Month: January 2006

China PBMR Nuclear Background

Here are a couple of older background articles about the story blogged earlier.

The Chinergy CEO Frank Wu, interviewed in Wired. [via Net127]
A speech by a South African Government Minister.

Quote from the Chinergy article “Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom – China’s nuclear renaissance could feed the hydrogen revolution, enabling the country to leapfrog the fossil-fueled West into a new age of clean energy. Why worry about foreign fuel supplies when you can have safe nukes rolling off your own assembly lines? Why invoke costly international antipollution protocols when you can have motor vehicles that spout only water vapor from their tail pipes? Why debate least-bad alternatives when you have the political and economic muscle to engineer the dream?”

And just to remind us where China are on the nuclear map, remember they are also hosting the next international “tokomak” fusion research reactor too.

Expanding yes, moving forward too.

Nuclear China and Peak-Oil ?

China (a big factor in overall global economic growth and fossil fuel supply and demand issues) has been involved in development (and safety proving tests) of a new generation of High Temperature Nuclear Reactors (HTR Technology) and the first production power plant project has just started. The technology is inherently safer and more compact than previous generation water and gas-cooled designs. (One reason is the local small-scale containment of the fissile material in carbide “pebbles” (PBMR), the second is the self-limiting physics of its “strong negative temperature coefficient”, which means the reaction slows as it gets hotter. No more Three-Mile-Island or Chernobyl ?)
[See here] [here] [here] [and here].

Pebble bed furnaces ?
Takes me back to my power boiler days at FW ….

Anyway, as most of China’s power generation is coal and hydro anyway, what does this have to do with Peak-Oil ? Well – reading between the lines – it’s like this.

These are high-temeperature reactors, hot enough to do more than raise steam (to drive power turbines), the hot gas can itself be used to drive gas turbines before (raising steam and/or) recycling through the reactor bed. What’s more the heat can be used to gassify coal and drive other hyrdocarbon processes, like Hydrogen-Cracking and Synthetic-Gasoline production – both of which take the load off Oil and Natural Gas fuel and raw material demands. Not surprisingly, South Africa which originally bought German technologies for synfuels and pebble-bed reactors, is a partner with both Chinergy and US Nuclear consortia for next generation (cleaner, greener, safer) nuclear power. [Post note : For the Chinese production projects, the focus, after power, is thermo-electric generation of hydrogen from water, made feasibly efficient at the temperatures involved. See later post.]

The significance of South Africa and Germany ? Both countries that in recent history (second world war and apartheid sanctions), had reason to find real alternatives to not having natural oil and gas supplies available for their industrial and/or military might. Real practical crises, not just hypothetical ones.

It’s an ill wind, etc.

(Vested interest ? The s/w company mentioned in the press-release is my employer, but we’re into all aspects of power and oil & gas, and a lot more, so business-wise we’re ultimately neutral on which energy and feedstock resources, or efficiency measures people choose.)

Peak-Oil Summary

Sam has a great link to a short video summary of Jeremy Leggett’s story on the looming oil crisis. A good powerful documentary. Notice that the difference between the late (optimistic) and early (pessimistic) toppers may be 2:1 in terms of effective reserves, but the net result isn’t a lot different – given the lead time needed for viable alternatives.

“It’s gonna happen on our watch”

(Full detailed article here.) (Direct link to the ABC Video and transcript here.)

PS – Playing down the need to panic is a fair point, given the global market economies and unstable politics involved, but ignoring the need to plan the transition and invest in the alternatives, and to condition public opinion to the changes needed, is hardly good planning.

Also, love the optimist’s suggestion that the doom-mongering pessimists are the ones with vested interests in this situation. Breathtaking. Don’t you just love rhetoric.

Even the Vatican Agrees …

… that Intelligent Design (ID) Creationism is not a scientific alternative to anything, and religion is quite distinct from science. They even refer to supporting the Pennsylvanian court ruling that upheld parents objections to IDC being taught as alternative science in their schools.[ via Sam at Elizaphanian]

Numbers, Objective, What ?

The Jeremy Leggett oil-crisis article is I guess no great surprise, in terms of the discovery, reserves, production, security and consumption of oil & gas supplies. It’s only ever been a matter of when, though as he points out even intelligent public guesswork would be way off the mark on many of the key dates. The consequences of not planning a smooth transition through the crisis don’t bear thinking about. Actually they do, but like Jeremy you feel that perhaps a small disaster soon might be what we need to wake everyone up before a total global economic crash and word war three.

It’s a well researched article and worth the long read. Excellent.

My main interest is in the “facts” – that is my epistemological agenda. I mentioned the Shell overestimation of their own reserves, that led to the fall of their then CEO and Chief Geologist, in my MoQ Conference paper last year. I mentioned it amongst other “accounting” scandals, not to raise the nightmare scenario, but in order to raise the question of “subjective” information “objectively” presented, as part of the normal “hypocrisy” of taking a “scientific” view of complex situations involving behaviour of humans individually and collectively in organisations of any kind. My main agenda.

Before I go there – the other striking “fact”. Is it really true that the full worst-case predicted demand for global energy could actually be satisfied by solar power occupying <1% (less than one per-cent !!) of land area currently used for agriculture ? If that were only vaguely true, nothwithstanding engineering and logistical factors, we could solve the EU Common Agricultural Policy and the world energy crisis in one move. What a missed opportunity for the UK’s year as EU Chair. What a criminal waste if true and known. Except … what are truth and knowledge anyway … therein lies the rub.

I won’t cherry pick the quotes – you can read the article – but Jeremy has so many examples of “rational” distortion and exaggeration of quantitative “facts”, and hypocritical denial and sharing ignorance, and so on. Every trick in the rational logical-positivist objective book.

My urgent agenda – to get us thinking, decision-making and acting with quality instead of pseudo-objectivity – just got its urgency re-inforced. Talk about intent, power and interest – all more significant than any objective “facts”.

Mary Parker Follett

Recently read Pauline Graham’s compilation of the works of Mary Parker Follett “The Prophet of Management“. Generally considered by a host of modern management gurus to have written the final word on many important management subjects, back in the 1920’s, when she became well known through her writing, lecturing and consulting. She is often cited (after Newton) as a giant on whose shoulders many of them stand. However she lay practically unknown and unreferenced for the following 30 odd years, as being of no significance, until unearthed in 1950’s by the guru of management gurus Peter Drucker (recently deceased).

(One of my earlier aphorisms, in the mould of reality having to be believed to be seen, is that “you have to believe in giants before you can stand on their shoulders”, but I digress.)

One aspect of her work was in “conflict management”, not only in resolving disputes (eg employers & unions) but in encouraging real differences to be aired (eg in counselling situations), where they would in general be hidden or unspoken. She says “Just so far as people think that the basis of working together is compromise or concession, just so far do they not understand the first principles.”- ie win-win integration is the aim, etc. (And for those advocates of the “False Prophets” view – she of course is not disclaiming management power to enforce its decisions, but she does remind us from where such power comes.)

Anyway, I was struck by the philosophical basis of her ideas, consistent with the agenda here …

“Progressive experience depends on relating. The ardent search for objectivity, the primary task of the fact worshippers, cannot be the whole task of life, for objectivity alone is not reality.”

“I do not see how [opposing tendencies] can be avoided whilst we see reality [exclusively] as either subject or object.”

“[Citing Edwin B Holt’s – The Concept of Consciousness] Reality is defined as some very complex system of terms in relation. Reality is in the relating; in the activity-between … subject and object are equally important and reality is in the relating of these [and] in the endless evolving of these relations. This has been the grain of gold of the profoundest thinkers from Aristotle to the present [1920’s] day.”

“Full acceptance of life as process gets us away from [controversy]. This is neither conventional idealism nor realism; neither mechanism nor vitalism.”

“We have to study a whole as a whole, not only through analysis of its constituents. The whole is determined not only by its constituents, but by their relations one to another.”

“The culture of an organisation has a momentum of its own, but an organisation is not an entity separate from it’s members. Parts and the whole are bound together in dynamic interaction. It is this dynamic interaction that must be influenced in order to bring about change in an organisation.”

“Without difference there is no progress. The value is in the difference. Common thought is not held [after removal of differences] but is produced by the integration of differences.”

“A Darwinist view of progress as evolution characterised by competition alone is too simplistic in ignoring cooperation.” [A prescient comment for the 1920’s given the later “Selfish Gene” view which drops the pure competition metaphors to the genetic level, and fully recognises the neo-Darwinian mixed competitive and cooperative strategies at the individual organism level.]

Interestingly, given the Pope’s recent warnings about “relativism”, this week’s BBC “In Our Time” discussed the topic. We should indeed all be worried by a spin on “relativism” that can be rhetorically interpreted as a wishy-washy “anything goes”. I liked the Hegelian (?) absolute-relativism idea. Very Pirsigian. A fundamental and relatively fixed (if not wholly absolute) framework in which “relations” determine reality and truth. Rebecca recently coined “Relationalism” over on MoQ-Discuss, as an antidote to the pejorative rhetoric surrounding “relativism”.

I could highlight all the key words in the Follett quotes, but I won’t; It’s not about objects, objectively distinct from subjects, it’s about

value-in-difference-in-relations,

and

life-as-process-as-dynamic-interaction, or evolution

Crisis, What Crisis ?

Thanks to Alex for pointing out this long and detailed Independent Article by Jeremy Leggett, adapted from his “Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis”.

All adding to the “Peak-Oil” relevance, and the significance of “The Middle East Situation” – Iran, Israel, Security, etc …