Will Nuclear Fusion be a Safe and Viable Source of Renwable Energy?

[Nathanael]

This article is definitely worth a read:

The new $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility in California is home to the world's largest laser. Once operational, 192 laser beams will focus on a 2 millimeter ball of frozen hydrogen in the hopes of creating peaceful nuclear fusion--and the greatest reserve of clean energy yet.

Link: http://www.energyboom.com/nuclear-fusion-holy-grail-clean-energy

[Taverner]

1. Well it doesn't exist yet so, sure! So is fairy dust!

But I do hope we find a way to do cold fusion...

[kestrel91316]

2. Only in my dreams, and those of millions of other people.

[phantom power]

3. Perhaps someday.

My interpretation of the various topics I see in this forum lead me to think that we have to immediately start proceeding without it, or else there may not be any "someday"

[pscot]

4. For some reason

the idea of nuclear fusion always makes me think of "ice nine". Not that anything could possibly go wrong.

[Nathanael]

5. Negative Associations

Yeah, I agree. For me, the term "nuclear" just has innate negative connotations. History has a tendency to plant heavy seeds.

[diane in sf]

6. no

[GliderGuider]

7. Probably not.

When I see statements like "Experiments are expected to continue right up to 2040" I stop thinking about it. From what I know, it looks like we have 10 years tops to cut our carbon emissions to 10% of what they are today if we want to preserve the global climate. 2040 is so far outside the timeline as to be inconsequential.

We should keep working on it in case a miracle happens (and lord knows it will take a miracle at this point to keep Really Bad Things from happening). Unfortunately, given the increasing instability of the global economy the likelihood of such complex research coming to fruition and then being operationalized is IMO becoming more and more remote.

[Terry in Austin]

8. File this under "be careful what you wish for"

We wish so hard for the unlimited energy that fusion would provide, we forget that having virtually unlimited energy got us into quite a spot in short order -- half the place paved over, and twice too many people.

Fuggedabowdit -- we're spoiled, and sooner later have to face growing up as a species. That means living within a realistic energy budget. Not too early to start...

[NickB79]

9. Well, not safe for the rest of the species on this planet

I believe it was GliderGuider that presented this example:

Imagine equipping the world's industrial fishing fleet with clean, efficient fusion reactors that allow them to operate for years without refueling, and then send them out into the world's oceans. How long would it take before the world's oceans are virtually emptied of fish?

With cheap, clean fusion energy, what's to stop humanity from stripping this planet like a swarm of locusts?

[Nihil]

10. Agreed.

Both you and Terry are right that although fusion would remove some
of the current issues, it wouldn't touch the underlying ones that
are by far the most damaging: humanities greed and insatiable lust
for resource consumption.

Locusts are merely feasibility studies compared to our species.

[GliderGuider]

12. An excellent turn of phrase

"Locusts were a feasibility study for human beings"

I'd like to swipe that for my next talk, if you don't object.

[Nihil]

16. You're more than welcome! (n/t)

:toast:

[joshcryer]

15. No! Human recycling isn't done because of energy! We consume resources because it's 'cheaper.'

We get nitrates from large deposits on the planet because to seperate those nitrates from our waste would require a lot of energy to do so. It's basic thermodynamics.

There would be no *reason* for us to continue consuming the worlds resources and polluting because it would be more logical to recycle those resources.

There's a reason things like Polywell fusion aren't getting paid for by venture capitalists, it changes the game forever. Energy is extremely profitable at the moment, if it ever became free (again)...

[Nihil]

17. Disagree.

At the global level, the energy requirement for recycling does
come into play but at the local level, the issue is primarily
human laziness & greed. It is cheaper to buy more raw materials
than to reprocess the waste ones. It involves less work to
simply repeat the previous order than to break new ground to
work around the waste issue.

> We get nitrates from large deposits on the planet because to
> seperate those nitrates from our waste would require a lot of
> energy to do so. It's basic thermodynamics.

The sticking point isn't the energy required, it is the cost
(and hassle) of getting everything into place. Yes, I know that
the cost of energy is a factor in this but it is a long way from
the controlling factor: if the total impact cost was accurately
reflected in the price things bear in the shops, there would be
a hell of a lot less produce for us to choose from ...

> There would be no *reason* for us to continue consuming the
> worlds resources and polluting because it would be more logical
> to recycle those resources.

It is *already* more logical to recycle the resources but this
requires concern. I will admit that this concern is gradually
growing (hence more recycling *is* happening) but there is still
a long way to go. "Reason" isn't a determining factor as often
as we would like it to be ...

> Energy is extremely profitable at the moment, if it ever became
> free (again)...

The only way that it will become "free" is if you invest on a
personal level (or a community level) - i.e., for solar/wind/whatever
generating resources - to take you "off-grid" and no longer beholden
to the *for-profit* *companies* that provide you with energy.

Even if fusion (from Polywell or whatever technology you want) becomes
widely available, it will be provided by a for-profit company and so
will be charged for at sufficient rate to not only recover their costs
but to ensure that they *do* make a profit.

[joshcryer]

21. If Polywell works I find it highly unlikely patents would be able to be enforced.

If it works everyone will use it. I don't hold out much hope on it working, however. But game changers are kind of obvious.

It logical from a rational perspective to recycle even now, however, I was speaking in the context of our globalized capitalist world, which tends to do the illogical in favor of profit. It's not logical for capitalists to recycle because it's monetarily cheaper to just dig up some third world countries deposits with hard labor than it is to sequester off nutrient drains (converting geoagricultural fields to hydroponic greenhouses).

But when recycling is cheaper and more time effective than shipping in raw resources from somewhere else it sort of changes the equation. Veritical gardens can't work at the moment because they don't get enough light (it's all about area). You either build some extraoridinary contraption to get the light to them or you use artificial lighting. The former is a difficult engineering problem (again it's about surface area), the latter is an energy problem.

[tom_paine]

11. You remembered that, too? What an excellent example.

And how true.

I was once a big fusion booster,and I still am, but in the realistic understanding that there is a good chance that even with fusion, we couldn't save the current version of civilization.

The difference is (I speculate) that whole new arenas of physics, engineering, biology and chemistry would be opened up due to the vast amounts of energy available for experiments and production.

These may, and it is difficult to guess on specifics of what is only imagined, revolutionize how we feed ourselves, and allow us to spare the oceans. Further, it would allow us to maybe get out of space and start getting our metals from asteroids instead of our planet.

But the image of that neverending, never running out of fuel fishing fleet, is powerful indeed.

[joshcryer]

14. We can easily do that now with current diesel ships. That's why we have quotas.

Really, consider the large tilapia ships (two of them almost as big as aircraft carriers with nets that can capture fish, process, debone, and package it all on the ship). They could *make extinct* the whole North Pacific in 2 weeks of fishing.

Think about that.

Extinction in two weeks.

Quotas were put in place to keep this sort of thing from happening, and it's fairly well understood.

What's going to happen when a survey produces vastly underwhelming numbers, though, will be interesting (because we'll have to go full stop on fishing so that their numbers can recoop; creating a big problem in the Asian and American fish markets).

Fear mongering is really kind of disappointing though. With fusion you'd grow all your crops in vertical gardens that recycle waste efficiently. The reason we pollute is because it's cheaper energetically speaking. If we had unlimited energy we'd obviously recycle.

[GliderGuider]

19. The Northern Cod moratorium was put in place 15 years ago.

There has been no recovery of the stocks since then. When a population gets too small it may not recover, at least not on timescales significant to human activities. In many ecological domains, by the time we notice we're in trouble it's already too late.

On your other point, even if energy were unlimited and very very cheap, it could still be cheaper to do primary extraction than reprocessing. If the non-energy cost of reprocessing a unit of a resource is higher today than the cost of primary extraction of that same unit, then even reducing the energy input costs to zero is still going to leave the reprocessed material costing more. It would change the economic equation if the non-energy costs of reprocessing were lower than for extraction. There's no guarantee that this would be the case.

[joshcryer]

20. We have a decent idea of the current stocks.

I don't buy that we don't. It's a self-interested perspective. Quotas have saved many species from extinction. It's a win win for all parties.

Anyway, extracting raw resources is obviously going to continue even with free energy, the key is that old polluting processes can be throw out in leu of more environmentally friendly processes. You don't need cynaide to seperate gold because you have so much energy the gold can be melted straight from the ground. As it stands now melting gold from raw ore with energy is more expensive than less energetic chemical (and polluting) processes. It's actually so expensive to do it thermally that the energy is worth more than the gold obtained by such processes!

With high energy we will probably extract far more than we do now, consider the clay deposits of the world, which are about 20% aluminum. Opens up a whole resource that as of now is not economically viable.

As long as there are polluting effects it won't be a bad thing (and please don't be dishonest and say all industry is polluting because I just described an alternative that simply is not).

[NickB79]

22. How exactly do you melt the gold ore right out of the ground?

The only way that sounds feasible is if you first MINE the ore out of the ground, with the resultant environmental impacts associated with tearing up the land, before you can bring it to a smelting plant. The same question applies to the aluminum-bearing clay deposits you mentioned.

[joshcryer]

24. So?

I don't see what the issue is. Mining alone isn't the big issue, it's the byproducts that are the issue, runoff can be mitigitated if not completely stopped, cynide runoff is not.

[NickB79]

25. Strip-mining isn't an environmental issue? Ok then.

http://images.google.com/images?q=open-pit+mining&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=ZAYvSv-LBoHQMpP-3fMJ&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

No issues there, none at all.

[joshcryer]

26. Nope.

Nature can quickly recoop from digging dirt up, it can't easily recoop from cynide in streams and rivers. Nature always balanaces things out, it's just that our pollution is so vast that it has a hard time adapting.

Appealing to emotion isn't necessary.

[Nihil]

27. Never mind.

Deleted as there is no point in arguing with someone
so completely opposite in viewpoint.

[joshcryer]

28. On the bright side, if fusion ever happens, we can get our minerals from space.

So there's an upside that perhaps people here can get behind.

[NickB79]

29. But with unlimited energy, Nature will not get a chance to recoop from our digging

That's the point: with unlimited energy the human population will boom, and with it the demand for new goods. We will control Nature in ways we haven't even dreamed of yet, all to satisfy our increasing levels of consumption. We would eventually turn to outer space for new raw materials, but probably not until we have exhausted most of the resources found on this planet first.

[joshcryer]

30. No, there are limits to human consumption.

If you read my sigline it's abundantly clear that the issue isn't energy usage, it's how we use the resources themselves. You can extract all of the aluminum from all of the crop fields in the whole of the USA and replace the silica with enriched soil, the "harm" would be non-existant. Certainly such a "disaster" would be better than the things nature can come up with (because we'd be intelligently forming the planet rather than mindlessly).

Algae use 5 times as much energy as us yet somehow we do so much damage that we can destroy whole ecosystems.

Energy usage isn't the problem and there are solutions to resource aqusition.

[Kablooie]

13. It already is! (The sun is powered by nuclear fusion) -- ha!

[TheWraith]

18. Let's try the one that can be operational in less than a decade.

Reminder: while the ITER and NIF projects are still talking about viability being decades away, the Polywell design is estimated to be ready for a full-scale 100 megawatt demonstrator plant that would be online and running in just 5 to 7 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

[IrateCitizen]

23. Will dilithium crystals be a safe and viable source of energy?

Seriously, there's just about the same chance of that happening as cold fusion, based upon the criteria that... I don't know, they actually come up with a working model first.

This doesn't even begin to approach questions of capital investment and economic viability.