In his Honest Broker blog, Roger Pielke, Jr., kindly gives space for Iddo Wernick’s essay “Counting Materials: How the use of 100 materials has changed in the United States since 1970.“
Area of Research: Energy and Climate
Is America dematerializing? Trends and tradeoffs in historic demand for one hundred commodities in the United States
Jesse’s decarbonization ideas in RealClear Science
Editor/journalist Steven Ross Pomeroy writes The Energy Transition We Actually Should Focus On in RealClear Science drawing on ideas of Jesse Ausubel about decarbonization.
Jesse interviewed at Energy Forum in Washington DC
Mark Mills’s new National Center for Energy Analytics launched publicly with an Energy Future Forum organized jointly with RealClearEnergy. The meeting included a half-hour interview with Jesse Ausubel conducted by Peter Bryant about what makes energy systems green.
Iddo posts on the problems with Batteries and Data Tyranny
See The Many Problems with Batteries posted at Real Clear Energy and The Bondage of Data Tyranny posted at Issues in Science and Technology
Fusion power density demonstrated
We have long focused on power density as the central arrow of energy system evolution. The recent achievement of the Joint European Torus (JET) to set a new fusion energy record of 69.26 megajoules of heat released during a single pulse over six seconds from only 0.21 milligrams of fuel, equalling the energy released from burning 2 kilograms of coal, prompts us to update our classic figure, below and as a pdf. Thanks to long-time PHE research associate Dr. Nadedja M. Victor, now at US DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Fuel mass per energy, including nuclear fuels. Economies of scale favor fuels suited to higher power density, thus decarbonization and finally nuclear sources, at least 10,000 times more compact than hydrocarbons. The recent JET fusion experiment achieved density 10,000,000 times coal with deuterium-tritium fuel. Note: *CANDU is a pressurized heavy water reactor. Sources of data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density and https://euro-fusion.org/eurofusion-news/dte3record/. Figure prepared by N.M.Victor, 2/9/2024. Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University.
The Virtual Worlds of Climate and Energy
Iddo publishes short essay on ‘The Virtual Worlds of Climate and Energy’
PHE research Iddo Wernick published a short essay, The Virtual Worlds of Climate and Energy, in RealClearEnergy
First World Ocean Passive Acoustic Monitoring (WOPAM) day
A child of the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, today is the first World Ocean Passive Acoustics Monitoring (WOPAM) day. The IQOE leaders, including Miles Parsons and Steve Simpson, have prepared two very cool 90-second videos to initiate WOPAM day.
Downloadable at this site. 150 MB each, but they download quickly.