THAT should put the World in a “Better Place”. Especially if the power is used to drive electric cars!

Hydroelectricity and nuclear power will definitely be our most important energy sources once coal, oil and natural gas run out. So far, the other “renewable” energy sources, solar and wind, aren’t really doing well. For at least the fifty years after we run out of fossil fuels we’ll rely on dams and fission.

With several comments above noting that nuclear power is going to be unsafe in tomorrow’s society, with all the tensions, we might just have to cut down on our power usage. We’ll use what we have.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFcylXFGTgk

If this kind of energy can be stored and released
from this batacitor, what are we waiting for !!!!

However the heavy industries in China, Russia, India and South Korea are still growing, and since those countries have the technology resources to manage new fission power stations, they are indeed building new ones as we speak.

Their combined population outnumbers the sum of the USA and European Union population, while their average education does not.

This adds up to the fact that those nations have a lot of catching up to do. Their combined energy output will soon take over that of the USA (if it hasn’t already), and so by avoiding CO2 emissions their use of fission is just as important as the USA’s and Eurpoe’s migration towards solar/wind/geothermal/tidal.

My point is that unless these nations power more of their heavy industries via fission, not coal, then at a global level, their CO2 emissions will outweigh the reductions in CO2 emissions from the USA and Europe.

Remember that those nations won’t use solar/wind/geothermal/tidal to power heavy industry because the alternative power forms lose their cost competitiveness when power transmission losses are added to them whilst channeling sufficient power from their disparate locations into the concentrated areas where the high-power-consumption heavy industries are situated.

Heavy industry requires concentrated power at the site of the plant(s). Hence the majority of the electrical energy supplied within China/India/Russia/Latin America/South East Asia has to be delivered to concentrated high power consumers, and the majority of electrical energy supplied within USA/Europe/Canada/Australia has to be supplied to distributed low-power consumers.

Therefore the best that can be achieved is that less than half of earth’s coal and nuclear fission power stations will be able to be replaced by distributed low power supplies from solar/wind/geothermal/tidal power. By the time China/India/Russia/Latin America/South East Asia growth levels off, we will have nuclear fission globally available, and that that time the heavy industry electricity supply problem will be solved.

###

The fundamental problem with solar/wind/geothermal/tidal is that they do not yet (or in the foreseeable future) deliver the continuous energy density, 24 x 7 x 365, at a cost which will allow heavy industry to profit. This is primarily due to transmission losses increasing the cost of transporting the electricity generated from remote geothermal areas, solar areas, windy areas, etc… into the concentrated heavy industry areas.

###

You may be considering a proposal to ensure 100% penetration of solar/wind/geothermal/tidal by pricing coal power and nuclear fission power so high, that solar/wind/geothermal/tidal become relatively lower cost. If you’re considering that, then the airlines won’t be able to afford new planes, governments won’t be able to afford new trains, mining companies won’t be able to afford new diggers and haulers, even though you have the ability to make those same planes and trains and mining diggers and haulers at the more expensive price. In other words you will have heavy industry products, but insufficient buyers for them.

The next thing that happens is that heavy industry has to lay too many of its workforce in countries with a heavily growing population, and that leads to the type of discontent which results in WW3. In other words, we will migrate at most half of the world’s coal and nuclear fission to solar/wind/geothermal/tidal to power commercial and domestic use, and we will migrate our heavy industries from coal/fission to fusion.

###

I agree we will have to limit the size of the next-gen LHC in order to limit the size of the black holes thus generated. I believe it will take the energy from a fusion generator the size of mercury to feed an LHC big enough to create a “dangerous” black hole on earth, so we won’t be able to create a dangerous black hole near earth for centuries.

I only argue that nuclear fusion is a replacement for coal power for heavy industry.

All of the alternative technologies, including those which I do very much dislike (wind + biofuel), are going to power our homes and light industry for many many years until fusion becomes globally available.

So your favorite technology will definitely make a serious impact on CO2 emissions.

But the reason why we continue to pursue nuclear fusion is because heavy industry will definitely only get “heavier”, not “lighter”.

We will continue to make bigger and bolder and more powerful machines which dig bigger holes faster, and which build skyscrapers faster, and which fly faster and with more people onboard, and which transport more and heavier items faster – rather than simply make more of the existing planes/trains/trucks/ships/automobiles/mining machinery/farming machinery.

We could make do with the existing types of equipment for a long time – but we won’t.

The same motivators which drive nuclear fusion also drive heavy industry. Those motivators are:
a) competition via technological edge
b) population density and growth
c) greed

If you want to stop fusion you need to stop these three motivators.

###

So I can extend your argument to say: if we don’t curb:
a) competition via technological edge
b) population density and growth
c) greed
…then we will definitely have to colonize space to save earth, or have a war which sends us back to the stone age as we can start again.

In other words, your fears are real, but you need to address the underlying cause, not address a superficial symptom such as the development of nuclear fusion power. stations.

So the rich keep getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. Which the wealthy can send their kids to school and get a good job while us lower class people struggle. With less jobs and higher fuel prices and cost of living this will cause the economy to collapse and cause social unrest resulting in who knows Martial law? Riots? Uprisings? Yes nuclear fusion may be promising but that’s so far a way. We need our government to step up and instead of wasting this money they need to start investing in our nation! Start subsidizing wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and biofuels to help develop new reliable fuel sources. We need to government to buy wind and solar fields so that more are developed. Have the government spend money on these products to help lower our oil demand. This in return will produce jobs and put money in to the economy.

The inflation rate and the cost of living is so high we cant afford to waste money so we are not going to buy commodities that are not needed. So your nuclear fusion may work great but we need to focus on right now and the future. People can develop that new tech. Sure 50 years down the line may be we will not need some of these wind generators, but then at that point we may have to spend money on dismantling them, but its only money that is being spent anyway. If government looked at their spending they could invest way more money on us as a nation and improve our own country here at home rather than spend money to go to war over nothing to protect our oil interests.

Hmm, what a waste. So if you want to sit around and wait for fusion and do nothing thats great but I myself as a average working citizen would rather not see this happen. Because if our economy fails this will not only affect us but also other nations. And at that point only the rich will thrive and we will become a much less sophisticated nation. We need to cut our oil demand not 10 yrs or 20 yrs in the future but NOW. We have to have all citizens and government participation to help do this. So do you think that we should really wait and watch our economy and nation break down before we do something?

Which implies that all that’s necessary to “contain” marijuana use is the threat of high prices.

Alcohol is legal, and taxed relatively heavily, yet it still requires the addition of a TON of time and cash invested in education (“keep it minimal”) and enforcement (“or you’ll be punished”) and we all have to get randomly tested for alcohol while driving and at work too, but only occasionally.

The same will also apply to marijuana, and any other substances which are both illegal and which impair mental function.

Since there are already so many people prepared to ingest/breathe/etc.. marijuana and other cognition altering drugs despite their illegal nature, therefore if we were to legalize and tax them heavily, then we would also waste a lot of our communities time to education and enforcement and random testing.

###

The educators and nurses of this world are only paid one level up from the minimum wage. That speaks volumes about the majority’s lack of desire to educate our children any more than the absolute minimum.

It’s much much much harder and takes a lot more time to educate someone to manage their use of a cognitive impairing drug than it takes to give them a binary black-and-white concept of “don’t use it, it will damage your health, and you may damage the health of others, and if you do use it we will punish you”.

Any attempt to place the considerable that additional education burden on our children, will be resisted with the utmost force.

We also hate increasing the police-state powers of our enforcement officials and our company managers.

Legalizing illicit drugs requires additional police and additional company-imposed drug tests because more people will use those drugs, and therefore experience their effects, and therefore have more road accidents, and cause more domestic conflicts, and make more poor decisions in the workplace.

I don’t want to have to be drug tested every hour because someone wants to burn biofuel from hemp.

Hemp is not going to happen.

No one wants to employ thousands of humans to walk through crops row-by-row to find the marijuana plants. The kind of person who performs that job is going to be paid very little – and is most likely going to be paid to keep quiet.

Until you minimize the cost of detection of a marijuana crop within a hemp crop, and until you improve the reliability of detection of a marijuana crop within a hemp crop, then hemp won’t get any further than a few shirts and shorts.

Thankfully the USA/Canada/Alaska geothermal map is “hot” along the entire west coast from Mexico to Alaska. That extends inland as far as the Rockies, and there’s a “warm” outcrop in Texas too. So only the eastern half of the USA and Canada misses out on reasonably efficient geothermal.

So for the eastern states of the USA and Canada I also would prefer them to use solar thermal, transmitted from the southern states of the USA, along with the inherent losses. This would be perferable (to me) to blighting their land with wind turbines (ugly ugly ugly….).

The UK and Northern European and Scandanavian countries have lucked out – they only have a tiny number of small geothermal resources to tap into.

As a result the UK has opted for reaping the benefits of their windy shores, so the poor beggars are going to get the ugliest looking coastlines. Thousands of square kilometers of wind turbines, all on pristine coastal land. Their only saving grace is that they will soon enough be replaced by nuclear fusion reactors.

#####

But I just discovered that while the European Union was building the Hadron Super Collider – the USA+UK+Japan+South Korea have been building full scale mockups of their new “ITER” Tokamak Fusion Reactor which is being built in France. Their plan is to run it for 500 seconds at a time and achieve the first stable plasma which will deliver a return on electrical energy generation. See here:
http://www.iter.org/pictures.htm

Since ITER is only a pilot for a commercial plant it will not operate full time, but it probably could – at low efficiency. But 500 seconds is immense compared to previous designs and compared to the 30 second continuous goals of the Northern European Stellerator 7X project, here:
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ippcms/eng/presse/pi/01_08_pi.html

When you consider the immense size and costs (multi-billions of US dollars/Euro) of the ITER fusion reactor, and the Stellerator 7X fusion reactor, you can see that the hundreds of millions of dollars which our governments are directing towards alternative power sources such as geothermal /solar/wind/tidal, are only short term interim measures designed to keep the householders of the world happy that they made some sort of difference, while the plasma physicists get on with the heavy industry business of SERIOUS power generation.

When you see the size of ITER, I believe you will comprehend that fusion power generation is only as far away as 2050 – at most.

Despite that it backs up my points, not yours, ie:

1) it specifically omits heavy industry from its definition of “household” energy requirements. But you missed that didn’t you ?

2) it quotes the vice president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Dr Sue Ion, as sayiong that “wind power could only provide about 20% of the country’s electricity to preserve grid stability.”

###

My point is the same point being made by the industrialized governments of the world, ie:
I have repeatedly stated that alternative energy will only ever be able to power households, ie: “other-than-heavy-industry”.
I have never wavered from that point.

Thank you for agreeing with me that solar/wind/geothermal/tidal will only ever be able to power other-than-heavy-industry activities.

I have repeatedly stated that solar/wind/geothermal/tidal power will not power heavy industry.

I have repeatedly stated that nuclear fusion will be required to replace coal fired power stations in order to power heavy industry.
I have never wavered from that point.

Here, I’ll give you a boost up….

“Thousands of new offshore wind turbines could power every home in Britain by 2020, the government announced today, as it set out new wind-energy plans.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/10/politics

And research how much carbon sequestering would add to the price of coal-generated electricity.

Again, I do hope we get affordable fusion some day. But it’s very highly unlikely that it will come on board rapidly enough to solve current needs.

Now, if you’d like to have the last word in this discussion, have at it. I’ve lost interest.

###

If Iceland could have powered their aluminum smelters from 100% geothermal they would have done so.

I am not saying that their geothermal is useless, I am saying their geothermal is inadequate to power heavy industry.

You underestimate the energy requirements for the heavy industry of today and the future – that’s your prerogative, but thankfully governments don’t.

Governments and industry haven’t bought into your view that solar/wind/geothermal/tidal will deliver even close to 100% of their power requirements, which is why they’ve bought in heavily into carbon sequestration of their coal fired power stations.

I’m not concerned with convincing you personally that coal is required for heavy industry and that heavy industry will onyl replace their use of coal with nuclear fusion. Your views are not shared by industrialists with the resources and decision making positions to make a difference.

Nor am I concerned with making nuclear fusion anyone else’s favorite power generation technology, just because it’s mine.

I am using you as a devil’s advocate so that others who read this discussion can learn about how nuclear fusion will definitely fit into the picture, as the power source for heavy industry, even if you don’t accept it.

Fine by me. We agree to disagree, but others can learn too.

But hydrogen is a very inefficient energy storage method. Too much energy is lost in cracking water, compressing the gas, transporting the gas, storing the gas, and converting the gas back into usable energy.

Decentralized generation of electricity is desirable simply because generation sources are decentralized. We’ve (the US) got solar in the southwest, tidal/wave/wind along the north coasts. Other stuff all over the place.

Decentralization also means that we don’t build as robust a national grid.

Peter – I don’t think you realize how large a role electricity plays in heavy industry. And it just doesn’t matter where the electricity comes from as long as it’s there.

Heavy industry doesn’t run on coal-produced steam any longer.

And please be intellectually honest.

If Iceland gets 25% of its electricity from geothermal then, obviously, geothermal electricity is being used in aluminum smelting. It’s all mixed together in the grid and were they to turn off the geothermal, they wouldn’t have enough power to run all their smelters.

Wind power does not use up “vast tracts” of land. Wind farms are spread over large areas, but most of that land is still available for farming and grazing.

Will tidal turbines kill fish? Unlikely. Those concerns were built into the design and testing to determine environment impact are underway. Mitigation, if necessary, will follow.

Now, you are free to lay on the floor, kicking and screaming all you like, holding your breath until you turn blue, but it’s quite unlikely the world will stand still and do nothing to solve our energy problems until you’re favorite is invented sometime in the distant future.