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The Future Of Energy
Perhaps even more than exposing the instability of the worldwide economic ponzi system, so far 2011 has been most remarkable for fully demonstrating the fragility of the global energy complex, which in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis (and the moratorium on nuclear energy in Germany now, and soon other places), and the MENA revolutions, have raised the question of what happens in a world in which crude is getting ever scarcer, while the one main legacy energy alternative, fission-based nuclear power, just took a giant step back. The topic of limitations in conventional and possibilites in alternative energy has gripped the general public's mind to such an extent that Popular Science magazine has dedicated its entire July edition to answering that very critical question. As PopSci says: "Oil’s amazing efficiency is one reason it remains in such high demand,
especially for transportation, and it’s also why finding an alternative
will be so difficult. But find one we must. We have already burned our way through most of the world’s easy oil. Now we’re drilling for the hard stuff: unconventional resources such as shale and heavy oil that will be more difficult and expensive to discover, extract, and refine. The environmental costs are also on the rise." So what is the existing line up of future alternatives to the current crude oil-dominated energy paradigm. Below we present the complete list.
Next Generation Nukes.
Nuclear power may have taken a major step back after the biggest nuclear catastrophe since Fukushima, but that does not mean existing Generation III projects (the Fukushima reactor is a Gen II) are not viable and safe. Below is a summary of the key aspects of this program now coming on line in Japan, France and Russia.
In the 30 years since regulators last approved the construction of a new nuclear plant in the U.S., engineers have improved reactor safety considerably. (You can see some of the older, not-so-safe ones in this sweet gallery.) The newest designs, called Generation III+, are just beginning to come online. (Generation I plants were early prototypes; Generation IIs were built from the 1960s to the 1990s and include the facility at Fukushima; and Generation IIIs began operating in the late 1990s, though primarily in Japan, France and Russia.)
Unlike their predecessors, most Generation III+ reactors have layers of passive safety elements designed to stave off a meltdown, even in the event of power loss. Construction of the first Generation III+ reactors is well under way in Europe. China is also in the midst of building at least 30 new plants. In the U.S., the Southern Company recently broke ground on the nation’s first Generation III+ reactors at the Vogtle nuclear plant near Augusta, Georgia. The first of two reactors is due to come online in 2016.
A central feature of this system is an 800,000-gallon water tank positioned directly above the containment shell. The reservoir’s valves rely on electrical power to remain closed. When power is lost, the valves open and the water flows down toward the containment shell. Vents passively draw air from outside and direct it over the structure, furthering the evaporative cooling.
Depending on the type of emergency, an additional reservoir within the containment shell can be manually released to flood the reactor. As water boils off, it rises and condenses at the top of the containment shell and streams back down to cool the reactor once more. Unlike today’s plants, most of which have enough backup power onsite to last just four to eight hours after grid power is lost, the AP1000 can safely operate for at least three days without power or human intervention.
Summarizing a typical Gen III schematic:
Regardless of the safety precautions, existing fission-based power will always carry the risk of a meltdown. Which brings us to...
Thorium-Powered Molten-Salt Reactor
Even with their significant safety improvements, Generation III+ plants can, theoretically, melt down. Some people within the nuclear industry are calling for the implementation of still newer reactor designs, collectively called Generation IV. The thorium-powered molten-salt reactor (MSR) is one such design. In an MSR, liquid thorium would replace the solid uranium fuel used in today’s plants, a change that would make meltdowns all but impossible.
MSRs were developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1960s and ran for a total of 22,000 hours between 1965 and 1969. “These weren’t theoretical reactors or thought experiments,” says engineer John Kutsch, who heads the nonprofit Thorium Energy Alliance. “[Engineers] really built them, and they really ran.” Of the handful of Generation IV reactor designs circulating today, only the MSR has been proven outside computer models. “It was not a full system, but it showed you could successfully design and operate a molten-salt reactor,” says Oak Ridge physicist Jess Gehin, a senior program manager in the lab’s Nuclear Technology Programs office.
The MSR design has two primary safety advantages. Its liquid fuel remains at much lower pressures than the solid fuel in light-water plants. This greatly decreases the likelihood of an accident, such as the hydrogen explosions that occurred at Fukushima. Further, in the event of a power outage, a frozen salt plug within the reactor melts and the liquid fuel passively drains into tanks where it solidifes, stopping the fission reaction. “The molten-salt reactor is walk-away safe,” Kutsch says. “If you just abandoned it, it had no power, and the end of the world came--a comet hit Earth--it would cool down and solidify by itself.”
In addition to safety, Thorium power provides other strategic benefits:
Without the need for large cooling towers, MSRs can be much smaller than typical light-water plants, both physically and in power capacity. Today’s average nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 megawatts. A thorium-fueled MSR might generate as little as 50 megawatts. Smaller, more numerous plants could save on transmission loss (which can be up to 30 percent on the present grid). The U.S. Army is interested in using MSRs to power individual bases, Kutsch says, and Google, which relies on steady power to keep its servers running, held a conference on thorium reactors last year. “The company would love to have a 70- or 80-megawatt reactor sitting next door to a data center,” Kutsch says.
A sample MSR reactor shown below:
Naturally, the transition from fission power to MSR would involve massive costs and a huge overhaul in the existing regulatory regime. Which is why, instead of going the MSR route, why not just focus on a totally different energy creation paradigm, namely...
Fusion Power
The reason fusion power has been the holy grail in energy production is simple: it is the most efficient form of energy creation available. After all fusion power, that at the heart of the sun, is the source of life.
The well-publicized failures of cold fusion may have tainted the field’s reputation, but physicists have been successfully joining nuclei with hot fusion since 1932. Today, research in hot fusion could lead to a clean energy source free from the drawbacks that dog fission power plants. Fusion power plants cannot melt down; they won’t produce long-lived, highly radioactive waste; and fusion fuel cannot be easily weaponized.
At the forefront of the effort to realize fusion-based power is ITER, an international collaboration to build the world’s largest fusion reactor. At the heart of the project is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped vessel that contains the fusion reaction. In this vessel, magnetic fields confine a plasma composed of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen, while particle beams, radio waves and microwaves heat it to 270 million degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature needed to sustain the fusion reaction. During the reaction, the deuterium and tritium nuclei fuse, producing helium and a neutron. In a fusion power plant, those energetic neutrons would heat a structure, called a blanket, in the tokamak and that heat would be used to turn a turbine to produce electricity.
The ITER reactor will be the largest tokamak ever made, producing 500 megawatts of power, about the same output as a coal-fired power plant. But ITER won’t generate electricity; it’s just a gigantic physics experiment, albeit one with very high potential benefits. A mere 35 thousandths of an ounce of deuterium-tritium fuel could produce energy equivalent to 2,000 gallons of heating oil. And ITER’s process is “inherently safe,” says Richard Pitts, a senior scientific officer on the project. “It can never, ever be anything like what you see in the fission world--in Chernobyl or Fukushima--and this is why it is so attractive.”
Alas, fusion energy is at best decades away:
To fully commercialize tokamak-based fusion, developers must overcome several challenges. First is the matter of breeding the tritium; there are only about 50 pounds of it in the world at any given time because it is not naturally occurring and decays quickly. (Deuterium is not radioactive and can be distilled from water.) Although ITER may use tritium produced by nuclear power plants, a full-scale fusion plant will need to produce its own supply--neutrons from the fusion reaction could be used to convert a stash of lithium into tritium. In addition, physicists must also determine which materials can best withstand the by-products of the fusion reaction, which will wear down the tokamak’s walls. Finally, residual radioactivity in the device will pose maintenance problems because people won’t be able to work safely within the vessel. ITER scientists must develop robots capable of replacing parts that can weigh up to 10 tons.
ITER will begin experiments in 2019 in France. If those are successful, the data produced by the project will aid the ITER team in the design of DEMO, a proposed 2,000- to 4,000-megawatt demonstration fusion power plant that will be built by 2040.
ITER in action:
Fuel
Engineers inject two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, into the tokamak, a high-powered doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber.
Plasma
A strong electric current heats the deuterium and tritium gases and ionizes them, forming a ring of plasma, a glowing soup of charged particles.
Heat
Radio waves, microwaves and high-energy deuterium particle beams heat the plasma. At high temperatures, the deuterium and tritium fuse to form a helium atom and a neutron.
Containment
If the plasma touches the walls of the tokamak, it will scuttle the fusion reaction. The charged particle is confined in a magnetic field made from 39 superconducting poloidal, toroidal and central solenoid magnets positioned around the outside of the doughnut and within its hole.
Lining
The vessel is lined with a steel blanket 1.5 feet thick to protect the tokamak walls from highly energetic neutrons.
Why the need for the above energy alternatives? One does not have to believe in peak oil to realize that crude is becoming increasingly difficult to procure. Per PopSci:
Even if we were ready to mass-produce a new generation of, say, biofueled plug-in hybrid electric cars by 2020, and even if we--in an absurdly best-case scenario--started cranking out those new cars as fast as we now make gas guzzlers (about 70 million a year, worldwide), we would still need another 15 years to swap out the fleet. In the meantime, oil consumption will continue to rise, as demand from fast-growing economies in Asia outweighs any green gains by Western nations.
David Victor, an international energy policy specialist at the University of California at San Diego, says consumption won’t even begin tapering off for another 20 years. At that point, daily consumption, now at 85 million barrels a day (mbd), will have topped 100 mbd. Realistically, says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University, cutting global oil consumption to a more economically and environmentally tolerable level (say, 30 mbd) will probably take at least four decades. Before then, he says, “we will use a lot of oil.”
How much? At the rate Victor suggests, we’ll need something like a trillion barrels of crude to get us to the peak of oil consumption sometime in the 2030s--and, in all likelihood, another trillion barrels to get us down the other side, to a point where oil is a vastly smaller part of the energy economy. Just to bridge the gap, then, we’ll have to extract about two trillion barrels of oil during the next four decades--almost double the 1.2 trillion barrels we’ve already burned through since Pennsylvania wildcatters launched the oil age in 1859.
Hossein Kazemi, a professor of petroleum engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, says that about half of those final two trillion barrels have already been discovered and are waiting in “proven” reserves that can be exploited profitably using today’s technology. The other half won’t come so easily. By some estimates, the Earth contains up to eight trillion more barrels of oil, but that oil exists in many forms, some of which, such as shale oil, can be extremely expensive to extract or refine. And as we work our way through the easiest oil, we will also be confronted by increasing external costs—real costs that nonetheless aren’t accounted for at the gas pump. A desperate rush to extract oil from unstable nations can topple regimes, for instance, even as extracting it from environmentally fragile spots can do major harm to the land or the sea.
Which means that we face a series of complex choices, not just about where to extract what kind of oil, but also about when to extract it. Going after everything at once may seem wise, especially to oil entrepreneurs invested in specific resources or policymakers unconcerned about external costs. But as engineers develop new extraction and refinement techniques, oil that is expensive or environmentally harmful now may be cheaper or cleaner in the future. With that in mind, what would happen if we considered how best to extract our two trillion barrels not from the short-term perspective of a politician or a businessman, but from the longer view of a petroleum engineer? Which oil would we save for last, and which would we go for first?
Below is a list of legacy energy forms that are currently being exploited and which provide a far lower capital investment need to generate incremental returns:
Shale
Total reserves: 3 trillion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE)
Given the political anxiety surrounding the prospect of importing oil, U.S. policymakers will be understandably tempted to reach first for the closest, richest oil resource. For many, that would suggest shale oil. The vast deposits located beneath Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone could generate up to 800 billion barrels of oil. But policymakers should resist that urge.
Oil shale is created when kerogen, the organic precursor to oil and natural gas, accumulates in rock formations without being subjected to enough heat to be completely cooked into oil. Petroleum engineers have long known how to finish the job, by heating the kerogen until it vaporizes, distilling the resulting gas into a synthetic crude, and refining that crude into gasoline or some other fuel. But the process is expensive. The kerogen must either be strip-mined and converted aboveground or cooked, often by electrical heaters, in the ground and then pumped to the surface. Either process pushes production costs up to $90 a barrel. As all crude prices rise, though, the added expense of shale oil may come to seem reasonable--and it is likely to drop in any case if the shale oil industry, now made up of relatively small pilot operations, scales up.
The problem is that the external costs of shale oil are also very high. It is not energy-dense (a ton of rock yields just 30 gallons of pure kerogen), so companies will be removing millions of tons of material from thousands of acres of land, which can introduce dangerous amounts of heavy metals into the water system. The in-ground method, meanwhile, can also contaminate groundwater (although Shell and other companies say this can be prevented by freezing the ground). Both methods are resource-intensive. Producing a barrel of synthetic crude requires as many as three barrels of water, a major constraint in the already parched Western U.S. With in-ground, the kerogen must be kept at temperatures as high as 700°F for more than two years, and aboveground processes use a lot of heat as well. Those demands, coupled with kerogen’s low energy density, yield returns ranging from 10:1 (that is, 10 barrels of output for every one barrel of input) to an abysmal 3:1.
Coal
Total reserves: 1.5 trillion BOE
Coal can also be converted into a synthetic crude, as the German army, desperate for fuel, demonstrated during World War II. The method of transformation is simple: Engineers blast the coal with steam, breaking it into a gas that can then be converted, by the Fischer-Tropsch process, into gasoline and other fuels. Many energy companies are promoting various coal-to-liquid processes (CTL) as a way to replace oil, especially in the U.S. and other coal-rich nations.
The appeal is obvious. At a conversion rate of just under two barrels per ton, the world’s 847 billion tons of recoverable coal theoretically represent roughly 1.5 trillion barrels of synthetic oil, or a substantial piece of the final trillion.
Like shale oil, however, CTL has significant shortcomings. Its energy return is unimpressive; a barrel’s worth of invested energy nets just three to six barrels of CTL. Moreover, coal contains about 20 percent more carbon than oil does, and converting it to liquid raises the ratio even further. CTL fuels have a carbon footprint nearly twice as large as that of conventional oil--1,650 pounds of CO2 per barrel of CTL, versus 947 pounds per barrel of conventional.
Even if producers installed a vast and expensive system to capture and sequester the CO2 produced during the conversion process, says Edward Rubin, a professor of environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, coal production uses so much energy that CO2 emissions from CTL fuels would still be as great as those of conventional oil. At best, making fuel from coal would get us no closer to a more climate-compatible energy system.
All of that aside, even the supply of coal is not infinite. Researchers at the Rand Corporation concluded in 2008 that replacing just 10 percent of U.S. daily transportation fuel with CTL would take 400 million tons of coal annually, which would mean expanding the American coal industry, which is already straining environmental limits, by 40 percent. Although such an undertaking might be politically feasible in China or other nations, Rubin says, “I have a hard time seeing that in this country.”
Heavy Oil
Total reserves: 1 to 2 trillion BOE
Other unconventional resources may, despite having many shortcomings, become somewhat more attractive as new extraction methods come online. One of these is “heavy oil,” which ranges from the molasses-like crude in Venezuela to the bituminous oil sands of Alberta. For decades, oil traders saw heavy oil as inferior to light crude, which is easier to extract and whose smaller-chain molecules are more readily refined. Heavy oil’s bigger molecules, in contrast, were suited mainly to low-profit products, such as ship fuel or asphalt. But new refining techniques are making heavy oil more renderable into gasoline, and new extraction methods are making it easier to get out of the ground.
At a heavy-oil field outside Bakersfield, California, for instance, Chevron deploys computer-guided steam injection to thin the oil sufficiently to pump out. Even more promising are oil-sands operations in Alberta, where companies are now separating the brittle bitumen from sand and clay and cooking it into synthetic crude. At a conversion rate of one barrel for every two tons of sand, Alberta’s oil sands alone may contain up to 315 billion barrels of crude. As refining costs have dropped, output has reached 1.5 mbd and could more than quadruple, to 6.3 mbd, by 2035.
That said, heavy-oil production also has plenty of external costs. As with the kerogen in shale, the bitumen is processed either in-ground or by strip-mining. Both processes consume up to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of oil they produce and yield an unimpressive EROEI of about 7:1. And because heavy oils are carbon-rich, the CO2 footprint of crude from bitumen is up to 20 percent higher than that of conventional crude—not as bad as coal, but not exactly friendly to the environment either. Carbon-capture and -sequester techniques can only keep so much of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Oil-sands operations are sprawling, and as a result, very little of the total CO2 emissions can be captured (one study suggests we might trap just 40 percent by 2030).
If carbon-capture techniques improve, though, heavy oil could make up a substantial share of the final two trillion barrels for a carbon penalty substantially below that of either CTL or shale oil. A further advantage (from the U.S. perspective) is that a lot of heavy oil is located in a politically stable country that’s right next door.
Ultra-Deep Offshore
Total reserves: 0.1 to 0.7 trillion BOE
The “deep” in ultra-deep refers to the depths plumbed by floating oil rigs (typically, anything beyond 5,000 feet). But the more important depth is the distance from the ocean floor to the oil itself. It’s not easy to start an excavation a mile or two underwater, much less one that continues on for several more miles underground (the current record, set in 2009 in the Gulf of Mexico, is nearly seven miles). But an ever-expanding drilling fleet is deploying new techniques in horizontal drilling, sub-sea robotics and “four-dimensional” seismology (which geologists use to track oil and natural-gas deposit conditions in real time) to rapidly expand output. Although fewer than half the world’s ultra-deep provinces have been fully explored, deepwater output in the past decade has more than tripled, to 5 mbd, and it could double again by 2015.
As the Deepwater Horizon disaster made clear last year, though, tapping this resource can involve significant external costs. The pressure in ultra-deep reservoirs can reach up to 2,000 times that at sea level. The oil within can be extremely hot (up to 400°F) and rife with corrosive compounds (including hydrogen sulfide, which when in water can dissolve steel). And the pipes that rise from the seafloor are so long and heavy that the platforms supporting them must be extraordinarily large simply to stay afloat. The biggest discovery in decades, Brazil’s “pre-salt play,” meanwhile, is defended by a 1.5-mile-thick ceiling of salt, which had the beneficial effect of absorbing surrounding heat and keeping the oil from breaking down—but which also, in doing so, congealed the oil into a paraffinic jelly that drillers must now thin with chemicals before they can extract it.
Not surprisingly, ultra-deepwater oil is some of the most expensive in the business. A single drilling platform can cost $600 million or more (especially if the deepwater is in the Arctic, where rigs must be armored to withstand Force-10 winter storms and hull-crushing ice floes), and companies can easily spend $100 million drilling a single ultra-deepwater well. The result of all this effort is a modest EROEI--from 15:1 all the way down to 3:1.
Thus, even as companies scramble to improve safety, most of the research and development in the ultra deep will focus on saving money and energy. Remotely controlled, steerable drill heads, for example, allow companies to drill multiple bores from a single platform (thus lowering costs and the aboveground footprint) and to follow the path of narrow oil seams, greatly increasing oil output. (The record for a horizontal bore, set by Exxon near Russia’s Sakhalin Island, is also about seven miles.) To further cut drilling costs, companies will steadily boost rates of penetration with more-powerful drill motors, drill bits made of ever-harder materials and, eventually, a drilling process that uses no bits at all. Tests at Argonne National Laboratory suggest that high-powered lasers can penetrate rock faster than conventional bits, either by superheating the rock until it shatters or by melting it.
Costs will further recede as companies develop more-accurate “multi-channel” seismic prospecting techniques that will, by combining up to a million seismic signals, help them avoid the ultimate waste of drilling into empty rock. And to better measure the oil reservoirs themselves, companies are creating heat- and pressure-resistant “downhole” sensors (similar to devices NASA developed to monitor rocket engines) that communicate to surface computers via optical fiber.
As the volume of data rises, the industry will also create more-powerful tools to analyze it, from monster compression algorithms (courtesy of Hollywood animators) to entirely new computing architectures. “If we go to a million channels [of seismic data], then we need petaflop computation capability, which we currently do not have,” says Bruce Levell, Shell’s chief scientist for geology. To get that capability, oil firms are working with Intel, IBM and other hardware firms. In the future, Levell says, the oil business “is really going to drive high-performance computing.”
Natural Gas
Total reserves: 1 trillion BOE
Natural gas, or simply “gas” in industry parlance, has long been oil’s biggest potential rival as a transport fuel. Gas is cleaner than oil--it emits fewer particulates and a quarter less carbon for the same amount of energy output--yet today it powers less than 3 percent of the U.S. transportation fleet (mainly in the form of compressed natural gas, or CNG). This proportion is poised to grow, though, in part because the overall supply of gas keeps growing.
With advances in a drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” companies can now profitably extract gas from previously hard-to-reach shale formations. Worldwide reserves of shale gas currently stand at 6,662 trillion cubic feet, the energy equivalent of 827 billion barrels of oil. And that doesn’t include the gas that is routinely discovered alongside oil in oil fields and that is sure to be found in some of those yet-to-be-explored deepwater basins.
Gas is so plentiful that, in energy-equivalent terms, its price is a quarter that of oil--a bargain that is already transforming CNG from a niche fuel, used mainly in bus fleets, to a product for general consumption. The Texas refiner Valero, for instance, will soon begin selling CNG at new stations in the U.S.
A gas-powered future could still have some high external costs, though. Fracking can be extremely hazardous to the local environment. The method uses high-pressure fluids to break open deep rock formations in which gas is trapped, and these fluids often contain toxins that might contaminate groundwater supplies. But such risks, which have received substantial media coverage and are now the focus of a new White House panel, may be controllable. Gas deposits are typically thousands of feet belowground, while groundwater tables are much closer to the surface, so most contamination is thought to take place where the rising bore intersects with the water table--a risk that could be minimized by requiring drillers to more carefully seal the walls of the bore.
That said, allocating too much natural gas to transportation might have surprisingly negative consequences. First, it would most likely increase demand for natural gas so much that prices would rise, thereby undermining the current cost advantage. Second, shifting a large volume of gas to the transportation sector would mean pulling that volume away from the power sector, where it is more constructively displacing coal, whose carbon content is far higher than oil’s. But converting specific sectors of the transportation system (delivery fleets, for instance, or buses) could simultaneously cut CO2 emissions and reduce oil demand.
Enhanced Oil Recovery
Total reserves: 0.5 trillion BOE
The resource that comes with the lowest external cost might be the oil we left behind, back when energy was a lot cheaper. Drillers typically end up extracting just a third of the oil in a given field, in part because when they drain reservoirs they also decrease the pressure that pushes oil to the surface, making it more expensive to extract the remaining barrels. In the U.S., abandoned oil fields may still contain a staggering 400 billion barrels of residual oil; worldwide, the figure is probably in the trillions. Extracting all of it is economically impossible, but advances in enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, could boost extraction rates to as high as 70 percent.
EOR could add perhaps half a trillion “new” barrels worldwide. And it could also carry a substantial environmental bonus. One of the most promising EOR methods involves “flooding” oil reservoirs with CO2, which dissolves into the oil, making it both thinner and more voluminous, and thus easier to extract. Once the oil is extracted, the CO2 can be separated, re-injected into the field, and sequestered there permanently. An aggressive strategy in which CO2 is captured from single-point sources (such as power plants or refineries) and pumped into oil fields could increase U.S. oil output by as much as 3.6 mbd while sequestering nearly a billion tons of CO2. And depending on the method, EOR can have an EROEI as high as 20:1.
EOR can’t entirely bridge the gap--but in a perfect world, we would at least begin by tapping those barrels, along with the oil--equivalent barrels of natural gas. That way, we would be using the least damaging resources first and saving the worst barrels for later, when (if all goes well) future engineering innovations will let us extract and consume them more safely and efficiently.
But of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. For now, oil producers will do what they have always done, which is to extract oil as cheaply as they can. And oil consumers will follow suit, buying the cheapest energy they can. We may eventually ask the market to take the true costs of production into account, perhaps by way of a carbon tax or some kind of climate regulation. Or we may not. Energy policy has never been particularly far-sighted. There is little chance that the transition to a clean-energy economy will be entirely clean. It will require trade-offs and compromises, and the cost of those trade-offs and compromises will rise with every year that we wait to get serious about moving away from oil.
One thing is certain: the status quoTM, which is just as entrenched in the legacy financial system as it is in the existing energy paradigm, will do nothing until it is far too late to provide for a contingency plan while it is still feasible and not cost-prohibitive. After all, by the time things get so bad that there is no choice but to move on to something "else" it will be some other, far less entitled, generation's problem.
Source: Popular Science
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You don't get junked near as much as you deserve, pussy boy, but that's because you post a hundred one-liners on every thread and no one's going to take that kinda time out of reading the interesting stuff here just to give a troll like you more attention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-eJ-t_XzOE&feature=related
Rusty I could only [get] 1/2 the way through! LMFUCKING ass off. The Red neck demeaner, and the deck of cards! I can't stop laughing! EXCELLENT FIND! Yen.
Obambi was made in China? Wish he were ceramic.
The paper he is [printed on] Certainly is.
Rusty, if we could only harness that energy. I bet the Bernanke, the Bankers would not step into the same room with this guy. Yet, if they knew he and many like him were around things would probably be different.
imho, seriously....
This article rings moot to me because our lives will radically change very soon. This will obviate the need for oil.
I give us 36 months as on outside timeline. Most likely sooner.
Sorry for the doomer perspective; I am a realist.
ymmv
So (I) guess you caught those s/t treasury charts?
Yeah, but we are fucked for so many reasons than just that.
Elaborate? Please?
Dam Doomers. Yes, it will never happen.
obviate?
Geez, must not be a Lib. It's that multi-sylabic thingy...
+2 YEN
I'll take the under on that.
Regards,
Another Realist
You are the artist of my Avatar! Thank you Yen.
Multi-sylabic speak for Libs (and Rue Paul morons):
You are all gonna die, and we will eat you!
Lot's of syllables in there....
Mr Party Pussy...
Very ass stute of you.
Things taint what they used to be....
remember, the economy is (I mean IS) cheap fossil fuel. This is why there will be no inflation, but rather the greatest deflationary disaster the world has ever known.
When you mean Libs, it's ok to say it.
the greatest deflationary disaster the world has ever known
H3 is also a fusion fuel. Lots of it on the moon.
Good stuff.
However unless we ditch this monetary system for a credit system, there will never be enough money...er credit, for such projects to be built and later mass produced
But first....
Glass-Steagall
+200 (best post of the next two centuries) Let me see if I understand what you are saying though:
Glass-Stegall = People invent new stuff. You can make bets on thier ideas and take/profits or losses in stock, bond and commoditiy exchanges. But you still need money to live, providing food shelter, water and property taxes for the childrens. So we are going to make you hold your savings in a different institution than your play money. With technology, you can click a button and move that money back and forth, but you still have to make a concerted act of doing actually doing so. This also puts a few more dampners into the machine so that the central planners & politicians can not use your meager lifes work product willy nhilly like a strategic petroleum reserve.
Tritium on the moon: There is probably enough tritium there to fuel the planet via fusion reaction for millenia. If we took the next generation of STEM students and put them on the mission they could figure out how to harvest that tritium and send it back to earth, or even better yet, build the reactors there and transmit the energy over microwaves to earth.
Naw, lets all get HELOCs for 106" plasma Teevees to justify 5000 sq ft houses. Need the viewing angles right to watch Dancing with the Stars. On that viewing scale they will look like greek gods.
Natural gas is a clean viable transportation fuel.
Yes right now natural gas prices are at rock bottom, but even if they doubled it would still cost about 50% of what oil does to fill ones gas tank.
Further building the infrastructure necessary to support natural gas as a transportation fuel, would actually create viable jobs.Starting with heavy trucks, should be a nice beginning. Of course it would require vision and long term planning.
It would also have the side benefit of making the US less reliant on foreign sources of oil (read mid-east). Moreover, cause a reduction in that pesky trade deficit.
However, conservation must also be looked at. Four thousand square foot houses, with 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, 8 televisions, two ovens, two refrigerators, and 6 computers, may not be viable for a family of 4 going forward. This isn't called reducing ones living standard, it is called living smarter.
NG sounds great, but try getting a 120% compression ratio engine to use it. So now we need thicker head gaskets on all trucks. So you should be stuck with the bill, while lots of diesel is available, if ODumbshit would just bend over.
Good point on the head gaskets.
Which is of course where the "jobs" and capital investment come in.
The move from Oil to Natural Gas, would take 10 years. And require a public/private partnership. President Kennedy put forth a plan to land a man on the moon "within a decade".....that is the type of thinking i am talking about. Longer than an election cycle, and a quarterly report.
Remember that $800B stimulus package......opportunity cost is a bitch.
Too bad they didn't put any of that GODAMN 800 FUCKING BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS into anything of substance. "Stimulated" somebody's rectums, apparently
When your only concern is changing infrastructure and equipment, then you have more serious issues than technological ones - first one being the scope of your thinking on the time-dimension.
Considering the situation at hand, 15 years, are nothing. We will not run out of sufficiently cheap energy in that timespan, but we WILL need both, technological as well as moral modifications, in a matter of 20-25 years.
Do you know how long it did took europe, to force transition to cars with catalysators, by something as boring as boring as monthly fines? I think it was somewhere around 8 years, at most 10.
Infrastructure and equipment is no issue, if you're determined, and have at least 10 years at your disposal. Fuck, do you know how much can happen in 10 years? Do you realize how many disruptive innovations civilization endured from the 1990 to 2000? Society is capable of achieving a lot, in a historically short timespan, IF (and only if) it is done efficieantly, and with consistent and common determination.
"Natural gas is a clean viable transportation fuel."
Viable for whom? Remember this: 2/3 of the world's population lives on the equiv of $3/day or less.
Crack addicts worried about their next fix...
Do we want to care about crack addicts, and artificially low wages? CAN we in the future?
"The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html
There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years
There we go again, two-dimensional thinking! No qualification to the rate of consumption whatsoever! Yeah, just trust these elites!
It's enough to power THEIR civilization, but you and I ain't in it (unless you suck their ass like Mr Party Pussy does).
Be considerate. The step from 1D to 2D is already steep for the majority of the superculture, that is called "human".
Several new developments are going to change the face of energy generation. Two new discoveries in solar photovoltaics promise to boost the efficiency of solar panels to about 30% (http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/37882/?p1=MstRcnt). Another discovery is gaseous geothermal using carbon dioxide as the heat trsansfer fluid instead of water (http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23953/). Both have the advantage of being capable of generating energy near the end-user. Most likely we will have combinations of all these sources in twenty years. The real mainstay is probably going to come from a "White Swan" event.
Unfortunately, dead Libs are energy negative. All that decomposition.
A central feature of this system is an 800,000-gallon water tank positioned directly above the containment shell. The reservoir’s valves rely on electrical power to remain closed. When power is lost, the valves open and the water flows down toward the containment shell. Vents passively draw air from outside and direct it over the structure, furthering the evaporative cooling.
Who is going to manufacture this stuff, Cameron (the folks responsible for the blow-out preventer valve at the Deepwater Horizon well)?
speaking of energy, this just in from the greek energy minister, in admonishing the striking utility workers:
“The government is determined to protect society from practices which show disregard not just for court decisions but for citizens and companies which are being harmed,” the statement said.
irony in its finest form
There is hope for making the 9th Circuit irrelevant?
I'm In for making ALL of govt irrelevant, as it'll mean that Party Pussies like yourself will have ZERO access to power.
Gover Norquist was right, except that he failed to go far enough...
why not just focus on a totally different energy creation paradigm (emphasis added)
WTF? We can CREATE energy? Laws of thermodynamics have been invalidated? We've become God!
Popular Science, it's neither popular or science. Just because an entity brandishes some impressive sounding name or phrase (like FOX News being "Fair and Balanced") it doesn't make it so. Edward Bernays lurks everywhere...
John Spartan, you are fined 50 credits for not being a Lib.
Why do you dips never lean forward and mention MSLSD?
Thanks for a list of technologies that wont be of any relevance untill most of us are dead.
Die sooner!
Vote Rue Paul!
Re-elect the Squirrel!
I really like how the control room is directly underneath the AP1000 design. Talk about incentive to not let it melt down...
Typical of the car- loving energy whores @ Popular Science, they shoot their collective dicks off with this pro- vaporware spam for waste.
Not one word about conservation, which is exactly the energy route that circumstances are mapping out for the hapless human race.
Nuke weapons and nuke power are joined @ hip. One cannot exist without the other: the same govts. that steal from their citizens rationalize/'control' nuke weapons. There are still tens of thousands of thermonuclear warheads here on Planet Stupid.
Nukes are radioactive on an unimaginable scale. Each 1000mw reactor in Fukushima is 2.800mw thermal. That 'heat' will leak for thousands of years x 20 which is the number of reactor cores at that site. Without proper remediation the entire of Japan can and will be rendered uninhabitable by that single reactor complex. There are dozens of other complexes in Japan!
There is certainly enough energy in the fuel at this complex to 'accomplish' this incredible feat of engineering, bribery, corruption, insider dealing, lying and abuse. How does anyone rationalize sterilizing an entire country?
Which bedroom @ your house will your Japanese family sleep in? Who will feed them?
Thorium reactors are proliferation hazards, too radioactive to approach due to thallium isos. Want one in your back yard? 1000mw thorium reactor + water = massive steam explosions. For what? Some cheap volts for the unbelieveable eelectric car? Giant TV/Lying Machine?
Hard times are coming, there won't be the money to afford this crap, not enough to do more than board up reactors and walk away when they stop being 'profitable'. Then what?
I'm glad I won't be around to witness any of this, that I don't have any children and that I don't care. Humans are no better than cockroaches and deserve whatever misery they inflict upon themselves.
I'd just like people to learn to actually project shit out, like include growth forecasts in order to show how their "great" shit will stand up to growth, how it will scale. But, we know That answer...
Food, shelter and water. And we were given "feet" for transporation. This is the reality. This is how Nature works. But, as I noted, Popular Science writes that energy CAN be created, which means that we have become God- I suppose, then, that ANYTHING is possible, that we can defy God's creation- COOL!
Steve: I would like to recommend to you a good movie, a walk in the park, a visit with a grandmother or other valuable human and then you may have a more compassionate outlook for yourself and the future.
I think we will live on. I don't think it's Mad Max scenario. world population WILL reduce on it's own and we will evolve. So take heart.!
In the overall scheme of things, I don't see where much has changed, or will change anytime soon. When the bulk of the world's economies have either a vested interest in producing a particular product, or via using it keeping their economies humming along, then it will require a major paradigm shift to even nudge them along down a different road. Nuclear power is not moving away from light water reactors very soon either. Most of the new facilities will be pressurized reactors, but the existing type 1 boiling water plants will be upgraded and re-licensed. Because of red tape, environmental issues and the lawsuits surrounding the whistle-blower ethos in the industry, it is virtually impossible to build a new nuclear plant in the US, so upgrading and re-licensing is the only way to go.
Germany may move away from nuclear power - and that too may change back over time, but I doubt Japan will, nor will China or France or the Middle Eastern countries who are inexorably headed down the nuclear path.
As long as the nuclear nations need tritium to maintain their stockpiles of weapons, and in the US case, is now producing it from civilian reactors, then nuclear power in some guise and quantity is here to stay. I understand that nuclear weapons can be built without tritium, but not efficient ones that fit on existing launch vehicles in a MIRV configuration with adequate throw-weight per warhead.
Natural gas is a good thing...sorta. A lot of the extensive reserves of it have been flared off, or used as a re-injection media to pressurize formations to push more out of them. One of the really good things about natural gas is in areas where it has a high BTU content, liquid fractions can be knocked out of it that can be used as a bulk mixture with gasoline, while the remaining NG can still be used to heat homes. In fact, really high BTU natural gas sucks for home heat, since it tends to produce soot and clogs the heat journals in wall heaters and space heaters. When I was a kid, there were some oil wells on my father's property that produced natural gas as well. In the winter, we kept barrels out there to collect the drip gas falling out of the NG, and would use a hand pump to put it in our car's gas tanks at about a 50% mixture. It would evaporate out pretty quickly, but it did save money - even though gas was cheap as shit back then. Eventually, he built a skid processor with a 502 refrigeration unit on it, and knocked the stuff out year round and put it in an old 5000 gallon propane tank. The leftover NG ran our house.
Fracking is a subject that is subject to a lot of hype and unknowns. Back when I worked on drilling rigs in the mid-sixties, we fracked wells with saltwater and sand, sometimes used a polymer that we called "bull cum," It was a water-based crap that was so slick, we had to shut down drilling if it was spilled on the rig floor, since it would be impossible to stand and work. I know a lot of new chems are added to the fracking process now, but as long as you have a viable casing, do not overpressure the overburden and only use it on deep well bores, then it should be okay...although it would probably be better without all the new-tech chems they use...which probably are not needed anyway. The bottom line on fracking is...a lot of wells that would never be produced without it, did produce because of it....for what that is worth.
Just my take on what I see as reality...with some wordy ad-libbing.:)
So, is that at thumbs up for the path of strength through exhaustion?
It is neither a thumb nor a middle finger. It is my opinion. You and I have no power over international reality...other than a fleeting middle finger.
Can we discuss [energon cubes] and reactor vessels please? Lets keep it Immelt.
Personally I'm a Jack Welch fan! YEN (dot)
I don't know....Jack Welch is just another horney power guy, who these days, sounds like an 80-year-old woman on speed.
Immelt/Welch I'll take the grapes. : Welch doesn't charge for " Lugage" And the man has Balls! And the man understands (Hedging)
Yen(dot) Rock on JACK!
Does he understand zero hedging?
Apparantly so.;
When it comes to mistresses, or corporate management?
TPTB don't care about any sort of energy future.
All they care about now is looting whatever wealth is left among the masses. This decade is the wealth plundering decade. By the time we get to 2020 nations will be reduced to feudal societies run by rich overlords.
Along the way energy consumption and technology will cease progressing and start regressing as entire societies are reduced to poverty and masses die off.
World population reduction is the only real energy plan going forward.
I must admit it's valid. The planet can't support 7 billion people.
I assume by your handle, that both you and I will do our part for that population-reduction thing sooner than later.:)
Alass he shows up} ?
Can i rent a [ GUILLOTINE] The Piigs are on the menu. ECB style.
I can build you one...but master wood-crafting is not cheap, and I will only opt for a titanium blade sharpened by a Co2 laser to a microtome edge. I am picky...Marie Antoinette would have killed for my Guillotine technology.
I'll come in WAY under your bid with an obsidian-based unit :-)
Ok...I will grant you the edge qualities of obsidian. The problem is, it cannot be laser cut to an edge that will split the annular spaces between flesh molecules. I am talking painless exocution here...of course, if pain in the receiver is not an issue, then you will likely win this contract. That is why I have never made any money...soft heart.
There are times for technical finesse, and then there are times when a large block of stone on the end of an old rope will do the job just fine. Removed Elite heads are heads; who cares about the quality of separation?
Ah yes...that modern dismissal of a quality job well done. My list of heads to remove is large, and does not just include the elite. It includes anyone I just have a simple distaste for. That is where head removal ends up in an anarchist environment. If I am gonna remove a bunch of them, then I will opt for a civil manner to do so. I am, after all, a gentleman.
I think in this matter it will be quantity that matters most, not quality.
As a fellow sufferer of technical perfectionism it pains me to admit that. But one must be realistic.
I love you to "Sire" Geesus.?
I believe the overall plan is not have enough energy delivery capability for the planet's population, along with not enough food and other essentials.
Why else would TPTB be ignoring these areas, and in some cases deliberately hampering progress in these areas, like our EPA for example? EPA is a tool of genocide. Protecting the environment is just the cover story.
Protecting the environment is the cover story for genocide these days, including "global warming", "carbon taxes", all the "green" regulations and "green" programs of various governments, etc.
NONE of these "green" initiatives are going to make a dent in future energy needs, and some are squelching current energy tecnologies, like "carbon taxes" for example.
They couldn't care less about the environment. It's the cover story for genocide. Which explains why all these "green" initiatives get generous government subsidies and generous support from the elite.
Have you noticed how they never support a technology advancement that actually works, but do everything they can to squash it?
4th generation pebble bed reactors are proven demonstrated clean safe technology way superior to what we have now. But we see no progress on implementing them, and lot's of government resistance.
Ditto for Thorium Molten Salt reactors, demonstrated and proven way back in the 60s.
Here's a quote from a recent Ambrose Pritchard article on China's Thorium MSR program:
"US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.
As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.
The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs."
What sort of government support do these vastly superior technologies get? None of course. Governments keep supporting 2nd gen technology that gives us disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Then they turn around and declare no more nuclear power.
People have been developing 50 - 80 mpg carburetors since the 60s. What sort of government support do these proven designs get? None of course. Govt allows greedy corps to buy up the rights and bury them.
But govt subsidizes corn-to-ethanol, when ethanol is corrosive to fuel systems and uses mountains of corn that could feed people.
No, TPTB don't want energy technology advances that actually work. Because genocide is their real goal.
BTW, nobody will have to "do their part" in population reduction. It will occur naturally via starvation as it does now. That's the overall plan.
I'm bored! Southpark time. C U in the morning.
Southpark - Zerohedge. I can see the relevance.
So the one magazine that did the most to marginalize the call for a real investigation of verifiable scientific inconsistencies surrounding the myriad of events occurring on September 11, 2001 that lead to the elite’s continuing resource war for control (oil, political expression, mobility, free capital, civil liberties) and synthetic oil scarcity is the “vanguard of measure” to determine what societies’ future energy needs will be?
How about an article from the Fed on the need for a one world currency to save us from the reckless behavior of private central banks?
This is wak Tyler...at least provide an alt article exploring the potential of zero point energy and the historical bias against real science outside the statist box...
PropSci FTW
Ugh
Hey hey
Ho ho
That ugly Earth
Has got to go
--J. Beatty, Matthew Looney's Voyage to the Earth, 1961
What, Jim, do you think circumstance might replace it with?
Anyone who believes a shortage of energy exists is a normal, dull, narrow minded human being. Someday they should make their best attempt to grasp the nature and scale of the sun, for example.
But a more practical investigation is to cut the earth in half like an apple and look at the cross-section. I mean really! Except for the incredibly thin skin, the entirety is a hotter-that-hell molten lava.
How much energy do we need?
Does anyone even imagine human beings need more energy that is right there beneath the feet of everyone on the planet? Not for the next million years anyway, by which time we'd be spread across the galaxy if not for the predators-that-be and predator-class who are totally intent on enslaving every last sentient being in the universe, and thus do everything they can to thwart escape opportunities and the good life.
Expensive? In some places the distance to the magma is much further than others. In other places, including rather near to my home, the magma blasts into the air and runs down to the ocean like a river (albeit a few meters under the hardened surface in most places). So yeah, it pays to tap this energy where it is easiest. But hey, probably 10% of the entire western USSA has a thin skin... there's no shortage of opportunity.
Expensive? Well, sure. It will cost you a lot more to build a geothermal plant on your property than erect a windmill or solar panels - that's for sure! Of course, your $50,000 windmill, solar-panels, batteries and electronics will only power your own home. Unlike these wonderful "personal power technologies" (solar and wind), geothermal has huge enonomies of scale, much like the oil business in fact.
So, expensive? Not expensive compared to the oil business today, not expensive compared to the nuclear business. But every energy source has its own unique development and investment profile, and geothermal does too. Fact is, geothermal is more like building a huge dam --- like Hoover/Boulder dam near Las Vegas for example.
Like hydroelectic dams, you get ZERO energy output from a geothermal project until you finish the entire development project and turn it on.
What is very cool though, is that once you finish the facility and turn it on, it works very much like the dam - it outputs energy with very little further investment of time, effort or resources [compared to the value of the output]. And how long does it produce energy? How long do you think Hoover/Boulder dam will generate electricity? That's right, it isn't obvious it ever stops! Well, at least not for untold thousands of years given very modest upkeep.
What many people don't realize is, given energy, many liquid fuels can be generated... from water and other abundant chemicals. Water is hydrogen and oxygen. What is hydrogen and oxygen? Rocket fuel. What horrible pollution does it generate when it burns? Water vapor. Sure, a great many slightly less benign forms of liquid fuel can be produced given electrical energy from hydroelectic, geothermal or nuclear, and some of them don't require new fuel tanks for cars or upgrades to filling stations (hydrogen and oxygen burn great in modern car engines, so that's already a non-problem).
I don't want to minimize the cost of building huge energy projects like the Hoover/Boulder dam or your favorite neighborhood geothermal plant. They are expensive - up front. However, if you ever bother to look at what the predators-that-be and predator-class spend on 900 military bases in 130 countries and endless offensive wars to "secure energy and domination", you'll realize that we could have all the geothermal plants we need to power all of the americas for half the military budget. Seems like a total no brainer to me - become "energy independent" and end up making friends in the world rather than invading countries, killing millions of innocents, and literally creating endless justified anger and terrorism in the process.
But don't expect to have anything intelligent happen while we live in a world totally dominated by:
predators DBA government
predators DBA corporations
predators DBA central banks
All intelligent discussions (on any topic) are utterly worthless (beyond the scope of what we can implement personally) as long as predators-gone-wild rule the earth.
All intelligent discussions (on any topic) are utterly worthless (beyond the scope of what we can implement personally) as long as predators-gone-wild rule the earth.
Yes, there are many intelligent workable solutions (from many people) to problems societies are facing these days. Many are discussed here on ZH and elsewhere.
But the ruling predator class doesn't want intelligent workable solutions, so it's pointless.
They want deprivation and genocide. The want starvation and death on a massive scale. When people aren't dying off fast enough, they start wars to kill people off faster.
They want 1 billion people alive on the planet, not 7 billion.
They want 1 billion people alive on the planet, not 7 billion.
And when they kill off 6 billion and only 1 billion remain, they'll decide 10 million is much better.
Then, when they...
Where is that (Fl)oridian- Barrister?
Sorry for the miss-pell
Strange, I am prohibited by my Big Boss to read and to write on ZeroHedge from now.
Gentlemen and ladies, Goodbye forever.
Forever is a long time. Most bosses get canned sooner, or end up in the Congress chasing underage women or boys on the public ticket.
Archi. With all that knowledge? You own the world? Why even waste your time? Yen
I have no knowledge worth speaking of. I am just a dying smart-ass with a Yen to write.
Be carefull on those crosses. Yen is caving in. A Friend+
Sounds like that poster was referring to his/her spouse...The BIG boss.
That's really sad. Even in your own time? What an asshole.
Make a final gesture. Post his personal contact details online. Let the Internetz deal with him.
Edit: Or is 'Big Boss' an Agency Policy Edict? Wish we could know which one.
Well, all such bodies must be reduced to rubble before the world can be free. Hopefully soon, eh?
Photosynthesis provides an infinite supply of energy, as long as the sun keeps irradiating our little rock.
CO2 grows plants, plants can be "burned" in an exothermic reaction releasing heat energy, the heat energy can be used to produce electrical power just like coal, NG or nuclear. It isn't as energy dense, but it can be replenished.
The irrational fear of additional CO2 in the atmosphere is mind boggling. Plants love it. It may help stave off the next ice age.
"Below we present the complete list." Yes, of energy generation schemes that involve huge billion dollar power plants. The complete list of all the ways the Elites dream of perpetuating their control of the world via their existing stranglehold on energy supply.
But actually there are many other developments in energy generation, that do NOT require massive centralized infrastructure. The Elites invariably oppose these, using methods up to and including murder, for ideological reasons as summed up in quotes like these:
"Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." - Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
"The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet." - Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
However, despite the efforts of the Elites there exist several promising 'small scale fusion' projects with great promise. Here are some links about just one - the Rossi cold fusion generator:
----
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Scientists_in_possible_cold_fusion__0324200...
Scientists in possible cold fusion breakthrough
20090325
Researchers at a US Navy laboratory have unveiled what they say is "significant" evidence of cold fusion, a potential energy source that has many skeptics in the scientific community.
The scientists on Monday described what they called the first clear visual evidence that low-energy nuclear reaction (LENR), or cold fusion devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists say are indicative of nuclear reactions.
"Our finding is very significant," said analytical chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss of the US Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego, California.
WRH:
Expect to see a flood of news articles ridiculing this announcement, as we have seen a flood of news articles ridiculing Cold Fusion ever since the initial announcement.
If Cold Fusion were to be proven and the general public aware of it, it would change the world. Oil would be obsolete except as a lubricant and raw material for plastics. Cars would be electric and self-powered. So would homes. Large centralized power companies, always a target for terrorists, would not longer be needed. Small electronics would be self-powered for the lifetime of the owner. Batteries as we know them now would be instantly obsolete.
Now, I have not had the time or resources to look into this myself, so I do not know where the truth lies on this issue.
What I do know is ...
1. There are a great many very wealthy US corporations which would find Cold Fusion a threat to their wealth and power.
2. Human-Caused Global Warming has proven that scientists can be bought to support a political agenda.
3. The US Government and media lied to us all about Saddam's nuclear weapons.
4. The courts have ruled that since there is no law requiring the US mainstream media to tell the truth about anything, that news corporations have a legal right to fire any reporter who refuses to lie when ordered to do so.
20100501
http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=XNC1WRBQ...
Cold fusion experimentally confirmed
U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting.
"We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring" at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are "the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions," she added.
20110318
It finally looks like Prof. Rossi invention fusion reactor is finally being acknowlegd by the mainstream media.
I was one of the first people to see it in action on line, and have been invited by the man himself for the one megawatt cold fusion demo in October in Athens, Greece. He will also be doing a private demo in Florida as well.
He already has backers, and they are in production as we speak
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/17/nuclear-future-beyond-ja...
http://peswiki.com/index.php/
Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Generator
20110501
http://freeenergytruth.blogspot.com/2011/04/97-e-cats-in-operation-right...
97 E-Cats In Operation Right Now Accross 4 Countries
20110625
http://pesn.com/2011/06/21/9501854_Rossi_Explains_E-Cat_Setup_in_New_Video/
Rossi Explains E-Cat Setup in New Video
Can someone explain to me why non-MSM is more believable than MSM? I think both are full of shit. Everyone is talking their own book, in one way or another. I don't talk mine, since I have no book. I am old. I have no investments. I do not care what happens in any industry. I do not care what happens in politics. I could give a shit less if the world came to an end tomorrow. I just like to write and make pictures and know the truth. You know what...humans have no truth to offer that is viable, they only have their own truth. And, that includes me, since my truth is nothing but a lie since it has no undrepinning of beliefs.
"Can someone explain to me why non-MSM is more believable than MSM?"
If you mean 'belief' in the sense of religious acceptance of dogma, then they are the same. Either one can be 'believed in' dogmatically.
If you mean 'belief' in the sense of ability to search out alternative viewpoints, evaluate their relative merits, and come to your own working hypothesis, then the MSM fail utterly due to being an almost monolithic mouthpiece of the establishment agenda.
The non-MSM ( = internet) on the othe hand presents the entire spectrum of views, putting the responsibility of determining truth on the reader. Where it always belongs.
ZeroHedge being a fine example.
Some articles on the nature of the MSM's lack of diversity:
http://rense.com/general78/mdot.htm
US Electronic News & Entertainment Media Control
9-24-7
http://www.rense.com/general44/sevenjewishamericans.htm
Seven Jewish Americans Control Most US Media
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/108923
Israeli Control of the Mass Media & the 9-11 Cover-Up (Part 1)
http://rense.com/general78/believe.htm
Why Americans Will Believe Almost Anything
By Tim O'Shea, 10-30-7
http://800poundgorilla.100webspace.net/geeklog//article.php?story=200903...
Six Jewish companies own 96% of world media
http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/six-jewish-companies-own-96-of-...
http://www.bushstole04.com/media/press_zionist.htm
The Criminal Nature of the Zionist Controlled Press
December 8, 2009
"The Secret of Masonry is the Jew."
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
-- William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence. An observation by the late Director at his first staff meeting in 1981.
http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-owns-media-6-monolithi...
Monday, October 4, 2010
Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read
20110209
http://saladin-avoiceinthewilderness.blogspot.com/2011/02/public-enemy-n...
Public Enemy No. 1 The Main Stream Media
"The media is the enemy!" This is the title of the introductory narrative of American Free Press.net. AFP offers: "In the old Soviet Union, the government controlled the media. Not a word of substance could be published without prior approval from the Bolshevik commissars. Today, in the United States, the situation is starkly similar. But most Americans don't even know it.
In the United States today, it is a select handful of super-rich families and tightly-knit financial interests-a plutocratic elite-who own the Big Media and who control the government through their ownership of that media. . . . Every single one of the major media outlets is controlled by this powerful interlocking combine."
http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/viewtopic.php?p=23066
1) Do you think that the data revealed by major scientific surveys of the past few years (Zogby, Angus-Reid, Scripps-Howard) has been largely ignored by the American media?
Ry: It has been completely ignored.
Why!? Why isn’t the fact that 84% of Americans disbelieve the official version of 9/11 front page news?
Ry: The MSM is owned by parent companies like Viacom, Disney, and GE. A quick look at the people on the Board of Directors for these companies and you find that the same people serving on the BODs of major weapons companies and Banks. War is a method of profiteering and thus the MSM promotes it as well as the official story of 911. They also hide the crimes of Israel for the same reasons. They are not there to report news. They are there to help indoctrinate people into the state. They have not reported on the AIPAC spy ring or the use of Depleted Uranium either. The Niger forgeries should be front page news, but TV goers wouldn't have a clue what that even means. The MSM never clearly came out and said they were wrong about Weapons of Mass Destruction either. The "News" is just part of the establishment.
Posted Nov 28, 2006 08:55 AM PST
What are we to conclude from a so-called progressive radio and television news program which so glaringly ignores or fails to accurately report the reality surrounding it? A quick Google of "Operation Mockingbird," the CIA's protracted program of infiltrating mainstream media, reveals that (during and decades after the McCarthy era) the agency established intractable control of news reporting in America - so much so, that former CIA Director, William Colby, before his death boasted that the CIA owned everyone of any significance in the U.S. media (a more in-depth analysis of alternative and mainstream media may be read at http://www.oilempire.us/media.html).
New Statesman - A kosher conspiracy?
http://www.newstatesman.com/200201140009
A few months later, Sam Kiley, a foreign correspondent for the Times, resigned after a row with his editors. Kiley had succeeded in tracking down and interviewing the Israeli soldiers who had shot dead Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy who had become, posthumously, an icon of the intifada. Middle managers at Wapping, Kiley claims, know that Rupert Murdoch has business interests in Israel and would "fly into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble". The instruction Kiley received to file his piece "without mentioning the dead kid" was the last straw.
Posted Nov 18, 2006 12:08 PM PST
Category: ISRAEL
(Btw, I read elswhere that Rupert Murdoch's full name is Rupert Murdoch Greenberg. Which explains a few things.)
Good list....but a list does not in itself make truth. There are a million sites with different opinions and "truths" on the internet. But to believe them, you either have to have been there, or have solid evidence from someone you know who is unimpeachable. That is the sad fact of information reporting. The only information I believe is that which is based on events conforming to solid, provable science, or me having been there to witness it. That cuts out the vast majority of bullshit sites on the Internet.
"Good list....but a list does not in itself make truth."
Not meant to. It's meant to be a reading list, and the arguments of the articles are what you should evaluate. Or use as a starting point for further investigation, if you feel the need.
"There are a million sites with different opinions and "truths" on the internet. But to believe them, you either have to have been there, or have solid evidence from someone you know who is unimpeachable."
You're making a very common logical error. One I suspect has been marketted as part of the 'keep the people passive' agenda. This is the idea that one's understanding of what is going on around you in life must be based on the same quality of proof as scientific understanding.
But this is a fallacy. It is IMPOSSIBLE to ever meet such criteria in real time events, especially political matters. Thus people who have been induced to demand such 'proof' are forever frozen in indecision, unable to arrive at conclusions they can accept as solid enough to act upon.
The correct way to deal with living reality is to continually weigh all available evidence, decide what you think is *probably* true, and proceed accordingly. While remaining open to new evidence.
For instance, you just got handed some pretty solid evidence that the world's mainstream media are controlled by a very small group of people with a particular unified agenda. You're using vague generalities about 'solid provable science' and 'didn't personally witness it' to avoid dealing with an unpleasant truth. Because if you faced it, you'd maybe have to make some kind of decision about it, such as (at minimum) change the way you approach the MSM.
"That is the sad fact of information reporting. The only information I believe is that which is based on events conforming to solid, provable science, or me having been there to witness it. That cuts out the vast majority of bullshit sites on the Internet."
You do know that your own senses are subject to exactly the same kind of doubts about their absolute validity, don't you? Not to mention the many known flaws in the human cognitive model - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases for starters.
You can never, ever have absolute certainty. But you still have to decide what to do.
Or, you could just choose to keep dithering forever. That works for some.
To illustrate your point several of the links have been disabled already.
You could just try reading and understanding the stuff, and not worry too much about whether you "believe" it or not.
When you look at science as a set of problem-solving disciplines, you find that there are certain circumstances in which you use one set of equations, and other circumstances which require different sets of equations which are ultimately incompatible with the first. But both models work for the specific subsets of problems they were found to solve.
Why would *any* sort of human knowledge be any different? In fact...how could it be?
Cheeses H. Christ! ... there's some crap on the internet! Don't believe everything you read.
Both his grandfather and great grandfather were Presbyterian (Scots) ministers with the surname Murdoch. Not much room for zion in there!
Electrifcation, < Burns Finger tips
Yes Rossi had a press conferance with many foreign officials. The official release of who was there will be releaed on monday.
The company set up to build in Europe is http://www.defkalion-energy.com/
More news also on http://www.ecatnews.com/
Cant wait till I go to the 1 MegaWhat demo in October.
And just to shut even more people up he will be demoing a 10-12 Megawhat unit in November.
http://ecatnews.com/?p=159
Hypothesis? The Well read ZH posters (r) well read. Let's get some sleep.
I'm +17 if you check the calendar!
An old and very common adage "Need is the mother of all inventions".
With the ever dwindling oil reserves, I am very confident the human race would soon develop alternatives and that would bring an end to transfer of wealth to the Middle East and thus also an end to funding our own destruction.
http://randomchaliceblog.blogspot.com
"The reason fusion power has been the holy grail in energy production is simple: it is the most efficient form of energy creation available."
So what you're saying that fission with its measly "E = m * c^2" mass to energy conversion rate is totally owned by fussion's way more efficient "E = m * c^2" mass to energy conversion rate?
Fission extracts maybe 2 percent of available energy from the atom.
Fusion is way on up there at 50 to 60 percent.
Fusion is only beaten by amtimatter nuclear reactors at 100 percent.
One word bitchez.
Algae.
Peak Oil is a scam, just like Global Warming. There's more oil in Alaska than in Saudi Arabia. But the US wants oil to be scarce for the rest of the world, so prices stay high. The only way to make sure the price of oil stays high is for the U.S. to stay in the market, buying up Mid-east oil. That's why the government won't touch the the big reserves of oil in Alaska that were found in the late 1970's. It's important for the continued strength of the U.S. dollar that oil be denominated in dollars, and expensive. That's why the government, oil companies, and their associated usefull idiots parrot the ridiculous notion of "Peak Oil".
The idea that oil comes from dinosaur bones, or decaying plant matter is such a joke. Did you ever think about this logically? What happens to dead animals after they die? Other animals eat them, bacteria eat them, they get broken down into their component parts....molecularly.
We're supposed to believe that a bunch of dinosaurs died, and then were suddenly covered up, and left to slowly transform themselves into oil, gas, coal. It's so ridiculous. The reason why the whole "fossil fuel" argument caught on is because it plays on an association we have with dead animals. They smell bad, sometimes they ferment, so it's not a large leap that instead of just fermenting, they could through some kind of process similar to what makes the bodies stink, turn into oil! It's an association that allow's housewife's to say..."aha, I get it".
But, dead animals don't turn into oil, they turn into bacerial feces. Bury a dog, then dig it up in about 10 years. Nothing left but the bones, and no oil, and no matter how long you wait, you'll never find any oil there.
Oil is created through an a-biotic process, under great heat and pressure. In the old Soviet Union they had figured this out in the 1950's, because finding substantial supplies of oil was a national imperative. They totally debunked the west's "fossil fuel" theory as a marketing ploy to promote artificial scarcity, and support fiat currency.
The full suite of hydrocarbons has been produced in laboratory conditions using heat and pressure, under conditions similar to what is found deep underground. The Germans during WW2 and later the South Africans, in reaction to international sanctions on oil imports, created petroleum products, gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation spirit, etc, using the Fischer-Tropsche method of creating synthetic oil by recreating the conditions that natural crude oil is produced in the depth of the earth.
Whereas no laboratory, scientist, or institution has claimed, or can claim to be able to demonstrate how organic matter can be transformed into oil, through any process they would like to suggest. It's never been done in a laboratory. When the Germans, or S. Africans needed oil & petroleum products, they didn't try converting organic matter in oil. . . because they knew it can't be done. . . . and yet the mainstream calls the abiotic theory an "Alternative theory".
So, there you have it. Peak oil is a scam. Oil is created in abundance deep under the surface of the earth, where it migrates through cracks to areas of lower pressure, always being pushed closer to the surface. This explains why so many "old" oil wells have miraculously topped themselves up over time.
The Peak Oil/Fossil Fuel/biotic source theory has become more of a cult/religion, with it's main proponents relying on faith in the familiar, and pure demogogery of the opposition to maintain their grip on the mainstream.
Dude, you really need to take it easy with those shrooms!
Nice i-dog.
He's on those hydroponic ones, small and really trippy!!
I see the signs.
:o
That was painful to read.
Global warming a scam - yes, though I seriously doubt you understand the competing theories. Peak oil a scam - no. Even supposing there are huge reserves untouched, that just delays the peak a decade or two. Exponential growth is a bitch.
USA importing expensive oil denominated in dollars good for the dollar's strength... not sure what you think 'strength' means.
Connecting oil deposits with 'dinosaur bones' or dinosaurs in any way... dude, I think you mistook someone's poetic reference to 'dinosaur blood' for a scientific theory. And you garbled the details. Though, I suppose if one buried millions of dogs between two impervious geological strata and left on 'simmer' for a few million years, you _would_ find dog-oil.
Abiotic oil... it's clear that CO2 diffusing up from the Earth's mantle sometimes gets trapped in some crust strata, and pressure cooked into long chain hydrocarbons (oil and gas.) What isn't clear is the rate at which this happens. But it can't be at anything like the rate mankind is burning oil.
In 2006, we consumed around one cubic mile of crude oil plus condensate in one year (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2186). If the Earth was producing abiotic oil at this rate for the past 500 million years (merely the Ordovician age onwards) the entire surface of the planet (198 million square miles) would by now be 2.5 miles deep in oil.
What's really happening is that there is a slow input of carbon as CO2 to the biosphere via mantle out gassing. Much of this gets converted to biomass via photosynthesis. At times amounts of biomass get geologically sequestered by sedimentary overlaying and eventually cooked into concentrated oil and gas deposits at a much higher rate than abiotic processes produce.
In the present era, Earth's atmospheric CO2 is unusually low - not far above the level at which plants struggle to survive. Our 'liberation' of large sequestered carbon reserves is probably a good thing in a longer term ecological sense, though in the short term often produces severe pollution damage. But in the process, we certainly _can_ run out of useful oil reserves.
"Whereas no laboratory, scientist, or institution has claimed, or can claim to be able to demonstrate how organic matter can be transformed into oil, through any process they would like to suggest. It's never been done in a laboratory."
You just held up a big 'I am an idiot' sign. Do you even understand what 'organic matter' means, or what oil _is_?
Did you even think to google 'converting biomass to oil'?
Good grief.
"Abiotic oil... What isn't clear is the rate at which this happens. But it can't be at anything like the rate mankind is burning oil."
But the production and burn rates don't need to match..... even a slow rate of oil production by the Earth's core x 400 million years since the Ordovician period means there are potentially quadrillions? of bbl of pooled oil stored at various depth, much more than we could use in hundreds of years.
How Abiotic Oil is thought to work: The shallow oil we currently use is thought to be just the tip of the iceberg of all stores of oil much deeper underground. It's not necessary we have to use oil at the same rate it is produced if there are still 1500 years worth of oil underground. And oil and hydrocarbons have, indeed, been made artificially in the lab recreating geologically extreme conditions without biogenic organic matter.
When accessible oil near the surface is removed, the oil is constantly replaced from the existing oil pools from much deeper below. It has already been observed in some formerly capped wells that have regenerated in a just a relatively few years time with an oil chemistry profile was totally unique from the original find. This means the new oil in the old well had come from a new previously unknown source of oil from below and was not just recapture of old oil that was previously missed at the site.
Ultradeep land wells might provide bigger, longer lasting oil sources, and/or faster generation times, because they're deeper and closer to the major deep pools of oil. Right now, only the Russians seem to be pursuing this seriously and they have no incentive to talk since they've already passed the Saudis as the world's largest exporters of oil.
Abiotic Oil or Abiogenic Oil Theory:
People who haven't bothered to look into this do not have a clue that inexhaustable oil may very well be a real possibility. Russia already has >310 ultradeep oil wells that are btwn 30,000 and 40,000 ft deep. But, organogenic materials and fossils have never been found deeper than 19,000 ft -- so it's not coming from that.
The abiotic theory is that oil is constantly produced from the Earth's core at great quantities and rises to the surface. It finds it's way closer to the surface through deep major fissures in the Earth's mantle, pooling at different depths, some shallow enough for us to easily drill and tap, and others simply deeper, and other pools way too deep to ever consider. The Saudi fields and others are, in fact, found over these major deep fissures. Hydrocarbons are lighter than the surrounding rocks so they naturally to rise as the denser material sinks and displaces them.
Presence of Helium is also found in ultradeep oil, and other oil, and supports this theory. Helium is a very light weight element. Helium should not be found in oil at all if it oil were created through a sinking organics theory. The Helium is so light it would rise and escape into the atmosphere instead. The only conclusion is that Helium that was trapped in the planet's core during the formation of Earth is finally finding it's way to the surface, hitching a ride with the oil.
A Dr. Gold, who could read Russian, followed up on the written Russian literature on the abiotic oil theory. He formed a group to test the theory and the found oil at great depth in Sweden about 20 years ago. But he also found out the hard way that unique technology and equipment was required at such depths and he had to stop. The rocks behave like putty at that depth and pressure, and his conventional drill equipment was not sufficient to bring in a well in at reasonable cost so the project was abandoned --- but he did find oil.
Saturn's moon Titan has frozen methane and hydrocarbons on the planet's surface. That is significant since there has never been any plant life on Titan. This is proof abiotic hydrocarbons are being produced elsewhere.
Abiotic Oil? Dunno for sure, and Putin isn't talking, but lets follow the evidence and check it out. Dogma is an ignorant bitch. The same people that say there is no such thing as abiotic oil are the same ones who used to say there was no water on the Moon or on Mars. But we now know there is lots of water on both.
Bumped and Pumped. A Jet to catch. I love South Park!
YENCROSS!
Ajet to catch! You were right "Rusty"
YEN +1
and what day was that, pray tell?
the standard deposit for a coke bottle was 2 cents.
Heck, a silver dime would buy a FULL one, in the fifties and early sixties ....
(of course, back then, the pennies WERE made of copper ....)
The cheapest stocks on Wall Street are those artificially suppressed--USO, HAL, ANR and KOL--for example. Check out how many Big Boys on Wall Street added ANR on this dip? Amazing! They shake out all the small time Mom and Pop investors while they add millions of share at Bargain Basement prices. In a few weeks Wall Street will suddenly announce coal/oil shortages and USO and KOL will jump 20-30% again...imho.
The demand for oil and coal will continue skyrocket as will their costs as nations go to war for more oil (a la Libya).
GL!
The problem isn't actually energy. As above there are many energy production mechanisms.
The problem is energy storage.
The future of cheap energy is solar. All life on earth as we know it depends on its abundace and free cost and has for a million times longer than gold has been a currency.
Leave it to a bunch of fucking morons with MBA's, and a fraud market to miss the obvious. No one need be a master[bater] of the universe to see this.
Tyler's credibility on energy is plunging with articles based on complex energy technology. Einstein proved how simple energy is, and nature proves how abundant it is..
Energy is everywhere, it's money with a future so uncertain.
Get a clue, Tyler (and vast majority of ZH participants), your greed is jading reason and simplicity.
Was this article written by overrated dip-shits at Fraud-Sachs?
Took my veg oil powered sickle to a public forest yesterday, cut wood with electric chain saw charged by photovoltaic, and broke the law numerous times in the process. Running non-norm fuel, fuel tax evasion, vehicle in forest, wood theft, overloading motorcycle. Shower with solar heated water after that was legal though.
Tyler, why no mention of wind energy and its most sensible development to date, KiteGen?
-----Solving the Energy Problem-----
Unlike wind turbines which are limited to the slow and irregular winds near the ground, kites can tap into the stronger and much more persistent winds at 1km altitude and higher. When there is no wind at ground level, there is typically more than enough where kites can reach.
Kites can extract more energy from the no-fly zone above a typical nuclear power plant than what the plant itself produces.
http://www.kitegen.com/en/?page_id=7
Zero pollution, almost free and certainly *much* cheaper than anything else, plentiful everywhere, safe (kites are just cloth and lines), fully renewable. Electric energy provided can be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and hydrogen fuel cells can power cars and trucks.
This article purposefully frames the argument away from renewables, and not a word about efficiency.
I'm glad someone else spotted it's dripping with bullshit.
Nah, it is just the "what is the solution" mentality.
The Doomers, politicians, "leaders", central planners all have it. Everybody looking for a silver bullet.
I also know this concept.
The guy behind it is an Italian computer scientist by the name of Massimo Ippolito.
He's a genius.
It's a brilliant concept.
The University of Delft in the nNetherlands is also working on a kite-powered plant.
The guy responsible for this is Prof. Wubbo Ockels.
He's a genius.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/03/renewableenergy.energy
Even the U.S. army has a project harnessing high-altitude wind energy by using kites.
Germany is going ahead full steam with offshore wind power.
We currently build wind turbines with 6 MW peak in the North Sea.
Wind power and Thorium reactors are the future.
The Indians are also heavily investing in thorium based nuclear power.
Even the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote an article about it.
It was his last article before his leave of absence to the Mayan uplands.
Have a look here:
"Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Safe nuclear does exist, and China is leading the way with thorium"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/839398...
Does anyone get the feeling we're gona run out of oil before any of these alternatives are fully online? There are other things we can do, a couple engineers decided we don't need 5,000lbs of steel to get from point A to point B and built a small 2 seater that gets around 60mpg and also tops out over 100mph. Granted it would suck ass to get in a wreck in one of these cracker boxes but I guess it's no more risk than a motorcycle.
I'm still building my foundry, I recently acquired some drums so I can make my own charcoal. I am going to do my own experimenting including gasification. Of course the EPA would just shit a brick over this kind of stuff but if things really got out of hand good luck having any ability to stop people like me.
My four door car available new from 1999 until 2005 does 80 mpg diesel and goes 105 mph, or 120 mph with mild chip tuning. Another driver hit me so hard from behind that the car I smashed into, hit another one in front of him and there was no damage to my car.
Where I live it is illegal to drive on wood gas, only with an antique vehicle you may get away with it. BTW it is illegal to live off grid here, you have to be connected. The country was co-governed by greens not long ago and they did not change these laws.
Before the world runs out of oil, these oil companies will move to that technology. Controlling energy resources is their business. I don't see that happening. Currently these oily are biggest hurdle to alternate energy development.
I'm very disappointed at the ZH community for
missing this: http://www.hidroonline.com/
Alot of garbage comes out in the comment section
too bad you egomaniacs cant stay on topic.
Seen this before. That's a snake-oil plant. He's not generating energy, he's generating an IPO scam.
I figured that, dude would be a dead man by now if
that thing really does work...
Focardi & Rossini have a surprise...
Popular Science is pure garbage.
It's commonly called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) people. AKA; Zero Point Radiation or as postulated by Professor Planck; Black Body Radiation.
It permeates the Universe uniformly in every direction without source or end. Limitless power the likes of Tesla and Marconi tapped into a hundred years ago. But the big energy suckers won't even acknowledge it's existence. Pop Sci is a mouthpiece for the Satanic baby killing offworld deceivers deserving of destruction. Damn them and their stupid infernal poison producers back to Hell where they came from!
You guys are all missing the obvious. The transition can not be done without war and depopulation. What manner of war could possibly achieve enough depopulation without wiping out all of the infrastructure and fouling most of the resources left?
BINGO! Biowarfare, masquerading as a natural plague.
And the instigators of such a war have a chance of grabbing all of the marbles with a minimal chance of being blown up into the atmosphere as radioactive dust.
Who would do such a thing? Ponder that.
"The transition?" What transition? War and depopulation?
The purpose of (pretend) wars is $profit$ not in a free market sense, in a ~jingos wave the flag and die, elites stuff their pockets sense. I woke up this morning and opened my fridge... cold. Now I'll turn on the shower and hot water will flow forth. Same thing tomorrow forever long as I can pay the bills. I wish I could pick up my phone and Russian models came over, if I could afford it there is probably a program for that too.
There is no 'die-off" there is no "transition" there is no "SHTF." Things just suck a little bit more every year as Liberty dies.... but jingos sure can wave the flag (not aimed at ZHers, aimed at sheeples and statists and slaves)
The University of Wisconsin has been engaged in researching nuclear fusion for many years. They have very detailed knowledge and designs. It almost seems out of a dream. You will need to go to the site and check out the papers. They have advance research into using fusion to power interstellar spaceships along with plans to mine the Moon - for the D-3He necessary to power the fusion reactors. CHECK IT OUT! http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/research
Now I will weird you out. Is there a Civilization on the Moon already mining D-3He? We haven't gone back to the Moon since Apollo 17 - some believe it was because we were told to stay away. Yeah - I know -what a nut! BUT ... before you close your mind - Check out the research and pictures.
http://www.boomslanger.com/apollo15.htm
What did the Apollo 17 Astronauts see at Nansen? Take some time and read a VERY interesting tale. NASA will not realease all the pictures. http://keithlaney.net/Ahiddenmission/A17HMp1.html
It would appear that the Research and Technology for D-3He Fusion Reactors has been done. Perhaps REVERSE - ENGINEERED? It's only a lack of fuel that stops us... Have we been stopped out?
The University of Wisconsin has been engaged in researching nuclear fusion for many years. They have very detailed knowledge and designs. It almost seems out of a dream. You will need to go to the site and check out the papers. They have advance research into using fusion to power interstellar spaceships along with plans to mine the Moon - for the D-3He necessary to power the fusion reactors. CHECK IT OUT! http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/research
Now I will weird you out. Is there a Civilization on the Moon already mining D-3He? We haven't gone back to the Moon since Apollo 17 - some believe it was because we were told to stay away. Yeah - I know -what a nut! BUT ... before you close your mind - Check out the research and pictures.
http://www.boomslanger.com/apollo15.htm
What did the Apollo 17 Astronauts see at Nansen? Take some time and read a VERY interesting tale. NASA will not realease all the pictures. http://keithlaney.net/Ahiddenmission/A17HMp1.html
It would appear that the Research and Technology for D-3He Fusion Reactors has been done. Perhaps REVERSE - ENGINEERED? It's only a lack of fuel that stops us... Have we been stopped out?
But you can have this: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/image_release042310.html
"I think we found what we came for." - The Genesis Rock
The fact that this rock stood out because of it's bright orange color has nothing to do with NASA's inability to show it in anything but black and white. It's special. Trust us.
Guess you had to be there.
Nothing new as a concept full of "science" dogma and same old brain washing ( I applaud the Thorium information though, it is a good first step). I am sorry that PopSci has waisted so much paper and present nothing new.
Energy is all around us, there is no future and past for it, there are only past, present and future METHODS for human extraction of the such. As Nikola Tesla recognized 120 years ago "Energy exist everywhere in unlimited quantities". For those with skilled do their own research and experimenting, try condensing power by extracting EM waves directly form the environment around you: http://amasci.com/tesla/tesceive.htm
This topic is so huge that is insulting to try to speak about it on the pages on one magasine with such an insulting title. But hey, it is a good marketing.
More energy ideas.
Plastic Solar pannels being used in California.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h9FLvj2ZJM&feature=related
Magnetic Motor, free electricity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAHKkuNAuJA&NR=1
Mirror Energy powers steam boiler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAHKkuNAuJA&NR=1
Parabolic Mirror Electric generator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAHKkuNAuJA&NR=1
Fresnel Lens Electric generatior
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20wQOZbHXvo
All FREE.
I don't place a lot of hope in technology saving us from ourselves.
The save the world formula seems to go like this:
Develop <insert magic bullet technology here>, life continues according to current arrangement, no change or discomfort necessary.
A lot of civilizations and empires have collapsed before us, and they didn't solve their problems either. We arrogantly assume that we are so much more clever than they were. The average person today can hold more computing power than ever before in the palm of their hand. What do we do with this power? Play angry birds and post innane thoughts on the Twittersphere? These and many other trivial distractions we jerk ourselves off with while in the drive thru.
The jury is still out on whether we are the pinnacle of humanity.
The jury is still out on whether we are the pinnacle of humanity.
This is not the work of a mature species
What, no pebble bed reactor?
Excellent synopsis Tyler. I've heard some about the latest nuke efforts but have not seen as good a rundown as you've provided here.
Any news on the Italians and there latest "cold-fusion" technology? I hate to dismiss those guys as kooks until we find out how their reactor fairs, I thought I read somewhere they're building a small prototype.
What happened to the Moon?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9NO84uvrg8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eS8Uep0z4o
more info (don't mind the geeky presentation please ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94rEqHP9dOQ
Here's Free Radical very appropriately quoting Ray Kurzweil on solar energy in the first in the series that FR just ended:
We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we’ll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we’ll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-rip-homo-economicus-end-ubiq...
Forget ALL above nuclear and fossil technologies!
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Gener...
fusior reactor from Italy - 1st expected working plant of 1 MW to be operational in October 2011!
First company to implement this is:
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/
http://www.defkalion-energy.com/White%20Paper_DGT.pdf
Individual units producing heat ranging from 5 up to 30KWh/h
That's a REALLY strange error for an energy company founded by an expert to make.
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Keep on worry we're going to run out of energy, and you'll never complain about paying 5.00 a gallon for gasoline. Peak oil is a scam. There's no shortage of oil in the world. Only politics prevents enough oil from hitting the market to keep prices low, where they should be.
Huge reserves of oil were located on the North Slope in Alaska in the late 1970's. I'm talking about reserves that make Saudi Arabia seem like small potatos. The reason why we haven't tapped into these reserves is because it's in the US's interests to keep the price of oil high, for a number of reasons.
Here's a resource that explains the entire peak-oil scam.
http://www.reformation.org/energy-non-crisis.html
Whenever you hear Peak Oil, misinformation will follow.
MUST READ - Jim Stone - BUSTED!!!!
"Federal government" BUSTED for forcing American nuclear industry to become a ticking time bomb
more here
MUST READ - Jim Stone - BUSTED!!!!
"Federal government" BUSTED for forcing American nuclear industry to become a ticking time bomb
more here
Energy STORAGE, PRODUCTION, WASTE, POLUTION, all SOLVED by Thorium Reactors using coal.
Credit to KARL DENINGER for ALL of the following information.
"There has to be a better way. We need a solution that will last at least fifty years.
What if I told you that there is one?
It's coal.
But not how you think of coal.
We think of coal as going into a power plant that makes electricity. But that's wasteful, believe it or not.
Here's the math on gasoline, diesel and coal.
1 lb of gasoline contains about 2.2 x 10^7 Joules of energy.
1 lb of coal contains about 1.6 x 10^7 Joules of energy.
These are reasonably-comparable; another way to look at this is that you need about 137% of coal (in pounds) as you do in gasoline for the same energy content.
We currently consume 378 million gallons of gasoline a day. At 6lbs/gallon (approximately) this is 2,268 million pounds. Reduced to short tons (2,000 lbs) this is 1.134 million short tons of gasoline/day, or 414 million short tons a year. Converted to coal, this is 579 short tons.
The most-current value I can find for distillate (diesel fuel) is 3.794 million barrels a day. At 42 gallons to the barrel, this is 159 million gallons of diesel fuel. Diesel contains about 20% more BTUs per gallon than gasoline, but is about 17% heavier at 7lbs/gallon, so if we convert simply based on weight we get close. So we have 1,113 million pounds of diesel daily; reduced to short tons that's 0.557 million short tons of diesel daily, or 203 million short tons a year. Converted to coal, this is 284 million short tons.
Add these two and we get 863 million short tons a year of coal equivalent.
Why is this important?
Because according to the EIA, again, we consume about 1,073 million short tons of coal a year, virtually all of it being burned to produce electrical power.
How much coal do we have? According to the EIA the total reserve base - the reasonable commercially recoverable coal, is about 489 billion short tons. That's roughly four hundred years worth of supply at current rates of use. If we assume our population will grow at about 1% a year and per-capita energy use remains roughly constant, we should have enough coal to last at least 200 years.
Now stay with me a minute.
Remember, we consume less than that amount in coal-equivalent between both gasoline and diesel.
Consider this: There is 13 times as much energy in coal in the form of Thorium as there is available by burning the coal, and right now we literally throw it away in the ash pile!
What is Thorium? It's a fertile material. That means that when struck by a neutron in a reactor it transmutes via a nuclear process to an element that is capable of fission. Note that Thorium itself is not fissionable - that is, it will not (directly) split and release energy. Instead it captures thermal neutrons and turns into Uranium-233. U-233 is fissile.
There is a type of nuclear reactor that utilizes this fuel cycle. Instead of the traditional nuclear reactor which uses water as a moderator and coolant (either a boiling or pressurized water reactor) these reactors use a liquid salt. In the vernacular they're called "LFTR"s, pronounced "Lifter."
You've probably never heard of them. But they're not pie in the sky dreams. Our nation ran one for nearly four years in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was scrapped in favor of the traditional uranium fuel cycle we use today because the fuel it produces is very difficult to exploit for nuclear weapons, and it breeds fuel at a slow rate. The natural process of the nuclear reactions in the core of such a unit produces a byproduct that is a very strong gamma emitter that is difficult to separate from the other reaction products. For this reason - and because we wanted both nuclear power and nuclear weapons - we built the infrastructure for uranium and plutonium rather than thorium.
Thorium-based reactors have several significant advantages and a few disadvantages. We have much less experience with LFTRs than traditional nuclear power, simply because we stopped working with them for political and war-fighting reasons. They use a fluoride salt which is quite reactive when in contact with water, but the reactivity is a bonus in all other respects, because it tends to encapsulate the reaction products (the nasty fission products that you don't want in the environment) through that same chemical process. It runs at a much higher temperature (typically 650C) than a traditional reactor and unlike a traditional reactor the fuel and the working fluid is the same - there are no fuel rods that can melt and release their nasty fission product elements, as the fuel is dispersed in the coolant.
Finally, the unit is intrinsically safe. It does not require high pressure; the working fluid and coolant is a liquid at ordinary atmospheric pressure. This gets rid of the need for high-pressure pumps, pipes and similar materials. Without the moderator the reactivity is insufficient to sustain a chain reaction, and the moderator is in the reactor vessel itself through which the fuel/coolant is pumped, so criticality is impossible outside of the reactor vessel and inside the vessel the fuel and coolant are the same, and a liquid. The working fluid is contained in the reactor loop by an actively-cooled plug. If power is lost cooling ceases and the plug melts; the working fluid then drains into tanks by gravity under the reactor and cools into a solid, as it cannot maintain criticality outside of the reactor itself (there's no moderator in the tank or the plumbing.) As the fuel is in the fluid, there is no core to melt as occurred in Japan and being dispersed over a much larger area the working fluid naturally cools from liquid to solid without forced pumping and cooling. This safety feature was regularly tested in the unit at Oak Ridge - they literally turned off the power on the weekends and simply went home!
There are some downsides. The working fluid requires special metals made out of Hastelloy. But these are no longer particularly-special materials, being used in other chemical plants where highly-corrosive material is commonly handled. They are expensive, but then again so are traditional reactor pressure vessels which require high-pressure integrity and thus special welding and inspection techniques.
Why did I just spend all this time talking about LFTRs?
Let's remember two facts from up above:
and
One final piece of information: The Germans figured out how to turn coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel - before WWII. This process, calledFischer-Tropsch, requires energy to drive it and is currently in commercial use in some places that have a lot of coal but little or no oil, such as South Africa. Malaysia also has an operating plant. Typical operating temperatures for this process are in the neighborhood of ~350C.
This light bulb should be coming on about now. We can replace our gasoline and diesel consumption, plus replace the coal-fired plant electrical generation, and have lots of energy left over - all while completely eliminating the requirement for foreign petroleum from anyone!
Now let's put the pieces together.
We'll start with the same amount of coal we burn today.
We have the fuel energy in the coal, and we have 13x that much energy which we are going to extract from it in the form of the thorium naturally contained in the coal.
Let us assume we consume twice the fuel content of the coal extracting the thorium. We have 11x the original energy left (once in combustion of the coal, and 10x in thorium energy content.)
We will then use the Fischer-Tropsch process to turn the coal into synfuel - gasoline and diesel. We will be rather piggish about efficiency (that is, presume we're not efficient at all) and assume we put in twice as much energy as the coal contains in fuel content converting it. Since the process heat from the reactor is of higher quality (higher temperature) than the Fischer-Tropsch reaction requires by a good margin, we can do so directly without first converting to electricity (which would introduce more losses.)
We now have all of our gasoline and diesel fuel, and we also have 8x the original BTU content of the coal left in thorium energy content.
We will then use the remainder to generate electricity.
So what we do we have out of this?
A nuclear and physical technology that:
The biggest disadvantage is that we've only built one of these reactors, at Oak Ridge, and then we stopped because a decision was made to pursue "conventional" plants due to their dual-use capability. But the challenges presented by LFTR technology are known, and the ability to build and operate such a plant is not "pie in the sky"; we've performed all of the necessary technical parts of assembling this alternative individually and ran one of these reactors for four years.
Are their engineering challenges in this path? Yes. Is it "free energy"? No.
Can this be made to work given what we know now, at a reasonably-competitive price? YES.
If you're going to propose something else then show me the math. If you can't, then get on board, because this is the bus that will work.
Incidentally, China and India appear to have figured this out as well; I'm not the only one with a brain.
We had better lead on this or we're going to get trampled." -- KARL DENINGER