Nuclear Energy Study Group at Dartmouth OSHER

Black Swallowtail Butterfly
Wikipedia

Dr. Robert Hargraves of Thorcon Power (the Do-able Molten Salt Reactor) and I  will begin leading a four-session study group this afternoon. The study group is a course at Dartmouth OSHER, and the title of the course is Nuclear Power: For Climate and for People.

The course is oversubscribed (has a waiting list).  I always have some butterflies in my stomach before starting something new.  Anything new, despite how familiar some parts of it might be.  Yes, I have taught other courses and been on many stages. Yes, that helps.

I remember an Aikido sensei who told my class: "If you have butterflies in your stomach, make them fly in formation."

I am starting a new course this afternoon, with Bob.  All right.  Get in formation, butterflies!

Nuclear Power:

For Climate and for People

MIT Prof Kerry Emanuel, in his 2017 OSHER@Dartmouth summer lecture, raised awareness of the potential for nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions that force global warming. Building more nuclear power plants is opposed by many on the grounds of health, safety, and expense. Fission power plants can provide inexpensive, ample power, especially for developing nations desperate to advance prosperity of growing populations. In four sessions we’ll cover the arguments against and for nuclear energy.

We’ll  first have a tutorial on energy, power, sources, uses, value to civilization and prosperity, energy poverty, and civil unrest where there is little. Second, we’ll review Emanuel’s lecture and book on global warming, CO2 in the air and ocean, the solar/ wind bandwagon, and the politics of IPCC, Kyoto, and Paris.  Third, we’ll cover how nuclear power works, why it’s opposed, and the future potential of energy cheaper than coal. Finally, we’ll cover activities of social organizations fighting for/against nuclear power.

There are no required texts for this course.

Robert Hargraves has taught OSHER@ Dartmouth courses on energy, politicized science, and internet money.
Meredith Angwin led The Grid and other courses for OSHER@Dartmouth.

4 sessions, 2:30 PM – 4:30 PM January 18 through February 8, 2018 DOC House - Hanover, NH

The Distribution Grid: Christine Hallquist on Grid Controversies

Hallquist and the grid

Christine Hallquist, CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative, presented the third class in my course: The Grid: What Your Electricity Bill Won't Tell You.

On May 3, 2016 at my class on grid issues, Hallquist described the grid  from the perspective of a rural electric cooperative in Vermont. She heads Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC). This utility was one of the rural Cooperatives of the Rural Electrification movement: it was founded in 1938 to bring electricity to rural Vermont.  It is now the largest locally-owned electric distribution utility in Vermont.  VEC is dwarfed by Green Mountain Power, a utility with a very Vermont-y name. However, Green Mountain Power is actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gaz Metro of Quebec.

In my opinion, Vermont Electric Cooperative is the quintessential Vermont utility. It started in the Rural Electrification movement of the 30s, and and it is a cooperative in which the owners and the consumers are the same people.

Update 2018: The videos still exist, but their URLs have changed. Here's the link to this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zN0D_CAkKE


As CEO of VEC, Hallquist is concerned with the cost shifts involved in net metering, since  VEC's service area includes low income areas of Vermont. When your owners are your customers, you pay sincere attention to the economic issues.

Late in the talk, Hallquist also discusses grid stability.  Intermittent power tends to be destabilizing: the grid was set up for rotating electric machinery. Rotating machinery has a healthy inertia which helps keep the grid stable. Starting at about 1:20 (1 hour 20 minutes into the talk), Hallquist shows the jagged effects of wind and solar, and the almost un-analyzable harmonics of the intermittents on the grid.  Few utilities collect this type of data.

I am very grateful to Christine Hallquist for sharing her information and her wisdom with our class.

It happens first in a village

Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is able to solve crimes because she has carefully analyzed many (supposedly) smaller issues in a small village.

To a large extent, Vermont Electric Cooperative is a "village" for the growth of renewables.  The owner/customers are not rich, and they need to keep electricity costs low.  While places like Germany can boast of their renewables while simultaneously building lignite-fired plants, VEC is actually adding renewables and dealing directly with the costs and stability issues that renewables  present.

For example,  the owner/customers have made decisions, very recently,  on how to keep wind energy from being curtailed on their grid.  They are making decisions, right now, on how much net metering the customers can afford.

VEC is hopeful about advances in energy storage and weather forecasting and so forth. (See Hallquist's last slide on "What are we doing about it.")  But right now, there are very real limits for renewables on a small grid, and VEC is reaching those limits.

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Previous sessions 

The first session was The Grid: Power and Policy Introduction, and Howard Shaffer on the Physical Grid.  The second session was Payments on the Grid: What Every Citizen Should Know.  This post is the third session.  The fourth session was a field trip to ISO-NE, the grid operator headquarters.

The Grid: My Course at Dartmouth OSHER

The Course

I have been quite busy in the past week, getting ready for the launch of my four-week course about the grid, The Grid: What Your Electricity Bill Won't Tell You. The course begins at OSHER at Dartmouth,  Tuesday, April 19.    Here is the course catalog description.

And here is a slide from my Tuesday April 19 presentation.

The Guest Speakers

I don't know why everything is taking me so much time!  I have two great guest speakers, and we are taking a field trip to ISO-NE headquarters the last day of the course.  With all this help, it should be easy-peasy for me to get ready for the course.  Right? Okay.  It's hard.

The guest speakers:

Howard Shaffer was a startup engineer on a major pumped storage project.  He will speak on the first day, about the physical grid. Here is Shaffer's post about the difference between supplying power and paying for power.  Where's the Magic Switch?

Christine Hallquist, CEO of Vermont Electric Cooperative, will speak on controversies on the grid. Here is Hallquist's recent op-ed at VTDigger: Pricing Renewable Energy Right.

Videotape

The course will be videotaped for CATV8  community TV, and it will also be on-line.  I will put links to the videos in some later blog posts. (In other words, I will be videotaped three times, and  I haven't got a thing to wear.)

Engineering Adventures Course

I am scheduling this to be published while I am leading the first day of the Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute course.  I will write about the course occasionally in this blog.

Since I announced it in the blog in November, several things have happened.

• The course has been filled and over-subscribed.  
• The Nevil Shute Norway Foundation discovered the course and the American librarian will attend the course and probably record it for the Society.  I am very pleased about this!  The Foundation has members all over the world. If you like Nevil Shute, I encourage you to visit the Foundation web page.
• I set up a page on my personal web page for downloads about the course.  So far, the 2-page course syllabus is at that page, as well as several articles about the R100 and R101 Airships.

Here's the letter I sent to course participants:

Welcome to Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute.

This study group meets four Monday mornings, 9:30 a.m., at the D.O.C. House.  The first meeting is January 7 and the last meeting is January 28.

Plus, as an extra added attraction: there will be an optional fifth session, Monday February 4 at 9 a.m.  In the optional session, we will watch the movie No Highway in the Sky, starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich.

The course is based upon Nevil Shute's books and on our own experiences with big, complex projects.  The two books are Slide Rule and No Highway.

Class participants are expected to read both books. If you can read them before the class begins, that would be terrific.  Otherwise:

• Read Slide Rule, chapters 1-7, by the second week of class. That is the majority of the book, and it would be good if you finish the rest of the book. 
• Read No Highway, chapters 1 through 7 by the third week of class
• Finish No Highway by the fourth week of class.

The format for this course is based on Great Books of Management.  I belonged to this discussion group in California when I worked at Acurex (now part of A.D. Little consulting).  The group members were chemists and engineers.  As our responsibilities grew, we began becoming project managers. One of the senior managers started the group to help people become better managers.   We also were encouraged to take traditional courses in project management.

Great Books of Management had a simple thesis: We can learn about project management by studying fiction and non-fiction books that present typical problems.  We read Plutarch, Halberstrom, Dickens and Shakespeare.  Some of our best discussions were based on Nevil Shute’s books, and I have chosen those books for this course.

For each meeting, we spent one hour discussing the books from a management perspective.  Did people seek the right information?  Did they make appropriate decisions?  The second hour broadened the discussion to include own project histories. Faced with similar issues, did we seek the right information and make the appropriate decisions?

Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute will follow the same format.  One hour on book discussion, one hour of our own experiences.  One hour book, one hour personal.

Read the books, prepare to share your own war stories, and be ready to have fun! I look forward to meeting you!

Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute

Poster for No Highway in the Sky
from Wikipedia

Once again, I will be leading a course at ILEAD at Dartmouth.  This time I will lead a 4-session course in January called Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute.  Below is a reprint of  the ILEAD catalog description of the class.

*******************

 Engineering Adventures with Nevil Shute

In this course we will read two of Nevil Shute’s  lesser-known books: Slide Rule (his autobiography) and No Highway, (which presaged the failure of the early De Havilland Comet airplane).

Based on these books, we will discuss the troubles that can befall engineering projects.  The books include issues of changing specifications, the difference between private enterprise and "government work," and how quirky individuals affect the outcome of projects.

The course will be participatory. We will discuss issues from the books, then we will trade "war stories": similar problems and solutions with our own projects.

The material will be of interest to engineers and non-engineers. If you have been involved in a big project, such as building a house, you have the background to enjoy this course.

Discussion group members should plan to read both books.

************************************

MEREDITH ANGWIN has a MS in Physical Chemistry. Though most of her life was spent in nuclear energy research and problem-solving, she also worked extensively with fossil fuels.  She likes to talk about technical subjects in a relatively non-technical fashion. For many years, her job title was "project manager." Consequently, she often wonders how projects get managed.

***************************************

In this class, we are also going to watch the movie, No Highway in the Sky, in an optional extra class session.

I have led courses at ILEAD before, specifically:

• All Around the Coal Boiler
• Energy Safari with Robert Hargraves. 

Robert Hargraves did most of the work with Energy Safari.  I was co-leader of the course, and I have several posts about it on this blog.

Leading a course like this, as opposed to a leading a course in energy technology, will be a new adventure for me. Wish me luck!  I will post about the course occasionally.

Energy Safari: The Class, the Field Trip, the Blog

Energy Education at ILEAD

Dr. Robert Hargraves and I have both taught energy classes at Dartmouth ILEAD. He gave an amazing course in Rethinking Nuclear Power, and I gave a course on pollution control for coal, All Around the Coal Boiler. In both our courses, actually visiting a power plant was a very important part of the course. Seeing is believing. Seeing is understanding. There's only so much a teaching that can be done with PowerPoint.

This fall we are teaming up for a super-duper-once-in-a-lifetime (probably) course on all sorts of energy, including energy efficiency.

It is ......Energy Safari!

During this course, the group will visit most major types of power plants. We will visit a solar installation, the Lempster wind farm, a wood-fired plant, an LEED (efficient) building, a hydro plant, a nuclear plant, a coal plant and a combined-cycle gas turbine. Whew! That is a LOT of information about energy. Most people (including people in the power industry) never get to see so many types of power plants.

We are very lucky, and very grateful to our hosts:

• AllEarth Renewables (solar)
• Iberdola Renewables (wind)
• Springfield Power LLC (wood)
• Dartmouth College (efficiency)
• TransCanada (hydro)
• NextEnergy (nuclear, Seabrook Station)
• Public Service of New Hampshire (coal and wood)
• Granite Ridge Energy (combined cycle gas)

We will use David MacKay's book, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, as our text. This book is available to read on-line or as a free download. You can also buy a more standard copy on Amazon.

The Blog

Hargraves has started a blog for Energy Safari, and we are also trying to get some media coverage. Getting media coverage may be hard, since most power plants will not allow photography on-site. This is such an unusual group of visits that we think they should be documented.

Visit the blog at Energy Safari. I will also post in this blog about our adventures.

Images from various sources on Wikipedia. Anthracite coal from the Wikipedia article on coal.The hydroelectric dam diagram originates from TVA. The gas turbine diagram is a GE gas turbine.