I do not agree with Antius and I believe what I have written about ERoEI* is sufficient to reject ERoEI* of 43 for anything. My computations and lucubrations are all over the internet and depend upon all of you to review because I have no desire to deal with the corporate-controlled journals and the peer-review system I have been very much a part of and which I investigated to my own satisfaction and found unsatisfactory.
However,Alain Le Gargasson has raised a serious and very real concern. I agree with him except for a few mitigating facts, which you can bet are going to save my thesis if I have anything to do with it. I have already thanked Denis Frith for pushing me closer and closer to a complete solution. Let’s face it: Denis had a better grip on the difficulty of solving the recycle problem than I did. There I said it and Denis is OK in my book.
BUT, I don’t have to solve the recycle problem for everything – only the renewable energy candidate under investigation. Lately, I have decided to investigate the case of tellurium. Begin by establishing a rule: No one gets a new panel without returning the old panel or the pieces of it. I’ll report myself unless Alain wants to do it and report on https://eroei.blogspot.com/ .
Remember too that we may have any number of years before we have to come up with a workable plan for recycling most things. As for structural metals, I would argue that the heat of fusion is an upper limit for the cost of recycling. If you recall, I expect that most of the structural and delivery components are amenable to do-it-yourself and decentralization. But, if not, they are going to sink a whole lot of systems whose purveyors don’t even take the trouble to compute ERoEI* they are so over-confident.
I guess https://www.dematerialism.net/CwC.html was not so far ahead of its time that I couldn’t take another look at it after fifteen years. But this is not merely another opportunity to complain about how shabbily I have been treated by the scientific community. I don’t suppose my socialist,communist,syndicalist, and dechrematisticalist sympathies had anything to do with it.
Tom Wayburn
“Any society that permits private profit is doomed.”
ReplyDeleteAntius on Mon, 23rd Nov 2020 2:57 pm
EROEI of nuclear fission with light water reactors is 43-81. EROEI for wind (without storage) = 6-80; Solar PV = 2.1-12.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx
In Europe, we could run a minimalist civilisation on wind power, provided we could adapt to intermittency and use it without wasting energy on poorly designed storage solutions. We would need a lot of installed capacity. In terms of EROEI, onshore wind is likely to be superior (and cheaper). Infrastructure will have longer lifespan, less material invested in foundations and easier logistics overall. Solar PV is far more problematic, due to low EROEI. It seems doubtful that solar would have been more than a niche technology without zero interest rates and QE. Wind power, especially onshore, would have fared better.
Antius on Mon, 23rd Nov 2020 3:45 pm
Some thoughts on wind power.
(1) Traditional windmill towers were built from brick or stone and blades were made of wood. These are materials with low embodied energy. There are practical size limitations for wooden blades. For medium sized onshore wind turbines, wood can be used for blades and masonry for towers. The only steel needed is the hub and the shafts.
(2) Rare earth elements are used in high strength permanent magnets. They are an advantage in the design of compact autonomous generators, but are hardly an essential component. Iron based electromagnets with copper or aluminium coils could be used. They would be a little bulkier.
(3) In fact, wind turbines could be designed to pump hydraulic fluid or compressed air to a central generator plant, with dozens of turbines providing hydraulic power to a single electrical generator station. In this case, the turbines themselves would contain hydraulic pumps or air compressors, but would not need generators. No special materials needed, just carbon steel and some polymers, with masonry towers and wooden blades.
Just because something is done in a certain way, doesn’t always mean that it has to be done that way.
Alain Le Gargasson on Mon, 23rd Nov 2020 7:30 am
ReplyDeleteEndless recycling is not possible for several reasons:
Even if you had infinite energy this does not guarantee you infinite raw materials, the circular economy is also a large consumer of energy and an impossibility in the medium term for several reasons:
· We still have a loss on melting metal, example: recycling case of aluminum beer cans, of the recovered quantity only 95% is available again.
There are thousands of steel alloys with noble metals: niobium, vanadium, tungsten, chromium, etc., only two classifications when it comes to recycling, carbon steel which will be used in construction as medium steel and l ‘stainless steel. Which never go back to the original use,
· Automotive industry, on average 10 years of life. For recycling, draining liquids and melting in an electric furnace, mixes up to 10 alloys of steel, copper from the electrical circuit, aluminum engine casing and combustion plastics.
· Disperse use, metal oxides used as colorants in paints (walls, prints, plastics, cosmetics, fireworks, etc.). The most emblematic case is titanium oxide, a universal white dye (paints, resins, cosmetics, toothpaste, etc.) 95% terminated in landfills, rivers and seas. Nanotechnology prevents recycling like the silver used in socks to prevent odors. Mobile phone with more than 40 different mendeleiev table elements (nano elements).
· Natural wear: Today, for example, in the streets, asphalt contains a higher concentration of palladium or platinum than certain mines, due to the exhaust of cars, copper and zinc from tires.
• No substitute for copper for electrical conductors, nickel for stainless steel, tin for soldering, tungsten for cutting tools, silver or platinum for the chemical and electronic industry, phosphorus for agriculture etc …
Agriculture: totally disperse, diesel from 100 to 150 liters per cultivated hectare, limestone in the correction of agricultural land, fertilizers (NPK- nitrogen, potash, phosphorus) phytosanitary products (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides …) which will end up in rivers and sea, as well as arable land due to erosion.
Renewable energies, wind turbine of 5 MW 1000t of steel and concrete at the base, 250t of the steel mast, the 50t of the 3 blades of fiberglass, carbon fiber and plastic resin, permanent magnet motor, in steel alloy with neodymium. Photovoltaic panel, with gallium, indium, selenium, cadmium or tellurium. Today not recyclable.
· Everything that spins needs lubricant. 50 million tonnes / year.
The improved return to life in 1800 is therefore assured around 2050 with a maximum of 1 or 2 billion inhabitants. In a constrained world, you can forget about democracy and going back to slavery.