Category Archives: Energy

the posts in this category used to be in “Energy in A Nutshell” at my former web site.

Fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Source: The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Preface. Anyone who thought the … Continue reading

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Fusion: Tokamak Obstacles

Source: Sparkes M (2022) Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100 million°C for 30 seconds. New Scientist. Preface. Hope springs eternally for Fusion.  I’ve come to see press releases about fusion breakthroughs as mostly a way to get more startup investment … Continue reading

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Opposition to mining will prevent a green transition to renewables

Source: Bare (2012) Environmentalists win review of two more plants near Rosemont copper mine. Arizona Capitol times. I could overwhelm you with world-wide trillions of tons of mining waste and how China has rendered 20% of its farmland too toxic … Continue reading

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The electric grid could be down for years if LPTs destroyed

Large Power Transformer Source: ABB Conversations (2013) Preface. This post contains excerpts from two Department of Energy documents and one about large geomagnetic storms and how they would affect Large power transformers (LPT) and the U.S. electric grid. They are … Continue reading

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Uranium waste from 50+ sites contaminating groundwater

Preface. One of the top priorities of collapse from energy decline is to clean up nuclear (Superfund and other hazardous) wastes NOW, while we have the energy and technical ability to do so. Future generations will be thrown back into … Continue reading

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Risks of cyber attack on Infrastructure

Delacourt TP (2022) Cyberattacks on Critical Infrastructure as the New WMD. Homeland Security. Preface. What follows are several articles on how cyber attacks could harm our infrastructure across at least 16 systems we depend on.  Although it is the decline … Continue reading

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Infrastructure interdependencies: an attack on one is an attack on all

An Attack on Energy Infrastructure would affect all other Infrastructure I should consolidate my many posts on cyber attacks, EMPs, and other ways the electric grid could come down, but our dependencies are just so widespread that I don’t want … Continue reading

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Why biofuels can not scale up to replace petroleum

Preface. This is my favorite paper on why we can’t replace crude oil with biofuels.  Of course, oil is a biofuel. But alas, not renewable, since it took over 100 million years to make them. Every year we burn fossil … Continue reading

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Skyscrapers: A bad idea as energy declines

Preface. One reason Paris is such a lovely city is that it was built to human scale, with buildings of five stories or less, because that was about as high as people were willing to climb, so not surprisingly, rents … Continue reading

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Review of Lights out: the electricity crisis, the global economy, and what it means to you

Preface. My books and energyskeptic.com explain why the electric grid can’t stay up.  This is a book review of Makansi’s “Lights out: the electricity crisis, the global economy, and what it means to you”. He explains why the grid is … Continue reading

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