Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

We have been playing around with hot fusion for decades. We are still decades away from commerical reactors. Its an indication of just how important this problem is that we are still pursuing it.

Steve 41oo wrote:

We have been playing around with hot fusion for decades. We are still decades away from commerical reactors. Its an indication of just how important this problem is that we are still pursuing it.

I am a bit more cynical than you on the matter. Our persistence in studying it may well be much more an indication of the stubbornness of scientists and their effectiveness in getting government funding for their favorite projects.

If importance was the dominant standard we would be constructing fission power stations in large numbers right now.

In 1961 he published The Theory of Subsonic Planar Flow, and important text in appplied mathematics, and became the foundation fellow in engineering at Balliol College Oxford, retaining a connection with Harwll as consultant in plasma physics. Nine years later he became professor of mathematics (the theory of plasma): it was during this period of his career and in texts afterwards that his combative approach manifested itself again in his quarrel with fusion physicists and his scepticism about Tokamak, the favourite device of fusion research supported by governments for more than 50 years with billions of pounds worth of funding. His four major texts - Magntoplasma Dynamics, An introduction to the kinetic theory of gases and Magnetoplasmas, Thermodynamic Inequalities with Applications to Gases and Magnetoplasmas, and Theory of Tokamak Transport: New aspects for nuclear fusion reactor design - were dismissed by some of his peers who argued that Woods had ignored the basic principles and equations on which the Tokamak theory is based.

Regardless of his controversial approach, and his suggestion that those involved in fusion would never admit its failings so long as their livelihoods and careers depended on its "steady progress", Les gained DSc degrees at Oxford, the former university of New Zealand and Auckland....

Leslie Colin Woods (Woodhead), pilot mathematician and physicist Dec 7 1922 - April 15 2007

We already have enough nuclear fuel to power the country for over a century just with fission reactors. The intriguing question is why we don't use it.

I would have thought the answer to that was blindingly obvious. We still have no satisfactory solution to high level nuclear waste disposal. Plus the increased terrorist threat. I'm pretty sure we will start building new fission power plants, bury the waste and keep our fingers crossed. It might buy a few decades respite whilst we reconfigure our whole energy infrastructure to a post oil economy. (Which of course we should have started doing many years ago...but damn that black stuff is just so good...)

Steve 41oo wrote:

I would have thought the answer to that was blindingly obvious. We still have no satisfactory solution to high level nuclear waste disposal. Plus the increased terrorist threat. I'm pretty sure we will start building new fission power plants, bury the waste and keep our fingers crossed. It might buy a few decades respite whilst we reconfigure our whole energy infrastructure to a post oil economy. (Which of course we should have started doing many years ago...but damn that black stuff is just so good...)

The answer is obvious, but it is not the one you give. There are about 450 nuclear reactors operating in the world today, as they have been doing for over 40 years. the high-level waste from their operations is well managed (and in some cases reprocessed) and generally causes far less environmental risk and damage than the by products of energy produced from coal or natural gas. The "problem" is a political and psychological one that infects many modern countries (but oddly not the French). It results from the conviction among zealous advocates that there IS NO "satisfactory" solution to the problem of high level nuclear waste - no matter what is done with it, and no matter how small the attendant risk is shown to be relative to other far greater ones that enjoy the acceptance and approval of these same zealots.

Hamburger's referenced article refers to a number of European programs that follow and parallel various nuclear fusion projects launched by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission over thirty years ago. The U.S. focus of this activity has been at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco. There, the Magnetic Fusion program was launched in the late 1970s. It had the same process and goals now being pursued by the referenced JET magnetic program and the International ITER program for the hoped for development of magnetic containment of an energy-positive continuous fusion reaction. The effort may achieve positive laboratory scaled results within the next decade, but practical applications are, at best decades away.

The high energy laser programs started at Livermore about 25 years ago. In the early 1990s a business group I headed did a major portion of the engineering support work for the very large facilities there. My impression was that the prime motivation of the leading scientists involved was to find out what high energy lasers could do. Their first venture into practical application was the LISP (=laser isotope separation program), an effort to separate UA-235 through high temperature diffusion using a high energy laser. It was successful but not economically competitive with other methods. Later the facilities were transformed into the NAIF (= national ignition facility) and a process for simulating the physics of ignition and fusion in a thermonuclear bomb in an era in which live testing was banned by treaty. It too has been mostly successful.

Evidently the referenced HIPER project is just a variant designed for the initiation and containment of a fusion process.

Magnetic fusion has long offered the promise of almost limitless energy in a process that consumes readily available fuels and leaves no (or little) long-lasting radioactive waste. The problem is achieving and, more significantly, sustaining the extremely high temperatures and pressures required. Beyond that are a host of additional challenges in designing a reliable and practical scaled-up power plant with all the attendant heat exchangers, pumps and support systems. Finally there is the question of acceptance by a public that already rejects proven fission reactors that are today demonstrably the safest, most reliable, cost-effective, and non-polluting source of power available anywhere.

We already have enough nuclear fuel to power the country for over a century just with fission reactors. The intriguing question is why we don't use it.

Fusion power has been on the "brink" of practical success for the last thirty or so years. I don't expect us to cross that threshold any time soon.

How to achieve unlimited, safe, clean and low-cost energy by laser- or beam-driven inertial nuclear fusion ....

Why should we care about global warming? The Associated Press reports it is "threatening cultural landmarks from Canada to Antarctica, the World Monuments Fund said Wednesday":

New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged historic neighborhoods, the Church of the Holy Nativity under Palestinian control in Bethlehem, cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary in Peru are among the locations listed on the fund's top 100 most endangered.

The U.S. locations also include historic Route 66, the fabled east-west highway flanked by eccentric, deteriorating attractions, and the New York State Pavilion, a rusting remnant of the 1964 World's Fair in New York City's Queens borough.

Surely it's oxygen and water, not CO2, that are causing the World's Fair pavilion to rust. And if Machu Picchu (elevation 7,710 feet) is in danger from rising sea levels, we're all doomed anyway.

The Immelt bet: That the 21st-century global marketplace has been fundamentally and permanently altered from the one that existed four days before 9/11.
The GE chairman launched the company's environmental strategy two years ago, dubbing it ecomagination after GE's slogan, "imagination at work." It's based on the conviction that oil prices will remain at historically high levels and that global governments will, sooner or later, move to constrain the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The ecomagination project is a major part of Mr. Immelt's effort to remodel the $163-billion (U.S.) company founded by Thomas Edison. He wants to take advantage of the 21st-century mega-trends of globalization, booming infrastructure needs in emerging economies, scarce commodities and growing environmental alarm.

But the stakes are even more critical than that.

Given the company's vast size and scope, from selling power turbines in India to running NBC in New York, Mr. Immelt's ecoplan is in fact a global test case for the concept that "green is green" - that environmental sustainability can mean economic opportunity, not just financial burden.

In a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review, Mr. Immelt said he initially encountered some resistance to the strategy from his executives, who were chafed at the corporate environmentalism. But he insisted the change in mindset was critical.

"Ecomagination was one way to show the organization that it's OK to stick your neck out and even to make customers a little bit uncomfortable."Mr. Immelt launched ecomagination a year later. To be certified under ecomagination, a product must offer customers not only environmental benefit but lower operating costs, with the average payback for the capital investment of two years.
The strategy included not just a focused sales effort, but a pledge that GE would reduce its own energy usage, and would reduce its own actual greenhouse gas emissions by 1 per cent over seven years, even as it expected to grow by at least 30 per cent.At the Hollywood release of the report card last month, Mr. Immelt confirmed that GE is on track to more than double its research and development in ecomagination products to $1.5-billion by 2010 from $700-million in 2005.

But the product rollouts aren't always smooth. Translating the ecomagination strategy from the business-to-business environment to the consumer market has proven to be challenging.

Interviewed at GE Aviation's sprawling headquarters in Cincinnati, where she spent 15 years as head of marketing , Ms. Bolsinger concedes she has become somewhat impatient over delays in the launch of a "carbon neutral" credit card by the consumer finance division.

She had hoped to roll out the green credit card last year, to allow customers of GE Money to use their credit accounts to finance projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the program's design has proved to be more daunting than expected. The company wants to ensure it is simple enough to be easily understood, but complex enough that customers can keep track of their "carbon footprint." And most importantly, it must be bulletproof against charges that it is simply a marketing gimmick.

GE has built a major marketing and advertising campaign around its corporate environmentalism. The last thing the company needs is a botched "green" credit card program that smacks of trendy opportunism.

"We just have to make sure we spend a little extra time and get this right," Ms. Bolsinger said. "We can't afford to ruin the reputation over it."

One piece of the GE puzzle

Certainly, the company is not limiting itself to the ecotrend, though it is eager to profit from it. GE has targeted the booming economies of China and India - and their insatiable demand for new infrastructure - as crucial to the company's future growth prospects. And both countries have signalled they won't let global concerns about climate change interfere with their growth strategies.

In the oil and gas business, GE is marketing energy-efficient turbines and filtration technology that reduce the use of water and energy. But it hasn't abandoned the traditional "dirty" business.

Last week, GE's oil and gas division, based in Florence, Italy, announced it would supply $80-million in key parts for the construction of a heavy oil upgrader near Edmonton, to be built by North West Upgrader Inc.

In fact, GE has targeted the oil sands as a major business opportunity, both for ecomagination and more traditional business. Last fall, Ms. Bolsinger participated in the "GE Day" in Alberta, visiting Calgary and Fort McMurray oil sands developments with a large team of company executives.

Elyse Allan, president of General Electric Canada Inc., was part of that mission. She and other GE executives meet regularly with oil companies and Alberta-based researchers who are working on methods of reducing the oil sands' destructive impact on both the local environment and the atmosphere.

As well, GE is researching carbon capture and storage, a process that offers some hope that companies can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, even as they triple and quadruple production from the oil sands. In sequestration projects, carbon dioxide is captured from industrial processes like upgrading and coal-fired power plants, compressed, and then injected underground for permanent storage.

While GE can offer improved operating costs to induce companies to invest in expensive new water technologies, Ms. Allan acknowledges that the oil companies will have to face significant constraints on the CO{-2} emissions before carbon-capture-and-storage technologies offer much payback.

And in the competition for investment dollars, companies won't spend where they don't have to, or where they don't see a competitive rate of return.

"To the extent that we create a market for carbon that puts a value on it, that would put some of these projects on a more equal footing with some others," Ms. Allan said.

Given the scope of ecomagination - a $12-billion project in a $163-billion company - you have to question whether it is more about marketing than a core growth strategy.

Analysts who follow the company tend to ignore it, except as individual products contribute to the broader GE's growth plan. They see the GE story as more of an infrastructure play, or a China play.

Bob Spremulli, an analyst with TIAA-CREF, a public sector pension manager, said he regards ecomagination as essentially a hugely successful advertising campaign built around a fairly modest segment of the company's overall business.

Ms. Bolsinger rejects any suggestion that ecomagination strategy is primarily a marketing campaign - though she is less defensive about that aspect of strategy than she once was.

"Isn't marketing a declaration of purpose? Isn't it a declaration of what you make and your value-add," she said. "Yes, [ecomagination] is marketing because marketing is the culmination of who you say you are to the world, and who you say you are to investors and shareholders, and even to your own employees."Even on a modest scale, the strategy is not without its risks. Corporate history is littered with the corpses of companies that bought into the consensus view of the 1970s and early 1980s that oil prices would climb to $80, or accepted the assurances from technology executives in the 1990s that tech bubble would never burst.

If Mr. Immelt is wrong about oil prices and carbon constraints, some future CEO could be taking billion-dollar writeoffs in the company's wind power portfolio, or its nuclear division, or its clean-coal investments.

Even if he's right, he may never achieve the kind of business-press adulation that was lavished on Mr. Welch, whose rags-to-riches life enhanced the storyline. But if Mr. Immelt does realize his goal of translating energy efficiency and environmental sustainability into core business values, his contribution will be infinitely more far-reaching.

Their views dont count.