What I found of interest was the inclusion of fusion as a possible green energy source. I did a quick search of the Grist archives and found very little. So what is it doing in a NG feature story?
Here is how the section for fusion starts off:
Fusion is the gaudiest of hopes, the fire of the stars in the human hearth. Produced when two atoms fuse into one, fusion energy could satisfy huge chunks of future demand. The fuel would last millennia. Fusion would produce no long-lived radioactive waste and nothing for terrorists or governments to turn into weapons. It also requires some of the most complex machinery on Earth.
From what I read in NG, there seems to be no downside to fusion, assuming you can actually make it work. So, I headed over to the indispensable Wikipedia and dug a little deeper.On the likelihood of an accident:
... a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor in which injury or loss of life occurs is much smaller than that of a fission reactor. The primary reason is that the fuel contained in the reaction chamber is only enough to sustain the reaction for about a minute, whereas a fission reactor contains about a year's supply of fuel.
On effluents, this: "The natural product of the fusion reaction is a small amount of helium, which is completely harmless to life and does not contribute to global warming."
On waste management:
The large flux of high-energy neutrons in a reactor will make the structural materials radioactive. The radioactive inventory at shut-down may be comparable to that of a fission reactor, but there are important differences. The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly ... Such materials would have half-lives of tens of years, rather than the thousands of years for radioactive waste produced from fission ...
And as the NG article pointed out:
Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is small. Tritium is a component of the trigger of hydrogen bombs, but not a major problem in production. The copious neutrons from a fusion reactor could be used to breed plutonium for an atomic bomb, but not without extensive redesign of the reactor, so that clandestine production would be easy to detect. The theoretical and computational tools needed for hydrogen bomb design are closely related to those needed for inertial confinement fusion, but have very little in common with (the more promising) magnetic confinement fusion.
So, acknowledging that fusion is a far, far, far ways off, I'm wondering what Grist readers think of this option. Does it belong under the clean and/or renewable energy banner? Did I miss anything in my ten minutes of research (I've got web pages to code, you know)?
Comments
View as Flat
jdhlax Posted 8:13 am
25 Jul 2005
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Chris Schults Posted 8:37 am
25 Jul 2005
I revisited Wikipedia and found this:
Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, also has the smallest nuclear charge and therefore reacts at the lowest temperature. Helium has an extremely low mass per nucleon and therefore is energetically favored as a fusion product. As a consequence, most fusion reactions combine isotopes of hydrogen ("protium", deuterium, or tritium) to form isotopes of helium (3He or 4He).
If hydrogen, I imagine we'd run into the same issues as discussed regarding fuel cells. But per the above, it sounds like helium is favored.
And here's what good ol' Wikipedia has to say about helium:
Helium is the second most abundant and second lightest element in the periodic table. In the modern Universe almost all new helium is created as a result of the nuclear fusion of hydrogen in stars. On Earth it is created by the radioactive decay of much heavier elements (alpha particles are helium nuclei). After its creation, part of it is trapped with natural gas in concentrations up to 7% by volume. It is extracted from the natural gas by a low temperature separation process called fractional distillation.
Ok, I'll stop here and let the more scientfic-minded folks jump in (please).
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amazingdrx Posted 2:09 pm
25 Jul 2005
""The NRC records also indicated that over these years the St. Lucie reactors had released over 6800 Curies of liquid tritium--radioactive hydrogen--into local waters. Community groups in western Massachusetts have implicated liquid tritium releases from the now defunct Yankee Rowe nuclear reactor as the cause of abnormally high rates of five kinds of cancer and Down's Syndrome. And in Suffolk County on New York's eastern Long Island, residents have filed a $2 billion lawsuit against the operators of a research reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, contending that its leaks of tritium and other radioactive substances into the groundwater have contaminated their community water supply."
Sprol points out that a reactor in Florida is leaking tritium into the environment causing cancer rates to soar in the local populastion, this tritium is formed in cooling water by neutrons released in fission.
Neutrons are released into cooling water in fusion reactors also.
If the mowrons who run nuclear power now cannot control tritium releases, what makes anyone think they will be any more competent with fusion.
They will be less careful, for everyone thinks fusion is CLEAN!!
Fusion is pie in the sky, linked to the fabulous hydrogen economy. Temember the Hindenberg? Do you want a mini-hindenberg in your gas tank? Does your insurance company?
Terrorists with hydrogen cars? Built in bomb.
Fusion and hydrogen are fables designed by neo-corporatists to put the people to sleep on renewable energy, plain and simple. Hybrid plugin biofueled cars now, electric cars next.
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Icelander Posted 11:16 pm
25 Jul 2005
The silver appearance of the Hindenburg was due to a surface varnish of powdered aluminum in a paint formula that resembles the chemistry of modern solid booster rocket fuel.
Second, "terrorists" are driving around with tanks full of gasoline right now. Or they could buy huge tanks of natural gas and detonate them. Or they could, I don't know, buy actual explosives. They're not hard to get. The best strategy against terrorism isn't to make our world like a padded cell with corks on our forks; it's to stop pissing people off with our foreign policy and use Interpol and the ICC to arrest, convict and sentence the thugs. But I digress.
Finally, storing hydrogen in its liquid or gaseous state in a tank isn't energy dense enough to make sense. That's why most energy pundits put their hydrogen hopes on carbon nanotube or metal hydride storage systems, in which hydrogen is stored in the chemical makeup of the tank. If you run into it, it'll sit their like a lump.
I'm all for renewable energy, but the myth that a hydrogen powered car is just going to burst into flames is ludicrous. That is, unless you make it out of solid rocket fuel.
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amazingdrx Posted 4:59 am
26 Jul 2005
Hydrogen in it's gaseous state is a very dangerous fuel for transportation.
Quick charge lithium ion batteries make hydrogen fuel cells obsolete for transportation, because a full charge that can carry a vehicle 200 miles can be acheived in 5 to 10 minutes.
Electric cars have already beat hydrogen fuel cell cars by virtue of this new battery.
Cost is inherently linked to safety. The danger of handling and storing hydrogen gas makes hydrigen fuel cell vehicles uneconomical.
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Icelander Posted 6:48 am
26 Jul 2005
And why store thousands of gallons of hydrogen gas on the premises when you can make it simply with electricity and water? Have a small tank of hydrogen that is constantly replenished via electrolytic production. Heck, you could have solar panels and a well and create a perfectly self-contained gas station.
The same safety concerns were voiced when it was perceived that gasoline engines would be the default engine for automobiles. Gasoline is highly flammable, leaks from underground tanks, and can be used to make a bomb. Hydrogen isn't an more dangerous than gasoline.
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amazingdrx Posted 7:10 am
26 Jul 2005
Tell that to the nervous folk at NASA launching the Space Shuttle, powered by liquid hydrogen!!
Can you imagine every airliner on launch going through what the space shuttle goes through?
Check out this new lithium ion battery.
http://amazngdrx.myblogsite.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/18/951555.html
What makes you think fuel cells last forever? The ones in the space program must be reconditioned or replaced quite often.
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illancolombick Posted 9:27 pm
26 Jul 2005
Radioactive waste sounds like the only realistic down side brought up in the comments above. I second that hydrogen itself is no worse than gasoline in its explosive/flammability potential. Heavy hydrogen isotopes for fusion would be physically extracted from sea water, most likely, and be used at power stations, not chemically extracted from fossil fuels and transported all over as for fuel-cell hydrogen (we all like to think that fuel-cell hydrogen will come from solar power, but it won't, at least for a long time yet. It will come from fossil-fuels).
Radioactive waste is a very serious problem, but it is whole orders of magnitude less serious than global warming, because it does not threaten to crash the entire biosphere.
However I have a global warming concern which I never see addressed in discussions of clean energy alternatives, one which applies to any widely-adopted clean energy solution, even solar power, but especially to any solution that looks to energy stored in forms that are not indirectly or recently derived from the sun.
Let us say, for arguments' sake that a "perfect" clean energy source is found. 100% non-polluting, magnificently abundant, and so cheap we can all have as much as we want. Fusion, especially cold fusion (which is no longer considered lunatic fringe, by the way) and some other more fringe-like hydrogen-derived ideas come close to this perfect source.
It seems to me that availability of abundant cheap energy would result in massive increase in energy usage. New industries would be born where energy cost was no object. Millions of new consumers in undeveloped economies would have access to previously unavailable energy. We would have an explosion of the same form as that produced by the mass-production of integrated circuits and computer chips.
Fusion fuel is similar to fossil fuel in the sense that it stores up old energy, it is not an intermediate form of current solar energy. Its use therfore results in a net increase in the energy released into the global system. Its like another sun coming online. The energy ends up as heat, no matter how it is used.
Thus if the world stepped up its energy usage, by, say, 100 times, we would find net heat production going up by that factor. This may or may not be a significant effect. With elimination of carbon emissions, the atmosphere would allow this heat to escape more easily than currently. It depends how that heat compares with trapped heat coming from the sun. That would be for the planetary scientists to answer. But the lesson from fossil fuel is that any massive global-scale perturbation of the system will have significant, unpredictable or unhappy effects, and a 100-foldstep up in the production of heat would surely qualify as massive.
Still, the risk is preferable to the disaster looming ahead.
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amazingdrx Posted 10:52 pm
26 Jul 2005
Yep, like bringing the sun down to earth. Either fusion or fission. Even solar captures some extra sunlight normally re-radiated into space.
Only wind uses solar energy already here.
But cut those greenhouse gas emmisssions with wind or solar and the balance is restored.
"the risk is preferable to the disaster looming ahead"
That is the false dilemna fallacy. That the looming emergency makes any risk from nuclear aok.
If there were only two alternatives then and only then would that be true.
But conservation through redesign of all human energy uses and wind, wave, ocean current, solar cogeneration can stop the looming climate disaster. Along with reproductive rights for women, which will solve the overpopulation problem at the base of the rapid rise of energy needs.
"If the lure of big science and big profits to big corporations is what spurs rapid development and adoption, count me on board."
There is plenty of that profitable "lure" in these alternatives, but it won't happen unless government of we the people gets the agenda of these corporate "citizens" back in line with reality.
Now corporatism is running government from within, that needs to change. Forget nuclear power and the hydrogen fueled economy, it is pie-in-the-sky corporatist propaganda.
Corporations are not citizens. They do not have rights in the same sense that humans do. The humans who run and work for corporations have rights. Wake up and smell the neo-libertarian propaganda, before it's too late.
http://amazngdrx.myblogsite.com/blog
I'm serious dammit! Hehehey.
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LindiBee Posted 12:39 pm
05 Sep 2005
First of all, Tritium production is required for fusion reactors. There's almost no way of confining or containing tritium, which readily combines with oxygen to produce heavy water. It has a relatively short half-life (~12 years), but it can easily be inhaled or ingested; thus, entire ecosystems and human populations would be impacted. (Personally, I don't feel like providing a real-time test for Chernobyl-The Next Generation)
Secondly, although there's no "chain reaction" as in fission technology, and "the fuel contained in the reaction chamber is only enough to sustain the reaction for about a minute", did anyone bother to ask these "scientists" to provide a model showing exactly what kind of explosion results when a mass whose temperature approximates that of the core of a small star contacts an ambient temperature environment?
The end of the fusion reaction is entirely irrelevant- we are still looking at a plasma mass hovering around 10 million degrees Kelvin. Yes, I'm sure that those electromagnets do a great job of containing that plasma core, but, just suppose that anything interrupts that field, for just a millisecond or two? And, if any problem is detected, how long does it take to cool a plasma core sufficiently that it no longer poses a danger to anyone? As one columnist described in Dark-Wraith Forums
"One core breach would be the end of the planet. That's not an exaggeration. The breakdown, even for a split second, in the containment field of a fusion plasma stream would create a small version of a solar flare.
The flare would simply turn the entire facility into sub-atomic particles as it raced into the sky. Some of the plasma would follow the weak magnetic lines around the Earth; the remainder would simply spread out like a curtain of Hell, engulfing everything in its thin, millions-of-degrees-Kelvin heat storm.
The atoms and molecules that comprise the atmosphere of the planet would receive a virrtually instantaneous kinetic energy infusion sufficient to undergo "prompt ionization" at the same time they were achieving escape velocity. Those that remained would articulate kinetic energy across the planet in a matter of seconds, driving temperature into the range where even oceans would vaporize from the top down."
I don't EVEN want to go there......
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