Shipyard reactor fabrication, global electricity demand, & a Tajik dog

Jul 09, 2021

Shipyards for nuclear reactor fabrication, BP numbers on electricity, an obit for a Tajik mixed breed

It's a rainy Friday here in Austin. Since last week, when I testified before the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, I have been recording podcasts, drafting articles, and preparing speeches. Four items today:

Robert Hargraves of ThorCon International on the podcast talking nuclear powerships
Electricity fell slightly in 2020
My House testimony on YouTube
A Dushanbe stray with an affinity for porcupines

Note about the image: This is a cutaway of the nuclear powership that ThorCon hopes to build.

Robert Hargraves on shipyard fabrication of nuclear reactors

There are two indisputable facts about climate change and carbon dioxide emissions: First, if we are to have any hope of reducing emissions, we (and by that I mean the world's biggest countries) need to rapidly increase the use of nuclear energy. The second -- and unfortunate truth -- is that nuclear reactors take too long to build. We need more nuclear generation capacity right away to meet soaring electricity demand, but our collective ability to build lots of reactors, and do so at the gigawatt and terawatt scale, simply cannot match the scale of global demand for reliable electricity production.

For those reasons, I was eager to interview Robert Hargraves, a co-founder of ThorCon International, a startup company that aims to build thorium-based nuclear reactors. Hargraves and his colleagues at ThorCon believe shipyards offer the best way to scale up the production of nuclear reactors because they have large skilled workforces, experience at fabrication, and they have the metalworking and forging capabilities that are needed to produce lots of reactors. "If all the permits are in place, we could eventually provide a ship with 500 megawatts of power in two years from the point of order," Hargraves told me. He also said that once production begins, a single shipyard could produce dozens of power ships per year. That could be a game-changer when it comes to the deployment of nuclear energy around the world.

I wrote about power ships in A Question of Power and saw them in action in Lebanon. In Juice, we included a segment on the power ships that are generating power for the Lebanese grid. Given that much of the world's population lives close to coastlines, nuclear power ships could be deployed all over the world to help alleviate electricity shortages. Hargraves makes some compelling points. Have a listen.

BP: Global electricity use fell 1% last year

I haven’t had a chance to take a deep dive into the latest BP Statistical Review, which came out earlier this week. I did, however, have time to make the slide above which shows the decades-long growth in electricity demand. Although global electricity generation fell by about 1% in 2020, that decline was only the second time since 1985 that annual electricity production declined. (The last time was 2009). Further, the drop in electricity production was far smaller than the decline in oil consumption, which fell by nearly 10%, coal was down 4% and natural gas use fell 2%. Thus, my immediate takeaway from the latest BP data is that it proves, again, the thesis of both A Question of Power and Juice. That is: electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy. Given the small decline we saw in electricity use last year, there’s plenty of reason to believe that global electricity use will soar in 2021 as the global economy recovers from the Covid lockdowns.

House testimony is now on my YouTube channel

Thanks to some skillful editing by Tyson Culver, my five-minute presentation to the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis is now on YouTube. You can watch it here. The full video of the hearing is here. My remarks start at about the 25-minute mark.

My written testimony -- all 5,000 words or so -- is available here.

Farewell to a Tajik mixed breed

Over 35 years of married life, Lorin and I have had three dogs. Of the three, Peaka (pictured above) had the most presence. She had a sense of herself that the other dogs didn’t. She was territorial, proud, and slightly aloof. She also had an unfortunate attraction to porcupines.

About four years ago, I was working in my office late one evening. I let Peaka out and she wandered into the woods that are downhill from my office and are contiguous with the Barton Creek Greenbelt. She usually will return right away after doing her business, but on that night, she didn’t return. After some more calling, she finally came back, slowly, to the deck. But she stayed in the shadows. When I finally coaxed her inside, I could see her muzzle was full of porcupine quills, about 18 in all. It took some patience – and a pair of needle-nose pliers – to get all of the quills out. But Lorin and I worked together to hold her still and we managed to remove them. Peaka was humbled and after licking her wounds for a couple days, she made a full recovery.

Peaka came to us through Lorin’s sister, Marit, who had adopted the dog while living in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. (Marit is a lawyer. She was working in Tajikistan for the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative.) Some of Marit’s friends found Peaka, who was then a small puppy, in a drainpipe in Dushanbe. Marit adopted her. A short while after taking in Peaka, Marit fell in love with a dashing British diplomat who, shortly after they got married, was assigned to move to China. Rather than take Peaka with them, Marit asked us to take the dog. Peaka got a passport (name: Peaka Rasmussen) which included her vaccine information and allowed her to be shipped from Dushanbe to the States. We picked Peaka up at the Delta Air Freight terminal here in Austin in December 2013 and she’s been with us ever since.

The second porcupine incident happened in 2019 while we were staying at a place in the country near Dripping Springs. The property was heavily wooded and was frequented by lots of wildlife, including coyotes and foxes. One night, Peaka went exploring. She came back, whimpering, with so many porcupine quills in her mouth, tongue, and muzzle that I couldn’t count them all. She was in great pain. I found a pair of pliers and began to extract the quills, but the dog was not having it. We ended up taking her to the vet hospital in Austin where they sedated her and removed, if memory serves, about 60 quills. (That was on top of the 20 or so that I extracted.) The second porcupine encounter took the starch out of her and it was close to a month before she was fully healed.

About six weeks ago, Peaka began to slow down. She was still feisty, still barked at any workmen who came to the house, and still had that same imperious manner. But over the three weeks, her decline accelerated. She began drinking extra water, refusing food, refusing long walks, and losing weight. The vet initially diagnosed arthritis but an X-ray showed cancer throughout her lungs and midsection. Yesterday morning, Peaka refused to eat and couldn’t stand. In the afternoon, the children came by the house and said their goodbyes. We shared some stories and cried a bit. Then Jacob and I took her to the vet so she could be euthanized.

Peaka had a good life and a remarkable adventure. Before we put her down, I told Peaka something that I hope is true: “There are no porcupines in Dog Heaven.”

Have a good weekend.

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