[dennisp]

You missed the part where I said “make hydrocarbon fuels [em]from CO2[/em].” If the fuel you’re burning is made from CO2 that you just pulled out of the air, you’ve got a closed loop with no net emissions. The overall effect is no different than if you were using electric vehicles.

Other advantages: no need to wait for sufficiently good batteries. No need to convince people to replace their cars with new ones that take hours to “refuel” instead of minutes. No need to retool the car companies or build a bunch of recharging stations. Just install new stuff at the refineries and you’re good to go.

Overall energy efficiency is lower, but with FF that’s less of a concern.

In any case, I think that’s the case we should make. If electric cars turn out to be more competitive after all, then fine.

[dennisp]

Lerner wrote: The few thousand individuals who sit on the boards of directors of the giant companies in every industry in the world (who are also generally directors of financial institutions or energy companies) are themselves most heavily invested in energy and in finance, which are the most profitable industries. They will not make decisions based on the competitive advantage of a given industry, but on maximizing their own personal wealth, which means protecting oil and gas, even if that means higher costs for everything else.

This is one reason I think it makes sense to use FF to power technologies that make hydrocarbon fuels from CO2. Instead of putting the oil companies out of business with electric cars, we give them a way to stay in business despite “peak oil.”

We still use their refineries, pipelines, and gas stations. The only people out of business are the ones who do nothing but pump oil out of the ground (or mine coal).

[dennisp]

Hmm…do you really need to capture energy from the helium beam and use it to run a big expensive particle accelerator? What if you just let that 3% lightspeed beam of helium nuclei slam directly into the target? Are they going fast enough?

If so, just do that, while capturing the x-rays as usual to help power the reactor.

[dennisp]

Sugar from cellulose is an interesting concept, I hadn’t heard of that.

Fusion would make biofuels obsolete, too.

[dennisp]

For vehicles large enough to carry their own FF reactor, it’d be crazy not to just do that. Ships for sure, maybe trains and large aircraft.

For smaller vehicles, nothing yet beats the energy density and fast refueling of hydrocarbons. Even the military has to consider that, unless they know for sure their vehicles will only be out for short trips. If batteries get good enough, that might change….but I’ve gotten tired of holding my breath for that. (That said, there are some pretty interesting projects in the labs.)

Boron is another interesting possibility, described in Tom Blees’ book. Even better energy density than gasoline, but it only burns in pure oxygen, and at pretty high temperature. It’d be a technical challenge, but if you can get it to work, you’re emission-free…you just ship the solid oxidized boron back to the factory.

[dennisp]

Customers will only stop buying their product after focus fusion attains wide usage. I’m not going to underestimate the oil companies’ abilities to (1) propagandize the public about scary nuclear technology, no matter how benign it actually is, and (2) get oppressive regulations enacted.

Aside from that, as I just posted in another thread, I think keeping hydrocarbons is the easiest solution, and a good one as long as we’re getting them from CO2. Why swap out an entire infrastructure and vehicle fleet if we don’t have to?

[dennisp]

Because you can keep fast cars with roaring V8 engines, pipelines, and gas stations. Just replace the oil wells with fusion-powered gasoline factories and you’re done. If you want to go electric, you have to get the car companies to retool, install an upgraded electric grid and recharging stations, and wait for everybody to buy new cars.

But before doing any of that you have to invent the battery technology that has been “just around the corner” for decades…as energy dense as gasoline, charges in minutes (somehow…that’s a *lot* of current flow), and cheap enough so the car doesn’t cost much more. And it has to use common materials so we can make enough of them. Personally I’ve stopped believing in every new battery breakthrough that hits the news.

Or maybe you mean, why not stick with methanol? Now you’re still using a liquid fuel, you don’t have the efficiency advantages of electric motors, but you still have to change out the cars and infrastructure, to convert to a fuel with half the energy density. When you could take one last step and make things a lot easier on yourself.

Maybe methanol-powered fuel cells? Improves your vehicle efficiency, but you still have to change your infrastructure, and fuel cells are still really expensive. Waiting for cheap fuel cells is like waiting for good batteries.

Major change to the fuel distribution network a giant chicken-and-egg problem. You might need government involvement to get it done. Sticking with gasoline, all you need is to be able to produce it cheaper than the oil companies can drill it, and they’ll do it on their own. Focus fusion can easily accomplish that.

[dennisp]

Buggy-whip makers didn’t have the economic and political power that oil companies do.

Exxon alone has revenue comparable to the GDP of the tenth largest country in the world.

[dennisp]

Back to the first post about making methanol…the oil companies have an efficient process already commercialized to turn methanol into gasoline. If you can make methanol, you can take one more step and keep all the vehicles and infrastructure we have right now.

[dennisp]

Keep oil companies in business by continuing to use diesel and gasoline for vehicles. Make it from water and ambient CO2. There are half a dozen technologies in development to do it with. Owning an oil well won’t be a good business anymore, but pipelines, refineries, and gas stations stay in business, and the car companies don’t have to retool.

[dennisp]

I’ll be surprised if we don’t have more surprises…but maybe I’ll get a climatecolab entry ready for it just in case: “never mind everything else, just commercialize FF”…

I’m having trouble imagining how happy that would make me.

[dennisp]

I just ran some numbers on indoor farming. Average sunlight per square meter is 250 watts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation

The dutch plantlab doubles photosynthetic efficiency, so we can figure 125 watts/m^2.

Crops and pastures take up about half of U.S. land area:
http://www.ajcn.org/content/78/3/660S.full

U.S. total land area is about 9 million square kilometers. Let’s assume we get more efficient with our food production, perhaps going more vegetarian and/or converting to a lot of lab-grown meat by 2050 or so. Also we’re getting rid of ethanol production. For nice round numbers we’ll say we need one million square kilometers for food production. Maybe we can do with less, but probably not by an order of magnitude.

A million square kilometers is a trillion square meters, so we’d need 125 terawatts to convert entirely to indoor farming, in the U.S. alone, not counting desalination. Current world energy production is about 17 terawatts. Not to mention, we’d need to build a million square kilometers’ worth of indoor structures and light sources.

With focus fusion it might be a distant possibility, but even then it’d be tough. But it might work for high-value specialty crops that are normally shipped long distances.

But that’s not the theoretical limit. What if we could use some kind of nanotechnology to synthesize healthy, good-tasting food?

One watt-hour is about equal to one kCal (dietary calorie). Let’s say we need 2000 per day per person. At 25% thermodynamic efficiency for the synthesis process, that’s an input of about 8 kWh per day per person. Divide by 24 to get a third of a kilowatt per person.

By the time we have technology like this, we could easily have 9 billion people on the planet. Food synthesis would then require just 3 terawatts for the entire world’s food supply.

In the meantime, Zapkitty’s idea for fertilizer production sounds pretty good…

[dennisp]

Presentations in January. If it’s like last year, we’ll have congressional staffers in DC, and the U.N. Secretary General’s advisory team on climate change in NYC. After that, I’ll start prepping for next year’s contest…I’m hoping to do some economic modeling and put together a plan with real quantified projections.

I’ve ended up in touch with some nuclear scientists and engineers working on thorium power, and a couple other people connected with ideas in the proposal. Not sure yet what’s going to develop from that. And I’m thinking about various ways to promote this stuff beyond the contest.

[dennisp]

I was thinking two main points….first, that it isn’t pie-in-the-sky, serious people are investing in fusion. Second, that according to one of the main economic/climate models, an energy breakthrough like cheap fusion would keep global warming to one degree C with no other interventions.

It’s a riskier bet than, say, thorium, because we haven’t yet produced net power. But if it’ll works, the whole climate problem just sorta evaporates. So I don’t promote it as our sole strategy, but if it is doable, it’d be a crying shame to miss out on it.

A question: I’m assuming you guys do want focus fusion to be noticed by government types? If you feel like you’ve got plenty of money right now, maybe there are downsides.

[dennisp]

Yep, sure did. I got huge support from a bunch of liquid thorium enthusiasts on reddit.

I’ll only have a few minutes to present a whole lot of stuff but I’ll get a blurb on alt fusion in there, and mention a few projects by name. I was thinking I might describe it as a hail-mary pass…you don’t know for sure it’ll work, but if it does it wins the game all by itself.

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