A coal mining nuclear engineer playing with synthetic fuels working to end energy poverty.
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Feb 8, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
What happens when you give a group of Luddites the ability to say “No”? Well, @DoombergT answers.
Q: Why is nuclear energy messed up in the US?
A: The NRC, but if you dig deeper you find their regulatory warrant comes from LNT (no safe dose), the keystone for their bad policy twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
The reason why I left the nuclear industry is because I didn’t want to deal with the battered wife syndrome that the nuclear industry has due to the NRC. There is a strong desire to change, but there is a fear of artificial dependence. The best way to deal with it, leave.
Nov 7, 2022 • 33 tweets • 11 min read
The question of could this work is a definite YES. The question is how would we go about doing it?
When I was a baby nuke, I got to see what a nuclear powerplant at sea can do on the Might P. The guy with the three stripes on his sleeve was my CO. Because I had a knack for power plant operations I spent a lot of time in the engine room, I was ORSE EOOW for every exam...
Nov 6, 2022 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
This is going to take a bit to go through and it will have a bunch of math. This is a topic I am currently working through to develop a formal methodology to measure. If I get technical, I apologize.
First, what is the second law of thermodynamics. It says that for a spontaneous event to occur the entropy of the system has increase. J.W. Gibbs identified this law as the fundamental equation of thermodynamics en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodyn…
Gibbs used η for entropy convention is 's'
Nov 6, 2022 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
The EROI threshold of economic viability comes from the fact we have to use energy to sustain a certain level of existence. This is about the best explanation I have found. open.spotify.com/episode/5CiMDC…
Beginning at the 16:45 point on the podcast, he talks about the three energy inputs into the economy:Food, feed, and wood. Everything that we did up until the industrial revolution was constrained be these renewable resources.
Nov 3, 2022 • 40 tweets • 18 min read
@Mining_Atoms asked me to write a little thread on why thermal energy storage is better than battery storage for the grid.
The problem is energy storage wasn't a problem I was trying to solve.
In 2010, fresh out of the Navy, I went to work at the TVA to be a Senior Reactor Operator At Sequoyah. There was a huge push at the time to limit GHG emissions.
This movie profoundly impacted me, but I couldn't understand why there was no mention of nuclear.
Sep 25, 2022 • 25 tweets • 9 min read
I've been pretty hard on economists lately. I've just finished writing this paper. It is a complete rewrite that formalizes the connection of utility to entropy. I added two parts one resolves the Allais paradox and the other looks at US income data.
1/ papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Why I've been so hard is that somebody should have done what I did a long time ago, but alas not all the low hanging fruit has been picked.
