My friend John Vickrey, up in Norman, Oklahoma, recently sent an email decrying the firing of teachers in the Kansas City schools as scapegoats for bad government having ruined those schools long ago. John and I used to teach together at Bosqueville High, near Waco, Texas (a school nationally recognized for excellence for the third time). He is a sincere and dedicated teacher. This kind of thing really disturbs him. It should disturb us all.
The text below is my recommendation for how to fix bad-government problems. This actually has application to any issue you want, not just public education. For most of the ills in American public life, the root cause is greedy, self-serving politicians not doing the jobs we elected them to do.
The cure for it is easier and more certain than any new laws or grassroots-proposed Constitutional amendments. Why would the guilty lawmakers change the law of the land in a way that might send themselves to jail? Read on .....
Text of my reply to John:
As you and I both know, it does not require a lot of money to provide a good education. You just have to ignore all the fads and most of the bureaucrats, and just do what worked for the last couple of centuries. I'm speaking of Bosqueville, of course.
All the government-driven top-down interference is the fault of elected officials who value politics above public duty, at all levels from the local school board to DC. The way to fix it requires that we get rid of the perpetrators of this evil, and that in turn requires two changes on the part of voters, and fairly simple ones at that.
(1) Vote for no incumbent unless you can personally verify that he did more good than harm while in office. Few do. But it usually takes more than a term to put down deep roots into the corruption system. If you don't know, vote "no". Period. This isn't party, this means all of them. Throw the bastards out.
(2) Communicate with your representation in writing, and often. Tell them what you expect them to do, and what you will do if they don't: which is to vote them out. And then follow through and do it (item (1) again). Throw the bastards out.
Do these two simple things, and you will (eventually) have decent government again. Fail, and you will continue to fester in response to the idiocy perpetrated upon us by the cesspits that are our Congress, our Legislatures, our city councils, etc. Throw the bastards out.
It is either that, or armed revolution in the streets. I prefer to fix it at the ballot box; far less mess to clean up. Throw the bastards out.
Again, this is independent of party, or any specific issue. Do not class me as a "tea party" type. I do not agree with most of them on a lot of issues. I have been advocating this "fix" since long before there ever was a "tea party" movement at all. Throw the bastards out.
Now, is there clarity about what I advocate that everyone do? (Throw the bastards out.)
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Drill here, drill now, pay less?
I receive a lot of e-mail forwards about a giant untapped American “oil formation”, usually under the name “Bakken", but there are several others. Every one of these forwards is really a political message: "why don't the Democrats and environmentalists get out of the way and let us drill this?" Some of these forwards claim that the message is true per snopes.com. The only thing here that is true (and verified by snopes or anyone else) is that this formation really does exist. The rest is a pack of lies.
What’s left out in each and every one of these forwards is the easily-verifiable fact that this great domestic “resource” is all but unrecoverable. Some of these forwards claim a new “breakthrough” (never actually described) makes recovering this resource cheap and easy, but that’s just a lie. These forwards were created by Republican political hacks to stir up political unrest, and it is just pure political BS, no two ways about it.
Here’s the actual truth, in 6 points, about “unrecovered domestic oil”:
(1) The Bakken formation has been long known. It is one of several named rock formations contained with a geologic region called the Williston Basin. This region stretches through parts of Wyoming, both Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Its theoretically-immense resource volume has been long known. The oil folks have been trying unsuccessfully since 1953 to recover useful product from the US portion of it. No significant return has ever been obtained. Not ever! There have been no technological breakthroughs that would enable its economic recovery, and that’s not for lack of trying. This is not and never will be drillable oil, period.
(2) One of the oldest names is the most descriptive: "oil shales". The volume of this “oil resource” is miniscule compared to the volume of the rock in the formation, because shale rock porosity is inherently a tiny percentage. The volume of “oil resource” is actually quite large, simply because this formation is so geographically immense. Shale is a porous rock of virtually zero permeability, precisely because the pores are not interconnected. That is just the nature of shale. Further, the "oil" in these pores is closer to a tar than an actual liquid oil. So, because this tar is virtually solid, down-hole fracturing (supposedly the “technological breakthrough”) does not work! That situation is quite unlike the down-hole fracturing-based recovery of the inherently very mobile gas of the Barnett Shale here in Texas. But, even so, we actually recover only a tiny fraction of that entire gas resource, from only those pores right along the fracturing cracks.
(3) The only known way, after over half a century of concerted effort, to recover significant quantities of "oil" from oil shales is deep strip mining, on a scale that makes mountaintop-removal mining for coal look like potting house plants. Think about digging a hole the size of Lake Superior. And then you have to truck immense volumes of rock out of that hole to be crushed and cooked, in order to recover the very tiny percentage of that volume that is the tar. This is all very capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive. Once you do recover the tar, you have to thermally-crack it (another capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive process) before it will even feed into a conventional distillation tower. Think $4/gallon gasoline was bad? It will be $40-400-4000/gallon gasoline from this stuff, if not even higher.
(4) The northwest end of this zone in Alberta is tar sands, not tar shale. While still not drillable, that is a different “beast”. It's already in production, and its products are a big portion of those we import here in the US. These tar sands must be strip mined, but are much nearer the surface. The tar is washed from the sand by a steam process. But there is a downside: no one knows how to clean up the immense volumes of wastewater from this process, and it is dangerous enough they keep it locked away in ponds behind armed guards. Since the clean-up method is unknown, its cost is not included in the price of the products; therefore these products are artificially under-priced. One of these days, that bill will come due. To date, the fast-growing volume of that untreatable wastewater exceeds the volume of Lake Erie.
(5) The claimed "breakthrough" is down-hole fracturing, a old concept whose actual commercial employment is more recent. It works with inherently-mobile gas. The used fracturing liquid has to be pumped down a suitable disposal well, for it is not safe to release on the surface. (That down-hole disposal of fracturing fluids is the source of all the little earthquakes along the Barnett Shale zone, by the way.) Fracturing doesn't work very well with thick, viscous, but still-liquid oil. It does not work at all with tar, period. The only economic application of down-hole fracturing is gas formations like the Barnett Shale. You have to combine this with steam injection to recover liquid oil, which not very economic, and creates a lot more wastewater to dispose. It does not work at all, steam or no, with tar shales. There simply is no technological “breakthrough” that would make “the Bakken” (or any other of these rock units) “drillable”. It is not likely there ever will be one. This resource is not recoverable at any price we might afford.
(6) It is an observed fact that without exception all finds of drillable oil made in recent decades have been of decreasing size and decreasing frequency. This includes the reserves off California, the reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the new find in the deepwater Gulf, and the new find in the Atlantic off Brazil. Further, there has been little, if any, indication of oil off our Atlantic coast (some exploration actually has already been done there).
You might as well face the truth: we will not be able to "drill our way" out of this. “Drill, baby, drill” and “drill here, drill now, pay less” make convenient and catchy political slogans, but they have no truth at all, as is common in politics.
Cellulosic ethanol (which is ethanol-not-from-food) has already hit the streets at $2.00/gallon. Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is near $1.00/gallon, if you junk the import tariff. The trick now is to build industry capacity. Not very far behind is diesel and jet fuel from algae, and even a synthetic biomass gasoline. I think these renewables (that we can never run out of!!!) hold a lot more promise than some fool's errand trying to dig thinly-spread tar out of immense volumes of deep, hard rock.
Many of the countries who own much of the world’s remaining oil are the sponsors of the very groups we Americans are fighting. Oil and terrorism are their only exports. These terrorism operations cost a lot of oil revenues to run. Why not actually win this war by denying the enemy our oil dollars? Use something else!
What’s left out in each and every one of these forwards is the easily-verifiable fact that this great domestic “resource” is all but unrecoverable. Some of these forwards claim a new “breakthrough” (never actually described) makes recovering this resource cheap and easy, but that’s just a lie. These forwards were created by Republican political hacks to stir up political unrest, and it is just pure political BS, no two ways about it.
Here’s the actual truth, in 6 points, about “unrecovered domestic oil”:
(1) The Bakken formation has been long known. It is one of several named rock formations contained with a geologic region called the Williston Basin. This region stretches through parts of Wyoming, both Dakotas, Montana, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Its theoretically-immense resource volume has been long known. The oil folks have been trying unsuccessfully since 1953 to recover useful product from the US portion of it. No significant return has ever been obtained. Not ever! There have been no technological breakthroughs that would enable its economic recovery, and that’s not for lack of trying. This is not and never will be drillable oil, period.
(2) One of the oldest names is the most descriptive: "oil shales". The volume of this “oil resource” is miniscule compared to the volume of the rock in the formation, because shale rock porosity is inherently a tiny percentage. The volume of “oil resource” is actually quite large, simply because this formation is so geographically immense. Shale is a porous rock of virtually zero permeability, precisely because the pores are not interconnected. That is just the nature of shale. Further, the "oil" in these pores is closer to a tar than an actual liquid oil. So, because this tar is virtually solid, down-hole fracturing (supposedly the “technological breakthrough”) does not work! That situation is quite unlike the down-hole fracturing-based recovery of the inherently very mobile gas of the Barnett Shale here in Texas. But, even so, we actually recover only a tiny fraction of that entire gas resource, from only those pores right along the fracturing cracks.
(3) The only known way, after over half a century of concerted effort, to recover significant quantities of "oil" from oil shales is deep strip mining, on a scale that makes mountaintop-removal mining for coal look like potting house plants. Think about digging a hole the size of Lake Superior. And then you have to truck immense volumes of rock out of that hole to be crushed and cooked, in order to recover the very tiny percentage of that volume that is the tar. This is all very capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive. Once you do recover the tar, you have to thermally-crack it (another capital-, labor-, and energy-intensive process) before it will even feed into a conventional distillation tower. Think $4/gallon gasoline was bad? It will be $40-400-4000/gallon gasoline from this stuff, if not even higher.
(4) The northwest end of this zone in Alberta is tar sands, not tar shale. While still not drillable, that is a different “beast”. It's already in production, and its products are a big portion of those we import here in the US. These tar sands must be strip mined, but are much nearer the surface. The tar is washed from the sand by a steam process. But there is a downside: no one knows how to clean up the immense volumes of wastewater from this process, and it is dangerous enough they keep it locked away in ponds behind armed guards. Since the clean-up method is unknown, its cost is not included in the price of the products; therefore these products are artificially under-priced. One of these days, that bill will come due. To date, the fast-growing volume of that untreatable wastewater exceeds the volume of Lake Erie.
(5) The claimed "breakthrough" is down-hole fracturing, a old concept whose actual commercial employment is more recent. It works with inherently-mobile gas. The used fracturing liquid has to be pumped down a suitable disposal well, for it is not safe to release on the surface. (That down-hole disposal of fracturing fluids is the source of all the little earthquakes along the Barnett Shale zone, by the way.) Fracturing doesn't work very well with thick, viscous, but still-liquid oil. It does not work at all with tar, period. The only economic application of down-hole fracturing is gas formations like the Barnett Shale. You have to combine this with steam injection to recover liquid oil, which not very economic, and creates a lot more wastewater to dispose. It does not work at all, steam or no, with tar shales. There simply is no technological “breakthrough” that would make “the Bakken” (or any other of these rock units) “drillable”. It is not likely there ever will be one. This resource is not recoverable at any price we might afford.
(6) It is an observed fact that without exception all finds of drillable oil made in recent decades have been of decreasing size and decreasing frequency. This includes the reserves off California, the reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the new find in the deepwater Gulf, and the new find in the Atlantic off Brazil. Further, there has been little, if any, indication of oil off our Atlantic coast (some exploration actually has already been done there).
You might as well face the truth: we will not be able to "drill our way" out of this. “Drill, baby, drill” and “drill here, drill now, pay less” make convenient and catchy political slogans, but they have no truth at all, as is common in politics.
Cellulosic ethanol (which is ethanol-not-from-food) has already hit the streets at $2.00/gallon. Brazilian sugar cane ethanol is near $1.00/gallon, if you junk the import tariff. The trick now is to build industry capacity. Not very far behind is diesel and jet fuel from algae, and even a synthetic biomass gasoline. I think these renewables (that we can never run out of!!!) hold a lot more promise than some fool's errand trying to dig thinly-spread tar out of immense volumes of deep, hard rock.
Many of the countries who own much of the world’s remaining oil are the sponsors of the very groups we Americans are fighting. Oil and terrorism are their only exports. These terrorism operations cost a lot of oil revenues to run. Why not actually win this war by denying the enemy our oil dollars? Use something else!
Update 1-3-15:
The recent explosion of US “fracking” technology (hydraulic
fracturing plus horizontal-turn drilling) has modified the picture of oil
prices versus recessions.
Unexpectedly, the US has become a
leading producer of crude oils for the world market. Plus,
there has been an associated massive production increase and price drop
in natural gas.
OPEC has chosen to take the income “hit” and not cut back
their production in response. Their
reasoning is twofold: (1) fear of loss
of market share, and (2) hope that low
oil prices will curtail US “fracking” recoveries. We will see how that plays-out.
Oil prices are now such (at around $55/barrel) that US
regular gasoline prices are nearing $2.00/gal for the first time in a very long
time. This is very close to the price
one would expect for a truly competitive commodity, based on 1958 gasoline prices in the US, and the inflation factor since then.
It is no coincidence that the exceedingly-weak US “Great Recession”
recovery has suddenly picked up steam.
The timing of the acceleration in our economic recovery versus the
precipitous drop in oil prices is quite damning. There can be no doubt that
higher-than-competitive-commodity oil prices damage economies. Oil prices are a superposition of the competitive
commodity price, overlain by an erratic
increase from speculation, and further overlain
quite often by punitive price levels when OPEC is politically unhappy with the
west. That’s been the history.
This economic improvement we are experiencing will persist
as long as oil, gas, and fuel prices remain low. (Government policies have almost nothing to
do with this, from either party.) How long that improvement continues depends
in part upon US “fracking” and in part upon OPEC. Continued US “fracking” in the short term may
depend upon adequate prices. In the long
term, we need some solutions to some
rather intractable problems to continue our big-time “fracking” activities.
The long-term problems with “fracking” have to do with (1)
contamination of groundwater with combustible natural gas, (2) induced earthquake activity, (3) lack of suitable freshwater supply to
support the demand for “fracking”, and
(4) safety problems with the transport of the volatile crude that “fracking”
inherently produces.
Groundwater
Contamination
Groundwater contamination is geology-dependent. In Texas,
the rock layers lie relatively flat,
and are relatively undistorted and unfractured. This is because the rocks are largely old sea
bottom that was never subjected to mountain-building. We Texans haven’t seen any significant
contamination of ground water by methane freed from shale. The exceptions trace to improperly-built
wells whose casings leak.
This isn’t true in the shales being tapped in the
Appalachians, or in the shales being
tapped in the eastern Rockies. There the
freed gas has multiple paths to reach the surface besides the well, no matter how well-built it might have
been. Those paths are the vast
multitudes of fractures in the highly-contorted rocks that subject to mountain-building
in eons past. That mountain-building may
have ceased long ago, but those cracks
last forever.
This is why there are persistent reports of kitchen water
taps bursting into flames or exploding,
from those very same regions of the country. It’s very unwise to “frack” for gas in that
kind of geology.
Induced Earthquake
Activity
This does not seem to trace to the original “fracking”
activity. Instead it traces rather
reliably to massive injections of “fracking” wastewater down disposal
wells. Wherever the injection quantities
are large in a given well, the frequent
earthquakes cluster in that same region.
Most are pretty weak, under
Richter magnitude 3, some have
approached magnitude 4.
There is nothing in our experience to suggest that magnitude
4 is the maximum we will see. No
one can rule out large quakes. The risk is with us as long as there are
massive amounts of “fracking” wastewater to dispose of, in these wells. As long as we never re-use “frack”
water, we will have this massive
disposal problem, and it will induce
earthquakes.
Lack of Freshwater
Supply to Support “Fracking”
It takes immense amounts of fresh water to “frack” a single
well. None of this is ever re-used, nor it is technologically-possible to
decontaminate water used in that way. The
additives vary from company to company,
but all use either sand or glass beads,
and usually a little diesel fuel.
Used “frack” water comes back at near 10 times the salinity of sea
water, and is contaminated by heavy
metals, and by radioactive minerals, in addition to the additives. Only the sand or glass beads get left
behind: they hold the newly-fractured
cracks in the rocks open, so that
natural gas and volatile crudes can percolate out.
The problem is lack of enough freshwater supplies. In most areas of interest, there is not enough fresh water available to
support both people and “fracking”, especially
with the drought in recent years. This assessment
completely excludes the demand increases due to population growth. That’s even worse.
This problem will persist as long as fresh water is used for
“fracking”, and will be much, much worse as long as “frack” water is not
reused. The solution is to start with
sea water, not fresh water, and then to re-use it. This will require some R&D to develop a
new additive package that works in salty water to carry sand or glass
beads, even in brines 10 times more
salty than sea water.
Nobody wants to pay for that R&D.
Transport Safety with
Volatile “Frack” Crudes
What “fracking” frees best from shales is natural gas, which is inherently very mobile. Some shales (by no means all of them) contain
condensed-phase hydrocarbons volatile enough to percolate out after hydraulic
fracturing, albeit more slowly than
natural gas. Typically, these resemble a light, runny winter diesel fuel, or even a kerosene, in physical properties. More commonly, shale contains very immobile condensed
hydrocarbons resembling tar. These cannot
be recovered by “fracking” at all.
The shales in south Texas,
and some of the shales and adjacent dolomites in the Wyoming region
actually do yield light, volatile
crudes. The problem is what to transport
them in. There are not enough
pipelines to do that job. Pipelines are safer
than rail transport, all the spills and
fires notwithstanding.
The problem is that we are transporting these
relatively-volatile materials in rail tank cars intended for normal (heavy)
crude oils, specifically DOT 111 tank cars. Normal crudes are relatively-nonvolatile and
rather hard to ignite in accidents. DOT
111 cars puncture or leak frequently in derail accidents, but this isn’t that serious a problem as long
as the contents are non-volatile. These
shale-“frack” light crude materials resemble nothing so much as No. 1 winter
diesel, which is illegal to ship in DOT
111 cars, precisely since it is too
volatile.
The problem is that no one wants to pay for expanding the
fleet of tougher-rated tank cars. So, many outfits routinely mis-classify “frack” light
crudes as non-volatile crudes, in order
to “legally” use the abundant but inadequate DOT-111 cars. We’ve already seen the result of this kind of
bottom line-only thinking, in a series
of rather serious rail fire-and-explosion disasters, the most deadly (so far) in Lac
Megantic, Quebec.
Volatile shale-“fracked” crudes simply should not be shipped
in vulnerable DOT 111 cars, period. It is demonstrably too dangerous.
Conclusions
“Fracking” shales for natural gas and light crudes has had a
very beneficial effect on the US economy and its export-import picture. We should continue this activity as a
reliable bridge to things in the near future that are even better.
But, we must address
the four problem areas I just outlined.
And I also just told you what the solutions are. The problem is, as always,
who pays. What is the value of a
human life? What is the value of a
livable environment? It’s not an either-or
decision, it’s striking the appropriate balance!
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
About old Project "Orion" - the nuclear explosion drive
The following data came from a book written by George Dyson, titled "Project Orion - the True Story of the Atomic Spaceship", published by Henry Holt, and copyrighted 2002. George Dyson is the son of physicist Freeman Dyson, who actually worked on this project. He interviewed many project participants, including his father.
Project "Orion" was a funded Air Force project in the 1959-1965 time frame. The Air Force had no application for a deep space ship, which restricted the funding and how far the project could go. The Air Force then had to turn its entire space program over to NASA in 1965. NASA saw "Orion" as a competitor to its Project "Rover" nuclear thermal rocket efforts, and so killed "Orion" by lack of funding.
"Orion" never flew or tested with nuclear devices. However, a 1-meter scale model flew just fine with pulses of high explosives. This verified the viability of the concept. The results would have been remarkable, had such a technology been pursued. Note that the following design data is based on surface launch of nuclear explosion-drive ships:
Design "name"..............test veh......orb.test.....interplan.....adv. I.P.
Gross weight, tons.........50-100........880..........4000..........10,000
Empty weight, tons..........45............370..........1700...........3250
Effective Isp, sec.......var, to 3000....3-6000........4000..........12,000
Dia, feet...................40.............80...........135............185
Length, feet................50............120...........200............280
Avg. gees...................2-4.............2.....var, to 2......var, to 4
Vacuum charge, KT.......0.1-0.5.........0.8-3.......about 5.......about 15
Sea level charge, KT.......0.003..........0.03.........0.15...........0.35
# charges to 125,000 feet...1-200..........200..........200............200
Total KT to 125,000 feet.. about 2.....about 20....about 100......about 250
# charges to 300 mile orbit..NA............800...........800............800
Total MT to 300 mile orbit...NA........0.45-1.8............3.............9
The name "test veh" was a sub-orbital test vehicle. The name "orb.veh" was to be a test vehicle capable of reaching a 300 mile orbit about the Earth. The name "interplan" was a smaller interplanetary transport ship, capable of reaching the moon or Mars. The name "adv.I.P" refers to a much larger interplanetary transport ship capable of touring the inner solar system in a single trip, or reaching Saturn and returning. Weight are shown in US customary units of the 2000 pound ("short") ton. The metric ton is a 10.25% larger unit. NA means "not applicable".
These are short, fat, bullet or projectile-shaped designs, of a heavy, strong type of construction resembling marine engineering more than any flight vehicles ever known. That means the heavy ship's hull provides a lot of radiation shielding against cosmic rays and solar flares. These ships are big enough to provide one full gee's artificial gravity by spinning at an acceptably slow rate. For example, the "adv.I.P." design needs to spin at only 20 degrees/sec (3.3 rpm) to provide one full gee at the outer hull.
Every one of them is a single stage device: nothing is jettisoned or lost, everything returns for re-use. Dimensions are in feet (one meter = 3.280833 feet). There is a large pusher plate mounted on resonant shocks at the rear. These pusher plates receive the impulse from the nuclear detonations and spread it over time.
The following data lists mission performance projected for these very same designs:
Design name.................test veh......orb.test.....interplan........adv.I.P
Payloads delivered, ton..................(3000 sec)............................
300 mile orbit (10 km/s)........NA..........300...........1600...........6100
Soft lunar landing (15.5 km/s)..NA..........170...........1200...........5700
Mars orbit & return (21 km/s)...NA...........80............800...........5300
(orb)Ven.-Mar.-ret. (30 km/s)...NA...........NA............200...........4500
To Saturn & back (100 km/s).....NA...........NA.............NA...........1300
Between the listed specific impulse data and the payload-to-Saturn data, bigger is clearly better with this pulsed-explosion propulsion approach. The mission data shown assume a return to Earth orbit for re-use of the ship. The speeds are the total velocity requirements based on Hohman transfer orbits. These ships do not make landings on Mars or the moons of Saturn, landing craft that are part of the cargo weight would be used for that.
The nuclear devices were "optimized" as shaped charges with a preferred "blast" axis. A "propellant" mass was included in each charge, to be vaporized into hypervelocity plasma and bounced off the pusher plate. Devices optimized in that way do not make very good weapons, but they are a very promising source of propulsion! This also raises a very interesting question: could this approach be scaled up further, and use higher-efficiency thermonuclear charges, for even higher effective specific impulse? Old Project "Orion" never looked at that.
Note that if Saturn could be reached, so also could Jupiter and the asteroid belt be reached. Round trip flight time on the Hohman-transfer Saturn mission would be 3 years. However, you could fly faster with this technology, if more of the vehicle were its nuclear "fuel" and less of it were cargo. That means even the outer solar system could be reached with this type of vehicle. Manned missions to the Kuiper Belt are possible!
Based on what they were able to achieve back then, we could build and operate such spacecraft right now. The atmospheric yields incurred to launch such things into space are not all that large, in terms of the fallout produced. Once a few of them are up there, we incur no further fallout risks. We could re-supply them with conventional launchers, and re-use them as space-based interplanetary transport vehicles for years, even decades. Or even longer.
Why not?
Project "Orion" was a funded Air Force project in the 1959-1965 time frame. The Air Force had no application for a deep space ship, which restricted the funding and how far the project could go. The Air Force then had to turn its entire space program over to NASA in 1965. NASA saw "Orion" as a competitor to its Project "Rover" nuclear thermal rocket efforts, and so killed "Orion" by lack of funding.
"Orion" never flew or tested with nuclear devices. However, a 1-meter scale model flew just fine with pulses of high explosives. This verified the viability of the concept. The results would have been remarkable, had such a technology been pursued. Note that the following design data is based on surface launch of nuclear explosion-drive ships:
Design "name"..............test veh......orb.test.....interplan.....adv. I.P.
Gross weight, tons.........50-100........880..........4000..........10,000
Empty weight, tons..........45............370..........1700...........3250
Effective Isp, sec.......var, to 3000....3-6000........4000..........12,000
Dia, feet...................40.............80...........135............185
Length, feet................50............120...........200............280
Avg. gees...................2-4.............2.....var, to 2......var, to 4
Vacuum charge, KT.......0.1-0.5.........0.8-3.......about 5.......about 15
Sea level charge, KT.......0.003..........0.03.........0.15...........0.35
# charges to 125,000 feet...1-200..........200..........200............200
Total KT to 125,000 feet.. about 2.....about 20....about 100......about 250
# charges to 300 mile orbit..NA............800...........800............800
Total MT to 300 mile orbit...NA........0.45-1.8............3.............9
The name "test veh" was a sub-orbital test vehicle. The name "orb.veh" was to be a test vehicle capable of reaching a 300 mile orbit about the Earth. The name "interplan" was a smaller interplanetary transport ship, capable of reaching the moon or Mars. The name "adv.I.P" refers to a much larger interplanetary transport ship capable of touring the inner solar system in a single trip, or reaching Saturn and returning. Weight are shown in US customary units of the 2000 pound ("short") ton. The metric ton is a 10.25% larger unit. NA means "not applicable".
These are short, fat, bullet or projectile-shaped designs, of a heavy, strong type of construction resembling marine engineering more than any flight vehicles ever known. That means the heavy ship's hull provides a lot of radiation shielding against cosmic rays and solar flares. These ships are big enough to provide one full gee's artificial gravity by spinning at an acceptably slow rate. For example, the "adv.I.P." design needs to spin at only 20 degrees/sec (3.3 rpm) to provide one full gee at the outer hull.
Every one of them is a single stage device: nothing is jettisoned or lost, everything returns for re-use. Dimensions are in feet (one meter = 3.280833 feet). There is a large pusher plate mounted on resonant shocks at the rear. These pusher plates receive the impulse from the nuclear detonations and spread it over time.
The following data lists mission performance projected for these very same designs:
Design name.................test veh......orb.test.....interplan........adv.I.P
Payloads delivered, ton..................(3000 sec)............................
300 mile orbit (10 km/s)........NA..........300...........1600...........6100
Soft lunar landing (15.5 km/s)..NA..........170...........1200...........5700
Mars orbit & return (21 km/s)...NA...........80............800...........5300
(orb)Ven.-Mar.-ret. (30 km/s)...NA...........NA............200...........4500
To Saturn & back (100 km/s).....NA...........NA.............NA...........1300
Between the listed specific impulse data and the payload-to-Saturn data, bigger is clearly better with this pulsed-explosion propulsion approach. The mission data shown assume a return to Earth orbit for re-use of the ship. The speeds are the total velocity requirements based on Hohman transfer orbits. These ships do not make landings on Mars or the moons of Saturn, landing craft that are part of the cargo weight would be used for that.
The nuclear devices were "optimized" as shaped charges with a preferred "blast" axis. A "propellant" mass was included in each charge, to be vaporized into hypervelocity plasma and bounced off the pusher plate. Devices optimized in that way do not make very good weapons, but they are a very promising source of propulsion! This also raises a very interesting question: could this approach be scaled up further, and use higher-efficiency thermonuclear charges, for even higher effective specific impulse? Old Project "Orion" never looked at that.
Note that if Saturn could be reached, so also could Jupiter and the asteroid belt be reached. Round trip flight time on the Hohman-transfer Saturn mission would be 3 years. However, you could fly faster with this technology, if more of the vehicle were its nuclear "fuel" and less of it were cargo. That means even the outer solar system could be reached with this type of vehicle. Manned missions to the Kuiper Belt are possible!
Based on what they were able to achieve back then, we could build and operate such spacecraft right now. The atmospheric yields incurred to launch such things into space are not all that large, in terms of the fallout produced. Once a few of them are up there, we incur no further fallout risks. We could re-supply them with conventional launchers, and re-use them as space-based interplanetary transport vehicles for years, even decades. Or even longer.
Why not?
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Addiction, Monopolies, and the Oil Price Weapon
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them there is a strong connection between excessive dependence upon foreign oil, and the wars and recessions we have experienced over the last several decades. Late last fall, I obtained from zfacts.com an inflation-adjusted gasoline price history stretching back to the early 1970's. The curve is expressed in October 2009 dollars, not very different from today. I annotated copies of this graphic to make my points here.
The following graphic shows the timing and relationship between gasoline prices and recessionary events. From this figure, even the casual observer should see the connection between high fuel prices and economic damage.
My conclusion from this is that the higher, longer price spikes cause greater recessions, with a sort of trigger threshold near months-at-$2.50/gallon. The short, mild events have a lower trigger threshold, nearer 2.00-2.25/gallon for several weeks. Look at today's prices all around town. Why are you surprised the economy is taking so long to recover?
Whatever you draw from it, it should be quite clear that years of exposure to $3.00/gallon or higher causes us great damage, for that is exactly what preceded both the "Carter inflation years" and the current "Great Recession" event. (The two mild events were brief problems experienced about 1990 and 2000.)
Another point I'd like to make is that the "Carter inflation years" ended when fuel prices dropped, during Reagan's second term. So, it looks to me like "tax cuts for the rich" and "trickle-down economics" had nothing to do with that recovery. The politicians lied to us about that. (But why should that be surprising?)
The next graphic shows the connection between price spike-ups and world events. My thesis is that many of these price spike episodes are not due to "market" anything, but are deliberate acts perpetrated by those with the oil. I cannot account for everything with this thesis, but I can relate gasoline prices we experienced to troubles we had with the middle east for the four recessionary events identified here.
Going back to the 1970's, we experienced in rapid succcession higher prices due to the "Arab oil embargo", and a further sustained price hike starting with the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The 1973 embargo was retaliation by the middle eastern oil producers for US foreign policies they hated. We got "crossways" with Iran over the Shah, their revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iran-Iraq war, all in the 1979-1988 time frame. They are about the 3rd largest crude oil producer in OPEC.
Not many folks know that we backed Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, but we did. Saddam Hussein was "our boy" against Iran. We gave him the poison gas bombs that he used in that war, and later against his own Kurds, so that he would not lose that war. Is it any surprise that Iran and OPEC maintained high prices all during that time?
Don't you kind of gather from this that those countries all really do understand the "oil price weapon" as an instrument of economic warfare, and how to use it against us?
Most folks also do not seem to understand that the various terrorist and religious-extremist groups that our troops fight now, are in fact the proxy armies and "favorite charities" of the middle eastern members of OPEC. We are, in point of fact, paying them to kill us, every time we fill our gasoline (or diesel, or jet fuel) tanks.
My best "guesstimate" is that about 25 cents of every fuel dollar finds its way to these groups. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare are expensive: those payrolls, travel expenses, training costs, and weapon costs have to come from somewhere. It should therefore be no surprise to anyone that fuel prices rise, anytime we or our allies seem to be winning in any of these wars.
We are currently winning in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and our ally Pakistan has been "wiping the floor" with the Taliban in their border region. Gasoline several weeks ago around Waco was about $2.40/gallon. Now it is headed for $2.60/gallon. The industry analysts on the business page of the newspaper predict $3.00/gallon this summer, but cannot supply a coherent explanation as to why this is happening. I think I know why. After seeing these graphs, I hope you know, too.
There's also the notion of "political warfare". Why should these people not be trying to influence our elections? In point of fact, I think they have been, and for a very long time. The third graphic has annotations I made showing the connections I think I see.
Since the early 1970's there has been, more or less, a political party correlation in American politics on the issue of alternative energy / oil independence. The Democrats have been more favorable to alternatives, the Republicans have not been.
If you were a "pusher" of the monopoly product the entire planet is addicted to, would you not want to do anything you could to ensure your addict client stayed addicted? I think OPEC wants to defuse or defeat any alternative fuel initiatives in the country, and so they favor the election of Republican Presidents over Democrats.
To that end, I think they might drop fuel prices a bit preceding the elections to make the Republicans more attractive, since lower fuel prices seem to ease public anxiety about dependence on foreign oil. If they get what the want, fuel prices zoom back up right after the election. If a Democrat wins, prices stay lower after the election for a while. I think this is likely an attempt to undercut alternative fuel initiatives by making their costs look less attractive.
And that is the price pattern I see in the record, for every single election except the last one. (That one is clouded by the price drop that happens every time our stock market crashes.)
This has nothing to do with market forces. This looks to me like brazen attempts to use monopoly pricing as a weapon, and as a tool to interfere in our politics to maintain our addiction to their oil. This has been "hiding-in-plain-sight" for decades. And I don't like it. Not one little bit.
Are you not tired of paying these bastards to kill us? Does it not infuriate you that hostile foreigners have been interfering in our elections? Then get off your collective duffs and go do something about it!
If your elected representation won't work toward alternative energy ASAP, then elect new ones who will. But you must communicate with them about it! You have to act.
Your vehicles are already running just fine on an E-10 (10%)ethanol blend in your gasoline right now. That ethanol is American-made, and every bit we use instead of gasoline makes a dent in the enemy's budget. Ask your representation to push for E-20 or even E-30 blends. My vehicles and equipment have been running just fine on it for 3 years now.
I have already been doing my bit. I tried the stiffer E-blends and they work just fine. And, I published this for you.
The following graphic shows the timing and relationship between gasoline prices and recessionary events. From this figure, even the casual observer should see the connection between high fuel prices and economic damage.
My conclusion from this is that the higher, longer price spikes cause greater recessions, with a sort of trigger threshold near months-at-$2.50/gallon. The short, mild events have a lower trigger threshold, nearer 2.00-2.25/gallon for several weeks. Look at today's prices all around town. Why are you surprised the economy is taking so long to recover?
Whatever you draw from it, it should be quite clear that years of exposure to $3.00/gallon or higher causes us great damage, for that is exactly what preceded both the "Carter inflation years" and the current "Great Recession" event. (The two mild events were brief problems experienced about 1990 and 2000.)
Another point I'd like to make is that the "Carter inflation years" ended when fuel prices dropped, during Reagan's second term. So, it looks to me like "tax cuts for the rich" and "trickle-down economics" had nothing to do with that recovery. The politicians lied to us about that. (But why should that be surprising?)
The next graphic shows the connection between price spike-ups and world events. My thesis is that many of these price spike episodes are not due to "market" anything, but are deliberate acts perpetrated by those with the oil. I cannot account for everything with this thesis, but I can relate gasoline prices we experienced to troubles we had with the middle east for the four recessionary events identified here.
Going back to the 1970's, we experienced in rapid succcession higher prices due to the "Arab oil embargo", and a further sustained price hike starting with the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. The 1973 embargo was retaliation by the middle eastern oil producers for US foreign policies they hated. We got "crossways" with Iran over the Shah, their revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iran-Iraq war, all in the 1979-1988 time frame. They are about the 3rd largest crude oil producer in OPEC.
Not many folks know that we backed Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, but we did. Saddam Hussein was "our boy" against Iran. We gave him the poison gas bombs that he used in that war, and later against his own Kurds, so that he would not lose that war. Is it any surprise that Iran and OPEC maintained high prices all during that time?
Don't you kind of gather from this that those countries all really do understand the "oil price weapon" as an instrument of economic warfare, and how to use it against us?
Most folks also do not seem to understand that the various terrorist and religious-extremist groups that our troops fight now, are in fact the proxy armies and "favorite charities" of the middle eastern members of OPEC. We are, in point of fact, paying them to kill us, every time we fill our gasoline (or diesel, or jet fuel) tanks.
My best "guesstimate" is that about 25 cents of every fuel dollar finds its way to these groups. Terrorism and guerrilla warfare are expensive: those payrolls, travel expenses, training costs, and weapon costs have to come from somewhere. It should therefore be no surprise to anyone that fuel prices rise, anytime we or our allies seem to be winning in any of these wars.
We are currently winning in Helmand Province in Afghanistan, and our ally Pakistan has been "wiping the floor" with the Taliban in their border region. Gasoline several weeks ago around Waco was about $2.40/gallon. Now it is headed for $2.60/gallon. The industry analysts on the business page of the newspaper predict $3.00/gallon this summer, but cannot supply a coherent explanation as to why this is happening. I think I know why. After seeing these graphs, I hope you know, too.
There's also the notion of "political warfare". Why should these people not be trying to influence our elections? In point of fact, I think they have been, and for a very long time. The third graphic has annotations I made showing the connections I think I see.
Since the early 1970's there has been, more or less, a political party correlation in American politics on the issue of alternative energy / oil independence. The Democrats have been more favorable to alternatives, the Republicans have not been.
If you were a "pusher" of the monopoly product the entire planet is addicted to, would you not want to do anything you could to ensure your addict client stayed addicted? I think OPEC wants to defuse or defeat any alternative fuel initiatives in the country, and so they favor the election of Republican Presidents over Democrats.
To that end, I think they might drop fuel prices a bit preceding the elections to make the Republicans more attractive, since lower fuel prices seem to ease public anxiety about dependence on foreign oil. If they get what the want, fuel prices zoom back up right after the election. If a Democrat wins, prices stay lower after the election for a while. I think this is likely an attempt to undercut alternative fuel initiatives by making their costs look less attractive.
And that is the price pattern I see in the record, for every single election except the last one. (That one is clouded by the price drop that happens every time our stock market crashes.)
This has nothing to do with market forces. This looks to me like brazen attempts to use monopoly pricing as a weapon, and as a tool to interfere in our politics to maintain our addiction to their oil. This has been "hiding-in-plain-sight" for decades. And I don't like it. Not one little bit.
Are you not tired of paying these bastards to kill us? Does it not infuriate you that hostile foreigners have been interfering in our elections? Then get off your collective duffs and go do something about it!
If your elected representation won't work toward alternative energy ASAP, then elect new ones who will. But you must communicate with them about it! You have to act.
Your vehicles are already running just fine on an E-10 (10%)ethanol blend in your gasoline right now. That ethanol is American-made, and every bit we use instead of gasoline makes a dent in the enemy's budget. Ask your representation to push for E-20 or even E-30 blends. My vehicles and equipment have been running just fine on it for 3 years now.
I have already been doing my bit. I tried the stiffer E-blends and they work just fine. And, I published this for you.
Update 1-3-15:
The recent explosion of US “fracking” technology (hydraulic
fracturing plus horizontal-turn drilling) has modified the picture of oil
prices versus recessions.
Unexpectedly, the US has become a
leading producer of crude oils for the world market. Plus,
there has been an associated massive production increase and price drop
in natural gas.
OPEC has chosen to take the income “hit” and not cut back
their production in response. Their
reasoning is twofold: (1) fear of loss
of market share, and (2) hope that low
oil prices will curtail US “fracking” recoveries. We will see how that plays-out.
Oil prices are now such (at around $55/barrel) that US
regular gasoline prices are nearing $2.00/gal for the first time in a very long
time. This is very close to the price
one would expect for a truly competitive commodity, based on 1958 gasoline prices in the US, and the inflation factor since then.
It is no coincidence that the exceedingly-weak US “Great Recession”
recovery has suddenly picked up steam.
The timing of the acceleration in our economic recovery versus the
precipitous drop in oil prices is quite damning. There can be no doubt that
higher-than-competitive-commodity oil prices damage economies. Oil prices are a superposition of the competitive
commodity price, overlain by an erratic
increase from speculation, and further overlain
quite often by punitive price levels when OPEC is politically unhappy with the
west. That’s been the history.
This economic improvement we are experiencing will persist
as long as oil, gas, and fuel prices remain low. (Government policies have almost nothing to
do with this, from either party.) How long that improvement continues depends
in part upon US “fracking” and in part upon OPEC. Continued US “fracking” in the short term may
depend upon adequate prices. In the long
term, we need some solutions to some
rather intractable problems to continue our big-time “fracking” activities.
The long-term problems with “fracking” have to do with (1)
contamination of groundwater with combustible natural gas, (2) induced earthquake activity, (3) lack of suitable freshwater supply to
support the demand for “fracking”, and
(4) safety problems with the transport of the volatile crude that “fracking”
inherently produces.
Groundwater
Contamination
Groundwater contamination is geology-dependent. In Texas,
the rock layers lie relatively flat,
and are relatively undistorted and unfractured. This is because the rocks are largely old sea
bottom that was never subjected to mountain-building. We Texans haven’t seen any significant
contamination of ground water by methane freed from shale. The exceptions trace to improperly-built
wells whose casings leak.
This isn’t true in the shales being tapped in the
Appalachians, or in the shales being
tapped in the eastern Rockies. There the
freed gas has multiple paths to reach the surface besides the well, no matter how well-built it might have
been. Those paths are the vast
multitudes of fractures in the highly-contorted rocks that subject to mountain-building
in eons past. That mountain-building may
have ceased long ago, but those cracks
last forever.
This is why there are persistent reports of kitchen water
taps bursting into flames or exploding,
from those very same regions of the country. It’s very unwise to “frack” for gas in that
kind of geology.
Induced Earthquake
Activity
This does not seem to trace to the original “fracking”
activity. Instead it traces rather
reliably to massive injections of “fracking” wastewater down disposal
wells. Wherever the injection quantities
are large in a given well, the frequent
earthquakes cluster in that same region.
Most are pretty weak, under
Richter magnitude 3, some have
approached magnitude 4.
There is nothing in our experience to suggest that magnitude
4 is the maximum we will see. No
one can rule out large quakes. The risk is with us as long as there are
massive amounts of “fracking” wastewater to dispose of, in these wells. As long as we never re-use “frack”
water, we will have this massive
disposal problem, and it will induce
earthquakes.
Lack of Freshwater
Supply to Support “Fracking”
It takes immense amounts of fresh water to “frack” a single
well. None of this is ever re-used, nor it is technologically-possible to
decontaminate water used in that way. The
additives vary from company to company,
but all use either sand or glass beads,
and usually a little diesel fuel.
Used “frack” water comes back at near 10 times the salinity of sea
water, and is contaminated by heavy
metals, and by radioactive minerals, in addition to the additives. Only the sand or glass beads get left
behind: they hold the newly-fractured
cracks in the rocks open, so that
natural gas and volatile crudes can percolate out.
The problem is lack of enough freshwater supplies. In most areas of interest, there is not enough fresh water available to
support both people and “fracking”, especially
with the drought in recent years. This assessment
completely excludes the demand increases due to population growth. That’s even worse.
This problem will persist as long as fresh water is used for
“fracking”, and will be much, much worse as long as “frack” water is not
reused. The solution is to start with
sea water, not fresh water, and then to re-use it. This will require some R&D to develop a
new additive package that works in salty water to carry sand or glass
beads, even in brines 10 times more
salty than sea water.
Nobody wants to pay for that R&D.
Transport Safety with
Volatile “Frack” Crudes
What “fracking” frees best from shales is natural gas, which is inherently very mobile. Some shales (by no means all of them) contain
condensed-phase hydrocarbons volatile enough to percolate out after hydraulic
fracturing, albeit more slowly than
natural gas. Typically, these resemble a light, runny winter diesel fuel, or even a kerosene, in physical properties. More commonly, shale contains very immobile condensed
hydrocarbons resembling tar. These cannot
be recovered by “fracking” at all.
The shales in south Texas,
and some of the shales and adjacent dolomites in the Wyoming region
actually do yield light, volatile
crudes. The problem is what to transport
them in. There are not enough
pipelines to do that job. Pipelines are safer
than rail transport, all the spills and
fires notwithstanding.
The problem is that we are transporting these
relatively-volatile materials in rail tank cars intended for normal (heavy)
crude oils, specifically DOT 111 tank cars. Normal crudes are relatively-nonvolatile and
rather hard to ignite in accidents. DOT
111 cars puncture or leak frequently in derail accidents, but this isn’t that serious a problem as long
as the contents are non-volatile. These
shale-“frack” light crude materials resemble nothing so much as No. 1 winter
diesel, which is illegal to ship in DOT
111 cars, precisely since it is too
volatile.
The problem is that no one wants to pay for expanding the
fleet of tougher-rated tank cars. So, many outfits routinely mis-classify “frack” light
crudes as non-volatile crudes, in order
to “legally” use the abundant but inadequate DOT-111 cars. We’ve already seen the result of this kind of
bottom line-only thinking, in a series
of rather serious rail fire-and-explosion disasters, the most deadly (so far) in Lac
Megantic, Quebec.
Volatile shale-“fracked” crudes simply should not be shipped
in vulnerable DOT 111 cars, period. It is demonstrably too dangerous.
Conclusions
“Fracking” shales for natural gas and light crudes has had a
very beneficial effect on the US economy and its export-import picture. We should continue this activity as a
reliable bridge to things in the near future that are even better.
But, we must address
the four problem areas I just outlined.
And I also just told you what the solutions are. The problem is, as always,
who pays. What is the value of a
human life? What is the value of a
livable environment? It’s not an either-or
decision, it’s striking the appropriate balance!
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