Potential of alternative energy sources?

peak uranium 235 is withing range bur peak uranium 238 and thorium would take millennia even eons, breeder reactors are the future, not like today breeders either, I would but my bets on particle bed, molten salt reactors as being even more economical, efficient, and less waste producing by several fold then todays breeder reactor designs.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

To ElectricFetus (replying to post 19):

All of your links are to "dreams." That will only, at best, get funding for more PR.

The first is set up to be a charity, and does what my group at APL did 40 years ago. In fact we did the magnetic cusp confinement better. (We magnetically “wiggled” the exit to make it leak less. – All cusp confinements do NOT confine a narrow cone of velocities directed along the magnetic axis so we tried to wiggle the axis location in less than the transit time.)

The second is a report by one guy which states:
“The submitted manuscript has been offered by an employee of the Midwest Research Institute (MRI), a
contractor of the US Government … Neither the United States government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty … for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed …”

I worked on the controlled fusion problem for a decade employed by agency funded by US government also and wrote dozens of “progress report” – In not one did I need to effectively admit that there was high probability that it was useless etc. My aspect of the project was the plasma source – sort of a-symmetric dense plasma focus*, which was used by others back then and called a Theta pinch gun (because the compression was a-symmetric the plasma was not only made but expelled.) – Our long range plan was to catch it in the magnetic cusp machine another member of the group was making (by over driving the “wiggler” to briefly open the cusp at one end and let the plasma in.)

It was quite amusing to read that they plan to use the H-B reaction instead of the much easier D-T reaction that ever realistic approach is planning on. To thermally throw a proton into Boron (atomic number 5 if memory serves) is five times more difficult as the Coulomb repulsion is five times greater. As far as I known, the dense plasma focus have never been able to achieve the require temperature (not to mention the fact that there is no confinement with that approach.) None the less here is some of that sole author's text:

“It {boron –hydrogen reaction} uses a much smaller, inexpensive, more elegant reactor, the Dense Plasma Focus. In contrast, conventional approaches to fusion revolve around the tokamak, a large, unwieldy and very expensive device that has consumed billions of dollars in research money and is still very far from achieving net energy. ...” I quote this to call your attention to what I originally stated: Namely that fusion power uses very expensive things compared to a fire-brick furnace and a chimmey to generate it heat. - Already with that simple economical heat source technology the fuel cost is a very minor part of your electric bill. -Thus even if The D & T of the fusion reactor were free (it isn't) the extra capital cost of the fusion reactor will not allow it to be economically competive with coal for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - until after "peak coal."

Of course it is "much smaller, inexpensive, more elegant", but so is a candle fire, which also cannot achieve the required temperatures or confinement.

Now for a simple calculation on your geothermal link (also un funded – people do not throw money away): They admit their geothermal source temperature is only 223F and there will be at least 11degrees difference across any economically reasonable size heat exchange to get the heat into the working fluid (NH4 dissolved in H2O) the high temperature in the limiting Carnot efficiency is 212F or 100C or 373K. Now in summer the air temperature can be more than 86F or 30C, but just to be kind, I will assume only that. Again you will need at least a 5 degree C differential across the heat exchanger, so the heat engine works between 100C and 35C and the maximum possible efficiency is then (100-35)/373 = 17.4% Again, let’s be kind and assume they get 17% useful output and must discharge as waste heat 83% of the energy the take in from the geothermal source. (Personally I expect the 17% output produced will barely be adequate to do the work of pumping the warm water up from deep in the ground, reinjection of the cooler geothermal water and turning the fans of the air cooled waste heat exchanger. You certainly will need them as air at 86F will not rise much by natural convection. Perhaps in a chimney several miles tall it would work.)

Do you have any idea how large and how expensive this waste heat exchanger would be to dump 83% of the input to the air at 86F? – I think not as if you did, you too would be:

:roflmao:

Yes, at great expense (and totally unaffordable) one can use accelerators to transmute elements. That is what your ”subcritical reactor” requires – an accelerator to supply the neutrons the critical reactor would be making. Why do you think that placing some undesired isotope in a reactor that only runs with the aid of an accelerator, BUT MAKES THE SAME DISTRIBUTION of neutrons that a critical one does in all of its reactions would be more desirable or more efficient than simply putting the undesirable isotopes in a critical reactor and not need the expense or complexity of also running an accelerator?

P.S. Before being too critical of people who have difficulty understand what you are trying to state, perhaps you should spend a little more effort in understanding what you are stating (at least in these extremely silly, unfunded, left-field ideas, far removed for the work of respected groups or discarded decades ago.)
-------
*A true dense plasma focus can be a very useful device for making X-ray time stoping photographs, but not for economical fusion, even withthe D-T reaction.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Billy T,

Everything was once a dream, all of alternative energy is a dream. testing Bussards and Lenars fusion reactors would require less then 1% the money we are wasting on ITER. If we are willing to waste billions on a reactor which is by design economically impractical then we should be able to waste a few million to validate reactors that could be economical if they work.

oh and the DPF people claim they have reach the require temperatures.

There are have been many projects that have demonstrated that viability and practically of organic cycle geothermal plants, of course the Carnot efficiency dictates that only a very small percentage of energy available can be turned to useful work, and you can suggest that it woun't be energy positive, but that won't change the reality that energy positive plant exist:
http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/sciruslink?src=web&url=http://www.nrel.gov/geothermal/pdfs/30275.pdf
so for example how big would the air coolers need to be? Well the 1.3MWe plant in tibet at ~15,000ft is less then 800 sq meters (fit on the roof of the plant in the picture) though the one in much lower altitude California is small enough to fit on a semi-truck.

As for the your comments on the subcritical reactor, again you failed to even read as you would relies why those "undesired isotope" cannot be used in a normal reactor. Those undesired isotope either cannot produce enough neutrons to maintain criticality them selves or would be to difficult to prevent from going supercritical. If you though waste in a conventional reactor they would absorb to many neutron and kill the fission reaction (hence why its waste in the first place) or the waste would go supercritical, and that would be really bad.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Although I have not followed closely the field for 25years, I think the DPF can achieve ignition temperatures for the D/T reaction. I do not think it can for the H/B reaction that your link intended it for.

Certainly geothermal power can be economical. I was part of a team (DOE funded them in every state - State Senators and politics made sure of that) that evaluated the geothermal potential in Maryland. The Maryland government turned to APL/JHU because were already in long term relationship with them concerning power plants* - both the impact on the Chesapeake Bay (I still remember that lose of pleasure fish was in the model at about $40/ pound as when you are honest that is what it costs to catch them from your private boat) and on urban air quality etc. for other "costs" as well as relative benefits.

Maryland does not have anything one would normally call geothermal resources, but over on the Eastern Shore part, where the basement igneous rocks are already starting to dip down for the ocean the over lying sediment is about 5000 feet or more thick. This serves as a "thermal blanket" and one can cheaply drill down thru the sediment to get significantly hotter water that your non-sense link's 223F, but still not hot enough for power generation. However, they raise a lot of chickens on Maryland's Eastern shore (perhaps 1/4 of all exported by the US, mainly to EU, especially Germany at least, back 40 years ago.) So I /our final report honestly admitted (despite some pressure to claim otherwise and get in on the second round of DOE funding of geothermal) that economically viable geothermal power production was not possible in Maryland, but the chicken processing industry did need huge amounts of moderately hot water. (This background is why I knew immediately that your geothermal link was essentially a scam. - We were too honest or we could have been funded for Round II also. - You link is so bad that it cannot even get funded for "Round I." - 223F geothermal water is OK for "scalding the feathers off" chickens and washing the floor of the chicken processing plant, but not for power production unless heavily subsidized.

I suspect that at 15000 feet in Tibet the air temperature is a lot cooler. This makes the size of the heat exchanger transferring the waste heat to the air much smaller or can be used to increase the power production efficiency. I do not know the details, but strongly suspect they have hotter water also than the silly 223F of your link.

Be a little more critical before endorsing scams.
----------------
*Maryland was quite intelligent in this multi-decade support of us. No one wants a new power plant near their home, yet every ones wants there to be electric power adequate to the growing demand. Basically we help MD set up a "bank of possible" new power plants sites. No one got too excited as there were many feasible ones and few of them would ever be used so the politcal resistance was not very strong and we could make rational evaluations with models of the cost / benefits, enviromental cost included, etc. long before the need was urgent.

 

Syzygys: It is my understanding that there is enough coal in the western USA to supply USA energy needs for at least 100 years. It has been ignored for the past 50 plus years due to petroleum being more cost efficient and more convenient to extract/transport.

With the price of petroleum going up and the possibility of its running out or being withheld from the USA, coal should start looking very good.

 

ITER is a scam, DPF may as well be too, but at least it would would take 5 million dollars each to disprove DPF and/or Bussard (or prove them) it going to take 50 billion only to prove ITER is uneconomical (or to disprove that a tokamak even at that size can achieve net positive energy.) So call it a scam, we can sit around and do nothing and let are civilization collapse from lack of delevopment and energy, or we can try as many alternatives as possible until we find and utilize the ones that work.

Heavily subside only at this time (more like 2 years ago) but when energy prices are 3-4 times high it will be worth it, or we can just deal with energy shortages when it happens and the lack of a functional economy won't even allow us to implement any alternatives.

The Tibet air coolers were significantly larger then the Californian ones, despite the air being "cooler", air density is nearly half that at sea level.

So far what you think and your personal experiences are opposite to referenced examples.

 

http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/coal.htm

Uranium is indeed a finite resource, but as ElectricFetus pointed out there is such a thing as a sustainable fuels cycle. We don't have one, but it can be done. As has been already said, fission is only a stopgap measure for the looming power crunch. All we need it for is to get past that while keeping our reserve capacity (out of net generation) above 10%. 50 years from now, today's new plants will be nearing the end of their operating lives and we'll be debating a bunch of superior technologies to replace them.

 

Echo3Romeo,

http://www.energybulletin.net/29919.html

Note that that 250 year estimate for coal assumes that demand today remains the same for then next 250 years. But demand is not steady state, its exponential!

 

Of course. 250 years is just a useful perspective for indicating the BTU content of our coal reserves (as in, big fuckoff huge). Point being, we really don't need to worry about running out of it, especially since it is already falling out of favor as a fuel source.

 

Heat engine solar is not that expensive, even at its current underdeveloped stage.

It is also pretty safe, and environmentally about the most benign of anything.

The most expensive, as well as most hazardous physically and politically, is clean nukes. Clean coal is a bit cheaper.

That about covers the immediate possibilities, for the quantity needed.

 

It is 250 or whatever years but :

With current rate of domestic consumption. So if you hike domestic consumption AND you also start to export it that 250 years can come down to much less...

 

Natural gas is also a very cheap alternative compared to gasoline. Current engines can burn natural gas after some relatively cheap modification. Natural gas is much easier on the engine, promoting longer engine life. It also burns with 75 percent fewer pollutants. It is an existing technology and requires no technology break throughs.
The only issue with natural gas, is you cannot buy it at the local gas station. I wonder why? The United States in rich in natural gas deposits.

 

Natural gas is not going to last much longer then Oil, most of its production is directly from oil production and gas prices have been going up with oil.

 

Your referenced examples are known for decades ago not to be attractive approaches.

I am of the opinion that even if ITER is a technical success, it will not make much contribution to the development of affordable electric power, but that IHMO does not qualify it as a scam. I would prefer to call sending men to Mars a "scam," but mankind will learn some things even from that, certainly will learn more that may be useful from ITER.

In my book, a "scam" is a scheme to collect money (Recall your first link even solicits contributions as a "charity.") on some idea that the proposers know is a fraud (or should know from the years of prior work by others). For a classic scam example, the nearly magic device that for only $25 dollars that when added to your car’s spark plugs will double your gas mileage, etc. H/B fusion with a DPL machine, or the magnetic mirror / cusp confinement machine, or geothermal power from a 223F source all qualify as scams, IMHO.

True I do happen to hold this POV from a decade of post physics Ph.D. employment working for APL/JHU in the controlled fusion area, and several months on evaluation of MD’s geothermal potential, but I am not so confident in my infalability to call these scams based on that alone. - I rely more on the collective judgment of at least 50,000 others who know more than me and are still active in the field.

 

I don't think the proposers know its a scam, in the case of geothermal, bussard even Lenard, they may (have been) be crazy but I doubt they knowingly are scaming. Scamers tended to have even more outlandish claims. target the uneducated, and also tend to get more money then these people do. If these people are scamers they are doing it all wrong.

We could learn allot about plasma physics studying Bussard's and DPF reactor which by the way are fundamentally different for reactor design study for decades. Bussard Polywell does not use electrostatic grids and relies on magnetically confining electrons rather then electrostatics. DPF is different from plasma pinch by implanting angular momentum. Most of all we could learn about plasma physics at a price of 100th that of ITER.

Do you know what an appeal to authority is? For example "thousands of theologians, astrologers and philosophers say the sun revolves around the earth, I'm an educated astrologer and I agree with them, IMHO."
now lets see if your argument follows the same profile:

It does! How then could your illogical argument be turned into a valid logical argument? Instead of claiming authority, give evidence, give the reasoning why 50,000 Physics say geothermal and alternative fusion techniques are "scams". Best if you cite research from them saying so in detail. Also best if you don't hide behind your claimed education.

 

You are distorting what I said. I said "Certainly geothermal power is practical, economical etc, but not if the source is 223F warm, especially if the plan is to dump greater than 83% of the input energy into the US summer air as waste heat.

I cannot tell who has already investigated the particular magnetic geometry Bussard plans (in part because I do not know what it is- he does not describe it.) but dozens have been well investigated in experiments and hundreds in computer models. We had one 40 years ago under test it was a quadra pole. It consisted of four heavy (about 1.5 cm diameter as the magnetic forces get to be great) parallel current rods about a 1.2 meters long. It was both a research tool (see the lose rate from the linear cusps) and intended to facilities the transfer of the plasma formed in my conical theta pinch gun into the more conventional magnetic mirror confinement chamber.

It is hard to believe now, but even though we of course knew that ALL cusp magnetic geometric (like, I think, Bussard is planning) have some exit paths in velocity space (following a scattering that aligns the particles velocity with the local field line direction - no confining force exist for motion along the line.) we hoped that "wiggling" the escape paths would keep the loss rate sustainable. Even if initially locally aligned the particle may not escape (as is case for most in Earth's ionosphere) as it tries to move into regions of increasing field strength, it in fact gets a cross field component of velocity that make it gyrate at the Lamor frequency.*

It is not "appeal to authority" -that too is a distortion on your part of my POV and 50,000 greater experts than me POV also. We have "been there," "done that" and "seen it fail" and eventually "understood why."

I will not respond more to you - your mind is set on dreams, ignoring well established facts.
--------------
* As I recall this was one of the first of dozens of instability that was well understood. The gyration radius of the ions and electrons is different. This made a radial charge gradient (I.e. radial electric field, even though none was applied) That E field can interact with the B field to pump the plasma out. That is why the B field lines were twisted in the old, now obsolete design of the "stellarator", built at Princeton, many years ago and is still used in the ITER design. I strongly bet the plasma of the ITER will be better confined but still has a few more "escape tricks" to teach us about.

 

It is an appeal to authority, you present no evidence, if these fact are so well establish then reference them! I reference facts showing Low temp geothermal as practical, you reference only claims, and you dare to call me a dreamer, Now Bussard's and Lenard's reactors may not work but I believe they are worth trying, you can claim all you want they will fail, and they might just, but it worth trying. I'm not a dream I'm an unbiased pragmatist, if it were up to you nothing would be done, but something needs to be done and soon.

 

Billy,
In the magnetic cusp experiments you were involved with, were you trying to confined a thermal plasma? What I mean is, magnetic confinement of both electrons and ionized nuclei, with electrons and ions in thermal equilibrium?

 

Unless you count the gigantic swath of desert you'd need to occupy with collectors just to make a dent in the baseload while the sun is shining.

 

I was part of a team and not responsible for, or much involved with, the confinement cusp work. I think they spent more than a year injecting electrons from a beam forming gun - perhaps stolen from CRT. They did not have good means of making hot dense plasma - that was to come from my conical theta pinch gun, but they did make lower density plasmas. It was 45 years ago and I do not remember it all well now.

Initially, we and US Navy, who was funding us thought that fusion would be easy. The Navy wanted us to keep knowledgeable in the field for the day when they would need some trusted, independent "experts" to help them evaluate various proposals for the Navy's first fusion powered aircraft carrier. - contracts for it being only 10 years away heehaw, now. It seems that with every year that passes the day of fusion power is not one year closer, but one year further away.

The plasma from my gun was not very hot by fusion standards, but fully ionized and at least as good a conductor as copper. It was neutral and initially dense expanding into vacuum (the small end of the conical end section had an briefly opening value that let the gas in - then a "Pre-ionizer" (a low current high voltage discharge self triggered as the gas expanded into the cone part) that make it conductive to be efficiently compressed by the huge fast-rise main current discharge in the single turn, also conical, coil fitting snugly around the conical glass wall of the vacuum tube. This single turn metal cone was milled in a large metal block as if it were just an inch or so thick coil of copper strap it would have exploded with the magnetic field it was producing inside the cone.

Because the gas was already plasma in the cone area that magnetic field could not immediately get to the axis of the cone. It induced a huge theta current in the plasma "skin" so strong that it tended to self constrict or "pinch” - hence the name "theta pinch" This rapid rise skin current was making its own sort of solenoidal B field in the reversed direction to the applied field (Len's law in action) - In fact, that is why just after the main discharge there is essentially no B field on the axis. (APPLIED AND INDUCED FIELDS ADD TO ZERO THERE) However, the very low inductance capacitor bank driving the current in the external metal single turn conical cone is still getting stronger while the induced current is relatively weaker and the external field "wins" driving the skin current wall of the plasma current radially inward - all this in a few microseconds. This compression and the natural pinch of the closed theta loop current in the plasma makes very dense, hot plasma "slug" on the axis as the radial implosion motion "thermalizes." Then depending upon what I want to do, there might be a longer lasting but much weaker current in a coil around the cylindrical section of the glass vacuum tube extension of the large end of the conical glass section. If this B guide field was on, it keeps the plasma slug off the walls and let me do spectroscopic measurements on the plasma the gun had delivered. My Ph.D. was from JHU and on the Stark broading of Argon ion lines. - APL is a division of JHU - they came looking for someone like me to bring some experimental and especially spectroscopic skills to their just formed group - I did not need to seek any job - it sought me. My fist week on the job I ordered a versatile spectrograph I could modify for several photo -multiplier tube detectors to simultaneously track the time evolution of various lines - it cost $14,000 as I recall - we were well funded, considering there were only 5 of us with Ph.D.s (Two were theoreticians, helping to model what happened and understand the latest instabilities found.

The Navy knew and accepted that we would not solve the fusion problem. All they wanted was that we had some “hands-on” experience and would know who was feeding them BS later etc. Navy (all the services really) has terrible problem with management of high tech, because their people need positions of command to move up thru the ranks and no one wants to spend 10 years or more as contract office in at a desk in DC. APL saved the pacific fleet from the Kama Kazi in WWII with the speedy development of the proximity fused artillery shell. Ever afterwards APL was their main innovative design and contract monitor team (although NRL worked more with some ship systems, especially torpedoes, ship power, motors, etc.) –Still does. For example that defective spy satellite US just shot down on first try (as I predicted) was done entirely with APL systems, a modified standard missile, the Aegis ship’s fire control guidance system and its phased array radar etc. – all came out of APL (Applied Physics Laboratory)