Arithmetic of power and plutonium

The first pile at Hanford generated 250 million watts—250 megawatts or MW—of thermal power and produced each year about a hundred kilograms of plutonium. A rule of thumb is that a megawatt of fission heat in a natural uranium reactor accompanies the production of about a gram of plutonium-239 per day. About six kilograms were sufficient to make a bomb.

Garwin, Richard L. and Charpak, Georges. Megawatts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons. University of Chicago Press, 2002. p. 33

Renewable energy has drawbacks and environmental consequences

Renewable energy sources — wind, wave, solar, and the like — are generally the preferred energy sources of environmentalists. At the same time, there is no way to produce energy without some sort of environmental impact, and the more people you need energy for the greater the impact will be.

Some examples of environmental impacts from renewable energy:

Nonetheless, unintended side effects of renewable energy sometimes lead environmentalists to oppose it. In my view, they are missing how every energy source will have drawbacks and the question is how they relate to the drawbacks from alternatives, chiefly fossil fuels. Environmentalists can be too easily inclined to become perpetual and reflexive critics, always emphasizing the problems with any course of action and effectively acting as a blockage to any action.

Related:

Renewable energy options:

Environmentalist / NIMBY opposition to renewable projects:

Energy storage:

Transmission and grid interlinkage:

Demand shaping:

Politics of renewables:

Onward toward examiners

A complete dissertation manuscript in LaTeX format is done and in the hands of my committee.

Now, I should get comments from a professor within the department but outside my committee (internal external) and a political scientist from a different university (external external).

Once I address their comments, we can move to the dissertation defence, which my committee is currently expecting in November.

To do lists telescoping down

Despite still not being at 100% physically or mentally, I am working through a four-step process for getting through all dissertation-related to-do lists, including emails to self, project tracking spreadsheets, and tasks written on physical notecards:

  1. Is there anything essential to successfully defending the dissertation still unfinished?
  2. Create final MS Word version for the LaTeX conversion. Accept all tracked changes.
  3. Convert Word manuscript into LaTeX, including complete footnotes.
  4. Re-write the final ten pages of the conclusion to better serve as a summary of the overall argument and statement about the work’s contribution to the literature.

The target date for the LaTeX version, ready for external examiners, and the new closing pages is the end of August.