By Steven Goddard
A favorite excuse to push the AGW agenda is that “energy is limited, so we have to preserve it for future generations.” But nothing could be further from the truth. As that clever fellow Albert Einstein figured out ( E = Mc² ) – energy is available right here on earth in vast supplies beyond our comprehension. In fact, a primary concern of mankind over the last 65 years has been to figure out how to keep mankind from releasing some of this energy too quickly, in a catastrophic fashion.
Einstein’s equation tells us that one kilogram of matter can be converted into 90,000,000,000,000,000 (ninety million billion) joules of energy. That is roughly equivalent to saying that one liter of water contains as much potential energy as 10 million gallons of gasoline. Those who saw the movie “Angels and Demons” are familiar with the concept of combining matter and anti-matter to achieve a highly efficient matter to energy conversion. Mankind probably won’t have access to that sort of technology for some time into the future, but we already have hundreds of fission reactors generating a significant percentage of the world’s energy.
Scientists and engineers are also actively pursuing control of thermonuclear fusion, which powers the sun, stars and hydrogen bombs – and offers nearly unlimited energy potential using readily available fuel. All of our current energy sources (coal, oil, wind, gas, nuclear, solar, etc.) are ultimately by-products of fusion. Controlled fusion uses as fuel primarily the hydrogen isotope deuterium, which is abundant in seawater.
In the south of France, there is a large international fusion effort underway named ITER (Latin for “the way.”) The project was originally agreed to by Francois Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in 1985, and was officially launched in October 2007.
It is now being built in the south of France as part of an international collaboration between France, the US, Russia, the UK, the EU, India, China, Korea and Japan. In 2010, the first concrete will be poured.
The deuterium will be heated to 150 million degrees centigrade, forming plasma (decomposed hydrogen atoms) which will be contained by electrical and magnetic fields inside the Tokomak pictured above. (Note the size on the person at the bottom right in the picture above.) The plasma particles combine in a fusion reaction to form helium, and release vast amounts of energy in the process – which is captured as heat and used to generate electricity.
From Wikipedia : (D = Deuterium T = Tritium n = neutron)
The easiest (according to the Lawson criterion) and most immediately promising nuclear reaction to be used for fusion power is:
D + T → 4He + n
Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen and as such is universally available. The large mass ratio of the hydrogen isotopes makes the separation rather easy compared to the difficult uranium enrichment process. Tritium is also an isotope of hydrogen, but it occurs naturally in only negligible amounts due to its radioactive half-life of 12.32 years. Consequently, the deuterium-tritium fuel cycle requires the breeding of tritium from lithium using one of the following reactions:
n + 6Li → T + 4He
n + 7Li → T + 4He + n
Below is the timeline for ITER over the next decade.
It is anticipated that some fusion energy will be in the power grid in as little as 30 years, and be the primary source of electrical energy in perhaps 80 years.
– Hopefully the construction of ITER is not being powered by frequently motionless windmills.
Some AGW types want us to think small, when in fact the key to meeting future needs is to think large. You can’t feed 10 billion people by fantasizing about the “good old days” – which never actually existed.
TO MODERATOR: PLEASE DELETE after reading.
If you need another wind post, sometime, I was inspired to find this data and write this after the comments on the last wind topic where a few people thought Texas was our salvation. NOT.
http://nofreewind.blogspot.com/2009/05/texas-wind-doesnt-work.html
note: I have an expert that is going to review this for accuracy and also an editor for grammar.
Glenn
glenncz@gmail.com
Will helium be branded a polutant?
Yes, we need to think big, but there are great merits in thinking small as well. The problem lies not with ‘thinking small’, but with those who think that ‘small’ is the whole answer.
For example in the biomass-to-liquid (b-t-l) field the need for large tonnages and the transport distance therefore required is (one) problem. Smaller b-t-l plants are not economic, nor as efficient, but if they were to become viable they would have huge merits for regions like my own which relies almost solely on import of energy and all the issues that brings, most notably cost and security of supply.
“Hopefully the construction of ITER is not being powered by frequently frequently motionless windmills.”
Most unlikely ITER is located next to the premises of Cadarache, France’s principal nuclear research facility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
Worth a read to see how things have developed, looks like the process will be successfull in generating power within 20- 40 years in the 2000 mw range if ITER is succcessful & the DEMO machines proceed. ITER a french machine hopes to produce 500 mw of power for only 400 seconds, DEMO is supposed to be a larger scale and continuous, but its going to be decades before DEMO is built & running.
The following timetable was presented at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in 2004 by Prof. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith.[2] These dates are conceptual and as such are subject to change.
Conceptual design is to be complete by 2017
Engineering design is to be complete by 2024
The first ‘Construction Phase’ is to last from 2024 to 2033
The first phase of operation is to last from 2033 to 2038
The plant is then to be expanded/updated
The second phase of operation is to last from 2040 onwards
Another good post, Steve.
Maybe it’s time for some reflection.
What we are are seeing here in the global-warming / climate change / thingy meme is several trends converging:
+ Cultural vertigo: life in developed countries is just so lovely that many people feel somehow guilty about enjoying an unprecedented standard of living.
+ Lefty trouble-makers: disappointed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and unsure where to go next so they hijack the conservation / nature movement.
+ Conservation / nature and animal lovers like the old WWF: hijacked by the new religion.
I guess the answer is to give the lefties some new cause to jump aboard and help the conservation peeps to get back to what they were good at like saving particular species that really were having a hard time like the natterjack toad etc.
I went for a walk in the hills last week with a local “Green” activist and she couldn’t name any of the trees or shrubs or small plants. My wife chuckled every time I asked – she knew I was winding her up. A black robin appeared and she was startled and puzzled. It really did seem like she had never been this close to nature before. We were all entranced – even tho’ I have seen this bird hundreds of times. Walking round you disturb small insects and the bird eats these – and follows you to get more.
Have you looked into the boron reactor someone was proposing, it looks like a much cheaper and more sane concept, even though there is some major hurdles to work out but instead of turning heat energy into electrons using steam turbines the concept is to capture the energy released by the boron in an electromagnetic field.
It’s a lot safer, could be completed sooner than the one in france and you can put other things in the reactor other than boron such as nuclear waste and have it turn into electrical energy and then a harmless lump of material afterwards rather than wasting 95% of the uranium potential by burying it for thousands of years.
>> large international fusion effort underway named ITER (Latin for “the way.”)
An interesting name that follows in the wake of Dan Brown’s new film ‘Angels and Daemons’ – illustrating the struggle between science and religion.
For those of you who are still perplexed, ‘The Way’ was the original name for the Church of Jesus and James (not the Church of Saul, which became Christianity).
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Fusion in 30 years? 80 years? I will either be an old man or dead.
We have fission today. Holding out this carrot of possible controlled fusion in the distant future in my belief just stall what could be today.
There is, of course, that now rather old aphorism that thermonuclear fusion is the energy supply of the future – and likely to stay that way.
But SG’s article is essentially right – sub-standard “renewables” such as wind power will never, ever meet mankind’s energy needs though they stand, in the short term, to make an awful lot of (our) money for some and give quasi-religious gratification to others.
ITER will be a fusion power station in that it will create an excess of power for periods of 20 minutes, IIRC. However it is unimaginable that it would be economically competitive with fission power for many decades. Also I believe fission reactors have less radioactive emissions because tritium, being hydrogen, is difficult to contain. One can only conclude that fusion is out of the picture as a major part of power generation for centuries, until concentrated ores of uranium and thorium are exhausted.
NASA should develop a fusion-powered space engine though, to build a space ship around it and blast all round the solar system exploring stuff. Chemical powered human space flight is pointless.
Fusion produces about 3.8 times as much energy per kilogram as fission. For uranium fission using breeder technology, if you use existing estimates of uranium and a simple extraction process from seawater then crank the numbers, we have enough uranium to supply our energy needs for a bit over 5 billion years. Then consider using thorium (about six times more plentiful than uranium) and you have a good idea how silly the AGW folks really are. For example, no one even prospects for thorium because it’s just too cheap and has no market. Fusion just makes the number even bigger.
Energy is used for everything, from cleaning up the environment, cleaning water, processing sewage, making fertilizer, growing food and surfing this site. The real issue should be how cheaply we can produce energy. You can conserve energy if that makes sense to you economically but with so much potential energy should be, well, dirt cheap.
ha ha ha !
It’s François Mitterrand or Jacques Chirac, you have to choose your french president !
By the way, it was François Mitterrand in 1985 who launched the project with his foreign collegues.
I hope we are buildind the future of mankind in south of France…
The roughly $2Trillion that the administration accountants say Cap&Trade will “bring in” over the next 8 years (vs the original estimate in the 0.6Trillion range) would pay for nearly all the fission power plants the USA would ever need — and have some left over for parallel rapid development of fusion.
However, the administration only plans to spend 0.15Trillion of that 2Trillion on “green energy” (I.e. climate research and ‘windmills’). The rest will go into the “general fund” to finance other initiatives.
What I am saying is that via Cap&Trade enough money will be coming into the system to pay for all the clean energy dreams outright. Yet, they choose not to do so. Why not?
In principle, there is infinite energy. What matters, however, is what we can deliver to the tank of your car in the near to medium future.
In the oil business, a version of the peak oil narrative has become mainstream in just the last few months. You can see James Hamilton and Daniel Yergin, two of the leading industry commentators, testimony to Congress here: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2009/05/link_to_jec_vid.html#comments
What you’ll see is, in fact, a call for increased investment in a variety of energy sources, including oil, gas, nuclear and renewables. It is not anti-oil or coal at all, but rather concerned about our ability to deliver needed quantities at acceptable cost in a timely fashion.
At that is the central issue.
If you want chapter and verse on this, JC says he is The Way in Joh 14:6, – while Acts 24:14 explains that ‘The Way’ was a sect.
You will note that the King James Bible translates the Greek hairisis as ‘heresy’ rather than ‘sect’, but the latter is a better translation (as most other Bibles attest). And it is amusing to note that the ‘Sect of Jesus’ (The Way) has become ‘a heresy’ in the King James version. Talk about rejecting the original teachings.
Note also in the INTER logo for fusion research, that the title is superimposed upon the rising disk of the Sun. There was a great deal of the old solar cults immersed the original Church of Jesus and James, which is why JC was said to be born on Dec 25 – the birth date of Sol Invictus. This is why JC was called the ‘light of the world’ Joh 9:5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_invictus
The ancient struggle between the Gnostic** (scientific) religion of Jesus and James (The Way), and the anti-science religion of Saul (Christianity) still simmers on – and not simply in films like Angels and Daemons.
** gnosis can be directly translated as ‘science’.
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You can add this category to the list (it might include your “green” friend)…
+Scientific/Technological Illiteracy: Many people totally lack the basic scientific education to even understand energy issues. This effectively renders them Luddites.
In June 2008, my wife and I went to Sedona, Arizona for a week. We’re both geoscientists (in the evil oil industry)…So almost all of our vacations have a geological focus. Well, we signed up for a hot-air balloon ride. There were six passengers and the pilot in the gondola. None of the other four passengers had the slightest clue as to how a hot-air balloon worked. One of the other passengers, a banker from Massachusetts, kept referring to the propane-generated flame as “helium”. So, of the seven passengers and pilot…Only the two geoscientists and the pilot knew how the balloon worked. Funny thing…Politics also came up. The only non-Obama supporters were the two geoscientists from Texas. The pilot didn’t want McCain to win because they would have to close the airspace around Sedona every time he flew in…;)
Wind and solar are great…But they are also very limited in their usefulness – particularly solar, unless we deploy orbital solar arrays that could microwave energy back to Earth. If we sited the wind turbines and the microwave receivers together, we could cook all of the birds that were killed by the turbines.
Leaving the CO2 good/bad debate aside…The only path to carbon-free energy travels through nuclear power. And it has to start with the technology that works now: fission.
Great post, Steve!
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
Lindsay H (04:01:59) :
The following timetable was presented at the IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in 2004 by Prof. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith.[2] These dates are conceptual and as such are subject to change.
Conceptual design is to be complete by 2017
Engineering design is to be complete by 2024
The first ‘Construction Phase’ is to last from 2024 to 2033
The first phase of operation is to last from 2033 to 2038
The plant is then to be expanded/updated
The second phase of operation is to last from 2040 onwards
The above timetable contradicts the official ITER time diagram, which is shown above btw with the correct link.
Maybe you are misremembering? Could you be remembering the DEMO?
http://www.iter.org/proj/Pages/ITERAndBeyond.aspx
And certainly it is not a french machine only. ITER is a world collaboration, and France won the location choice by offering the site close to the nuclear reactor and more central than Japan and with easier access to port than Spain ( the other contestants).
Electricity requirements for the ITER plant and facilities will range from 110 MW to up to 620 MW for peak periods of 30 seconds during plasma operation. Power will be provided through the 400 kV circuit that already supplies the nearby CEA Cadarache site – a one-kilometre extension will be enough to link the ITER plant into the network.
Achievements like these have led fusion science to an exciting threshold: the long sought-after plasma energy breakeven point. Breakeven describes the moment when plasmas in a fusion device release as least as much energy as is required to produce them. Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70% of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step device – ITER – which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.
—————-
If it’s safe, If it’s controllable it will be good. If it ever happens – it has been a long time coming. But will it arrive in time?
Thanks for the article Steven.
The point is that the Alarmism Movement initiated by the Club of Rome and the United Nations do not intend to feed 10 billion people.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/GlobalWarmingMyth.pdf
Think big indeed, billions of small sunshades in orbit around Earth, i just saw it again on Discovery. Nice idea but completely out of reality and not even for the fact that we don’t need such a sunshade. As they stated, if they are going to use rockets than they would have to launch a rocket every 20 minutes for at least 6.5 years to get that sunshade up.
The best rockets we have score a 97% succes rate (wich was nicely demonstrated in the program, the test rocket that only was supposed to simulate a launch failed because the seccond stage ignited two secconds late, that was just one of the 1300 things that could go wrong during a launch), guess how many launches will fail during the construction of that sunshade?
±5200 failed launches at minimum for those 6.5 years if we take 97% as granted. All those rockets with their toxic fuels and so on, al that schrapnell and debris in orbit (and that does not include those launches who are succesfull, because even those tend to leave debris behind).
Call me sceptic but i see more in fourth generation nuclear powerplants and eventually fusion-power (wich always seems to be 50 years away).
Until the call for windmills and solar came along,man had not gone backwards,good to see some trying to go forward.Man will find a way,he always has,there may come a day that man can harness energy from space,who knows?The possibilities are endless.It must suck to be a scientist,knowing that there is still so much to discover.
The news clips this morning showed the increased holiday traffic this year to last. The people and business’s seemed quite happy that America is getting out and driving again. Not everyone is happy. Hansen, the lead IPCC scientist, would describe this traffic as the Automobiles of DEATH. (google coal trains of death, he is deadly serious!).
Right now in Congress there is the Cap/Trade bill whose sole purpose is to take us common folk so that driving for fun becomes uneconomical. Once again our political leaders, urged on by the strong lobbyists of special interest groups, are creating an additional tax which will increase the cost of every bit of real energy we consume. Of course they won’t be taxing energy which is already expensive, the renewable energies. (often energy NOTS!)
A rather content-free of article about ultra dense deuterium is at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090511181356.htm . Their claim is that they have produced deuterium with a density of, umm “Imagine a material so heavy that a cube with sides of length 10 cm weights 130 tonnes, a material whose density is significantly greater than the material in the core of the Sun,” i.e. 130 x 10^6g/10^3 cm^3, or 130,000 gm/cm^3.
(No, don’t ask me why a web site with the word “science” in the URL doesn’t expect readers to know what density is.)
They can only make microscopic amounts, they don’t say how, but are looking at it as feed stock for laser inertial confinement fusion.
I wonder if muon catalysis can compress it further (muons are a lot like electrons only heavier).