Effect of Hurricane Helene on the Solar Industry?

[NNadir]

This is a news item from NPR, and so I'm not sure about its veracity, since I have a low level of respect for science reporting from journalists, but it did come to me via my daily Nature News Briefing. Any one familiar with my writings know is that I have minimal interest in the solar industry because it is demonstrably useless in addressing the global extreme heating we now observe, and I object to solar's material and land requirements, as well as it's intrinsic reliability implications.

All that said...

From the News Briefing:

Hurricane Helene puts solar at risk
The battering of a small town in North Carolina by hurricane Helene could have a significant impact on the solar panel and microchip industries. The southeastern United States faced the full force of the category-4 storm, with 61 centimetres of rain deluging the town of South Pines, North Carolina. Operations at local quartz mines were paused and the timeline for reopening is unclear. Repercussions of this could be felt globally, because the quartz found in the town’s mines is unusually pure and is used globally to manufacture solar panels.

NPR | 2 min read

The full NPR journalist report is here:

A tiny town just got slammed by Helene. It could massively disrupt the tech industry

A tiny town in North Carolina that’s just been devastated by hurricane Helene could end up severely disrupting the global supply chain for microchips and solar panels.

Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, the community of Spruce Pine, population 2,194, is known for its hiking, local artists and as America’s sole source of high-purity quartz. Helene dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, destroying roads, shops and cutting power and water.

But its reach will likely be felt far beyond the small community.

Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz.

Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine.

“As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.”

Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors...

I would imagine that it is possible to produce this quality of quartz synthetically, albeit with additional cost and energy input.

When the world ran out of cryolite, mined in Greenland, and a key component of aluminum manufacture in the Hall-Heroult process, the aluminum industry didn't go away. Synthetic cryolite was developed.

This said, there could be short term disruptions to the semiconductor industry as a result of this supply chain issue.

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. It was no Fukushima, was it?

Did panels get wrecked? I am sure. Maybe we need to hurricane-proof these solar panel installs? BTW, I like Westinghouse's micro nuclear plants. This sounds really promising.

[Think. Again.]

2. I'm also extremely interested in the "Small Modular Reactor" designs...

...in addition to Westinghouse, I've been reading about a company called Nano Nuclear Energy and another called NuScale Power who are both in the small nuke field.

This sounds like an excellent immediate solution to the database and AI sites that need sooo much energy, if Small Reactors could be dedicated to those facilities which would also allow for those facilities to be located away from populated areas.

Of course we will still have the question of what to do with the radioactive waste, but that is a much less immediate danger than the CO2 waste that is causing so much harm right now.

[OAITW r.2.0]

3. I agree with your last statement.

Need energy and need to reduce CO2

[NNadir]

4. No. It was actually worse than the big bogeyman at Fukushima.

Extreme weather is a function of extreme global heating. Compared to extreme global heating, the big bogeyman at Fukushima is a triviality. To my mind, the extreme overreaction to things like the big bogeyman at Fukushima is largely responsible for extreme global heating.

I wonder if the Western North Carolina, Georgia, East Tennessee, and the Pan Handle of Florida will be cleaned up to the same standard we seem to require for the reactors at Fukushima, that being, that no one, no matter how low their level of education, no matter how indifferent they are to extreme global heating, can even imagine that someone somewhere at sometime may be injured or killed by exposure to the debris from Hurricane Helene.

[OAITW r.2.0]

5. Seems to me, Fukushima could have been an operational sucess....

if they had put their emergency generators, maybe on top of the reactor plants? I know, more costs.

[NNadir]

6. It was simply poor design; but I'm not sure there would have been profound cost implications.

From my perspective, it would be better to not have diesel back up generators at all.

Thermoelectric systems, possibly driven by the heat output of fresh used nuclear fuel would not have failed at all. In fact the flow seawater may have increased their output.

Of course, at the time the reactors were built there wasn't quite the valuable inventory we have today of used nuclear fuel.

The best case for this sort of thing would be ternary uranium-plutonium-thorium fuels, because of the month long half-life of ²³³Pa, which would generate significant residual heat in the fuels. Once through used uranium, restored to the reactors in a closed fuel cycle would also produce ²³⁸Pu for this purpose.

Of course, the city of Fukushima was poorly designed for a Tsunami. It was the collapse of buildings, drownings in the streets, etc., that actually killed people in the Sendai Earthquake. The death toll from radiation releases, if it existed at all, was trivial by comparison to the death toll associated with the city itself. There doesn't seem to be a movement to ban coastal cities however, and nobody ever whines about their existence because of the Sendai Earthquake.

Go figure.

[OAITW r.2.0]

7. Can the people who lived there....go back there?

I don't know, maybe you do.

[NNadir]

8. Some time ago, I attended an author lecture at Princeton University about his book, "Nuclear Ghosts."

The author is Ryo Morimoto, who spoke quite eloquently about the effects of the evacuation and the disruption to the lives it caused. People want to return, and in my opinion should be allowed to do so.

Nuclear Ghosts

The death toll associated with radiation is basically very hard to differentiate from the background, if it exists at all.

It turns out that the death toll associated with the evacuation of nursing homes out of fear of radiation, was far higher than the death toll associated with radiation itself.

I link this paper and text on that topic fairly regularly.

Comparison of mortality patterns after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant radiation disaster and during the COVID-19 pandemic ( Motohiro Tsuboi et al 2022 J. Radiol. Prot. 42 031502)

It's open sourced, but an excerpt is relevant:

However, in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant(FDNPP) accident, no direct health hazards due to radiation, such as acute radiation injury, were observed, while various indirect health effects were reported even in the acute phase [2, 3]. Major health effects are attributed to the initial emergency evacuation and displacement, deterioration of the shelter environment, evacuation from nursing homes, and psychological and social health effects. In addition, there were also the effects of medical collapse, where lives that could normally be saved by medical care could not be saved due to a lack of medical resources [4, 5]. It is known that these effects are particularly susceptible to the socially vulnerable [6].

.

I added the bold.

Now the rest of the cited text - some of these authors live and work in Fukushima and have always done so; their institution is Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima City, Japan - indicates that the fear of radiation killed people, but radiation itself didn't. By the way, this group has published hundreds of papers on the topic.

Of course, fear of radiation is killing people, and in fact, the planet far beyond the confines of Fukushima. It's called "extreme global heating," and again, to my mind, it is a direct consequence of the fear and ignorance of people muttering insipidly about Fukushima and Chernobyl.

Recently there was a proposal to restore agriculture to the bulk of Chernobyl exclusion zone. Understanding, as I do, the dire needs of Ukraine as it fights a war against Russia that was funded by German antinukes buying gas, oil and coal from Russia because of their ignorant decision to shut its nuclear power plants, I oppose agriculture in the exclusion zone, not because of radiation risks, but because the absence of humanity has rendered the area into a precious wildlife preserve, a "viridian zone."