FIRST LIGHT

  From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

          DAY  USA  WORLD    Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9     1093     4732         1185        246       82

July    22      1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12      1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9      1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21      1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25       2304    12025        620        518      118

Dec    30       3880    14748       1224       299      465

Jan     14       4142    15512       1151       189      712

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398

Mar     2        1989     9490        1726       110      194

April   6         906     11787         4211       631       37

May    4         853     13667        3025      3786      59 

June   1         287    10637         2346      3205      95

 July   7          251      8440        1595        817     411

Aug    4          656    10120        1118         532     423 

Sept  22       2228      9326          839        279     124

Oct    6         2102      8255          543        315       59

Nov   3         1436      7830         186         458       23

Dec    1        1633      8475          266        477       28

Jan    7         2025      6729         148        285      140

       14          2303      7872         238        430      128

       21          2777      9091         396        489      103

       26          3143   10,554         606        575        94

Feb  2           2990   12,012         946        991      175

        9           2785   11,827        1295      1241      213

      10           2465   11,110          922        659      203

      11           1917   11,193        1121        804      146

      17           2184   11,440        1129        496      435

      23           2440   10,731         956         302      110

Summary:

• The new deaths for the USA are not exactly declining, unlike those other locations above.
• What has happened, though, is that our new cases dropped yesterday to 75,300, putting us in 6th place in the World.  In the parentheses is new cases/million population.
• #1  Germany  219,859  (2617)
• #2  South Korea  171,448  (3342)
• #3  Russia  137,642  (943)
• #4  Brazil  133,626  (622)
• #5  Turkey  86,600  (1007)
• #6  USA  75,300 (225)
• Japan  66,373  (527)
• Vietnam  60,085  (607)
• Singapore  20,312  (3443)
• Taiwan  56  (2.33)
• China  205  (0.14)
• There are now two pandemic epicenters:  Europe and parts of the Orient.

So how has the invasion of Ukraine affected the world?

• The war has expanded to military installations throughout the country, including Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear power calamity.  Why?  The speculation is that Russia can use this facility to release radiation into Europe.
• Said to be the most significant European war in 77 years, which, of course, was World War II.

• 
  Petroleum prices exceeded $100/barrel for the first time since 2014.
• Worldwide, stock markets plunged, with the German DAX down 4%.
• Historically, how wars influenced the market:

• 
  The USA, European Union, NATO and UN are powerless to stop Russia, and, next...from China forcefully taking over Taiwan.
• Cyberattacks will become a far more serious problem for the rest of the world.
• The Russia-China Alliance has become a formidable new Axis.

Maybe not as dramatic as the Bible, when Let There Be Light was pronounced by God, and it was good, but the James Webb Space Telescope is close to attaining something similar.  For now, last week a test run was completed on the mirrors using the Near Infrared Camera to identify the same star in 18 primary segments.  

• As you can see, these mirrors are yet unaligned, for images are blurry.  
• When this phase of refinement is completed, the 18 images will each become the focused single star.  
• The star, incidentally, is HD 84406 (photo taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) in the constellation Ursa Major, located only 260 light-years away.  You can yourself see this sun-like star located near the bear's head with good binoculars.

So did the astronomers actually see the official first light?  

• Well, yes and no.  There are two first lights.  
• On February 3 detectors for the first time reflected that star.  This was significant because it shows that the telescope essentially works.
• 
  Then there is the official FIRST LIGHT, a term cosmologists use to describe the first generation of stars formed in our Universe, approximately 300 million years after the Big Bang.  Sometime this summer, the Space Telescope will see some of the oldest galaxies over 13.5 billion light-years away.
• The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion ago.
• Here is the logic:

You're not seeing the sun as it is today, you're seeing an 8 minute old sun. You're seeing 642 year-old Betelgeuse. 2.5 million year-old Andromeda. In fact, you can keep doing this, looking further out, and deeper into time. Since the universe is expanding today, it was closer in the past.

• 
  Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today, is quoted to say:

I always find it absolutely mind bending to think that all around us in every direction is the first light from the universe. It's taken 13.8 billion years to reach us, and although we need microwave eyes to actually see it, it's there, everywhere.

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THE PROMISING FUTURE OF GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

Earlier this month I posted on THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS FRACTURING.  Some of my articles draw a lot of attention, and this is one of them that did.  Last week I noticed that Rinaldo Brutoco of the World Business Academy wrote on A Reason for Hope:  On Conscience and Integrity.  To quote his first paragraph:

In the political swamp that has ensnared our democratic republic a glimmer of something we haven’t seen for almost six years is on the horizon: the emergence of a fissure in the Republican party, which has lately been in the grips of Mr. Trump’s remarkably single-handed control as it morphed into the Cult of Trump. Finally, over 160 present and former leaders of the Republican party have said “Enough!” 

Brutoco never went into detail on who the 160 were.  However, more and more Republicans are shifting away from Donald Trump.

Today is Wednesday, and I usually focus on a scientific/technological topic.  I was one of the reservoir engineers for the Hawaii Geothermal Project.  Almost half a century ago we began to investigate if geothermal energy had any potential for Hawaii.  We drilled down 1.2 miles in Puna and struck the hottest well in the world at 676 F.  Today, one of the Italian wells holds this record.  We built a 3MW power plant, which operated at 95% availability from 1981-1989, supplying electricity to the Big Island of Hawaii for a couple thousand households, with the waste effluent used as input to develop new industries at Noi'i O Puna.

I subsequently submitted a proposal to tap the lava lake of Kilauea Iki, which erupted in 1959 and sent out fountains exceeding 1000 feet, to produce a different kind of geothermal energy.  I was not successful, but have closely followed the efforts of Jeffrey Tester at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is now at Cornell.  

What about drilling down three miles almost anywhere to access the heat of the Earth?  He says: It's not a question of whether it's there--it is and it's significant.  It's a question of getting it out of the ground economically.

Of course, this future technology brings some risk.  Quoting further:

In the U.S., Tester envisions a gradual switch to district heating by first transforming military bases, hospitals, schools, universities, and state and federal government complexes with public and private funding. One potential problem, though rare, is that deep drilling and fracking are known to induce seismicity and cause earthquakes. The famous example is an enhanced geothermal system drilled in Pohang, South Korea in 2017. Injecting fluid at high pressure to fracture the hot geology to release heat caused a 5.4-magnitude earthquake — the strongest in the area’s recent history — that injured 135 people and caused nearly $300 million in damage. “There certainly is seismicity with anything you do underground,” said Tester. “Controlling that and monitoring that is usually what is done in any subsurface injection. I don’t see it as the biggest challenge facing geothermal… The biggest challenge is productivity. Insuring that these connected systems between injection wells and production wells produce enough fluid to justify the economic investment to drill to that sort of depth.”

About conventional geothermal power, here are the top 16 countries producing and using it.

	Geothermal electricity production, 2010		Geothermal direct use, 2009
	GWh/year		GWh/year
United States	16,603	China	20,932
Philippines	10,311	United States	15,710
Indonesia	9,600	Sweden	12,585
Mexico	7,047	Turkey	10,247
Italy	5,520	Japan	7,139
Iceland	4,597	Norway	7,001
Japan	3,064	France	3,592
Kenya	1,430	Germany	3,546
El Salvador	1,422	Netherlands	2,972
Costa Rica	1,131	Italy	2,762
Turkey	490	Hungary	2,713
Papua New Guinea	450	New Zealand	2,654
Russia	441	Canada	2,465
Nicaragua	310	Finland	2,325
Guatemala	289	Switzerland	2,143

Sources: Data on electricity from Bertani (2010) and on direct use from Lund et al. (2010).
Notes: GWh/year = gigawatt hours per year.

Few even recognize that the U.S. has long been the largest producer of geothermal power, now at 3700 MW, supplying a million homes with electricity.  One huge advantage of geo-power is that it is baseload.  The sun comes and goes, and so does our winds.  Tester (left) believes that geo-methods could increase our lead production by a factor of 26 by 2020.  Plus, there is the matter of geothermal heat pumps for warming.  The Biden administration has committed $150 million to the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) project in Utah.

Here is a graph showing the highest percentage share of geothermal energy for electricity in these countries:

I might add that 99% of Iceland's electricity is produced from renewable sources, 30% of which is geothermal.   Another interesting story is that President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has linked geothermal electricity in his quest to mine crypto-currency.  How?  Read this.

So how promising is geothermal energy?  First, remember that it is baseload, unlike solar and wind energies, which come and go depending on time of day and weather.  A 2019 U.S. Department of Energy report indicates that the current production can be increased 26-fold by 2050 to provide 8.5% of the U.S. electricity, plus direct heat for other applications.

Returning to the situation in Hawaii, the Puna eruption nearly decimated the geopower plant there, but luckily, much of the surface equipment was untouched.  Today we are producing 38 MW, with a probable reserves on the Big Island and Maui around 1000 MW.  Geothermal energy is very competitive with other sources, and in some analyses was equal or lower than natural gas electricity production, and also below wind farms.  A levelized cost of 6 cents/kWh is about average.

Considering the rest of the world, being really ambitious, geothermal energy can provide enough energy for humanity for a long time to come.   Consider this:

• 
  The molten core of our planet 4000 miles deep is as hot as the surface of the sun at 10,800 F.
• Thus above subtitle:  the Sun benBth Our Feet.
• Better yet, the heat is continuously replenished by the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements at a flow rate of roughly 30 terawatts, almost double all human energy consumption.
• This process will continue for a few billion more years.

• 
  The ARPA-E AltaRock Energy estimates that just 0.1% of this heat could supply all of humanity's needs for 2 million years.
• All that is necessary is to tap this resource located a few miles from the surface.  Here is the U.S. potential 6 miles down:

•  The cost of Super Hot geothermal energy could well be cheaper than wind energy, fossil fuels or nuclear power:

• 
  Of course, getting down to 6 mile depths will be very challenging and there is uncertainty about the economics.  But it was only in 1954 that Bell Labs demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell.  It took us almost 70 years to get us to where rooftops now provide "cheap" electricity.  Nothing wrong with speculating about the future of hot-dry rock geoenergy.

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WHY UKRAINE IS IMPORTANT

First some bad and good news about COVID-19.  The Omicron sub-variant B-A2 (now known as the Stealth Omicron) that showed signs of being more contagious than the Omicron variant B-A1, is indeed more infectious.  Maybe by a factor of 1.5.  But this virus is having some difficulty finding people to attack because only the unvaccinated are left...and if you haven't gotten your shots, stay away from anything that moves and get vaccinated as soon as you can.  The good news is that one booster appears to be resistant to serious illness for a much longer period than initially feared.  Plus, this booster is effective against B-A2.

Well, Russia did enter Ukraine, although it's not quite war yet because the troops only encroached into the Russian separatist region, which is pro-Putin.  Of course the U.S. and European Union condemned the move, but the worry now is what next, then what about Taiwan?  

The Russia-China partnership is looking more and more like the Axis Power formed by Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II.  But this time the goals are limited only to Ukraine and Taiwan...not the World.

Someone sent me the following copypasta: Why does Ukraine matter?  I first went to Snopes, and they said they were checking into the 30 entries and will file a report later today.  I looked into a few of them and they seem about right, save for at least one.  Here is a map of what minerals they have.  Ukraine ranks:

• 1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores (in thousand tons):
• Australia  1,781
• Kazakstan  942
• Canada  704
• Namibia  463
• South Africa  449
• Russia  395
• China  366
• #8  Ukraine 220
• USA  138

• 2nd place in Europe and 9th place in the world in terms of titanium production (in thousand tons):
• China  3,830
• Australia  1,513
• Mozambique  1,070
• The USA has around 10% of the ores, but no real production.
• Canada  1,030
• South Africa  743
• #9  Ukraine  492
• 2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world's reserves) and #8 in world production at 390,000 tons...but South Africa produces 6,200,000 tons/year.
• #7 in world production of magnesium with 19,000 tons...but China produces 1,020,000 tons/year.
• 2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons):  WRONG
• Ukraine has 6.5 billion tons and is #5.
• #1 is Australia with 48 billion tons.
• 2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves.
• 3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas reserves (22 trillion cubic meters).
• 4th in the world by the total value of natural resources;.
• 7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons).
• 
  Ukraine is an agricultural country:
• 1st in Europe in terms of arable land area.
• 3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world's volume).
• 1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil.

• 
  2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in barley exports
• 3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the world.
• 4th largest producer of potatoes in the world.
• 5th largest rye producer in the world.
• 5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons).
• 8th place in the world in wheat exports.
• 9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs.
• 16th place in the world in cheese exports.
• Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.
• 
  Ukraine is an industrialized country:
• 1st in Europe in ammonia production.
• 4th largest natural gas pipeline system in the world (142.5 bln cubic meters of gas throughput capacity in the EU).
• 3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants.  Remember Chernobyl?
• 3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail network length (21,700 km).
• 3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production of locators and locating equipment.
• 3rd largest iron exporter in the world.
• 4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world.
• 4th world's largest manufacturer of rocket launchers

It goes on and on.  If the Snopes review is significant, I'll later return to let you know.  For now, you can see why Russia wants Ukraine.

As I'm sitting at my computer, I see a beautiful rainbow over Honolulu:

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THE DECLINE OF DEMOCRACY

The blatant takeover of Ukraine by Russia seems close to reality.  Will this lead to China doing the same to Taiwan?  Donald Trump opened the door to both and Joe Biden and the European Union seem powerless to say don't.  While the Scandinavian countries are united for freedom and democracy, many elective democracies, including the USA, show signs of fraying.

The Democracy Index shows that we are a FLAWED Democracy.

The 2021 Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index map 

Full democracies   9.01–10   8.01–9

Flawed democracies   7.01–8   6.01–7

Hybrid regimes   5.01–6   4.01–5

Authoritarian regimes   3.01–4   2.01–3   0–2.00

The U.S. shows a score of 7.85 and ranks #26, with Norway #1 at 9.75.  Russia is #124 (3.24) and China #148 (2.21).  Afghanistan is #167 (0.32), Myanmar is #166 (1.02) and North Korea is #165 (1.08).

The shift to democracy is shown here from 1816:  File:Democracy_peace_theory_gif.gif.  

• 
  Democracy is a political system in which all members have an equal share of power.
• Humanity started with a hunter-gatherer society and tribalism, a form of primitive democracy.
• In time came monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy.

• 
  Mesopotamia had a primitive democracy circa 2000 BC.
• India had independent republics as early as the 600 BC.

• 
  The birthplace of modern democracy is said to have started in Athens around 508 BC.  
• Rival Sparta was an oligarchy, government run by a few.
• Remember that their Great War lasted from 431-404 BC...and Sparta prevailed.

• 
  Rome was a Republic.  What is the difference between a Democracy and Republic?  Read this.
• Republics are Israel, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines....etc.
• Democracies are Norway, Sweden, France, U.S.....etc.
• This is confusing, but Russian and North Korea are non-democratic Republics.  This essentially is Donald Trump's goal.
• Or that China is a one-party socialist Republic.
• 
  Interestingly enough, more than 600 years of American Indian democracies led to Ben Franklin and his originators borrowing from them.  Funny, but this was not acknowledged until the U.S. Senate did so in 1988.
• Refer to Wikipedia to learn about the evolution of democracy.
• Today, here are the electoral democracies:

Freedom House last year reported that THE GLOBAL DECLINE IN DEMOCRACY HAS ACCELERATED.  Fewer than 20% of the world's population now live in a fully Free country.  During this 15-year decline, freedom dropped in 73 countries, representing 75% of the global population.  Included in this group are the USA and India.  It is entirely possible that President Donald Trump might have been a forerunner and not an anomaly.

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