Climactic Changes

[CptKipling]

This has turned into a really interesting thread!

I wouldn\'t worry about looking fanatical Whitehall, I have have nothing but admiration for you (or is that contempt... [img]/ubbthreads/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] joking). If thats what you want so be it, but I think others are interested.

Regular fission IS currently the (definately having the potential to become more so) most efficient form of power, and other current \"alternatives\" are pathetic in comparison. But we should never rule out the future.

I was never really sayomg cold fusion was real or anything, just a suggestion. And also proving the point that new things are in the pipeline (or could be).

Hydrogen fusion (if possible in a controlled environments) holds great potential.

Who knows, maybe one day we will be \"farming\" the solar wind aswell.

[Whitehall]

OK, so long as I\'m not boring anyone!

I guess a lot depends on your time frame. On one hand, the utility guys have to worry about tomorrow afternoon - the next peak load on the electric grid. We should all be worrying about this winter because many are predicting a huge price spike in natural gas and hence electricity. The big problem under debate now is the structure of the electric markets - deregulation has been a huge bust in many respects yet the feds are still pushing it on the many states that don\'t want it or wish they could turn back the clock.

We\'re still building new coal plants in the US - that ought to be stopped - now - even if we don\'t want to sign on to Kyoto. What I\'d like to see is for the US to decide to shut down the worst 20% of our existing coal plants and replace them with new nuclear plants. Nuclear plants take years to build and the equipment suppliers are not eager to stay in the business, such as it is.

Worst, the liberal politicians only want to talk about alternatives and conservation - especially here in California. I really admire Bush and Cheney for putting forth a serious energy plan even if I disagree with big chunks of it. The plant to require ethanol in motor fuel is the worst kind of political pork too. The North Slope (ANWR) is really pretty trivial and looks to be more of a bargaining chip.

On the long horizon, most current alternatives just don\'t have the potential. I would love someone to propose some new ideas but we\'ve pretty well exhausted the possibilities based on our current science.

What I really like to see is direct energy conversion from fission or fusion. There is such a huge potential to make fission work smarter. Even pebble bed reactors need some sort of boost and they\'re not that new or innovative - although a big step forward from our current nuke plants.

\"Cold fusion\" is interesting. Some people I respect - serious people - have shown that its a real pheomenon. But its a case of the real world getting ahead of the scientific establishment. The government\'s panel of physicists took one look and noticed that 1) it was easy to do and 2) it lacked the negative side effects expected - and declared that it just couldn\'t be. Time will tell.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

Why is requiring ethanol in motor fuel a stupid idea?

Isn\'t it true, at least for cars, that there have LONG been engine designs for cars that don\'t emit pollutants, but they\'re not being made? It seems the expense of retooling all our factories and all our equipment is prohibitive as far as implementing the things we already know, so since we don\'t have the money (or have but don\'t want to spend it on that) for massive change, we chip away at certain things but never accomplish much.

[CptKipling]

It is pretty appaling that we still rely on steam to produce all of our power, almost 200 years of the stuff and its still used in bleeding edge power generation technology. Pretty silly.

<blockquote><font class=\"small\">In reply to:</font><hr>

On the long horizon, most current alternatives just don\'t have the potential. I would love someone to propose some new ideas but we\'ve pretty well exhausted the possibilities based on our current science.

What I really like to see is direct energy conversion from fission or fusion. There is such a huge potential to make fission work smarter. Even pebble bed reactors need some sort of boost and they\'re not that new or innovative - although a big step forward from our current nuke plants.

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That makes a lot of sense, current alternative simply just dont give great enough yields. I agree nuclear IS the short term solution, but as you say there are improvements that need to be make to the current technology.

What are pebble bed reactors? I\'ve heard of them, but only in passing.

When science descovers the cause of \"cold fusion\", then maybe we could make some big progress.

I\'m sure there are big things happening in the area of plasma, and I remember some anti-matter research in the US that was making SOME progress.

[Whitehall]

Why is ethanol for cars a bad idea? The problem is really in the government mandate and the net energy.

So how do you make ethanol on an industrial scale? You take a field, you plow it, you disc it, you plant the seeds, you cultivate, fertilize, and surpress the weeds. You then harvest it, dry the corn, transport it to the processing plant, grind it, ferment it, then distill out the ethanol for shipment to the oil refiners where it is blended with petroleum. All those steps are energy-intensive themselves so that if you do an net energy balance, you find that you\'re putting IN as much or more energy than you\'re getting out. THe sunlight that falls on the corn to make it grow is trivial in the bigger scheme of things. So where\'s the savings?

This is one big boondoogle to buy votes in farm states and to please Archer-Daniel-Mildland (ADM) a political super-heavy weight. Other problems include a lack of distribution here in the western states so that fuel shortages are a concern. There is a general issue in that ethanol is an \"oxygenated\" fuel. That\'s supposed to surpress NOX formation but it also lowers fuel economy and hence increases operating costs. Oyxgenated fuels are really just \"pre-burned\" since the combustion process also oyxgenates the fuel. It\'s like using wet wood in a fire.

This is government at its worst.

Actually, automobile engines are miraculously clean now - a hundred or a thousand fold cleaner than in the \'60s. I don\'t see much room for improvement.

[Whitehall]

Here\'s a link to the pebble bed reactor:

http://www.pbmr.com/

Steam has a glorious history as a foundation of the power technologies going back to James Watt and the start of the Industrial Revolution. It does have some things going for it: we know it well and it has great thermodynamics as a working fluid. It\'s non-toxic too. When you\'re spending billions of dollars on a plant, you get very conservative and you\'re willing to trade a slight performance advantage for the surety and confidence in a proven technology.

Still, one would think that something better would have come along by now. The Pebble Bed reactor uses helium and gas turbines which have several advantages. Current nukes are about 32% efficient while a pebble bed might hit 40 or 42%. But since uranium is so cheap compared to its energy content, the savings are more in capital costs from a physically smaller plant.

[a.k.a.]

Global warming is real and carbon emissions are the cause, anybody that doesn’t want to believe the world’s leading climatologists on this should visit a library and draw their own conclusions. There are a number of books that explain the process in terms that anybody with a high school education should be able to grasp.

I’ll strive to keep my head out of the clouds if my detractors strive to keep their heads out of the sand.

Before industrialization, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were about 280 parts per million. At the turn of the 21st century they were 360ppm. Stabilizing at current levels would require a 70% reduction in current emissions. This is the main reason policy makers want to run away from this issue. No mater what kind of science you throw at this problem, there’s no escaping the need for conservation = a massive restructuring of our economic system.

I think I can see Whitehall’s criticism of liberal politicians vs. Bush/Chaney. Back in 1998 Clinton proposed that the US could reduce emissions by 20% simply though energy efficiency and conservation. During his administration there was no strides made in energy efficiency, no conservation programs, and consequently emissions increased.
At least the Bush administration is honest enough to admit that it plans to INCREASE carbon emissions over the next 25 years. Sure this is suicidal, ecocidal, historically irresponsible and a whole lot of other bad things, but that’s what it’s going to take to keep US corporations competitive in the 21st century. If we want GNP to go up atmospheric integrity must go down.

Whitehall is also correct about modern cars being much cleaner than 1960 models. There have been a couple of hydrogen fueled prototypes and GM has already thrown $1 billion towards a plant that will produce them on a mass scale. So I could argue that it is possible to produce even cleaner cars. But that’s beside the point because what kind of energy is going to be used in the production process and how clean will it be? (I believe GM is considering natural gas for its plant.)

The bigger issue is that roughly 8% of the world owns a car while roughly 89% of the US owns one. Our consumption has gotten out of control and we have to reign it in. But that’s not what the big auto makers want to see. The capitalist system is “grow or die”. Capture a bigger market share or be eaten up by the competition. That’s why I say the biggest bottleneck is political rather than technical.

One example is food. The average US meal travels 1,000 to 1,500 miles to get to our table. This means energy for transportation, energy for refrigeration, energy for storage, energy for packaging... All of which could be conserved if agriculture was geared towards local markets rather than export.

Another example is transportation. The city of Curitiba, Brazil has reduced fuel consumption by 30% simply by introducing public transport. San Francisco had a relatively good system, but now it needs more. Other cities are way behind the times and there’s lots of room for improvement.

I don’t buy the argument that the burden of proof is on anybody that questions nuclear power. Everybody knows that nuclear fuel is hazardous and after 40 years of lies from the nuclear industry, I would say that the burden of proof is on them. Even if Yucca Mountain is ideal ( never mind that it’s situated between two active earthquake faults and on top of a major Western aquifer), even if there is no risk in transporting the stuff (never mind all the terrorists looking for an easy target) this will only account for about 75% of the waste. And it doesn’t account for the fact that some of this waste has a half-life into the millions of years. (But I’m no scientist, so maybe Whitehall can recommend a good storage device that will survive the half-life of Uranium 236 or 238.)

Regarding solar power... No you can’t immediately shut down the coal plants and light up Southern California with solar panels. I don’t know of any environmentalist organization that has proposed such a thing, so I can’t figure out who Whitehall’s contempt is directed at. On the other hand a British study has found that a typical house fitted with solar panels saves an average of 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. And in Kenya more rural houses get their energy from solar power than from the national grid. The physics is there and the technology is advancing ( Japan is now producing super thin cells at 1/10 the cost of the US’s bulkier models.) Nuclear and hydroelectric have already had a chance to prove themselves as alternative sources, why isn’t solar being given a chance? $100 million is considered too expensive for a solar powered plant, whereas $4,000 million is acceptable for an oil rig. Is this due to a lack of scientific knowledge or an overabundance of corporate lobbyists?

I also disagree that wind power is inefficient. Once the turbines are set up, operating costs are cheeper than any other energy source. Holland has given its farmers economic incentives to set up wind turbines and not only are they able to meet their own needs, they are producing a surplus of energy that they sell back to the national grid.

Pardon me if I’ve gone off on anybody or said disturbing things. It’s just that I can’t stand the responsibility of belonging to the generation that is destroying nature at such an unprecedented rate. Call me egotistical, but I haven’t made my peace with the armageddon. I don’t accept the inevitability of any kind of future. But if this is really the end, I want to know that I’ve done everything in my power to stop it.

[Whitehall]

Yes, you did say one disturbing thing...

\"...after 40 years of lies from the nuclear industry, I would say that the burden of proof is on them\"

Having been a part, a small part but a part, of the nuclear industry since 1973, I know that the US civilian nuclear power industry has pretty much told it like it is over that period. We\'re held to a high standard and our basic assertions are verifiable and consistent. There has been a few bad actors in that period but they get removed pretty quickly. The lies have been with the opponents of nuclear power who exagerate, distort, and fanaticize statements against nuclear power to satisfy their internal emotional needs for political power and self-glorification. I, for one, welcome constructive criticism, but most of the opponents of nuclear power are indulging in demogogary pure and simple.

Sir, Do not call me a liar.


When I say the burden of proof lies with others, I\'m saying that any idealist can take pot shots at the work of practical people for not living up to some Utopian standard. If you have a better practical proposal for energy supply, please present it in detail. I\'m open to new ideas but every alternative now on the table to increased use of nuclear power suffers under scrutiny. You can\'t just say \"I demand a perfect system.\" Wind, solar, conservation et al only look good from a distance and with rose-colored glasses. If you can criticize nuclear, I can criticize your fave too.

Take wind. I used to work for a large west coast electric utility that operated one of the largest wind power installations in the world, the Altamont Pass. Besides killing over 600 eagles, hawks, and other large birds a year, the wind farm only produced at about 20% of design capacity. The worst part was that it produced when we least needed it. When we had our peaks loads was when the Central Valley of California was hot and there was no cooling fog rushing into the Valley from San Francisco Bay. Altamont Pass only made juice when the fog was blowing and hence system demand was down. Wind power did displace some fossil fuel use - largely natural gas - but the system still had to build the plants for those hot days when the fog wasn\'t blowing and the wind mills weren\'t turning. Economically, they weren\'t worth building - ie couldn\'t repay their capital cost without price and tax subsidies.

Solar electric has similar performance characteristics although there is usually a better match between output and demand but it\'s still not perfect. Solar peaks between 10 and 2 on a normal sunny day while demand peaks about 6 - at least for the typical summer-peaking system. Of course, get up before dawn in Minneapolis some winter day and solar power is absolutely useless. Even then, production of solar panels is not innocuous and has surprising environmental and energy costs of their own. Frankly, they seldom net-out.

I helped a leading Silicon Valley firm with a very advanced solar cell design consider building a solar power plant during our California energy crisis two years ago. The numbers just wouldn\'t work - even at 25 cents per kilowatt-hour they still couldn\'t commit to a practical plant. Nuclear electricity goes for 2.8 cents a kW-hr out here.

Yucca Mountain is a more than adequate site for a nuclear waste repository. So what do earthquakes do 1,000 feet underground in hard rock? Answer - just about nothing. You do need to avoid placing waste packages directly in the fault zones but that\'s easy. As to taking responsiblity for uranium-238, I can only point out that this stuff is surprisingly common. In fact nuclear power REDUCES the Earth\'s radioactivity from uranium by spliting it - the fragments have a much shorter half-life with the net result that, in a blink of the geological eye, there is LESS radioactive energy. But that\'s not a practical issue. What is pertinent is that in 500 to 1,000 years Yucca Mountain will be less toxic than the original ore bodies that we mined for nuclear power.

Listen, AKA, I feel much the same way as you do - humans are headed for ecological collapse. I decided on a career in nuclear power at age 20 after helping to clean up an oil spill on my favorite beach in Florida. I\'m known as a tough internal critic of nuclear power inside my business but nuclear is still the way to go. It won\'t really save the world but it will help and it is something that I can contribute to.

My greatest worry is that some day my grown grandchildren will look to me and ask \"Grandfather, how come you didn\'t build MORE nuclear plants while you had the chance?\"

[druid]

Well people heres what I understand about the subject...

The reason we have an atomosphere (you know the air we need to breath) is because Earth is massive enough to hold it here. You see all the gas particles in the atmosphere are moving at certain speeds (most important is the avgerage speed of these particles) call this speed v. Now for something to escape the gravitional pull of the earth, it needs to attain a speed called escape velocity (i forgot the number). Now Earth has a atmosphere because v &lt; escape velocity ie Earth has enough mass such that Escape velocity is pretty high. But when heat (just a form of energy) builds, as is the case with the burning of fossils fuels, heat from living creatures, hell even cigs, this heat causes the atomosphere molecules to move faster, therefore increasing their avg. velocity and that is why we are losing the ozone. The ozone is the outer layer of atmosphere and there more prone to escaping. The activities of an post-idustrial world are speeding this up..So yeah the planet is probably trying to fight back to acheieve some type of blance.

[CptKipling]

Do also be aware that there is a perfectly natural swing in the Earths climate. It can be very extreme, take a look at the various ice ages.

[belgareth]

No, global warming is not a proven fact, nor is ozone depletion or man\'s complicity in either. Each is a theory. Much of what is touted as fact is based on research that is poorly documented and done by researchers who have a stake in the outcome. That alone makes the research suspect.

I am not saying it is right to continue despoiling our world either. In my opinion, only an idiot craps in their own kitchen. However, we all have to accept the fact that we are not going to turn back the clock, consumption is going to continue to increase. People are not going to give up their air conditioning and computers and personal vehicles or the hundreds of other modern devices we rely on. We need to use our best technology now while we look for more, cleaner power sources.

Coal burning plants are dirty, that\'s real. A number of years ago there was research into mono-hydrodynamic power generation. It produced temperatures so high that all by-products were reduced to their basic elements. Pollution was reduced to virtually nothing. The old USSR did a lot of work on that, allegedly had a 500 mega-watt unit on line. Has anybody heard anything about that?

[Whitehall]

That was magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) power conversion. The idea was shot a stream of ionized gas (plasma) through a magnetic field and you create an electrical current which is tapped for electrical power. The energy source is whatever makes the gas so hot and pressurized - like a jet engine exhaust. The juice came out as direct current and required conversion to alternating current, the kind we get from our wall plug.

It wasn\'t really a new energy source - just new conversion method. It did work - sorta. Since the temperatures were limited for materials concerns, one has to spike the plasma stream with an alkali metal like metallic sodium or cesium that is hard to handle and expensive. The Soviets did make some field units for their military and built one or two demonstration central station plants.

One would expect the units to run on fossil fuels like natural gas and to have a major problem with NOX emissions.

A still-born technology with little current impetus for development, so far as I know.

[belgareth]

Yeah, I hadn\'t heard anything in many years and being no longer in the energy industry, I don\'t have as many resources for information as in the past. Thanks for the input.

I saw an article (Maybe in Science magazine) a few months back detailing the advances in producing larger quantities of anti-matter. Any information on that?

[Whitehall]

Anti-matter is surprisingly commonplace - at least in the form of positrons (positively charged electrons). For example a PET scan uses positrons. What you were reading about is recent advances in making a complete atom of anti-hydrogen with an anti-proton and a positron. It\'s an interesting scientific experiment but offers little economic opportunity for the energy business since it takes huge quantities of regular energy to make anti-matter.

Anti-matter will annihilate upon contact with matter releasing huge amounts of energy (remember E=mc2?) But where do you find anti-matter that hasn\'t already annihilated itself?

I do have a design for an anti-matter battery I\'ve been working on but it\'s mostly a PR device.

[**DONOTDELETE**]

My God, Captain! Where do you get the dilithium crystals??

[Whitehall]

Actually, it would use diamond. The anti-matter version is not really practical since it would emit 0.511 MeV gamma rays - a rather hard radiation with a high biohazard.

The real version would use a very soft beta particle or maybe an alpha particle that would be completely contained within the diamond matrix. These would be great as power sources for implanted medical devices - the radioactivity would be very well contained within the diamond - barring cremation.

[Watcher]

What aboud cold-fusion. Is it possible to use heavy water as a fuel type that is clean and efficent.
How far have advances come in this area. Is it just science fiction or something more.
What we need to do is to develop better technologies that are cleaner and more efficent in all areas of human technological usage.

http://www.chez.com/kristalisator/

We can probably do a decent job discussing thigns on this forum for starters, hey this is a good thread, what about wearing a constant OD into research labs, making everyone more competitive raising research efforts and producing a better outcome through everyones increased sexual driven motivation behaviour.
Hey ive done this in the past when i was in a medical facility and to be honest when i was around local advances and more effective measures for everything seem to happen overnight. Im wondering if my exposure to lots of people drove them to do things better through motivation (competition in a co-operative envirnoment.)

Im apply social behaviour and higher principles of human behaviour as a model here, but they seem to fit.

On another front the eventual outcome of competiting thought systems.

Ie what would fit into place a

B,C,D or E and found that it is best to be the theroy or idea with the highest support or the third hightest support as 2nd place loses in the end 94% of the time.

http://www.chez.com/kristalisator/

[Whitehall]

\"Cold Fusion\" is an interesting story about the limitations of establishment science.

The first reports came from a couple of guys working at a provincial college (Utah) in a minor branch of chemistry - not physics. They thought that they really were on to something but they didn\'t have a solid explanation as to the theory behind it. Their first success came when they walked into their lab one Monday morning and found a hole in the floor from a cell they had left working over the weekend.

Establishment science rushed to check. Most other scientists could not replicate the power output of the original cold fusion cells. The theorists met and agreed that 1) it wasn\'t hot and 2) there was no radioactive contamination and 3) they counldn\'t explain it - they concluded that it could NOT be fusion and therefore it never happened. Frankly, they seemed over-enthusiastic in their absolute denounciations.

Others did find ways to make the cells produce excess energies. Turns out that there is a lot of art involved and no one understands the underlying theory so we\'re all flying blind. One of those teams was from Texas A&amp;M and was funded by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) - I used to sit on an industry research committee there for a while. EPRI is a profoundly conservative entity, funded by the electric utility business.

Work continues but in an underground way. There are HUGE financial and social interests at risk as well as the potential for a tremendous paradigm shift in basic science. The original discoverers were whisked away to a special \"lab\" in the South of France funded by a Japanese firm and have not been heard from in years.

So far, no one has brought to market an application of \"cold fusion\" and no one has provided a theoritical basis for how it might work. Maybe there is a big conspiracy to cover it up or maybe in was all a mistake - I don\'t know. I\'m keeping an eye out for it though.

[CptKipling]

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Others did find ways to make the cells produce excess energies. Turns out that there is a lot of art involved and no one understands the underlying theory so we\'re all flying blind...Work continues but in an underground way...So far, no one has brought to market an application of \"cold fusion\" and no one has provided a theoritical basis for how it might work. Maybe there is a big conspiracy to cover it up or maybe in was all a mistake - I don\'t know. I\'m keeping an eye out for it though.

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Cold fusion - a lot like pheromones.

[Watcher]

This lab in the south of france wouldnt be CERT would it, only those with a conscipisory theroy background would understand what im talking about anyone else got area 51 in mind.

The social and scince impact would be huge but the economic structure would adapt, however it may open the way for new types of propolusion systems - Mssions to mars etc down the track once developed. However like pheromones top secret or just harassed so much by the media that it will never take off in a mainstream public focus type of way.

[Watcher]

Ok figured id put this back up seeing as though here in sydney australia in recent years bushfires have been more widespread and the average temperatures are up also. This country is in its worst drought in over 100 years and yet we hear conflicting stories on wether global warming is the results of solar flares and solar activities interacting with the earths atmosphere altering global weather patterns .

Or if its us humans and all our carbon dioxide and excess waste heat. Im sure the hydrogen economy will pick up in the next 20 years as coal and oil become more scarse and problems in middle eastern countries continue. The USA could specifically reduce realiance upon these middle eastern countries and leave the whole region alone if it didnt depend upon oil to drive its economy and then the fundalmentalists muslim religious nuts could run that region as they see fit.

[druid]

i think that would really mess up those middle eastern countries. if it wasn\'t for their oil they would have no major exports.

And yeah i think the weater is changing. Here in south florida every summer seems to get hotter (and more humid then the last -- and if you have ever been to south florida on a sunny july day you would think that it isn\'t possible to get more humid).

[belgareth]

The debate about whether the globe is warming or not should be settled soon. NASA launched two satilites last week with the expressed purpose of measuring climate changes and sea levels. It will take some time to correlate the data but the results should be interesting.