
Alternative energy can power the world in 20-40 years - dirtyaura
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/january/jacobson-world-energy-012611.html
======
PaulHoule
Ugh. You can pave the Earth with solar panels and wind farms or you can save
the Earth with nuclear energy.

Intermittent renewables aren't a complete solution to our energy needs because
they aren't available when we need them. They either need to be supplemented
with fossil fuels or we'd need to build an energy storage system that would
cost as much, if not more, than the energy production system.

~~~
stcredzero
_Intermittent renewables aren't a complete solution to our energy needs
because they aren't available when we need them._

In a lot of places in the world, solar energy is more available generally when
it's most needed.

That said, I'm all for non-intermittent renewables. Newer geothermal and tide-
energy and wave-energy technologies could fit the bill. We could also develop
infrastructure that would allow us to lob bulk cargoes cheaply into orbit,
which would bypass the unfavorable economics of the rocket equation and enable
orbital solar power.

I'm also for saving the earth with newer nuclear technology. (Thorium wouldn't
carry the proliferation risk of current breeder reactors.)

~~~
PaulHoule
A modern FBR that uses commercial plutonium as a starting fuel and with no
external blanket could breed with a ratio around 1.0 and, at all points in the
fuel cycle, have the Pu be so contaminated with Pu-238, Pu-240 and Pu-241 that
weapons use would be impossible.

In fact, sodium cooled cartridge reactors are considered so proliferation
resistant that they could be deployed to places where they could fall into
enemy hands. Not only is the material inside not usable for weapons, but
people trying to get the fuel out would probably be killed by a sodium fire.

Now there's another risk that a government could use FBR technology to
construct a system for creating weapons plutonium. For instance, a country
like Iran could use an improved version of the EBR-II with integral
reprocessing to produce 'supergrade' plutonium. On the other hand, any country
that wants weapon grade plutonium can build a graphite or heavy water and use
the well-understood PUREX process.

It's too early to compare the proliferation risk of a thorium vs plutonium
cycle. Solid fuel thorium systems are highly resistant, but liquid fuel
systems are too immature to characterize. If a highly effective system of
protactinium removal were perfected, it might be possible to extract weapons
grade U-233 from a liquid fuel reactor.

Another problem with liquid fueled reactors is that it isn't easy to verify
the fuel cycle. In a solid fuel cycle, every fuel element has a serial number,
and a random sample of them can be occasionally looked up to make sure that
none have disappeared... Diversion outside of the reprocessing center can be
easily detected with only intermittent surveillance. With liquid fuel systems,
it's impossible to know exactly how much fissionable material was made and
where it ended up.

~~~
stcredzero
What are the disadvantages of solid fuel Thorium reactors?

~~~
PaulHoule
The advantage is that they really work. A Thorium-U233 core was tested in the
Shippingport reactor and demonstrated slightly over-unity breeding without
operational problems.

One disadvantage is that fuel cycle costs are higher, a lot higher. Some
people estimate the cost of electricity from a Shippingport-style reactor
could be 3-4 the cost of electricity from conventional LWRs. U-233 in a
Thorium cycle gets contaminated with U-232, which has isotopes in its decay
chain that emit nasty gamma rays.

Uranium Oxide or Plutonium-Uranium Oxide fuel can be handled manually, but
U233-rich fuel is too radioactive for manual handling. The Japanese have
managed to fabricate a few sample fuel elements remotely, but this is far from
a mature technology.

Another issue with the Shippingport design is that the fuel assemblies are
more more complicated and must be fabricated to more precise tolerances than a
conventional LWR because reactivity is managed by moving some of the fuel
elements relative to other fuel elements.

I think capital costs suffer too: I'd suspect you'd need a larger pressure
vessel to contain the same volume of fuel, and power output won't be as good
because heat production will happen predominantly in the U-233 'seed'
elements, so power density won't be as good as a conventional LWR.

Now, the folks at Lightbridge

<http://www.ltbridge.com/>

have been doing some work on a seed and blanket core that puts U-233 into
metal fuel elements (which would be easier to fabricate remotely) and puts the
Th in oxide fuel elements. The metal fuel does better at transporting heat to
the fluid, so power peaking may be less of a problem.

Reprocessing is also more expensive in a sold-fuel Th cycle. Th fuel can
handled by the THOREX process, which is a modification of PUREX, but it's
harder to dissolve Th fuel than U-based fuel.

------
grammaton
Yet another iteration of the soundly discredited "hydrogen economy" model. I'm
really surprised this came out of Stanford, of all places.

>They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals,
the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient
amounts. And >recycling could effectively extend the supply.

>For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices
that if one becomes short, you can switch,"

Cornucopian hand waving. It reminds me of Julian Simon and his assertion that
if we ever run out of Copper, we'll find a way to just make it or substitute
something else for it.

I'm really, really curious how they came up with their numbers on that. I'm
also very interested to see if they accounted for the quantum limitations on
solar cell efficiency.

I think i'm going to have to actually read the paper.

------
zeteo
"If someone told you there was a way you could [do amazing things at a cost
comparable to the Moon landings], why wouldn't you do it?"

Because such large and complex projects are bound to seriously overrun initial
budget and time estimates, and sometimes fail altogether. I'm always
suspicious when big and fancy promises are made, if only we're willing to pay
an arm and a leg. Tell you what: pick the bluest of the blue states, where the
political will definitely exists, and implement all this stuff there. (You did
say it could be done with today's technology, and only political will was
needed?) Then we'll talk about the world.

~~~
schwabacher
I don't think this is a bad idea, and would vote for this to happen in my
state.

The problem is that if only one state does this at significant expense, they
won't see any appreciable benefit because the rest of the states and the rest
of the world would still be emitting CO2.

So one state has huge expenses with an unlikely payback, AND they won't
benefit from the economies of scale that everyone else will if they do get
around to converting. It's a hard sell.

I think the best way to look at it is that non renewable energy does has huge
hidden costs to society. Converting to renewables is the rational action, so
if we use a cap or a carbon tax to price non renewables appropriately the
price of each will reflect that.

*edited for typos

~~~
anamax
> AND they won't benefit from the economies of scale that everyone else will

Most of the "economies of scale" happen at a fairly modest level. In fact,
there are actually diseconomies at extreme scale. (The US Govt is a nice
example.)

> The problem is that if only one state does this at significant expense, they
> won't see any appreciable benefit

The claim was that the expense wasn't significant, that it was mostly just
"will".

> if we use a cap or a carbon tax to price non renewables appropriately

And what makes you think that the price will be "appropriate"?

The arguments for carbon taxes and the like are comparing an abstract ideal
with what we got through the political process. That's a meaningless
comparison because that processh pretty much guarantees that the nice
properties of the ideal won't be realized if we try to implement it.

When a proposal contains basic errors like those mentioned above, what are the
odds that the rest of it is sound?

~~~
schwabacher
Do you think the price of energy now is appropriate? There are clearly
negative externalities associated with CO2 emissions that aren't taken into
account in the price today.

Wouldn't an artificially high price of carbon emissions be quite a bit better
than an artificially low one?

~~~
anamax
> There are clearly negative externalities associated with CO2 emissions that
> aren't taken into account in the price today.

I'd be more sympathetic to your externalities argument if there was some
evidence that you weren't just using it as an excuse to do what you want to do
for other reasons.

For example, you're ignoring the negative externalities of your proposal.

And then there's the small matter that the predicted cost of the externalities
is significantly lower than cost of the "solution". Money has positive time
value.

What? You don't like numerical arguments? Or, is it that you didn't know that
the numbers existed?

> Wouldn't an artificially high price of carbon emissions be quite a bit
> better than an artificially low one?

No. Or rather, it depends on the magnitudes of "high" and "low".

Most folks who complain about subidized energy miscount. Feel free to
demonstrate that you'r an exception.

------
Isamu
Links to the actual papers (PDF):

Part 1:
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnP...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/JDEnPolicyPt1.pdf)

Part 2:
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnP...](http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/DJEnPolicyPt2.pdf)

------
ajays
This reminds me of the quote, "In a five year period we can get one superb
programming language. Only we can't control when the five year period will
begin."

Yeah, we'll be totally on alternative energy in 20 years. It's just that we
don't know when this "20 years" will begin...

------
wil2k
It's simply time to think very much outside of the box and separate the wheat
from the chaff in a truly scientific and unbiased way..

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions, also known as Cold Fusion: <http://www.lenr-
canr.org/>

"Finding and facilitating breakthrough clean energy technologies."

<http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page>

"In a July 9, 1998 keynote address at the Fifth International Conference on
Composites Engineering in Las Vegas, Dr. Deborah D. L. Chung, professor of
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at University at Buffalo (UB), reported
that she had observed apparent negative resistance in interfaces between
layers of carbon fibers in a composite material. Professor Chung holds the
Niagara Mohawk Chair in Materials Research at UB and is internationally
recognized for her work in smart materials and carbon composites. The apparent
negative resistance was observed in a direction perpendicular to the fiber
layers. "

<http://www.energyfromthevacuum.com/Disc3.htm>

"The reflexive response from mainstream science about the possibility of
producing free energy from the vacuum is that it is not possible as this would
violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Over the last 20 years the absolute status of the second law has come under
increased scrutiny, more than during any other period in its 180-year history.
Since the early 1980's, roughly 50 papers representing over 20 challenges have
appeared in the refereed scientific literature."

<http://www.energyfromthevacuum.com/Disc8/index.html>

Time to go back to the ORIGINAL work by Maxwell and dive into the quaternion
notations and not follow the crippled rewritten version by Heaviside.

------
ScotterC
<http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/11/03/wws-2030-critique/>

[http://energyfromthorium.com/2008/12/11/a-review-of-mark-
z-j...](http://energyfromthorium.com/2008/12/11/a-review-of-mark-z-jacobsons-
review/)

[http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/11/food-for-
critical...](http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2009/11/food-for-critical-
thinking-in-light-of.html)

------
stcredzero
_Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel
cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen._

Hydrogen carries a lot of energy for its weight. Unfortunately, it's not all
that compact. I've seen comments online that even liquid hydrogen doesn't so
much fall as floats downward. Still, for all that, I can see ships and trains,
maybe even busses, using hydrogen. As you increase the size of a vehicle, the
internal space increases by the third power, so space is not such an issue for
large vehicles.

A good interim step would be for the US to go to natural gas for vehicular
energy. We have a lot of it. It would be more efficient, and it would help
decrease the importance of petroleum in our industrial infrastructure.

------
mrleinad
Guess The Venus Project is not so far fetched as it seems:
<http://www.thevenusproject.com/>

But.. do we have the will and determination to dodge our own demise?

------
chopsueyar
How viable are algae-based biofuels?

~~~
samatman
Not bad, but far from a whole solution. Background: used to work for one of
the raceway-pond based companies trying to commercialize this technology.

The current frontrunner, IMHO, is NASA's Algae Omega project, to grow
freshwater algae on sewage in membrane bags in the ocean. But there are
serious problems. The one that isn't likely to be solved is the photosynthetic
limit: plants just aren't very efficient at turning solar heat into chemical
work.

Yes, we will have more algae biofuels over time. No, this will not replace
petroleum singlehandedly.

~~~
chopsueyar
What kind of yields can you get from the raceway method?

------
ivankirigin
I highly recommend watching this Saul Griffith talk, "Climate Change
Recalculated"
[http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...](http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated)

------
gaius
I guess in California it's easy to say "we can use solar". But I look outside
my window here in London and it's overcast and hazy. I don't recall it was
windy either when I went out for a sandwich.

~~~
ajscherer
Well I guess that pretty much settles it then. It's not windy or sunny today
in London so renewable energy is surely a pipe dream.

~~~
stcredzero
Thermomax evacuated tubes (developed in England) can get your bathwater and
washing-input water nice and toasty, saving tons of carbon. They can even do
this in the middle of an English winter. The trick is to use this as a water
pre-heat. This way, you have complete control and reliability of your hot
water, but you get the benefits of the sun's free energy input.

------
philthy
arizona should be paved over as a massive photovoltaic lot. you don't need to
live there anyway you won't have water soon. as for questions of putting that
energy into the grid, we already do it, just because energy is locally
produced doesn't mean it is locally consumed.

~~~
alabut
That's along the lines of one of the bigger proposals I've seen - to cover
large inhospitable and hot places like the Sahara. It doesn't have to be with
expensive photovoltaic panels, you can take Spain's route and use the mirrors-
heating-molten-salt technology instead.

~~~
stcredzero
Technology for super-efficient thermal insulation is literally centuries old
now. Just what are the barriers to solar-thermal with storage?

------
chopsueyar
EMPs?

------
innes
Having read Prof Mackay's e-book[1] on the subject, I am massively, massively
unconvinced by that article.

[1] <http://www.withouthotair.com/>

