NNadir
NNadir's JournalEnergy Production and Use Graphics: Sankey Diagrams of the World, Germany, and France.
A useful type of flowchart is called a "Sankey diagram," which in energy shows the primary sources of energy and how it is used in industry, transportation and residential settings.
The IEA had an extensive body of these going up to 2023 along with a description (on the linked page) of how to view them, along with a slider that can show the evolution of the diagrams from 1990 to 2023.
The graphics are partially interactive on line, but won't be in this post. The energy units are the SI unit Terrajoule, which is a millionth of an Exajoule.
Here, for convenience, is the Sankey Diagram of the whole world for 2023 which shows up when you click on the link:
Here is the Sankey Diagram for the whole world in 1990:
You may have heard in lots of lots of places at DU and in the world beyond about an "Energy Transition" that's supposed to be underway.
Really? Am I missing something? I can't see any "Energy Transition" prominent in comparing the 1990 and 2023 Diagrams.
Now two European Countries in 1990 and 2023. First Germany, in 1990 before the dubious antinuke "victory" over nuclear energy:
Germany in 2023, the year it shut its last nuclear plants, thereby deciding to kill people by burning coal and gas:
Germany, as the United States did in the last 30 years, reduced, but did not eliminate dependence on coal, but to the extent coal was replaced, it was largely by dangerous natural gas. So called "renewable energy" is trivial in Germany as it is in the rest of the world, despite its 5.6+ trillion dollar price tag.
Let's turn to France:
France in 1990:
France in 2023:
In 1990, France's real energy transition from coal to nuclear was already underway. As of 2023, the tiny amounts of coal imported into France are not used for power generation, but for materials use.
From 1990 to 2025, as far as electric power was concerned, France didn't need an "energy transition." They were (and are) way ahead of the rest of the world, still the only nation on Earth without much hydroelectric capacity to rely almost exclusively on clean nuclear power. One may ask to compare the number of people in France who were killed by exposure to radiation from power plants to the number of people killed by coal waste dumped into the planetary atmosphere by the antinuke Germans.
To me, these Sankey diagrams graphically demonstrate something called "reality," despite all the popular sloganeering about "energy transitions."
Have a nice evening.
Detection of Offshore Wind Turbine Chemical Spallation by Non-Targeted Analysis (Mass Spec).
The paper to which I'll briefly refer in this post is this one: Nontargeted Screening to Unravel Offshore Wind Farm Chemical Fingerprints David Vanavermaete, Pablo Zapata-Corella, Karien De Cauwer, Javier Castro-Jiménez, Elena Hengstmann, Torben Kirchgeorg, Koen Parmentier, Christof Van Poucke, Putu Yolanda Yulikayani, and Bavo De Witte Environmental Science & Technology 2026 60 (19), 14108-14119
From the introduction to the paper:
Offshore wind turbines and scour protection introduce a hard substrate into the marine environment. Combined with the exclusion of fisheries, a diverse ecosystem is observed around these new structures with an increased biomass and biodiversity. (6,7) However, the wind turbines also introduce different new stressors into the environment, such as underwater noise, electromagnetic fields, and potential collisions of sea birds with rotor blades. (8,9) Therefore, the impact on marine organisms in OWFs is systematically monitored in various EU countries. (10−13) In contrast, the study of chemical emissions from OWFs has been strongly overlooked because of presumably low (and negligible) emissions compared to other sources, like the oil and gas industry. (14) Nevertheless, different potential sources are present, which could lead to a continuous, discontinuous, or accidental release of a large variety of chemical compounds and (plastic) particles. A recent comprehensive review by Hengstmann et al. (15) reported 228 chemicals potentially emitted by OWFs, including both organic (almost 70% of the listed compounds) and inorganic compounds. The effects on the marine ecosystems of either of these emitted compounds are still unclear. (16−18)...
I added the bold.
I disagree with the statement in the first paragraph that "Wind energy plays a crucial role herein," where "herein" refers to wind energy having any effect on addressing the collapse of the planetary atmosphere. This is nonsense on inspection. The expenditure of trillion dollars on wind energy has had no effect on the use of dangerous fossil fuels, which are now being used at the highest level ever observed, and rate the collapse of the planetary atmosphere is accelerating continuously to levels never seen in history. The chief role of the wind industry in particular and the so called "renewable energy" industry in general has been to attack nuclear energy, the only sustainable and clean form of energy now available to humanity. Wind and solar by contrast depend on access to and use of dangerous fossil fuels.
From the article it appears that the wind turbines have been assumed to be chemically benign because well...well...well...why would that be?
Assume Assume makes an ass of U and Me.
The waters around the OWFs (Offshore wind farms) were found to have generated quite a number of chemicals beyond the well known microplastics generated by collisions with dust particles, rain drops, ice, and temperature gradings interacting coatings that wind turbines release as the blades are degraded, a well known phenomenon.
Some graphics from the paper:
The caption:
The caption:
It is not always possible in nontargeted analysis to identify every compound, although many can be found by appeal to commercial and public libraries. Some compounds represented in these chemical libraries are identified however:
Several PAHs were also identified. To confirm their presence, a mixture of PAHs and phenols was analyzed using the same NTS method. Eight out of the 15 PAHs were confirmed on GC-MS, whereas no phenols were found in either GC-MS or LC-HRMS (see Supporting Information S3)...
Some compounds found are unknown and unidentified, others may have escaped analysis. The authors write in the conclusion:
Because the majority of the compounds are unidentified, it remains difficult to assess the risk of these (unidentified) leachates in the marine environment. Therefore, further screening is necessary to understand whether the detected compounds are persistently present in the OWFs and to what extent. In addition, target analysis can be used as a complementary approach for a quantitative determination of suspected chemicals. Biological effect monitoring or dedicated exposure experiments could help to understand the ecotoxicological effects of the mixture of leachates without the immediate need to identify the separate compounds (e.g., Alter et al. (68)), but to ensure a safe environment, hazardous substances should be identified and monitored on a regular basis, which would require further research.
Someone is likely to argue that petroleum drilling off shore is worse for chemical impact, but then again, wind energy has nothing to do with addressing petroleum use; the effect of the vast wind industry in Germany has not eliminated the use of fossil fuels there, although its dubious claims of cleanliness was utilized in a paroxysm of ignorance to shut clean energy, of which there is but one form, nuclear energy, in favor of fossil fuels.
I trust you're having a pleasant week.
I was talking with my wife and son today on Father's Day, and I admitted that I never before appreciated my country...
...as much as I do now that we have lost it to an idiot buffoon.
Like Taj Mahal sang, "You don't miss your water, until your well runs dry."
I should have appreciated a great country when it was great.
Biomass Power Plants and the Global Burden Nanomagnetite Particle Emissions.
The paper I'll briefly discuss in this post is this one: Uncovering the Global Burden and Future Trajectories of Nanomagnetite Particle Emissions from Biomass Power Plants Zhiqiang Shi, Yujie Cui, Mengyuan Wang, Jiayuan Wu, Xiaojing Yang, Miao Xu, Zuoshun Niu, and Yi Yang Environmental Science & Technology 2026 60 (17), 13063-13074.
Like the other forms of so called "renewable energy" the combustion of biomass in all of its forms, whether it involves agricultural products like corn or strip mining old growth and new growth forests, is not sustainable on a planet with 8 billion people on it. The idea that so called "renewable energy" is clean and safe, approaching even remotely the cleanliness and sustainability of nuclear energy is clearly absurd if one bothers to look at the numbers and effects.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this post, since I really don't have it, but in Chinese scientists who have acceded to the world leadership after US science was killed by a moron, have published this paper. It's introduction:
Anthropogenic-source NMPs are generated primarily through high-temperature industrial and combustion processes, including steel manufacturing and fossil-fuel combustion, in which iron-bearing minerals undergo thermochemical transformations into magnetite. (7,13) Among these sources, coal-fired power plants have recently been identified as an important contributor to atmospheric NMPs. (14,15) Our previous work systematically characterized the formation mechanisms and emission potential of NMPs in representative coal-fired power plants. (15,16) We showed that the transformation of iron-bearing minerals under locally reducing furnace conditions produces abundant NMPs, and that their emissions vary substantially with boiler configuration and dust removal technology. These findings collectively highlight the sensitivity of NMP formation to both feedstock composition and combustion technology. As global energy systems transition away from coal, biomass power plants (BPPs) have become an increasingly important component of low-carbon power portfolios. (17,18) Their installed capacity grew from about 20 GW in 2010 to over 150 GW in 2022, (19) underscoring the accelerating adoption of biomass as a carbon-neutral energy source worldwide. Biomass fuels can also contain iron-bearing minerals derived from soil inputs and ash-rich agricultural residues, which can favor magnetite formation under high-temperature combustion conditions. (20,21) Consistent with this, related studies have reported measurable ferrimagnetic signatures in biomass-combustion dust from Poland, 0.79–8.98 wt % iron oxides in biomass power ash from the Upper Rhine Region (Germany/France), and 6.7 wt % magnetite in woody biomass fly ash from an operating BPP in Japan. (22−24) Despite the rapid expansion of BPPs, current emission inventories largely target conventional pollutants, including PM2.5, NOx, SO2, and trace elements, (25−27) whereas source-specific NMP emission factors and inventories for BPPs remain lacking. Compared with coal-fired power plants, expectations for NMP emissions are further complicated by the wide range of biomass fuels and large variability in mineral composition, indicating the need for dedicated measurement and modeling efforts.
To address this gap, this study links toxicological evidence with emission quantification (Figure 1). In vitro assays first demonstrate that NMPs represent a disproportionately toxic subfraction of fine particles (FPs, the the less than 1 μm fraction)...
Some figures from the text:
Figure 1:
The caption:
Where the problem is considered serious, note North America where, despite it's failure to address the collapse and poisoning of the planetary atmosphere, so called "renewable energy" remains popular, and fossil fuels, albeit unpopular but essential because the useless solar and wind industries depend on it, remains necessary:
The caption:
Some soothsaying, based perhaps on the dubious belief that there will be, in 2050, forests to strip mine since the failure to address extreme global heating has led to many burning in vast uncontrollable wild fires that also, presumably, result in the distribution of ferric nanoparticles:
The caption:
Particular "scenarios" in my personal opinion are meaningless; there are no scenarios in which biomass combustion is sustainable.
Some remarks from the paper's conclusion:
In China, unit-level emissions closely follow differences in dust removal performance and feedstock characteristics, leading to pronounced provincial contrasts where modernization of control systems has progressed unevenly...
I have a low opinion of any text referring to "energy transitions," of any type, although its use in parlance is ubitiquous. It's nonsense. There is no "energy transition." We are burning more fossil fuels than at any point in history.
I trust you're having a nice weekend; happy Father's Day if you are involved, as I am, in fatherhood.
Two New US Nuclear Reactor Designs Go Critical.
Valar Atomic’s Ward 250 Becomes Second Reactor to Go Critical Under DOE Pilot ProgramExcerpts:
The milestone, confirmed by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy at about 4:30 p.m. MDT on June 18, involved a “zero-power fueled criticality demonstration,” the DOE said...
...Ward 250’s criticality comes less than two weeks after Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 became the first advanced reactor to go critical under the Reactor Pilot Program on June 4 at INL. Antares Nuclear’s Mark-0 is a sodium heat-pipe-cooled microreactor fueled by high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) TRISO fuel compacts.
Ward 250, an HTGR rated at 100 kWt initial test power and scalable to 5 MWe, uses helium coolant and TRISO fuel particles in Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor (AGR) compacts, according to an October 2025 Valar quality-assurance program description. The document says Ward 250 incorporates passive safety features and builds on WardZero prototype technology, while the co-located Valarin Fuel Fabrication Facility is designed to manufacture TRISO-coated particle fuel embedded in graphite compacts using German HOBEG technology with modern process improvements. Kiewit Nuclear Solutions served as the project’s engineering, procurement, and construction contractor...
Both reactor types are TRISO based. I'm certainly not a TRISO kind of guy, since I favor used nuclear fuel reprocessing, but the TRISO fuel type seems to be very popular, featured in the Kairos commercial reactor now under construction in Tennessee.
This said, there are zero nuclear reactors that are inferior to any other energy source, including the land and material profligate so called "renewable energy" systems, which depend on access to fossil fuels, and fossil fuels themselves.
Zero power criticality doesn't mean all that much, the real task is powered criticality.
An advantage to TRISO fuels is that they are inherently high temperature fuels. Raising the temperatures of nuclear reactors under low pressure conditions is key to moving nuclear energy beyond mere electricity generation to process intensive roles that can eliminate fossil fuels entirely.
Some famous animal wartime "heroes.:
Came in on one of my news feeds:
The Heroic Stories of 6 Wartime Animals
As an atheist, how do you feel about dead people, specifically, bluntly, dead bodies, including, ultimately, your own?
One of the books I'm reading - I'm way behind on reading in general, there's so much I want to read, so little time - is called "Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas" by Jennifer Raff.
A review of the book by another anthropologist, which is somewhat critical of it, is here: Jennifer Raff’s ‘Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas’—A Review
The introduction, beyond which I haven't gone very far, begins with the tale of the discovery of a human mandible in a cave on Wales Island in Alaska. For page after page, Dr. Raff gives commentary on respect for the dead, the history of anthropologist's disrespect, genocide against native Americans, disrespect for the oral traditions of Native Americans, the role of oral traditions in anthropology and the effort to obtain permission to extract DNA from tribes of modern Native Americans etc., etc., etc., and so on and so on.
Eventually, after much discussion she remarks that ultimately scientists obtained "permission" to analyze the mandible with scientific instrumentation, a "proper burial" for a person whose bones were scattered across the cave by animals who apparently ate his dead body is arranged, this after he is given a name, Shuká Káa, translated from a language he may or may not have spoke or be related to the language he spoke, as "Man ahead of us." Whenever his bones are discussed thereafter, this name is used, as if he were a person who exists. The funeral, probably religious in nature, although there is no discussion of that, indicated "respect" for his bones.
If I sound dismissive of the appalling history of the conquest of the so called "New World" it's not intended; I fully acknowledge that as is very common in all cases where one people's tribe displaces another, whether the "tribe" in question is millions of British, French, or Spanish Europeans, or an Inuit group of a few thousands, genocide is, more often than not, practiced, sometimes explicitly, usually by designating the original inhabitants of the conquered Lebensraum as somehow subhuman, less "human" than the conquerors themselves, "savages" or worse. Hitler intended for all the Slavs in the former Soviet Union to starve to death, and the US government in the 19th century began shooting bison indiscriminately to make Plains Native Americans starve as well. Hitler admired the United States for that history, starving the conquered, as well as its Jim Crow apartheid and before that, human slavery, which he practiced himself. These are facts. They cannot be changed. The people who performed these acts of committing genocide, the actual physical killers, did so in airs of self justification, even positive self regard, no matter how we now detest what they did from our current cultural matrix, some of us at least.
History can not be corrected and made better; it can only be described in ways that are a function, ethically, in the terms of the moral purview, such as moral purviews exist, of the historian's society and not the society of the perpetrators. This is not an excuse for horror; ideally it is part of a path for a culture, all cultures in fits and starts, to rise to a higher level of decency, which I define as respect for the living as opposed to the dead.
A point:
In analytical molecular biology, generally using mass spectrometry, we often need "blanks" of human tissue, usually blood, serum or plasma, but often tissues obtained from cadavers or surgical tissue, presumably all of which has been "ethically" obtained. One of the most difficult blanks to obtain, for the development of treatments for serious eye diseases, is vitreous fluid. I've been there, done that. Presumably these tissues are obtained "ethically," but in all cases they are extremely expensive and hard to get. Dead bodies are valuable in this sense, and the tissues can be instrumental in improving the lives of the living. If this sounds like a form of cannibalism, it cannot be avoided.
Every once in a while my wife and I discuss what she should do with my body after I kick off, which I hope to do before she kicks off, since it would be much harder for me to live without her than for her to live without me. My favorite idea - which might be too expensive - would be composting, since I'm concerned about phosphorous flows, but another is donating my body to a medical school or to a tissue bank. Being a skeleton in a classroom sounds like fun. Having my tissues distributed to labs around the country and the world also seems perfectly reasonable to me. I rather like the idea. All that said, I've worked to inform my wife that it really won't matter to me no matter what she decides since I won't exist in any form other than her memory, the memory of my sons, my friends, my relatives. She should do whatever makes her feel comfortable. Cremation is fine; I won't feel a thing.
When I visited my son some years back to discuss his further graduate school plans, to offer my advice and to discuss the institutions and the faculties therein to which he might (and did) apply, I took him out to dinner, whereupon I got a little emotional: I made sure to discuss with him that I was mortal, and that the only place I will exist after "shuffling off my mortal coil" will be in him, his brother, his mother and a few other people. I told him that therefore, if he wanted to honor me after I'm gone, doing so will involve nothing more than living an honorable life himself, and to give as much to humanity as he can, until he himself, sets off on the road of dying twice.
Here's what I think about dying "twice: "
One dies twice, physiologically, and then a second time when the last person to remember you dies themselves, and afterwards, there are only artifacts for a while, and finally a precious and deserved oblivion. The flesh doesn't matter; there is nothing to "respect" since the flesh is no longer a human being. I say, "do what one will with it," it's a form of matter no different than a piece of driftwood at sea.
I'd be interested in the thoughts of other atheists in this respect.
For fathers here, I wish a happiest of father's days.
I just got a push poll for the missing Tom Kean.
I hung up when I was informed that Rebecca Bennett was a member of the "radical Left."
These people are disgusting.
Fluorinated Lithium Salts: A Significant Class of Environmental Pollutants from Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries.
The paper to which I'll briefly refer in this post is this one: Fluorinated Lithium Salts: A Significant Class of Environmental Pollutants of Emerging Concern from Spent Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Xiang Ge, Jiali Ge, Bibai Du, Weisheng Luo, Jingwei Zhao, Jiabei He, Mingyang Xing, and Lixi Zeng Environmental Science & Technology 2026 60 (14), 11013-11021.
The awful hydra that seems to never go away as we race to the destruction of the planetary atmosphere is that there is a "green" redundancy that can make the useless solar and wind industries reliable. These claims come in two forms, hydrogen and batteries, neither of which has done much to address the fact that the main real means of addressing the appalling lack of reliability for so called "renewable energy" is fossil fuels. Still these thermodynamic nonsense schemes still fly around; we see them all the time here at DU and more broadly in the world at large, even in the scientific literature. So called "renewable energy" is mass intensive, which is the main reason it is not sustainable, and batteries worsen that reality, even if they are insufficient to prevent the use of fossil fuels.
There's a lot of handwaving about the mass intensity of so called "renewable energy," most of relying on a presumed magic approach to recycling. Recycling does not work very well in any setting where the mass is large, and the materials to be recycled are diffuse. There is also the problem of energy for transport, separating the components to be recycled, and processing, particularly where heat is involved.
Another issue is toxicity. Toxicity is what the paper cited is about.
From the introduction:
Generally, LIB electrolytes are composed of approximately 83% solvent, 12% fluorinated Li salts, and 5% functional additives. (10,11) Fluorinated Li salts are of emerging concern to the environmental science community because of their high potentials to contribute to Li exposure, as well as their PFAS-like persistence, mobility, bioaccumulation, and toxicity. Currently, lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6) is the most commonly used fluorinated Li salt in commercial LIB electrolyte formulations due to its high ionic conductivity and excellent compatibility with graphite anodes. (12) Between 2019 and 2024, global shipments of LiPF6 increased from 36,000 to 208,000 tons. (13) Besides LiPF6, multiple emerging fluorinated Li salts, for example, lithium bis(fluorosulfonyl)imide (LiFSI) and lithium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide (LiTFSI), are also widely applied in commercial LIBs and considered promising replacements for LiPF6. (14) In commercial electrolyte formulations for LIBs, a combination of multiple fluorinated Li salts is often used to achieve superior electrochemical performance. When end-of-life LIBs are retired, the first treatment processes, which include dismantling, shredding, grinding, milling, and pyrolysis, produce a dark, powdery substance known as “black mass” (BM), which serves as the primary feedstock for downstream recycling processes for valuable metals. BM is mainly composed of graphite anode materials from LIBs, mixed with small amounts of cathode metals, residual electrolytes, and binders. (15) During spent LIB recycling processes, fluorinated Li salts, as additive chemicals, are inevitably released into the surrounding environment, posing potential risks to the environment, ecology, and human health...
I contend that the only way so called "renewable energy" can be considered green is to complete ignore the environmental impact of recycling massive amounts of material. (In an upcoming post on which I'm working, I will consider the case of recycling solar garbage itself, and not the redundant battery systems designed to pretend that the real back up is not dangerous fossil fuels.)
Some figures from the text of the present paper:
The caption:
These anions are of a type typical in a class of compounds known as "ionic liquids." There are basically a possible infinite number of these, but in this case, they are primarily focused on anions coming from the PFAS group, fluorinated chemicals that are of rapidly rising concern because of their persistence, suspected and known toxicity. They are very hard to destroy, given the strength of the carbon fluorine bond, with a bond energy requiring UV or shorter radiation (x-rays and gamma rays) to cleave the bond.
The caption:
This is triple quad mass spec results. The analytical chemistry of PFAS, because of the rising concern, is a major area of research.
The mass spec utilized is nothing spectacular, simply a Sciex 5500, which works well if one knows for what one is looking. (NTA, nontargeted analysis requires high resolution mass spec and often considerable computer time and power. NTA analysis is required for tracking degradants of PFAS and is analytically challenging.)
The caption:
These are concentrations of physiologic concern. Many substances work for good or for bad at the picogram level; these are at nanogram concentrations.
A table from the text is more accurate and covers analysis of many samples:
The caption:
Figure 4. Composition profiles of the 11 fluorinated Li salts in dust (A) and black mass (B) samples from the LIB dismantling plant.
Some comments from the conclusion:
(2) Current investigations have primarily focused on dust and black mass samples collected from an LIB dismantling plant, whereas the pollution levels in the air, which may serve as a key medium governing the migration of fluorinated Li salts within and beyond the LIB recycling facilities, remain unknown. Soil and vegetation near these recycling sites may have accumulated fluorinated Li salts owing to their affinity for organic carbon. Rainfall and surface runoff promote the transport of fluorinated Li salts into adjacent aquatic systems...
One sees in the literature many cases where the substitute for a problematic substance eliminates one problem only to create another, potentially worse. The invention of the automobile, which represents a profound environmental tragedy was invented to help solve the problem of horse manure on city streets. The collapse of the planetary atmosphere, for which the automobile represents a significant causative agent, is worse than horse manure I think. There is a big lie floating around that so called "renewable energy" can make automobiles "green" via batteries. This is nonsense for many reasons, not limited to the toxicology of battery recycling and the moral cost of mining for battery materials for virgin batteries.
The car CULTure is not sustainable by any means.
A cautionary tale, I think...
Have a nice day tomorrow.
Update Further Remarks on the Administration's Efforts to Destroy American Science. Where to Comment.
This is an update to my previous post on OMB changes to science funding, which I erroneously described as a "bill before Congress." It is instead an administration rule change; however Congress can act to prevent it.
It is this post: A Bill Before Congress to Put the Last Nail in the Coffin of American Science: Write Your Congressperson.
I received an email from the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).
Excerpts:
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently released a proposed rule that would have far-reaching consequences for the research and development model that has made America the world’s innovation leader for the past 80 years.
Putting budget analysts and political appointees in charge of deciding what merits scientific opportunity and how to spend federal research and development funds is an egregious example of overreach. If enacted, this rule would override federal agencies’ decision-making authority while weakening their independence. It would also undermine the scientific, merit-based peer-review system.
In the following video, AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh explains why this proposed rule is concerning and ways you can help. Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/D8WTZttfjFQ?feature=share
In another email, the means to comment was given as follows:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/29/2026-10817/regulation-for-federal-financial-assistance
This is a direct attack on science by ignorant politicians of the this incompetent administration.
Profile Information
Gender: MaleCurrent location: New Jersey
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 38,848