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.
[Apologies if this is a repost. Well, it is, apologies if you see it twice.]
In addition to hot fusion, cold fusion refuses to go away. (People are trying to call it LENR, Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, since researchers generally don’t chill the experiments.) In a rather disappointing article from Science News, http://sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/41220/title/Cold_Panacea , the many commenters make up for it and include people actively involved with current research, and some have been involved since Pons & Fleischmann days.
If that article requires login, the major links in it are to lenr-canr.org and newenergytimes.com . [I left out the http to thwart the spam filter, sorry.]
If hot fusion continues to promise commercialization in the next 30 years (they’ve been saying that for 40 years now), cold fusion certainly deserves as much attention!
BTW, the most bizarre suggestion in the LENR arena is one that suggests muons from cosmic rays may help trigger fusion reactions. So perhaps cold fusion works best during a cooling climate. 🙂
Predictions of when we will have viable nuclear fusion is more of a fiction than predictions of what global temperatures will be 10 years from now.
At least climate modelling is based on current reality and not on hypothetical scientific and technological advances. Any solution to our current energy and climate crises that does not include nuclear fission is a polyanna’s fantasy.
Good video of Robert Bussard talking to the people at Google abot fusion.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606
It is true that govenrment (s as there are many of them) funding is inefficient, as I have said above. Governments though build airplane carriers, and the price of one such would cover the cost of ITER. So it is a matter of political will and foresight. Because of cheap oil no priority was given to fusion research and factors of pi abound in planning and delivery.
rbateman (10:07:45) :
Speaking of that same constant, I met a phsycist some -constant- years ago who was working on the mathematical equations for the magnetic field to hold the plasma. The problem, as he stated it, was that at fusion temps, the magnetic fields would break down, and the reaction was ended as the plasma fell from fusion temperature (i.e. – containment was lost).
Did ITER solve this yet?
Yes. Tokamaks work, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak .
It is a matter of size to be able to break even, get more energy out than the energy needed for the magnets.
Frank Ravizza (09:08:44) :
Cheap nuclear reaction:
http://www.giurfa.com/mass.html
JET at Culham, built in the 1980’s was the predessor of ITER showed it was possible to contain and maintain the reaction back in the 1980’s but NOT whether it was possible to actually generate useful power. JET, like ITER, was a joint venture but it was only designed to establish whether controlled and sustained fusion could be got.
I should add that i go back to DRAGON which didn’t work and fusion like efficient solar cells and much else was a long way in the future then and still is. And as has been pointed out here there is no shortage of fossil fuel or Uranium: the only equation that counts is the price of extracting it, distributing it and and turning it into power where that power is wanted at a price people are willing to pay.
Or as a current TV advertisment here says ‘Shimples’
Kindest Regards
Jon Jewett (08:16:31) : The metaphor “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” was published in the New York Times newspaper (byline: Walter Duranty) in the 1930s. It was used to justify the killing of an estimated 10 million people as necessary for the creation of a Socialist Utopia in the Fatherland of the Proletariat (i.e. the Soviet Union.).
While I understand the sentiment, you can not allow an SOB to steal a perfectly good bit of language or culture from you via an atrocity. That just hands power to the SOB. The problem is that one may then have some SOB decide to commit an atrocity in the name of “science” and make science evil. Or have a “truth commission:” and make “truth” evil.
That it the fundamental flaw at the heart of all “sensitivity training”. It gives power to the evil folks to then steal, corrupt, and own the language and culture. (Vis the Nazi corruption of a perfectly good moral sun sign such that now folks froth at the mouth when looking at 500 year old monuments and texts with a swastika in it – being culturally illiterate beyond 70 years…)
So please, find a way to help the injured past their injury, but do not ever let the evil SOB set the terms of the language by unchallenged appropriation. Otherwise I’ll have to set The Ministry Of Truth on you with a truth commission…
(I, for example, have a particular issue with the word “professor”. It was used to bring me pain by evil brainless children. Would it be right to forbid all of you to use the word since I’m “sensitive”? Or would it be better for me to “get over it”?… I chose the latter and now have a college level teaching credential. *I* own my language, and nobody else.)
I loved the part about “releasing it slowly”. Isaac Asimov humorously said that “supernova are industrial accidents”. We must move forward into realistic solutions to the energy question, while at the same time being sure to be on firm ground when we do. Does anyone in North America realize how much of France’s power comes from nuclear? Seems pretty safe to me.
The current energy and climate crises is a Malthusian fantasy.
There are many different researchs on fusion and fission. The media mostly talks about ITER, because the States give huge public funds, but this doesn’t mean it’s the only important one.
Here is an article which presents eleven projects:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/05/nuclear-fusion-and-new-nuclear-fission.html
Nuclear fusion/fission are not the answer to our energy needs. Nature has had 4.5 billion years to figure it out and nature uses the sun as it’s energy source. The sun is our nuclear reactor. All we have to do is harness the energy it gives us.
Where would the hydrogen for the fusion come from? While hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe it is incredibly scarce here on earth because our atmosphere can’t hold it.
Solar is the way to go.
Jon Jewett (08:16:31) :
Some good points, but I have a personal quibble.
The metaphor “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” was published in the New York Times newspaper (byline: Walter Duranty) in the 1930s. It was used to justify the killing of an estimated 10 million people as necessary for the creation of a Socialist Utopia in the Fatherland of the Proletariat (i.e. the Soviet Union.).
It carries negative connotations, especially to Ukrainians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
http://newsbusters.org/node/2886/print
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
Well, I am sorry about this. It is the first time I hear of it. I thought it was something like “it takes two to tango” or some such, an older saying.
Actually it is listed as a french proverb in http://french.about.com/library/express/blex_proverb.htm
On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs.
I will keep it in mind on such international fora.
MartinGAtkins (11:03:47) :
“The current energy and climate crises is a Malthusian fantasy.”
Agreed! I meant to put “crises” in quotes.
@ur momisugly Geonite (11:29:04)
So what’s a H2O molecule made off?
Fusion will be nice, but until then we have plenty of fission fuel. And if we run low, we can get more from an asteroid.
No need to get worked up. There is one sure fire way to know if this is really a viable alternative, and so far I do not see the tell tale evidence. I have not read one statement of one environmentalist against the concept. Therefore, it is not a viable alternative.
Hi Tony,
Could you also cover the Hyperion micro-fission & Z-Machine / Z Pinch fusion technologies? I see these as just as viable as the ITER effort.
Specific to nuclear fusion I sense that the Plasma X-ray implosion / Z-Pinch inertial confinement method appears superior to ITER because it natively creates more energy. Well above break even and in the billions of degrees Kelvin, well above the 1.5M degrK of the sun’s core. The super-heating in z implosions are conjectured to be the same phenomenon as what causes the extra energy observed in the sun’s corona (hotter than the sun’s surface).
The Z-Machine has already gone well past break even (well, at least on a phenomenological level) and faces mostly engineering obstacles that I suspect would be found in any laser-driven inertial confinement machine. ITER, however, has yet to be turned on & get past break-even. With such unbelievable heat possible almost purely clean fusions of He, Li & Be may also be feasible.
Unfortunately the discovery of feasible z-pinch fusion means that development of new electrically-driven z-pinch fusion weapons might be possible.
Geonite (11:29:04):
Although tritium is expensive because it must be created, hydrogen is so abundant as a waste product in some manufacturing processes that in Germany it’s given away free to hot air balloon enthusiasts. And deuterium can be purchased on line as deuterium oxide: click
Actually, one of the AGW arguments is that fossil fuels are limited, no energy. So this post is actually a very long strawman.
“Where would the hydrogen for the fusion come from? While hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe it is incredibly scarce here on earth because our atmosphere can’t hold it.”
That excerpt above from the solar panel enthusiast qualifies as quote of the week (for being so utterly ridiculous of course)
The sun is our nuclear reactor. All we have to do is harness the energy it gives us.
The Earth already did that, with the help of photosynthesis.
The big problem is the agenda that wants to take it away for themselves.
If we make fusion power at this point in time, they will surely make weapons out of it.
The desire to zap is irresistable as long as the human race sports selected rulers seized with madness.
The biggest favor science ever did was when the German scientists told Hitler that the A-bomb would not work.
“Life in the ‘developed’ world is not beautiful nor sustainable for at least one-third of its members, and two-thirds of the ‘developing world’ will never benefit from the current ‘development’ model and simply see their own community and beauty destroyed in the process.”
This is what socialists told the Chinese and Indians for most of the 20th century. Oh how wrong they were. The development model you refer to goes back thousands and thousands of years. Free trade is a paleolithic, natural system of exchange between creative sentient beings. Every time a theocracy or socialism has attempted to suppress this natural exchange they have caused famine, poverty, mass murder and chaos.
The problem with limousine liberal activists like the one I quoted is that they are under some guilt-complex illusion that free trade is the creation of evil white Republican Protestants. That’s why we have a leftwing media acting as a lapdog for a [snip] American president. He’s supposed to be the ethnic minority saviour (a Yoda figure) who will teach the white man the errors of his ways and return mankind to an eco-friendly prehistoric socialist utopia.
I see that as racist towards whites and blacks (they’re human, not Yoda), and also ignorant of what the world is like without development.
Frank Ravizza (09:08:44) :
Cheap nuclear reaction:
http://www.giurfa.com/mass.html
What I forgot to tell is that this process could make possible fission of elements of not so high atomic weight, by increasing probability of collision.
Ric Werme (10:19:42) : In addition to hot fusion, cold fusion refuses to go away
I have wondered that when resins are used to demineralize water, one takes the anions OH- and the other the cations H+, so if recirculated many times through the anionic column water deproportionates, then having more H+ than OH-, so H+ can fuse, this fusion would increase temperature.