Europe aims for endless energy

Europe's scientists hope to mimic the power of the sun and create limitless energy on Earth with the help of a £6bn experiment in the south of France.

Ministers in Brussels gave the go-ahead yesterday for Iter, the world's biggest and most ambitious fusion reactor, at Cadarache near Aix-en-Provence. It will be 10 years in the making and, in its 20-year operating life, researchers will experiment with a kind of slow hydrogen bomb in the hope of extracting vast amounts of clean energy from tiny amounts of heavy water.

Iter will replace Jet, the current joint European fusion research project, based at Culham, Oxfordshire.

Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith, head of the UK fusion programme, said yesterday: "The Iter project will allow a major step towards an inexhaustible source of environmentally friendly power."

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,2763,1094164,00.html)

I wish them all the luck. Eventually we're going to run out of oil, so something has to take the place of dead dinosaurs!

i agree. the environment can't take many moer fossil fuels, and i'll be damned if i want to inherit a planet that was trashed all in the name of progress: which brings up another point.

Progress happens, but which direction does it move us?

I hope this really works; we need a new source of energy. Petroleum products (Coal, oil, natural gas) can only be extracted while they last, and hydrocarbons in any form aren't too clean burning anyway. And not just the petroleum hydrocarbons; biomass has the same problem.

Maj most progress has been in the name of some form of financial profit. Oftimes the negative end result is not heavily considered.
There-fore some seemingly progressive advances are detrimental in the long-run.

Sorry to bust your bubbles, but I believe that it will take a very long time to get hydrogen fusion technology up and running effectively. Researchers at MIT are working on a similar fusion reactor and found that containing the "slow hydrogen bomb" with a torus-shaped magnetic field sucks up more energy than is gained by the fusion process itself. Also, larger reactors require an exponentially greater energy allocated for containment, which means that the net energy output for fusion is vastly negative.

But, there are other alternatives...

One theoretical alternative is vacuum energy, zero-point energy, negative energy, or "dark" energy. This is the true unlimited fuel source, since the source is space-time itself. An illustration of this energy is called the Casimir effect. Take two electrically neutral plates and place them close to each other in a vacuum. You will find that the plates come together since photons of long wavelengths (low-energy) cannot exist between the plates such that the net energy density between the plates is negative. It is so "concentrated" that a mug-full is enough the vaporize all the water on the earth. However, it is very difficult practically to extract this energy.

Whoops

well, i'd rather they be messing around with energy that could give everyone for a hundred miles cancer than energy that, if unleashed, will turn everything in it's reach into, well, nothing.

I have a (comparatively) low tech idea that I think is practical with a moderate ramping-up of today's existing science, but is for some reason oft overlooked:

Anywhere geothermal.

Some billionaire (or upstart coalition) could design a computer controlled and highly cooled automatic tunneler and shaft-layer to bore straight down anywhere laying a shaft wall and being sacrificed to the heat at depth. Using heat resistant pipe material, a heat exchanging fluid medium could be sent down and brought back up at high pressure due to heat to power turbines, exchange direct heat, etc. Any municipality would be able to afford it eventually, but some federal budgets or power companies would at first.

That's a great idea. If you have a pipe long enough and a drill strong enough, you could create a high energy geothermal power plant on virtually any place on the globe.

Reading your posts, I'd like to comment. First off, getting fusion to work is going to be a long, SLOW, time consuming and expensive process. I've read about the difficulties MIT has had, and it's just one obstacle. I can applaud the efforts of those in Europe for researching alternative sources of energy. My question is, can they stick with it when it goes wrong over and over and over? This is going to take time. Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist (he also investigates UFOs, which is how I came to know him) says it IS possible to utilize fusion, he did work on theories and designs for such a plant (he was designing a rocket that would use fusion instead of the chemical rockets we use nowadays) he claimed that a fusion power source small enough to almost get your arms around could produce power equal to what the hoover dam produces. He also said it would take 20 years and billions of dollars to create. Do we as a society have the patience to spend the money and wait that long? I could hope so.

As far as geothermal heat is concerned, people here in the U.S. suffer from the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome. It's a fine idea, but where to build it? As it is, the environmentalist wackos have sued to stop windmill farms from springing up because the supposedly kill birds. So there are great ideas for safe alternative methods, it's just that it's difficult to implement them, dammit.

True about Nimby. Partly it happens here and in Europe because we're free to hire lawyers and such. In the developing world, the gov wants to do something, they just do. Corp wants to do something, they just do.

Which brings me to why initiatives are such a deegone confrontation here: Right-wing overextendedness. No corporation wants to invest in seeing a study through to a thorough new product. They're not paid to. They're paid to resist new tech and keep the status quo.

We could have a perfectly capable government at seeing through a study and finding the best way to do something, if we weren't so convinced "small government" is so great. Over in Europe, a lot of the political culture has been able to evolve to a gently more lefty state. Partly out of necessity. That's why you get more public transportation and better downtowns in some cases.


My idea with the geothermal is that the end result could be a plant about the size of a home central air conditioner hopefully. But even a cube twice the edge, eight times the volume, wouldn't be that big an impact. I envision that the excavation would be accomplished by a remote controlled TBM possibly as small as a foot in diameter. I figure why not? There is no theoretical restriction against one that small, once you're already going to take the personnel out. And the smaller the bore, the quicker the job. I suppose some more important effects on the bore size would come from what diameter pipes and how many you'd eventually want to fill it with. How fast the hot water has to flow, how much turbulence, etcetera.

Originally posted by Starling
Which brings me to why initiatives are such a deegone confrontation here: Right-wing overextendedness. No corporation wants to invest in seeing a study through to a thorough new product. They're not paid to. They're paid to resist new tech and keep the status quo.

No, they're paid to make money. Any good corporation will assess the risk versus the potential benefits and act accordingly. A lot of these bold new technologies are incredibly expensive, have only the smallest hope of becoming a useful technology, and won't realize any benefits for a long time to come. What company in their right mind would make such an investment?

Originally posted by Starling
We could have a perfectly capable government at seeing through a study and finding the best way to do something, if we weren't so convinced "small government" is so great. Over in Europe, a lot of the political culture has been able to evolve to a gently more lefty state. Partly out of necessity. That's why you get more public transportation and better downtowns in some cases.

As to more public transportation and better downtowns - I think that's more because of the cost of gas and the crowded streets than anything else. There's a real disincentive to drive in Europe. But as to your main point, I think the reason so many people (such as myself) prefer small government is because the government has shown itself to be generally incapable of doing anything for a reasonable price. Don't get me wrong, the government has accomplished incredible things, like rural electrification, the atomic program, the interstate system, etc., but the government generally gets bogged down in politics and bureaucracy. You can start off with a program to develop fusion and then watch the price go up as a powerful senator makes sure that the program is based in his state that's far away from the scientists that have the needed expertise, then watch the price go up again as some committee decides that everyone in the program should be unionized, etc. etc. etc. The government just does a bad job at cost containment. I'd rather see the government set the goals and farm out pieces of the project to universities and research organizations.

Originally posted by Starling
My idea with the geothermal is that the end result could be a plant about the size of a home central air conditioner hopefully. But even a cube twice the edge, eight times the volume, wouldn't be that big an impact. I envision that the excavation would be accomplished by a remote controlled TBM possibly as small as a foot in diameter. I figure why not? There is no theoretical restriction against one that small, once you're already going to take the personnel out. And the smaller the bore, the quicker the job. I suppose some more important effects on the bore size would come from what diameter pipes and how many you'd eventually want to fill it with. How fast the hot water has to flow, how much turbulence, etcetera.

What about the effect on the temperature of the earth when millions of wells suddenly start taking that energy up to the surface?

The only realistic and proven safe/effective energy alternative to foissil fuels is wind energy right now.

Originally posted by LionelHutz
No, they're paid to make money. Any good corporation will assess the risk versus the potential benefits and act accordingly. A lot of these bold new technologies are incredibly expensive, have only the smallest hope of becoming a useful technology, and won't realize any benefits for a long time to come. What company in their right mind would make such an investment? Well, exactly. What my tendency to rant is about is that I often hear this glorification of corporations, or an unwillingness to find their faults. When, in reality, corporations are extremely limited in some very important abilities.

The right-wing tendency can trace itself all the way back to the arrival on the new continent. Europe had depleted its forests, and was turning to coal as a new heating fuel. The bounty this created was in turn creating specialization and a factory middle class. Europe's need also sent ships out from the continent with a bigger mission and better investment. But then another bounty discovered in the new world gave credulity to a frontiering, male-type enterprise mentality. The possibilities of that countered the new rise of the left as a response to the abuses of industrialism. On a new continent, even as one resource would approach being used up, a modified industry could rise every time, partly out of trade. Europe hated to lose colonies, but couldn't really blame them for a variety of drives, and couldn't afford the enforcement of possession. And Europe had already been suffereing from and adapting to depletion before.

All that is an extremely short summary of why there is such right wing strength in the US where in a lot of other places, it exists more in balance or as a flash-in-the-pan reaction.

The trouble in the US is that, time and again, a glanced view of history will prove the right wing sensibility at least victorious if not justified. But the new world bounty was just an end-game contrdictory wave, not at all a true reversal of Europe's, or rather the world's, depletion. Similar tracks were happening in other subcontinents as well.

As to more public transportation and better downtowns - I think that's more because of the cost of gas and the crowded streets than anything else. There's a real disincentive to drive in Europe.But this is due to policies that stem from a more left-wing sensibility. There are higher gas taxes, and less of a willingness to favor the rights of motorists over pedestrians. Europe used to be extremely crowded; they've had time to convert this to community and lower fertility, the signs of which we're more at the beginning of seeing here.
But as to your main point, I think the reason so many people (such as myself) prefer small government is because the government has shown itself to be generally incapable of doing anything for a reasonable price. Don't get me wrong, the government has accomplished incredible things, like rural electrification, the atomic program, the interstate system, etc., but the government generally gets bogged down in politics and bureaucracy. You can start off with a program to develop fusion and then watch the price go up as a powerful senator makes sure that the program is based in his state that's far away from the scientists that have the needed expertise, then watch the price go up again as some committee decides that everyone in the program should be unionized, etc. etc. etc. The government just does a bad job at cost containment. I'd rather see the government set the goals and farm out pieces of the project to universities and research organizations.I agree, that's true, I think it's due to a bad condition of misinformation and departure from principle. I don't fully know what causes it or how to bring it back, but these things have an inertia to them. It'll probably be that way for a while. Meanwhile, I see the cancelling of government programs, and tax cuts as a way to guarantee that less happens, rather than a guarantee that some happens and there is a lot of waste. Also, with a 2 party system who are not all that different on principle, a lot of programs are diluted down to a compromise for both parties. This means that often voters from both wings are benefitted, but it is not often seen that way. On the topic of universities, I'm still not sure how I feel about the gov's further involvement in education. Other than health, education is one of our near basic needs, the kind of thing that it's what we bother to have a governnnment for. However, it's easy for education to be hijacked for propaganda. I don't mean something as obvious as ideology. I mean that like, right now, the soda companies have moved into the schools with funding in exchange for exclusivity. This is extremely bad. We are required to put our vulnerable young'uns into this corrupted mix. The feds should A) be prohibitting this and B) be funding it instead of soda companies.
What about the effect on the temperature of the earth when millions of wells suddenly start taking that energy up to the surface? I think it has to be a lot better than what we're doing now, for a few reasons.
Fossil fuel burning, in its best forms, still has a limit on efficiency in absolute calories We'd be at a better starting place if what we're bringing up is already heat. Inefficiency occurs wherever energy is converted, only because there is no way of converting it from form A to just form B. It also ends up a little in form C and form D, etcetera. So the energy stored in gasoline ends up converted in plurality to motion, but a chunk is heat, a chunk is light, and a chunk is even other motion, but unusable: vibration. And of course, we get CO2.

Since it would take energy to make the energy at site, there is still an incentive to be efficient with the pumped up hot water. Even at big plants, where there would be some heat flare to prevent overload, nonetheless, like any machine, the economy of scale would keep it more efficient.

And since with an alternative energy source, we could volunteer and even mandate a reduction in atmospheric change, the planet could likely afford to gain and radiate some surface heat. Keep in mind that the one thing that we're worried about - the atmosphere - is vulnerable because it is so small and fast behaving. It's the flowable and compressible fluid, so it just doesn't leave a lot of time for a corrective change. Specially not at the rates we've been affecting it. Think of the statistics for natural geothermal activities - volcanic eruptions. They quote how many megatons of H-bomb it's equivalent to, or how long it could light LA. Those things radiate. It's the action of something huge and constant - the sun - on something small and pliable - the atmosphere - that is cause for such great concern.

Also, could we affect the planet via cooling the core? Theoretically and eventually, yes. But the degree of difference in vulnerability to that is just staggering. Comparing volumes - the atmosphere is practically 2 dimensional if considered from space. It is high in surface area and low in volume. Contrastingly, the core is hundreds of times thicker and is one spherical volume, the ideal shape for low surface area to volume. And then, consider the masses of the 2! All that rarefied air vs compressed iron and nickel. And the more massive something is, the better it is at holding heat. The earth is like a billions of years old loaf cooling on the counter. The crust seals it from quicker radiation. I forget the term for that, when a process automatically throws u obstacles in its own way, slowing itself, but loaves and planets cooling is such a process, and a big part of the reason is that similar crust to both examples.

This could be a very good idea. Not only is it a potentially limitless source of environmentally friendly energy, it could possibly deal with another environmental problem.

Hasn't everyone been going crazy about global warming for a while now? Greenhouse gases, blah blah. We could be screwed. What better way to relieve the earth of this excess heat energy than this- which would stop us from making the problem worse with our exhaust, and etc. It would have to be nicely calculated, though.

Could be very interesting- hey, Starling, could I use something like this in a story or whatnot if I get a good idea for it?

Could be very interesting- hey, Starling, could I use something like this in a story or whatnot if I get a good idea for it?

You bet! By all means, give it life as you wish!