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Author Topic:   Fusion Power on the way - at last ?
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 107 of 130 (741682)
11-13-2014 7:02 PM
Reply to: Message 97 by Jon
11-13-2014 11:25 AM


Re: All Good Things Suck ” At First
Fission has a stigma, and I think people have good reason to be concerned about the disposal of the wastes.
The odd thing is how people are often concerned more about nuclear waste than fossil fuel waste. A 1000MW plant might be looking at 3-400,000 tonnes of ash. This ash is toxic, though obviously not hlw, it still contains radioactive material. Most of this is dumped rather than put into the atmosphere, by many countries, but nevertheless, in the US where there are about twice as many coal plants as nuclear plants:
quote:
According to U.S. NCRP reports {source - Mod}, population exposure from 1000-MWe power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal power plants, 100 times as great as nuclear power plants (4.8 person-rem/year).
People are worried about the 'worst case scenario' while ignoring the radioactive contamination they are getting and too often neglecting those pesky non-radioactive things like the 3,000,000 tonnes of carbon emissions as well as the arsenic, lead and other fun heavy metals.
A similar sized nuclear plant produces 30 tonnes of waste, much of which could be reprocessed, and that fact means people are seriously considering 3-4 million tonnes of crap which arguably contains a higher amount of radioactive material (the heavier metals obviously don't tend to burn so they make up a higher proportion than the source coal). 30 tonnes sounds like a lot, and with a lot of nuclear power plants it certainly adds up, but it should be pointed out that the volume of 30 tonnes of high level nuclear waste is maybe 20m3. With reprocessing this can easily be reduced to 5m3 or even less, by this point the material is still radioactive but over the course of about 50 years it will be about 1/1000th as radioactive as it was fresh out of the reactor. Granted it'll still not be something people should be handling in any sense for another thousand years or so, but I'm guessing if we're still around and technically advancing we'd have found a use for the stuff by that point.
Bad things will probably happen with nuclear fission, but they'll likely be relatively localised. Terrible things will happen if we keep using fossil fuels.
The time it takes for the waste to become non-problematic means we are essentially setting ourselves up for future disasters.
Like climate change?
The half-life of fusion waste, and the fact that there is much less of it, means it can effectively be managed within a couple generations, which is, in my opinion, a more reasonable time period for company, political, etc. organizations.
Well sure, fusion would be awesome, if the best case scenario of plants that can't runaway, explosions where the radioactive material is at safe concentrations within the borders of the plant, the use of only the fuel that is required at a time rather than fuel that will last years being put in all at once, most of the material being reasonably safe within 500 years, all these things sound great. Until we figure out the engineering and the science though, we'll have to opt for other solutions.
But let's fund the boffins, maybe someone'll find something that is the key to making the whole thing work and I'm hopeful we'll all be better off because of it. How cool would it be to be powered by 1/64,000th of the sea (or whatever it is)!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 97 by Jon, posted 11-13-2014 11:25 AM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 108 by Jon, posted 11-13-2014 8:41 PM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 109 of 130 (741697)
11-13-2014 10:41 PM
Reply to: Message 108 by Jon
11-13-2014 8:41 PM


All the best!
But it seems to be a more manageable problem than the unknown problem posed by trying to store nuclear wastes for thousands of years under unknown political or social conditions.
What makes you think managing the climate for thousands of years is more manageable than managing inanimate buried objects for the same period? If the last 50 years is any track record and all...
I mean, we haven't even tapped into all the productive area of this planet. Remember our Ebola thread? The estimate was that farming an area of the Congo roughly the size of your little island could feed all the people now eating tainted and unsustainable foods.
I'm cool with provisioning food for people and all, but as an on topic comment I might point out that massive agricultural transformations can sometimes have deleterious effects of their own.
Anyway... there are millions of people just like me who want nothing to do with fission.
So? Millions of people have all sorts of opinions, some of them frankly, a bit bonkers.
So long as we live in democratic societies, nuclear fission is not the future.
Good luck with that
quote:
PRINCETON, NJ -- One year after the tsunami and resulting failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, a majority of Americans continue to favor the use of nuclear energy as one of the ways to provide electricity for the U.S. The 57% who favor nuclear power this year is identical to the percentage measured in early March 2011, just before the Fukushima incident.
When asked a slightly different question about increasing the use of nuclear power the opinion seems more split.
And none of those solutions seem likely to replace fossil fuels before we burn through the whole damn works.
Perhaps it's ironic, but I think the saddest thing of all this is not that we will be forced to switch from fossil fuels (which have plenty of drawbacks) after running out of them, but that we will completely lose a part of history. It seems like it'd be cooler to teach 10th graders about the Industrial Revolution by showing them coal-fueled steam engines than simply telling them about this thing called 'coal' that no longer exists and never will again exist for the rest of their lives.
If we manage to burn all the coal that's thought to be left, we'll probably all be much too dead to worry about teaching children about why we're dead. Running out isn't the problem we once thought it was going to be.
And that's all the more reason I would like to see workable replacements for fossil fuels than the namby-pamby, not-a-chance-in-hell, hippy shit people have been putting forward in this thread.
I'm hoping for a real alternative; so far only fusion takes that cake.
So instead of implementing solutions that are known to work, you'd literally just hope for the best?
I agree that we are likely to figure it out eventually. What's more, whatever we figure out will probably be able to fix most of the problems we have so far created.
I don't think it's quite safe to trust that discovering the secrets of harnessing the power of fusion will solve the problem of rising temperatures causing natural carbon stores to release more carbon and any potential sustained feedback that may result.
ITER isn't expected to get fusion for another 13 years, if all goes to plan, which it almost never does. If it works, it'll probably be another decade or two before something becomes viable for actual use. That puts us at about the time we project to hit the 450ppm mark in atmospheric carbon. If it's our only hope, let's also hope that other factors manage to stop it going any further - our estimates right now suggest that this gives us a 50/50 chance of avoiding disaster that may make every nuclear power disaster to date look preferable.
The question then, though, is whether people in 2500, who have made that world work, will really think it is a good thing to return the planet to the state it was in in 1750.
Why is that the question?
Absent of making the whole damn place uninhabitable, the beat will probably just go on.
Ay, there's the rub.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 108 by Jon, posted 11-13-2014 8:41 PM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 110 by Jon, posted 11-14-2014 12:19 AM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 114 of 130 (741806)
11-14-2014 4:37 PM
Reply to: Message 110 by Jon
11-14-2014 12:19 AM


Re: All the best!
Who says we have to manage the climate?
Nobody. But nobody said we have to manage hlw either.
We're still alive and are likely to keep kicking
Though not everyone is.
Climate change makes life tough, not impossible.
*ring ring*
Hello? Oh hi! Yeah, he's here. OK, sure I will. Jon, it's for you, it's Venus.
How so? I haven't seen any models for global warming that predict complete extinction of humanity.
That's because models for global warming tend not to include projections for burning all the fossil fuels (mostly because achieving this would take longer than any reliable projections we can make). A few climate scientists have done some maths on the subject and the estimates from them suggest a global temperature increase of about 15 - 30 degrees C. This would be a mass extinction, and we'd be under serious threat. Even if some humans survived in some regions, they wouldn't be worried about taking their kids to Industrial Revolution museums.
Think PETM (35% extinction rate) happening 100-500 times faster (thus prohibiting evolution from attaining dwarfism as a means to allow for diversification and extinction avoidance). Insects would collapse, and pollination would be more limited, grasses and grains would die off and the animals that graze on them would follow (if they aren't dying of hyperthermia) as would we. We might be able to survive in Antartica or Siberia or something.
Carbon can be removed from the atmosphere. And it might become cheaper to use alternate building material, thus allowing us to plant more trees, etc.
Maybe. But then maybe we still need space in say, the Congo, to build farms. So we cut down an area of forest the size of Britain.
Most of the carbon that's in fossil fuels comes from long dead plant life and trees. It formed over millions of years. I would be surprised if a world with a lot less trees in it is able to sequester all that carbon within a few hundred years, and decomposing trees do let off some carbon anyway. A tree might absorb a ton of carbon over 50 years or so, but if temperatures are rising in the meantime we can expect more forest fires that almost completely undo this sequestering in some regions.
Getting say, 300 billion tonnes of carbon out of an atmosphere, and keeping it out of the atmosphere, and doing it before too many negative effects manifest, is very difficult.
And then we'll have to store it, potentially for millions of years protecting against disaster or malevolence releasing it all into the atmosphere again!
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 110 by Jon, posted 11-14-2014 12:19 AM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 115 by Jon, posted 11-14-2014 10:31 PM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 116 of 130 (741847)
11-15-2014 7:56 AM
Reply to: Message 115 by Jon
11-14-2014 10:31 PM


Re: All the best!
CO2 levels were far higher during previous eras with life still possible.
Life is possible all over the place. Human life is a different matter. If we change the climate faster than the many moving parts of our food supply chain can adapt to, that's going to be a serious problem. The PETM resulted in a 30% extinction rate and the carbon output was less than it is today.
I don't think our current output of CO2 is going to make our lives rosy, but it also seems unlikely that it's going to extinguish us.
Neither is fission power. And 'not rosy' is an interesting euphemism for 'millions dead'.
Isn't that it? Climate change doesn't screw the whole planet - just certain parts of it, particularly the parts that we currently find very attractive for putting down roots.
In that scenario, billions would be dead, and a few thousands or millions surviving in small pockets is an outside possibility I mentioned. Is this preferable to fission power?
And by 'certain parts' you mean almost all of it?
Maybe. But then maybe we still need space in say, the Congo, to build farms. So we cut down an area of forest the size of Britain.
Fine by me. People are more important than trees.
Well you were the one that mentioned planting more trees. I was just pointing out that we'll still be cutting them down even if we aren't building stuff out of them.
Unless we discover a super energy source that lets us do virtually anything we want at little to no cost.
I'd kind of like to have a contingency plan just in case we don't, you know?
Again; this is why I think only successful fusion is going to solve any of the current problems. It doesn't look like we'll be largely switching anytime soon to solar or wind or fission.
Hence why some people are arguing we should be trying to increase solar, wind and fission power production. Even if it doesn't 'solve' our problems, it can buy us the time we need to create a rainbow machine that powers the world.
But in that case, we're all left with massive global warming from total depletion of fossil fuels. And no after solution.
Naturally, if we don't have contingency and mitigation plans. I'm just suggesting we should have such plans.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 115 by Jon, posted 11-14-2014 10:31 PM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 117 by Jon, posted 11-15-2014 9:13 AM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 118 of 130 (741894)
11-15-2014 1:01 PM
Reply to: Message 117 by Jon
11-15-2014 9:13 AM


Re: All the best!
Our food doesn't really come through a 'chain', unless you are talking about a production/processing chain.
Wrong. Insects are required for much of our food to get pollinated. And grains are required for much of our meat.
The PETM resulted in a 30% extinction rate and the carbon output was less than it is today.
Where did you get this information from?
Weather underground
Nature Geoscience wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica and so on.
It's not hyper obscure information beyond the realms of most search engines.
Who's dead?
Some people. You know, extreme weather events kill in all sorts of ways and it's impossible to point at any one and say 'but for climate change it wouldn't have happened'. Just like with cancer deaths from nuclear accidents, it's all in the statistics. And I was also talking future tense, so I was including people not yet dead.
Why are all these people dying?
Hyperthermia, starvation, drowning, diseases like Ebola and malaria, there's lots of ways to die in a world with global temperatures are moving towards being 15-30 degrees K higher than they are today.
Of course. But those are ones we already should be cutting down. My point was that we could cut down fewer trees overall if we weren't needing them for building material (if using other materials became cheaper).
And my point is that we'd still have less trees overall to absorb the carbon than we're releasing via fossil fuels.
We already do. It involves switching to solar, wind, fission, etc. and dealing with their consequences instead.
Exactly.
But increasing use of these energy-generating methods shouldn't involve a reduction in our standard of living
Huh?
Those plans won't prevent the level of global warming caused by total depletion of fossil fuels.
Obviously. So we should put them in place before we deplete the fossil fuels. That's what I'm suggesting. Burning all the fossil fuels at the current rate would be insane and I'm betting - pretty hard to do.
Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 117 by Jon, posted 11-15-2014 9:13 AM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 120 by Jon, posted 11-18-2014 1:46 AM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 123 of 130 (742280)
11-18-2014 3:06 PM
Reply to: Message 120 by Jon
11-18-2014 1:46 AM


Re: All the best!
So where's this 30% mass extinction?
It's the first sentence of the wiki link you just posted:
quote:
The PETM is accompanied by a mass extinction of 35-50% of benthic foraminifera (especially in deeper waters) over the course of ~1,000 years —
As is obvious, organisms, especially deep water ones, are going to be most affected by warming due to physics, chemistry and biology (acidification, lower oxygen content etc).
The difference between now and then is that it is happening much much faster today than it did with PETM. As wunderground says:
quote:
Modern ecosystems are already struggling to adapt to their new, warmer environments. Penguins, polar bears, whales, seals, salmon, and orangutans are just a few of the mammals being impacted by anthropogenic climate change. Foraminifera have already decreased markedly in some areas. Coral is bleaching at a very rapid rate. While it was possible for land mammals to migrate to cooler regions in the PETM, manmade infrastructure (roads, railways, cities, etc) will prevent them from doing so this time around. Given the rate of warming the globe is experiencing, it is likely that many ecosystems will be totally incapable of adapting.
What I don't understand is where you get estimates such as "billions would be dead, and a few thousands or millions surviving".
Because we're talking 1,000ppm-1,600 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Just living in that atmosphere would make us dizzy, sleepy and have permanent headaches, blurry vision etc it would probably be enough to kill us all even not accounting for the 15K rise in temperatures globally. I didn't think a formal study on this madness has been conducted, but here is one of the estimates.. And Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide, James Hansen et al. here is a paper that does some analysis on the notion.
quote:
The practical concern for humanity is the high climate sensitivity and the eventual climate response that may be reached if all fossil fuels are burned. Estimates of the carbon content of all fossil fuel reservoirs including unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands, tar shale and various gas reservoirs that can be tapped with developing technology [114] imply that CO2 conceivably could reach a level as high as 16 times the 1950 atmospheric amount. In that event, figure 7 suggests a global mean warming approaching 25C, with much larger warming at high latitudes (see electronic supplementary material, figure S6). The result would be a planet on which humans could work and survive outdoors in the summer only in mountainous regions [115,116]and there they would need to contend with the fact that a moist stratosphere would have destroyed the ozone layer [117].
...
Burning all fossil fuels would produce a different, practically uninhabitable, planet. Let us first consider a 12 W m−2 greenhouse forcing, which we simulated with 8CO2. If non-CO2 GHGs such as N2O and CH4 increase with global warming at the same rate as in the palaeoclimate record and atmospheric chemistry simulations [122], these other gases provide approximately 25% of the greenhouse forcing. The remaining 9 W m−2 forcing requires approximately 4.8CO2, corresponding to fossil fuel emissions as much as approximately 10,000 Gt C for a conservative assumption of a CO2 airborne fraction averaging one-third over the 1000 years following a peak emission [21,129].
Our calculated global warming in this case is 16C, with warming at the poles approximately 30C. Calculated warming over land areas averages approximately 20C. Such temperatures would eliminate grain production in almost all agricultural regions in the world [130]. Increased stratospheric water vapour would diminish the stratospheric ozone layer [131].
...
More ominously, global warming of that magnitude would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans [132,133]. The human body generates about 100 W of metabolic heat that must be carried away to maintain a core body temperature near 37C, which implies that sustained wet bulb temperatures above 35C can result in lethal hyperthermia [132,134]. Today, the summer temperature varies widely over the Earth's surface, but wet bulb temperature is more narrowly confined by the effect of humidity, with the most common value of approximately 26—27C and the highest approximately of 31C. A warming of 10—12C would put most of today's world population in regions with wet a bulb temperature above 35C [132]. Given the 20C warming we find with 4.8CO2, it is clear that such a climate forcing would produce intolerable climatic conditions even if the true climate sensitivity is significantly less than the Russell sensitivity, or, if the Russell sensitivity is accurate, the CO2 amount required to produce intolerable conditions for humans is less than 4.8CO2. Note also that increased heat stress due to warming of the past few decades is already enough to affect health and workplace productivity at low latitudes, where the impact falls most heavily on low- and middle-income countries [135].
The Earth was 10—12C warmer than today in the Early Eocene and at the peak of the PETM (figure 4). How did mammals survive that warmth? Some mammals have higher internal temperatures than humans and there is evidence of evolution of surface-area-to-mass ratio to aid heat dissipation, for example transient dwarfing of mammals [136] and even soil fauna [137] during the PETM warming. However, human-made warming will occur in a few centuries, as opposed to several millennia in the PETM, thus providing little opportunity for evolutionary dwarfism to alleviate impacts of global warming. We conclude that the large climate change from burning all fossil fuels would threaten the biological health and survival of humanity, making policies that rely substantially on adaptation inadequate.
The planet now supports more people than ever before and that that number is only increasing.
I fail to see what now has to do with a hypothetical future in which we burn all the fossil fuels off.
Energy capture is directly related to standard of living. The competing technologies are less reliable than fossil fuels. For example, there is no existing storage infrastructure that would allow us to provide all our power from wind or solar, and there isn't even a feasible way to construct such infrastructure.
I understand, but you said 'should', which confused me. I mean obviously things have to change. Our current way of living that strives for eternal economic growth is simply not sustainable, so there's going to be a change in living standards one way or another. You also didn't discuss fission.
But it seems like we aren't going to put them in place before we deplete the fossil fuels.
12% of the world's power is nuclear.
20% comes from various 'renewables'.
That's a third of our needs.
Compared to 1920 this is a big change over the last 100 years.
We have centuries of coal left.
What maths leads you to think we can't put them in place in time?
If we switched as much of our energy production to renewable as possible, we'd still be burning fossil fuels because in many cases right now they are the only option.
Of course, it would be foolish to completely stop using fossil fuels, they're very useful.
We'd burn through them much more slowly, but we'd still be burning through them, and we'd certainly never meet the U.N.'s recommendation of being carbon free in 85 years.
Technically it's carbon emissions free. It may end up amounting to the same thing, but surprises happen.
Unless...
We accept major decreases in our standard of living (think unstable power supply, no steel, no cement, no plastic, etc.), or...
Or we improve technology such that more regions can stably rely on renewables which is still within the realms of reasonable expectations.
We develop fusion.
A theoretical idea, with many many hurdles that we've only gotten slightly closer to in the last 50 years of trying. If we're lucky we might be able to produce half as much as an average sized power plant for a few minutes by about 2030. If we're doubly lucky we might prove that to be stable enough to put into practice by 2035. If we get even luckier we might be able to get a commercial plant up by 2050, and we might be able to get 100 such plants in operation by 2060. That will require the results of experiments go exactly as we hoped every time from here on out (unlikely) and politicians are doing slightly better than normal at pushing this stuff through legislation and budget (unlikely), that planning permission at any given site is unresisted (highly unlikely - if people resist nuclear power, how many are going to resist living near experimental thermonuclear power, just because of the name?). Of course, the recommendations that we reduce carbon emissions to 0 by 2100 assume we'll be decreasing them every year, if we don't keep up we'll be in significant danger of overshooting the mark even if we get this far by 2060.
Another alternative is to increase our use of fission, a technology that is empirically functional and many of the engineering challenges involved are already well known, many man hours of design into reactors has been completed and trained construction workers for the contracts are ready to go.
If we get 40% of power from fission and 40% of power renewables then only 20% needs be coal and gas.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 120 by Jon, posted 11-18-2014 1:46 AM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 124 by Jon, posted 11-19-2014 10:56 AM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


Message 125 of 130 (742406)
11-19-2014 3:32 PM
Reply to: Message 124 by Jon
11-19-2014 10:56 AM


Re: All the best!
But 30% of a single type of organism that lives mostly in a single place on the planet is hardly a mass extinction.
There's more than one type of organism down there. Feel free to call it what you will.
If you read the whole portion there (between your quote and mine) you'll see that many species diversified, there was little effect on land animals, and mammals did very well.
You'll also read that mammals had time to adapt better surface area to body mass ratios (primarily through dwarfism) just as I said in Message 114. Life in general did OK, but do you know what typically accompanies rapid evolutionary change? Lots of premature deaths.
This was hardly the mass extinction you portrayed it to be; and its effect on the food supply of mammals like us (which is the context in which you made the original statement) seemed negligible if present at all.
The original time I brought it up was:
quote:
Think PETM (35% extinction rate) happening 100-500 times faster (thus prohibiting evolution from attaining dwarfism as a means to allow for diversification and extinction avoidance). Insects would collapse, and pollination would be more limited, grasses and grains would die off and the animals that graze on them would follow (if they aren't dying of hyperthermia) as would we. We might be able to survive in Antartica or Siberia or something.
and this was in context of
quote:
If we manage to burn all the coal that's thought to be left
My point was that even with conditions worsening, population is still increasing.
Right, we're below the carrying capacity of the earth which we have raised to unknown heights. Climate change is bringing that down, but we're still underneath it right now. I'm not sure what this demonstrates.
g. I wasn't so much talking about burning through all the fossil fuels but just about releasing the amounts of greenhouse gasses currently estimated if we decide to take certain measures before global warming completely fucks us (and not much sooner).
Well, I was responding to when you said:
quote:
And none of those solutions seem likely to replace fossil fuels before we burn through the whole damn works.
Perhaps it's ironic, but I think the saddest thing of all this is not that we will be forced to switch from fossil fuels (which have plenty of drawbacks) after running out of them, but that we will completely lose a part of history. It seems like it'd be cooler to teach 10th graders about the Industrial Revolution by showing them coal-fueled steam engines than simply telling them about this thing called 'coal' that no longer exists and never will again exist for the rest of their lives.
For several reasons (which we can certainly discuss) I honestly don't see us getting to a world in which all the fossil fuels have been burned. Do you?
quote:
Running out isn't the problem we once thought it was going to be.
quote:
That's because models for global warming tend not to include projections for burning all the fossil fuels (mostly because achieving this would take longer than any reliable projections we can make).
quote:
Burning all the fossil fuels at the current rate would be insane and I'm betting - pretty hard to do.
quote:
I didn't think a formal study on this madness has been conducted
So yeah, I've pretty much been saying its crazy since you first posted this hypothetical scenario.
We may be far past that point already; perhaps all that is required for a good standard of living is comfortable living arrangements (house, furniture, etc.), access to modern healthcare, heat in winter, food security, protection from foreign/domestic violence, etc.
Maybe we should look to Portugal or Switzerland. They have pretty low emissions, though Portugal and to an extent Switzerland probably doesn't have the heating issues of more northern countries. Mexico can probably be added to this list.
Denmark and Canada are places of a more cold persuasion that have fairly low emissions and pretty happy long lived affluent citizens too.
The USA and Australia is emitting about double or treble the above countries, so I think there is plenty of scope for cutting back there.
http://www.happyplanetindex.org/data/#table-view
List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per capita - Wikipedia
Well, yes, I was talking about emissions. Even if we cut back entirely on our use of fossil fuels for energy, other essential industries still release huge amounts of carbon (and even use fossil fuels). Steel and cement come to mind, as well as the great environmental bane plastic (which does has valid uses).
Well, yes. Indeed as I said: It may end up amounting to the same thing, but surprises happen.
Not entirely theoretical, but I think you know that.
Here's the state of the practical:
Thermonuclear weapons.
We have some control over instabilities in fusion plasma courtesy of JET
16 MW from JET, but a Q of 0.7 (net loss of energy, 1 is break even).
JT-60 achieved 1.25 Qeq but not Q in practice. 5 is needed to be a self sustained power source, 10 is the aim for a power plant.
ITER is being built aiming for Q>5.
It's almost entirely theoretical. Some good theory, enough to get people investing an ass bucket of money into it, but right now, still theoretical.
Our only problem with fusion now is getting the reaction to sustain itself without putting in more energy than it produces.
Yes, but despite it being our 'only' problem, its magnitude is not fully known. We reckon we've cracked the principle, and I hope it pans out - but if everything does pan out it's still going to be a fair while before it can replace our energy sources. In the meantime do we build more coal or go with fission as a stop-gap?
The problem is still disposal and management. I'm not talking from my ass here, of course. For example, whether we can rely on the existence of future institutions with the capability or interest in safely managing and monitoring the wast is an issue that even people involved in nuclear power agree is a serious matter warranting discussion.
Imagine the global catastrophe of people a thousand years from now unwittingly blasting or drilling into these disposals.
I think we're in risk management mode here. We have to cut carbon emissions, quickly, and we want to maintain our quality of life. Fission seems the best thing to do, using breeder type reactors to minimize the amount of waste. I doubt blasting into a nuclear waste site would be a global catastrophe, it's ceramic/vitrified and has a high surface area. There'd likely just be balls of pretty hazardous glass scattered around. Depending how far in the future this happens, it's unlikely to be anything more than a local emergency.
On the other hand, burning fossil fuels until fusion can be rolled out globally, doesn't seem like a prudent course of action.
The potential for disaster in a world based entirely on nuclear fission just seems far greater than the potential for disaster in a world where improvements in renewable energy generation allow us to slowly move away from fossil fuels as we look for the next development to break through the current ceiling (likely to be fusion, but who knows?).
I say both. I'm not convinced the potential hazards outweigh the risks in the other direction. Renewables have room for growth still, but not enough to realistically fill coal's gap, not without supplementing with gas. There's likely to be less deaths in the short and medium term if we switch to fission from cleaner air in general and climate changes overall. In the meantime, we can figure out more long term plans for the material - there are already plans in mind.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 124 by Jon, posted 11-19-2014 10:56 AM Jon has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 126 by Jon, posted 11-20-2014 2:29 PM Modulous has replied

  
Modulous
Member
Posts: 7801
From: Manchester, UK
Joined: 05-01-2005


(1)
Message 127 of 130 (742494)
11-20-2014 5:17 PM
Reply to: Message 126 by Jon
11-20-2014 2:29 PM


Re: All the best!
Another big difference is that the mammals at the center of things today (us) don't have to rely on evolutionary adaptation to survive changes to the environment.
Which is expensive and too often reactive rather than preventative.
All the arguments and evidence about global warming and the environmental benefits of renewable energy aren't changing anyone's opinion.
Well, not enough minds to enough of a degree to satisfy those arguing. It's still plays a significant role in energy production globally, but it's not a solution that can feasibly replace other energy sources entirely.
Maybe we should. I went investigating to figure out what the numbers might tell us. From Wikipedia (Countries by GDP, 2013, the E.U. has an economy of about $17,512,109 million and emits about 3,709,765 Kt of CO2 (Countries by CO2 Emissions, 2010); all of this in a single year. That equates to about $4.70 earned off every Kg of CO2.
It's an interesting measure, for sure, but I'm not sure where it's going. Are you using GDP as a proxy measure for quality of life? I'm not sure that necessarily follows. I pointed to some countries which had a relatively high happiness index score which seems at least related.
China, for instance, is using much of that power to produce cheap goods that the West marks up tenfold when selling domestically.
The per capita results should also be noted. 17.5t per capita in USA vs 7.4t per capita in EU (6t for China). My point was driving towards living a little more frugally not being a barrier to a decent standard of living - not on spending and emitting more to make the carbon we're emitting more dollar efficient.
That's kind of like 'in the meantime we can figure out ways to deal with global warming'.
No really. The waste doesn't have to be that big a problem. Certainly a serious one, but it's hardly insurmountable. Dealing with climate change is difficult by virtue of the size and chaotic nature of the system.
Where do we win?
There's also the pollution issue, that kills many people a year courtesy of coal. I think at this stage the plan moving forwards is to increase fission use, particularly the breeder type reactors. With luck a way to get clean and reliable energy will come along, but if not the effects to the climate will be mitigated.
We already have high level waste to deal with. Increasing the accumulation of this two fold is not going to present a significantly larger problem than we already have, and breeder reactors will produce much less hlw if we can get more of them up and running.
This is Kobayashi Maru without a cheat option, we'll have to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 126 by Jon, posted 11-20-2014 2:29 PM Jon has seen this message but not replied

  
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