Monday, December 22, 2014

CHEAP OIL

     Cheap oil may well turn out to be our undoing. The quest for, and development of renewable energy will move to the back burner, the economics no match for oil at sixty dollars a barrel and under.
    The quixotic architect of the current dilemma is arguably President Obama, who simultaneously urges drilling for oil in order to gain energy independence, yet promotes policies to avert climate change. The two policies are at odds with each other. The Saudi’s reduction of the price of oil as a counter measure has thrown a giant wrench in the machinery of energy production.
    The world will now gorge itself on cheap oil, at a rate never before experienced, as a result of modernization of many countries and population growth. It will hasten the day of reckoning, which may also be when climate change has reached the point of irreversIbility.

Monday, December 15, 2014

A COLLOSAL WASTE OF MONEY


      Every day, every living thing on the surface of planet Earth receives free energy from one of the most elegant of chemical transformations, the energy of the stars. It’s called fusion, the combining of two light nuclei to produce a heavier one of slightly lower mass than the sum of the two, with a concurrent release of energy in accordance with Einstein’s equation E=mc2
      Nuclei of deuterium and tritium combine under great heat and pressure to yield helium plus 3.5 MeV and a neutron plus 14.1 MeV......an enormous energy output.
    Of course, in stars, fusion doesn’t stop there.... additional fusion takes place up the periodic table to iron, following which the remaining elements are produced by fission.      All the material in the universe was provided by exploded stars.
      The hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, are the same as used in fusion bombs which were developed in the 1950’s. Setting off a fusion bomb, though, is an instantaneous release of energy, useless for power generation. In a hydrogen bomb ignition is initiated by a fission bomb, configured to compress and heat the hydrogen isotopes to a region where fusion will occur.
      Since the 1950’s there has been an avid interest in many nations to create on Earth an artificial means to tap into this prodigious energy source. Billions have been spent in this quest, following two main ideas on how to achieve controlled fusion.
      One idea is magnetic containment of the plasma. Thermal energy must be added either by the fusion products or by electricity generated by the reactor. The goal is to produce more energy than is necessary to sustain the reaction.
   The U.S program began in 1951 when Lyman Spitzer began work on magnetically confined plasmas. His work led to creation of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where magnetically confined plasmas are still studied. Other major universities began to undertake theoretical studies and experimental work.
   Theoretical work in the Soviet Union during 1950-1951 by I.E. Tann and Andrei Sakarov led to construction of the first tokamak.(a Russian word meaning “a toroidal device for producing controlled nuclear fusion by means of confinement in a magnetic field) and first demonstrated the feasibility of a continuous nuclear fusion reaction.
In 1997 the largest joint experiment was the Joint European Torus (JET). In that year a test run produced a peak of 16.1 MW of fusion power, with a sustained power of 10 MW over a period of 5 seconds. Not much, and the output of this experiment was only sixty-five per cent of the power put into it.
      But bigger plans were afoot with the formation of ITER (InternationalThermonuclear Experimental Reactor), and the funding of an entirely different approach to achieving fusion in the National Ignition Laboratory at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. That method seeks to obtain ignition by focusing powerful lasers on a raindrop sized capsule filled with deuterium and tritium. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore hope to produce a powerful enough implosion of the capsule to achieve ignition.
      ITER was proposed to President Reagan by Gorbachev in the 1980’s. The United States initiated the project, putting together a consortium of participating nations, but later withdrew. and still later decided to participate in a limited role. That largely takes place via the Princeton Plasma Laboratories, funded by the Department of Energy at about 175 million dollars annually. The United States, then, has work underway on the two main approaches to fusion energy.
     ITER continued under French leadership. The experimental laboratories for ITER are located in Cadarache, France and headquarters is located in Barcelona, Spain.
The National Ignition Laboratory (www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/01/the-national-ignition-facility) funding exceeds eight billion dollars. Budget for ITER was established at fifteen billion dollars in 2008 and is certain to be exceeded. Billions more will have to be invested if either concept demonstrates economic and operating feasibility, to produce reliable and safe means of extracting the energy to produce electricity. That appears to be years in the future.
     But here’s the rub: We are already benefitting from a limitless source of fusion energy. Why go to the enormous cost and effort to make it on Earth? It’s called the sun, a safe 93 million miles from Earth. It is free, there are no waste products, and it is reliable. 174 petawatts of radiated energy arrive daily at the upper atmosphere. World energy consumption is about 25 terrawatts. It remains only to apply ingenuity in devising systems to collect it and convert it to electricity. Significantly, we are already doing it, capturing it via photo-voltaic and solar thermal collectors and wind (yes the wind is solar energy. Available wind energy alone is 335 terrawatts).
     The twenty five or so billion dollars being spent on laboratory demonstration of fusion power could have been spent to produce 25 gigawatts of fusion power that is already available from the sun, or advancing the technology for doing so.
     What are we thinking? Admittedly, the research efforts produce technology advancements in computational technique, materials science and processing. But
it may not be a sufficient justification for all the spending.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

THOUGHTS FOR 2015

HERE ARE MY THOUGHTS FOR 2015

LONG RANGE FORECAST FOR EVOLUTION

Pole vaulters will eventually orbit Earth.
Women will develop shoulder hooks for purse straps. Eventually theft proof
as purse snatchers become a nuisance.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

New APP shows a fuzzy image on computer. User pulls it into focus and prints
out a prescription for glasses.

Buffalo demonstrates  first  unmanned, GPS guided nuclear powered snow
removal device. It melts the snow at 40 mph ahead of it instead of removing it,

Now that Marijuana is legal, politicians debate whether the ban on growing hemp
should be continued. Lifting it will offend foreign hemp growers.

Germany ships first biodiesel electric cars to US. First near-zero carbon footprint electric car.

It will be revealed for the first time that the purchasing of indulgences at the church
(especially Catholic) actually does work,
and the benefit is in direct proportion to the amount.

Sadly, no amount of treatment will cure a heroin junkie. They’re gone.

Don’t waste money on fusion power. We already have it at a safe 93 million miles distance.
It’s called the sun. All that’s needed is to collect and distribute it and we’re doing that.

Gamma ray pulse may not be a serious threat to life, except for wearers of pacemakers.
Then again, it may be the single reason why life has not proliferated across the universe.
Fermi’s paradox; “Where are they?”

GOOD THINGS TO D0

Pet your dog
Eat broccoli and cauliflower.
Be obedient (Paul said this, didn’t he?)
Don’t let plants wilt. (They are obviously suffering)
Write letters (an unacknowledged cure for a bad day).
Eschew tobacco.
Worship the sun.
Revere Stephen Colbert
Abjure televangelists
Sing, dance and read out loud
Believe in aliens
Love somebody dearly

Thursday, December 4, 2014

SAN DIEGO HOSPITALS


A 2014-2015 US News and World Report survey of the best fifty hospitals in the United States, for the categories of illness: Cancer, Cardiology, Neurology and Neurological Surgery, Orthopedics and Gastroenterology shows that San Diego hospitals are seriously flagging. None were rated number one, or anywhere near it. For cancer treatment UC Medical is rated Number 18 in the list of fifty. Number 1 is Memorial Sloan Cancer Center in New York; for Cardiology, Scripps is ranked at Number 18 and UC Medical at Number 23. Number 1 is Cleveland Clinic; There are no hospitals specializing in Neurology and Neurological Surgery in San Diego that made it to the top fifty. Number 1 is Mayo Clinic; in Orthopedics, Scripps is ranked at Number 27 and UC Medical at Number 44, Number 1 is Hospital for Special Surgery in New York; and in Gastroenterology UC Medical is ranked at Number 25. Number 1 is Mayo Clinic.