsona and S. F. Singer, 2007: A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions, Int. J. Climatol., DOI: 10.1002/joc.1651

Keenlyside, N.S., M. Lateef, et al, 2008: Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector, Nature, 453, 84-88.

Lindzen, R.S. and Y.-S. Choi, 2009: On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, accepted Geophys. Res. Ltrs.

Lindzen, R.S., 2007: Taking greenhouse warming seriously. Energy & Environment, 18, 937-950.

Ramanathan, V., M.V. Ramana, et al, 2007: Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption, Nature, 448, 575-578.

Santer, B. D., P. W. Thorne, L. Haimberger, K. E. Taylor, T. M. L. Wigley, J. R. Lanzante, S. Solomon, M. Free, P. J. Gleckler, P. D. Jones, T. R. Karl, S. A. Klein, C. Mears, D. Nychka, G. A. Schmidt, S. C. Sherwood, and F. J. Wentz, 2008: Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere, Intl. J. of Climatology, 28, 1703-1722.

Schwartz, S.E., R.J. Charlson, R.A. Kahn, J.A. Ogren, and H. Rodhe, 2010: Why hasn’t the Earth warmed as much as expected?, J. Climate, 23, 2453-2464.

Smith, D.M., S. Cusack, A.W. Colman, C.K. Folland, G.R. Harris, J.M. Murphy, 2007: Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model, Science, 317, 796-799.

Tsonis, A. A., K. Swanson, and S. Kravtsov, 2007: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts, Geophys. Res. Ltrs., 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030288

Wong, T., B. A. Wielicki, et al., 2006: Reexamination of the observed decadal variability of the earth radiation budget using altitude-corrected ERBE/ERBS nonscanner WFOV Data, J. Climate, 19, 4028–4040.

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advidory Council