Futurismic

One of my bugbears is the constant implication in the popular press that the twin problems of anthropogenic global warming and peak oil will be solved by the mythical “hydrogen economy.”

Take this article in The Guardian newspaper:

The main fuels used in history form a nearly exact sequence, from ones having less hydrogen to ones having more. Wood and charcoal were the earliest fuels, and have only a little hydrogen. Much of their burning is wasted in pouring out great gusts of carbon, which was needed to build up the tree from which the wood came, but doesn’t do much for the user burning that wood.

Coal has more hydrogen, and its burning can be cleaner. Oil - which dominated next - has yet more hydrogen per unit of carbon; natural gas has even more, and its burning is the cleanest and most efficient of them all. The trend line points pretty strongly to a pure hydrogen economy - but when that will occur is in the hands not of the scientists, but our wise political masters.

Hydrogen fuel cells have some promise as an energy storage medium, but you still need a source of energy in the first place: much of the commercial hydrogen produced today is actually produced from natural gas in a process which still produces carbon dioxide emissions.

Alternative methods using biological extraction have proven successful - but they still don’t tackle the fundamental problem of where the energy to extract the hydrogen comes from. With oil running out and our current industrial infrastructure reliant on dumping stored carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this is the problem that needs to be solved.

And if the basic problem is getting energy, wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on that and, once this problem is solved, use this source of hydrogen-producing energy to produce petroleum via the Fischer-Tropsch process and save £X trillions by avoiding upgrading our entire transport infrastructure to use hydrogen tanks and fuel cells?

My conclusion: every penny of research currently being poured into the hydrogen economy should be diverted into developing cleaner nuclear fission and synthetic petroleum fuel combined with hybrid electric-petrol vehicles.

Monday rant over.

[main article from The Guardian][other articles from PhysOrg][images from felixmolter and gavindjharper]

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It’s easy to forget how reliant we are on our technologies … until we are unexpectedly deprived of the means to use them, that is.

Deprived by … oooh, let’s say, an electricity grid fault that leads to an automatic shutdown at a nuclear power station and leaves a big chunk of Florida completely blacked out for an evening? [image by dogfrog]

[As a side note, I never knew that nuclear reactors could just be switched off. Disconnected from the grid, sure, but switched off?]

And that’s just one little hardware failure, hence quickly fixed. But imagine for a moment another highly electricity-dependent country, like the UK for example, being hit by some sort of environmental disaster to which it isn’t accustomed, which causes a large number of grid hardware problems which are hard to trace and fix in the absence of the electricity they provide …

… I think we have a potential cookie-cutter techno-thriller movie plot, folks! Now, who shall we cast as the plucky Prime Minister?

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Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. says it has developed a practical method for producing fuel and organic chemicals using only air and water as raw materials. (Via PhysOrg.)

“Green Freedom,” as they’re calling the proposal, is a process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production through a new form of electrochemical separation. The new process can be integrated with existing technology to produce fuels and organic chemicals.

Of course, the process itself takes energy. Los Alamos’s proposal envisions using nuclear power, but notes that hydroelectric, wind, or solar power could also be used to ensure the process remains carbon-neutral. As a result, they say:

The primary environmental impact of the production facility is limited to the footprint of the plant. It uses non-hazardous materials for its feed and operation and has a small waste stream volume. In addition, unlike large-scale biofuel concepts, the Green Freedom system does not add pressure to agricultural capacity or use large tracts of land or farming resources for production.

F. Jeffrey Martin of the Laboratory’s Decisions Applications Division, principal investigator on the project, will be presenting talk on the subject at the Alternative Energy NOW conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on February 20.

The full nine-page concept paper is available online here in PDF format.

It’s almost like a recycling scheme for hydrocarbons: first you burn them, then you suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, recreate the hydrocarbons, and burn them again. Very intriguing and potentially transformational idea, if it pans out.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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The FBI swooped into a house in Rockwall, Texas when it emerged a gamer and physicist enthusiast was trying to create a small nuclear reaction in his house using Uranium.

“People do it in universities all the time,” the man said. “It’s just not usual that somebody does it outside of a university. These things are in your tap water, you know, in the dirt. You could hold a Geiger counter up to a banana and get a count off of it.”

It just goes to show how the internet helps to spread information - the man learnt how to make the mini nuclear reactor using online resources and then the FBI learned he was doing it via his online blog posts about his house doubling in radioactivity.

EDIT: In a similar ‘normal guy gives governments a scare’ vein, it looks like the recent confrontation between US patrol boats and Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Straits of Hormuz may in fact have been a hoax by a local radio ham who regularly pranks passing ships.

[via Gamespot News]

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Toshiba has announced a 200 kilowatt nuclear generator that can power a small block or large apartment building. At 20*6 feet large it can fit in a basement.

It’s designed, like pebble bed reactors, to not need mechanical parts to keep it safe.

This is a potentially disruptive piece of engineering. For one, it decentralizes power generation. It will allow power generation to be installed in remote locations throughout the world.

[link via Jay Lake]

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The quote physicists often say when asked about nuclear fusion is that ‘commercial fusion is 40 years away, but we’ve been saying that for 40 years’. Two main types of fusion are in development - ‘tokamaks’ like JET and ITER that use magnets to fuse hydrogen in a torus of plasma and those that shoot high powered lasers at pellets of hydrogen a few times a second, making bursts of energy.

Neither process is currently producing more energy than is put in to start the reaction but there have been some developments in laser technology that may help the latter approach. The EU has recently decided to fund a new high energy laser research project to build a working reactor. Laser fusion may ‘ignite’ and provide energy before the magnetic fusion research reaches the same point but the pulses of laser energy need to come much faster and more efficiently for this to be economically viable. Without considerable funding, the technological challenges of getting hydrogen to fuse will be insurmountable. However, fusion offers a real hope in the long term (30 years+) of providing clean energy.

[via the guardian, image of UCLA tokamak by r_neches]

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While we’re definitely big optimists here at Futurismic on alternative energies, there are downsides to most of what we consider clean energy.  Biofuels in their current incarnation pits the hunger of the poor against the hunger of our poor.  Solar is at the mercy of cloudy weather and efficiency concerns, while similar problems face wind power.  And coming from the Midwest United States, tidal power generators aren’t going to do me a lick of good.

The far-thinking people at the Long-Now Foundation had two very fascinating speakers back in September whose theory is that nuclear is the way to go.  They’re not your usual nuclear shills, either.  Gwyneth Cravens wan an anti-nuclear activist who marched against the bomb and against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island.  The other is an sustainable organic-farming, bee-keeping, nuclear expert at Sandia Labs called Dr. Richard Anderson.

Their point is that alternative energies are largely tied to the whims of nature, something not good enough to supply the baseload power for our energy needs.  They do bring up some scary thoughts on our current use of fossil fuels, and make comparisons to what we would consume using nuclear.  One fun tidbit is that all the nuclear waste that would be generated to provide power for the average American over the course of their life would fit inside a Coke can.  Give it a listen if you can, but at least read the blog summary.

Personally, I think nuclear’s the way to go, at least for the moment, although I definitely think wind and solar can and should be used to provide supplemental power.  Maybe someday we can move to completely clean energy, but that day hasn’t come yet.

(image via Operators Are Standing By)

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