Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Forbes contributor Steve Denning, the best hope of finding a solution to climate change is to commit the global economy to discovering an entirely novel source of energy.
The One Viable Solution To Climate Change
Jul 12, 2019, 06:37pm
Steve Denning Senior Contributor
Leadership Strategy I write about Agile management, leadership, innovation & narrative.…
Something has to be done. But what? The problem is that none of the paths presently under consideration are viable, except one.
The Limits Of Wind, Solar And Batteries
As explained in a paper from the Manhattan Institute, we are near the theoretical limits of what is possible from efficiency improvements in existing hydrocarbon technology or from wind, and solar energy and battery storage: those technologies are radically inadequate to handle the challenge of climate change.
…
Nuclear Power
Other experts push for greater investment in nuclear power, which is the second largest low-carbon power source after hydroelectricity. It supplies about 10% of global electricity generation. While these experts push for nuclear power as “the answer”, disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima dominate the popular imagination about nuclear power and make wider implementation politically difficult.…
More Regulatory Action And Voluntary Efforts
Meanwhile, regulatory action or voluntary efforts will be utterly insufficient to make a difference. The 2015 Paris Agreement called on countries to individually make their best efforts to contain the damage. This was perceived as a positive step, but it was not enough to stay climate change, even if the Agreement were to be fully implemented.
…
A New Manhattan Project
So what if a massive effort in basic research with the best minds and adequate funding was undertaken to find new technology for creating non-polluting energy for the planet?
What if it was launched by one country to get it started and then other countries were invited to join it so as to make it a multinational effort.
Is there any real alternative, except denial?
When do we stop our magical thinking and work on the one thing that will sustain the human race? Is there anything more urgent or important?
When do we start?
Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/07/12/the-one-viable-solution-to-climate-change/
Has anyone else noticed how weak green excuses for not embracing nuclear power are? I mean, on one hand greens tell us the world will end in 12 years or by 2050 or whatever, yet in the same breath they tell us nuclear power is too dangerous because there might be a few meltdowns.
How could the risk of a few meltdowns possibly be worse than the end of the world?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The final solution to this problem is very simple: Do away with all users of man-engineered energy; then there should be plenty of natural energy from burning wood and dried dung to take care of the basic needs of anyone left after implementing this solution.
Almost all of the energy that I use is organic, from organic chemicals.
So what we have here is really the proof that AGW has turned into some sort of cargo cult ? Amazingly its not ignorant and secluded islanders buying into it, its the middle classes of the western world. Which would seem to give credence the the Clown World idea, honk honk 🙂
On day 1 of that new Manhattan Project what exactly are they going to discuss?
How they get the funding for Manhattan Project II
LOL, +1!
They will make a plan and, most important, define exactly what is the condition that terminates it.
LOL, in your dreams. They’ll take a page out of the UN and instantly give themselves a pay rise and immunity from all acountability.
Even if a new Manhattan Project discovered some type of a Dark Energy Generator, I doubt the Green’s and those in power would now allow that to be developed. Unless we were in a war time era, which is probably what this all leads to when we allow ourselves to be dictated to by forces of ignorance, deception and foreign subversion.
He’s thinking of an enormous First World taxpayer funded programme; if there is an urgent and important problem it is global sovereign debt.
One area where government funds would be useful is in genuine objective research into the driving factors of the global climate.
“Has anyone else noticed how weak green excuses for not embracing nuclear power are?”
Yes. ‘For decades we’ve been telling people that nuclear power is icky, and now they don’t want it’
If they actually believed we only had 18 months/12 years/two minutes left, they’d be building nuclear power plants as fast as they could.
Here’s a great idea, but I need $2 billion to initially assess it’s feasibility. I propose to capture the kinetic energy of rain drops and turn it into electricity.
Hopefully Forbes can arrange full funding.
That’s NOT a Manhatten Project.
The Manhatten Project was a continuation of the British Tube Alloys project, and was a straightforward engineering project to develop a practical nuclear explosive device for which the principles were known.
By contrast, calling for a new source of energy where the principles are NOT known demands a completely different approach. One which is invariably created by one man acting alone – someone like Newton or Einstein.
Big regimented projects are actually very bad at creating the conditions necessary for one-man breakthroughs of the kind we need…
So, what exactly does the picture of Joe Pesci dressed up like Freddy Krueger add to this discussion?
It’s like someone is asking: “We need the greatest minds on earth to get together and work out an alternative to food”. Or … why doesn’t congress repeal the law of gravity!
The problem is that his “Greatest minds” are great in any sense of the word … except great tits … instead they are just a bunch of lemming-minded deluded numpties, scared to death by a fractional degree rise in temperature from entirely beneficial plant food. There is not the slightest hope they could invent their way out of a plastic bag let alone invent a non-energy using society.
Nothing “magic” is even possible, it turns out.
PHYSICS insofar as all the trillions spent on it in the last 100 years, has found
× 1 – Thermodynamics … Laws which cannot be sidestepped
× 2 – Nuclear … binding energy in the nucleus of atoms
× 3 – Electromechanical … transmission systems can be near–100% efficient
× 4 – Chemical … Chemistry describes energy-balance equations that can store potential energy
× 5 – Kinetic … energy (think dams, springs, flywheels, pressurized gasses) works…
× 6 – Solid State … harvesters such as photovoltaic, Peltiers, that kind of thing
From these, we have ALL of the known energy sources that are available to us, to our ancestors and almost certainly to our successors.
№ 1 Thermodynamics gives us limits to heat-engines. To converting heat-to-mechanical power and energy.
№ 2 Nuclear reveals extraordinary binding-energy in heavy atoms, which we’ve harvested with uranium (and potentially thorium) as nuclear fission energy. It also has revealed just-as-mind-blowing binding energy opportunites with the very lightest elements, for fusion; while the world supply of fusion fuel is near-infinite, it turns out to be very, very hard to control, hence why we’ve never gotten a kilowatt-hour out of hundreds of billions of dollars spent on it yet.
№ 3 Electromechanical transmission from antiquity to the present has shown that both mechanical and electrical conversion, transmission and eventual power delivery systems can be quite high in efficiency, in some cases near 99%. Really rather remarkable. But gears and levers, electrical transformers, switched capacitor and inductor banks, do it all the time, on all scales from your tiny smart-phone audio amplifier squeaking at you incessantly, to the giant transformers and even more giant gears-and-transmissions in steampunk factories.
№ 4 Chemical energy is nearly entirely what civilization depends on, today. Oil, coal, gas, and almost ridiculously, biomass burning. Which includes corn, grain, cane, beet and other biomass vehicular fuel alcohols. What is it, 80% of the world’s energy is chemical. It also is the mechanism for common energy storage, from Tesla cars to Smart Phones.
№ 5 Kinetic is the other oldie-but-goodie. Dams. Rivers (“microdams!”), paddlewheels and wooden cogs, to computer optimized 500 foot tall dams and huge generating stations at the foot. Kinetic includes compressed air storage systems, and giant-blocks-of-granite-on-railcars-going-up-mountains as storage systems. One imagines “catching waves and tides” as another kinetic energy harvesting technique. Sounds good. And also giant turbines in the great oceanic currents. Bet GreenPeace would have a few less-than-printable things to say about that though.
№ 6 Solid State really isn’t a SOURCE of energy, but rather a physics-dominated energy harvesting technology. The Sun provides the energy by fusing hydrogen; we intercept it with PV panels, harvesting the Sun’s prodigious output in the tiniest way. Peltier-type bimetallic junction harvesters are just thermodynamic harvesters using a different technology. Ultimately the heat has to come from somewhere else. Chemical, geothermal, solar, nuclear, waste, biomass, gerbils on wheels.
THE POINT IS … that that’s that. That insofar as Science, Physics, Biology, Chemistry and all the rest have discovered and carefully sussed out the Laws of, well … that’s that.
And therefore… what are the chances of a miracle new energy source to replace the 80%-of-all-energy derived from fossilized solar and geothermal energy capture? Mmmm… lemme think… mmm… NADA, that’s what.
________________________________________
The ONE (and truly only) hope is to harness fusion-of-small-nuclei. There is another off-beat side-channel that might have a glimmer of hope, which is to say non-conventional heavy-nuclei activation alongside (and right inside) conventional fission energy reactors. Another is an even less palatable possibility: that FUSION will for the foreseeable future be a total-energy-system dud, but as an “accelerator” to promote fission from nominally non-fissile “depleted” uranium, it has a hope of being the ultimate breeder.
We would have to deal with fission waste though for the forseeable future. Is this really such a problem? I don’t know. It doesn’t feel like it. I think the obvious — burial at sea, at the great subduction trenches of the Pacific and Indian oceans — would get the job done, and could achieve the platinum standard for security, safety, and capacity to handle thousands of years of future fission waste. Just have to get the bleeding hearts to shaddup.
So… fusion.
As it stands, there have been remarkable independent strides undertaken in the fusion research world. There are ginormous (and getting larger) compressed air molten lead rams, to compress lil’ blobs of plasma to the point of fusing. There are great magnetic confinement operations, some stellarator, some Big D, some Tokamak, some based on reversed-pinch fields, some with super-high-current counterrotating charged ion rings. All sorts of ways. Wiffle bâhlls and more ahem… odd… ideas.
There’s the persistent meme of so-called aneutronic fusion, which never seems to want to come about seriously. Physics knows why … if it is hard to get the easiest two nuclei to fuse (²H called deuterium and ³H called tritium) to fuse under all conditions yet thrown at them, it is anywhere from 6× to 100× harder to get the EASIEST “aneutronic” nuclei pair to do the same, under similar squishy requirements. Hydrogen and Boron. Or deuterium and ³He … light helium. Either one.
The ³He problem is that there is all-but-none of it here on Planet Dirt. Seriously little. There is supposedly “some” on the Moon, captured (and frankly, mostly lost too… ) in the billions of years that the Moon has been wobbling aroudn Old Planet Dirt. But realistically, the film “Moon” notwithstanding, the idea of having huge robotic setups on the Moon, tirelessly churning thru dozens-of-meters of regolith (lunar dirt), cooking the stuff efficiently, capturing the ³He and then … bottling it to deliver back to Dirt is, well, pretty much as much science fiction as I can readily imagine.
Nope. The “aneutronic” angle is a bogey, boys ‘n’ girls. A misdirection caused by the irrational public’s irrational fear of poorly defined future harm, decommissioning giant not-so-aneutronic fusion plants someday. Talk about counting your chickens before your eggs have hatched! This is like counting your retirement pension account earnings before you’ve figured out where to BUY the dâhmned chicken eggs from, fresh out of High School!
But… there we are… That’s the gig. Fusion.
Because if we are really, really, really, really realistic, we can say with darn-high authority that the only HUGE potentially new energy sources are these:
• Really large scale solar energy, and “magical transmission” from far, far distant fields
• Environmentally disastrous hydro power at scales never tried (and still small)
• Huge scale geothermal tapping, in the very few places that warrant it.
• Nuclear fission BREEDING – to use up all the waste-uranium already captured
• Nuclear FUSION of one kind or another incl. above.
And the outlier — which I hold not a single brain cell of confidence in — carbon capture and sequestration to allow us to endlessly tap-and-burn all the fossil fuel we have yet to discover, for as much time as Earth allows us to do so, before it runs out of the stuff. Where the hêll it’ll be sequestrated to is quite the conundrum. Nothing is cheap and easy.
The use of REALLY large scale solar however does require a total revolution in the transmission of the power, collected at really inopportune times of the day, at distances usually quite far from civilization’s population centers (like who would want to live there?). Science has hinted that perhaps we’re on a cusp of mastery over superconducting transmission lines, soon. This would in theory allow the distant-made electricity to be piped without loss to our distant cities and the huge electrical grids of the lands of Man. Nice. Could be used for other stretch-energy capture too. Geothermal, waves, mountain-based wind capture, the like.
OTHER folk have jollied up the idea that we just need to move our PV to space. You know, because unlike terrestrial Planet Dirt PV operations, there isn’t the inconvenience of have days, and NIGHTS. Mostly-all-day can be had in some orbits. And there is a LOT of space up there. Way more than is easy to imagine.
The thing is that transmission of that power has become the Achilles Heel of its viability. The Physics is pretty clear: microwaves have to be used, so that the “downside spot” is as small as is safe … to keep its implementation cost modest … to keep the energy cost modest … to make it viable against other cheaper options. Yet, transmitting gigawatts (or globally, terawatts) of energy by microwave certainly introduces a new idea of “wait, that’s going to HEAT the planet directly!” as a problem. Locally, as all the passing fish get turned into superheated chowder, and globally from just collecting more heat than we get in insolation.
Well, the easy solution is of course specular reflectors in the deserts of the planet. Cheap, glass-and-plastic panels that reflect most of the incoming sunlight back at Sol herself. Lots of light can be reflected back. It’d work. Or the use of bright white panels to do the same thing. Reflection to compensate.
But we still have the remarkable cost of getting all the solar-power stuff up there, or makign it from passing asteroids, and then beaming the hundreds of giant collector satellites “power” to thousands of downside collector stations. Because there WOULD be thousands of Earthside collector customers. It’d make almost no sense to collect the power at just a few ginormous Earthside stations, to face the transmission-grid-isn’t-superconducting-yet-damnit problem.
So FUSION it is.
FUSION and using it we cannot get it to suddenly become potent, compact, inexpensive … just to more efficiently do fission of heavy atoms that otherwise don’t like releasing their huge nuclear binding energies. That’d be a start. The environmental peeps would of course endlessly March for The Environment, and would decry the advance of this potent energy source as immoral, unethical, detrimental and downright mean-spirited.
Yah, sure.
But in a world of still (wow!!!) growing population, of rising expectations of personal prosperity world-wide, of hving more people dependent on the planet’s not-infinite resources, well …
Fusion, Fusion + Fission, Fission + Breeding, Fusion + fusion breeding (no time to talk this one up).
WHAT magic will make those happen?
The magic of discovering a new fusion-confinement ‘structure’ (what else to call it?) that results in a stable, high pressure, wickedly high temperature plasma, while fusing light atoms’ nuclei; something that is so successful at confining a high-density million °K plasma, that it actually rapidly heats, speeding up the reaction … and threatens to destroy the confinement chamber unless quenched!
That’d change everything.
Or, a giant breakthrough that allows a simple magnetic bottle such as Wiffle-Ball (amped up Farnsworth Fusor) to run hotly enough so as to fuse a substantial amount of ²H (D) rich D+T, to create bazillions of really high energy neutrons, whicn in turn trigger powerful fission cascades in a molten-salt jacket. Kind of fusion-meets-fision-and-makes-both-better. Use thorium, depleted uranium (we’re sitting on hundreds of thousands of tons of that stuff), both. Or throw in all the transuranics that come from reprocessing nuclear ‘waste’ spent fuel. There is a LOT of additional fission energy to realize.
My own belief is that tho’ at times it seems like lunacy even to suggest it, I do believe that the real way to tap these new possible energy gambits is by way of oppressive taxation-and-reinvestment. There was nothing so motivating as the 1973 Mideast Oil Embargo to completely throw our country (and Europe) into a tailspin. The much laughed at Datsun and Toyota cars, hardly sold outside the great coast’s Chinatowns, suddenly couldn’t import enough of the little tin cans for the American market. Skyrocketing gas prices do change behavior.
But there’s no reason to give the usuriously overcharged fuel prices ot the fat oil ticks in the sandy badlands of the Arabian peninsula. Better would be to collect and redistribute. Redistribute to the industries that really can break free of the Lilliputian fetters of present-conventional-thinking, and just redo energy on a new basis. Lead, don’t follow. Learn, don’t repeat yesteryear’s misguided tropes. Liberate, don’t tie up every solid effort with megamiles of red tape.
Just saying,
GoatGuy ✓
Good one, thanks.
re: “THE POINT IS … that that’s that. ”
The only further answer is, Physics has been hamstrung by its own hand (rr theory (ies), in this case.)
For instance, let’s take the hydrogen atom. Give me a good reason why the electron’s “ground state” is what it is.
re: “My own belief is that tho’ at times it seems like lunacy even to suggest it, I do believe that the real way to tap these new possible energy gambits is by way of oppressive taxation-and-reinvestment. ”
Let me introduce you to the dangers of govt funded “enterprises” by way of the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt:
http://www.burtfolsom.com/?p=2335
Fukushima= no one dead = disaster.
Bhopal = 4000 dead = industrial accident
Manhattan project was pure development. They knew what tpo do, they even knew more or less how to do it, they just had to refine enough Uranium – big problem – and slap it together hard.
WE dont have a clue what to do or how to do it for a holy grail of energy, or how to compensate fossil fuel shareholders or the Arabs, if we did.
Nuclear power if it were a real priority could be done in a decade.
That’s how long it took France.
“As explained in a paper from the Manhattan Institute, we are near the theoretical limits of what is possible from efficiency improvements in existing hydrocarbon technology or from wind, and solar energy and battery storage: those technologies are radically inadequate to handle the challenge of climate change.”
That’s a weaselly tricksy way of saying the climate changers got it seriously wrong with wind and solar power. So what else did they get wrong? Plenty more hydrocarbons even if there’s not much more efficiency gains to be had and the nukes are proven right now but let’s go off on tangents with all the slushfunding and send more grants. Sounds familiar.
A new Manhattan Project???
This is an egregious example of cultural appropriation.
The real Manhattan Project broke scientific barriers to save the free world. It was crunch time when people laid down their lives and whole economies focussed on the war effort.
The current suggestion is about a chicken little snowflake non-problem that bourgeois elites wet their panties over.
Go play pee in the bath with each other while you debate your sexualities. And stop appropriating my culture, my history. It’s really offensive.
But we know that the Greens DON’T WANT a cheap, pollution free source of power to be found, because people will then carry on with their profligate lifestyles…
i nominate the manhattan project…. pay up forbes
What morons! There is a magic energy source and it’s called molten salt nuclear power. And it is being developed by a dozen companies and several countries and will commercialize in mid 2020’s. No Manhattan Project needed. And the Manhattan Project did NOT discover or invent the atomic bomb. it was an engineering
project
We have the answer.
There is no reason why fission reactors musts be high pressure, water cooled, hydrogen explosion prone, with a long list of natural catastrophic failures. Loss of water flow melts down in roughly 12 minutes.
The problem is not engineering, the optimum, safest possible fission reactor design the liquid fuel, no water, no fuel rod reactor is a a civilization changing breakthrough that was built and tested 50 years ago.
The liquid fuel reactor is six times more fuel efficient than a fuel rod reactor and cannot melt down because its fuel moves in and out of the reactor zone and because it does not contain fuel rods and a water cooling system.
“THORIUM: Energy cheaper than coal” by Robert Hargreaves gives a good handle on all of this.
Small, modular, molten salt, inherently safe at atmospheric pressure and self regulating. possibly able to consume current nuclear waste. Doesn’t proliferate weapon grade material. Can be located below ground and air cooled if required and delivered on the back of lorries.
Does, however, need development in the materials used in construction for longlife operation due to the high temperatures involved.
I’m no expert; but would recommend Hargreaves’ s Book if only to get an idea of the potential; but can’t comment on the accuracy.
A number of projects are in hand. Now just a question of who grabs the market, scuppers the dreadful Green Machine and wakes up the currently brain dead politicians.
The Mills device using energy from hydrogen: https://brilliantlightpower.com/validation-reports/
Has that scaled beyond the low-levels of heat he had evolving in the 1990’s?
Oh – I see it has. Well done Dr. Mills. Contrary to all the naysayers who have proven on paper only that this was impossible.
Chernobyl and Fukushima are pretty good arguments against nuclear. There are new designs that are closer to “fail safe” but I’d still like to see them situated 200 km from the closest dwellings or fresh water.
No . One was poorly sited , the other was poorly operated .
Lived within 200 feet of an operating 90 MW reactor for years . As have many other people .
There really is NO valid argument against nuclear power .
😉
“Chernobyl and Fukushima are pretty good arguments against nuclear.”
Chernobyl was due to idiot operators and Fukushima was due to ignoring known wave hazards.
I and hundreds of others lived within 200 feet of operating 90 MW reactors for years .
Other than a weird sense of humor ….. no problem .
😉
The reality is that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. So there is no magic climate energy solution. If one wants to reduce the burning of fossil fuels the logical choice is more nuclear power plants.
A Manhattan Project involving trillions towards nowhere to solve a non existent problem ?
Is this guy completely dumb ?
Why do some people think all they have to do is “order” scientists and engineers to develop solutions?
Isn’t the answer staring us in the face? We are told that back-radiation from a trace gas has warmed the world by 1 deg.C over the last century or so, but the bulk of that energy must dissipate overnight, so it’s actually increasing the temperature by 1 deg.C EVERY DAY. There must some way of harnessing this miraculous power source. So, come on all you engineers out there, design a machine that can operate on this principle and build a prototype if possible. Then you can report back here on how much useful work can be produced by such a machine. Fabulous rewards await you!
Not holding my breath.