Environment & Energy

...back to the good old days when General Atomic called up the SI cycle and promoted it for use with their gas cooled reactors, reactors that were overall, failures, because the materials science of the time - the 1960's and earlier - were not up to the challenge although Peach Bottom did OK, not great, but OK.

(The British, on the other hand, had commercial success with their AGCRs, with CO₂ working fluids, but did not employ them for thermochemical purposes.)

I am familiar with almost all of the various permutations beyond the SI cycle, although truth be told, the SI cycle remains a favorite for various reasons, chiefly because it utilizes fluid phase materials and thus can be utilized in continuous flow loops in process intensification settings using the high temperatures for exergy recovery. I have crudely estimated thermal efficiencies approaching or even exceeding 70%.

I have understood that the Chinese are actively working on the nuclear driven SI process.

The SI process has been discussed for decades, and perhaps advances in modern materials science - my son's field, nuclear materials science engineering - will make it workable. I certainly discuss it with him whenever I have a chance to do so during our wide ranging conversations..

The ability to make hydrogen with thermal processes - often to secure grants people publish these papers using the very, very, very stupid and destructive solar thermal junk - does not, of course, invalidate the fact that hydrogen, while being a very useful captive intermediate, should never be a consumer product. One needs to be a complete idiot in my view - or as is the case at DU and elsewhere someone attempting to advertise in favor of greenwashing fossil fuels by rebranding them as "hydrogen" - to advocate for hydrogen as a consumer fuel. It's physical and material properties are awful. As it is, hydrogen is a dirty captive intermediate essential for fertilizers, methanol, and petroleum refining, responsible - depending on the source of information - for in "percent talk" about 1% to 3% of carbon dioxide emissions - which now are believed to be on the order of 40 billion tons per year, while we all wait for the so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come, meaning that the production of hydrogen may be for responsible for something like a billion tons of CO₂ per year.

These "hydrogen miracle" threads rehashing 50 years of hydrogen bullshit that comes to the fore like a hydra every decade or so, along with all the rest of the fossil fuel greenwashing scams including but not limited to carbon capture and sequestration, and, of course, hyping use the useless so called "renewable energy" crap as a fig leaf for the continued use of fossil fuels.

The only way to deal with fossil fuels that is sustainable is to ban them. That's not going to happen with so called "renewable energy" which is wholly and totally dependent on the use of fossil fuels.

Have a nice day.