Our Energy Future? 2

The Energy Future
What are our goals? What do we need and how will we get there? What are the risks?

Human evolution has followed a path of energy dependence that has lead from wood to coal then on to oil and next to nuclear energy.

Each evolutionary step in our cultural development has depended on thinking about each fuel source as “unlimited” until a point is reached at which the limits threaten and we have moved on to some new form of energy.

We still have trees, we still have huge reserves of coal and we also have substantial reserves of oil, even though we are more aware of the limitations of supply and the new political and environmental issues arising.

If we continue as before then soon oil will also be a thing of the past with unused reserves locked forever in the earth.

Quite plainly human society depends on finding ever more convenient and ever more abundant sources of energy. We are addicted to growth and maybe without growth society will stagnate and ultimately die like some planet wide water culture.

So what is our ideal energy? It should be cheap. It should be available to all and it should be infinite.

That energy sources is now within our grasp. I refer to fusion power and the news is that we are about to take an important forward step:

The problem is that we may never take that step due to our inherent self-destructive nature. I mean, our “Frankenstein” obsession.

The only way to regard the use of finite fossil fuel sources is to consider them as working capital, capital that we have used and must use to grow our economy to the point where we not only must have newer energy sources but where we can afford the investment in their development.

The problem is that we face a growing campaign to curtail our use of these resources and divert our investment into other forms of energy. It may be that if we allow this to happen we may end up in a cultural dead end out of which there is no escape.

So, the questions are:
What resources do we need to complete the development of fusion power?
How long will it take?
Can we afford it yet?
What will happen if we invest in “green energy” sources? Will this augment our working capital or replace it?
What are the limits of growth achievable with each source of energy?
Fossil Fuels: Obviously, however much we can point to new sources being found, and more efficiently used, we are well aware that these are limited resources that will be exhausted if we do not find an alternative. If we don’t find that alternative then we can expect society to enter a new dark age from which there may be no recovery. Even if society did again rise it would not have the fossil fuel resources available to it to start again and thus could only rise so far and the stagnate.

Nuclear energy – fission:
Well as a compensation for the sparse resources of fuels, the cost of developing and processing fuels both for use and after use, the compensation is that the energy conversion is enormous and the fuel cheap. Of course, it could only have been afforded once a certain level of development had been reached and it became “affordable” and that level was achieved by investing fossil fuel energy in growing the economy. We may still want to consider this as the best currently realisable option but here is where the Frankenstein complex has come into play. Few countries have actually exploited nuclear energy the way it should have been exploited and that is one reason why we use fossil fuels for domestic energy when we shouldn’t. We missed a trick. Our future depends on the best utilisation of the available fuels.
We need only look at France to see how effective a good nuclear power strategy can be. (Maybe staying out of NATO so long did not create such an antipathy within the French population as it did in the UK, for example).

“Green Energies”
Most significantly at this time, wind energy. Most “green” energies are far from “green” and while inexhaustible, the yield is so far from abundant as to be subsistence level. There is a limit to the investment we can make and we have to ask what sort of society we would end up with if all our energy comes from wind farms. You can be sure it won’t be one of growth. Indeed, it might result in a society that has to “live within its means” to the extent that social controls would become very much more strict. I won’t speculate further but I would suggest we would end up with a zero growth society and one that would therefore stagnate much like a water culture of old. Could it happen? I attended a “Sustainable Scotland” forum where Scotland was setting itself up as the centre of excellence for all things green and renewable. The most serious criticism raised was that government was proposing a future of sustainable growth and the opponents questioned why there had to be growth.

A green energy society such as this would most probably end up at a point where all the resources are devoted to maintenance – the repair and replacement of wind farms and when that lags - as anything government controlled inevitably seems to do, then energy resources will actually start to contract.
There is no escape that I can see from this type of society either and again, there is no rebuilding an economy growing on fossil fuels when that capital has been wasted.

So let us assume we need fusion energy.
What do we need to get that future? Do we just need sufficient fossil fuels to get us here? Do we need fission energy to help us get there (low cost high abundance) Will “Green” energies actually rob us of our future? Are they an irrelevance a hindrance or a help?

What form should fusion energy take? Do we want the centralised power generating facilities or do we want small portable energy sources to replace batteries? Where each device has its own energy source?

Your thoughts please.





JMW

I think you have largely hit the nail on the head. Nuclear, whether fusion or fission, is our only long term base load power resource. With nuclear reprocessing our fission resources could last for thousands of years.

Your fusion articles are primarily focused on laser inertial confinement. This method is well on the path to working. The National Ignition Facility will achieve this feat. However, energy production has always seemed secondary to their primary purpose of nuclear stockpile stewardship. There also, intuitively, seems to be issues with scaling such a system for CW or rapid pulse use with an effective energy extraction system. The good people working on the proposed HiPER project disagree and have some interesting ideas.

Right now, most of the fusion eggs seem to be in the magnetic confinement arena. This as arguably the best path towards commercialization. In fact the ground breaking should be starting on ITER in France relatively soon. It is designed to be the final step in a path towards the first commercial scale reactor. It should return a near commercial scale net energy production over CW times. The final step is the proposed follow on DEMO project which will be, for all intensive purposes, a functioning commercial fusion plant.

I think that this process could be expedited if it had greater exposure. The U.S. has waffled over the past decade as to our own commitment to the project and our financial obligations to it.

There is also a "dark horse" in the race. Robert Bussard's polywell might shake out. He's dead, but there are several well financed people who are interested. It seems too simple to me. However it isn't pure shenanigans like cold fusion.

Absent any ground breaking means to store tremendous amounts of electricity at several times cheaper than the cost of generating, renewable power supplies will always be marginal sources.

In my opinion, the governing economic and political model that characterizes the western lifestyle relies on plentiful and inexpensive energy sources, as well as a monotonically increasing market for the goods produced by the industrial economy. Failure to maintain a plentiful and inexpensive source of energy can effect the industrial basis of the exonmomy in a manner simialr to the loss of credit and its effect on the gloabl financial systems.

If we do not succeed in finding an alternate source of energy to replace the dwindling fossil fuels, it would not mean "the end of the world", but could mean that some other form of economic and political model would be needed to manage social forces and avoiding some sort of catastrophe. In the worst case, if such an energy source or energy distribution or energy management technique is not found, then we could see developed western nations revert to a lifestyle and economic /political system as was expereienced in China or other developing countries 20 yrs ago- another case of "back to the future".

From what I have seen, problems find solutions. And dark cold homes change peoples minds about there choices.

I see a multiple options as a good solution, in that several methods can stand to provide part of our energy needs. We need to develop several solutions, with the wining cost solution to take the prize. Or said another way, as one energy solution becomes cheeper, in the eyes of the public, the other energy solutions must adapt, develop, and invent new a better mouse trap.
This will ensure each energy solution always has a problem to over come, and politations to pay off.

boy, there's a lot here already... I will hit some high spots.

JMW, at each stage we have replaced a lower-energy density source with a higher one as it became economically and technologically feasible. Wood to coal and coal to oil. No shortage of wood or coal drove these changes, better forms of energy did.

Green sources could well play a useful part in our future energy mix (as cranky108 refers to) as one in a variety of sources, if the politicians and charlatans don't screw it up. But I think green sources are generally too diffuse and/or intermittent to rely on exclusively. It'd be davefitz's "back to the future".

b2theory, I am certainly not up with fusion research, but the polywell looks pretty exciting, as I understand it, given that it is clean, scalable and yields electricity directly. It has alway seemed odd to me that the only way to get power from nuclear reactions is to boil water.

I think it is clear that the answer to a wide range of lifes' problems is cheap, abundant energy.

Regards,

Mike

SnTnMan,
exactly so.

However, part of the popularity of oil has been convenience, not cost. Coal is still one of the cheapest fuels around and we still haven't made the final transition.

Indeed, we should be wary of any dramatic transitions as they can be rather painful. In the UK steam trains persisted for many decades before the capital for electrification was finally made available.

In just such a manner we need a good economy to generate and create the conditions where we can transition to fusion. But not if we have spent all our money on wind farms or some other lunacy.
What ever the option, it not only has to replace current energy use it must also support the energy use growth curve because some where along that curve we trip over to fusion.

The question then becomes, do we have enough oil to get us to that point where we can afford to pay for fusion? Do we need to augment it and if so, which is the best way to do it? by wind farms or coal?

How much oil there is depends who you believe. Interesting article on Peak Oil here:




JMW

If we could cut through the carbon crap, we could synthesize liquid transportation fuels from coal, if we could cut through the nuke crap we could generate as much of our base load as we wanted with nuclear, replacing the majority of our imported fossil fuels. (sorry about the loaded terminology). For maybe a hundred years. That would surely be enough time for some form of fusion to be commercialized.

It's going to be interesting to observe the state of California, now that it has regulated CO2. Industry exodus?

Regards,

Mike

One of the obvious solutions is to stop wasting so damned much of it in the first place!

Energy is not expensive enough yet to make sincere efforts in relation to energy efficiency improvement truly economically necessary. Even during the oil price run-up, only baby steps were being taken toward improving the efficiency with which we use these non-renewable resources.

Fusion is a pipedream. It's centralized and needs to be done on a massive scale. Even fission plants are so huge that the projects are at the limits of humans' ability to organize themselves. The projects are a swamp of corruption and inefficiency.

When energy is more expensive, all sorts of generation and efficiency solutions present themselves. Without the economic driving force to do something differently, the past is the best predictor of the future. That means we'll continue to rapidly exhaust our primary fossil fuel sources and gradually work our way down the hydrogen to carbon ratio toward coal.

There seems to be a notion that there is enough coal and tar sands out there to solve the fossil fuel scarcity issue- but on the time frame of 100+ years even coal will be past its "peak".

Complete implementation of tar sands conversion will leave a landscape that is worse than shown in the cartoon "Wall-E"- if you have any doubts, use Google Earth for the Fort McMurray , Alberta area. But then again, environmental standards are flexible, and maybe that sort of landscape will be considered acceptable 100 yrs from now.

The estimate that we have 200+ yrs of coal available was initially provided in the 1970's , based on 1970's consumption rates and reserves known and available at that time. Adjusting for the rate of increase in consumption in China + India, and for likely coal -to-gas and coal-to-liquids implementation, the latest german estimates put our coal peak at about 2108. 100 years is not a long time on the scale of the longevity of countries, and we can expect our great-grandchildren to see the end of popular use of fossil fuels we take for granted today.

Every single estimate of remaining resources is based on the term "economically recoverable". Technologically, we can recover virtually all of the oil in place in old oil fields around the world. Economically, that number is closer to 30% at projected prices. When oil prices were heading towards $200 US, thousands of really smart people were looking for ways to scrape a bit more oil from the Permian Basin, et al, at $50 US, those guys have moved on to something else. Today's prices are simply the worst thing that could have happened to the world's energy security. If gasoline (petrol) were not outrageously inexpensive, hybrid cars which only improve energy efficiency a few percentage points) would have been the norm 10 years ago and very energy efficient transportation methods would be mainstream.

Look at the energy mix 100 years ago (coal and wood were still king, and places like London never saw blue sky and lung problems were epidemic). I'm certain that 100 years from now either the human population will be a tiny fraction of today's levels or we will have a mix of energy sources that are as far removed from Oil & Gas as Oil & Gas are removed from Coal & Wood. I don't know what technology will dominate that mix, but I'm pretty certain it won't be wind or solar.

David

Is it my lack of knoledge or is the best fusion material, available in our reach, found most abunditly on the moon?

If so we need to be looking to build mooncraft to be able to reach it. As well as a refining facilities on the moon.

Sorry we just aren't there yet (Yes we have been to the moon). We lost our technology because we took our eye off the ball (moon).

Part of the fusion debate is, or has been, about the tendency to design for large regional generating facilities rather than to pursue a goal of smaller independent utilities.

With the unbundling of national power generation, e.g. with the privatisation of power in the UK, secondary production by "auto-producers" has shown the way toward much more flexibility and the creation of many smaller power generating facilities, often as CHP and as often as not with multi-fuel capability.

If we look at fusion then at the core of the research is a small pocket of fuel. The vast size necessary is in the related equipment. Who can doubt the ingenuity of engineers and scientists to be able, ultimately to produce ever smaller power plants?

Maybe the potential is for individual fusion packs for cars?
I don't know enough to be able to comment seriously but even so, even if we are limited to a few large facilities, that we can generate electricity cheaply and cleanly will unlock many development paths.

Perhaps what we should do is set out what we want our future to look like and then see about how to achieve it.

JMW

moltenmetal (Chemical)

I would be very careful about calling Fusion a "pipe dream". The over optimism of the first generation of researchers has certainly caused a high amount of skepticism with regard to any technology road maps.

There is a clear path to working plants. There has also been a profound amount of apathy towards the technology. At the same time, politicians and talking heads are walking chanting "solar, solar, solar.....". If our country was truly motivated and was aware of the current state of the technology, we could have this available in a couple of years as opposed to decades. We spend billions a month on military activities in Iraq. You would be surprised what would happen if the U.S. cut a $50 Billion check and demanded round the clock work on the ITER project. In the mean time it will stager along in the shadows of the Department of Energy's short term policies.

I also have a huge problem with the notion that price will solve these problems. There are some fundamental technology limitations. Renewable resources will never function as a base-load source until some method to even out the supply is developed. There are some ideas as to how to do this. The only one I have seen that seems truly scalable and practical are Vanadium flowing batteries. Yet, that technology still really sucks.

I also think decentralization of generation doesn't make much sense. The losses due to transmission are lower than most people think. I would imagine maintaining reliable infrastructure is best done with a centralized system.