People when nuclear plants store their waste in indestructible cases deep underground in seismically stable region: 😡🤬
People when coal plants store their waste in the air they breathe 😊🤩
@Firem1nded Says:
Coming back to this and see that the cost of offsetting global warming is cheaper than running OpenAI for a month is insane.
@dwinter44cdca1 Says:
an idea:
sulfuric acid stratospheric missiles
@DizzyD88 Says:
I watch this video every couple of months and it always disturbs me. More videos like this please, TF.
@markTheWoodlands Says:
Love your channel. Agree with the strategy you mentioned. People are insanely opposed to even testing the use of spraying fine grained salt into the air to seed clouds over the ocean. One error: At 21:32 the audio narrations refers to 50 billion tons of co2 vs 50 million tons of so2. However the text shows 50 million tons of CO2 instead of SO2.
@tiavor Says:
14:00 the energy price for consumers is heavily subsidized in France, it's one of the most expensive to produce in Europe. but still preferable to the alternative.
@THNKKY Says:
What if we cut down trees, baked em with a nuclear powered plant (to cook off the water and hydrogen) then put it into the coal mines?
@sascharoni Says:
Really funny people thought planting trees would do anything. There are 3 trillion trees on earth thats about 10x more trees on earth than stars in the milky way galaxy.
@andromeda8368 Says:
hi thunderf00t and community, im somewhat skeptical about this solution or 'patch', as slight changes in pH could affect the biodiversity drastically, no? I'm no climate scientist but i do know that many of our biospheres have been fine tuned to the climate and chemical composition of the ground, water and air, as well as other things. doing aerosol injections would likely have unforeseen consequences. I recommend transitioning to renewable energy/ nuclear. then plant a bunch of trees to capture CO2 then launch them into space. (jk, LOL, but everything else was a serious inquiry)
@logicallibertarian7656 Says:
Look up Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller.
@logicallibertarian7656 Says:
Wow, let me guess, you never took epistemology, because your assumptions of certainty on AGW measurements are abysmal. You are right on nuclear by the way.
@Jagetful Says:
This video is completely wrong and stupid.
The CO2 emission grew under all that period.
It's not detectable.
What actually masked the warming was aerosols.
It has nothing to do with nuclear power because as I already said CO2 increased over the same time.
Also only 4% o the energy comes from nuclear. 10x more nuclear power plants won't happen.
Stop making this a thing.
@chrishamilton53 Says:
Oh ... there's also a problem with sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere (and sulfates indirectly products via carbonate or metallic oxide particulate reactions with SO2), and that's ozone depletion.
So sulfates in the stratosphere are highly problematic in as far as ozone depletion is concerned ... the use of alumina or carbonates (or other oxides) might be a better solution.
That or getting sulfates into the mesosphere ... but they'd eventually drift into the stratosphere and deplete ozone, too.
Highly reflective, long-lived polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons might be of interest, too, particularly as some of those double as UV blockers. (stuff in the anthracene and heavier range would be interesting)
ALSO, for any potential plan utilizing commercial airliners (or specialized aircraft still operating in the stratosphere), you have a massive issue that various aerosols (and almost any particular matter) contributes heavily to contrails, which themselves (as artificial clouds) significantly increase the greenhouse effect. In this case, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and soot particulates act as nucleation sites to induce cloud formation.
There's currently an effort to transition to fuels that reduce or eliminate particulate formation in aircraft exhaust, namely in reducing the aromatic content, particularly naphthalene content of jet fuel (aviation kerosene). SAF type fuel (or other synthetic, highly pure paraffinic fuels or potentially, oxygenate based jet fuels: namely esters, ethers, and potentially fatty alcohols) can all achieve this, but current regulations still require some aromatic content to keep old, swollen seals from shrinking and leaking. (brand new seals could potentially be 100% compatible with a purely paraffinic fuel like SAF ... or reneable diesel, or fischer-tropsch diesel)
Though I understand that FAME (biodiesel) tends to cause swelling similar to aromatics in ground based diesel vehicles and high fraction or 100% biodiesel can dissolve some older seal materials ... so replacing the aromatic fraction with a small portion of FAME or similar ester based fuel component might solve this issue, too. (so refined paraffin oil + a small fraction of fatty-acid-methyl-esters might do it)
Ketones similarly cause swelling, so higher molecular weight ketones (like hexanone, perhaps) with lower volatility and flammability risks might also be potential additives to ensure a minimum required swelling of rubber seals.
@chrishamilton53 Says:
Also ... fossil fuels aren't technically safer than nuclear. From the statistics I've seen, even with the stupidest and worst nuclear disasters included (and cases of incompetent or negligent nuclear waste handling), the net health impact, injury, and death toll related to fossil fuel extraction and energy production vastly outweighs that of all of nuclear power generation's history if you compare energy produced to death/harm/illness (and ecological disasters) caused.
Albeit most of that is related to oil and coal, while natural gas (at least conventional natural gas) fares a good deal better ... though unconventional natural gas produced via fracking could easily outweigh that in the long run. (that is unless the risk can be minimized by better geo-engineering of that in the future)
And if you only look at the competent, sensibly managed nuclear power infrastructure built up in an orderly fashion with mature technology (namely France's) then the difference is far, far more stark in terms of safety, including reprocessing and storage of spent fuel and waste.
But the point is, even with all the worst case disasters and teething troubles in the early nuclear era, it's STILL much safer than fossil fuels, even if climate change is completely ignored as an issue. Nuclear power is just that much safer, even if we manage it as sporadically incompetently as the Americans and Soviets did at times in the 20th century.
@chrishamilton53 Says:
I forgot, there's also been studies showing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen can be used directly as feedstocks for biosynthesis, too. Various strains of clostridium bacteria, and I beliece e.coli and possibly butyric acid bacteria can be directly fed by syngas OR a combination of CO2 and hydrogen (without need for the shift reaction to CO).
So you have biosynthesis opporunities as alternative to fischer tropsch synthesis as well that tend to require less exotic infrastructure (no high temperature, high pressure vessels) and simply an external supply of hydrogen to combine with waste CO2 from other biosynthesis/fermentation processes (or from direct gassification of biomass).
Large scale hydrogen pipeline from alternative energy sources (namely nuclear, and solar where it's cheap) could facilitate this greatly, but even with the existing infrastructure, natural gas pipelines could be used to generate the necessary hydrogen balance along with additional CO or CO2 via either a water gas shift reaction or reduction of the waste CO2 stream. (or both at once in a steam + CO2 + methane reactor)
I believe the water gas shift reaction is exothermic, but CO2 to CO is endothermic, so an optimized ratio could be maintained with minimal waste heat, that is unless you have a significant use for the waste heat (distillation of the crude biochemical output, power generation from a steam turbine or lower boiling point closed loop type working fluid and/or sterling engine).
There's also the route of converting methane to hydrogen and solid carbon for sequestration purposes, but I think that would be going a bit far for a potential project that's already going to need substantial subsidies to be viable.
Oh, and note: even for alcohol fuels and mixed hydrocarbon-oxygenate fuels with optimized combustion qualities for SI piston engines, if you have high enough efficiency and yields, you can even use 100% fossil fuel feedstock to produce the fuel and get a net carbon footprint reduction compared to using conventional refinery processes (including losses from upgrading to reformate, alkylate, etc via catalytic cracking and other processes). Since the break thermal efficiency is subtantially improved, you could potentially be competitive with existing corn based ethanol production ... especially in regions far away from the production centers and especially if you have existing oil refining infrastructure and could be adapted to methanol/ethanol/propanol/butanol/pentanol production. (including use of residual oil and flare gas, etc)
You've got multiple routes to petro-alcohols (and ethers), too, with hydration of alkenes (produced catalytically or via simple thermal cracking) with modern solid-state acid catalyzed hydration of ethene to ethanol, propene to isopropyl alcohol, and 1-butene and 2-butene to sec-butanol. (isobutene produces t-butanol, which is also useful though has high freezing point issues when pure)
Granted, production of butenes for fuel alcohol competes with production of polyethylene and polypropylene plastics. Propene hydration also results in a roughly 2:1 mixture of diisopropyl ether and isopropyl alcohol and while the former can be recycled to further hydration, it can also be used directly as a fuel component where higher volatility is needed (though the risk of peroxides forming in long-term storage increases, but certain alcohol blends reduce this as do tiny amounts of antioxidant additives). Di-t-butyl ether would also be a useful component and of higher heating value (though, again, this doesn't result in a proportionally higher energy yield in an engine, necessarily, but its properties might be better to further displace the hydrocarbon component of fuel blends and have a similar synergistic effect when blended with lighter alcohols as does gasoline)
I'd argue California should've invested long ago in alternate sources of reformulated gasoline additives (and a wider cut standard than E10 or the old MTBE-15) with various sources of organic raw materials from biomass waste (crop residues and possibly some wildlands/forestry waste might have been viable ... municipal solid waste is more difficult, though paper and plastic fractions of recycling streams would be viable, particularly given the large fractions not actually efficient to recycle) along with petroleum residuals and byproducts that otherwise have low value.
We also shouldn't have stopped our methanol fuel program in the early 90s, but instead expanded into a broader range of alternative fuel blends aimed at both flex fuel vehicles (in the M75 or E85 range) and more intermediate blends with a potential broader cocktail of other components.
The engine and fuel system (and even moisture sensitivity and phase separation) issues could have all been fairly easily engineered around and modulated for seasonal fuel blends, and even meeting CARB emissions standards shouldn't have been a big problem with the technology already developed in the late mid 80s. Meeting VOC and vapor pressure emissions requirements would be more problematic (something that screwed over some 15% methanol+butanol blends in the 80s that got EPA waiver approval only to be revoked due to high vapor pressure ... methanol and ethanol are both treated as restricted VOCs in CA now too, and are difficult or impossible to purchase for use as solvents or camping fuels: denatured alcohol is pretty much gone ... acetone is exempted due to its inability to easily form smog; you can buy ethanol pump fuel and methanol fuel additives, and you can buy rubbing alcohol, but not hardware store solvent alcohol).
That said, intermediate alcohol blends largely address the vapor pressure issue as well, as the peak vapor pressure is hit at roughly 5~8 %, then plateaus for a while before decreasing at an increasingly steep slope. Too low a VP will have cold starting issues (though less a problem in CA usually) so something approximating that of the normal gasoline range would be preferential. Miscibility/solubility also drops at low temperatures, especially for the lower molecular weight alcohols (methanol is the worst) so that is a concern for using methanol to boost vapor pressure in winter (butane is already used for this, diisopropyl ether could be easily used for such, too). Though heavier molecular weight alcohols act as cosolvents for the lighter alcohols, and a tiered blend of methanol, ethanol, propanol(s), and butanol(s), and possibly ethers and pentanols could have made a very nice, flexible fuel blending feedstock.
Built-in tolerance for some percentage of water dissolved (not suspended) into the fuel would also be useful, or even a prescribed fraction of water content allowed in fuels, especially in summer blends where solubility is higher. (hydrous azeotropic ethanol could be used for blending in this case, significantly reducing energy costs required for anhydrous ethanol: vs methanol which doesn't form an azeotrope with water and higher alcohols which have azeotropes that are easier to break)
I mean, we still COULD do this, but it would've been far more useful as a transitional measure back in the 80s and 90s. That and pushing more for nuclear power and industrial solar (thermal solar in less ecologically sensitive portions of the desert or where thermal solar arrays happen to minimally disrupt the local ecosystem would've been viable long before modern photovoltaics were available) could've all been done decades ago. Even with CA's earthquake issues, and flood (or dam failure) prone central valley water infrastructure, there's still a good range of regions that would be safe enough for relatively foolproof, highly standardized nuclear power stations. (and if you used a closed-loop coolant and turbine working fluid system it could be located far away from water sources out in the desert ... high emperature molten salt reactors would've been good to invest development into)
Granted, CA also has a history of some quite questionable and incompetent management of experimental nuclear facilities ... like the open pit burning of contaiminated sodium coolant after the fast-breeder reactor program concluded in southern california. (the Sodium Reactor Experiment) Granted, there's plenty of OTHER industrial pollution incidents in CA's history, including notable superfund action taken in the semiconductor industry back when we had more domestic manufacturing.
While I'm personally mixed on centralized government projects vs private sector economy (I tend to favor a regulated, competition-optimized sort of meritocratic capitalism), tightly regulated, highly standardized, centralized government controlled nuclear industry is something that I'd tend to generally suggest over any sort of decentralized or private sector stuff. Preferably at the national level (like France), but for a state as large and wealthy as CA, you basically already have a government infrastructure similar to many European countries. (we also even saw some progress with the old generation of anti-nuclear environmentalist politicians, notably Jerry Brown who changed his mind and supported nuclear in the 2010s as a useful and necessary move towards future energy production ... not that we ended up realizing any sort of developments based on that, but the sentiment is at least noteworthy: I've personally been following Michael Shellenberger much more closely as he ekes his way into politics)
@chrishamilton53 Says:
Yeah ... all the chemtrail and cloud seeding conspiracy theory stuff seems to get fed like wildfire by any remotely publicized test of atmospheric aerosol tests ... let alone more conventional cloud seeding aerosols. (the latter might be an important component for climate engineering to combat severe chronic droughts)
Also ... couldn't you use controlled nuclear detonations to eject stuff into the upper atmosphere? Like high yield, minimal fallout civil engineering style fusion explosions in desert regions with sufficiently high quantities of necessary raw materials. (I wonder if gypsum and aluminum rich regions might be useful, since you'd get both calcium oxide and sulfur dioxide as high temperature decomposition products of gypsum, and the calcium oxide should absorb CO2 to form calcium carbonate in the atmosphere ... unless it just ends up re-reacting with the sulfur dioxide to form calcium sulfite)
Silica alone seems to have some potential, so various aluminum-silicate minerals could be targeted, or just silica sand. Diamond-doped silica is also mentioned, and a nuclear blast might be potent enough to generate some diamond from carbon-doped silica sand.
Also, couldn't you use large seafloor explosions to cause massive upwelling of calcium and magnesium (and other) carbonate silt from the seabed, which would absorb surplus CO2 dissolved at the surface to form bicarbonate? (you'd also be addressing the ocean acidification issue)
The geological and ecological impact would obviously need to be considered, but it's a possibility ... and I'd think specialized "clean" nuclear detonations could again have some potential there.
I do realize even the cleanest attempted civil nuclear explosives ended up producing enough fallout to be unappealing and not generally safe or practical to employ for geo-engineering of human habitable (or farmable, fishable, etc) regions, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about explosions used to eject material into the upper atmosphere and at worst still end up with diffuse global fallout far, far less than during the era of nuclear weapons tests.
Contamination in seawater might be more problematic, but I'm not really sure how that would work out with a deep sea detonation with almost entirely fusion based explosion.
On that note, I wonder if the atmosphric nuclear tests contributed at all to the global cooling in that same period.
@chrishamilton53 Says:
Younger generations of environmentalists and science nerds ... and average individuals seem to be vastly more pro-nuclear than previous generations (including those still lingering on the forefront of the US's Green Party).
And while I don't see Germany changing their extremely irrational view of nuclear power (or their quite poor by European standards, carbon footprint per capita ... bad enough that California actually manages to beat them), I'm still a bit more hopeful for much of the rest of the western world, including the US.
Plus, France could afford to decomission many of its load-leveling power stations, operate the rest at capacity, and use molten salt thermal storage or hydrogen storage (along with combined cycle turbine power stations) to handle all the load leveling instead.
They could also invest in newer generations of power stations ... but short of proper investment in refinining thorium-uranium cycle fast-breeder reactors, there's only so much gain you'd get over their 1970s technology (with the persisting advantage of high levels of parallelism and standardization of design).
Though I suppose they could target a more conventional fission reactor with high temperature molten salt heat exchange (like some experimental potassium chloride reactors, or the same salt blend used in large thermal solar storage systems, like Spain uses), then you can do all the load-leveling within the primary power plants.
France also had a large enough nuclear weapons program that they probably have a surplus of weapons grade material that could be decomissioned and diluted into reactor grade stuff. The US definitely has massive potential for this, including use of plutonium in mixed oxide reactors. (of course, the higher radioactivity of plutonium makes it more of a pain to handle than enriched uranium, or even thorium bred U233, but we still have a whole lot of it, and once you start using it up in nuclear reactors, you contaminate it without enough other plutonium isotopes as to render it useless for nuclear weapons ... short of isotopic separation, it's not going to work)
Last I heard, the US's decomissioned plutonium stockpile was either being held in long-term storage or melted down as nuclear waste, sequestered in borosilicate glass packaged in drums to be deposited at the Yucca mountain repository. This seems like a horrible waste.
This status quo hasn't changed all that much since the early 2000s when I was in high school musing on these same issues. (and idealizing advanced molten salt cooled fast-breeder reactor designs ... though I was less sold on the advantages of the Thorium-Uranium cycle over the Uraium-Plutonium one back then)
@chrishamilton53 Says:
You could incentivize re-use of existing natural gas pipelines with either synthetic natural gas substitutes or hydrogen (with heavier retrofit to address hydrogen diffusion and embrittlement) to allow massive centralized thermal solar (or thermal-photovoltaic hybrid solar) and nuclear power stations built up in centralized locations ... or as a bigger compromise, as moderately centralized locations located near the existing hubs for fossil fuel distribution. (ie you can't use remote parts of the desert or great basin in the latter case, but you could use industrial gas production locations as prime real estate for nuclear powered hydrogen producer stations)
Existing combined cycle gas turbine power plants could be easily converted to run on hydrogen or any number of other gas (or vaporized liquid) fuels.
I could see electric vehicles largely replacing short-haul type of uses, but for long haul stuff, a plug-in-hybrid type arrangement with powerful combustion engine range extender would be more realistic. You just need optimized use of biomass derived fuels with high yields boosted by nuclear or solar energy used for synthesis. (or use of biosynthesis, but capture of waste CO2 for conversion to syngas using solar/nuclear generated hydrogen)
There's also alternatives to splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen beyond electrolysis (and cheap, plentiful heat and light sources are a major factor for some of these), but electrolysis is the simple, established, old tech solution.
It'll be interesting to see if diesel cycle or spark ignition (or possibly gas turbine) powerplants end up coming out on top as far as the combustion engine component of plugin hybrids. I think fuel choice will more likely determine the winner more than inherent engine efficiency ... though turbine engines can run on almost anything, they're also probably the least likely option to dominate. Compressed or liquid methane or LPG vs synthetic paraffin oil seem like the two most likely possibilities as far as trucking goes. (I'd say mixed alcohol fuels, but methane fuel and LPG fuels have already taken off in various market segments, especially methane for mass transportation and trucking ... and conversion to methane/LPG flex fuel would be very straightforward while alcohol fuels would be less so ... and synthetic paraffin oil would be for a compression ignition engine where methane and LPG would not)
@chrishamilton53 Says:
Processing forest waste into biochar and amending the local soil (or simply scattering it to allow for ad-hoc terra-preta to form) would at least be more useful than trying to use plant based biomass directly. Likewise charring permafrost before it has a chance to melt and decompose would be helpful.
Biochar conversion would be a good deal more useful than simple controlled burn methods for dealing with forest management, both positive for carbon emissions (and sequestration) and for actual soil quality.
This should include select felling of dead wood and at-risk dying wood (or simple overcrowding), plus harvesting of wild grasses prone to annual wildfire ignition (and more rapid decomposition than bulkier woody biomass).
If charcoal retorts were used to achieve this, you'd even have some value-added byproducts in the form of captured tars. (wood gas would likely be burned off as a means of fueling the retorts, though)
Given the portable nature and remote locations such mobile biochar factories would need to be, you probably couldn't tap into cheap, large scale alternative energy production to directly use that to char the material or to capture the wood gas and use it as synthetic feedstock.
The whole thing would need lots of subsidies, but perhaps not more so than already needed for proper forest and wildlands management (which are, admittedly, insufficient).
Also bear in mind that in significant regions of the US (including California), annual wildfires make up a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions, though still only a fraction of that used by power generation, commercial trucking, OR passenger vehicles. (and a much smaller fraction of all of those combined)
That said it would still be a good habit to get into both for long-term carbon sequestration and fire management. (we're getting hit twofold by violent weather patterns AND many decades of kicking the can down the road and ignoring investing in better forest and wildlands management ... same problem with the aging dams and levee systems in several states, including California)
You should be investing far more in infrastructure upgrades to cope with climate change ... this is something any reasonably wealthy country or state can and should do, even if they have virtually no real power to impact global CO2 emissions themselves. (though leveraging protectionism and tariffs based on environmental sustainability grounds and minimizing globalization in favor of localizing and decentralizing infrastructure as much as possible would also help, both for long-term independence and for actually having some impact on the global stage ... particularly putting pressure on China, the US, and India ... india has a lower direct CO2 footprint, but also has vastly worse pollution issues in other categories, and I'd argue international trade should qualify all types of environmental impact as well as fair trade based on human rights and working conditions ... and fair business practices)
Also, from a US-centric perspective ... while there's a lot of domestic economy generated greenhouse gas emissions, the amount we effectively import from China makes the situation so much worse, where a more protectionist mindset that resisted outsourcing (ideally on fair trade and environmental/health reasons ... but realistically, even for stupid types of protectionist reasons, as the net outcome can be similar regardless), we'd still be a lot better off than we are now, especially in terms of pollution and environmental impact beyond greenhouse gas emissions alone. (even in a fossil-fuel dominated industrial nation, one with modern, first world style pollution controls and ecological impact regulation is going to be vastly better than the likes of China, among others ... plus the inherently higher cost/price of first-world-only production would curtail disposable consumerism and put pressure on the longevity and re-use of materials ... reducing consumption and re-use of materials is far more important than recycling, after all)
@chrishamilton53 Says:
It's worth noting that theoretical energy content doesn't translate into real-world energy yield.
Brake thermal efficiency of straight hydrocarbon fuels is significantly poorer than a variety of optimized hydrocarbon-oxygenate blends (especially certain alcohols and ketones with very high flame speeds) and, to a lesser extent, straight oxygenate blends. (a blend of higher alcohols like butanol and pentanol, potentially along with aromatic ethers, esters, or alcohols, like Anisole, with ethanol and/or methanol can largely mimic the behavior of alkane+aromatic hydrocarbon blends with methanol and/or ethanol, possibly along with acetone or isopropyl alcohol as well)
n-butanol and isobutanol in particular (especially the latter) are appealing chemically, physically, and for the variety of existing and developing methods for biological and synthetic production.
Thermodynamics of internal combustion engines is far more complex than simple chemical energy content.
You can find various anecdotal examples as well as research papers dedicated to examining this behavior and this is aside from the increased compression ratios allowed for certain very high octane fuels (speaking of spark ignition engines), but what I'm talking about is the efficiency gained by burning different fuels in the same basic engine without resorting to increasing the compression ratio, changing any forced induction components, or resorting to lean burn conditions.
The most common consumer-end anecdotal testing is with ethanol-gasoline blends (as E85 is cheap and common enough in much of the US to experiment with), often employed with zero modifications to the fuel system, engine, or engine control computer and simply relying on the existing air/fuel ratio adjustments done by the computer to compensate. Some engine set-ups tolerate far more ethanol than others (various Japanese cars from the 2000s to 2010s often tolerate >50% and as high as 70% ethanol without any errors/warnings or problems, or difficulties passing emissions tests), but a much wider array of vehicles from the 1980s up to today tolerate blends in the 25 to 40% range with 30 to 35 more often being the limit before at least some problems occur, even if no error codes are reported. (some 1980s era cars with simple single-point fuel injection will suffer surging issues during start up before an equilibrium is reached, moreso if the engine is started while already hot)
From personal experience, vehicles featuring EGR systems are more tolerant and flexible than those without.
More importantly, you see real-world efficiency gains with often little to no loss in mpg, and thus a significant increase in energy economy. In quite a few cases, mpg actually increases at or near an optimal ethanol-gasoline fuel blend. Ie a vehicle that has a particular affinity towards say 35% ethanol blends could very well travel further on a given volume of fuel than 100% gasoline ... and moreso compared to common E10. Combustion efficiency often trends to a rough bell curve arrangement, so mpg will go down, then up, then down again as you increase the ethanol proportion. Note: E10 blends typically still have a similar or very slightly higher brake thermal efficiency than E0, and E85 or E100 has significantly better BTE than straight gasoline, but it's the ideal intermediate blends that manage to increase BTE sufficiently that, combined with the given energy density of said intermediate blend, the actual mpg results exceed those of E0, and in some cases, significantly exceed the BTE of >85% ethanol blends.
Again, I'm not talking about flex-fuel vehicles or modified vehicles, including tuning software to change the fuel/air ratio. (E30 and E85 tuning is popular for high performance tweaking, but is a separate topic from what I'm addressing)
There's some explanations for the phenomenon including higher laminar flame speeds and increased working mass (the latter overlapping with some of the benefits of water injection or water emulsion fuels), but it's less straightforward than that. I suspect formation of azeotropes (and thus ore complete vaporization of fuel before and part-way through combustion) also play a role, and this is significant for Ethanol specifically as it forms azeotropes with a large number of hydrocarbons (isomers of pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, along with benzene, and toluene to name a few; some also form ternary azeotropes that include water as well).
At some proportion, the reduced combustion temperatures likely exceed the gains in increased working mass and contribute to the diminishing returns beyond the optimum blending ratio.
On a side note, 80s and 90s era cars with electronic port injected and single point injected fuel systems are also known to run perfectly fine on 100% n-butanol and typically without a significant decrease in mpg (potential increase; though I suspect a cocktail of lighter and heavier alcohols would peform better than pure butanol). On paper, n-butanol roughly fits into standard 87 octane US gasoline and real world testing seems to at least point to this also being the case, though given the higher RON and lower MON vs typical gasoline, there's more potential variables. Isobutanol by comparison would be closer to premium fuel, broadly speaking.
Isobutanol is also one of the simplest and highest yield products in the heavier-than-methanol liquid fuel range for fischer-tropsch synthesis, and many of the byproducts of the reaction can also be useful fuel components. (which could, of course, use biomass waste, crop residues, forest waste, or carbon capture + electrolytically generated hydrogen as non fossil fuel sources of syngas ... but you really want a surplus of nuclear and industrial scale solar power to make that sustainable ... and carbon capture from the air is rather silly until we do away with easily accessible CO2 rich exhaust gases from various industrial processes burning fossil or biomass fuels; large-scale carbon capture in reservoirs with intent to recycle that CO2 as industrial feedstock later on would be far more efficient as well)
Hydrodiesel has some interesting potential for both air-quality related emissions reduction and energy economy improvments and, while applicable to petro-diesel, similarly emulsified water+fuel blends using fatty acid esters (biodiesel) or synthetic diesel (like the high quality, high purity paraffinic renewable diesel produced by hydrogenation of animal and vegetable fats: saturated fats like animal fat and palm oil have the highest yield per energy input due to requiring less hydrogenation to be broken into saturated hydrocarbon chains). Use of nuclear-themal or thermal-solar derived heat would significantly improve the net yield as well relative to carbon footprint.
Fischer-tropsch diesel is chemically very similar to fat derived synthetic diesel, but a good bit more energy is required (and a lot more waste CO2 produced) compared to hydrogenating fats. And even with large amounts of cheap energy to allow recycling of the waste CO2 with fresh hydrogen to produce more syngas, it would probably be far simpler to stick to lower molecular weight osygenated molecules when the fischer-tropsch process is concerned. (and where carbohydrate-rich biomass is the feedstock, syngas via pyrolysis is the obvious route to take given the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen ratio ... though lignin rich biomass might be worth hydrogenating into aromatic hydrocarbons and oxygenates, but in the case of typical woody biomass with mixed cellulose and lignin, pyrolysis will produce syngas as well as liquid tar fractions, and the latter can be condensed and separated of for further refining as useful chemical feedstock both for potential hydrogenation into fuel and as a feedstock for other chemical syntheses or direct purification of the methanol, acetic acid, formic acid, and acetone present)
@darrenivak4536 Says:
Thunderfoot rules, the only reason I follow him is because he tells the truth,
Every time, thanks thunderfoot for the truth
@nunyabizness3866 Says:
Put that in the chemtrails
@Denkono Says:
An ethically inconvenient prong to curbing the rate of gloval warming would require the decimation of animal agriculture.
Being approximately a third of all CO2 emissions is only allowed and encouraged because of the veneer of health benefits and social indoctrination into the assymetrical moral valuation of uncontested basic negative rights of sentient beings.
@JS-pw8nr Says:
Man, Thunderf00t must think we are all dead stupid. If you look at this graph, in contrast to the graph he used seven years ago, the actua global temperature hasn't gone up anually by even a single degree C. Not one.
Thunderf00t has made a fundamental flaw in reasoning here. He thinks that the data he is using and being given is honest, because everyone knows, science doesn't lie. However, scientists absolutely lie. How may Doctors recomend smoking cigaretts? And he has to believe in his religion, because that's all he has. There is no God, no guidance in life for us humans. We're just lazy. Right, Thunderf00t? We didn't see how successful Judeo/Christian values built the USA (built the free-est Nation in the world), built the place more people want to go than anywhere else in the world, etc. Never mind how those same values elivated the UK Europe, and most of the world, gifting him the success he now has in resources and tools to not believe in God.
"Educated, they are but fools" - Jesus Christ. And just because Thunderf00t is successful at debunking SpaceX or solar-road's, that doesn't mean that he even has the capability of replicating the hundreds of years it takes to verify the truth of Global Warming. And while I see no reason for anyone to lie about how hot or cool the weather is, at any given point in time, there is every reason to ignore masive climate events say, volcanic eruptions, that throw out more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the entire world does in a thousand years. Our current rise in temperature might be that, not us. Mt. St. Helen anyone? Not to mention that the data sets seem to keep changing. Folks, I whole-heartedly believe Thunderf00t about Elon Musk and solar-roads and dehumidifiers. I also believe that he is the perfect advocate for an actual scam. Why? Because of his dilusional, and misplaced, faith in science appart from scientists. Scientists can lie like every other human and the reliablity of the data sets Thunderf00t is working with DO NOT go back far enough in history to account for major sizemic events (volcanic eruptions) nor do they account for the massive polution of the air cused by them. The science simply does not account for all factors. What could be the result of burning less gas in cars could just as easily be the eruption of Mt. St. Helen. It's like the myth of paying women less. What is atributed to sexism is more honestly atributed to the different priorities, and therefore choices, made by women and men, not sexism. When Thunderf00t says, "this is a real problem based on science" the truth is, a single volcano can cause more atmospheric polution in an hour than all humanity can cause in a thousand years, so he doesn't really know what has caused the warming at all. He doesn't know why. Could it be us? Maybe. Could it be a natural cause? Maybe. Could this be part of a natural cycle? Maybe. All Thunderf00t actually knows is, things are getting warmer. The science simply doesn't explain why. Yes, it can say whether things are or are not getting warmer, on average, but since the temperature change isn't even by one (1) degree, is that us or is it any number of natural causes? He doesn't know. I dare say, Thunderf00t does not know what the cause is, nor does he know what, if any, effect that there will be. This makes Global Warming the perfect Boogy-man. Why? Because, by the time one human life ends, the data set can simply be changed. The fall in temperature change can simply be atributed to more fuel efficent cars or some other change that may or may not be the actual cause, and the cycle of fear-mongering can simply keep going and going and going. Never mind the fact that the actual cause is simply a natural patern of weather or the long-term effects of sizemic or volcanic actuvity. Just as with religion, science too, and the fears behind the unknown, can be used to manipulate and control the masses of people. Why? Because we aren't all scientists, let alone the odd-man-out saying, "this could be caused by other things you know."
I side with God. God makes better people than science does, and with the average IQ still being 100, Thunderf00t has that data stacked against him. Atheism has now taken way, way, way more lives with their defunct faith than the Christian religion ever has. Not to mention the vast quantity of hypocrites and ignorance it has produced. Religion gives everyone cause to try, to strive, to work for better and for change in one's own self. Science give's smartphones and hypocrites. How is that for facts and data?
Sorry, Thunderf00t, bang on about this all you want. The science simply doesn't back you up here. It sure does against Flat-Earther's. Not here. God is real and He built all of this Universe. Atheism is a massive lie. Go and find God and then serve God, and still be a scientist.
@Zunnerchia Says:
This is one of the few videos I've seen to explain the reality of climate change accurately. Most people either fall into three camps, the "but the climate always changes/it's just the sun" camp, the "we're all gonna die, man" camp, and the "plant some trees and live like a romanticized version of hunter-gatherer communities to save the planet" camp. You understand the science of what's really going on, that planting a few trees and buying "sustainable" products won't fix things other than someone's guilty conscience but that there is a solution, one that ironically most of the green movement doesn't want to consider. Nuclear power is the future, and only the beginning.
@budsak7771 Says:
Windowed buildings, concrete, asphalt, sitting water, dry dirt and sand are just some of the factors that can think of which can heat the atmosphere pretty well. I wish I could say it was the cow farts leading the way.
@Pebkio_Nomare Says:
We would have to pump *a lot* into the air... and constantly. Way more than 40 years ago. And that's just to *plateau* the heating. It's all going to come down, *a lot* and constantly. It's not just going to cost "billions". That's the *initial* cost. Maintaining *everything* under constant global acid rain is going to be expensive. And we all get to live in a highly polluted hellscape that is, because it's only plateauing the heat, still too hot to live. It's *not* going to stave off anything.
@ionlyemergeafterdark Says:
You really believe in the global warming hoax? It has been shown that the CO2 rises and falls follow global temperature with a lag of about two hundred years. I am disappointed if you believe the hoax which has bee created to steal from us and to control us. Check out “Climate - the Movie”. CO2 is beneficial, not a pollutant.
@ShortfactoryUK Says:
The singularity can deal with global temperatures. Thunderfoot although is less clownlike as say, elon musk... urm, should still not burden his wallet or sholders with the weather 100 years from now.
@ghostkhadaji Says:
So this is why Elon has been blowing up rockets! ELON SAVES US AGAIN!!
@chesterV72 Says:
Ok Thunderf00t, I like your videos, especially the ones debunking guys like Musk, and I like this video here too and I agree with ALMOST all of it, but I had to stop watching when you went into the ramblings about nuclear power. Sad...
Chernobyl is supposed to have been the worst? What about Fukushima? Did they build a very bad reactor too? I don't think so, because the Japanese reactors are considered to be the safest in the world. And the consequences of that explosion (and yes, it was a big explosion, certainly not the same as a nuclear bomb, but still), do you want to live there for any length of time? I don't think so. And the effects of radiation around Chernobyl on the flora and fauna that now inhabit the area have not yet been fully researched. It is one thing to be exposed to radiation for a short period of time and to live in a place with elevated radiation levels, to eat plants grown on contaminated soil and to drink contaminated water. One thing especially grim are genetic mutation which would only be visible on a generational scale. That's what needs to be done around Chernobyl first, before we can actually talk about repopulating a contaminated area.
And very conveniently for your video, you leave out that we still haven't found ONE single viable way to deal with the nuclear waste produced by nuclear reactors. And when you consider that today we generate worldwide 17880 TWh of electricity from fossil fuels and only 2260 TWh from nuclear reactors, you can work out how much more waste we would produce if we subsidised fossil fuels with nuclear fuels.
Nuclear power is simply not the way forward, it is the same as continuing to burn fossil fuels. It is an attempt to solve modern problems with recipes from the past. And it also obviously shows your inability to grasp the bigger concept that we need to apply here: The only way is degrowth, not perpetuating growth by using unsafe, dirty technologies from the past just because we don't want to change our wasteful lifestyles.
@ClassyClavicle Says:
This might be the first time I've actually seen a really poor argument from you. Your statements about "pouring water on a reactor" during the bit on the HBO Chernobyl series is completely not what they were talking about. While the show is-- quite inaccurate at times, what they were referencing was the meltdown flowing into a water storage tank and creating a secondary steam explosion. Now a 30 km radius of destruction? That's a stretch, but with the volume of water mentioned, it would've been quite sufficient to destroy the Chernobyl powerplant, reactors included, hence her mention of reactor material being ejected. Kinda strawmanned that a bit.
@hilldoggydogg635 Says:
You actually believe human intervention in carbon output affects the weather? That's really dumb.
@janklaas6885 Says:
1:11
@OktoberSunset Says:
Thunderf00t pushing hard for Snowpiercer.
@CanadianSnowflake Says:
I agree with everything but I do have a but to add to the whole team trees. I looked into it as a parent who had kids who wanted to donate. And 1. Sir beast did actually go into detail to explain that it isn't the solution, or even a huge difference maker, however that in a world where every little bit counts, getting kids talking aboit, thinking about how to contribute, being maleable to exchanging donation for chores, and there are many ngos, both from countries throughout the world, but also through un programs and the donations are being used in ways that are intriguing. If nothing else, it certainly has helped increase our understanding of terraforming in a... mixed results sort of way. (Re de desertification projects in Egypt, China, and other smaller projects that do have some limited successes)
He never painted it as the thing that will change the world. And at the time, I don't think he had quite wrapped his head around, fully, about his influence on the children.
Same with team seas. The less plastic crap in the ocean. The better it is for all of us. Sure. It's a slow, process. One technology can't replace elbow grease completely on. But it's still a decent fundraising thing, it gets kids being conscious about plastic waste.
Something that engages them that isn't whatever the hell a skibidi is supposed to be.
And the conversation over "what is and isn't the best aim for fundraising" has actually given a platform for people who *actually* know what they're talking about, to put their 2 cents in.
Sadly, the real solution is one the world is not going to entertain at this point. We would need to force ourselves to only selectively manufacture items. Look at regional food circular economies. Limit cars to only Long distance trips that have no better options. It's forcing ourselves to limit what we use internet or electricity for. It's about giving up the lifestyle we are all so comfortable with.
I'm not sure as a society, we are there.
We can't even figure out how to stop fighting over stupid crap like the shape of the earth (sad egg), so I don't think it will happen until after whateve4 mass extinction event occurs. At least they will be able to recycle a lot of pre fabricated stuff for the next century or so. #optimism
@Praxe Says:
thank you thunder foot, this really helped me synthesize my market alternatives to climate change paper
@millax-ev6yz Says:
Terrific video!
@odril Says:
Here're 3 formulas (or variants thereof) to stop anthropogenic #ClimateChange NOW:
1) ^235U+n -> ^92Kr + ^141Ba + 3n + E
2) 2H2O + E -> 2H2 + O2
3) 4H2 + CO2 -> CH4 + 2H2O
If you don't bother to look them up or have a serious debate about them, you are not a climate activist.
@Pej191 Says:
You guys are so silly global warming won’t be an issue because of population collapse
@charlesmorschauser5258 Says:
Meanwhile DeForestation is happening quickly
@Conserpov Says:
The whole warming is mere 0.5 degrees per century, and it is warming because... *Little Ice Age is ending.*
Climate is going back to normal, as it was back in Caesar's time, and that's your entire crisis.
This is called Gell-Mann Amnesia.
@blindprophet182 Says:
Hasnt the earth got 20% greener in the last 100 years. Idk why co2 is such the boogie man, bc a chart going back to the 1880s? Im sure urbanization would skew temp readings all over. Its like the earth goes through all these rotational/orbital cycles, the sun goes through its cycles. The magnetic field goes through its cycles. For the majority of life on earth the co2 was orders higher than now, but a couple hundred ppm more is the greatest threat. We have like 100 years of accurate readings of temp data (even if some are in asphalt seas) in an ever-changing climate & pretend we have a clue whats normal. Several x5.8 class solar flares light up the auroras as far down as the Caribbean last weekend. If we took it directly head on, modern society could of come down. I try to resolve sources i trust, by how accurate are their short term predictions, & do they live like theyre avoiding the crisis they predict, & how much power stands to be grabbed. Their predictions have been wrong since the al gore movie, they all live on the beach, fly private jets. For power they pushed climate lockdowns, control over the food production (shutting down farms), tracking every purchase, no freedom to own a car. Id roll the climate dice over empowing sociopathic politicians & kleptocrats to fix anything.
@Nehemiah_Scudder Says:
The two biggest problems with nuclear power are that invariably 1) the power station will be used to manufacture weapons grade isotopes and 2) somebody will consider their design to be "infallible"
Item 2 is not unique to power stations like Chernobyl, don't forget that Titanic was "unsinkable," right up until the moment it sank.
So yes, there are huge risks involved in nuclear energy, but not because of the physics, or the radiation, but because of the attitudes of humans.
@AllHailSeizure90 Says:
Only sheep buy into climate change at a catastrophic level, especially at this point. It's literally a mechanism of controlling people and nothing more. Paying taxes isn't going to make the weather change, but somehow, you guys still buy it reardless how stupid
@ДмитрийФ-ц4ч Says:
"умник", без выбросов СО2 нас ждет скорейшее наступление нового ледникового периода. В целом для Земли считается оптимальным потепление на +5 градусов.
Плюс, к сожалению сжигание углеводородов скоро закончится. Тебе не стыдно кстати твоя глупость, по поводу размышлений как распылять антипарниковые газы? Не стыдно?
Речь о том, что запасов углеводородов на Земле осталось на 25-40 лет при текущем потреблении. Дальше нас ждет кони запряженные в телеги и новый ледниковый период из-за уменьшения парникового эффекта.
@nichance Says:
In 20 years people are going to be commenting here how correct you were... the only solution is to open the ozone layer from time to time until we stop burning so much fosil fuel, even if that sounds crazy af
@samwilliams680 Says:
how is this guy so good at bullshit detection except on climate change? the only thing missing from this video is all the data from nasa and ice core samples that clearly show the earth goes through these cycles. The earth has had the same rising temps and co2 naturally and all life forms were thriving.
@Wooksley Says:
Energy density is no problem if we build antimatter-generating solar freaking roadways. It's not that hard.
@enigmaticunknown2862 Says:
Just after WW2? Could it be that a large portion of populated cities were raised to the ground?
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