Tags
atomic power, cricketdiane, Energy, fusion, nuclear alternatives, nuclear fusion, nuclear power, power
So, I was looking up this –
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11Prager.html
How Seawater Can Power the World
NYTimes
By STEWART C. PRAGER
Published: July 10, 2011
Harnessing nuclear fusion, the energy that powers the sun and the stars, has been a goal of physicists worldwide since the 1950s. It is essentially inexhaustible and it can be created using hydrogen isotopes — chemical cousins of hydrogen, like deuterium — that can readily be extracted from seawater.
Fusion energy is created by fusing two atomic nuclei, in the process converting mass to energy, which appears as heat. The heat, as in conventional nuclear fission reactors, turns water into steam, which drives turbines to generate electricity, or is used to produce fuels for transportation or other uses.
(etc.)
***
Which I had seen the other day, and as I was looking for it – found these other couple things of interest –
on a google search trying to find the article – I found this which is from a psych class at a university –
Cold fusion and scientific belief
http://www.uic.edu/classes/psych/psych242/…/NYT,%20Cold%20fusion.doc
File Format: Microsoft Word – Quick View
“Cold fusion” held the promise of endless, cheap energy. It is a good example of how stubborn theories can be. The New York Times. March 23, 1999, Tuesday …
**
Which means there are psych classes being taught and information in psych textbooks which approaches the scientific research about fusion to be inappropriate and off in left field somewhere. That is what they are teaching.
And, that the belief in the possibility of fusion to be incoherent with any basis of reality.
Then, I found this (also during that google search for the article in the NYTimes linked above)
Cold fusion/The Wikipedia article/Comments on edits/Pathological science
At present, the article says:
- By late 1989, most scientists considered cold fusion claims dead,[8] and cold fusion subsequently gained a reputation as pathological science.[9]
and, deeper in the article,
- In May 1989, the American Physical Society held a session on cold fusion, including many reports of experiments that failed to produce evidence of cold fusion. At the end of the session, eight of the nine leading speakers stated that they considered the initial Fleischmann and Pons claim dead with the ninth, Johann Rafelski, abstaining.[8] Steven E. Koonin of Caltech called the Utah report a result of “the incompetence and delusion of Pons and Fleischmann” which was met with applause. Douglas R. O. Morrison, a physicist representing CERN, was the first to call the episode an example of pathological science.[8][39]
- [8]: Physicists Debunk Claim Of a New Kind of Fusion, New York Times, May 3, 1989, report of APS meeting.
- [9]: U.S. Will Give Cold Fusion Second Look, After 15 Years, New York Times, March 25, 2004, report of coming 2004 DoE review.
- [39]: A report from the American Physical Society, Spring Meeting, 1-2 May 1989, Baltimore, MD, Special Session on cold fusion unpublished report, email from Emmett Black to Vincent Cate. Appears to be an individual’s notes on the meeting.
Notes
The statement about “most scientists” is sourced by [8], an article on the APS meeting, Physicists seemed generally persuaded as the sessions ended that assertions of “cold fusion” were based on nothing more than experimental errors by scientists in Utah.
This was (1) not late 1989, and (2) was not “most scientists” but simply “most physicists,” and not even most physicists, it would be most of those who attended the meeting. However, this source does cite Morrison as mentioning “pathological science.” That term has a recognized usage, and the characteristics couldn’t possibly be applied at that early date.
Source 9 does not mention “pathological science,” but is a report of the coming 2004 U.S. DoE review. It begins with: Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world’s energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington. This is a report in a reliable source, all right, but is fluff, general passing hyperbole, passive, with no attribution of who did the discarding.
Source 32 is not a reliable source, it appears to be a single individual’s private account of the meeting, attending with a group from General Electric Research, and does not mention “pathological science” either. It contains the following information about Morrison:
- Jones’ data were challenged by Morrison of CERN, who said Jones had overstated the statistical significance of his data. (This was about Jones’ independent report, not the Pons-Fleischmann effect. Remarkably, the observer considers it possible that there is some real effect, so this report contradicts what the Times reporter stated.)
- A second Cold Fusion seminar was scheduled for the APS meeting on Tuesday 2 May 1989, at 7:30pm. The Tuesday session was to begin with “a general review with emphasis on European work by D.Q.O. Morrison, CERN.” Unfortunately none of our representatives were able to attend; also, due to the rapid decrease in interest in last night’s seminar after the Cal Tech talk, we did not believe the second seminar would generate much interest.
There is no mention of any severe criticism by Morrison, other than of the Jones work.
How did it come to be that these statements so poorly support the text? Why is a newspaper report of a conference proceeding given great weight, when conference proceedings themselves are not considered reliable source?
Looking back, 02:05, 30 December 2009 has the first text, but not the second. It has, instead, CERN physicist Douglas R. O. Morrison said that “essentially all” attempts in Western Europe had failed.[29] [29} is the 1989 NYT article, which does support the “pathological science” claim about Morrison as well.
“Most physicists in attendance,” so to speak, has become, in the article, “most scientists.” Cold fusion is a turn war between chemists and physicists, that’s covered in reliable source.
http://management.energy.gov/program_support/library.htm
Which is the Department of Energy Library (and there is another page I want to find that I’ve seen before with a vast nifty database of projects in it – which I’ll add in a little bit after I find it.)
And, although it has several great areas to see on the above page – I’ve picked this one to list here for now –
Library Resources
The Energy Library provides the Department and the Public with links to important energy related and general reference subjects and their resources on the Internet.
And, I had already been looking at the list of Tesla patents and another quick page from the other day – and read through a Tesla turbine design which isn’t being used in the manner for which its design was created –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_patents
Tesla Turbine from wikipedia entry
And on the page about it, the text starts out by saying this –
The Tesla turbine is a bladeless centripetal flow turbinepatented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. It is referred to as a bladeless turbine because it uses the boundary layer effect and not a fluid impinging upon the blades as in a conventional turbine. The Tesla turbine is also known as the boundary layer turbine, cohesion-type turbine, and Prandtl layer turbine (after Ludwig Prandtl). Bioengineering researchers have referred to it as a multiple disk centrifugal pump.[1][2] One of Tesla’s desires for implementation of this turbine was for geothermal power, which was described in “Our Future Motive Power“.[3]
(from)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine
And, this is the other one I was considering (from the other day) –
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/15_heatelectricity.shtml
Researchers convert heat to electricity using organic molecules, could lead to new energy source
By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | 15 February 2007
BERKELEY – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have successfully generated electricity from heat by trapping organic molecules between metal nanoparticles, an achievement that could pave the way toward the development of a new source for energy.
The discovery, described in a study published today (Thursday, Feb. 15) in Science Express, an electronic publication of the journal Science, is a milestone in the quest for efficient ways to directly convert heat into electricity. Currently, the dominant method of power generation involves burning fossil fuels to create heat, often in the form of steam, to spin a turbine that, in turn, drives a generator that produces electricity. (etc.)
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/15_heatelectricity.shtml
Which is actually a discovery published from 2007 and it is now 2011, in fact, well into 2011. But, this hasn’t been producing electricity of any significant measure for mankind either – now is still a time that our scientists, engineers, politicians, academics and others claim we are still 25 – 30 years away from any other source providing electricity for our nation and for other nations of the world.
That just can’t be right. They were saying the same thing 30 years ago, even in the 1950’s that was the claim. Always, it is thirty years away. Always costing money to study it some more today. Always, without commercial applications and backing in the marketplace.
Now, why exactly is that being tolerated?
Hmmm………….
– cricketdiane
***
I also looked up this one – which may or may not be accessible. I haven’t checked it yet –
UC Berkeley Library Data Lab
sunsite.berkeley.edu/wikis/datalab/
But even if it is not – the CERN labs information about fusion, plasma, discoveries and difficulties is available and easy to use. Great reading too – and some of it has pictures and diagrams and charts of the things they are discussing in the various papers.
***
And then, I think of my own notes about fusion, and about the USA Today article about “Turning your Hobby Into a Profitable Small Business” that I found a couple days ago and it is still open on my tab bar – I don’t think they mean nuclear fusion, though. It looks like they are really talking about women making cupcakes or something . . .
Besides which – in Georgia (and probably in America generally) – any woman who wants to do something besides making cupcakes as a living would have to be psychologically troubled in their estimation and certainly, abnormal. What a shame.
But, we have enough cupcake makers, fragrances, cosmetics, panty and bra designs being made as businesses. And it doesn’t interest me to study those things, despite the fact that I can do some of them and have designed some of those kinds of things. I think it is easy to resent being forced into only those kinds of things because I am a woman and treated to the state’s further victimization of me if I happen to choose something else. And, I don’t like that.
So, regardless of the outcome –
And, having had enough of experiencing the same crap from it as most other people who have sought to educate themselves in America and participate in some aspect of it – here are some of the things I’ve discovered about nuclear fusion which happens to interest me a great deal more than making a hotdog stand, a damn cupcake business or designing women’s panties –
DOE: Energy Science and Technology Virtual Library
Collections of scientific and technical information from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) with a distributed searching capability.
(Note – this was the page that I was talking about earlier in this post with the most wonderful archives of information from the DOE and it is really easy to figure out and use it – cricketdiane)
I do want to say, about the first article mentioned from the NY Times about fusion written by Stewart Prager, that it seems a loss to consider nuclear fusion as a way to heat water into steam, although that is probably the manner in which academics and maybe even commercial participants want to consider it. That seems like something that could more easily be accomplished even right this minute using geothermal sources, if that is really the only thing that they are going to do with it. The harnessing of the atomic knowledge we have as no more than a way to make steam in order to move turbines really misses the point. Its kind of like using nuclear fission based power plants to turn water into steam in Japan, (such as Fukushima) in a land which sits on enough geothermal energy sources to outpower damn near anywhere else on the planet. It makes that use of nuclear power with all its inherent drawbacks and dangers into nothing more than an extremely expensive joke on mankind (and at the expense of generations now in the wake of that radiation damage.) There is no sense in it.
However, the chances are that Mr. Prager understands the use of nuclear fusion will be similar to that of fission systems now in place where the steam will be generated to move turbines from the heat that is created from the atomic level processes. There is something so stuck about that thinking, but there it is – and he is probably right about that.
I will never understand why our nation has so devised its power scheme to unfavorably consider anything beyond the scheme currently in place and to allow disinformation, out and out lies and propaganda, purposeful intentional perception management strategies and other crass, inappropriate techniques to dissuade the public, the political decision-makers and businesses from using anything else either. Where there may have been some advantage in having done that at one time (during the last thirty years) – it is far from our advantage or the advantage of businesses engaged in the energy sector to do that today. Every other nation is throwing tons of money at this problem and seeking other solutions to it that work. We have nothing to gain by sticking with the same old designs than to be left in the dust of every other country on this earth at the point they reach that destination and we do not.
As much as I, too, agree with sticking with what works – not when doing that takes away our competitive advantage and leaves us with troubled systems for our national energy needs as everyone else in the world thrives, progresses and long before seeing the sum total of their efforts for a viable energy system from it, benefits – even as we do not.
We are indeed a global world. Yet, the costs of our energy system as it stands are born by us, not the world. And, the degradation of that system even as we need greater power from it, is not a cost that will be born by the world, but rather by us individually and collectively. Our nation needs every new source of generating energy that we do have, can have and strangely enough, will need to have for the coming centuries. And, sadly, our business community, (and our government) rarely considers what we will need across coming centuries. Certainly Enron was a prime example of that short-sightedness, along with a multitude of others from defunding projects which could have yielded to commercial investors not backing new technological advances. It is all based in short-term gains and short-sighted opinions.
– cricketdiane
***
Cupcakes,
Yeah, right.
**
From one of my September 2009 posts –
(A bit from the GAO about our national infrastructure offered May 8, 2008 to House Committee, US Congress) –
The economic well-being of the United States is dependent on the reliability, safety, and security of its physical infrastructure. The nation’s infrastructure is vast and affects the daily lives of virtually all Americans. In total, there are about 4 million miles of roads, 117,000 miles of rail, 600,000 bridges, 79,000 dams, 26,000 miles of commercially navigable waterways, 11,000 miles of transit lines, 500 train stations, 300 ports, 19,000 airports,5 55,000 community drinking water systems, and 30,000 wastewater treatment and collection facilities. Collectively, this infrastructure connects communities, facilitates trade, provides clean drinking water, and protects public health, among other things.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08763t.pdf
my note –
It is missing the natural gas, petroleum facilities and pipelines, the electricity generating facilities – hydroelectric, coal-fired and nuclear / atomic plants, and national parks, preserves and lands. (additionally, mines and mining operations, air routes, drilling operations, shipping operations, and taxpayer funded research facilities and operations.)
(from)
September 29, 2009
US infrastructure crumbling while money continues to flow into the Middle East and around the world to build infrastructure for our enemies – air quality, pollution, global warming, US infrastructure, Afghanistan and Iraq –
***
Cricketdiane's Weblog 