[dennisp]

The Obama campaign used gamification to great effect on their website. Users got points for fundraising, canvassing, telemarketing, and holding neighborhood meetings. The site provided assistance for all these…a telemarketing interface with interactive script, setup for small online fundraising groups, etc. (Not that these particular activities are appropriate for FF advocacy.)

[dennisp]

I think what’s a little different about discussing it here is that, with fusion and cheap access to space, a lot of the usual arguments against it become a bit irrelevant. (But I admit it’s sorta offtopic.)

[dennisp]

A little more on the Methuselah Foundation (and related SENS Foundation)…Aubrey de Grey identified seven components of aging, which they’re tackling in various ways.

For example, excess junk accumulates inside and between cells, which the body can’t get rid of. But it decomposes in soil, so they’re surveying soil microbes looking for enzymes they can use to clean that stuff up.

Mitochondrial DNA takes a lot of oxidative damange, so they’re looking at using gene therapy to insert the mitochondrial genes into the nucleus, where they’ll be protected.

Cross-linking between sugars and proteins happens over time and makes everything stiffen up, so they’re looking for ways to dissolve those links.

His basic idea: fixing aging is like restoring an old car. You don’t have to figure out in detail why it rusts, you just need to apply rust cleaner and maybe replace some parts.

There’s a book de Grey wrote which goes into the science in great detail. He’s actually not a big fan of the telomere approach, but there are other people pursuing that pretty vigorously. Regenerative medicine with stem cells is another approach with a lot of promise that’s not really part of SENS.

[dennisp]

> What more are you going to do in an immortal span that you aren’t doing now?

Tour the solar system.

Aside from that, with a thousand years or so, I would get advanced degrees in a dozen different subjects. I’d write novels, and software, and music. I’d work as a scientist, in multiple fields. I’d study martial arts like tai chi for centuries, and do the same learning to be a stone-age hunter-gatherer and tracker. I’d start businesses, become an expert poker player, read all the great literature, and get a lot better at playing piano.

Getting really good at anything requires 10,000 hours of focused practice. Not many people manage that more than once. I’d like to do it with a lot of things.

Need room for new generations? Fine. With the cheap access to space that focus fusion would provide, there’s plenty of room out there.

[dennisp]

This discussion is veering pretty far away from fusion and risks getting all political and stuff. But I’ll mention that if you give new printed money to people and they bury it in their backyards, it won’t have any effect. That’s essentially what the banks have done for the past couple years.

The whole idea of “printing” money is kind of misleading, because with fractional reserve banking most of the money supply comes from debt. If banks must have 10% reserves, they can loan out ten times as much as you print, and when those loans are paid off or default, the money supply shrinks. You can print more money to give to the banks, but if they don’t lend, it doesn’t do anything.

Japan struggled with deflation for decades.

[dennisp]

Sure it was gradual but at this point, there just aren’t that many coal jobs left. 80K isn’t that much. In September 2008 alone we lost twice that many jobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/business/economy/04jobs.html

My concern with the idea of LPPX doing it all isn’t that they lack credit, but that they lack manufacturing expertise. Economically, I don’t see the fundamental difference between one firm building devices vs. a hundred firms doing it, except that the hundred firms are likely to be more efficient due to competition.

It’s nice to think of one company making trillions and devoting all the money to the good of humanity. But FF would solve energy, climate, and water, and with a few other predictable advances, food and mineral resources too, without assuming any altruism at all. Compared to those, issues like Glass-Steagal are pretty minor. You’re also assuming that Lerner actually agrees with you on all these issues.

But I think it’s safe to say that if FF works Lerner will make quite a lot of money from licensing, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he started something like the Gates Foundation to put it to use. But if he spent it all on hookers and blow, I’d still be pretty darn happy at how it all turned out.

[dennisp]

Oddly enough, lower energy prices historically correlate with higher growth, while higher energy prices depress the economy.

Whether it’s Lerner or licensees, somebody is going to make a lot of money on FF. That money has to go somewhere. It won’t be going to the coal industry anymore, but it’ll go *somewhere*. (Incidentally, 80% of coal jobs have been lost since WWII, as the industry has automated. There are only 80K miners left in the U.S.)

If Lerner avoids exclusive licensing, competition will quickly bring down energy prices. As for utilities, bear in mind that their rates are regulated by the states.

Yes, distressed homeowners may pay down their mortgages. Most people would consider that a good thing, especially if the alternative is foreclosure. Better to refinance a mortgage than to disintegrate it.

However, as optimistic as I am about a quick rollout, I think the mortgage crisis will be long over by the time FF makes a large dent in energy prices. We’re talking four or five years to be production-ready? And then several years after that while the plants get licensed, built, and integrated into the grid.

Meanwhile, if this stuff actually works I expect practical, cheap fusion to kick off the biggest stock market boom in history, when people discover that all their grim expectations of climate change and exhausted resources have been made suddenly obsolete, and cheap energy has made all sorts of new businesses possible…large-scale desalination, indoor farms, cheap liquid fuels made from ambient CO2, who knows what else. It’ll reach another level when SpaceX puts a FF in a rocket and kicks off a *real* space age.

Bottom line, I think there’s one thing that will be best for the economy: roll out FF reactors as quickly as possible. The way to do that is to license it far and wide. Great inventors don’t have a great track record for industrial-scale commercialization, and monopolies don’t tend to do near as well as widespread competition.

[dennisp]

Stewart Brand’s new book Whole Earth Discipline talks about population. He says the world is urbanizing very rapidly, and when people move to the cities they have a lot less kids. Kids are an asset on the farm, a liability in the city.

Right now humanity is a little over 50% urban. We’re rapidly progressing to about 80%.

The replacement rate is 2.1 children per adult. Many countries are below that now, some well below…I think the lowest he mentioned was 1.3. Many of these countries still have a lot of kids around, but as those kids get older and even more urban, their populations will drop rapidly. By 2050, the global population will start crashing.

(Only two countries are urbanized and maintain population growth: France, because they have extensive social programs to support parents, and the U.S., because it has immigration and lots of religious families who have kids because the bible says to be fruitful and multiply.)

On the other hand, with cheap fusion we’ll probably use a lot more energy per capita.

I think the answer is that we’ll expand into space. With compact fusion available that’s a lot easier to do. Expanding throughout the solar system gives us a lot of growing room.

Nevertheless, the article makes a good case that some time in the next few thousand years, even the solar system will run out of room. Hopefully within a thousand years or two we’ll be able to figure out how to put the economy in a steady state.

Or, maybe by then, people feeling crowded will put themselves in deep freeze and head for other stars. By the time the whole galaxy gets crowded, they’ll ramp up to a high percentage of the speed of light so the time dilation kicks in strong, and head to other galaxies. It might take billions of years to get there, but if you’re going close enough to lightspeed the shipboard time could be only a few years.

Nevertheless, from the POV of the people left behind it’s still a billion-year trip, so the rate of energy expansion drops enormously.

In short, as long as we get off this rock I don’t think this is going to be a problem.

[dennisp]

No doubt. It’ll be important to license it in a lot of countries. Those silly enough to let that stuff happen will fall behind other countries until they smarten up.

The rest of us can help by getting involved politically.

[dennisp]

The magic of capitalism is that even if incumbents don’t want to lose sunk costs in old power plants, competitors can spring up, make the small capital investments needed for FF plants, and sell power at 1/20th the cost anyway. At which point the incumbents either get with the program or go bankrupt, unless they manage to convince governments to outlaw the competition.

Given the realities of the electric grid and regulated utilities, maybe it’ll actually work out this way: utilities buy and sell FF-produced electricity at regulated rates. FF producers make out like bandits at first, and as they proliferate, state regulators gradually reduce rates. Most likely, they reduce the purchase price faster than the sell price, giving utilities compensation for obsoleted power plants.

The difficulty of converting all vehicles to electric is why I’m interested in using FF to make gasoline.

Home heating is a good point. FF-powered plants could make cheap oil too, but wood and coal might be harder to substitute.

[dennisp]

Also worth mentioning: at 6% efficiency, a gallon of gas would require 683kwh to produce. That’d be prohibitive at a penny per kwh, but if FF were to cost a third of that, we’d still be competitive.

This page estimates FF energy as low as a twentieth of a cent per kwh:
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/will_is_really_be_inexpensive

At that price, with a mere 6% efficiency for the chemical process, the energy required to make a gallon of gasoline would cost 34 cents.

The Los Alamos document mentions a price of $4.60/gal, with half being energy. However, with two potential improvements to the chemical process, they estimate $3.40, including capital costs and profit, giving us $1.10 not counting energy.

Nuclear power runs around 8 cents per kwh, but let’s assume they think their GenIII nuclear will be as cheap as coal (5 cents), and FF achieves a fifth of a cent. That gives us an energy price of ($2.30/25) 9 cents per gallon. In my area, gas tax totals 50 cents/gal, giving me about $1.70/gal at retail. If we’re more conservative and figure the non-energy cost at $2.30, we’re still at $2.90/gal retail.

[dennisp]

Photosynthesis is an interesting counterexample but doesn’t seem all that relevant, to me. We’re not relying on diffuse sunlight for energy, and we’re making oil, not sugar.

It’s hard to see how Los Alamos could estimate $4.60/gal at only 6% efficiency.

Using older processes:

We could start with the Sabatier reaction, which turns CO2 and hydrogen into methane and water, using a catalyst.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

This is a very efficient reaction…this paper claims 95% efficiency:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11892751

The next step is steam reforming, which converts methane to carbon monoxide and hydrogen, using a nickel catalyst. This is between 70% and 85% efficient:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

The final step for liquid hydrocarbons is Fischer-Tropsche:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

Using Fischer-Tropsch to generate liquid fuel from biomass has about 40% efficiency. I haven’t found numbers yet for pure syngas.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/05/manganaro-20110516.html

The Los Alamos approach uses an entirely different process, see the link posted above for details. Initially, carbon dioxide is absorbed into a potassium carbonate solution to form bicarbonate ions. An electrolytic processes pulls the CO2 out of solution, and water electrolysis provides hydrogen. From there, they synthesize methanol, followed by a methanol-to-gasoline conversion developed by Exxon.

These numbers aren’t nailed down as well as I like but 6% efficiency seems unduly pessimistic. The initial collection of CO2 doesn’t take that much energy, according to the sources I’ve mentioned, and after that it’s just a matter of applying industrial processes that have been in commercial use for decades. The Germans used Fischer-Tropsch in WWII.

Waste heat is a good point…people have talked about using the waste heat from thorium reactors to desalinate seawater. It could just as well be used to make fuel.

[dennisp]

Here’s a report from Los Alamos on a project called Green Freedom, to create fuel from atmospheric CO2: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/GreenFreedom.pdf

Their design uses existing technology and a Gen III fission plant, which accounts for over half the cost. Since the capital cost is high, they assume a substantial profit margin. Even so, they say it can be competitive at $4.60/gal. Less than that assuming certain modest improvements, but let’s go with $4.60, with $2.30 for the fission plant. If FF delivers a 10x cost improvement, that gives us about $2.50/gal gasoline.

Another approach: To simply pull concentrated CO2 from the atmosphere, Klaus Lackner’s system costs about half a kwh per kg CO2, which is a little over twice the minimum required by physics: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c31/page_245.shtml

One gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 37 kwh, and has 2.5 kgs carbon, which is the amount you get from about 7.5 kgs CO2. So getting CO2 from the air contributes under 4 kwh to the cost.

Another option to turn that CO2 into fuel is the Fischer-Tropsch process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

I haven’t found how efficient it is, but since it’s been used commercially, I’m assuming it can’t be too horrible. Let’s say it’s only 25% efficient, requiring 160kwh per gallon of gasoline.

Electricity cost in the U.S. is about ten cents per kwh, and about half that for the cheapest electricity from coal. If FF gets that price to one cent, that gives us an estimate of $1.60 per gallon of gasoline, plus profit and capital cost of the chemical plant.

At least one person on the forums has claimed that the x-rays from a FF plant could be used to convert CO2 to hydrocarbons directly. I have no idea how efficient that would be.

Gas taxes in my state total 50 cents per gallon (state plus federal), with a retail gas price around $3.50/gal currently. It looks to me like FF/CO2-sourced fuel could easily compete.

[dennisp]

I think it’ll be a crisis but in the Chinese sense, which includes “opportunity.”

Given the low capital cost, much lower energy cost, and miniscule environmental impact of FF, I think it will roll out quite rapidly.

Given such low energy costs, oil and methane could be produced from the CO2 in the atmosphere at lower cost than it can be pumped out of the ground. Refineries might stay in business but anyone providing raw fossil fuels will be in big trouble. Anyone who’s too heavily invested in them will be sorry, too.

Meanwhile, the rest of the economy will get a huge boost. Energy prices affect everything.

[dennisp]

More info at NextBigFuture: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/fusion-energy-without-radioactivity.html#more

It’s not just a thruster, they think they can generate net power with it.

For a practical system they need a pretty high-power laser that fires at 75MHz. It doesn’t exist yet, but according to Talk-Polywell folks there are commercially-available lasers that meet the specs, except they only fire at around 10kHz. That ought to do for “scientific feasibility,” I’d think. Lasers are advancing pretty quickly, too.

One thing that’s interesting is that according to their analysis, boron fusion isn’t much harder than DT fusion in this configuration.

[Author]

Posts