143. The Fusion Energy Breakthrough vs. Climate Change

A net energy gain for fusion in a lab is a landmark scientific achievement but we're decades away from commercialization according to experts. We have to decarbonize the planet by 2050. Will fusion energy contribute? Utility solar farm that lays the panels flat on the ground is commissioned. The Salton Sea in California could provide all the United States lithium needs and then some (CNBC video link). And it could be the greenest lithium in the world. The Keystone pipeline spills its wares all over Kansas.

Will traditional nuclear energy be effective to reach our climate goals? A study casts shade on that idea.

17:36 - The fusion breakthrough in California. What it doesn't mean for the race to net zero and what it does mean for our grandchildren.

• Free New York Times article on this.

As well we'll have stories on Canada cancelling fossil fuel subsidies, sorta,  an update on the people shooting at a power substation causing blackouts, sails for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines are more likely to think the moon landing was fake, plus a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more!

A listener in Virginia asks us about a proposed new community solar farm near him and how he should deal with the misinformation floating around.

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Transcript

Clip: Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.

Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 143 of the Clean Energy Show.

I'm Brian Stockton.

I'm James Whittingham.

This week fusion breakthrough, all clean energy needs have been met.

This podcast is no longer necessary a go.

Listen to Joe Rogan.

Oh, wait.

I'm hearing in my ear that people are overreacting to this.

News and commercialization is still decades away.

The world's first utility scale solar project is going ahead.

With solar panels sitting flat on the ground, these green energy hippies were just too lazy to put them up on a proper mount.

The salt and sea in California apparently has more lithium than Nevada's.

Lake Mead has dead bodies.

Some think there's enough lithium to power the entire United States.

And then some.

Huge congratulations to TC Energy's keystone pipeline that has successfully leaked more oil than any other pipeline since 2010.

Wait, I'm being told that's a bad day as well.

We have stories on Canada canceling fossil fuel subsidies.

While sort of an update on people shooting at power stations sales for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines, and more are more likely to think that the moon landing was fake.

Plus, a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more on this week's edition of The Clean Energy Show.

Yeah, so first up for me is an update.

As you know, I'm trying to get rid of fossil fuels in my own house because I love the planet, and I don't want to burn any more fossil fuels than I have good fuel.

So made a little bit of progress.

Been speaking to a contractor who could put in an Arctic type air source heat pump so I can get rid of my natural gas furnace.

And the latest update is that it's 16 weeks from when you order it because there's a backlog four months and they want you to pay upfront.

Oh, you got to pay upfront.

You got to pay up front.

Yeah.

So the point being this week, because we talked about these kinds of subsidies upfront 100%, right? You got to pay 100% upfront.

Why is heat pump and then wait 16 weeks? Because there's just huge demand for them, which is basically what's going on all over the world.

Like, there's a couple of stories here.

I've got one from Clean Technica.

The title is Heat Pumps Are on Fire globally.

They mean, as in getting more popular, heat pump sales rose 15% in 2021, and they're expecting for something similar or greater this coming year.

Europe.

They rose by 35% in 2021.

And of course, they're very much trying to get off of Russian gas in Europe.

And heat pumps is definitely one of the ways to do it.

And there's another story here from China.

China is actually the world leader on heat pump adoption.

Of course, they have a very large population.

They do things big in China when they, when they do them.

So sales are up 35% in Europe and 45% in China for heat pumps.

So I bring this all up because we were talking in the last couple of weeks about subsidies that are available for things like heat pumps.

So I'm in the Greener Homes Grant in Canada, so I should get about $5,000 to help offset this cost.

In the US is the Inflation Reduction Act, and starting in January, there's going to be subsidies for people to do things like put in heat pumps and other kind of energy upgrades.

But I wanted to tell our listeners because there is going to be a global shortage of heat pumps.

So if it's something you're thinking of doing, start talking to somebody now and maybe beat the rush, because there's definitely going to be a rush in January in the US.

Can a person invest in a heat pump company? I mean, is there anybody who's on the stock market that would make a good investment? Not that I'm aware of, but I'm going to make a note of that and check later because yeah, that's probably a smart idea.

Well, get back to us.

I'd be curious to know.

And then certainly anyone who makes effective, the most cost effective heat pump and maybe the most efficient heat pump, they're going to win the game, especially if they patent that technology.

So, I mean, keep an eye on developments there because they are.

Sure, yeah, no, there's two things like the cost of the unit and then the efficiency of the unit.

Generally speaking, you're going to kind of be paying more upfront, which is the common refrain here on the clean energy show.

You're probably going to be paying more upfront for the equipment, but it will be hopefully cheaper in the long run.

It's a bit of a weird equation where we live because in this ridiculous frigid place and our natural gas prices are still quite good.

Our natural gas is still fairly cheap here.

So I'm not necessarily going to be saving money right away by doing this.

It's more of a long term gambit and I just want to get the gas out of my house.

Yeah, I was going to say paying for it up front.

You'd run the risk of them going out of business.

But then they're not going to go out of business, are they? The chances are I don't think so because it would be terribly wrong for a heat pump company to go out of business us at this point.

Yeah, I suppose the contractor could go out of business, but it should be fine.

Well, we'll talk more about that as we go along because heat pumps are the new thing, even where we live, apparently.

We're certainly going to monitor if you freeze into a Popsicle or not after you get your heat pump because we get down to -40 here as we talk about our electric vehicles.

It's much more of a no brainer if you're on the west coast or on the east coast of Canada or pretty much anywhere in the world where people live.

Pretty much anywhere in the world.

It's just our ridiculous climate.

And just coincidentally, we have fairly decent natural gas prices.

By the way, we're still looking for clean energy show property in Hawaii, if you have any.

Yeah, please.

Anyway, Brian, I want to say thank you to our donors because we've had big donations to the show.

Not just donations, which are humbling enough, but big ones.

And thank you to the people who have done that.

One person chose to do an email transfer, an e transfer, rather via email, because they didn't want to lose any fees and make the most of their donations that did that, and it worked out nicely.

So thank you to everyone.

I won't name you because you didn't say you could be named, but you know who you are.

We appreciate you greatly.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for your donations.

This is an independent production.

We've been doing it for over two years now.

And we do it because we love the show and we love the planet.

But it's also nice to get some money and so James can get a new toaster.

I guess we're approaching our third year pretty quick.

Before you know it'll be three years.

My goodness.

That's right, we're coming up on three.

Say, did you happen to see Saturday Night Live, the comedy live comedy show in North America? Here I saw part of it was Steve Martin and Steve Martin, I saw part of it they were doing in the opening monologue, which I thought was quite well done, they were doing each other's eulogies.

They had pretended to have written each other's eulogies.

And this is Steve Martin reading from his eulogy that he had prepared pre death for Martin short, his friend.

But I would always be haunted by Marty's last words, tesla Autopilot engaged.

I thought that was funny, so I played it on the show.

My son, he's been nagging me just before Showtime today, this big fusion announcement.

I was waiting to hear from him on this because he's one of these people, these silver bullet people, which is almost everyone.

It's probably 99% of the people listen to our show.

I'm sorry, but everybody has this silver bullet where it's a pet of theirs, an energy pet.

Yeah, whether it's nuclear as a whole, some people, or do that.

And then there's nuclear fusion, which has been talked about.

I mean, I learned about nuclear fusion from my hairdresser 25 years ago.

He's like, oh, it's coming quick, it's coming quick.

And you know, that's going to be the thing that's going to solve this whole problem.

And of course, a lot of people believe that, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean, it's been frustratingly long to get to the achievement that we're going to talk about shortly after we update some other stories.

But he says this, my first text from my son after the announcement is, oh God, you're going to hate this.

So right away he's assuming that I'm going to be upset by this because I've been telling them, arguing with him about nuclear, that you can't compete on cost.

And he says the first fusion reactor has been built that produces more energy than it consumes.

And later on, after a bunch of bickering and quotes and articles sent back and forth, he said, you said solar would be so cheap that it would be even cheaper than fusion, even down the line.

And I was actually quite excited about this announcement on a personal level.

I spent the better part of a week researching and digging into this so that I could talk about it on the show this week and have my facts straight.

Well, it turns out I was right.

Not to spoil the story, but I'm afraid I was right that it is going to be very expensive.

I'll get to it later, okay.

But it's not going to happen quickly and it's not going to happen cheaply.

And the people who made the announcement are the people saying that.

So it's not me poopoo nuclear.

I am, however, quite excited on a personal level that my kids generation and my grandkids generation will have power that won't have to deal with nuclear waste.

It'll be completely safe and completely it's a wonderful technology that has very few caveats of any I mean it's just aside from expense and not being developed yet into a power plant.

But yeah, we'll talk about that later.

Those substations, I keep seeing them in the news when I'm flipping through the channels.

It's turning into a big story.

The shooting of the substations.

Yeah.

So we talked about this probably last week where in North Carolina there was a shooting attack on an electrical substation and 30, 40,000 people were without power for almost a week.

Then a few days after that, news of gunfire near the Duke energy facility in South Carolina.

Now it seems like probably nothing happened with that one.

There were some shots heard, no power outages.

But there's a great article on NPR about this.

North Carolina attacks highlight the vulnerability of power grids.

So here's the thing.

There's 55,000 electrical substations around the US.

And most of them are kind of vulnerable.

These things are liquid cooled.

This is the main kind of danger.

They're liquid cooled so you can take a rifle shoot into them and then all the liquid drains out and then they overheat and then they fail.

Probably the whole thing fails.

And I'm guessing it's not just one component, not one capacitor or one individual component.

The whole thing has to be replaced.

We shouldn't be telling people this, but it is the dues and some of them have been over the years sort of fortified, like put up like brick walls and stuff.

Is that right? I didn't know that.

But there's 55,000 of them, and they're not going to be particularly well protected, of course.

Yeah, it's a concern.

I mean, it's maybe not something we should be worried about yet, but I don't know.

Who knows? Well, if somebody decided to get organized and attack on a coordinated basis, I mean, a week long power outage for tens of thousands of people is nothing to sneeze at.

And it sounded like it was awfully easy to do with.

I wonder if they had the knowledge of what they were doing or if it was just they were shot at it and got lucky and just got lucky.

I'm not sure.

I mean, presumably they knew.

I mean, it's this issue of the cooling liquid leaking out.

Well, let's hope it was a disgruntled power employee and not somebody who knows what they're doing and trying to disrupt the United States.

People talking about on television experts saying that you can't really protect the power, it's just not going to happen.

You have to find the people doing it and then get to it that way.

I mean, you could put up more barriers, and some of them do have brick walls around them or whatever, but it seems unlikely.

I mean, if it turns into a bigger problem, then perhaps there'll be a mass deployment of walls.

Not at the moment.

And one of the problems that I keep seeing mentioned is that a lot of these stations, they want to be away from people.

People don't want to look at them.

So they're kind of isolated.

In fact, some of them are extremely isolated.

They're very remote in rural areas, not near populations.

Yeah.

So ground mount solar.

I know that you brought this up on the show several months ago.

This is the idea of putting solar panels just completely flat on the ground without any hardware or panels really at all.

Yeah, they're just connected together somehow.

So you level the ground first.

You probably have to level it, make a nice, smooth, level chunk of land, and you probably have to make us sort of like drainage ditches and stuff like that.

So we have one now that's coming online in Texas.

And this is 100 MW.

This is a decent sized solar project.

Ten times what we have here where we live.

They're making 10 MW here, and it's just a normal one on regular mounts.

This is 100 MW.

This story is from Electric, and it will be the only utility scale solar farm that is mounted flat so far to date.

There's many advantages to this, but one of them is just that you can put more panels in the same kind of area.

That's right, because you're basically just sticking them up right next to each other.

So if you're in an area where land is an issue, and you don't quite have enough land for this stuff.

Now, of course, there's downsides to that, too.

Like you don't get the advantage of the angle of the sun.

But as we talk about frequently on the show, the whole solar system will eventually be so overbuilt that those kinds of issues aren't that big a deal.

But one of the biggest benefits of this, as near as I can tell, is they can just basically they throw a roomba on this thing to keep it clean.

But that's also one of the challenges, Brian, is the fact that they get dirtier because they just sit there.

There's not as much of runoff.

But then at the same time, the solution to that problem works quite well.

You say it's dirt cheap.

The robot can clean up to 2 solar every day.

So the robot can just kind of run continuously, like Arumba runs in people's houses.

So every 50 days it starts over.

The rough cost to clean a tracker plant one time is fifty cents per kilowatt hour.

This is a plant where they're mounted normally fifty cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt.

And these panels can be cleaned for a year at wow, very interesting.

So you would save money.

Hardware is not cheap.

But the solar panels that I saw here, they track, they're on Movable, tracking things that track the sun east to west.

And of course, Texas is a lot farther south.

That's going to yeah, we're not in the far north of Canada.

We're in southern Canada, but that's still quite far north.

So if we had flat panels here, the winter production would be pretty abysmal.

Yeah, I don't think it makes sense.

I said it last time, I don't think it makes sense in winter climates.

Although I'm sure they could develop robots for cleaning snow if they had to.

But I think it also just works better where we are.

And the more northern you are, even northern half of the United States, it's going to make more sense to actually tilt them towards the sun, perhaps.

I assume economically it makes more sense.

Yeah.

Obviously Texas is a lot further south, so the angle of the sun is not as big a deal in the winter.

So yeah, there you go.

News from here in Canada against Canada had made a pledge some time ago to stop subsidizing fossil fuel projects abroad outside of Canada.

So the good news is that Canada has decided to stop any subsidies that would go to fossil fuel projects outside of Canada.

The bad news is they haven't canceled those projects here at home yet.

They haven't canceled those subsidies in Canada.

But what can I say? It's progress of a kind.

This was a pledge that Canada had made last year, and there was a deadline at the end of this year.

They said, okay, we're going to do it by the end of 2022.

So at the last minute, they have pulled it out and made that announcement.

But this is typical of the progress that's happening right now in clean energy, is that governments are just not moving fast enough.

But at least they're moving.

I wish they'd done it with inside the borders.

I mean, we're at a pretty critical time here, climate wise.

It'd be nice if they get on that.

Yeah.

Canada is a fossil fuel country.

It is a big part of our economy.

So, of course they're worried about killing the economy and that's why they haven't done it here at home.

But it's coming someday, I guess.

This is the Clean Energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham.

Well, this was a very successful scientific experiment done in a laboratory to show that the process of fusion can be duplicated here on the Earth and that they can get more energy out of it than they put into it.

But let me say that the way they did it in this National Ignition Facility is not the way we're going to be generating electricity.

This was to study the process of fusion itself and study the lasers, the incredible lasers that they use to generate the power.

All right, it's time for full team coverage of the fusion breakthrough.

Okay.

The advancement by Lawrence Livermore national Laboratory researchers will be built on to further develop fusion energy research.

So this is a laboratory milestone, one that has been sought after for decades.

Brian and from an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal because it's not dangerous.

It's different than fission, which is your normal nuclear power.

Fusion combines atoms rather than splits them.

Right.

It puts them together.

But it's very interesting and it's just hard to do.

And they haven't achieved a net energy gain, so it takes a lot of energy to create particles, atoms that want to fuse together.

It's hotter than the inside area of the sun.

The center of the sun.

Yeah.

Well, I watched the YouTube channel.

The Cleo abram YouTube channel.

Huge if true, is sort of the name of the series.

And a couple of YouTubers did you watch that? A couple of YouTubers built a fusion reactor in a garage.

Did they? And it worked.

But the key is they did not get more energy out than they put in.

And this has been the problem with fusion for all these years.

Takes a huge amount of energy, and they're not getting even that amount of energy out of it.

Until now, billions of dollars from governments around the world have been put into this, and this is the first time that it's happened.

I guess they got out 1.5 times the energy that they put in, using the world's most powerful laser to do this.

There is always a nagging caveat, however, with this, and in that all of its efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consume more energy than what was going in.

But that changed.

Brian.

According to the New York Times, at on December 5, when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory's national ignition facility busted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen newbin of hydrogen.

Do you have any frozen new bins of hydrogen laying around the house? Probably not.

Let me check.

The freezer encased in diamond.

So that makes it even more rare.

Well, that sounds totally practical.

Well, that's what they did, and that's kind of yeah, it's a long story, but that's what they did.

They used all these lasers to get to that.

And in a brief moment, lasting less than 100,000,000,000,000th of a second 205 pardon me, 2.5 megajoules of energy, roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT, I think.

The Sneeze At bombarded, the hydrogen pellet out of flowed from that pellet a flood of neutron particles, the product of fusion.

See, when you put things, when you put particles together, they create energy.

When you take them apart, they create energy.

Which carried about three megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5.

Yeah.

And basically, this is how the sun works.

The sun is like fusion energy is as near as I understand it.

That's correct.

And obviously, the sun is producing endless amounts of energy for free.

It's doing a hell of a job.

So the solar panels on our roof are technically fusion.

Yeah, technically, wind is technically solar because you need the sun to create wind because it's the energy differences that create wind.

So some people like to call wind power solar power, and now we can call it fusion.

I don't know if you want to so does Tuesday's announcement mean we'll have cheap fusion energy soon? A lot of people, such as my uppity son, would say yes.

They assume, oh, it's a breakthrough.

They'll start manufacturing tomorrow.

A couple of years from now, we'll see solar panels going to the landfill.

Yeah, well, it's taken them, what, 50 years to get this far? Well, the answer is no.

According to the New York Times.

Okay, so even if scientists figure out how to generate bigger bursts of fusion, immense engineering hurdles would remain.

Experiments have studied one burst at a time, basically.

So a practical fusion power plant using this concept would require a machine gun pace of laser bursts with new hydrogen targets sliding into place for each burst.

That's the challenge.

They're using magnets and magnetism to float things and have a continuous repeating chain.

There's three different ways of approaches to fusion power, and this is basically an experiment at a nuclear weapons facility.

But there's a Canadian team working on something, too, and they're going to have a prototype power plant getting built in the UK.

But it still doesn't mean that it's anywhere near decades away.

So the torrents of neutrons flying outward from the fusion reactions would have to be converted into electricity.

That's another challenge.

Basically, the fact that they created more energy doesn't make a power plant.

Okay, so the laser complex fills a building with a footprint equal to three football fields.

So it's too big, too expensive, and too inefficient for a commercial power plant, at least right now.

A manufacturing process to mass reduce the precise hydrogen targets would have to be developed.

And that sounds to me nowhere near okay, let's put it into the contest.

Grinders.

Remember, we have to decarbonize the planet by 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050.

China, if you're listening, 2060 is not good enough, and we can do it.

In fact, we have 80% of the technology available to 100% by 2030, I've read, if we wanted to.

Yeah, but we choose not to.

It's just things like heat pumps.

Like, there's going to be a waiting list for my heat pump.

We need to just crank up production of the existing technologies, win solar batteries and heat pumps.

We just got to make enough of them and that's all we need.

Yeah.

My son doesn't think that the world is coming together and will reach those targets.

I hope they do.

I think they'll miss them.

But at the same time, I think people underestimate the economics of clean energy from 2030 to 2050.

Like, it's going to just erase at least as far as power generation goes.

This is from Power magazine.

They're on top of this, too.

Tony Ralstone, a nuclear engineer at Cambridge University in the UK, told National Public Radio in the United States that unless more significant progress is made, fusion would be unlikely to have a major role in power generation for another 40 to 50 years.

Yeah, that's too late.

It's too late.

It's too late for me, too.

My kids might see it when they're my age or older.

My grandkids might live in a world where a solar farm erected today would come down and be decommissioned in 30 years.

And even then, it doesn't sound like it's going to be there.

Okay, it could be, but it doesn't sound like it would be.

Well, this is something we've talked about before, too, but there's so many super complicated energy systems that exist today, including things like nuclear.

Like making a nuclear plant is just insanely complicated.

Building an offshore floating oil platform to drill for oil, it's insanely complicated.

And if solar, wind and batteries existed 50 years ago, we wouldn't have done any of these things.

They're just too complicated and expensive when these cheaper alternatives exist.

And that's kind of the problem is that solar and wind and batteries and geothermal and other things that exist and are getting cheaper make it less profitable for investment into stuff like this.

Because there is going to be huge upfront costs to get the development there.

And then you're going to have to really back the technology in order to get the prices down.

So David Keith, climate expert, says fusion maybe but beware of the hype.

I don't know the details, he says, but for what it's worth, my my first professional job was in Canada's National lab, working big lasers for fusion.

And I have been interested since.

Getting more energy out than went in.

Into the laser is cool technical benchmark, but it has almost nothing to do with the practical requirements to make commercial power.

That's what people don't realize.

And you hear this silver bullet thing, I'm going to finish what he had to say, but they're just not looking at the whole picture, and maybe they're not hearing that one sentence.

That caveat at the end of the interview, which is really important.

Suppose one had a free supply of fusion reactions in Pellets.

You could make competitive electricity? He asks.

Hard.

Getting cheap energy from neutrons is really hard.

Even those neutrons, if they're free, it's really hard.

And worse when it needs a high vacuum.

So there's lots of just technical details that are hurdles, really.

Yeah.

Well, these YouTubers that made a fusion reactor in their garage yeah, like a vacuum is one of the big things for it.

You got to suck all the air out and they blew a breaker on their wall and then they lost all the air, and then they had to suck all the air out again.

It's still kind of cool that they made it and they sort of made it with these off the shelf parts.

You know, it's a lot of fun.

But yeah, it's just insanely complicated.

It's it's it is a genuine breakthrough.

Like, they got more energy out and people have been trying to do this for literally 50 years or more.

So it's a huge breakthrough, but nowhere in your practice.

But it's a slow churn towards commercialization, which is what we think of.

Right.

Another challenge is that it is as hot as the sun.

So that stuff breaks down when you have something that has to contain something that hot and a vacuum in particular.

So there's serious challenges here that I'm confident they'll work out.

And I think that next century there will be no wind turbines or maybe even solar panels that will just have fusion at the end of this century, sometime maybe 60 years from now, when it's cheap and cheap enough to spread 70 years.

I don't know.

I think it is the future.

It's just going to take a long sounds like it's going to take a long road to get there.

So Bloomberg says this.

It's still a long way from the breakthrough in California to building a fusion based power plant.

Well, this experiment generated excess energy on a small scale.

The industry needs to develop systems that can produce much more excess energy on a much larger scale.

This is 1.5 brian.

I heard ten X as kind of where they need to be, and that energy gain shows that the concept will work, but the systems are still.

Complicated and expensive.

The New York Times says this this is just taught off the press.

This is after the announcement, which happened a little while ago on Tuesday morning.

It says it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread practical scale, if ever.

Probably decades, said Kimberly S.

Boodle, the director of the Lawrence Livermore facility where this announcement took place.

The director herself is saying probably decades.

So I'm not being a poopoo here.

I'm not being a nuclear naysayer.

This is from the horse's mouth, literally.

Now, other people in the industry will say, well, we've moved along fast and it's going to be better than that, but it's certainly going to be decades.

We might have something functioning next decade in some level, but it's not going to be commercially functioning that you can replicate and spread.

Okay, this is what she said at the good news conference.

Not six decades, I don't think, which is what most people used to say, I think not even five decades, which is what we used to say most often.

So that sounds like 40 years.

I think it's moving into the foreground, probably with concerted effort and investment.

A few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.

Yet this is not around the corner.

I'm sorry.

I mean, I wish it was, but it's not.

Most climate scientists and policymakers say that to achieve that goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, or even the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050, the world must reach net zero emissions by then.

And this, Brian, under any circumstance, doesn't seem like it's going to be any significant part of that.

Even under the most ambitious optimistic scenario, we still have to rely on what we have.

And what we have will become at least half as expensive in the next decade.

So, Katherine Hale, this is the Canadian climate scientist.

I'll just add this on here, she said on Twitter.

Yes, it's a huge technological advance, and yes, it will help us long term, but no, it won't get us out of the climate crisis we're in today.

The biggest invention we need right now, political and corporate.

Will we need Canada to stop those fossil fuel subsidies not just abroad, but here at home as well.

All right, I think this next story is the perfect one to go into because it's the exact opposite of what we're just talking about, the exact opposite of the incredibly complex world of fusion reactors.

So this is a story from clean technica wind power to cut cargo ship emissions by 20%.

So basically, what they're talking about doing, cargo ships take an enormous amount of fuel to ship stuff around the world.

They're going to put wind sails on them.

And you ever see, like, kiteboarding, is that what that's called? Or parasailing, where you can get on skis in the water, and you got a big sail in front of you to pull you along from your cottage.

There are some parasailers at our cottage.

It's a crazy sport, and I wish I could do it, but until it's passed me by anyway, they're going to do this on cargo ships.

So this is the sea wing sale from a French company called Air Seat.

Wait a minute.

It's going to be like a parachute? It's like a parachute.

Like, it's not like a sailing ship where you're putting up a sale, because I've seen pictures of hard sails put on ships, both new ships and retrofitting ships, and there's different rotating yeah, there's different rotating turbines that they've figured out for ships that kind of sit that look like a chimney.

Oh, I'm looking at a picture right now.

But yeah, it's like a parachute.

And now I assume the caveat is you've got to have the wind at your back for this to work.

What happens? The kite goes down? It looks like the ship is flying a giant kite.

Yeah, the ship is flying a giant kite, but I imagine there's prevailing westerly winds out on the ocean.

So if you're sailing west, just throw up your sail.

Maybe they can't use it on the way back.

Yes, this has been tested.

It should cut emissions by 20%.

Like, this is a thing, you know, wind power works.

I'm kind of speechless.

Like, this seems really cookie, to be honest with you.

When you go and fly a kite, the kite twirls around, it goes down into the ground, and you have to send your kid to go throw it up in the air again.

And then you know how that works? Well, you couldn't do that with this.

It'd be go hit the water, and then you'd be like, oh, well, I guess we're done.

I'm sure there's ways to people figure this out for parasailing, for kite surfing.

Why can't they figure it out for ships? Well, you got a dude who's very skilled pulling that parasail at the right time to get it lifted up again, and you become very adept at that.

But unless there's an automated AI system or something doing it, I don't know.

But I mean, this is not the ocean.

The ocean is a steady you're not looking at gusts on the ocean.

I'm not an atmospheric expert for oceans, but I assume that it's less gusty, that it's just a blow.

It flows regularly.

Yeah, and they're not talking about powering the whole ship this way.

It's a 20% reduction in emissions.

This should help.

So that's 20% reduction in the price that it takes to fuel those goods across the ocean, too.

Yeah, fuel is super expensive, and you would save 20% of your costs.

Yeah.

Well, that's interesting.

And maybe it would work with onboard sales as well.

The ones that I was talking about.

Brian, I wanted to talk to you about the sultan Sea.

This is a place that I passed by in my big California trip a number of years ago.

We went down to Calexico, which is right on the US.

Border.

There's a little town on the American side called Calexico.

On the other side looks very different.

It's called Mexicali, and it's kind of a cute thing.

And of course, there's lots of drugs going on there, according to the shows I've watched on TV.

Anyway, 40 miles north of the border, there's the Salt and Sea, which is this dead, salty lake bed.

Okay? It's always been that way.

And I guess in 1905, there was this overflowing of the Colorado River that overflowed some canals and filled it up partial way, I guess.

It's it used to be much bigger, years and years, well, decades even, perhaps centuries ago, I don't know.

But it filled up a little bit back then.

And then it became like this popular resort in the 50s for like, Frank Sinatra and celebrities would all just go over there from La.

And live in the saltwater.

And there's all these remnants of this 1950s vacationy place left to look at when you go.

It's a ghost town now, but there's lots of geothermal in the area.

Okay? And what I didn't know, what I just learned today, is that it's got a lot of bad dust.

So because it's geothermal, because the crust is between two tectonic plates, it's thin there.

And so the water just sort of gurgles up the brine from the ground water, and it gurgles up because it's heated, and then it brings with it minerals, including lithium.

And then the water dries and it just leaves the lithium behind.

So this could be the cleanest, greenest lithium on the planet, they claim.

And not only that, there's a lot of it.

There could be enough to power the entire United States'lithium needs and then some.

Yeah, of course, lithium being one of the key components in lithium ion batteries, which are kind of running the world right now.

So, yeah, there's lots of dust, including arsenic dust, which is kicking up, so people trying not to even live there anymore.

But there was this huge artist community.

I mean, you're getting close to Coachella and places like that down there.

Eleven geothermal plants producing 400 MW, which powers 350,000 homes worth just from geothermal.

So there's actually a lot of geothermal plants there, probably the most in North America, I'd guess.

The Earth's crust, like I said, is thin, so all this stuff gergles up.

Now, usually at a geothermal plant, they would put the brine back into the ground.

The water would come up, this hot brine, they take the energy out of it and transfer it to water to produce steam and then put it back in the ground.

But what they're saying is it could be a cheap way, since they're bringing it up already, to just turn that into a lithium extraction.

Right there at the geothermal plants or all of the eleven geothermal plants.

Lithium mining is usually water intensive and leaves behind contaminants.

And this bypasses those things.

And there's a cool 15 minutes video that CNBC did.

I put a link in your show notes for you to have a look at that.

Just wanted to pass that along.

And just some quick bad news.

The bad news story of the week, the Keystone Pipeline.

So this is one of the major oil pipelines that runs between Canada and the US.

Massive leak in Kansas.

So this is a company, TC Energy.

Big controversy in Canada lately about expanding the Keystone Pipeline with kind of mixed results.

But I think it's just important to remember that pipelines, it's probably a safer way to transport than by rail.

There was a derailment near US not long ago with some oil on board that massive fire.

But 26,000 barrels of oil since 2010 coming out of that pipeline.

We'll be better off once we can stop doing that.

Why a world without pipeline leaks or oil spills? Wouldn't that be something? All right.

A nuclear study as a solution to global warming.

This is something I want to talk about because it's from Stanford.

They did a study and basically they said that in evaluating the solutions to global warming and air pollution and energy security, two important questions arise.

And they are should new nuclear plants be built to help solve these problems? A lot of people say yes without thinking about it.

I say, should existing aged nuclear plants be kept open as long as possible to help solve these problems? To answer these questions, the main risks associated with nuclear power are examined.

And the risks associated with nuclear power can be broken down into two categories.

One risk risks affecting its ability to reduce global warming and air pollution.

Two risks affecting its ability to provide energy and environmental security aside from climate and air pollution.

So the risks in the former category include delays between planning and operation, emissions contributing to global warming and outdoor air pollution, and costs as we talk about a lot.

Risks in the latter category include weapons proliferation risks, reactor meltdown risk, radioactive waste risk, and mining, cancer and land despoilment risks.

So new nuclear power plants cost 2.3 to 7.4 times those of onshore wind or utility PV per kilowatt hour, and they take five to seven years longer between planning and operation, five to 17 years longer, and produce nine to 37 times the emissions per kilowatt as wind.

Something you don't hear about.

The emissions that nuclear actually produces is not zero, and it's actually nine to 37 times the emissions of its energy output compared to wind.

So, as such, a fixed amount of money spent on a new nuclear plant means much less power generation.

A much longer wait for power at a much greater emission rate than the same money spent on WWS technology, wind, water and solar.

There is no such thing as a zero or close to zero emission nuclear power plant, says the study.

Even existing plants emit due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the plant.

And however, though all power plants emit 4.4 grams per CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour from the water vapor and heat they release.

So water vapor is bad.

This is a question I have about the fusion plants, rather, is that are they emitting any water vapor? I haven't heard on that, and I will get back to you as soon as I hear something.

Or if you know something, always email us at the Clean Energy Show.

Clean Energy [email protected] this contrasts with solar panels and wind turbines, which reduce heat or water vapor fluxes to the air.

On top of that, because of all nuclear reactors, they take ten to 19 years or more.

Between planning and operation, there's two to five years for utility, solar or wind and nuclear causes a lot of emissions for 100 years.

Overall, emissions from the new nuclear 78 to 178 grams/CO2 per kilowatt hour, not close to zero at all.

So China's investment in nuclear plants take so long between planning and operation instead of wind and solar resulted, you know, because it chose nuclear instead of wind and solar because it took so long.

China's CO2 emissions were increased 1.3% from 2016 to 2017 in one year, rather than they should have declined by 3% if they went the way that we suggest here on the show.

Brian? Yeah.

Solar, wind and battery.

The resulting difference in air pollution emissions may have caused 82,000 additional air pollution deaths in China.

This is nothing.

This needs at literally between 2016 alone with additional deaths in years prior.

And since some feedback here that came in just as we were wrapping up last week's show, this is from well, let's listen.

Aloha, James and Brian.

My name is Ryan Nielsen.

I live in a little town called Gaylax, Virginia.

G-A-L ax like galaxy without the Y.

I originally grew up in Hawaii, hence the Aloha Go, Hawaii, for their clean energy.

I've heard lots of things about it on your show the last few months.

I've been listening for about six months now and never miss a week.

We started listening after we got our first electric vehicle, an ionic five, and have taken an increased interest in the environment and helping to save our planet.

We just found out yesterday about a solar farm.

It's going to be a 20 megawatt solar farm that's in the plans for our community just a few miles from our home.

And they're having a public commentary period for the next few weeks.

I will be going to a public meeting for it at our local library tomorrow, and I wanted to get your guys thoughts on the pros of solar farms in the community to counter all the negative as there are lots of outlandish and ridiculous claims that are out there and already being put out there.

So hope to hear from you guys and wanting to leave one of these messages for a while.

Mahalo for all that you do.

Well, thank you so much.

We love SpeakPipe Voicemails because we get to hear our listeners.

They're not just an intangible thing that we have to kind of imagine and people can listen to somebody else for a change.

It's like having a third host of the show, or a guest perhaps.

Congratulations on the Anna five.

That's great news.

Hoping you are enjoying it.

If you have any issues with it or any questions or concerns, let us know.

I know more about gaylax Virginia than I should, Brian, because I've been trying to find out, trying to find the solar farm proposal, and I can't find it.

There's lots of other ones, but I couldn't find it.

I went to the Galeax Library and I couldn't find it there.

Yeah, so I can't find anything about it.

So I don't know what the exact location is.

My only guess that a solar farm could be trouble is if it visually disturbs nature when they put it on a hillside or a high elevation.

That's the only thing that I can think of.

And I have seen something like that.

And I would say, well, why don't you put that in a valley? Or why don't you put it on a flat piece of land where you can't really see it? People probably don't even notice a solar or farms on flat land if you're driving down the highway.

If you're not looking for it, there's no negatives, Brian.

There's no negatives.

No.

And wind, it's kind of the same thing.

Like, there can be an issue with migratory birds and killing birds, but I think usually the people who are against wind turbines don't genuinely care about birds.

There's always small issues.

My brother was just telling me recently, he lives in rural Ontario, and this sort of came up at a local planning meeting for the small town that he was in.

And they weren't planning to do any clean energy, but it was just sort of on the agenda and they wanted to kind of get everybody's opinion, like the city councilors and everybody was against it.

He said, wow.

Yeah.

I don't think it would have been a year or two ago.

I think the rhetoric on Facebook, which is a lot of small town people, are even more connected to Facebook than anyone else because they need to be connected.

And there's not a Starbucks to go to, necessarily.

I do find that here where we live in a fairly rural area, and there's a lot of people on Facebook and they are in their bubbles and they are getting ridiculous information.

Now, I don't know what to tell you about people who believe in ridiculous information.

There's no magic bullet.

I mean, you can try and sit down with them and reason with them, and sometimes that works, but I wouldn't do that myself.

I'd like, screw that.

If you want to be dumb, be dumb.

If you want to have crazy ideas, fine, have crazy ideas.

It'll be built somewhere else.

It'll be built in another jurisdiction.

Well, I guess that's the one sort of saving grace of all this, because yes, absolutely.

There are going to be city councils everywhere voting this kind of stuff down, but it's a tide that can't be stopped.

Clean energy is better and cheaper.

It will eventually take over everywhere.

It's just unfortunate.

But I would encourage people to go to their city council meetings or whatever and speak on this topic, because sometimes if you don't, then nobody does.

Yeah, I just don't like getting into arguments with people who are cuckoo because you can't reason with somebody who thinks the Earth is flat.

And I don't like going to meetings.

Meetings.

I'm not a big fan of meetings, so I decided to start a podcast instead.

This is our way to contribute.

Yeah.

So 20 is twice the size of the solar farm that I looked at nearby, and they're building around here right now.

They are building bigger ones down the road.

But, you know, Virginia is actually a pretty good place for solar.

They have a lot of projects on the Go rooftop.

Solar is possible there.

The utility there has school bus rebates, which I happen to see just before I got his message, that they have they're buying a bunch of electric school buses, and they quite like them.

They are more expensive right now, but immediately the drivers are really praising them and liking them a lot.

We love to hear from you.

Contact us by email at clean [email protected].

We're on TikTok.

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Go there, find us.

If you'd like to look at us and leave us a voicemail like this one, which was fantastic, and we can't thank you enough.

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But if you don't want to do that, send us an email.

We'll hear from you one way or another.

And that means it's time for the lightning Round, a fast paced look at the weak in clean energy and climate news.

Brian, if our show wasn't long enough as it is, it's long, and I apologize.

I apologize, I apologize, I apologize.

We are a long one this week.

Some people, they can't get enough.

Other people say, Come on, my commute is over.

You should be done by now.

A new clean energy poll from Abacus Research suggests 64% of Canadians realize that clean energy is cheap, affordable energy, which is pretty good, I think.

Speaking of naysayers, there's a lot in Canada.

That is the positive.

It's cheap, it's clean.

You want to win over people in a small town.

Cheap.

You save money cheap.

Everybody likes money.

Everybody likes saving money.

Maybe people don't realize that.

They probably read on Facebook that it's more expensive.

We heard somebody say last week for the oil industry propaganda, that wind turbines have never worked anywhere in the world.

They've been in operation for decades.

OK.

So it's another one.

There's two talking points for you.

Clean, cheap.

In our current climate, energy security is a big, big thing.

If you can control your own energy supply and get it from the sun, you don't have to deal with foreign dictators.

Toyota again in the news, they are telling their suppliers that hold on, we're coming up with a new three year EV plan, especially with what they deliver to Europe.

So it sounds like we're going to hear in the new year.

Toyota coming around on the EVs.

We'll see.

Oh, it's time for a CES Fast Fact clean Energy show.

Fast Fact from Eco watch.

In Europe, 40% to 60% of fish caught are discarded because they do not meet supermarket quality standards.

Nearly 50% is discarded in the United States.

So that is all.

Food waste is a big thing, Ryan.

Can't they turn it into pet food or something? Discarded.

Discarded.

I'd look into that further, further information you email us.

US gas prices peaked in June at $5 a gallon.

That's dollar 31 a liter, which is not where we peaked here.

We picked over $2, didn't we? Yeah, for sure.

I say to that.

In a study of 2055 German adults, a study found that a strong correlation between harboring conspiracy mentality and being unlikely to vote for wind turbines near your community.

Again, this gets back to our feedback from Virginia.

The correlation held regardless of if the referendum on the building of turbines was proposed by the supporters of the wind farm or its proponents.

So in another study of a similar amount of German adults, a conspiracy mentality was found far and away the biggest predictor of voting against the wind farm, much more so than age, gender, education level, sad or being politically right wing.

So if you believe in conspiracies, regardless of your political affiliation, regardless of your education and it's always sad to see educated people believe conspiracies.

But it happens.

I've seen it.

Yeah.

So Germany ranks third in the world for installed wind power capacity in 2020.

Almost a quarter of the country's energy came from wind and the government has pledged to double that by 2030, designated 2% of Germany's landmass to become wind farms.

So that's our time for this week, Brian, and it is more than time.

So thanks for listening to everyone.

We always appreciate it.

Tell your friends.

Spread the word.

Write it on bathroom walls, in public washrooms.

We don't care.

No, we like to hear from you.

As always.

Clean energy [email protected].

Check us out.

On social media, where our handle is at Clean Energy Pod.

By the way, if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week.

And there is a donate button in your show notes if you care to buy us a cup of coffee.

We'll see you next week.

Probably one day late next this week, but we'll see you then.

I can't wait to do it again, Brian.

See you next week.