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.
What might you ask did I do that was so novel?
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Feb 27, 2021 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Climate change thread
TLDR, is CO2 a green house gas. The consequences of increasing concentrations remains uncertain.
I’d appreciate it if someone can point me to references that show proper statistical testing of climate models.
My background is in nuclear engineering. The bulk of what we do is model highly non-linear systems (Boltzmann transport equation which is an integra-differential equation). These reactor systems are so complex that we have to use linear approximations to even describe them.
