Redstate

The only things that are known to move Americans to accept wholesale changes in our social order are pocketbook issues (the Federal Reserve Act, the New Deal), immediate security threats (WW2, the Patriot Act), and gross miscarriages of justice (the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act).

The end of planet earth in a wave of balmy temperatures doesn't even pass the laugh test.

However, I will agree that our young people have drunk so much GW Kool-aid that there will be serious pressure under the next President to debate the issue for real. (Perhaps in the context of accepting the Kyoto Protocol or of debating the terms of Kyoto-2, due in 2012.) I'd like to see the debate, candidly.

I can completely believe that the GW priesthood can convince ordinary people that they will suffer no threats to their prosperity or their livelihoods under a Kyoto regime. Most people haven't the slightest idea how the economy really works.

But I don't think anyone will accept limits on our consumption of gasoline or heating oil, regardless of what they may tell pollsters or of how they may actually feel. Americans will sooner suffer bitter pangs of moral conscience about causing the destruction of planet Earth than pay more for fuel.

Ergo, nothing will happen, and you can keep your shirt on (a phrase that von Neumann used on occasion).

______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

On this so far, but that's because I want people to at least "know the enemy" before they go into battle with them.

That post and the series of posts after that are coming. We are going to have to start to fight back against this collection of newage zealots, secular religionists, Socialists, and so on...

I know that *I* can keep my shirt on (or take it off when I really have to work, to show the world my beeeautiful body) so I'm not particularly worried.

But I do want people to know what the "state of play" is right now, and in my estimation it's this:

Round 1: Whackos 3, Sane People 0.
Round 2: Socialists 3, Whackos 3, Sane People 0.
Round 3: Hollywood 3, Socialists 3, Whackos 3, Sane People 0.

We've got 6 rounds to go and my "fight back" columns are coming.

Your beautiful body is pretty near the bottom of the list of things I want to see.

Seriously though, take a look at the terms you're using. You've defined your enemies as "Whackos." Usually when you're up against an enemy that's not playing with a full deck, shouldn't you just wait for them to hose themselves?

That's precisely what I'm hinting at when I say that GW has "jumped the shark."

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of early-stage investment money is flowing out of green technologies like better electrochemistry and fuel cells. Where's it going?

Cellulosic and conventional (corn-based) ethanol, and unconventional petroleum.

Some very big money is going into these investments, which are far less speculative and far closer to real markets. What has changed? I can tell you for sure that the investment world is packed to the gills with money, all of it looking for a home, and speculative early-stage investments aren't really worth anyone's time anymore. They just don't put enough capital to work.

I'm guessing here, but I think the emphasis on "energy independence" is driving the ethanol thing. The rest is probably being driven by the recognition that oil prices will probably stay high in coming years, and that Congress will do absolutely nothing to permit development of conventional petroleum in US coastal waters.

Green energy projects are getting starved. (Yes, I know about all the windmills, but that's a production technology, not a speculative one.)

Bottom line: we'll be burning carbon in ever-increasing amounts for decades to come.

Kyoto or anything like it will not happen.

Why the h**l aren't we investing $25 billion dollars a year in fusion research?

It seems to me as an educated layman that all of our problems are directly tied to the cost of power, especially electricity. For example, steel is the most recycled metal in the world, but to do that you have to melt it back down and remove the impurities and so on. Aluminum in its natural oxidative state (bauxite) is the MOST ABUNDANT element on Earth, but in order to boil off the oxygen and get pure aluminum you need enormous amounts of power. Lots of places in the world are thirsting for pure water: the ocean has plenty of water but desalination is energy-intensive. Even copper can be recycled -- but not back into wire if it came from wire because it's too energy-intensive to be economical, so they make nickels, quarters and dimes out of it (!).

Now let's look at "going green" with zero-emission electric vehicles: we're getting to the point where the energy density of the batteries is good enough to keep the cars running for a few hundred miles and still drive like a "car" instead of a "cart." Certainly we know how to build powerful electric motors. However, the problem is that you have to plug those buggers into the grid and it takes LOTS of kilowatt/hours of electricity to take you and the kids on a trip to Florida. You'd need a solar array bigger approximately the size of a football field to power my current Audi 5000 CS Turbo Quattro and keep it running. But then it wouldn't be able to move!

In other words, everywhere we look in terms of making the world "progress" and actually keeping it liveable, it comes down to the same answer: we need much more power, much more cheaply.

So why on Earth is fusion power recieving such a paltry trickle of funds? And why in tarnation are we allowing the French to build the first prototype fusion reactor?

In my view, we need electricity that is too cheap to meter by contemporary standards but need to consume MUCH MORE of it, so that it's economical. The only way to achieve that in an envionmentally-sound way is with fusion reactors.

What the heck is going on? Why is the CERES group not doing anything? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, about as wastefully as we can, in Health n' Human services, and we're going to approach a trillion dollars of spending on the Iraq war -- but people who want to develop fusion reactors have to hold a bake sale to build a Tokamak.

Something is deeply, sadly, shockingly wrong with that, in my humble opinion.

For example, the 162-horsepower engine of my 1987 Audi 5000 CS Turbo Quattro (which reliably gets me 38-40 MPG at 70 MPH in fifth and on cruise control) is equivalent to about a 120 kilowatt motor.

Let's say I decided to power it the car with solar cells. At the equator, the average solar flux equates to approximately 1 kilowatt per SQUARE METER. Therefore, assuming I lived at the equator and had 100% efficient solar cells, I'd need a 120 square meter solar array attached to my car to generate the same power my engine already does. A football field is about 5,000 square meters, but remember -- commercially-available solar cells are only about 15% efficient, so I'd need about 800 square meters of cells -- on a perfectly clear day, if I lived at the equator.

Well, the weather isn't perfectly clear, and I don't live at the equator, so let's multiply that by a factor of four to make sure that even when I'm in London in the winter I can drive my 162-horsepower car -- and you can see that I'm rapidly approaching the size of a football field.

To power my car.

This is insane.

I'm going to ignore all the stuff about copper and aluminum and France, and try to boil your argument down to fundamentals:

You believe that we should continue incremental improvements to existing technologies, and solve the carbon problem by moving to nuclear fusion power.

We've expanded the discussion way beyond the politics of GW, where it started, and into a realm where both of us are speculating. So rather than construct an argument, I'll just ask you a speculative question. (I'm not looking for an answer, just asking you to think about it.)

What if your fundamental assumptions are wrong?

What if the way forward does not involve an extremely large step-up in energy-usage in order to replace existing energy-using technologies with less-efficient but non-carbon-using ones?

What if the way forward involves a movement toward radical efficiency instead?

Rather than plugging inefficient batteries into a fusion-powered grid, what if the future finds ways to avoid so much motor transport in the first place? Yes, this would involve basic changes in how humans live their lives, how we create value, and how we trade.

Computer servers now consume about 10% of our electrical output. (In the Fifties, more than 10% went to making plutonium for nuclear weapons!) What if we figure out how to process 100 times as much information with one tenth of the power? I think that's quite possible, and quite expectable.

My assumptions aren't wrong because while efficiency is fantastic to pursue, and we should pursue it, you eventually hit a very hard wall in terms of the laws of physics:

Moving 500 people through the atmosphere from the ground at 600 miles per hour in safety requires a certain amount of power.

Moving you and your family up the hill leading from your house and down to the local Duncan Donuts for chocolate eclairs takes a certain amount of power.

Taking a piece of bread dough and cooking it into a donut on a mass production scale takes a certain amount of power.

Computer servers are going to consume *more* electricity, not less, as time goes on, unless there are radical advancements in quantum computing technology. But I'm building systems right now and I know the energy density of these machines is prodigious and is only going to get moreso in the near future.

Recycling materials in bulk is an extraordinarily energy-intensive process -- there's no way around it! It's a matter of the chemistry. The laws of physics dictate that it takes a certain amount of energy to convert bauxite into aluminum. It takes a certain amount of heat to melt steel back into a puddle. If you want to have lighter automobiles and lighter door frames and lighter lighters, you have to take the bauxite and separate the oxide from the aluminum. Even Alcoa will tell you that.

I don't doubt that we're going to see great advances in information technology, in terms of processors. So far, however, the trend has been to make those computers *more* energy consuming, not less. And you still have to supply the photons to people's eyes! You still have to build an input device they can work with! And when they get tired of looking at that, you have to give them a means where they can get out in the real world, blow the snow off of their driveway (which takes a lot of energy, trust me!) and get in some kind of vehicle to travel down to the local Dunkin Donuts and have a chocolate eclair. And then, when they get back home, throw the wrapper away and have it recycled back into a sanitary form that can be used again.

And what if they get some pebbles in the car they're driving and have to wash it? They're going to need clean water, they're going to need something to propel the water, they're going to need a vacuum cleaner to suck up the junk from the floor -- and an electric motor can't get much more efficient at a price point most people can afford.

I know, you're on the verge here of a nanotechnology discussion. That, my friend, is for another thread...

I'll sum it up like this for now: as a carbon-based lifeform with (hopefully) another 60 years to go here on this planet, I know that most of the things that I see around me have been made possible by the vast force multiplication made possible by industrialization and engineering. Behind all of that advancement has been (relatively) inexpensive, reliable power. Everything I do -- from driving my car to McDonald's to get a Quarter Pounder to talking with you right now, has been made possible because we've made power cheaper, and available in more forms, at greater efficiencies, and with less waste. With so many billions of people in the world who aspire to a standard of living approaching mine, I think the last thing I should be telling them is: "go back to windmills."

More later...

And in saying what I've said, I don't want to slight the computer industry in this country and in the rest of the world: because it has achieved things that most people in 1970 would have considered to be miracles.

My father owned several mainframe computers and I helped on several occasions to run the power systems for them through conduit and down to the computer rooms themselves. Even the lowly Celeron machine that I'm currently using for my workstation is orders of magnitude more powerful (in terms of raw computing power) than the 370-138 I once helped my father install. That machine required a 220V, 500A *three phase* power supply and had a whopping ~2 gigabytes of disk space that took up most of a room. The air conditioning ducts alone took us almost a week to put in place, and we needed several tons of AC in the summer to keep the machine running.

In the late 1980's, it became clear that running those machines was more expensive than it was worth. We threw them away and they were melted down and scavenged for good parts and the gold in the interconnects, and all of the miles of wire inside them were melted back down.

The "digital divide" is a ridiculous Democrat meme. That machine, which probably was 1/20th as powerful as the cheapo Celeron sitting on my desk right now, cost more than a million dollars. The tech. companies of the world are really heroes -- they have brought more computing power to more people at lower cost than anyone could have predicted back in 1970. It is a "side effect" of their enormous success that we're seeing so many "ordinary" people around the world using computers in their daily lives. My Dad worked for IBM and when he gets nostalgic and lapses into storytelling mode it still spins his head around.

I enjoyed reading them.

And in point of fact, the computer you are using to write that post is fundamentally based on the architecture that John von Neumann decided to build at the IAS in Princeton. The Wikipedia article doesn't do justice to the fact that the "von Neumann" architecture was basically the blueprint for everything most people are using today.

He was a genius of the highest order. We still have people like that at Princeton and elsewhere, but we need to stop this baloney about not giving them the funds to make their dreams reality.

as a tool and dye maker after WWII. I have memories of him bringing me there as a child and seeing the computers that took up entire rooms and the business envelope sized pieces of cardboard with tiny square holes punched out.

We used to have a room full of "IBM cards" (actually, the technical term is "Hollerith cards") in a set of cabinets with tabs, just like a file cabinet.

I used to help feed them into our IBM 2540, which was still an invaluable machine even in the late 70's, early 80's if you were running a System 370 with a lot of legacy programs.

There are very few machines in this world that if you look at the insides of them inspire that much awe in terms of the sensitivity of the mechanical engineering involved to make them work.

They were very funny machines in a sense, even though they weighed a ton and consumed a lot of power and made a lot of noise. The term: "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate" is an artifact of the need to feed Hollerith cards through machines at a high rate of speed. Little bends in the cards would result in spectacular jams and shredding. We had at least a dozen IBM keypunches, also. When the machine jammed, it was a disaster unless you had a "backup medium" in the form of other sets of punched cards or (wonder of wonders) a tape image of the program...

But that's for a computer nostalgia thread...

...in discussion with a guy who won't examine his assumptions. Therefore I'll leave you with your own thoughts, my friend.

You might keep in mind as you work from projections of current trends, that the only thing known to be 100% predictable in human affairs is discontinuous change that invalidates all prior assumptions.

When you think about it.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I don't have "assumptions" I have facts. And the facts are that in order for the billions of people on this planet to have a standard of living that approaches what you can buy down at Home Depot and Best Buy without making the United States into a third world country, we're going to need a lot more energy on a global scale, at much lower environmental cost.

The environmentalists and the AGW people are telling us to accept *less* energy at *higher* costs through taxes. It is *not* going to work.

Those aren't "assumptions" -- those are basic facts of life.

I thought I was going to get kicked off of RedState a year ago for talking about efficiency. The truth is that the United States could reduce its energy consumption by probably 20% within 5 years just by bringing the buildings in our large cities up to code in terms of their windows and HVAC equipment.

I love efficient things: I get a little chill up my spine every time I fire my air rifle and realize that it's getting a lot of efficiency out of the energy it takes me to cock the mechanism and fire the pellet with air pressure alone -- enough air pressure to punch through sheets of glass and all kinds of other things.

I'm a big efficiency maven, in fact. When I lived in Chicago I used to put 3M plastic around all my big windows in the winter.

But even if we're as efficient as we can be, the world is going to need *much* more power in the next 100 years. Clean power. Low-cost power. Available power, that can be managed intelligently. Central power-station power. Local plug ins for electric cars that you can put on your debit card and use to transfer a few hundreds of kilowatt hours worth of electricity into your vehicle in a few minutes.

And no efficiency that we have is ever going to overcome the basic problems of heating spaces, lighting spaces, recycling things we use, producing them, packaging them, and moving them around. You cannot get around those problems with efficiency alone.

If you want to live in a really efficient world, maybe you've heard of R. Buckminster Fuller and Old Man's River City project.

All of these "efficiency" ideas are half a century old. The difference is now that AlGore has the public panicked sufficiently, his big idea is to tax us all into doing things that aren't as intellegent as they were.

That there is not large investment in fusion research is that there has been a lot of research done in the area and not once has a controlled fusion reaction produced more usable energy than it took to create and sustain it. That isn't to say it can't be done, but scientists have been hammering away at that nut for a while and haven't cracked it. We've figured out how to make uncontrolled fusion reactions work - that would be some of the new nuclear bombs - and they give off a whole lot more energy than those firecrackers we used in WWII, but when we try to control fusion it gets a lot more difficult. The fusion reaction everyone is most familiar with (sol - our wonderful sun) isn't even controlled - which is why it's such a good thing that we are 93 million miles away from it.

If you have some good ideas for how to control a fusion reaction and get more power out of it than you put in I'm sure scientists would love to hear them...unfortunately, right now fusion is more of a curiosity field than one that promises returns on any investment in it.

"I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves."
Ronald Reagan

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
Ronald Reagan

Tell that to the people at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Tell them that they're working on a pipedream, that can't work. We've all heard (I know because I've heard for more than 30 years now, which roughly corresponds to the amount of time that the United States hasn't built a new *fission* reactor, either) that it's not true.

Where's the money?

But let's dream, for a second. I give you a graph. No, scratch that, I'll give you the videotape, Warner Wolf. In my opinion, anybody with half a brain should be promoting this research at Manhattan-Project levels:

Fueling the Future

It's waiting for a project plan for the first production-scale fusion plant. Until someone figures out how to make one, there won't be any investment except for funding the science.

The Manhattan Project was an exercise in engineering more than science (apart from pinning down the critical masses). Everyone more or less knew the gun-based uranium device would work.

That's not true yet for production-scale fusion power. Adding more money doesn't solve the problem because money doesn't help people think faster. And besides, the Chinese are graduating five times as many science and engineering PhDs as we are. Let them figure it out.

Who are you, Bill Richardson?

n/t

I think that Bill Richardson during his tenure in the Clinton Administration as Secretary of Energy did more to discourage the development of fusion (and fission) power in this country and allow the Chinese, the French and other powers in the world to take the lead than anyone else in history. It's a shameful record. He deliberately put the brakes on the National Ignition Facility and he is one of the people who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the lead that other countries now have over the United States in terms of development of these technologies.

I look at the time that Richardson was Secretary of Energy and all that I can think of is how badly that man worked to hobble the United States in favor of our erstwhile friends or our outright enemies. And now he's running for President!

...politican. Back off that, now.

I've been nice to you because it's a Saturday. But your whole disquisition on nuclear fusion and the energetics of aluminum production is a threadjack. Write your own diary on the subject.

Letting other countries take the lead: they're also taking the risk. What are they going to do, keep us from using any of their power once they figure it out?

China: they're going to build a few thousand coal-fired plants in the next few decades. If they don't think they can figure out fusion, what makes you think anyone else can?

Faith is a very fine thing. And that's what you're pinning your hopes for fusion power on. I'll be thrilled if you're right. If you're wrong, I'll have long since forgotten all about you. In neither case will I be investing in it.

China: they're going to build a few thousand coal-fired plants in the next few decades. If they don't think they can figure out fusion, what makes you think anyone else can?

China is not building coal power plants because they can't figure out fusion. They're building coal power plants because they have a lot of coal, and a lot of population to electrify. That's why they are one of the largest consumers in the world of copper right now (I think they're second, last time I checked.)

Coal is easy for the Chinese -- it's all over the place there. In provincial towns in China people are still burning raw coal to heat their homes. It has nothing to do with their "ability" to produce a fusion reactor, but it has much more to do with the fact that they are exempt from Kyoto (and will be exempt from any future carbon trade scheme -- because their leaders will reject it) and much more to do with the fact that you can get Chinese coal miners to die in the thousands for almost no money and without any international scrutiny. China is a disaster zone for coal miners -- thousands of them die every year, and it's only the big disasters that we hear about. Nevertheless, they're pushing that turn-of-the-century technology forward at full speed for one reason:

Life is CHEAP in China. There is no such thing as a lawsuit against the government. The Chinese government pretends that its miners have to have modern equipment, but who enforces it? Approximately nobody, because the Chinese don't want it to be enforced.

They have almost 2 billion people, more than 1.5 billion of them are poor, and they can afford to work them all to death if they'd like. That's not going to stop any time soon.

C'mon blackhedd, you know these things, don't you?

Just a cultural/governmental comment. The Chinese haven't been horribly great at coming up with new things in quite awhile. They have been very good at perfecting what others have invented.

This is not a slam on the chinese as a people just that their lack of intellectual property protection makes inventing undesirable.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I will grant you its a prodigy. The largest laser array ever conceived or attempted but its purpose is in no way to produce power tech. The only reason for its existence is to verify nuclear weapon designs while staying within the bounds of the testban treaties.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

It's waiting for a project plan for the first production-scale fusion plant.

It's ITER. And under the undaunted leadership of Bill Richardson, and the flatfooted lack of leadership of this administration, we've let the French take the lead. We might have won the Tour de France, and Lance Armstrong is a nice guy, but let's face it -- we've blown it on the big picture.

The whole Tokomak program has been talking big and delivering little for nearly 60 years.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I just can't believe what I'm hearing in this thread. I thought I was a pessimistic person but I've never encountered anything like this before. You're telling me that the only reason we've spent billions of dollars on NIF is to validate nuclear weapons designs -- which we already do in hydrocode with supercomputers, no lasers required. You might as well be a spokesperson for the NRDC or the UCS.

I don't get it! What is it with you guys tonight? What is this fundamental aversion to putting a lot more money into fusion research?

If you're just trying to tick me off, just say it out the outset. Or better yet, just email me and say:

"Hey, Kowalski: why don't you try to get a few people from NIF and PPPL to give an interview to RedState or at least answer some questions?"

You don't have to try to disparage the underfunded science with cynical remarks. Tom Edison would never have gotten anywhere with people like this telling him he was wrong, remember? How long did it take him to find a filament good enough for the incandescent lightbulb?

Furthermore, I think back to the first transatlantic telegraph cables. My God, those men on those ships running all that cable out into the briny deep and braving the storms across the ocean must have thought it was the stupidest thing in the world to try -- it couldn't possibly work! All those miles across the lonely ocean, putting thousands of miles of cable across the bottom that nobody knew how deep it was. What a bunch of losers!

I don't even think Fusion is that much of a leap, frankly. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on absolute garbage and you guys are telling me that you really aren't willing to divert a few billion away from the garbage into something that will really change the world.

Maybe some of Soros' investors and fund managers are right to move to Asia. Maybe the real spirit of the United States now is summed up by incompetence, greed, decadence and decline.

I used to be a Fusion believer but its been going on 40 years now. Simply put there are better alternatives that are here already.

Nuclear is the way to go for baseline power.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Kowalski I have been hearing the siren song of fusion power since 70. Back then it was ten to fifteen years away. Now its twenty to 40 years away. Thats progress.

If I want energy problems solved there are three techs here and ready right now. Conventional nuke, Thorium power amplifier reactor, and breeder reactor. Thats where the money needs to go and soon.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I've always been a supporter of nuclear power in this country. I'm one of the people that you could get out in public to talk about why we should open Yucca Mountain and get back to doing what we can now only *sell* in theoretical form and blueprints to the rest of the world.

We have our priorities so badly screwed up, however, that instead we're going to TAX people and put a CAP on CARBON and hurt our OWN ECONOMY because of Al Gore.

And with that I'm done for tonight. I don't know whether anyone has understood a word I've written here on RedState regarding energy over the past couple of years. It's frustrating.

You're talking as though fission and fusion are mutually-exclusive technologies: they're not! They have almost nothing to do with each other except that they both share the word "nuclear" and derive their energy from the core of the atom instead of a rearrangement of the electrons in its outer shell.

That's why the French are building the first ITER prototype while also getting 80% of their electricity from nuclear power plants, which they are not going to retire any time soon. But they will be the first to develop fusion power because everyone in this country is dragging their feet or bound up in politics over the word "nuclear". It's a national shame.

And we have till 2050 before it is even projected to produce commercializable results.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

In a very marginal sense of the word. We've got a few people who consult with the people who are building it.

I suggest that RedState contact John H. Marburger III, and ask him for an interview here. He has a model of a Tokamak magnet in his office and I'm sure he's just dying to tell us all why the United States hasn't supported this research effectively.

It would be the best interview RedState ever conducted, and I throw it down as a challenge to our editors and directors.

They can get Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, etc., etc. to appear here: maybe they could get Marburger III in the room and ask a few candid questions.

When you can light a candle. Ask him.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

.

Would allow us to produce superdense states in uranium and plutonium. It opens up new realms of condensed matter and high pressure physics. Its not a trivial thing. The hydrocode is just a model it needs to be checked.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

I'm not trying to claim that some of the results from NIF won't be valuable to people who want to understand the physics in the areas you're talking about.

BUT SO WHAT?

If as a byproduct of producing inertial confinement fusion it also gives us all kinds of new data on nuclear weapons design, is that a BAD thing? I don't personally think so. I think that's great.

http://www.llnl.gov/nif/project/missions.html

If you notice their first mission is stockpile stewardship. Then its energy research.

I think they even laugh at the energy research. There is no way to make inertial confinement a continuous production tech. Their lasers have lifetimes measured in tens of thousands of shots and cycle times measured in shots per day.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

More than three years ago. I know that NIF works on stockpile stewardship. And I ask again: SO WHAT? That's what Wen Ho Lee was working on with the ASCI supercomputer when Bill Richardson decided he was going to be the scapegoat. Ever since Wen Ho Lee, things have been a disaster -- and all of that was orchestrated by BILL RICHARDSON to DISCREDIT the program. Wake up.

ICF is not viable as an energy production technology heres why.

1. The lasers need their lifetimes increased by 4-6 orders of magnitude.
2. Their fire rate needs to be increased by 4 orders of magnitude.
3. With both the above the lasers need to be made cheaper, much cheaper.

If you want to see ICF, invest in laser research.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

If you want to see ICF, invest in laser research.

How is that different from what I have been saying all along in this thread?

Achieving ignition isn't laser research. It will be an endpoint accomplishment until practical laser tech is there to move it forward.

You could throw all the money you want into into the program and all you would get is how to fine tune a power plant without the means to actually build one.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

If as one of the byproducts of furthering inertial confinement fusion research the NIF teaches an entire generation of engineers and theoreticians in the areas of high-energy lasers, uniform crystal growth, large scale power supplies, and the manufacturing techniques needed to produce those things cheaply.

I would be very happy (and not surprised at all) if the Airborne Laser is using technology that was pioneered at NIF to focus its beams. Those are GOOD things, man.

We should be pumping another $50 billion a year into the place.

But yes for the purposes of training and employing engineers its a great thing.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

..*

I'll say one other thing here: if this year's Atlantic hurricane season is average or above average, we will see binding legislation enacted by Congress before 2009. So everybody had better hope that we have a repeat of last year and the upper-atomospheric conditions that stopped the hurricanes from building before they reached the U.S. Even an "average" hurricane season is going to be fresh meat for the global warming crowd, and my suspicion is that this year's season will be average or above average.

Just asking. Seriously.

Weather has never been predictable. One of my personal heroes, John von Neumann, once believed that with the advent of powerful electronic computers (the primary architecture of which he helped to invent and built the first example of in the basement of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton) it would be possible to run the equations fast enough to predict the weather at an arbitrary date in the future. He also believed that we could change the climate by seeding the polar ice caps with dye to affect the albedo and *warm* the climate, which he believed would be beneficial.

It was one of Johnny's only true mistakes. Even with the most powerful supercomputers on earth, and all of the most recent data-collection equipment we have, the weather is still unpredictable beyond about 7 days or so.

However, this is not the argument that the AGW people are using. They make a distinction between "weather" and "climate" and assert that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources will gradually warm the planet -- but with UNPREDICTABLE local effects.

This is why their movement is so dangerous -- it's irrefutable. On the one hand it posits that we're definitely going to die at some point in the future because of out-of-control greenhouse effects, and on the other hand it has a built-in escape hatch if the local, near-term effects don't always fit that general pattern. In other words, even locally beneficial effects are construed as "evidence" that their theory is correct.

That's why all of these people have jumped off the deep end and are now only arguing about what new laws to pass.

It's a very bad virus of the mind.

The other main reason that they've "jumped off the deep end" is because many of them are Socialists (especially in Europe, where they are aristocratic Socialists) who want two things: money, and power. The United States' economy is so strong that it makes the sclerotic Socialist economies of European Socialists look bad, with their rampant unemployment and inability to grow. The only way to "make the playing field level" is to drag the United States down with them.

I have another idea about where the money from the tax scheme that the Times talks about is going to go, however: it's going to be used for entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, instead of reforming those programs.

So basically they are going to work to convert the United States into a Socialist economy like Denmark's or France's. But we're going to have a harder time, and it's going to be even more painful for us, because France already gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear reactors, while the United States hasn't built one in more than 30 years.

I think you've just stumbled upon the difference between climate and weather.

Climate is what fits the models predictions; Weather is what doesn't.

:)

the computers can't even model climate. Climate models, for example, have sea level rising 20 feet by 2050 according to Gore's favorites, and 20 inches according to one being heavily touted by the UN right now.

Infusing current state-of-the-art climate models with data from ten years ago and seeing how closely the results match where we actually are today show that the weather prediction models are far more accurate than the climate predictors. The models don't even come close. The planet is WAY too dynamic for accurate modeling given the current state of knowledge.

If someone had a model that could predict accurately where we are today.... starting from known conditions ten years ago.... I'd be more inclined to view it less skeptically.

Of course, given that the planet operates on a very complex, active feedback systems (e.g., if it gets too warm, that evaporates more water which forms more clouds which reflects more solar energy back into spoace, which causes cooling until it gets too cold, where upon there is less evaporation, fewer clouds, more energy absorbed causeing a heating cycle, etc, etc, etc),if you could model it accurately, it would show a tendency toward cyclic behavior, NOT taking off in one direction until we reached destruction. You could say that man's input of GHGs could artificially modify those cycles, but we know we've had much higher densities of CO2 in the past without it destroying the cyclic nature of the feedback mechanisms.

When they can explain to me why cyclic climate variation on Mars (which seems to approximate cyclic climate variation on Earth) is a natural phenomenon, but on Earth it's anthropogenic, I'll give it due consideration.

The highwayman's mantra thoughout history has been, "Your money or your life." This is just the latest iteration of that same theme.

You have also drunk the kool-aid.

"I don't believe in a government that protects us from ourselves."
Ronald Reagan

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."
Ronald Reagan

Did my remarks sound remotely like someone who is buying into the GW "crisis"?

to reduce it's greenhouse emitions by converting the majority of its coal-fired power plants to North Sea natural gas a few years back. That's why they are selling carbon credits instead of buying them right now.

I want to sell some too. I haven't fired up my fireplace for over ten years. I ought to be able to get some credits to sell out of that!

http://www.pr-inside.com/exelon-nuclear-receives-early-site-permit-r6738...

Exelon Corp just received a site permit for a new plant.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

there was an article in Scientific American which described new nuclear plant designs which would actually be powered by the dangerous kinds of nuclear fuel that we are looking for places to store and turn it into a more benign substance that would be unsuitable for nuclear weapons. I no longer have that magazine laying around (or I would cite the issue myself), but does anyone have a stack of them laying around who could point to the issue? After reading that, I have wondered why nothing has been heard about using that technology. If I remember correctly, these plants would produce power safely with the side benefit of reducing the world's stockpile of fuel for nuclear bombs.

I seem to remember reading in Scientific American about the pebble bed reactor design, although it would have been several years ago. I cencelled my subscription after one too many 'social science' articles. Anyway the pebble bed reactor design seems like it is much safer than light water, but is yet to be proven in production due to protests from the anti-nuke crowd. See the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

I'm thinking about writing a piece on the subprime thing, though. If you write a diary on it, I'll read it.

Just watch the video and do some research and think about it a little while. I don't need to argue that fusion (either in its inertial confinement or plasma guises) is the best power source we can build.

Ethanol is not an "energy independence" fuel option -- it's another high-priced boondoggle, which takes more energy to create than it generates. It's chemical energy, this time grown on American soil and taxpayer-subsidized. Carbon emissions are a problem because people think they are, and you're not going to change that, in my view.

But I think you should watch the video in any case and do a little thinking.

If you'd bothered to read my post in this thread, you'd stop mischaracterizing what I've said and realize that I most certainly have not said this:

I know you're sure it's just a matter of time, and that there are no architectural or physical barriers to this idea. Come back when you can prove it.

Of course there are "architectural and physical barriers" and that is precisely why I've stated repeatedly, at great length, and with no shortage of emphasis, that instead of funding this research at a trickle, barely equivalent to the amount of money that the Department of Health and Human Services spends in 12 hours, we should be working much more aggressively.

I don't watch promotional videos for ideas I'm not really interested in. Life is just too short.

We may have a semantic difference on the meaning of "barrier." To me, an architectural barrier is insurmountable, either absolutely or at a reasonable cost. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're using the term to mean an "obstacle" rather than a barrier, something that can be overcome with enough effort.

Even so, my criticism stands. Controlled fusion is a theory, not a technology. No one will be more thrilled than me if it can be turned into something practical. But I won't be interested until then.

You suggested putting $25 billion dollars a year into this. From that remark alone, I infer that you know not the first thing about technology investing. Even if I'm wrong about that, allow me to tell you out of long experience that you'll get nowhere with that.

My suggestion for you is to stop trying to convince us that vastly more public money is needed for fusion research. There is a handful of people that are very interested in future technologies, that might be persuaded to get into this. Paul Allen and Richard Branson come to mind. Someone upthread mentioned Soros. He may be a possibility, but I don't know him or what he's into these days.

Ethanol: you don't have to like it, but it has attracted a vast amount of investment money. We'll be burning a huge amount of American-produced ethanol in coming decades, whether or not it makes economic, energetic, or environmental sense. That's because it makes political sense. It is what it is.

You are looking at this as a purely business decision. The government enjoys advantages that ordinary investors don't and has obligations that corporate boards don't.

The argument is that a fusion power end run would be a technology driver with numerous side benefits. I don't necessarily agree with this. What I have seen is fusion has been more of a technology and investment sink with little in the way of spinoff. But if you can make a case that there will be substantial spinoffs and secondary industrial development its no longer a pure ROI calculation that a power company would make.

The spaceprogram had a lousy direct return on investment but a tremendous return for our society. (Space travel effectively got here 70 years before it should have) A tremendous prodigy but mostly justified by the secondary benefits. Unfortunately nobody has been making certain that continued investment in NASA has kept up the return.

The atomic bomb program is another such program. From it we got nuclear power, artificial isotopes, cancer treatments, new ways of exploring the world.

Mark me I am not saying your conclusion is wrong. Just that the method of making the calculation is inappropriate to the situation.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

You're agreed that nuclear fusion make no sense as an investment. But you're saying that pure research in nuclear fusion makes sense as public policy.

Two comments. First, we've gone far afield from global warming now. As a practical matter fusion can't affect any of the dynamics in GW, because fusion itself is not a practical matter.

Second, going about convincing people to fund a research project for the hoped-for policy benefits isn't my bailiwick. I'm having trouble understanding how to get Nancy Pelosi on board with it. She can buy a whole lot more votes, both in Congress and at the ballot box, with $25 billion a year by parcelling it out into traditional pork, than by throwing huge gobs of it at Princeton, Rochester, Brookhaven, Fermilab, and Livermore.

In terms of doing the right thing for America and for the world: Congress is the wrong place to go looking for that. Sorry.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of opposing a new technology, when my whole career has been about funding and developing new technologies. The problem with fusion is simply that it's not ready for prime time. We were all quite sure we could make a fission weapon when the Manhattan Project was greenlighted. Ditto with landing on the moon when Apollo was approved. We're not there yet with fusion, and I'm not ready to accept that more money will automatically solve the problem.

I am quite negative on the current fusion program in general.

I am just saying that the traditional models of return on investment don't hold for government research.

Calculating a strict ROI on developing a product or service isn't a correct methodology. The government derives benefit from all the ancillary businesses and societal benefits that are not captured on a corporations balance sheet.

Take for instance electrification. The government funds the TVA at little better than breakeven but they capture revenue and benefit from the industrialization and commerce it generates. A power company can't consider that the government can.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

...all the way to the point that the government creates our current levels of economic activity because they create the (fictional) money that underlies it. (By the way, that statement isn't nearly as outlandish as it seems, and it may in fact be more true than not true.)

But what does this have to do with either global warming or nuclear fusion?

On the money argument of course its true. A stable strong currency is vital to any nations prosperity.

Kowalski made the argument that we should have a crash program to create commercial fusion. You made the argument that we shouldn't because it couldn't be justified in terms of a traditional business investment.

You have a correct conclusion but a wrong argument. The government is inherently not a traditional business. If you did strict bottom line accounting we wouldn't have a military or much else.

Kowalski has a potentially correct argument but is looking at what is the wrong solution. ITER isn't expected to achieve experimental success till 2050. This would mean you probably wouldn't see adoption till the 2060's. Further magnetic confinement in a tokomak may very well be a dead end. So a crash program isn't going to do much and may be a complete waste.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777