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.
There is a rather interesting discussion going on at Talk Polywell including Physicists and Engineers and the conclusion is that ITER has almost zero chance of being a viable energy source. In fact many doubt that it can ever work.
In fact I’m inclined to say that ITER is intellectually as big a fraud as AGW. Thank the Maker that at $20 bn it is relatively low cost.
This is a good place to start but there is lots more. Esp. check out what Physicist Art Carlson has to say.
http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?p=20223#20223
The main problem of fusion reactors are immense engineering problem. The enormous amount of energy that would be generated in a fusion reactor when a big size commercial reactor is built then the problem of taking out that heat pose a huge task. But once this engineering problem is tackled then not only the future energy crisis will vanish but gigantic spaceships also could be built for exploration of deep space for colonozation. For a glimpse into the world of future a visit to the website will be helpful. It shows the shape of future civilization in a megacity in the year 2080 with advanced futuristic technologies. http://www.eloquentbooks.com/MegalopolisOne2080AD.html
You can’t make a fusion bomb without enriched Uranium (Little Boy) or Plutonium (Fat Man.)
Thermonuclear weapons require a fission bomb at their core, to achieve the energy required to initiate a thermonuclear explosion. Thus the danger lies in the abundance of fissionable material associated with nuclear reactors, and in particular breeder reactors.
The boron reactor some one was referring to above is the Polywell Fusion Reactor. Experiments are ongoing – funded by the US Navy for about $5 mn a year. Expected time to get a yes no answer is two years or less.
You can read more about it here:
Bussard’s IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained
Once you have looked at that scroll around the blog:
http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/
To find out more about the technology and funding.
Steven Goddard:
Actually what fusion bombs require is an x-ray implosion. The Z-machine shares a similar x-ray plasma implosion technique as hydrogen bombs, using a hohlraum. http://everything2.com/title/hydrogen%2520bomb
Good news, bad news: Good news that billion-degree x-ray plasmas have been produced in the lab nearly achieving break-even. Bad news: Z-pinch hydrogen bombs may be possible leading to thermonuclear proliferation.
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/thermonuclear-weapons.html
http://everything2.com/title/Edward%2520Teller
Attn Smokey
My point entirely. When ballooning you do not mix hot air and hydrogen. One or the other is fine but trying to mix the two is a very, very bad idea. Trust me on this.
But oddly this emphasises a point about fuel.
The problem with hydrogen ballooning today is not so much the cost of the gas but of transporting it to your balloon because the only practical method is to move it in cylinders.
True the volume needed is tiny compared to a hot air balloon, a few thousand cubic feet, and the gas is cheap, especially in Germany, but unless you are filling your balloon at the works the cost of moving the gas is considerable.
I did some gas ballooning in my youth and compared to hot air ballooning it is a very skilful art and although the flight itself is best described as ethereal: the landing is less so.
No nasty noisy burners you see: but then no simple control by turning the burner on when in difficulty.
Again natural gas, methane, which is lighter than air and can be used in balloons, is potentially a vast and cheap resource but the problem is moving it from there to here as it were. Coal is easy to move, oil needs a little more care but gas is a problem. Pumping it by pipeline over long distances is very expensive in capital plant, but the running cost of the pumps is irrelevant since you have free gas to burn as it were.
Liquefying methane is even more capital intensive and it is notable that after the industry got its fingers badly burnt in the 1980’s by US cost controls that a few years ago it refused to invest the some two hundred billion dollars needed for LNG this time around. True there are a few LNG tankers and terminals but much of this limited capacity lies idle.
For example in the UK there is a complete terminal capable of handling about 10% of the country’s needs and built with private capital: but it has never turned a wheel. If you want to know how the politicians screwed this one up please ask: I can tell you but it would take a very long post.
Synthesising methane into easily transported liquid hydrocarbons is also a practical technology which is available now and can produce clean fuels with no sulphur etc. Just as important it means no nasty new refineries in the USA. And adapting the ships to carry these more volatile fuels is easy.
BUT it costs. Roughly the industry won’t invest in this technology unless it an see a guaranteed price of about 60 dollars a barrel. At that price the USA could buy all the clean synthetic oil and petrol (gasoline) it needs and will need for the next hundred years or two: and get it all from stable friendly supplying countries.
Of course the infrastructure would cost about a trillion dollars but that doesn’t have to be paid up all at once: it is an investment over a decade or two.
How much is President Obama asking for?
Kindest Regards
Mike McMillan (14:57:15) :
The notion that fusion is going to be “clean” doesn’t hold water, heavy or otherwise.
The notion comes about from the fact that it can never become a runaway accident and there are no used rods to dispose safely. The whole machine, robots and all, will become extremely radioactive and will have to be abandoned, not decommissioned at the end of its cycle. This will be a small price to pay, some acres not to be visited for a long time.
M. Simon (20:18:04) :
In fact I’m inclined to say that ITER is intellectually as big a fraud as AGW. Thank the Maker that at $20 bn it is relatively low cost.
Wrong. ITER is the result of a long series of studies with Tokamaks , with the largest at JET showing that sustainable fusion controlled by the magnetic fields works according to the equations. ITER is the study of the engineering problems in size and materials.
ITER is as the car engine that turns a Molotof bomb into useful energy used in our cars.
This does not mean that other research need not be carried out, as this Polywell. It is maybe the turbine solution to the cylinder solution . They probably are also thirty years away from usefulness, considering that they will also have the same/similar materials problems.
I am suspicious that the navy supports this Polywell. It might have weapons capability, or maybe they are thinking of submarines.
I will repeat that if any large country had really wanted fusion power , they could have funded it by themselves and we would have had it already.
rbateman (13:53:36) :
The biggest favor science ever did was when the German scientists told Hitler that the A-bomb would not work.
Operation Alsos and Epsilon would suggest otherwise.
leebert (20:57:46) :
Steven Goddard: Thermonuclear weapons require a fission bomb at their core, to achieve the energy required to initiate a thermonuclear explosion.
Actually what fusion bombs require is an x-ray implosion. The Z-machine shares a similar x-ray plasma implosion technique as hydrogen bombs, using a hohlraum. http://everything2.com/title/hydrogen%2520bomb
Good news, bad news: Good news that billion-degree x-ray plasmas have been produced in the lab nearly achieving break-even. Bad news: Z-pinch hydrogen bombs may be possible leading to thermonuclear proliferation.
Actually, Steve is right.
Mike
former B-52 driver and Nuke Weapons School grad.
I’ve lurked here for about six months and posted on a very few threads when I thought I might have something to add. Other than that, I take a lot of information to work for the lunchroom discussions. I’ve really enjoyed all of the discussion that takes place here. There appear to be a few here who know how the whole fusion/fission thing works to release energy (aside from the basic E=MC^2). However, there are a few posts on this thread that show a lack of understanding about how nuclear reactions work (fusion and fission). For example:
Adolfo Giurfa (14:09:22) :
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.
Increasing the density of a fissile material will increase the probability of a collision for a given neutron flux and, therefore, increase the amount of fuel that can be burned before atom density precludes a sustainable reaction; however, the design of a fuel element or rod is much more complex than just increasing the fuel density. That is way beyond the scope of this thread.
What would be useful, IMHO, to those unfamiliar with nuclear processes is a little easier to explain. When we talk about the energy released from fusion, it comes from the mass defect of the reaction. Specifically, the product of the reaction has less mass less than the reactants (I know, this is the duh part of my post). For Deuterium to helium, the reactants (2xH-2) have a mass of 4.0282036 AMU and the product (He-4) has a mass of 4.0026032 AMU for a total defect of 0.0256004 AMU which is released as energy. The equation works much the same way for fission as far as mass defect. This mass defect can be expressed as binding energy per nucleon and can be shown on a graph.
From DOE-HDBK-1019/1-93 Figure 20 Page 93:
“Figure 20 illustrates that as the atomic mass number increases, the binding energy per nucleon decreases for A > 60. The BE/A curve reaches a maximum value of 8.79 MeV at A = 56 and decreases to about 7.6 MeV for A = 238. The general shape of the BE/A curve can be explained using the general properties of nuclear forces. The nucleus is held together by very short-range attractive forces that exist between nucleons. On the other hand, the nucleus is being forced apart by long range repulsive electrostatic (coulomb) forces that exist between all the protons in the nucleus.”
This graph has a very steep rise for the light elements and a slow decrease for the heavier elements.
To put it more simply, if I fuse small atoms and the product has atomic mass of 56 AMU or less, energy will be released. Conversely, if I fission a large atom and the fission products have masses of approximately 56 AMU or more, energy will be released. The same is true for radioactive decay-the resulting atom has a higher BE/A. For fission, the reaction can be caused by a low energy (thermal) neutron for a few isotopes (primarily U-235 for commercial use) or a high energy (fast) neutron for some others (primarily Pu-239 for commercial use). Since a neutron doesn’t have to overcome the electrostatic charge of the nucleus, this reaction can occur at low temperature (actually low kinetic energy). For fusion, the atoms must have enough kinetic energy to overcome the electrostatic charge of the nucleus and must, therefore, be at high temperature.
From http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucbin.html:
“Nuclear binding energy = Δmc2”
and
“The binding energy curve is obtained by dividing the total nuclear binding energy by the number of nucleons. The fact that there is a peak in the binding energy curve in the region of stability near iron means that either the breakup of heavier nuclei (fission) or the combining of lighter nuclei (fusion) will yield nuclei which are more tightly bound (less mass per nucleon).”
and
“Iron-56 is abundant in stellar processes, and with a binding energy per nucleon of 8.8 MeV, it is the third most tightly bound of the nuclides. Its average binding energy per nucleon is exceeded only by 58Fe and 62Ni, the nickel isotope being the most tightly bound of the nuclides.”
That brings us back to this:
“The inventors claim that if we introduce 105 eV to the iron (isotope 56), its change to the iron isotope 54. The energy generated by this nuclear reaction inside the iron rod will produce an energy gain of 20,000 eV. The energy required for generating the isotopic mutation is produced by a nuclear magnetic resonance effect. The parametric excitation is obtained by the coil #2 acting as the pump.”
I have to assume that this process is supposed to release two neutrons. The mass defect for this reaction (Fe-56 to Fe-54 + 2 N-1) is + 0.0220025 AMU. Since 931400 KeV is equivalent to 1 AMU, it would require approximately 20493 KeV to cause this reaction. This agrees with Fe-56 being the third most tightly bound isotope. I think the authors switched a sign somewhere or they have discovered some physics of which I am unaware.
The masses for all of the calculations came from http://atom.kaeri.re.kr. I left my chart of the nuclides on my desk at work, I didn’t think I would need it this weekend. ;-}
Hope I didn’t offend anyone with this post and, hopefully, at least one person will find it informative.
SSSailor (06:29:44) :
What boat(s) have you been on? Just the Chicago SSN-721 myself.
Andy
I have always been skeptical of the motives of anyone who claims we need to stop using fossil fuels but is unwilling to replace them in electric generation with nuclear powered generators.
I can only come up with two possible reasons for a person to oppose nuclear power if they fear CO2 caused warming. 1. They don’t care about warming they simply oppose modern society or 2. They lack the ability to make rational decisions.
One question though Steven isn’t there a fissionable Thorium isotope?
FIFY
polywell fusion IS clean because it fuses protons with B11, a clean aneutronic reaction that does direct electric power conversion, no need for neutron heating of water or other coolants. The magrid captures highly charged alphas escaping and converts the charge to electrical current.
Ralph Ellis,
It’s an interesting argument, except for the that the earliest unbattested reference to December 25 as a celebration of the birth of Jesus is 243 AD and the Sol Invictus was created by Aurelian in 274 AD. But hey, who wants to inject facts into criticisms of the church?
Sorry, everyone, for the O/T, but if outright fallacies are going to be excepted as posts I feel the need to rebut them (in fact, isn’t this site all about rebutting fantasies?).
Ralph Ellis, do you get all of your information regarding the Bible from Dan Brown? You might try actually reading the Bible if you want to criticize it.
You state:
[/i]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.[/i]
Your intention here is obvious: that the modern “church”, which seems to be comprised of both Catholics and Protestants in your statements, is somehow NOT the original church (a la Dan Brown) and that this modern church branded the “original” church as heretics. You pull a verse fragment out of context out of the text, throw some gnostic/Brownian double-speak about word translation in, et voila, your conspiracy is proven. Now, take the text IN CONTEXT (and from the KJV, even though it’s not my favorite translation just to make the point complete). The scene is Paul’s trial in Jerusalem:
[i]Acts 24:12-15
12And they [Jewish Elders] neither found me in the temple [in Jerusalem] disputing with any man, neither raising up the people, neither in the synagogues, nor in the city:
13Neither can they prove the things whereof they now accuse me.
14But this I confess unto thee, that after the way [Paul states he follows The Way?] which they [Jewish Elders] call heresy [NOT Paul or the KJV or the “modern” church, but the Jewish Elders call it heresy], so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets:
15And have hope toward God, which they themselves [Jewish Elders] also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust. [/i]
Please leave Dan Brown and Gnostic criticism of Christianity out of off-topic arguments and I’ll not have to waste everyone else’s time refuting it.
Oh, and just to toss one more log on this almost infinite energy fire, we can treat all our present nuclear “waste” as fuel, should we wish to. This, IMHO, is the biggest reason NOT to entomb “waste” at Yucca Mountain. I’ve added the “bold”.
From:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Small_nuclear_power_reactors
HTRs can potentially use thorium-based fuels, such as highly enriched uranium (HEU) with thorium, uranium-233 with thorium, and plutonium with thorium. Most of the experience with thorium fuels has been in HTRs. General Atomics say that the MHR has a neutron spectrum is such and the TRISO fuel so stable that the reactor can be powered fully with separated transuranic wastes (neptunium, plutonium, americium and curium) from light water reactor used fuel. The fertile actinides enable reactivity control and very high burn-up can be achieved with it – over 500 GWd/t – the Deep Burn concept and hence DB-MHR design. Over 95% of the Pu-239 and 60% of other actinides are destroyed in a single pass.
So all the hand wringing over nuclear “waste” and all the folks saying we are going to run out of Uranium since we only use some small part of it in a reactor load; are all missing the point. We do that because it’s easy and cheap. We don’t “waste” the large part of the energy left in a “spent” fuel bundle. We’re just saving it for future generations…
BTW, given the decay rate of “hot isotopes” in “spent” fuel bundles: After a couple of hundred years the radioactivity level is roughly the same as the original ore from whence the fuel came. All the hand wringing over 25,000 and 50,000 year “waste” storage fails to mention that this numbers imply holding the fuel until it’s as radioactive as your swimming pool… not just letting it cook back to the natural level of a Uranium ore body.
It’s a somewhat different perspective, isn’t it? If you don’t need to guard natural Uranium deposits, why do you need to guard a “waste” depository to lower levels of radioactivity than that? I’m very uncomfortable with “waste” that must be guarded for 25,000 years or life on earth ends. I’m much more comfortable with “waste” that needs guarding for 200 years or somebody making a house out of it might have a modestly increased risk of some cancers after a few decades… I have no problem at all with “waste” that needs burning up for fuel during the next reactor refueling in a couple of years.
Wondering Aloud (22:56:00) : One question though Steven isn’t there a fissionable Thorium isotope?
Thorium is fertile, not fissile. But that’s just fine for making energy. Add Thorium to fuel bundles and it breeds U233, which is fissile. That then burns as “fuel” and you get oodles of energy. IIRC, one of the first commercial power reactor was fueled with Thorium. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#Reactors
for an interesting bit of forgotten history… Oh, and both the USA and India have made nuclear bombs out of U233 derived from Thorium. In some ways it is better than U235 and can be treated more like Pu (i.e. implosion bombs with small cores, not so much wasted in the explosion, chemical separation from Th makes it relatively easy to extract). The biggest issue is the presence of U232 IIRC that is a hot isotope so you need fuel bundles that are not cooked long (again like Pu production reactors) and remote reprocessing or you end up cooking yourself with radiation…
So yes, Thorium works well as reactor fuel and offers a kind of back door to small Pu like bombs based on U233 and with some of the same issues (but without the Pu specific issues). Oh, and the world has so much of it we haven’t even bothered to inventory it. There is a bunch in the Carolinas in river placer deposited sands that is not mined due to Brazil being cheaper:
There are monzanite sand beaches in some parts of the world where you can go sit on tons of the stuff… Kerala coast India, for example. But I wouldn’t suggest it…
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2573177/Mutations-induced-by-natural-radiation-in-Kerala-coast
I’d suggest using it up in power reactors “to clean up the planet”, but that would just get folks tossing rocks at me again… 😎
Geonite (11:29:04) :
“Solar is the way to go.”
Thanks Geonite. I don’t know where you live but where I live your proposed power source would be a death sentence.
There seems to be a bit of confusion regarding the workings of a thermonuclear device. Some folks are fixated on the term “temperature” without recognizing that “temperature” has meanings other than “degrees Centigrade”.
It is important to remember that fusion requires an initial input of ENERGY.
The Primary of a thermonuclear device does, indeed, generate a “high temperature”. However, we need to remember that “high temperature” = “high energy”, and that the highly-energetic photons in this particular case are X-Ray photons.
In order to use the ENERGY supplied by the Primary, it is necessary to focus the X-Ray photons, so that maximum use can be made of them. Delivering the energy from the Primary to the Secondary was the major stumbling block in the original effort to design these devices.
I studied weapons design 35 years ago.
Didn’t get to drive a BUFF — wish I had!
Too many contributors suggest that since the Sun has an independent internal fusion engine a fusion driven reactor can similarly harness such energy. That solar fusion theory is not proven beyond all doubt. As many should know, the solar surface is much colder than its atmosphere, a situation most easily explained by an external energy source rather than by some odd heat transfer mechanism to move internal heat to the atmosphere while keeping the intervening surface cold.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Atmosphere
WUWT contributors sometimes note the work of Dr Theodor Landscheidt who suggested the solar sunspot cycles could be related to the motions of the major planets implying the Sun’s energy is directly affected by its environment.
http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com/
There are other internet sites that investigate our Electric Universe and alternate explanations for the mechanisms in our Sun.
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x49g6gsf
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=aapprbh6
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm
While we can certainly wish that a fusion reactor will provide more energy than mankind could ever hope for, it is quite possible that an approach (as described above) based on what is assumed to be the fusion mechanism within the sun might NOT be successful.
Dave Michalets (13:13:40) :
I have come across the Electric Sun/Universe theory from time to time, and find it interesting, not only because it proposes an explanation for the hot corona and the cool sunspots and surface, but because of the uncanny visual similarities between observed plasma phenomena in laboratories and those that play out on a galactic scale. But I have never seen a discussion between advocates of this theory and mainstream (speaking just of the Sun) solar scientists. That would probably be too far afield for this blog, but perhaps if one exists someone could point us to it.
FWIW, the second link that Dave Michalets provides suggests there are climate-science implications for the Sun-Earth connection with the Electric Sun theory. . .
/Mr Lynn
As others have noted, the time horizon for the achievement of nuclear fusion as an energy source does not seem to be moving any closer as we move out in time. Be that as it may, one can still hope that some day it really will come to fruition. However, my prediction is that this would tend to occur faster if we live in a society where fossil fuels are essentially made more expensive in order to correct the market externalities associated with their use rather than in a world where a new energy source such as fusion has to compete against artificially cheap energy supplies from fossil fuels because we continue to allow the real environmental costs associated with these fossil fuels to be borne collectively instead of by the producer / consumer.
Oh, and just to comment on the premise of “Angels and Demons”, to state that “mankind probably won’t have access to that sort of technology for some time into the future” seems like somewhat of an understatement to me. When I watched the movie, I was quite amused at the premise that such a combination of matter and anti-matter could serve as an energy source when we have to generate the anti-matter! To get net energy out of such a scheme would require repealing the laws of thermodynamics. (One could, however, at least in principle imagine generating and using anti-matter as an energy storage medium, in the same way that hydrogen is contemplated as being a convenient energy storage medium.)
Joel Shore,
The only thing keeping fusion from happening is a lack of commitment from government. Each new administration is convinced that everyone before them were idiots, and hits the reset button at the National Labs.
Hansen says we have less than four years to save the planet, which makes it difficult to do any serious long-term planning. Panic and rational thought rarely work in concert.
Allen63 (04:35:16) :
“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?”
Energy is NOT the agenda. Conforming your lifestyle is.