Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Station: Offline Since April, 2011, Two Years Four Months, and Counting

Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station

Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station

Two Years Ago, April, 2011, the Fort Calhoun nuclear power station, on the banks of the Missouri River, north of Omaha, Nebraska, was shut down for refueling. It should have been a routine operation. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, NEI.Org, here, “U.S. nuclear reactors shut down once every 18 to 24 months to refuel approximately one-third of the reactor. In the 1980s and early ’90s the average refueling outage lasted about three months. Over the past decade, refueling outage durations have improved substantially. Now a typical refueling outage lasts one month.” Clearly Fort Calhoun, shut down for refueling 28 months ago in April, 2011, is not typical. Continue reading →

Popular Logistics Energy Portfolios. Sustainable Energy Doubles. Fossil Fuels increase by 5.4%

PLEP_13.7.22

In December, 2012 I created two portfolios, a “Sustainable Energy” portfolio comprised of 8 stocks in the solar, LED lighting, wind and biofuel sectors, and a “Fossil Fuel” portfolio, comprised of 8 stocks in the coal, oil, and fracking sectors. The results, after seven months, as illustrated above:

The Sustainable Energy portfolio more than doubled: it is up 101.77%
The Reference Fossil Fuel portfolio is up 5.4%
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 18.75%
The S&P 500 is up 18.6%.

The Sustainable Energy portfolio has significantly outperformed the Dow Jones Industrials and the S&P 500 and the Fossil Fuel portfolio.

These data are summarized in table 1 and below. Continue reading →

 

Frank Pallone, D. NJ

Frank Pallone, D. NJ

Sea Bright, New Jersey, July 11, 2013. I joined Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action, (fact sheet)  U.S, Rep Frank Pallone, campaign, and many citizens, including two children, one about 6, the other about 9. We spoke with eloquence, passion, and wisdom of the need to protect the shore, the biosphere, the bio-human-sphere.

“We need to build a clean and sustainable energy infrastructure,” I concluded, “one based on solar, wind, wave, geothermal and sustainable biofuels; an infrastructure for the future.  These distributed systems can be designed to withstand natural disasters, human error and terrorist attack. Our future is at stake, and our children’s future.”

I spoke for about 3 minutes, cutting my prepared remarks about in half.

This is not a partisan issue. Rep Pallone and I are Democrats. Governor Christie is a Republican. The Governor wisely vetoed an identical project in 2011 has promised to veto new deepwater LNG transfer ports.  Senator Buono and environmental / citizens groups should hold the governor to his promises. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

We need to look to the rooftops for solar, the oceans for wind and wave power, to geothermal differentials for heat and electricity, to build an infrastructure for the 21st Century.

Robot Rodeos Conjure Up Disasters and Pancake Contests

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Alberquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

A sultry day was in the offing near Purnell OK, the seat of McCurtain County in the state’s southeast quadrant, just a dozen miles northwest from the triple point where Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma meet. One hundred forty miles northeast, the National Weather Service Doppler radar station KSRX at Ft. Smith Arkansas, was monitoring a cold front approaching from the west, driven by a mass of cool dry air sweeping down from the northern plains. Typical for the late spring in the American prairie, this eastbound mass was colliding with a warm, wet air mass streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, now roiling under a cool dry tongue at 700 mb. Buoyant but trapped under heavier cool air, supercells were forming in the humid 850 mb surface layer twenty miles west of Purnell.

Continue reading →

Fracking – As Clean As Chlorine & Benzene

Benzene Ring Currents, Quantum chemically calculated magnetically induced probability current density vectors in benzene. The magnetic field is pointing out of the molecular plane upwards. Displayed are vectors with modulus between 0.01 and 0.1 nA/T. Left subfigure is in the molecular plane, right subfigure is 1.0 a.u. above the molecular plane. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Benzene_ring_currents.png

Quantum chemically calculated magnetically induced probability current density vectors in benzene. Wikimedia Commons

As noted in my post March 24, here, the petrochemical industry says,

“Trust us. The Fracking fluids are water mixed with sand, a few other chemicals, and 5% is household chemicals, like chlorine and benzine.”

The thing is, chlorine and benzene are hazardous.  So when the people in the petrochemical industry imply, “This is safe,” because it is household chemicals, I don’t know what they mean. And as documented elsewhere in the series, here, pollution from Fracking is not regulated at the Federal level.

Continue reading →

China Air Pollution: The Bitter Years Return?

China Air Pollution 中国空气污染

The Bitter Years Return 的苦涩年返回

Projection of air pollution deaths in China, based on reported deaths in 2006 and 2010.

Projection of air pollution deaths in China, based on reported deaths in 2006 and 2010.

During the “Bitter Years” from 1958 to 1962, an estimated 15 to 43 million people died of starvation in China (wikipedia). Mao, who ate well during that time, did not want help from the west. Fast forward to today. It has been reported that due to air pollution, an estimated 650,000 people died in China in 2006, and another estimated 1.2 million died in 2010. Knowing these 2 data points of this dynamic system, we can plot a curve. The blue line assumes a linear curve, the red line, the exponential uptick of a sigmoid curve.  Assuming reinforcing feedback, the red curve is more likely.

The three most important questions are

  1. “How serious is the air pollution?”
  2. “What will it take before the Chinese government acts?”
  3. “What will be the delay between action and results?

The short answer to Question 1 is “Very.” If this is as serious as I think it is, the challenge for the government of the People’s Republic of China as for other governments, will be to stop polluting and clean up the pollution it has allowed to be dispersed into the bio-humano-sphere. However, this conflicts with the apparent goal of the Chinese government to be the world’s biggest producer of stuff without regard to pollution.

Continue reading →

The Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Four: “You Have Nothing to Worry About (click) Worry About (click) Worry About (click)…”

Stability Model of an experimental distribution grid

A stability map of a simple power grid. Each point on this image represents an operating state of a simple power grid consisting of a few generators. Bluish regions constitute stable working states, red unstable and ‘salt-and-pepper’ represent chaotic behavior. One can tune a grid for stability by controlling the phasing of generators and transformers on the grid and such settings suffice for day-to-day operations. It is difficult to decide where, or by how much, abnormalities such as geomagnetic storms might push a system into red, unstable regions, or, worse, salt-and-pepper regions where the system oscillates between states. It is easy to find cases on the map where chaotic regions lie very close to stable regions, indicating that the destabilizing push need not be large at all. James Thorp, Cornell University, published in IEEE Spectrum

People paid to worry about the North American power grid regard geomagnetic storms as “high impact, low-frequency” events, spawning the inevitable acronym: HILF. Low frequency, in that a geomagnetic storm as intense as May 1921, at 5,000 nano-Teslas/minute, or the 1859 Carrington Event, best guess: 7,500 nano-Teslas/minute, might not happen in our lifetimes, the lifetimes of our children, or even our grand children. If signature traces in Arctic ice core samples are correct, these are ‘500 year events.’ When it comes to deciding where to put that preventative maintenance dollar, storm-proofing Oklahoma elementary schools against EF 5 tornadoes seems a far more practical spend than the hardening of electrical grids against a half-theoretical event that might not even happen in 500 years.

What pulls planners up short is the high impact part: the utter god-awfulness of a power grid that crashes and which then can’t boot itself up. There is a self-referential dependency: fixing a dysfunctional power grid requires it to be functional, as key aspects of the manufacturing of transformers need electricity.

Nor can one expect the cavalry to ride in anytime soon, as the vast geographic reach of geomagnetic storms means that one strong enough to take down the North American grid may very likely take down Eurasian grids as well – entire hemispheres could wind up in the toilet, and we only have two hemispheres. That and the statistical variableness to it all: the Carrington 1859 and May 1921 storms, nominally two ‘500 year events’ were, in fact, separated by only sixty-two years.

Where does the buck stop? Continue reading →

Popular Logistics Energy Portfolios: At 6 Months

PLEnergyPort

After Six Months,

  • The Sustainable Energy portfolio is up 61.78%
  • The Reference Fossil Fuel portfolio is DOWN 0.39%
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 16.49%
  • The S&P 500 is up 14.76%.

These data are summarized in table 1 and discussed below the fold. Continue reading →

Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Three: When a CME Hits the Atmosphere

Failed GSU transformer at Salem River, NJ

A Generator Step Up (GSU) transformer failed at the Salem River Nuclear Plant during the March 1989 geomagnetic storm. The unit is depicted on the left; some of the burned 22kV primary windings are shown on the right. Though immersed in cooling oil, the windings became hot enough to melt copper, at about 2000 degrees F. John Kappenman, Metatech

Coronal Mass Ejections are mainly charged particles, protons and electrons. When a CME arrives at Earth, the charged protons and electrons come under the influence of the Earth’s own magnetic field, the magnetosphere. Charged particles spin around the lines of magnetic force that comprise the magnetosphere, which diverts most of CME harmlessly around the planet, keeping Earth’s surface tranquil.

If the ejection is large enough, however, it can distort the shape of the magnetosphere, occasionally causing magnetic flux lines to snap and reconnect. When this happens, charged particles leak in and follow the magnetosphere’s flux lines down to the Earth’s ionosphere. There, they strike oxygen and nitrogen molecules and strip them of electrons. These ionized gases glow, giving rise to the ethereal beauty of the auroras around the north and south poles. Unfortunately, these excess charged particles also produce immense electrojets.

Continue reading →

Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part Two: The Physics of Geomagnetic Storms

goddard_cme_earth

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. The image above includes an image of Earth to show the size of the CME compared to the size of Earth. NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013, a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurled nearly one billion tons of charged particles from the sun’s corona at an outward velocity of one million miles per hour – 270 miles per second.

In less than a half hour, 2,700 virtual Empire State Buildings, 340,000 tons apiece – give or take a few gorillas – erupted from an active region of the Sun’s surface called AR1748, a northern latitude sunspot. AR1748 had just become visible on the western limb of the Sun’s surface when it ejected this mass, so the vast bulk of it hurled outward, not toward us in Libra, but more or less toward Cancer, at right-angles to us. In practical terms, it shot wide of its mark. Still an impressive shot. The CME had been triggered by an M class solar flare, the second largest in a five step scheme (An, Bn, Cn, Mn, Xn; for n a relative magnitude). It had been the largest coronal mass ejection observed thus far in 2013.

And it was still early in the day for AR1748.

Continue reading →

Celestial Shooting Gallery, Part One: The Day We Lost Quebec

Electrojets over N. America

John Kappenman reconstructed the electrojets which formed in the ionosphere late in the March 13, 1989 geomagnetic storm which compromised the Hydro-Quebec power grid in Canada. Concurrently, the eastward jet induced ground currents that severely strained the electrical distribution grid of northern continental United States, resulting in a transformer failure at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant, in New Jersey. Courtesy of Metatech

Nearly a quarter century ago, on March 13, 1989,  a geomagnetic storm led to the collapse of the Hydro-Quebec electrical grid system, which furnishes power to much of the province of Quebec, Canada. So pervasive were abnormal currents, that protective circuit breakers tripped throughout the system, bringing the entire grid to a halt in about one and a half minutes. The grid’s self-protective systems were geared toward local abnormalities happening in particular places. In contrast, ground induced currents created abnormalities everywhere. The good news was that most of the hardware protected itself. The bad news was that six million customers were without power for as long as nine hours, and where transformer damage did occur, outages continued for another week.

Further south, the United States experienced a close shave. A second surge in the March 13 storm generated similar ground induced currents in the northern United States, with large current spikes observed from the Pacific Northwest to the mid-Atlantic states, one spike destroying a large GSU transformer at the Salem Nuclear Power Plant in New Jersey. According to John Kappenman, of the Metatech Corporation “It was probably at this time that we came uncomfortably close to triggering a blackout that could have literally extended clear across the country.”

Continue reading →

First Responder Deaths Demand Response

Ground Zero in Ruins. Courtesy CBS News

Ground Zero in Ruins. Courtesy CBS News

Adan Gonzalez, 69, died of throat cancer in April, 2015. Mr. Gonzalez had been a photographer and a volunteer at the World Trade Center site, working for two years as a photographer documenting the event and serving other volunteers.

Mr. Gonzalez is one of 1,712 First Responders who died due to the Sept. 11 attacks, 412 who died the day of the attacks (wikipedia) and 1,300 who died from medical complications arising from their search and rescue work. Over 40% of the 4,053 people who died in or resulting from the attack, not counting soldiers killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, or who died after returning home were first responders engaged in search and rescue or cleanup operations, a humanitarian mission.

Continue reading →

Leave Improvisation to Actors, Comedians, and Musicians – and Develop Coherent Disaster & Risk Policies

Craig Fugate

Craig Fugate

After bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, April 15, 2013, the FBI and the Boston Police tracked down the alleged terrorists, who in the course of their flight killed a cop at MIT, hijacked a Mercedes, fired and threw bombs at police, and tried to ram the police with the stolen car. Continue reading →