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.
Thank you E. M. Smith
If I ever knew that I had long forgotten. I just remembered that India had made a bomb using it and that there was a lot of it around.
Nuclear fission is the cleanest safest and most practical way to go, so I suppose the US will continue to ignore it.
Practical fusion power is like the AGW catastrophe – always 10 to 50 years away. Still, it’s very promising and needs continued support.
But nuclear energy of any sort appears to be off the table for now. The Yucca Mountain repository for storing nuclear wastes is canceled and is in the process of being shut down. This is a clear signal that nuclear has no place in our ‘green’ future.
Yet it seems to me if our goals are really to reduce greenhouse warming and reduce our dependency upon fossil fuels, then nuclear power should one of our primary sources of energy for the next several decades. The fact that support is being withdrawn from nuclear power tells me our stated goals are not really what is motivating our push away from fossil fuels.
Ref the boron fuel cycle at wikipedia. Short version: no neutrons produced, no induced radioactivity, no radioactive waste issue. Downside: higher particle energies needed.
anna v:”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.”
No, the Polywell doesn’t have materials problems, because it doesn’t try to achieve the necessary particle energies by heating the plasma. It contains the target ions electrostatically, and fires protons at them. In fact, all of the high energy fusion techniques try to contain the plasma away from the walls of the reaction vessel because that would cool down the plasma and erode the vessel walls.
If Polywell pans out (and we should know in no more than two years), then it will be fairly easy to design and manufacture power reactors. The most expensive component will probably be the power converter that turns millions of volts into something more useful.
anna v: “I am suspicious that the navy supports this Polywell. It might have weapons capability, or maybe they are thinking of submarines.”
Yeah, the Navy envisions all electric surface vessels with rail guns; this will require tremendous amounts of electrical power. I would think their interest is blindingly obvious. Having a superior replacement for submarine reactors would be real nice, too.
Wind power used to be used to propel navel vessels too, so if you’re looking for a power source that has absolutely no military applications, there isn’t any. Live with it.
Unbelievable. Almost 130 comments and not a single post about Dr Julian Simon. This conventional scare (aas the overpopulation scare by the Ehrlichs and other pro-environementalist as J. ‘de-development’ Holdren for example) has long been refuted by current reality in general and the great work of Dr Julian Simon whose simple and intuitive ideas were supported by many Nobel Price’s economist winners (F. Hayek, M. Friedman to name a few). I suggest reading his 1996 book entitled ‘The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment’ (and available here). He resolved the resource and population scares better than non-problems. His humanist view still waits for a proper critique (that is, other than the usual eco-scares). His central point is that “supplies of natural resources are not finite in any serious way ; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource. Coal, oil and uranium were not resources at all until mixed well with human intellect” (Wall St. Journal, Ben Wattenberg).
“There is no reason to believe that at any given moment in the future the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent.”Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource
Bye,
TMTisFree
So we can get 90 TerraJoules per gram; Whoopee!
Well except we don’t have a way of converting much mass to energy. As Anna V points out, the mass change in fusion reactions is pitifully small. Yes if we had lots of anti-matter, we could just mix the two together and have a truly Cosmic Bomb; the ultimate blast.
Cosmologists agonize over why it is that there is only a very small amount of anti-matter left in the universe; if they were created simultaneously why is it that the anti-matter disappeared.
Well the answer to that is so simple I don’t know why somebody else didn’t think of it before I did. Why would you name the surviving material Anti-matter; rather than matter; it makes no sense. So that is why it is the anti-matter that is scarce.
The problem with fusion energy is caused by “string theory” ! Strings have a problem that they can only pull; they can’t push. Electronic switches have the same problem; they can only pull; no pushing. If we had an electronic switch that pushed on command; we wouldn’t need any power supplies at all. You simply parallel a “pull” switch with a “push” switch and you get a zero with the pull switch on, and a one with the push switch on; and both on is prohibited.
We have CMOS switches; but both the N-FET and the P-FET can only pull, down and up respectively; so now you need a sky hook to tie the P-FET to so it can pull up.
So what does this have to do with fusion energy ? Well the best known “string” is gravity such as the gravitational string that ties the earth to the sun, so we don’t fly off into space.
The sun holds itself together with string theory; gravitation tries to pull each particle or plasma ion to the center of mass; and the more mass you have, the stronger the string gets and the more gravitational pull. Eventually with enough mass the pull is strong enough to pull the nuclei close enough to react and form helium. Because the strings pull the same in all directions, that mass of plasma, for the most part stays nice and symmetircal, so everything collapses uniformly.
So in a fission bomb, you have to use energy (a power supply) to drive the materials together into a greater than critical mass for the fission chain reaction to keep on going.
The NIF over in Livermore, plans to do the same thing with lasers; 192 of them. But it’s a hopeless task; to take microgams of D and T that are frozen as ice on the inside of a perfectly spherical (nearly) Berryllium fuel capsule at a few Kelvins; then mash them symmetrically to heat the whole thing to 100s of millions of Kelvins to make it fuse.
Well now you have to extract all of that heat out of there somehow; clean up all the mess with a cleaning crew, and put another fuel capsule down, and feeze it back down to a few K to do the whole thing all over again.
Does anybody know who Rube Goldberg was ? Well he invented Laser Fusion.
Now you you have a perfect spherical symmetry, so you get that perfect implosion, and still have a way to get fuel in and energy out.
So magnetic confinement is the answer. Unlike the nanosecond laser blast, magnetic confinement will push in perfectly symmetrically; not for nano seconds; but for climate time scales like 30 years. We know that because the computers tell us that is so. Of course you still dont’ have any entrance and exit.
It’s a good idea at this point to bone up on “Earnshaw’s Theorem”, all about stable positions in electric and magnetic static fields; and why there aren’t any.
So mother nature has this very simple fusion reactor that uses plentiful string theory to hold itself together just by being damn big and massive; and when you get enough mass together you automatically get a fusion reactor; what could be simpler than that ?
So we are going to ignore Earnshaw’s Theorem; and string theory, and we are going to make a bottle that pushes, instead of pulls.
There’s one little word up there that is important; “static”. Earnshaw, doesn’t say you can’t have dynamic stability; as in the B-2 flying wing has dynamic stability so it can fly; so long as you keep supplying power (as in energy) to the computer that tries to keep up with the natural instability of the flying wing; and make manouvering corrections, to keep it flying.
Too bad if one little transistor quits, and the computer crashes; you don’t need to fix the computer, because the B-2 crashes as well.
Anyone want to take odds on the magnetic bottle not crashing; when the computer crashes.
I plan to be somewhere else with all of my descendants; when they get ready to smoke test that practical pushing device that doesn’t rely on string theory to give us cheap clean plentiful fusion energy.
George
To coincide with the launch of the film Angels&Demons CERN has launched a website and an exhibition to explain some of the science behind the plot. Don’t know your antimatter from your God particle?
http://angelsanddemons.cern.ch/
Dave Michalets (13:13:40) :
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.
The fusion mechanism has been proven in the big earth laboratory. It is called the H Bomb, and it worked.
It is an engineering problem to go from explosion to controlled reaction, similarly to the car engine, where instead of having a molotof bomb, you have pistons and motion.
Wondering Aloud (07:00:57) : Thank you E. M. Smith
You are most welcome.
I just remembered that India had made a bomb using it and that there was a lot of it around.
I suspect that the early US Th program was shelved and focus put on U rather than Th as a way to deflect rogue states away from the U233 back door. But now that India has gone and done it, the point is moot. Basically, you can cook some Th for a short time, chemically separate U233, use it to easily make small effective bombs, and bypass the whole enrichment boondoggle. Using a CANDU type reactor this would be near trivial (which is why the US tried very hard to drive it out of the market with big and expensive light water reactors).
By ignoring Th, you were left with U enrichment and / or Pu production from U (that is complicated by the number of U isotopes – back to enrichment…) where Th has less isotopic complication. Really a neat intelligence coup, if you think about it. Even Pakistan went down the centrifuge path and Iran is following it.
(And I would not be saying any of this were it not for the fact that the present “push” for Thorium based commercial power implies to me that the whole issue has been mooted by current events… i.e. Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel, probably Iran Real Soon Now, etc. and India having made a bomb from Power Reactor Pu just to prove the point that they could…)
Nuclear fission is the cleanest safest and most practical way to go, so I suppose the US will continue to ignore it.
Yup. AND we’re going to ignore our vast coal reserves and oil shale too… No, we just MUST have a shortage and the only way to do that is to get all those giant quantities of energy supply “off limits” by hook or by crook…
So Hansen and Gore are making carbon off limits. Established nuclear fears have put U and Th off limits. And what is promoted? The “Someday Real Soon Now” hydrogen economy and fusion… both conveniently a generation or two beyond reach.
While I strongly believe the mantra “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”, there is a very well fitted pattern here that is not, IMHO, adequately explained by stupidity… What to make of it, though, is a place I’m not ready to visit. Yet.
tmtisfree (09:31:05) : Unbelievable. Almost 130 comments and not a single post about Dr Julian Simon.
Thank you! Love the read.
From:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR11.txt
The Long-Running Running Out of Oil Drama
Just as with coal, running out of oil has long been a nightmare, as this brief history shows:
1885, U.S. Geological Survey: “Little or no chance for oil in California.”
1891, U. S. Geological Survey: Same prophecy by USGS for Kansas and Texas as in 1885
for California.
1914, U. S. Bureau of Mines: Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels, perhaps 10 years supply.
1939, Department of the Interior: Reserves to last only 13 years.
1951, Department of the Oil and Gas Division: Reserves to last 13 years.
The fact that the gloomy official prophesies of the past have regularly been proven false does not prove that every future gloomy forecast about oil will be wrong. And forecasts can be overoptimistic, too. But this history does show that expert forecasts often have been far too pessimistic. We therefore should not simply take such forecasts at face value, because of the bad record as well as because they are founded on an unsound method of proven reserves, as discussed in Chapter 2.
THE LONG-RUN HISTORY OF ENERGY SUPPLIES
The statistical history of energy supplies is a rise in plenty rather than in
scarcity. As was discussed at length in chapter 1, the relevant measures are the production costs of energy as measured in time and money, and the price to the consumer.
Suddenly finding that someone else has broken trail in front of you in deep snow can be incredibly refreshing… 😎
Anna V: The fusion mechanism has been proven in the big earth laboratory. It is called the H Bomb, and it worked.
My comment was apparently not clear. I am not doubting that fusion is possible. A fission bomb can provide enough energy for many nuclei to combine to release the energy of the H-bomb.
I am questioning whether the engineering problem for finding a new and efficient source of energy has been appropriately defined when basing the effort on the assumption that fusion happens at the core of the Sun and the mechansim can be practically managed. Early fusion reactors attempted to use the Z-pinch (a plasma mechanism often mentioned in the Electric Universe concept) but it was found to be too unstable. The earlier Tokamak test reactor was unable to get more energy out than put in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_Fusion_Test_Reactor
Rather than spending billions of dollars on a huge fusion reactor I was quite impressed that some entrepreneurs have sought other alternatives for an innovative energy source, like:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/applications.shtml
I am just a bit pessimistic about this HUGE effort meeting its promises. The complexity of this reactor makes me wonder about its reliability. The Hadron Collider also did not start out well. Fission reactors have been proven to be capable of a great deal of power but the difficulty of the controlling/cooling the reactor and dealing with the nuclear waste make the technology unattractive. Bigger is not always better though ‘big projects’ go well with government funding.
@Dave Michalets (19:13:49) :
So is that blacklightpower hydrino stuff you referenced real? I’ve aggregated some links and asked that question here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/are-hydrinos-for-real/
And I have no idea if this stuff is real or bogus. More “settled science” or just a slick operator?
The claim seems to be that hydrogen can be dropped to a fraction of quantum base state and you get energy out. I can’t tell if it has truthyness or bogosity…
Dave Michalets (19:13:49) :
How fusion happens or if it happens in the sun has nothing to do with the design of ITER.
The scale up of the tokamak is necessary to break even and get enough energy out for use. It is not for fun of making larger machines.
If ITER were better funded and managed progress would be faster and safer. I agree that government programs and experiments by consensus are cumbersome and accidents can happen as in the LHC. Which LHC accident was due, in my opinion, to the stinginess and outsourcing to labs of operations that should be supervised by CERN engineers.
Re anna v and Dave Michalets above.
It seems that Dave thinks that ITER is somehow a huge machine; which he thinks is a boondoggle.
I don’t know beans about ITER, since I just haven’t kept up on fusion research, so this thread actually is my introduction to ITER.
But we can put ITER in perspective by just considering the NIF facility in Livermore Ca; which isn’t more than about ten miles via crow from where I am sitting.
The 192 laser beams that operate in NIF operate at an optical power level of 500TerraWatts, that exceeeds the entire electric power capacity of every powerplant in the USA, including all those portable Honda units that are popular in hurrican and flooding regions of the USA. Fortuately for the power grid; that laser blast only lasts for about 20-30 nanoseconds; and the final output energy from the nuclear fusion that may occur when they squish the pea sized Berrylium fuel capsule; may possibly make a cup of coffee; but that’s about all.
In these systems, energy levels tend to go up as volume while losses tend to go up as surface area; so bigger is better; and as anna explains you have to scale existing tokamak designs to larger sizes to win at that game.
Now the NIF coffee maker is only the size of a ten storey building; and the laser light travels about 305m or so, for each of the 192 beams, so it is a massive machine.
But it is still miniscule compared to a wind farm, or a PEV solar farm, or even conventional power plants.
I’m not as confident as Anna is that controlled fusion will ever work; but then she is the one who has worked in this high energy Physics field; so I take her inputs very seriously.
The size of ITER doesn’t faze me a bit; except I still don’t see how they plan to extract energy from it. I gather that the exit mechanism is to let the neutrons escape (how are you going to stop them from escaping) and then somehow gather the kinetic energy of the neutrons into some thermal form.
Which is actually quite ingenious since the neutrons aren’t subject to the magnetic bottle confinement. You still have to somehow get actual fuel in and waste products out.
I don’t have a problem with a multinational program of this magnitude pursuing such a goal; despite the fact that I have very low confidence in its success; and I shudder to think what a pickle we will be in, if and when they succeed.
As for Blacklight energy systems; I’ll just wait until I can buy one off the shelf down at Fry’s. Those guys wouldn’t even get a hearing on the Art Bell Dreamland radio program.
George
E.M.Smith and tmtisfree, thanks for the reminder about Dr. Julian Simon. “The Ultimate Resource II” is one of the most memorable books I’ve read. Reading it should be a prerequisite for voting. 🙂
Gary Hladik (18:31:17) : E.M.Smith and tmtisfree, thanks for the reminder about Dr. Julian Simon.
You’re welcome, but really the thanks go all to tmtisfree… I just followed his pointer and enjoyed what I found there…