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Power Science

Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility 429

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the so-i-rewired-it dept.
SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"
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Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility More

Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility

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  • Fusion again? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ttfkam ( 37064 ) * on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:35PM (#13485999) Homepage Journal
    Have they sustained break-even point with this technology yet? Have they produced a surplus -- actually generate electricity -- with this technology yet?
    According to Henry Hutchinson of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, who set up the European panel, fast ignition requires less laser energy than the conventional approach, which means that it is considerably cheaper.

    "The energy problem is sufficiently urgent that we cannot afford to ignore different approaches to fusion," he says.
    It's sufficiently urgent that we can't wait for the fusion fairy to visit us. By all means, we should continue research in fusion. It's an exciting field with a lot of potential. But we don't potential so much as a workable energy policy now. We can't base them prototype research facilities that materialize "by the middle of the next decade."

    My $0.02

    • Re:Fusion again? (Score:5, Funny)

      by noidentity ( 188756 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:45PM (#13486042)
      "According to Henry Hutchinson of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, who set up the European panel, fast ignition requires less laser energy than the conventional approach, which means that it is considerably cheaper."

      This is great news! Now I can upgrade my imaginary working fusion reactor with a much more efficient model.

    • Re:Fusion again? (Score:3, Funny)

      by sanx ( 696287 )
      ...produce helium and neutrons...

      Seems like a real expensive way of novelty balloons...

    • Re:Fusion again? (Score:3, Informative)

      by lordholm ( 649770 )

      Have they sustained break-even point with this technology yet?

      Not with laser ignited fusion such as this, but the JET tokamak in the EU has reached break even.

      Have they produced a surplus -- actually generate electricity -- with this technology yet?

      No electricity has been produced, this is a lesser problem though (basically a huge water boiler), the main problem is that one would like to achieve ignition and have fusion for more than a second. Iter will achieve this. There are also som problems relati

    • Speaking of break-even... what's the big deal? I know what break-even means, but what's the practical significance of it? Is it just* a psychological achievement, or do things get much easier after break even?

      Break-even has been "just around the corner" for the past 50 years. Assuming we hit break-even within the next few years, will it take another 50 to get 1Mw over break even, or will it progress faster than that? At this rate, we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we get any reasonably useful ou

  • Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:36PM (#13486001) Homepage
    We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?

    • Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:38PM (#13486016) Homepage
      Fusion is easy, turning it into a practical source of energy is hard.
      • The fortune at the bottom of the page is oddly appropriate:

        Everything is possible. Pass the word. -- Rita Mae Brown, "Six of One"

    • Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)

      by Spy der Mann ( 805235 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `todhsals.nnamredyps'> on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:44PM (#13486037) Homepage Journal
      What makes this any different?

      Fast Ignition. From TFA:

      Kodama and colleagues are now upgrading their laser system in order to approach "breakeven" - the point at which the energy output is equal to the energy needed to sustain the reaction. They then plan to further enhance their system so that it reaches ignition, which happens when the fusion reactions generate enough energy to sustain themselves without the need for further heating. Finally, they hope to build a demonstration fast-ignition facility. Physicists in the US are also studying fast ignition.

      • Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Interesting)

        by brian0918 ( 638904 ) <brian0918@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:09PM (#13486173)
        TFA serves as an introduction to some nice fancy words like "breakeven" and "ignition", but that is all. It was made clear long ago that lasers are hopeless for this purpose.

      • Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Informative)

        by WatertonMan ( 550706 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @12:03AM (#13487170)
        Umm... Physicists in the US have been working on this for a long time. There was a laser at Lawrence Berkeley doing these experiments back in the early 90's and I worked on it at Los Alamos then as well.

        There are some big problems with it as a reactor design. Needless to say you have to get the tritium pellet positions just so inside a large laser. Figuring out how to do that with a *lot* of spherical pellets is non-trivial. And that's assuming they can make a self-sustaining system. (Something that I tend to doubt a lot - although I became rather cynical about the whole approach)

        My personal feeling is that at least in the US, most of those working on this were former weapons physicists. The physics is basically the same. They got to keep their jobs and work on the same sort of thing by bringing up the fabled "alternative energy" mantra. But I honestly doubt it'll ever pay off as an energy source.

        Great way to refine the physics of nuclear weapons though.

    • People laughed at idea of heavier than air machine (Score:5, Insightful)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:47PM (#13486055)
      ..until the Wright brothers built one.

      A thirty, fifty, or even seventy-five year delay doesnt mean people should write a technology off!

      What makes this different? Well rtfa.

    • This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Informative)

      by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:51PM (#13486080) Journal

      We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?

      You're exaggerating. Scientists have always been pretty upfront that creating a confined, sustained fusion reaction is an exceptionally difficult problem. The potential payoff is so large that we continue to study it.

      What makes this different is that they are building a large test facility for inertially-confined fusion. Magnetically-confined fusion is the more popular approach. The article doesn't talk about the details very much but one of the primary obstacles to inertially-confined fusion are the presence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov effect. The lasers are directed at a spherical shell containing a deuterium-tritium pellet and are supposed to cause the shell to implode. Manufacturing imperfections result in the RM instability and the less-than-perfect implosion causes the whole thing to fall apart without the deuterium and tritium fusing together. Does anyone know what the status of research on this is? A decade ago, there were still difficulties getting theoretical models of the RM instability to even agree with experiments, which obviously meant that the process of dealing with the instability seemed pretty far off. Are they still having problems with this?

      GMD

      • For more info on this, you would want to check out Sandia National Labs, where they're doing just this research. When ZR (Z-machine Refurbished) comes online (2007 I think), they'll once again be a step ahead of the rest.
      • I saw a documentary on how a scientist used lasers to ignite tritium into a fusion reaction. Unfortunately the reaction got out of control and nearly wiped out New York City. It was a good thing Spiderman was there to stop him.
      • If perfect spheres are needed, I wonder if it's possible to meld the elements in space - like in the ISS.

        Zero G's should result in perfect sphere, but would the return to Earth's gravity warp them?

      • Re:This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Informative)

        by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @09:03PM (#13486424)
        Here's the thing. I am currently posting this message as I sit at my desk in this [rochester.edu] building. You needn't wait until the middle of the next decade to see what Fast Ignition MAY offer us in terms of inertial fusion power. Only 2 more years. That is when our new multikilojoule multiPETAWATT laser [rochester.edu] will come online and fast ignition experiments will begin. Kodama et. al. have shown a neutron yeild increase of over three orders of magnitude when they coupled 500 J of chirped pulse (heater) light to their imploding cone in shell [rochester.edu] targets. We will be able to couple a ~3Kj heater pulse to the targets normally imploded on our current 30Kj 60 Terawatt system which currently holds the world record for neutron production at ~5X10^14 neutrons per pulse. This will therefore put us VERY close to the ignition regime and in fact one of the reasons the building of the new laser was approved was to examine the "near ignition parameter space" of scaled implosions to determine if the National Igniton Facility will ignite its capsules with high gain.

        As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor [wikipedia.org] instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.

        Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.

        Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....

        To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this [wisc.edu]. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.

    • Re:Yeah right (Score:2, Insightful)

      by DAldredge ( 2353 )
      Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...

      • AI has a problem of changing definintion (Score:5, Insightful)

        by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:58PM (#13486114) Journal

        Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...

        The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined. At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI. Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba. It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI. Today, we consider that to be little more than a clever computer algorithm. AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.

        If you are talking about "strong AI", where machines can actually think for themselves and are sentient beings, I don't think you're going to find any reputable scientist claiming that is only 10 years away.

        GMD

  • Nothing for you to see here, please move along.

  • oil companies days are numbered (Score:3, Insightful)

    by timmarhy ( 659436 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:39PM (#13486020)
    oil as a fuel, won't out last the decade i think. you think you have high prices in the USA? everyone else is paying 2x 4x as much as you are. consumer demand for cheaper power and transportation will drive the nails in the coffen.
    • Unfortunately technologies like fusion are not just around the corner.
      • Solar, Wind and Nuclear are here right now. We could all stop using fossil fuels tomorrow if someone would come up with an economic way to power our cars using electricity. As it stands, paying 10x as much for fuel as we are now is still cheaper than using battery technology. Fuel cells are even more expensive due to their need for platinum group metals. Putting electric rails on all our roads is impractical.

        Of course, now someone is going to spray me with numbers that prove that battery or hydrogen pow
    • Oil will last, just maybe not cheap oil. As far as alternate energy sources, have you looked at oil? [scripps.com] Seriously, oil shale in Colorado and tar sands in Alberta have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia.

  • Prior Art (Score:5, Funny)

    by uits ( 792760 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:40PM (#13486025)
    I saw this in Spiderman 2, like, a year ago.

  • Fusion + Laser Beams (Score:5, Funny)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:42PM (#13486030) Homepage
    Sounds like someone got funding from combining two of the coolest buzzwords from the 1950s.

  • Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:42PM (#13486032) Homepage
    "However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."

    Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?

    (I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)

    • Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Now that we've signed the nuclear test ban treaty, you can't actually tell what percent of your weapons will really explode if you were to use them (it's not 100%).

      Some of the lightest warheads are actually pretty fragile and it's an open question if they'll fizzle or go boom. You can simulate the degradation of materials and take a guess.

      Some of the warheads are dial-a-yield too. Maybe you could make interesting focused explosions for underground hits. You want your opponents to get the sense that there
      • "Now that we've signed the nuclear test ban treaty," When did that happen? Last thing I heard Bush was refusing to sign it.

    • Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xestrel ( 306192 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:03PM (#13486139)
      What there is left to nuclear weapons research today is understanding what happens to nuclear weapons as they age. This is the goal of so-called 'stock-pile stewardship.' And since we are currently not testing nuclear weapons, there's no empirical way to understand how our decades-old nuclear stock pile will perform today and in the future. These laser facilities will be able to provide weapons designers some information on the subject. That's one major reason why the DOE is willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on these facilities.

      -xest

    • Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Insightful)

      by InfiniteWisdom ( 530090 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:10PM (#13486179) Homepage
      Making big, dirty nuclear weapons is relatively easy. The challenge is making low-yeild ones that don't produce long-term radioactive fallout. Basically the "bunker busters" that Bush has been talking about.

  • The usual name for this is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:42PM (#13486034)
    inertial confinement fusion [berkeley.edu]. I'ts not new, but getting better. Most labs are not trying to reach break even point. It's more of a research tool.

    And to everyone who has/will ask 'when will these ever get us energy? We've been hearing about fusion for years!'. The new Tokamak being built in France right now is the first one that physicists expect to reach break even point. No other reactors were ever expected to generate more energy than they consumed. They were all for research purposes, to get them to the point they are at now. Probably the same for this new inertial confinement one in Europe.

  • Lasers, eh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Landshark17 ( 807664 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:45PM (#13486045)
    Yes, but will there be frickin' sharks?

  • The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DirtBag99 ( 912547 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:47PM (#13486052)
    The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion, even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that the energy released has a very substantial neutron component. Unlike gamma or beta radiation, neutrons stick to atomic nucleii and change the atoms of say, the reaction chamber walls into radioactive isotopes which in most cases, are actually far "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from fission power plants. Now, you say that you don't change the reactor vessel very often, but with most steel or other possible chamber materials, this bombardment of neutrons also makes the chamber very, very brittle. Now you are faced with the problem of changing and disposing of a very hot pile of material. Much better if you use Deuterium and Helium-3.

    • Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by John Hasler ( 414242 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:59PM (#13486121) Homepage
      > The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion,
      > even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that
      > the energy released has a very substantial
      > neutron component.

      Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium.

      > ...the reaction chamber walls into radioactive
      > isotopes which in most cases, are actually far
      > "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from
      > fission power plants.

      Hotter, and therefor shorter lived.
      • >Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium. True enough, however, if you put a layer of Li thick enough to capture all of the neutrons, you'll fill the reactor vessel with lithium... (Ok I'm exaggerating) You won't be able to catch them all... the mean free path of neutrons in lithium might be pretty big, but I don't know what the cross section of lithium is. It probably isn't as big as Halfnium or other "conventional" neutron absorbers. You'll still have a brittle pile of hot steel to r
        • Well, you need some sort of moderator to slow your fast neutrons, but this is a well-considered problem for fission reactors, and the result certainly won't be worse than a fission plant. Liquid lithium apparantly works pretty well. It's easy to shield your steel walls from thermal neutrons - a very thin layer of Gadolinium stops thermal neutrons cold (so to speak). Boronated plastics work as well, and are easy enough to dispose of.

          Still, D-T reactors are the messiest solution, and I certainly hope we ca

    • Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Funny)

      by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:08PM (#13486166) Homepage
      But, but but... It says right in the article that there are no greenhouse gases, no generation of long-lived nuclear waste... ...no downside, no safety issues, no problems, that it will produce a limitless supply of clean energy too cheap to meter, that neutrons are good for you, that the isotopes it produces will cure cancer and that people living near the plant will probably live to be 150... ...and that you can double your money in 45 days by arbitraging postal reply coupons.

    • Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Phanatic1a ( 413374 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:08PM (#13486167)
      Much better?

      Sure, if you ignore the fact that it's about 16 times harder to even initiate the reaction, *and* the fact that since most of the energy comes off the reaction as a 15 MeV proton, the Bremsstrahlung losses absolutely kill you.

      The more you look into magnetic confinement fusion, the more it seems that there's almost some sort of cosmic conspiracy to prevent us from using it as a power generation scheme. Go with neutronic fusion to avoid losing all your produced power to collisions with electrons in the plasma, and you run up against materials limitations. Try to avoid that problem, and you suddenly have a reaction that is *grotesquely* less efficient, to the point where it's probably not *possible* to even *break even*. To reduce those losses, you need to operate at even *higher* temperatures that it takes just to initiate the reaction, but when you do that, you lower your power density relative to D-T by a similar proportion and make containment that much harder.

      Seriously, we do not have the time to keep generating power by fossil fuels until we get fusion to work, because that might never happen, the problems are that significant. Even that big new testbed reactor that's going up in France won't really get us close, because it's not dealing with the materials issue; over the lifetime of a fusion reactor, *every single atom* in the containment vessel will be struck by neutrons hundreds or even thousands of times, and we don't know how to build materials that can withstand that sort of irradiation without swelling, distorting, cracking, and a variety of other things you don't want to see in a nuclear containment vessel.

      On the other hand, we know how to make *fission* work, and we should switch to that *now*. By the time we start making a dent in the fissionable fuels available to us, we should know how to build large-scale structures in orbit, and can just switch to solar collection satellites. I sincerely doubt if we'll ever even use fusion for power generation; by the time we ever figure out how to do it, it's likely there will be superior options available to us.

  • This superficially sounds like.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by distantbody ( 852269 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:48PM (#13486062) Journal
    the US National Ignition Facility [wikipedia.org]. The NIF will be used for multiple exercises, however, the devices main roles will be nuclear weapons testing for the United States, and fusion power experiments.
    • NIF is done for. It will never amount to anything. The most we can hope from it is that they will realize they were screwed from the beginning and donate the 4 lasers they've built to somewhere like Sandia National Labs, to make some single-shot compression videos or 3D views to determine capsule symmetry.

  • Time Until Break-Even (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob Carr ( 780861 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:48PM (#13486065) Homepage Journal
    A lot of people say that "Fusion is always thirty years away." This isn't accurate.

    With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.

    It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.

  • What's interesting about this setup isn't that it's using lasers to produce fusion (yawn... old news). What's relatively new about this facility is that it's using a two-stage approach with one set of lasers being used to compress the capsule, while the other ignites it. Supposedly, this requires less energy, so it's far more hopeful that it will reach the break-even point.

    Supposedly, they're even hoping (as the name suggests) to cause ignition -- where the process actually becomes self-sustaining (so you'll only need the containment lasers). Even more likely to reach break-even then.

    The other somewhat newsworthy aspect about this unit is that it will be a civilian facility, not a weapons facility with a few weeks a year allowed for civilian research (which is, apparently, the case for many of the other fusion units).

    I was originally gonna skip reading TFA, then I figured... Given how (in)accurate slashdot headlines are, I've got to presume that there's something non-boring about this 'new' plan.

    • Useless (Score:3, Interesting)

      by brian0918 ( 638904 )
      This project is hopeless from the go. Unless they plan on using thousands of lasers, they will never get the symmetry available in setups like pulse-powered z-pinches (which can also do fast ignition, such as Sandia National Labs Z-Machine), and lasers are far more inefficient for this purpose.

  • Free Fusion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @07:57PM (#13486107) Homepage Journal
    We have a source of unlimited ( well, practically unlimited ) fusion power plant now.

    Its called The sun.

    Why not work on technologies that use what we got now, instead of wasting it on research that most scientist agree will never realize even a 1:1 power ratio?
    • Even if solar cells were 100% efficient, they would not be able to power our cities. The intensity of sunlight on the earth is not that high.

      The future (for large scale energy needs) is either fusion or fission.

      We do work on technologies that are working now. Scientists are not a collective that only work on one thing at a time.

      Most scientists do not agree that fusion will never realize a 1:1 power ratio.
    • why cant we put some sort of probe by the sun that captures the energy given off by the plasma and beam it back to earth as microwaves?
  • 1. Blow $4 billion
    2. Only build 4 of the 192 lasers
    3. Lose entire budget
    4. ???
    5. Fusion!
  • is it like this [slashdot.org]?
    • NIF was a failure from the start. This is ICF (inertial confinement fusion through capsule ablation) combined with, quite literally, a "big frickin laser" to finish off the job and overcome and instability or asymmetry problems.

  • Continuous? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:38PM (#13486318) Journal
    I see one major problem with this, if it actually works...

    How do you make it work on a more-or-less continuous basis, rather than "blow one up, extract energy, reset system"?

    I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would work to control the overall rate, if the exact position of the capsule doesn't matter too much, but even then this will still make "little bangs" rather than a continuous stream of energy. Internal combustion engines we grasp, but internal fusion engines? This strikes me as similar to the problem of a space elevator - great idea, if only we had something that could bear that much stress...
  • How is this new lab different from what these folks [rochester.edu] are doing?

  • Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Marrow ( 195242 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @08:53PM (#13486379)
    Ok, so lets say we get fusion working perfectly. Say a 50% NET return on the energy in hydrogen. What answers are in the wings for vehicals?

    No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.

    So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?

    Are there other denser fuels that we could make with a rich energy source that would be convenient and portable?

    And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?

    I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.

    • Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by njh ( 24312 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @11:36PM (#13487070) Homepage
      There are fairly simple chemical processes for converting H2 and CO2 into oil. They just aren't economic because we produce H2 from oil at the moment. If H2 were cheap, producing oil replacements would be relatively straighforward.

      Another approach is to electrolyse the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, then react this with water to produce oil. However, that technology was developed for producing oil from coal, and there is plenty of coal around, so unless fusion power is surprisingly cheap, we'll probably just use coal.

      Converting methane into propane and butane is already done on a large scale, and in some countries these gases are already commonly used as car fuels (LPG in australia).

      Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.

      • Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.

        That's unnecessarily complex. Typical crops (such as rapeseed oil) yield around 150 US gallons of biodiesel per acre per year.

        On the other hand, algae species have been found to contain 50% oil that can be used for biodiesel. An algae biodiesel factory has the potential for 10,000 to 20,000 US gallons of biodiesel per acre under normal sunlight. Using 0.

    • Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner?

      Oh, *hell* yes. For weight-limited applications like air-travel, hydrogen walks all *over* dead dinosaurs. It's volumetric density is piss-poor, which is why you'd need your car's fuel system pressurized to about 5,000psi if you want to get as far on 16-gallon tank of hydrogen as you do on a 16-gallon tank of gasoline, but if you're talking massic energy density? Hooboy.

      H2: 140 MJ/kg
      Diesel/gasoline/avgas: ~46.8 MJ/kg

      Granted, at ST

  • Yurop ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sfjoe ( 470510 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @09:34PM (#13486576)

    Bah - I laugh at these foreign scientists. Just wait until the first wave of creationists start graduating from our high schools. Then we'll show them what scientific advancement is all aboout.

  • The Public and Nuclear Fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by iamlucky13 ( 795185 ) on Monday September 05, 2005 @10:32PM (#13486835)
    Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?

  • We need a couple of Wright Brother types... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AB3A ( 192265 ) on Tuesday September 06, 2005 @03:30PM (#13492403) Homepage Journal
    It's funny. I just flew back from a visit to one of aviation's great monuments: Kill-Devil Hills, where the Wright brothers figured out how to build a controllable aircraft and actually flew it.

    The interesting thing about the Wright Brothers is that they approached the "aviation problem" with a totally different view of how the Europeans were approaching it. They studied the European data for why it didn't work, rather than why it did. They discovered, for example, that the Lilienthal tables of aerodynamic performance were far more inaccurate than anyone realized [centennialofflight.gov].

    Perhaps, with all the effort that we're seeing toward research on the "fusion problem" we ought to ask ourselves, why this isn't working, instead of how it can. And then perhaps someone can think of something better than the brute force methods that everyone seems to enjoy funding. The turn of the last century was one where many governments were throwing money at all sorts of outlandish research projects to figure out how to aviate. Socially this feels remarkably similar to the "fusion problem" of today.

    OK, so the first "cold fusion" experiments weren't the real thing. How about Sonoluminescence [wikipedia.org]?
    And let's not stop there-- there are many other theories about how one might be able to get fusion energy surplusses on a smaller scale. Ultimately, this may be a class of problem like the power to weight ratio that the Wright Brothers noticed.

    Where are those Wright Brother types when you need them?

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