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Hello ICouldBeWrong,
I second your thoughts on memmel. One can only appreciate all his due diligence, his powerful insight and his willingness to share same. His contributions have helped my understanding of peak oil and its ramifications enormously.
Re: Dr Bussard. You probably know this but he passed away last October. I'm not sure if his "team" will be able to go forward without him or not.
Dr. Bussard
Hard to get a break these days isn't it?
Thanks for the article Khebab. You and Westexas have done great work.
Don
Thanks.
And on one hand I'm sorry I've not been able to come up with some cool graphs. But the collapse of civilizations is a hard problem that the smartest people around at the time of collapse have been unable to solve time after time after time.
The first mistake they make is that its a solvable problem. I.e collapse can be prevented this is wrong.
It cannot be prevented but once you recognize this it can be controlled.
Collectively we are all going to get a lot poorer as the leverage provided by cheap oil disappears.
Like it or not McMansions and monster SUV's are tangible wealth given cheap oil and in a expensive oil
regime their value goes to zero. This wealth will be lost period it won't be spent on electric rail or on
a fuel efficient car etc.
As you expand this to include other assets who's value is upheld by cheap oil you realize that the US alone will lose trillion and trillions of dollars in paper wealth it makes the underlying cost of oil a small part of the problem. The reason its small is we have leveraged oil deleveraging regardless of if its a planned move to rail a panic move etc will result in a write down of the value of the far flung suburbs strip malls , road and parking lots that cannot be resurfaced etc. Next its a major contraction in the consumer economy as people become more focused on necessities. The world economy will naturally move over time to one driven by its yearly solar energy allotment this economy is only a fraction of our current one.
Thats the big picture problem and no reasonable alternative to oil can solve this problem.
And of course even knowing the right answer if you will that we need to undertake a controlled collapse
of our economy is not really all that useful since people refuse to believe that our only two choices are
controlled collapse or chaotic collapse. This refusal is in effect a vote for chaotic collapse.
If you still don't believe me let me put it this way. Peak oil theorist focusing on production completely missed the concept of export land and its implications we discovered this problem fairly late in the game.
How many other serious situations do we face that are not directly related to oil supply but have a significant impact on oil production and utilization ? How many other "export land" type problems are
lurking ? These are the types of problems which drive the solution chaotic and thus into collapse and
they are almost impossible to predict but require insight to recognize.
We know about a lot of them EROI, fiat currencies, growth economy etc etc.
And I believe I found another one that has a impact just as large as exportland.
Just enumerating the number of external factors that are causing problems as oil supplies decline is impossible and it seems that they are growing exponentially but this is exactly the conclusion I came
too and why you can't solve the problem.
I still have a academic or probably more correct forensic interest in peak oil and its effects.
I'd like to know what actually killed the victim. Are we dead yet ? yep.
Thanks for your reply Memmel!
I fully accept peak oil, Hubbert's 1953 'Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels' paper by itself convinced me. I also accept the export land model that shows exports to the oil consuming nations will peak before production does. Furthermore I find your hypothesis that improved technology that has allowed us to extract fossil fuels at an increased rate means that rather than oil production resembling a normal curve, it could instead resemble a drop off a cliff.
There are other problems too, e.g. with the global financial system. It's not in good shape for reasons discussed by luminaries like Jim Rogers, and Peter Schiff. Basically the financial system was due to collapse and a greater depression begin even without peak oil. Peak oil is simply the 1 ton boulder that has broken the camels back.
So I agree things look extremely bad, and agree we are rapidly running out of time. Maybe we no longer have time to build more nuclear reactors, let alone solar/wind/wave machinery.
Having said that I haven't given up all hope. We need a revolutionary energy production technology, and I've been searching for one. What I've found is the Polywell IEC fusion reactor. This technology is not 'reasonable', Farnsworth and Bussard were not reasonable people, they fought the odds and on Dec 17 2003 they appear to have hit pay dirt achieving fusion.
This technology has the promise of producing energy at 1/1000 the cost of anything we have today. It can run on boron which is the 10th most common element in seawater. So it can run on seawater producing fresh water and virtually free electricity as output. Potentially you can put one on a barge take it to a country like Brazil and produce ethanol from sugar at a cost of less than 35 cents a gallon.
(See around 1 hr 3 minutes into this long video for more info
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606&ei=&hl=en )
Now obviously this is a speculative technology, maybe it won't work. And producing a working (net energy gain) product will take 5-8 years. I'm just wondering, that is my question to you is, do we have that long left or will civilization as we know it have fallen apart be then?
1observer: Thanks for your reply, yes I realize that Bussard has moved on, I'm also aware he got funding and a team together to continue his work before that. Obviously more money and more good people would be a great help.
Sorry I meant to say Hubbert's 1956 'Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels' paper.
Also Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, died before Bussard led the Polywell team to achieve fusion on Dec 17 2003. Bussard based his work on Farnsworth and some other people I'm vague on Hirsch, Elmore, Tuck, Watson. There was a publishing embargo for I think 11 years, due to the work being done for the Navy. So heaps of info has come out quickly. Current team is being led by Nebel I think.
I wish them good luck.
Actually fusion is not all that hard to create.
http://www.physorg.com/news10806.html
This one that uses crystals to create the intense electric fields needed is probably a better approach then the fusor. I used to work on the theoretical side of penning-paul traps and given a deep enough of a electric field you probably could generate fusion even with weak magnetic trapping.
I believe that some of the so called cold fusion experiments are actually seeing something similar to the piezo/pyro electric fusors. My best guess is that they might be forming platinum nitrides.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5765/1275?rss=1
Or some other nitrides that then produce intense electric fields. Who knows for sure.
But at least with my work on traps you get a sort of intrinsic understanding of these fields and the energy it takes to make a strong electric field is pretty high and the amount of fusion possible in the small region
is pretty low. The net outcome is chances of break even generation simply because of physical constraints and volume issues is very low in my opinion.
Fission of course occurs naturally and room temperature and we already have nuclear batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
With some really neat new ones that use ionization and are much more efficient then the thermonic ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_piezoelectric_generator
With most fusion routs you have to deal with a build up of radioactivity so long term fusion or fission is not as big a gap as most people think. Fusion is not "clean" cleaner than traditional reactors yes but not clean.
Nuclear reactors can be used to generate large quantities of isotopes and indeed we did this with plutonium.
The point is we already have nuclear batteries that can last basically forever. And of course we obviously have nuclear reactors and we can say use induction roadways to power cars. Very small nuclear reactors certainly small enough for a bus or truck and maybe even a car are possible. But fission also suffers from this volume constraint issue. I was once asked why we could not have nuclear bombs the size of a regular stick of dynamite a reasonable question but the answer is really the same as with break even fusion devices.
You need a certain amount of material to get a chain reaction and its actually fairly large.
You probably could generate fission using methods not all that different from a fusor but I can see you reaching break even. Its a cross-section thing and probability thing. Neither fission or fusion scale down it seems past a certain energy threshold thats actually fairly large. I won't say its not impossible but the problem of break even gets very hard past a certain size just like a "dynamite" size fission bomb is almost impossible to create. Your making a really hard problem we have not yet solved orders of magnitude harder with plasmas that small in some cases a few hundred atoms at the high energy state.
Now with all that said I've always felt that we could create much smaller fusion reactors then what we have attempted to create to date. For some reason we tried to go strait to one big enough to power a city. While smaller ones say capable of powering a submarine could have been prototyped much faster.
We kinda looked into this here.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/launches/fusion_rockets_000719.html
And doh hmm maybe smaller is better.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985epfr.sympQ....P
More here.
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/studies?rm=MINIMARS&s=1
Long run they are better and probably will eventually be commercially built but they really don't offer any advantage over using small nuclear reactors which we could build quickly if needed.
But backing up a little bit coal fired plants could be constructed even faster if we really needed the electricity.
Nuclear powered cars with either a fission or fusion plant thats cheap is probably not possible in the short term. Other solutions can produce stationary power and grid electricity. With the nuclear option any grid issues could be rectified easily within a fairly short period of time not to mention expansion of renewable or coal fired plants etc.
The only problem thats solved by desktop fusion is the potential for a "car" power plant.
Unless we have a break through very soon I don't think they will make it in time even if they are feasible.
I went through my own Farnsworth fusor phase myself I think its something everyone goes through that looks at the problem. But if you step back and think a bit about cross-section collision probabilities and energy densities you become a advocate for electric rail and renewable sources of electricity.
Assuming even todays PV cells and Wind energy and a bit of hydro electric generation of enough electricity to power a high tech civilization is readily feasible. Whats missing is good storage systems and thats what I'm actually working on.
I've chosen liquid nitrogen as a storage medium its not got the energy density to really power a car but its perfect for a diffuse network of renewable energy sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_nitrogen_economy
If your considering load leveling of a electric grid its a really good fit.
CO2 is another possibility either compressed to a liguid or in the form of dry ice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
This is the problem we need to solve along with better cheaper PV systems.
Hydroelectric or concentrated solar in the desert can be used for the small amount of high energy sources you need in a well planned electric/ low energy/ high information not high tech economy.
I'd say leave fusion for space rockets we don't actually need it on earth if we design our societies correctly. I'm not agianst it but its really not needed. We are better off living as peers with the rest of the ecology making use of our alloted photons like every other living organism in a sense as energy equals to other dumber forms of life. If we live this way we can be pretty certain we won't overstep our ecological niche and destroy the environment. Remember energy is but one resource we need and all the others are also effectively non-renewable. Coming up with a good small high energy source just means we will hit peak something else in the future. Given our population growth I'd guess it would be peak food.
Energy equality with the ecosystem forces us to solve our population problem which is the real problem we face peak oil is a symptom. So treat the real disease and start living within our means.
Wow what a great reply, I'm impressed.
You write "Actually fusion is not all that hard to create.", I concede not only are you correct, but this is an important point. The Dec 17 2003 fusion was the first fusion by a Polywell system, that's all.
You also write "I'd say leave fusion for space rockets we don't actually need it on earth if we design our societies correctly... We are better off living as peers with the rest of the ecology making use of our alloted photons like every other living organism in a sense as energy equals to other dumber forms of life. If we live this way we can be pretty certain we won't overstep our ecological niche and destroy the environment.... Coming up with a good small high energy source just means we will hit peak something else in the future. Given our population growth I'd guess it would be peak food."
I agree we don't need advanced technology to become happy, I suspect it doesn't even help. Also I agree 'good small high energy sources' could result in unparalleled environmental destruction, loss of life and suffering. Nevertheless, if such devices are built and work they will be used. Those who adapt most quickly will have an advantage over those who are slower to adapt. The genie can't be put back in the bottle.
Regarding the physics, unfortunately I'm no expert but I thank you for the links you have provided and will attempt to respond intelligently to the points your have raised.
You wrote: 'With most fusion routs you have to deal with a build up of radioactivity so long term fusion or fission is not as big a gap as most people think. Fusion is not "clean" cleaner than traditional reactors yes but not clean.'
Bussard designed Polywell devices to run on Boron11 fuel. According to Bussard reactions using this fuel produce only harmless Helium, that's it. The reactions are completely aneutronic, the reactions are radiation free. There can be no 3 mile islands or Chernobyls. This is covered in minutes 5-6 of the long video I linked to above. Or you can read page 3 of this paper http://askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuclear.pdf
Memmel wrote "You probably could generate fission using methods not all that different from a fusor but I can [not] see you reaching break even. Its a cross-section thing and probability thing... I went through my own Farnsworth fusor phase myself I think its something everyone goes through that looks at the problem. But if you step back and think a bit about cross-section collision probabilities and energy densities you become a advocate for electric rail and renewable sources of electricity."
As I understand it cross-section probabilities are mainly a problem for Maxwellian systems like the Tokamak. The Fusor and Polywell systems solve this problem by mimicking fusion in stars. In a star gravitational forces cause particles to combine. In Fusor/Polywell systems a spherical electric field is used to combine fuel particles. Both gravity and electric fields have 1/(r^2) convergence. So rather than a Maxwellian distribution fuel particles are concentrated at the core. See page 5 of the above document.
The main problem with Fusor/Polywell systems is electron containment. In a Polywell magnets are used to contain electrons to create the spherical electric field. I believe that's the problem Bussard spent most time working on.
Memmel wrote: 'The only problem thats solved by desktop fusion is the potential for a "car" power plant.'
Unfortunately currently designed Boron11 fueled Polywell machines are too large to fit in cars. They are about 2.5 meters in diameter, hence the need to produce ethanol from sugar. Given the extreme cost it would seem desirable to avoid migrating the worlds transportation fleet from hydrocarbon based engines to something else (like liquid hydrogen) if we can avoid it.
The current Polywell machines are small in size because they are cheaper to build than full scale (net power gain) machines. Because they were large enough to solve the known physics problems. And I think because even small machines can be used to confirm that power gain scales with the fifth power of the radius of the device.
"backing up a little bit coal fired plants could be constructed even faster if we really needed the electricity...
Both Farnsworth and Bussard suffered from underestimating the work required to build commercially viable machines. Maybe 5-8 years and 250 million will not be enough. Possibly coal fired plants can be used in the interim.
Memmel wrote: "Energy equality with the ecosystem forces us to solve our population problem which is the real problem we face peak oil is a symptom. So treat the real disease and start living within our means."
I'm not willing to agree with you on this point. I'm not convinced that we have reach the carrying capacity of planet earth let alone the universe.
Thanks again for your great comments, and all your time.
No problem I like your responses also. And as you say you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
But I'd respond that if we are not careful we will smash the bottle and shoot the genie.
As far as crossections etc all I can say as showme :)
Like I said I actually worked on Penning Paul traps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penning_trap
A number of variants exist.
I worked on this. In fact this link is too my professor.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9920628
In any case consider mechanically spinning both the electrodes and magnets with the electrodes
and magnets designed to produce a non-linear field say a double well.
This sets up all kinds of secondary fields and compression of the magnetic field lines.
I've never seen anyone spin the piss out of there 10 million dollar traps but its something
I'd love to see done.
So in short yes you can beat thermal cross sections. And I really supect if I'm alive when we
finally develop fusion that at least part of the machine will have a mechanically spinning magnet
or electrode that generates a non-homogeneous rotating field causing plasma oscillations.
Right now these are considered the problem but I think they are the solution the ions are
allowed to "escape" but if you can spin fast enough you capture them with the time varying field.
This paper off the first page is going in that direction.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15446986?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DiscoveryPanel.Pubmed_Discovery_RA&linkpos=2&log$=relatedarticles&logdbfrom=pubmed
Enough on that I'll get sucked in again :)
The only point I disagree on is carrying capacity of the earth. Here I think we are in overshoot.
Just flying over the US and China shows that we have developed all the best places and a good bit of the marginal lands. Flood plain ecosystems have been destroyed for so long people don't realize it.
Natural rivers in the south used to have huge natural dams called snags that built up along the rivers the riparian environment has been destroyed etc.
What I mean by living within our means is only using a small portion of the best lands say less then 10% so that all the natural ecosystems remain intact and this means leaving many rivers untouched by man all along there route. I don't know exactly the density that we need to be at to support keeping large parts of the worlds ecosystems untouched but its a lot lower than today.
Now since we must always have some high energy sources if we are going to have a technical civilization done correctly fusion could replace the use of hydroelectric altogether and we could rip out all or dams.
But it has to be done at the right time and place and for the right reasons and the right level. We are not ready for another endless power source we screwed up big time with our first one (oil).
So I hope that if we do achieve fusion it won't be for a long time and it will be in a society that wants it to rip out dams.
As far as space goes the more the merrier plenty of room to expand and a society that lives within its means would only lightly touch the planets it settles before moving on to others.
If we had star flight now we would basically be a scourge on the universe. We make locust swarms look benign.
Who knows if aliens exist but if they did I'm sure they would not want use "escaping" :)
Memmel: "As far as crossections etc all I can say as showme :)"
Here is WB6 in a vacuum machine,
In page 14 of the should google go nuclear PDF linked to above, Bussard reports
"On November 9 and 10, 2005 they obtained DD fusion
at about 10 KV, with B fields of 1300 Gauss, in a 30 cm
diameter device. It produced a pulse of DD fusions at
109 fusions/second that was 200,000 times higher then
anything that Hirsch and Farnsworth had ever achieved
in any experiment they had ever done for similar well
depths and drive conditions."
According to emc2fusion.org this "agreed with rate predicted by theory" and "confined electrons as the computer models said it should".
When the funding was cut to the lab they decided to run WB6 with as much power as it could handle, that's how they got the above results. (On the last test run it was broken perhaps a magnet short circuited, they didn't get the results until they were computed a month later).
Now WB7 an improved version of and the same size as WB6 has been built to reproduce and verify the results obtained from WB6. Here it is achieving first plasma in January (a larger image is on emc2fusion.org):
Richard Nebel who is leading this project said "The initial analysis showed that Bussard's data on energy yields were consistent with expectations", according to a report here http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/13/224458/454/929/436375
But I'm not sure that info is accurate, because they were reporting on first plasma, at the time of the report first fusion may not have yet been achieved.
Next they may build WB8 another device similar in scale to WB6 and WB7, but with an alternative (truncated icosahedron) topology which may more efficiently trap electrons. After that if the results are ok if funding can be obtained the plan is to build WB1000. The full scale net power gain model, that is if Bussard's prediction that power gain scales with the 5 power of the radius is correct.
Hopefully Nebel reports more results. But he may have to go under embargo publishing like Bussard.
Maybe fusion will help or maybe it will accelerate peak food and other problems as you suggest. Anyway thanks for the discussion about it, it has helped improve my understanding.
Regarding Penning Paul traps, I will look at the links you have provided. Your suggestion to consider mechanically spinning both the electrodes and magnets sounds interesting, thanks, I will think about it.
Regarding the carrying capacity of the earth, well you could be right. I hope for the best but I can see the logic in planning for the worst.
Memmel: "What I mean by living within our means is only using a small portion of the best lands say less then 10% so that all the natural ecosystems remain intact". This sounds nice but I don't know how it can be achieved in practice it's difficult to get people to practice population control. I could see the planet getting more crowded with cheap power. We might irrigate the deserts and colonize them and also build colonies in the oceans.
Thanks again for the discussion.
I don't know if you have mentioned it in any of your links, but the next reactor is likely to be 100MW:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/07/next-bussard-iec-fusion-reactor-could.h...
Next Big Future: The next Bussard IEC fusion reactor could be 100MW size producing net energy
Hi Dave!,
I'm not sure if that blog is correct. Perhaps it is a misinterpretation of something Nebel said. I think he said 'We might as well go ahead and build the next one'. Which I would have thought meant WB8. The author of the blog may have jumped the gun thinking it meant the 100MW machine.
If they are going to start work on the 100MW version that would be great. I'm interested in a link to a direct quote by Nebel making that clear.
Another gee whiz technology that will be forgotten in ten years as a curiousity in plasma physics when they finally realize they aren't getting useful energy out of it. Maybe in 100 years something similar will be used for caulatron refining.
So far I've seen no conclusive data from these guys, just press releases to get more grant funding. I'm sure they're not being dishonest and believe in the concept, but I just don't see them overcoming braking radiation losses.
If you accept that global warming is occurring, then by definition we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth.