How Do We Make The Most of Fusion?

I hope you all have read the news about the big fusion break through from Lawrence Livermore. This is potentially a really important achievement, likely a part of the solution to a top-3 type of problem the world faces. With our current technology, the 7 billion people we have on this planet is a completely unsustainable situation.

Like a lot of people, I grew up in the 1970s, and lived through the energy crisis. Alternate energy sources has always been a topic in the back of my mind. I missed my opportunity to work at the University of Rochester Lab for Laser Energetics when I froze in my interview as a first year engineering student and couldn’t name Hooke’s law (F=kx, the spring equation).

Fusion has been one of those holy grail / unicorn issues that international science and engineering teams have just not been able to crack. There are people who are trying to hype this recent milestone, and people who are trying to debunk it.

Why You Can Never Simply Trust Stats, Even if the Stats are Correct

The big event in this announcement is that the scientists were able to get more out of the reaction than it took to create it. That’s what they sensibly call “break even”, or ignition. But it all depends on how you do the accounting.

It’s true that the amount of energy they got out of the reaction was more than the energy of the lasers trained on the target, the lasers have some loss, and efficiency isn’t 100%. So the total amount of energy put into the experiment was actually more than they got out. So technically, they didn’t really break even.

But every step forward is a step forward. It seems no matter what topic you pick, there are always political opponents who will do anything to keep the other side from celebrating wins. And that’s true even here in fusion. Who other than people heavily invested in either fossil fuels or nuclear power would want to see fusion fail? It’s silly to me, but there are people working hard to keep you from thinking this achievement is a mile stone.

Don’t believe everything you read. Make sure you understand the point of view of people making assertions in the press, especially on hot button issues.

The people on Earth have an immense need for energy, and that need keeps growing on a per capita basis. There are many options for our immense requirements, and we need to investigate them all, but each has its own specific advantages and disadvantages, about which we need to be clear headed:

Overpopulation Drives Need for More Power

Any suggestion of reducing the human population turns out to be ridiculously cruel, inhuman or downright stupid, yet, it is the only way we currently have to get things under control in a generation. I’ll leave that argument to others, as I don’t see any way to achieve that without catastrophic global war, withholding life-saving drugs, or massively draconian birth control/euthanasia all of which are obviously unacceptable to anyone with a conscience.

The organic chemical power (primarily coal and oil) we’ve been using since the dawn of time has some advantages, but it also has disadvantages. It is very energy dense, but it takes a lot of resources to process it into a useful form (extract, refine, distribute), and it consumes the same atmospheric chemicals as all animal life on Earth (oxygen) and the by-products are harmful to all animal life and to the natural processes that keep us alive.

Natural sources of energy available to us now are solar, wind, chemical (fossil fuels), hydro, geothermal and nuclear. Chemical energy is easy to transport and convert on a small scale as needed, which is probably why it has been so popular over the last 150 years or so. Retrieving, refining and transporting it in bulk (drilling, refineries, ships, pipelines, trucks) is expensive, potentially dirty and dangerous, as well as wasteful processes.

Fossil Fuels Guilt Trips

Advocates of alternate energy really need to get off of the emotional, guilt and shame ploys to drive adoption of power sources other than fossil fuels. This has had exactly the opposite of the desired response in a good portion of the public. Yes, some people are susceptible to guilt and shame, but it’s not a good method to make an argument where you need wide ranging acceptance. It sends the wrong messages, gets emotionally complicated, often veers into factual gray areas, can be alienating, making enemies where that isn’t necessary, and can even be counterproductive.

We really need a practical engineering-based argument. The emotional ploy has become too political, with a predictable segment of the population buying into it, and a predictable segment ridiculing it.

Because we need to create energy on a mass scale, and use it in small local bits, we have to have ways to first produce the energy, then store it in some convenient and safe format and then convert it back to a usable and portable format.

Hydro Electric

Hydroelectric energy production requires us to flood land and destroy habitat for ourselves and our natural neighbors on this planet. Water itself is another scarce resource, and using mass quantities of it to store energy is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Hydro energy and water for home use are coming into direct conflict in the American southwest right now. In so many ways, huge dams seem like great way to store energy, but in practice there are too many problems.

Hydro can be applied to waves and ocean currents. That may interfere with ocean transportation, but it is avoidable. It may also interfere with ocean life to some extent, but at the same time it creates habitat. Once this energy is collected, you have to have big infrastructure to transport it to land where people can use it.

Hydro power can also be created on a smaller scale that is less destructive to the landscape. For hundreds of years water wheels have been used to create small amounts of power where it is needed.

This small scale power creation is part of my assertion that there are many reasons for adopting local power creation, not all of which are driven by the emotional/political arguments. Most of it has to do with local economics and independence. One pillar of self-sufficiency is to not rely on big corporations for your power.

Solar Power

Solar power is an obvious source of energy that gets a lot of attention, and rightly so. Solar can produce local power on a small scale for household use, and to avoid paying the man for something that’s freely available to everyone.

However, there are several considerations. Not all locations get enough constant sunlight to make solar a viable source. Also, over the course of a year, you only get 50% light at best (night and day), not counting clouds, and oblique angles of the sun’s rays closer to the poles. Solar is probably best viewed as a complementary source rather than a single primary source.

Wind Power

Wind power is of course a ubiquitous source of energy, but huge mills can be unsightly or even psychologically damaging. If we think again on a smaller scale, wind power is easy to develop, easily scalable and can run day and night all year round, plus there are no latitudes at which the wind doesn’t blow. Wind power can be generated from home appliance sized equipment, and stored in batteries. It is a great way to accumulate enough energy to run off the grid where that is desired or necessary. Again, probably more of a supplemental source of power than primary.

Geothermal

Geothermal power uses natural temperature differences between the earth’s crust and its atmosphere. Fluid in drilled holes or horizontal pipe beds or even ponds are used as heat sinks in a system much like heat pumps. You can use geothermal for both heating and cooling. This type of system can be expensive to install initially, but over time can be very cost effective. Of course you still need electrical power to drive the pumps, compressors, fans and other equipment. It is also not viable in all locations, so you really need to do some homework if you want to consider geothermal sources. It’s just another source of energy to consider.

Nuclear

(Or as one former president famously called it – noo key lar). Nuclear energy is attractive in a lot of ways, but it has some obvious long-term consequences that could render portions or the entire planet unlivable. Mining Uranium and then storing the radio active waste are practical hurdles that can be overcome, but it is difficult to guarantee against accidents, sabotage or natural disasters.

The accidents we’ve had with nuclear power have been few, but the devastation they have wrought is disproportionately large. To be fair, the US Navy runs a lot of small nuclear reactors without large scale accidents. While it can be done safely, I’m not sure you can trust profit-based private enterprise to do it.

Fusion

World’s longest introduction, right? Fusion. Fusion has long been touted as the answer to our overpopulated energy problems. Part of the problem with fusion is that it’s mythological, or close enough. It happens in the Sun. We don’t have a way to do it on Earth. Until this week.

With fusion, you take a very small amount of heavy hydrogen (hydrogen with extra neutrons – deuterium or tritium), blast it with lasers and fuse the components of the hydrogen into helium + a lot of extra heat. The heat is then used to boil water, and the steam drives turbines which generate electricity. I mean, this is what it would do if we had a functioning fusion reactor plant. The radiation is minimal. It sounds simple, but it has taken decades to get to today’s announcement.

Another issue with fusion is that it requires a lot of energy to get it started up, so for a new fusion reactor, there would need to be another source of electrical power available at hand to get it started. Once it is running, it would produce power, but it needs a significant jolt to get it started.

Energy Storage

Energy storage is a difficult problem. We currently only do this on relatively small scales. But as electric cars and other devices migrate away from gas power, this is going to create a very large instantaneous load on the system that the grid might not be able to react to quickly enough. Some sort of storage might become a feature of charging locations.

Using power in a vehicle or other devices requires the storage to be portable and resilient to mishandling and accidents. There are several methods to store energy. Some familiar and some unconventional. Small and large scale. The storage methods all work with energy in different forms that can eventually be converted to electricity.

One of the problems with storing mass amounts of energy is that it tends to get very dangerous. Just think of an immense capacitor holding enough energy to power a town for a week. Or a fly wheel that holds all of that energy in a giant spinning disk. Energy storage has to be practical, portable, and able to withstand accidents without devastating civilization.

Another consideration with energy storage is the efficiency of the systems used to convert energy into various forms. You can lose a lot of the original energy by converting it from say mechanical kinetic energy into electrical. As we saw with the efficiency of the lasers used in the fusion at the top of this article, enough energy was lost firing the lasers that it brings into question whether this was a “break even” event or not. Often storage systems will require two conversions – one into storage and another out of storage. Efficiency becomes doubly important for storage.

Diesel-Electric Transmissions Work Differently

Diesel-Electric transmissions have been used in locomotives, ships, submarines and all sorts of large equipment for decades. They don’t actually store any electricity. They generate electricity with the Diesel engine and use it immediately in a electric motor which drives the vehicle. This is because an electric motor can be used without a clutch, and gets 100% of rated torque at 0 rpm, both of which are very important for very large vehicles like a locomotive. This type of performance simply isn’t available from internal combustion engines. Diesel-Electric concept has been around for over 100 years. This is the initial idea for hybrid cars, all that remains is to add regenerative braking, which is our next topic.

Recovering Wasted Brake Energy is Why Electricity is Essential in Cars

Beyond all of this, energy storage is one of the key issues we have to talk about when we mention automotive efficiency. The main argument against fossil fuels to drive automobiles doesn’t come from the engine or exhaust at all; it comes from the brakes. In a gas car, the brakes generate friction and turn kinetic energy into heat. That energy can easily be recaptured by slowing the car by generating electricity (regenerative braking). This in turn requires the need to store the electrical charge until it can be used.

This is the process used by hybrid cars today. Generators pull double duty as motors to drive the car. For this reason, at least get a hybrid, because it reuses all of that braking energy that you usually just throw away.

And then of course the obvious next step is just to do away with the gas power altogether because once you start collecting energy through the brakes to reuse in a motor, it makes more sense to just drive it all with an electric motor. No need for a redundant gas propulsion system.

So you see, electric cars are not a ploy to save the planet at all. It is just an accident that activists have connected with the idea. Electric cars are an engineering idea to improve efficiency, and that idea can be extended by powering the car entirely with electricity.

There are 3 types of vehicles that use electricity:

• Hybrid – uses gas and electric drive, regenerative braking is only source of electrical charge
• Plug-in Hybrid – Works like a hybrid, but it has a bigger battery and you can add more electrical charge by plugging it in
• Full EV – No gas engine, very big battery, has regenerative braking plus very large electrical storage

Plug-in Hybrid and Full EV can be plugged in at home, which is cheap. Or you can plug them in at retail charging stations, which should only be used when on longer trips when you need to charge away from home. If you have either of these types of car, it makes sense to add solar or wind generation along with battery storage to your home. This allows you to essentially run your car for “free”, minus of course whatever it costs to set up the solar or wind generation. For these reasons, it is tough for apartment or townhouse dwellers to get the most out of electric cars. You at least need a driveway to park in.

Hybrid Vehicles are Related to Fusion Power …How?

If fusion ever actually works, it will give us cheap electricity. For that to be relevant to transportation, vehicles have to go electric. Blame it on the liberals, but this is not a revolution of ideology, it’s just engineering and good decision making revisiting a mistake made more than 100 years ago that sent us down the path of gasoline powered transportation instead of electric vehicles.

Energy storage is key, and we can’t store the results of fusion as fossil fuel or combustible organics.

Battery Storage of Electricity

Battery research is big right now, and we might be on the cusp of another technological breakthrough. Generating power is great, but if you can’t store it any more efficiently than we do now with heavy, expensive, dirty and accident prone batteries, we haven’t gained all that we hope for.

Fuel cells can be included under this heading, but as the name implies, they are more of a power generation method than storage. They require a constant source of fuel, which in turn requires energy to collect or generate. It’s never a simple problem, is it?

Pressurized Air

Pressurized air can be used to store small bits of energy, but it is bulky and dangerous. It also is tough to store or move it in bulk. Collecting enough pressurized air to be competitive with others methods of storing energy would require a huge and heavy apparatus. One advantage of pressurized gas is that you can re-collect it by turning turbines into pumps for regenerative braking. Several examples of actual vehicles that move on compressed air have been created, but they all have predictable shortcomings – short range (~100 miles power that decreases with amount of pressure in tank, they still require some other source to initially pressurize the tank, and they are slow. They typically run on about 60 gallons of compressed air (probably split into smaller tanks) initially pressurized to ~3600 psi, and the brakes can regenerate pressure to refill an auxiliary tank.

Gravity Storage