nuclear fusion
27 Jul '08 07:552 editsOriginally posted by FabianFnasGiven the previously amply demonstrated collective stupidity of the human race, I am not so optimistic. It CAN happen that way but there are forces in industry that don't want to give up their bloodsucking drain on the planetary resources like fossil fuels. When you have world class asssholes like bush in office protecting big business, there has to be a paradigm shift away from big business dictating the fate of the human race. Big business will have to be convinced it is in their own best interest to stop bottom feeding on oil and do the right thing with renewables and fusion. That however, is a multi-trillion dollar project not possible to accomplish by any one nation, even the US. Look at some numbers:
I'm not so pessimistic about it.
When governements feels that the point of no return is approaching, they will spend money. There is money floating around, sucked up by various meaningless wars. Release this vast amount of money, channel it into fusion research, and things will begin to move in the right direction.
I'm more optimistic about it.
Suppose it is determined in 25 years that fusion is not viable and we have to go solar. Right now we are closing in on a US $1.65 per watt of solar production, maybe in ten years getting down to 1 dollar a watt.
The world uses about 10 terawatts, 10,000 GIGAwatts 24 hours a day, so ten Terawatt/hours a year. Suppose the world is convinced to go even 50 percent solar, that is an investment of 5 trillion dollars, a strain on even the US. Even if solar gets down to 10 cents a watt it would cost 500 billion to supply half the present consumption of electricity and the thinking is we MAYBE might get it down to 50 cents a watt, even that is not certain. 50 cents a watt would still be a 2 and a half trillion dollar enterprise to get 50% of our energy that way. Now considering solar intensity is only about 1/5th what hits the TOP of the atmosphere, about 1300 watts per square meter, then we only get say 200 watts per square meter on the ground and then only about 20 percent of that gets converted to energy, so the bottom line real estate wise is about 50 watts per meter squared WHILE THE SUN IS SHINING. That means you actually on a 24 hour basis get about one third of THAT or say effectively 15 watts per square meter, having to store energy to use at night, means you have to have about three times what you actually generate to cover night time and storms. So lets go with 15 watts per square meter, then 5,000,000 megawatts takes up a chunk of land about 600 square kilometers, 600 Km by 600 Km totally paved with photovoltaics. That is an area roughly equivalent to the entire state of Pennsylvania totally covered with PV cells. Since there has to be space to get between the cells for maintenance and probably sun tracking mechanics, it might even be double that to maybe 1000 square kilometers totally covered by photocells. Is it even possible to do that assuming 50 cents a watt? That is by far the biggest construction project ever devised by mankind. Of course it won't be all in one place but still, you need say a thousand square Km, say split up into 1000 plots of land scattered around the globe of a square km each and it may be considered wise to have them connected by a network of power lines where places of light can give energy to places of dark and that is anther expense since it cannot just follow the present HV transmission lines since they are not designed to be at solar centric places geometrically but in fact around present power generation facilities be it fission, fossil or hydrodynamic. To network PV cells is a totally separate technological problem. Do you see where I am going with this?
We have to use many different technologies in parallel to get all the energy we need. Even with fusion power, it is unlikely we will be totally off fossil fuels so there has to be parallel development of wind, solar, hydrodynamic, fusion, fission, etc to get us safely into the next century.
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