Daily News 3 Apr 2025

Another IVO Quantum Inertia Drive Attempt

H/T Stuart Brown

Mike McCulloch’s quantised inertia (QI) theories of propulsion in space were left untested last time around in early 2024. Hoping for better luck now.
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Another IVO quantum inertia drive is in orbit now and will be turned on within a few to ten weeks and then operated for many weeks or months, reports NextBigFuture.com.

The previous satellite had communications failure and the IVO drive was not activated.

The IVO quantum inertia drive is very controversial because it would go against many theories in physics.

Let us assume the 52 millinewton drive using 1 watt of power from a drive that weighs about 200 grams works.

We will only know that the drive works for however long the experiment is run. We will know if the 52 millinewtons of thrust from lab tests is achieved in space and if the thrust stays constant.

Changing Altitude and Speed

If the IVO inertialess quantum drive provides 52 mN of thrust for a few weeks (e.g., 3 weeks), it will significantly alter the satellite’s orbit by applying continuous prograde thrust.

For a 10 kg satellite, the orbit could increase from 400 km to over 11,000 km or even escape Earth’s gravity if it was operated for many weeks. For a 200 kg satellite, the altitude might rise by approximately 2,000 km). The orbit spirals outward, remaining nearly circular, with the center of mass elevated to a higher altitude. The drive achieves this by thrusting in the direction of the satellite’s motion throughout its orbit.

I think they will only operate it for maybe a dozen hours. I expect only tens of kilometers of orbit change.
. . .
Mike McCulloch thinks both power and thrust can be improved. But this all depends upon actual experiments. He designed a proposal where he has 400 watts of power from an RTG and scaling to about 20 newtons. This would get to Proxima in 12 years IF these things work.
. . .
Rowing a Boat to Wind Sails

All of our existing propulsion involves propellant. This is somewhat like rowing a boat where we must feed the rowers food. It is also like a coal powered ship where many tons of coal drive the turbine.

The new IVO drive could be a variant of wind sailships on earth or solar sail in space. The sail ships have no fuel or propellant but they are leveraging other processes and effects to capture thrust.

We have theories about how Quantized Inertia works, but we don’t know it if works yet (other than the lab tests which are disputed) and we do not know if the theories or any aspects of scaling are correct either.

Full report here.
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Where to find Proxima Centauri [credit: Wikipedia]

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April 3, 2025 at 03:29AM

Daily News 3 Apr 2025

GREEN HYDROGEN WOULD INCREASE GAS BILLS IN UK

We already have the highest electricity prices in the developed world and UK and European gas prices are many times higher than those in the US and Canada. We simply cannot afford any more whacky projects that push up energy costs even more. In fact we should be going in the opposite direction and declaring an energy emergency to bring energy costs down.

Green Hydrogen to Increase Gas Bills – Watts Up With That?

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April 3, 2025 at 02:00AM

Daily News 3 Apr 2025

Biden Lives! Nuclear Power Welfare from U.S. Department of Energy

“What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.”

The Department of Energy last Tuesday (March 24) announced a $900 million pot of money to “de-risk the deployment of Generation III+ light-water small modular reactors (Gen III+ SMR).” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said (although it’s more likely someone wrote the words for him), “America’s nuclear energy renaissance starts now.”

Really? The new solicitation is a dead ringer for the Biden administration’s October 2024 $900 SMR solicitation, in many cases word-for-word, including a ‘two-tier’ structure: $800 million for the first, $100 million for the second. The residue of the Biden initiative has been scrubbed from DOE’s website, probably in hopes that no one would remember it.

But Wright gave away the secret in his news release, which stated, “Applications are due on April 23, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. ET. Previous applicants who applied to the 2024 solicitation must resubmit their proposals following the new guidance to receive consideration. New applications are also welcome.”

It either case, it’s bad government policy. It puts taxpayer money into enterprises that are fully capable of succeeding or failing without it.

Mirage of SMRs

Anyone who has been paying attention to small modular reactors over the years, as The Quad Report has done, knows that lack of investment is not a problem for serious SMR developers. TerraPower, a Bill Gates venture, has close ties to the United Arab Emirates. The company recently announced it is going global with its unique SMR design. Gates is not out on a corner with a tin cup.

Oklo is backed by Sam Altman of OpenAI and is publicly traded. Chris Wright surely knows this. He sat on the Oklo board before being named the head DOE. Oklo’s stock took a beating on Monday, Baron’s reported, “after the nuclear start-up posted a widening annual loss and noted that ‘significant’ financial losses were expected for the near future.” That’s the market speaking.

NuScale Power has Fluor money and is publicly traded. The customers for the power – particularly the data center developers, including Microsoft and Amazon – have plenty of money.

What’s lacking are the products – the SMRs. It’s not the government’s job to pick winners and losers in the race to develop the products. That’s how free markets are supposed to work.

But that’s not the way the federal government has worked for the last 50+ years when it comes to energy, particularly nuclear energy. The new, allegedly “conservative” administration is no different. Their practice is no-fault capitalism.

The first nuclear era died for a number of reasons, many of them decisions made by the partnership of government and industry – the vendors and the utilities – who were determined to overcome market forces. They were seduced by the concept of “economies of scale,” which they didn’t understand. “Learning by doing” was swamped by a rush to differentiate what were experimental designs. [1] They deluded themselves about the pace of growth of demand (sounds familiar today). They were blinded by engineering hubris.

DOE will likely go forward with its almost billion-dollar boondoggle. The reactor vendors will certainly take the public money. But it will surely make no difference in whether they succeed or fail. The pressure will be on the DOE to posture about its “successes,” while the market will tell the tale.

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[1] As Vaclav Smil noted (Energies, 1999: p. 152):

As the U.S. utilities opted for many individualized designs, rather than for a standard reactor, and as they began to build concurrently dozens of new plants, construction costs escalated, and they were pushed up further by changing requirements of new safety regulations.”

This is a slightly revised version of what was originally posted at The Quad Report, the blog site of electricity expert Kennedy Maize. Other posts by Maize at MasterResource are here.

The post Biden Lives! Nuclear Power Welfare from U.S. Department of Energy appeared first on Master Resource.

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April 3, 2025 at 01:05AM

Daily News 3 Apr 2025

Role of Climate Change in LA Wildfires “Not Statistically Significant”, Says Report Author

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Climate change was a major factor behind the recent Los Angeles wildfires, reported Matt McGrath of the BBC last January. According to a ‘scientific study’ instantly produced by World Weather Attribution (WWA), the prevailing weather conditions were made about 35% more likely due to humans using hydrocarbons. The WWA study, according to the trusting McGrath, is said to confirm this somewhat precise attribution of blame. Possibly the BBC and most of the mainstream that also parroted the WWA line might consider some corrective copy in the light of a devasting critique of the claims from the theoretical physicist, science writer and prominent youtuber Dr Sabine Hossenfelder. In a YouTube video broadcast here that has gone viral on social media, she elicited an astonishing admission from one of the report’s authors that, “as you can see from the numbers, the changes in intensity and likelihood are unsurprisingly not statistically significant”.

Not statistically significant is exactly what Hossenfelder found since she noted that the figures supplied by the WWA were outside a 95% statistical probability level. Her broadcast goes into detail about the outlier numbers falling outside the 95% level meaning that an alternative explanation is that climate change had no part to play in the LA fires. In fact Hossenfelder was so appalled by the work that she was inclined to be harsh in her conclusions. “It is so bad that I have sincere doubts that even the authors read it,” she says, adding it was so bad that “it is actually quite funny”. Wondering why other scientists don’t complain, she notes: “Whenever there is some crap going around the media, they look away and keep their mouths shut.”

But the laughter has a touch of gallows humour since Hossenfelder is concerned about matters of public policy arising from such widespread fearmongering. Wildfires affect the lives of millions of people and the claims of the WWA broadcast worldwide by unquestioning activists are policy relevant numbers, she observes. People in LA need to consider their response to the recent tragedy and judge whether it will happen more frequently in the future, she says, observing: “This research matters for people’s lives.” Of course similar observations can be made about all the other mainstream pseudoscience babble designed to deliberately induce mass climate psychosis and promote the collectivist Net Zero fantasy.

Lost in all the mainstream narrative-driven madness was any report about the recent sensational scientific finding that wildfires across the United States and Canada were occurring at a rate of only 23% of that expected from a review of the tree ring fire scar record going back to the 17th century. The findings published in Nature Communications effectively blew the politicised wildfire climate change scam out of the water. It was noted that a current ”widespread fire deficit” persisted across a range of forest types, and the areas burned in the recent past “are not unprecedented”.

Such was the alarm created by these inconvenient findings that one pre-publication reviewer noted: “I see this paper as potentially being used by deniers of climate change impacts.” Advice was given to rephrase “to put even more emphasis on impact rather than burned area”. In other words, concentrate on emotion rather than facts to help produce the Ultra Processed Message that is slowly but surely destroying faith in both climate science and the useful idiot media.

Regular readers will of course be familiar with the activities of World Weather Attribution. Part founded by Green Blob-funded Climate Central, which specialises in publication-ready catastrophic climate copy, it is run out of Imperial College in London where it is part of the green billionaire-funded Grantham Institute. It is run by the frequent BBC broadcaster Dr Friederike Otto and has a number of international partners including the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Red Cross Crescent Climate Centre. It aims to make a near-instant assessment as to whether an extreme weather event is made worse by humans burning hydrocarbons. It does this by using computer models to compare the results of two imaginary climates operating with different levels of carbon dioxide. Such an approach, using models to pick out individual events in a chaotic atmosphere full of little understood influences, has its critics. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. calls it weather attribution alchemy. He argues that the extreme position of attributing individual bad weather events is “roughly aligned” with the far Left. For her part, Otto states that event attribution was originally suggested with the courts in mind. The main function of these studies is to support lawfare against hydrocarbon companies, and she explains this strategy in some detail in the interview ‘From Extreme Event Attribution to Climate Litigation’.

The BBC is clearly a fan. Former Radio 4 editor Sarah Sands wrote the foreword to a WWA guide for journalists claiming the attribution studies have given us “significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse”. Pielke is less gushing, noting a “less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy”.

Timed to make next day headlines, WWA weather attributions are not peer-reviewed. However the studies follow established methods which it is claimed have been “peer-reviewed and assessed as scientifically reliable”. How comforting to discover that the peer-review claim links to a paper written by none other than Dr Otto along with numerous authors from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the Red Cross Crescent Climate Centre.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.