[HermannH]

benf wrote: … I’ve read a DOE document that refers to a classified safe substitute…

Besides X-Ray transparency, Be has a number of other physical characteristic that make it an ‘ideal aerospace material’, according to Wikipedia.
My guess is that ‘substitute’ refers to other uses, like brakes for military aircraft.

[HermannH]

Henning wrote: You could maybe use just boron, but this adds inefficiency and shortens the lifetime of the parts involved. But if the beryllium is handled in a cleanroom, or like radioactive material is handled, that should not be a big issue in my opinion. The problem arises if you handle beryllium like any other nontoxic metal.

That’s right, if you handle beryllium very carefully, most problems can be avoided. But, of course, Murphy’s Law applies. People will be careless and accidents will happen. Both, at the factories that manufacture the Beryllium parts and at the generation sites.
That’s another reason why you won’t be hooking up a FF generator in your garage anytime soon.

Just because FF, if we can make it work, is far superior to any other energy source we know about it doesn’t mean it is exempt from any drawbacks. In balance there is no doubt that the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, especially when compared with the alternatives.

[HermannH]

Beryllium has a very important property: it is transparent to X-Rays. This property derives from the fact that it has a very low atomic number. It is the fourth element in the periodic table. The only ones before it are Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium. None of them are any good as electrode material.
Unfortunately, there is no classified element or compound with similar properties.

Remember, half the energy is generated in the form of X-Rays. Any material that absorbs X-Rays will convert them into heat.
So you have two problems:
1. You have lost X-Rays that you need to generate electricity.
2. More importantly, you need to cool the material. In fact, the amount of cooling that you can provide in such a small space may be the limiting factor as to how many ‘shots’ you can have per second. The amount of power that you can generate is proportional to the shot rate.

[HermannH]

Henning wrote: The important mineral would be beryllium for the focus and the onion — price and production on this PDF. That’s currently about 200000 USD per ton, with a current production of just 100 tons per year.

Unfortunately, Beryllium also is nasty stuff : Beryllium poisoning

[HermannH]

vansig wrote:

Proposing to install more than 10 times the current capacity every year makes us look a bit out of touch

only just a few high-profile installs will change the demand profile quite a bit. eg: a large container ship requires ~60 MW to run. if that’s fusion instead of crude oil, then it’s carbon footprint drops to nothing. voila.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I think it is a fair assumption that globally we consume more than 10% of our energy in the form of electricity. So if you install 10 times the current capacity in form of FF reactors these reactors would be able to power EVERYTHING that needs energy today. That is you would have enough capacity to power all ships, trains, cars, factories, heat all houses, etc.; either through direct hydro lines or batteries that are charged by FF devices. No oil needed, nor coal, conventional nuclear, wind, bio-fuels, solar cells, or hydroelectric dams. This is a good thing!

Of course it will take a while to convert everything to electricity. Some devices will not be able to run on electricity for quite some time: planes, steel smelters, tanks, tractors, transport trucks, etc. My guess is that it will take more than 10 years to achieve 90% conversion. And, given that the price of oil and coal will drop, some sectors will convert much more slowly.

The proposal asks for installing that much capacity EVERY YEAR. As I mentioned before there are some applications that can soak up a huge amount of electricity; like desalination. Beyond that, however, you need to build new devices to actually use that energy.

The global economy would have to increase tremendously to consume that energy. In 10 years you would need 10 times as many cars, houses, appliances, factories and batteries to consume all that electricity, and probably more people as well.

One might say this is a good thing. But guess what, all these cars, houses, appliances, factories and batteries need raw materials for building them, they need land, they cause pollution.

Today one of the most limited resources is energy, in the form of oil in particular. Some people are convinced that global oil production will peak during the next decade and will drop significantly thereafter. There is more coal, but even that is limited and the consequences for global warming might make it impossible to use that coal.

Having unlimited, cheap and clean energy will usher in a global economic boom. But eventually other resources will be the limiting factor and bring that boom to an end. And then we may be in a situation where the entire world population is accustomed to a lifestyle that is entirely unsustainable. Just like today we have a situation where the populations in the industrialized nations have a consumption pattern that is not sustainable.

So I am all for replacing all current energy production with FF energy. I am also for significantly increasing the energy consumption and wealth of third world countries. But we should not fall into the trap of thinking that FF will solve all problems and, once we have it, everlasting prosperity is ensured.

[HermannH]

Proposing to install more than 10 times the current capacity every year makes us look a bit out of touch.

I can see myself using three times as much electricity by getting an electric car and using electric heating instead of gas. I could double that again by installing a bunch of gadgets like a 100 inch plasma TV (and a second air conditioner). But I can’t see myself using 100 times as much 10 years down the road.

I agree that water desalination could possibly be scaled up to a level that dwarfs all other uses of electricity. If global warming does turn out to be as dangerous as we think it is we also may end up deploying a huge grid of CO2 scrubbers powered by FF.

If FF does work it will usher in a ‘golden’ area for mankind. Having a source of unlimited clean energy is a major advance in human development. Many problems can be solved if you have cheap energy. There will be years, perhaps decades, of substantial economic growth worldwide. But don’t be fooled! Unlimited cheap and clean energy alone is not enough for sustainable development. There are other resources that already are in short supply and that will be depleted even faster when the world enters a prolonged period of substantial economic growth.

Henry Ford helped set in motion a century of almost uninterrupted exponential growth. However, this may end up being a Faustian bargain. Our economic system is such that we depend on continued GDP growth. We are addicted to it! If that growth comes to a halt for a few years our economies and societies will collapse. However, anybody who deals with real physical systems (i.e. non-economists) will tell you that exponential growth cannot continue forever. If nothing else stops it, eventually you will run out of atoms in the universe. If you learned the lesson of the chessboard and the rice grains you will realize that this ‘eventually’ is often sooner than one thinks.

Don’t get me wrong, I want FF to succeed. But FF may simply trigger the mother of all bubbles if we don’t mange to direct its benefits towards a more sustainable and just world economy.

[HermannH]

I believe the numbers got a bit inflated; actually quite a bit.

According to this the total electricity consumption in 2005 was, on average, 297W per person on the planet.
Multiply this by the world’s population and you have a total consumption of 1.9TW.

One FF unit produces 5MW, so you need a total of 384,000 units to supply the current world demand.
Of course demand is not constant but varies during the day/year so your peak capacity needs to be quite a bit higher, say about 3 times as high. This gives you 1.2 million units.
Further assume that electricity consumption will likely quadruple in the next 10 years: 5 million units.
So for the next ten years we need to build on average 500,000 units. And that rate would probably be about what is needed thereafter to keep up with rapidly increasing demand and replacement of old units.

Now some parts (electrodes) may wear out rather quickly and may need to be replaced/refurbished several times a year. For these parts you could end up with 20 million per year.

[HermannH]

Unfortunately I can’t give you a detailed answer, I am heading out of town for a few days.

In the meantime I invite you to ponder the fact that the paper in question hasn’t garnered more attention.

It was published a year ago and has been available in manuscript form for much longer. The lengthy discussion thread (apparently over 1000 messages) happened 2 years ago. So the paper wasn’t really born into obscurity. Yet your link was the first time I heard of it. Now why would thousands of lobbyists fight it out in Copenhagen without one of them bringing up the ‘proven fact’ that the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist.

Given the heated debate about AGW around the globe this should be a news story that can hold its own against Micheal Jackson and Tiger Woods.

Sure, Brian, there is an ‘evil conspiracy’ going on. But no one bringing up the topic? That’s a conspiracy that even humbles the mafia, perpetrated to a large degree by a bunch of climatologists.

BTW, you still didn’t respond to my accusation that you blatantly misrepresented the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory position on AGW.

And there is something else you need to do: If you are still convinced that the greenhouse gas effect does not exist you should remove the ‘MAXIMIZE CH4’ part from your signature.

[HermannH]

Brian H wrote: The physics underlying the CO2-temp connection is not just weak, it’s missing. Read or re-read http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4 (Falsification of Physics Greenhouse Effect)

I did just that, well almost. I read this annotated version (sorry, German only and possibly slow link).

Needless to say the author finds many faults with the paper; his annotations to the original are in blue. I will quote just one short piece here that deals with the apparent paradox that an atmosphere that is far colder than earth’s surface somehow manages to heat the surface. Gerlich and Tscheuschner claim that this is equivalent to a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. I chose this example because the arguments can be easily understood by a layman.

Gerlich and Tscheuschner (3.9.3 A paradox):

The renowned German climatologist Rahmstorf has claimed that the greenhouse effect does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics [141]:

“Some `sceptics’ state that the greenhouse effect cannot work since (according to the second law of thermodynamics) no radiative energy can be transferred from a colder body (the atmosphere) to a warmer one (the surface). However, the second law is not violated by the greenhouse effect, of course, since, during the radiative exchange, in both directions the net energy flows from the warmth to the cold.”

Rahmstorf’s reference to the second law of thermodynamics is plainly wrong. The second law is a statement about heat, not about energy. Furthermore the author introduces an obscure notion of “net energy flow”. The relevant quantity is the “net heat flow”, which, of course, is the sum of the upward and the downward heat flow within a fixed system, here the atmospheric system. It is inadmissible to apply the second law for the upward and downward heat separately redefining the thermodynamic system on the fly.

Here is Ebel’s reply as translated by me:

The second law of thermodynamics is not redefined in Rahmstorf’s quote. In equation (70) the emission of a body is handled correctly, that is implicitly independent of the surroundings. The surroundings can be warmer. Consider the case of a cooler sphere inside a hollow sphere that is hotter. Where do its emissions go? Why is it that the outside sphere cools down faster if the interior sphere is colder? How does the outside sphere know when to stop heating the inside sphere; once equilibrium is reached? The explanation is simple if one takes into account that the inside sphere emits radiation as well: When it is very cold it emits almost nothing so the emissions from the outside hollow sphere encounter almost no compensation the other way. With rising temperature the inside sphere emits more strongly until, when temperature equilibrium is reached, as much power is emitted by the inside sphere as it receives from the outside hollow sphere. Prevost knew this already 200 years ago. If you have heat radiations in opposite directions the difference is the net heat transfer.

If you want to see the Gerlich and Tscheuschner paper debunked in English have a look at this page.
Or a much shorter piece here.
There is also a formal proof that the greenhouse effect exits, available here.

So Brian, I hope you opened your champagne bottle on New Year’s and didn’t waste it on this paper.

BTW, you still didn’t respond to my accusation that you blatantly misrepresented the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory position on AGW.

And there is something else you need to do: If you are still convinced that the greenhouse gas effect does not exist you should remove the ‘MAXIMIZE CH4’ part from your signature.

[HermannH]

Brian H wrote:
Speaking of “ellipsis”, note the omitted CO2 readings in Figure 1 for most of the 19th Century. These were done with the same technique used today, and would have no more than 1% lower accuracy than the best current technology.

The figure you refer to shows measurements between 250 and 550 ppm in a span of a few years.
If you look at modern measurements you will find that average CO2 is increasing very smoothly at a rate of about 15 ppm per decade. Superimposed on that steady rise is an annual cycle with an amplitude of about 5 ppm: the northern hemisphere has more vegetation so in the summer more CO2 is absorbed and in the winter more is released. If you zoom in closer you will probably detect a diurnal cycle: plants absorb CO2 only during the day while CO2 goes back up at night. I would expect that the diurnal cycle is much more erratic than the annual cycle and depends on many local factors. It probably has an even larger amplitude than the annual cycle.

These daily and yearly cycles are well understood and they average out over longer time spans.

The article you link to disputes this and claims that the extremely smooth CO2 curves from Mauna Loa are flawed for a variety of reasons. Given the extreme care that goes into the measurements I do put a lot of faith into those curves. Also, very similar measurements have been recorded at numerous other locations around the globe. None of these curves exhibit any of the huge variations shown as ‘CO2 chemical’ in figure 2 of the article. And somehow the highly variable ‘CO2 chemical’ measurements stopped after the Keeling ‘s Mauna Loa measurements started. Why is that? Could it be that it was generally acknowledged that Charles Keeling had come up with a more reliable way of measuring CO2 and it could be shown (in each case) that measurements that contradicted Keeling’s measurements where flawed when closely examined?

I haven’t seen any report from the last 50 years that claims to have recorded CO2 variation even remotely approaching the wide swings as shown in the historic data in the article. If there was a study that contradicts the so-called Keeling Curve it would be explosive news; I haven’t seen it.

I certainly don’t want to denigrate the accomplishments of those early scientists; they made remarkable progress with the equipment and knowledge they had available. But claiming they performed delicate measurements of CO2 concentrations with 1% accuracy seems naïve, at best.

[HermannH]

Brian, your did not address the fact that you clearly misrepresented the official position (if there is such a thing) of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, a well respected institution. And you did it in a sneaky way.

Does fighting sleazeballs give you clearance to act like one yourself?

[HermannH]

Brian H wrote:
“…Lawrence Livermore Laboratories … concluded that a doubling of carbon dioxide would have little or no effect on the temperature at the surface and, if anything, might cause the surface to cool.” p.36, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161v4

AGW is not just wrong, it is an evil hoax.

Interesting use of ellipsis, Brian, you should be a tabloid newspaper editor. You seem to imply that Lawrence Livermore Laboratories investigated the issue and came to the conclusion that AGW is a hoax.

Here is a more complete quote from the paper. They referred to a 1990 movie called the “The Greenhouse Conspiracy” and state:

In the movie these four pillars were dismantled bringing the building down. The speaker states:
“In a recent paper on the effects of carbon dioxide, Professor Ellsaesser of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, a major US research establishment in California, concluded that a doubling of carbon dioxide would have little or no effect on the temperature at the surface and, if anything, might cause the surface to cool.”

The Ellsaesser paper was from 1984, apparently the last year he published in a peer reviewed journal. And, of course, he has close ties to ‘think tanks’ that are heavily funded by the oil industry.

Here is one example of a more up to date publication from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories:

Santer’s expertise is in the area of “climate fingerprinting,” which seeks to identify and separate human effects on climate from purely natural climate influences. His presentation will describe how human fingerprints have been detected in many different aspects of the climate system — not only in the temperatures of the land surface, ocean and atmosphere, but also in atmospheric moisture, rainfall and circulation patterns.

Or have a look this IPCC page and search for ‘Lawrence Livermore’: 10 different hits.

Brian, how does this square with your above (mis)representation of their position?
You delight in making forceful and provocative statements about global warming, but why should I or anyone else trust any of it?

Happy New Year!

[HermannH]

I suppose by drift tube you mean the ion beam converter. I have no idea how large an opening you need for the ions.
At any rate, both neutrons and x-rays will escape through that opening. So you need to provide some shielding. I have no idea what material you would use and what the geometry should be.
If I understand correctly, the entire room where the reactor sits is off-limits for personnel during operation and possibly for an hour or so afterward. I assume the concrete walls of the room will take care of any x-rays and neutrons that do escape the shielding.

All of this is important: In order to gain widespread acceptance and avoid overly restrictive regulations you need to demonstrate that the amount of radiation that can escape the ‘reactor room’ is comparable to, say, the radiation that gets out of a radiology lab in a hospital.

[HermannH]

The seams would be in the walls of the water containment vessel, which could be any shape. All you have to ensure is that the total travel distance through water is 1 meter or more in any direction.

Of course you could bury the thing underground and not worry about shielding it with water. That is until you have to service it. Depending on the surrounding material you may encounter some neutron activation. i.e. the neutrons have made the material radioactive.

That residual radiation should be rather small, after all it is mostly aneutronic fusion. In the end, however, I would expect that water (with a blanket of boron) provides the cleanest solution.

[HermannH]

Needing a ton (or several) of water is a problem if you want to use the device to power a truck or a plane. Otherwise, nothing could be simpler, cheaper, safer and more elegant than a blanket of water. Also, water molecules pack tightly, you would have to apply a lot of pressure to hydrogen gas to get the same density of protons that water gives you in its natural state.

The container for the water can be shipped in pieces and assembled on site. At the end you hook up your garden hose and fill it up. Well, you may have to use distilled water.

Keep in mind, even in the best case scenario there will be extensive site preparation and assembly required: You don’t just plug a 5 MW power supply into an outlet! Getting rid of around 5 MW of waste heat is also not trivial.

[Author]

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