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Ah good old ad hominem. Never fails to show up. It's true he worked in Australian mining (I assume coal). The guy has been working in industrial recycling and

• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  An ad hominem is where you use someone's character as a faulty reason their argument is flawed. Pointing out someone's argument is flawed and is a standard part of the coal propaganda machine as a valid reason to question their motives is not ad hominem. The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades and have detailed roadmaps for overcoming the real roadblocks (which are not even issues he considers). > We will literally never run out of fissile material. There are no commercially viable or even prototype closed loop breeding programs and there never have been. The current stock of economically accessible fissile material is around 40,000 tonnes and each GW of reactor needs 3-20 tonnes. There are no processes with a doubling time under 10 years because spent fuel needs time to cool, so rolling out your non-existent reactor in place of renewables rather than after one or two generations still requires mining all of it. Even in the scifi world where breeding is viable, we still need a 70-95% renewable transition to fill the 20-40 year gap.
  • evilos 4y ago
    You started by trying to discredit the work based on the author's work history. Then you threw out a few unspecific attacks on his data sources. Hardly convincing. Essentially name calling. > The absolute most generous interpretation of the report you linked is that it was a mastubatory exercise by a completely naive person who thought he was the first person to think of problems that have been studied for decades Here is a paper published by IEEE this year, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research. It is a comprehensive review of the research in this field. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 Section D. Raw Material Demand for 100% Renewable Energy Systems As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits. Hardly mastubatory, then.
    • Schroedingersat 4y ago
      > As the previous criticisms are starting to become less and less tenable, increasing attention is now shifting towards the more salient point of raw materials needed for the transition towards a sustainable energy system. Practically all research in this field finds critical limits for material availability. This may be a major concern and should be addressed with more consideration and analyses to truly test the material limits. Yes. There are real critical minerals, as well as real broad overviews that highlight them without going into industry specific roadmaps for addressing them. The limits are entirely unrelated to the paper you first linked because the Michaux analysis does things like assuming all new PV will be CdTe or there will be weeks of battery storage for any electrolysers built in the form of NMC811 batteries. Trying to conflate the former with the latter or use overviews to pretend said roadmaps don't exist is just as dishonest as your first attempt.