If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.
Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”
But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer. Are we there?
My father worked on this for 30 years. My father told me that there was no reason to worry about energy or energy policies for anything but the short term because “in 20 years” we would have unlimited fusion power. My Dad told me this 30 years ago. My Dad was never wrong about anything he made a serious scientific statement about in all the years I knew him except for this. Maybe it’ll turn out it he wasn’t completely wrong after all. 🙂
One of my friends growing up in L.A. was a guy named Steve DePattie, whose dad worked with Hanna/Barbera and was a principal developer of the Flintstones and Jetsons cartoon programs. We used to have long conversations about the future. The Future. The key ingredients were: cheap, plentiful, environmentally friendly power (at that time we thought, nuclear), and flying cars. I’m pleased that scientists and engineers are making good progress on the former. Now I hope they get on to the more important task.
Bruce Robison
And the other hand clapping ( 😉 ) with the “ultimate energy source is just aroud the corner” is “the big oil companies and the federal govrnment won’t let the utimate energy sorce go into production”.
Another exercise in wish management. Billions have been poured into “renewables” (I don’t buy the term since the farmland or wildlife habitat eliminated to accommodate the comparatively massive footprints of solar plants or wind farms is anything but – whereas waste reprocessing would bring nuclear energy much closer to meeting that particular definition) over the last 30 years without their having gotten massively cheaper. Why not just say it: they’re not going to.
Let me get this straight: for the price of a new nuclear power plant, you can build a fusion reactor that *may* reach energy break even – at the theoretical level, at least (the energy released by the reaction is greater than the energy added via the lasers). That’s not the problem and never really was. The real question is not, how do you contain an eight million degree plasma (good question, though) or reach break even, but rather – realistically now – how do you step the temperature down to the point that you can actually boil water without losing all the heat energy that you’ve generated in the first place? Other than a passing reference to molten salts (oh yeah, the eco-crowd is going to love that one: million degree radioactive lithium hydroxide – the public forums at the licensing phase are going to be a real hoot), I don’t see anything here on how this is going to be accomplished. Like wind, solar and hydrogen, it sounds like pie in the sky to me.
Am I alone in thinking the science is already there…but the world is squeezing the last dollars out of us until the oil actually runs out- using panic to hike the prices- before saying ‘Voila! here it is’ and then charging a fortune for that? #
After all if we can clone sheep, enter space, map DNA- why is running cars on something other than oil so hard? Or am I jst a miserable cynic
http://www.sbarnabas.com/blog
Running cars on something other than oil isn’t that hard. Running cars on something other than oil that works as well as oil, and which could be produced and distributed at a cost no more than that of oil, is hard.
The reason we use fossil fuels isn’t because of some conspiracy of giant corporations; it’s because fossil fuels work so well. The ratio of the energy you get out of a unit of fuel versus the energy you have to expend to produce that unit of fuel is more favorable for fossil fuels than for almost anything else.
The problem with fossil fuels is that the supply is finite and there’s no way to replenish it on useful timescales. This means that at some point, we’ll need a replacement energy source. When that “at some point” hits is a matter of debate — “peak oil” enthusiasts say it’s now, skeptics say it’s a long way in the future — but the fact that if we keep using the stuff we’ll eventually run out is indisputable.
Unfortunately none of the likely alternatives have a really attractive energy-out/energy-to-produce ratio. Some might even be net losers. So far as I know, nuclear fission is the next best after fossil fuels; but Americans have a history of being unreasonably frightened by the word “nuclear.”
The other factor to consider is this: whatever energy source we eventually pick — and my bet there would be a patchwork combination of many different sources — there is a substantial cost to switching over our entire fossil-fuel-based infrastructure. I’m not talking about money, although believe me it will cost money; it will cost a vast amount of energy to make that switch. And there is no credit in that system; we can’t “borrow” ahead against an energy source we haven’t built yet. If we wait too long to make this investment, it’s possible we could find that we don’t have enough fossil fuels left “in the bank” to fuel the transition to something other than fossil fuels.
A pleasant thought for a Monday.
The world is not running out of oil. It is running out of really cheap, easily extracted oil. All the talk of ‘Peak Oil’ somehow neglects to remind the reader they are talking about “conventional” oil, which excludes things like the Alberta/Saskatchewan oil sand. Oil sands are certainly in the money with $60 crude, which equates to gasoline about US$3 per gallon or about CD$1 per litre. That’s quite manageable, and there is one awful lot of that stuff.
For high-energy-density fuel we can look also at di-methyl ether (DME), readily refined from coal and easily substituted for diesel fuel with existing technology. The supplies of coal are absolutely mind boggling.
Similarly, we don’t have to get fancy with electricity. Thorium fission reactors are practical tomorrow and they don’t produce a leftover applicable to weapons. Fusion is interesting, but it’s a waste of effort. Even to the extent we retain ‘legacy’ uranium fission plants, what’s preventing us from returning the waste to the very hole from which it was extracted — that ground is [i]already[/i] radioactive, so returning the leftovers will not change the environmental situation in any significant manner.
Actually, nuclear fission is a lot more efficient than fossil in converting mass to energy – hence the gross disparity in the amount of waste produced. The expense is in building and (even more particularly) maintaining the engineered features needed to contain possible transients – money well spent at TMI and tragically not spent at Chernobyl, which had the deadly combination of a positive moderator temperature coefficient and no containment structure (yes, an American-style containment would have prevented the contamination releases and probably all of the deaths). Thorium is not a bad idea but I would note that, while much smaller in scale than that for oil, the existing infrastructure is built around conversion of yellowcake uranium to enriched UO2 pellets. I wouldn’t plan on that changing in the near future. Even though nothing was touted in the stimulus plan with regard to fission and the current administration seems dead set on paying off certain powerful interests by halting Yucca Mountain (in flagrant violation of the law), a renewed nuclear industry is inevitable. Public opinion regarding the greenhouse gas nonsense and the continued lack of viability of solar (too expensive and unworkable) and wind (unsightly and too destabilizing to the grid), not to mention fusion, for the reasons cited above, will necessitate the move.