Alice J. Friedemann is the author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the future of transportation.” She is also the creator of the excellent website: http://energyskeptic.com/. Ms. Friedemann is perhaps best known for “Peak Soil,” edited by David Pimentel at Cornell, Tad Patzek at U.C. Berkeley, and Walter Youngquist (author of “Geodestinies”). She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her interest in oil began at 10 on a family vacation when the car was running on empty in Death Valley and it was 120 F in the shade. After researching Hubbert’s Peak in 2000, Alice realized the world couldn’t run on empty beer-cans-painted-black solar collectors like the one she’d help build in the 1973 energy crisis, and became a science writer, focusing on Peak Oil and related issues.
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I just started listening to this podcast. It covers on many of the things that most concern me. I find it interesting that many of our societies most pressing issues are rarely discussed or seriously debated on mainstream media.
Here are some interesting questions that I just don’t know the answer to when I think about peak oil or a rapidly changing climate.
What is the actual carrying capacity of California in regards to water?
What is the LD50 temperature for people without a working air conditioner in the southern states?
The Lethal ambient temperature for most people in a static situation is 114F. So if you have a dry sauna or a wet sauna death would come more quickly in the wet vs. the dry because water penetrates to the body’s core faster. Our average internal temperature is 98.6 but mine runs cooler and I attribute that to my body acclimating to living in the south all my life. Having low blood pressure helps, too. There’s a reason southerners talk slow.
A lot of people forget that A/C has only been around a relatively short time and people lived in the south for hundreds of years with out it because they knew how to build their homes with breeze ways and 20ft ceilings.
Most of our grandparents lived for a time without electricity and used kerosene lamps that you can still find in their homes as antique decoration.
There can still be found in most towns the remnants of ice factories where ammonia was used to make ice blocks that were delivered to individual homes along with the milk.
If one was to extrapolate into the future what we’re seeing the beginnings of now…it would be an extreme scenario where you have maybe 20% of the worlds population still living like us but 80% living like our great grandparents; off the scraps of the wealthy.
Regarding Alice’s comment on how exact the refining and formulation of diesel fuel must be, that is true ONLY because all of the electronic and emission controls that came into being. The old diesel engines were quite tolerant of the fuel oil they burned.
Yes, modern diesels are cleaner and more powerful but, if you factor in the losses from higher diesel fuel refining and the higher upfront energy investment in modern computer controlled diesel engines, we have already sunk a LOT more material and Energy Investment before the engine has even started and pulled its first load.
I can’t help but wonder whether a modern coal-fueled steam engine would actually perform more work in its first five years of life compared to a modern diesel, based on a fixed upfront energy investment. Consider the minimal extraction and processing to make coal usable. Consider the far lesser degree of engine manufacture required. A modern steam engine doesn’t have to be made from cast iron! A coal steam truck, with far less upfront investment, might actually work for three years before the computer-controlled diesel has even cranked to life. Even if you figure in a reasonable emission-control system on the coal engine, I think you’d still be ahead.
With far fewer resources in a World Made By Hand, it would be good to develop such coal-fired steamers to move stuff. There will have to be a compromise on abstract clean air metrics and what is needed to keep the nation alive. Life will have to be slowed down, scaled back, and the old bulk inventory system revived. Much higher levels of inventory will be necessary to compensate for long periods of not getting product in. Just-In-Time supply will have to be outlawed. It is inherently brittle and requires a TYRANNICAL control matrix to keep it functioning.
Excellent podcast. Two points, diesel engines run REAL good on Nat gas and propane, they just need a added ignition system. Caterpillar developed a ecm controlled ignition that injected a very small amount of diesel to ignite I believe propane probably 15 years ago or more. Cummins has offered a engine that has spark plugs. I think a conversion to Nat gas would be possible nationwide, it would take a Federal government mandate and a countrywide filling station network. How much gas we have and how long it will last is a different question.
Second point, You can drive all along the west coast of California and up I-15 to the Utah Idaho border on Nat gas only, right now. with a 200 mile range, which is what the civic has. I do not work where conversions are taking place so I am sure their are many other things going on.
Thanks Jim, I don’t miss a Monday read.l
Or raise the price of diesel to $10.00 a gallon and you would see Nat gas conversions skyrocket, assuming Nat gas price stayed reasonable.
The problem with natural gas is the laziness of engine builders to do a proper conversion. Propane has much lower BTU’s than gasoline or diesel. BUT… that can be compensated for by high compression ratios and turbocharging.
Most propane conversions simply stick a propane carburetor onto a gasoline engine and without changing anything else. The result is a gutless engine and high fuel consumption. Most of these conversions lack a pressure regulator to compensate for engine temperature and ambient temperature. Again, lousy performance due to laziness and ignorance.
Diesel engines naturally have the high compression and the CR can be easily dropped with thick head gaskets. Modify to accept an ignition system and you’re good. The drawback is that diesel engines are very heavy.
Propane engines can replace gasoline engines but, unless it’s done CORRECTLY, then it’s just a waste of time and resources.
I had a propane converted truck. Every propane fuel system has a pressure regulator. I’ve never seen one without one. Propane and Nat Gas are pressurized systems. There must be a regulator otherwise you have the fuel going from liquid to gas phase so fast it freezes the lines and likely displaces any air you are trying to get in your A/F mixture.
Propane injection into diesel engines is a thing, for weirdos. The idea is displace that bit of air in the chamber with propane. We’re talking very marginal gains in power.
The problem with converting any engine is compromise, compromise, compromise. A diesel engine under propane no matter how much lower you take the compression is still going to be heavy as hell, and will be a complete pig on fuel economy. Natural gas will be similar.
The problem with using these as transportation fuel is you are stealing it form other uses! Even if you fracked everyplace you could, you wouldn’t be able to replace a fraction of the raw BTUs of diesel, given the competition for the in-place consumption of energy grids. Not even propane is that versatile. The chemical feedstock needs to make propylene! Heck, you get most of the propane from gasoline refining!
Love the coal steam truck idea though, thats something I can see Jay Leno going for.
I wasn’t very clear with my comment on propane conversions.
I meant to say that propane regulators didn’t come with temperature compensation features. Good conversions include something to compensate for engine and ambient temperatures.
The best conversions raise the compression ratios on ex-gasoline engines AND use temperature compensated regulators. Very rare for conversion shops to do that much work.
Hey nutty what does ld 50 mean?
LD50 means the lethal dose that kills half of the people exposed. 95 degrees F wet-bulb temperature is lethal to all humans. Somewhere before 95 F wet-bulb is a temp that will kill half of the people. France had a heat wave a few years ago and the old people were dropping like flies on a bug zapper.
Man I’m not talking about the $200 sh$t
you work on in your back yard.
And what do you know about engines, evidently not much since you are so enamoured by turbochargers, I have replaced hundreds of them.
We are not talking about propane, it was a example of what Caterpillar developed for a propane hauler on the Texas Mexican border many years ago. I apologize for my reaction Florida.
I have tried to get Kunstler to open his eyes to nuclear technology but his anti-nuke religion is to ingrained in him to consider the solutions that it can offer. This is not a magical technology. It is a simple way to obtain massive amounts of energy with a fuel that we will not run out of any time soon.
I will post the solution to our energy problems here and let the fellow readers comment on it or ask questions.
Many years ago when the mass zeal over nuclear power had swept over the military leaders of the day, the Air Force came up with a plan to build a long range bomber powered by a nuclear reactor. The lead engineer took on the task knowing that it was a crazy idea to power a bomber with a reactor. He took on the task with the sole purpose of developing the molten salt fast reactor. He felt that if he could make it work for a bomber, the superior design would be adopted for use in the future reactor designs developed for other tasks. The molten salt reactors can be built a lot smaller with the same power output as a much larger sized light water reactor. To illustrate this point, you can obtain the same power output from a 1 meter wide and 1 meter long cylinder shaped molten salt design as what a 3 meter long and 3 meter wide light water reactor can generate. This is possible because the molten salt is better at transferring the heat away from the fuel to the coolant. Salt is also a much better material to use because salt is chemically stable compared to water in a high energy neutron flux.
The molten salt design are far superior in just about every way when compared to a light water reactor design. I would say that the analogy of comparing a turbojet to a propeller airplane would be insufficient to describe the advantages of a molten salt design over the light water design. The biggest advantage of the molten salt design is the inherent safety. They operate at very low pressures but very high temperatures. Without high pressures, there is no driving force to spew the radioactive fuel out into the environment and creating a radio-logical emergency. This also reduces the costs of a reactor by not having the need of a large robust containment building. These designs are also melt down proof. The small size but high power output gives it a large surface area to reject the decay heat should the need arise during a transient or emergency. The salt coolant can transfer the heat away from the fuel quickly and does not boil away. Light water reactor designs however must be actively cooled for a long period of time before the decay heat output is low enough to be rejected by ambient losses.
Another advantage is the molten salt design’s ability to burn up heavy actinides. Elements such as Plutonium, Californium, Uranium, and Thorium can all be burned in the MSR design due to their harder neutron spectrum. What I mean by harder neutrons is that the neutrons are moving faster in a MSR and have more kinetic energy than the neutrons in a light water reactor. These fast neutrons can fission both fissile and fissionable isotopes. Fissile atoms means that adding a neutron with 0 kinetic energy to the nucleus is enough to cause the atom to fission. Fissionable elements can also undergo fission but they must absorb a high energy neutron or there is not enough energy to cause a fission. Fissile isotopes are all fissionable but not all fissionable isotopes are fissile.
The neutrons in a MSR are moderated less than the neutrons in a light water reactor and are therefor faster and more energetic. The extra kinetic energy of these neutrons adds enough energy to a fissionable isotope like U-238 undergo fission. The light water designs simply can’t burn these elements because the neutrons are moderated to an energy level too low to burn the fissionable but non-fissile isotopes. Light water reactors can only burn fissile atoms such as U-235, Pu-239 and U-233.
This ability to burn both the fissile and fissionable isotopes gives you a few key benefits. The MSR eliminates the largest challenge of the long term storage of radioactive waste from reactors by burning up the actinides that are present in waste from light water reactors. The waste of the MSR contain mostly fission fragments and they decay away within a few hundred years. You can use the waste of today’s nuclear reactors as fuel in a MSR design.
MSRs can be designed to be breeder reactors. The breeding of new fuel is key to our energy future because it would allow us to use the Thorium fuel cycle. Thorium is much more common than Uranium and it has a very long half life (14 billion years). It is not going away anytime soon. With breeding you can make more fuel than you consume. This is not magic. It is simple physics. When you add a neutron to the nucleus of a Thorium 232 atom, you make the already radioactive element more unstable by turning it into a Th 233 atom. This isotope’s radioactive decay path is a beta decay with a 22 minute half-life to Protactinium 233, Pa-233. This beta decay ejects an electron out of the nucleus and raises the number of protons in it by 1. The Th 233 has now become a Pa-233 atom. Pa-233 then beta decays again with a 27 day half-life to Uranium 233 which is a fissile fuel. This process does not violate any laws of conservation. The energy was there all along stored in the long half-life and unstable Th-232 atom.
With all these advantages some might be asking why the MSR was not developed. We built experimental MSRs and they operated safely for many years at DOE facilities. These research projects were killed because they were not a viable reactor technology for making Plutonium for nuclear weapons. The research from these projects are not considered classified and the Chinese are now using our data to develop their own advanced reactor designs.
I will add that there was another advanced reactor design called the Integral Fast Reactor or IFR. It was killed by Jim Kunstler’s “hair cut looking for a brain” John Kerry with the support of anti-nuke democrats and republicans owned by the coal industry. Ask yourself this simple question. Had the British refused to adopt coal fired boilers and steam engines to power their fleet of ships because it would have killed their sail making industry, do you think they would have risen to become a super power? Why is it that the USA refuses to adopt a far superior reactor technology due to the religious ignorance of the anti-nukes and fossil fuels industry?
It would be helpful to explain why this all matters to you and the future of America. These MSR designs can be used to provide the heat source needed to drive a power plant for both industrial heat and electricity generation. You could choose a standard Rankine cycle steam plant that has been used for many year and used in all US nuclear plants or use the more efficient and advanced Brayton cycles that are used in natural gas turbine plants. The Brayton cycle would be especially attractive because you can add a Rankine cycle to use the waste heat from the Brayton cycle to attain an efficiency as high as 60%. These combination plants are called combined cycle power plants.
These reactors could be used to make synthetic oil using the Fischer-Tropsch process. You could scale this process up and make it a viable alternative to crude oil used to power our transportation. The key here to making it work is cheap and plentiful energy source because you are not “making” energy with this process. You are simply storing it in the chemical bonds between Carbon and Hydrogen in oil molecules.
I will add this personal experience from the polar vortex that hit 2&1/2 years ago. I was a licensed reactor operator at a commercial nuclear power plant up until May 2015. I was working the night shift when the polar vortex hit. I remember receiving many frantic calls from the load dispatcher demanding that I raise the reactive load on the main generator. It got to the point that I was at the operating limits of the main generator. I only experienced this type of interaction with the load dispatcher once in my career as a reactor operator. Reactive load is what is used to transmit electrical power throughout the grid. It does this by generating the voltage potentials needed to move electricity. Without reactive load, the grid collapses and this causes brownouts/blackouts. There were cases of rolling blackouts in the eastern part of the US that night but they were not well publicized. I later found out why I had received so many calls demanding more reactive load. Many of the coal units were knocked offline that night because the coal piles froze up. The natural gas units were knocked offline because the high demand of natural gas for heating homes lowered the pipeline pressures so much that the gas power plants could not operate. The only thing keeping the grid for the eastern USA up that night were the nukes. The windmills were also making power but what use is that if you can’t move the power around? Windmills don’t make reactive load!
I have a challenging question to offer to the zealous followers of the anti-nuke religion. How many people would have to die as a result of your obstruction to this technology before you would accept nuclear technology? Have you even thought about what the carrying capacity of our planet is using just the energy budget of our sun? To the sociopaths that own the fossil fuels and have a financial interest in stopping nuclear power, at what point is the welfare of humanity and the future of our species on this planet enough to be a priority over your profits?
I have offered a solution to our problem of peak oil. Great countries rise and fall due to corruption and mismanagement of the elites. China is pushing forward with developing nuclear technologies that the USA pioneered in many decades ago. Where do you think the balance of power is going to go if we don’t secure our energy future?
OK, OK, lets imagine there is an energy supply so unbelievably powerful, so cheap, lets just say free, more than you could ever want- maybe its impossible to make a dirty bomb out of it and there is so damn much anything is possible!
Does anyone really want that?
Think about it- no limits on energy. No limits on the size of an SUV, its raw tonnage, how much range- all irrelevant.
The apes will go ape-s***.
We are living in a time where we can act (almost) as if energy isn’t a limiting factor. Of course, it is, fundamentally. But if it becomes no object, then something else becomes a limiting factor. What could it be? Real estate? Oxygen? Water?
The human dilemma remains the same. We can’t seem to pull back to keep from overshooting.
I think you know exactly what you are talking about.
I haven’t heard JHK say diddly squat about MSRs or thorium, however.
Every time a good American goes down to the store burning his Allahu Akbar oil, to buy a Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia Pet PC made in China by slave laborers, and then mosies over to the Sam’s Klub in his motorized Harley wheelchair, and gets a bag of midwestern Cheetoes and slave-labor picked strawberries with a side of authentic American pesticide, they are all kind of pissing on the Thorium dream aren’t they?
When it comes right down to it, these people don’t deserve Thorium, and its a crying shame they got cheap oil. Bring the pandemic, the population crash, the genetic engineering, and lets breed a version of humanity capable of restraint.
And to answer your question, how many have to die? Ah, about 6.5 billion, I reckon.
You bring an interesting point of view to this dilemma. How do you even attempt to social engineer a large and diverse population of people on this planet? I imagine you would run into a stumbling block immediately with the people that believe in an imaginary sky wizard. I don’t know what to do about the belief that this sky wizard would be enraged about humans using critical thinking and objective thought to control themselves.
My wife and I have two daughters and that is enough for both of us. This is just under the replacement rate of 2.1 children per person needed to sustain a stable population. I can’t compete with the people that insist on having kids with no regard to their ability to support them. I grow a bit more cynical each time I go to the grocery store and see people swiping their EBT cards with a basket full of groceries with their unruly demon spawn screaming and running around like wild apes.
Did you ever watch Idiocracy? This movie is looking more and more like a documentary about the future of America than a piece of fiction.
America reached zero population growth in the 1970s… I think a lot of people assumed this meant exactly what it implied. Americans didn’t want population growth. However, then came St. Reagan, with another amnesty- Agriculture interests had grown to depend on this cheap labor. Politicians spoke to the standing interests of the Ag sector which had been consolidating into corporate behemoths for decades. And then all the knock on effects of that. American food profits were in value-added processing, the commodity itself having become completely subsidized. Too many interests paid for and got a system that fed its standing interests. UNESCO and dept of state bargaining chips = food aid. Fuel and chemical industry for pesticides and fertilizers. Industry for machinery and equipment. Finance for mergers and acquisition worldwide. Advertising for novel foods. Etc…
Cyclical dependence on these imported workers systematically overrode immigration laws with nearly decadal “amnesty”. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, a new immigration bill out forth by Kennedy and others allowed unlimited relatives to come over. NAFTA created the sprawling maquiladoras and sudden overpopulatoin of the Rio Grande desert. Just as quickly those jobs left and the waves of immigration became more intense.
At the same time pragmatic American business saw this new pool of second-class citizens as a gold mine. Every “blue collar” occupation was swamped: auto repair, hotel worker, janitor, you name it. The capitalists loved it; cheap labor that would never organize. Economists crowed endlessly about how great this was. Your blue-collar American without a pay raise in 20 years could buy Strawberries for $0.50 cheaper. Every body wins!
Except what happened was a flood. Now they say there are only 11 million illegals in the country. What a load of horseS**t. There are probably closer to 30-40 million. Nothing really has been done about it.
So now, 20-30 years down the road, those blue-collar people, they’re still screwed out of back pay. We have an electorate that basically hates lower class people and will never compensate them. Our younger generation are getting absolutely screwed to find dignified living arrangements when an apartment complex is filled with apartments over-stuffed by foreigners willing to sleep 8 to a 2 bedroom.
Still the same people are profitting and the same people are telling us what’s good for us. They don’t really care about blue-collar people, American independence, their kid’s generation, or the environment. Its a complete focus on attainment of wealth, essentially, for survival.
I’m voting Trump because he is the only politician who seems like he would actually kick all of these people out- which would be a great, great boon to the American worker and the working poor. And it would be great for America and trading partners’ home nations to have American-trained people back in their countries to turn those countries’ political economy around. Emigration from those countries absolutely wrecked their democratic institutions by concentrating the corrupt and consolidating their power.
We need less people, not ways to keep more of them around, comfortably…
The future isn’t with humanity, when will people like you realize this?
The problem isn’t with the masses. The problem is a bloated and overpaid Top 1%. They take far too much and deliver NOTHING of value.
They alone are guilty of gross misallocation of capital, both in terms of financial capital and labor. The scheme of the Top 1% to send production to China and the 3rd World, while creating interdependence among the developed nations, is the main problem. Joe Sixpack did NOT create the problems nor ask for them.
A return to sovereign nations that produce as much as possible in-house, trading the surplus with nations that have what is needed, and using gold ONLY as a form of escrow until the exchange is complete, would solve the problem of distribution of goods.
The world’s manufacturing systems are wasted on endless novelties and worthless consumer junk. Just-In-Time inventory and distribution is inherently brittle and requires a global tyranny to ensure its reliability. The fix is to restructure consumer goods manufacture to make basics as top priority and restore the old bulk inventory system that always keeps at least week’s worth of goods in stock.
Such a restoration is not “expensive” but, will reflect the proper cost of a reliable production and distribution of goods with a robust tolerance for supply variances. It will also force the system to put the top 1% to be paid LAST and treat them like the parasites they are.
I think we’ve seen what can go wrong with nuclear . Given there’s been 2 major disasters and vast swathes of un -usable land as a consequence. Btw there are still minor leaks all the time. Sure china might have a advantage in the short term but maintenance costs and decommissioning costs make that non affordable in the long term. It takes over 10 years to decommission a reactor or else it will have a melt down! what a cost to create steam.
The main thing I think they’re going to do is develop coal there”s still a fair bit of it and if worse comes to worse they will liquefy it like Germany in WW2. If Germany could do it while getting bombarded I’m sure the U.S can. They might ration it for most necessary transport etc. Given energy economics i don’t see how they can run mega cities on solar and wind. So medium and short term will definitely be coal.