Republican Climate Denial

Originally posted by sonhouse
Nuclear is certainly one answer but doesn't have to be the total story. Wave power, wind, solar should all enter into the equation.

The problem with nuclear of course, is this delayed ass biting you get 30 years later when all the waste adds up and what to do with it.

As they found out in Japan, just storing it onsite in pools is not such a great idea ...[text shortened]... ctions can become commonplace and that would replace fusion but not in this century for sure.

Perhaps in a few hundred years, antimatter reactions can become commonplace and that would replace fusion but not in this century for sure.

it takes at least as much energy to make antimatter as you would gain from its annihilation so there would be no net gain of energy in making antimatter for energy production.

However, there would be a point to making antimatter to fuel spaceships providing a way can be developed to make it in useful quantities that is not too expensive and a way to store it can be developed that isn't too dangerous.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Nuclear is certainly one answer but doesn't have to be the total story. Wave power, wind, solar should all enter into the equation.

The problem with nuclear of course, is this delayed ass biting you get 30 years later when all the waste adds up and what to do with it.

As they found out in Japan, just storing it onsite in pools is not such a great idea ...[text shortened]... ctions can become commonplace and that would replace fusion but not in this century for sure.

If you would pile up all the nuclear waste in one spot, you'd probably be able to get within a few hundred yards safely, as long as the waste is properly contained. The intensity of radiation falls off as the distance cubed (assuming no absorption, with absorption it falls off exponentially).

The problem would be getting the waste there safely and economically. And since you can already safely contain nuclear waste in multiple areas, there is no real point anyway.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
If you would pile up all the nuclear waste in one spot, you'd probably be able to get within a few hundred yards safely, as long as the waste is properly contained. The intensity of radiation falls off as the distance cubed (assuming no absorption, with absorption it falls off exponentially).

The problem would be getting the waste there safely and ec ...[text shortened]... you can already safely contain nuclear waste in multiple areas, there is no real point anyway.

Radiation falls off as an inverse square rule rather than inverse cube rule.
(dependent on medium between you and the radiation source)

But otherwise you are right that waste is not nearly the issue that it's made out to be.

Many of the difficulties stem from ridiculous and near impossible to meet requirements
imposed on waste storage by the green lobby who were trying to make it hard and
expensive to do to discourage doing nuclear in the first place.

Things like requiring structures to to bee foolproof at multi 100k year time scales...
or in other-words requiring storage solutions that we could guarantee for 10 times
the entire length of human civilisation to date.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Nuclear is certainly one answer but doesn't have to be the total story. Wave power, wind, solar should all enter into the equation.

The problem with nuclear of course, is this delayed ass biting you get 30 years later when all the waste adds up and what to do with it.

As they found out in Japan, just storing it onsite in pools is not such a great idea ...[text shortened]... ctions can become commonplace and that would replace fusion but not in this century for sure.

I agree that nuclear isn't the total story and that we should use all the available environmentally
sustainable options.

However the core backbone of our grids needs to be something that doesn't fluctuate with the
weather and can reliably produce lots of power while not emitting CO2.

Barring certain locations lucky enough to be able to use geothermal for that the only options are
nuclear and biomass. Biomass is bad when it uses land that could be used for growing food crops
and is not carbon neutral when burning waste that would otherwise be buried locking much of the
carbon into the ground.

That leaves nuclear for 50%+ of the electricity generating capacity. Probably more like 60%+

The remaining 40[ish]% is what you fill with wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/tide/biomass as
suitable.

Otherwise the grid wont be stable enough and will be too vulnerable to fluctuations in weather.



Fission could be made much safer if we used liquid thorium reactors rather than Uranium reactors.
The technology works (although needs improving/refining/relearning) and was demonstrated in the
60's in the USA (and then dropped because you can't use it to make plutonium for nuclear bombs).
There is enough known thorium to meet 100% current demand for 100 yrs.
Thorium reactors produce much less radioactive waste.

Fusion should hopefully be working by around 2050 to take over by 2075~2100.

There is also an intermediary that is useful where you use a sub-critical mass of radioactive material
(depleted uranium works, as does high-grade radioactive waste) to surround a sub0ignition fusion reactor.

The fusion reactor produces neutrons that interact with the radioactive waste causing that to decay and
emit energy making the unit as a whole a net energy gain. While at the same time reducing the radioactivity
of the fissionable fuel.

So you can use these to turn high long term grade waste into medium/low grade waste that can be more
easily dealt with. And generate useful energy at the same time.

As the reaction is controlled by the fusion reaction supplying the neutrons it can be rapidly powered up and
shut down. making it more flexible and safer than conventional fission reactors while also actually reducing
the amount of waste we have and providing us more experience with fusion reactors.

Originally posted by googlefudge
I agree that nuclear isn't the total story and that we should use all the available environmentally
sustainable options.

However the core backbone of our grids needs to be something that doesn't fluctuate with the
weather and can reliably produce lots of power while not emitting CO2.

Barring certain locations lucky enough to be able to use geot educing
the amount of waste we have and providing us more experience with fusion reactors.

the core backbone of our grids needs to be something that doesn't fluctuate with the
weather and can reliably produce lots of power

not quite because this problem can be solved with a combination of using fickle renewable energy (mainly solar and wind but there are several others) and using too things to get round its fickledness: off-the-grid electric storage (which can now be done economically with high-energy-density batteries) and a suppergrid to economically transport electricity between counties (the idea being that it is always either sunny or windy somewhere so, if you can transport electricity far enough, you would always be able to transport the energy from a fickled source to where the demand for it is. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_grid )

however, I would agree that nuclear energy would also reduce the above problem and should be further developed and be part of the medium-term solution until we are able to use just the truly renewable energy sources.

P.S. “fickled” and “fickledness” above are just words I invented and have no conventional definition. I hope it is obvious enough what I mean by them!

Originally posted by humy

Perhaps in a few hundred years, antimatter reactions can become commonplace and that would replace fusion but not in this century for sure.

it takes at least as much energy to make antimatter as you would gain from its annihilation so there would be no net gain of energy in making antimatter for energy production.

However, there woul ...[text shortened]... ties that is not too expensive and a way to store it can be developed that isn't too dangerous.

There is a lot of work being done on antimatter, the first thing coming to mind is not MAKING AM but FINDING it. There are designs that can theoretically attract AM in space, a giant buckyball shaped affair, charged up to 100 million volts can more or less selectively attract AM and collect it inside in a magnetic trap.

The amount of AM vs our kind of matter has a ratio of 1 in ten billion, I think that is the ratio bandied about.

So for every 1 billion tons of regular matter there is one ton of AM which means there should be a lot of it diffusely floating about in space, right near the Earth, around the moon, anywhere in the solar system.

If you take the mass of the solar system to be just the sun, a pretty good approximation, that would be about 2E30 kg. 1 part in 10 billion would mean there is in the vicinity of the solar system about 2E20 kg of AM.

So if these capture ideas work out, there could be tons of the stuff stored in magnetic traps. Obviously a lot of technology would have to be invented but there is more than enough to power a thousand civilizations.

It only takes a few milligrams of AM to be able to launch a space shuttle sized spacecraft so a little goes a long long way.

There is the quote, I think from Einstein, one kilogram of AM could power a 100 watt light bulb for 30 million years. So that means inversely, 30 million watts generated for 100 years.

300 megawatts for 10 years, 3 gigawatts for 1 year. So rounding out a year to 8000 hours, 3 gw for 8000 hours, 3 terawatts for 8 hours.

So you can see this could give a very large spacecraft enough energy to accelerate to a high enough velocity to OWN the solar system AT LEAST.

Things are never 100% efficient but if it was, some kind of propulsion system clocking in at 100% could accelerate 550 pounds at one g with 32 hp.

Too bad we can't get even close to that, since chemical rockets ends up spending about 2000 times the energy just to heat up the fuel enough to produce thrust.

I think nuclear powered (Fission or fusion or AM) ion rockets can do MUCH better in the efficiency department. Certainly not 100 percent but suppose it could even get to 10%, not an unreasonable assumption then 32 hp ~= 25 kilowatts so the original number, 550 pounds needing 25 kw to get to 1 g of acceleration becomes 550 pounds needing 250 kw, 320 hp, to get that same 1 g.

So extending that, 550,000 pounds(250,000 kilograms) would need 250 mw to accelerate at one g (275 tons).

Going back to my first set of numbers, 1 kg of AM combined with 1 kg of matter can produce ~ 3 tw for 8 hours. So 1 gram of AM can make 3 gw for 8 hours or 300 mw for 80 hours.

So going with that, you can get that 275 ton craft cranking at 1 g for 80 hours, means a one way trip would get you to to about 2800 kilometers per second.

So doing that for 40 hours gets you to 1400 km/second and then back down to zero by reverse thrust when you need to.

That gets you to around the orbit of Pluto in about one month, going in more or less a straight line.

That is just a quick analysis of what AM can do.

That was with just one gram of AM.

Our fastest craft is taking more than 120 times as long to get to pluto right now.

So you can easily see the possibilities of AM for long distance space voyages.

I think the engineering details will be worked out within 100 years and space flight will be a regular thing thanks to the capture method of AM.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Radiation falls off as an inverse square rule rather than inverse cube rule.
(dependent on medium between you and the radiation source)

But otherwise you are right that waste is not nearly the issue that it's made out to be.

Many of the difficulties stem from ridiculous and near impossible to meet requirements
imposed on waste storage by the gr ...[text shortened]... lutions that we could guarantee for 10 times
the entire length of human civilisation to date.

Oh right, a silly mistake, I was considering a sphere of some radius but the radiation density obviously scales with the surface of the sphere, not the volume.

Originally posted by sonhouse
There is a lot of work being done on antimatter, the first thing coming to mind is not MAKING AM but FINDING it. There are designs that can theoretically attract AM in space, a giant buckyball shaped affair, charged up to 100 million volts can more or less selectively attract AM and collect it inside in a magnetic trap.

The amount of AM vs our kind of ma t within 100 years and space flight will be a regular thing thanks to the capture method of AM.

So for every 1 billion tons of regular matter there is one ton of AM which means there should be a lot of it diffusely floating about in space, right near the Earth, around the moon, anywhere in the solar system.

no, no; think about it! Any particle of antimatter floating about within our solar system would be gradually ( if not quickly!? ) eroded and destroyed by the continuous bombardment of particles from the solar wind ( mainly the electrons and protons ) until there would be absolutely nothing left of it!
Note that the sun loses about 1 million tons of material per second via the solar wind so there is plenty of mass in the solar wind, it is merely very dispersed.
Sorry, absolutely no chance of any antimatter just hanging about in our back yard ( at least not within our solar system ) just waiting for us to pick it up!
Pity.

Perhaps between the galaxies in those places where there has never been much space dust or space gas or solar wind made of ordinary matter?
Not sure if it could be made practical to collect it from there though! just getting there would be difficult.

Originally posted by humy

So for every 1 billion tons of regular matter there is one ton of AM which means there should be a lot of it diffusely floating about in space, right near the Earth, around the moon, anywhere in the solar system.

no, no; think about it! Any particle of antimatter floating about within our solar system would be gradually ( if not quickly ...[text shortened]... could be made practical to collect it from there though! just getting there would be difficult.

There is a lot of antimatter in space (and on Earth for that matter). It is true that it does get annihilated when it comes into contact with matter, but in the near vacuum of space that does not happen that often. Antimatter gets created all the time in a myriad of different processes.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
There is a lot of antimatter in space (and on Earth for that matter). It is true that it does get annihilated when it comes into contact with matter, but in the near vacuum of space that does not happen that often. Antimatter gets created all the time in a myriad of different processes.

After doing just a bit of skeptical research, I stand corrected:

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1108/19antimatter/
“....James Bickford, the senior member of the technical staff at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has calculated that Earth’s antimatter belt contains 160 nanograms of antiprotons. This in itself doesn’t sound much – pure annihilation of this antimatter would produce just ten kilowatt-hours of energy – but it dwarfs the amount of antimatter that we can create in particle accelerators on Earth. ….”

this is a big surprise to me! I find it strange that I have never heard of this before.

However, we are not talking about huge amounts of antimatter here. Assuming a truly efficient way can be devised to harvest it and then store it ( a big assumption in this case I think ) , there’s enough for a few potentially faster space missions per year but only if you use it sparingly and you would probably mainly have to confine most of the missions to within our solar system. Still, not bad! that would still be a vast improvement on what we can do now!

I also found this:

http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2009/05/13/physicists--take-first-steps-to-harness-antimatter
“...it may be conceivable to collect that antimatter from a mother-lode hiding out near the center of our galaxy. ...”

Anyone;
There is a "mother-lode" of antimatter near the center of our galaxy?
does anyone know anything about this?

Of course, if we found a vastly more energy efficient way ( and make in significant quantity ) of creating antimatter with particle accelerators, there would be no point in collecting this naturally occurring antimatter because it would be better to make it ourselves.
Does anyone know why making antimatter with conventional particle accelerators is so ridiculously energy inefficient?

Originally posted by humy
After doing just a bit of skeptical research, I stand corrected:

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1108/19antimatter/
“....James Bickford, the senior member of the technical staff at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has calculated that Earth’s antimatter belt contains 160 nanograms of antiprotons. This in itself doesn’t sound much – pure ...[text shortened]... king antimatter with conventional particle accelerators is so ridiculously energy inefficient?

It is the energy needed to just accelerate the ions in the first place and the cooling needed for the cryopumps that maintain the ultra high vacuum. That is my field, cryogenics, cryopumps and the like. Cryopumps work by cooling down a 'tree' of activated carbon chunks about the size of a grain of rice, but a bunch of them on the cooling tree column. It gets cooled down to about 10 degrees kelvin or so and the activated carbon has incredible surface area inside each chunk so an air molecule comes colliding with the carbon and that carbon is so cold the molecules check in but they don't check out, like a roach motel. Thing is, each one of those cryopumps needs an auxiliary cryopump compressor that is just like a common air conditioner compressor except the gas in this case is helium not some CFC. So the helium gets compressed and sent into the cryo cold head which connects to the 'tree' I mentioned. It is a two stage pump and the outer stage gets to about 100 K but the inner cage gets to 10 degrees K which is cold enough to trap incoming gasses.

All that takes quite a bit of energy, about 3 kilowatts, but an accelerator needs hundreds of them. That is in addition to the energy it takes to bend and shape the beam, usually with magnetic fields, and the newest ones use superconductors which does cut down the energy use dramatically over standard magnets I am used to. I used to work for Varian and associates in the ion implanter division and that machine is a small version of the big guys like at Cern but for industrial use.

It only accelerates maximum a few mega volts and most around 200 KEV.

They are used in the semiconductor industry to bury certain ion isotopes under the surface of pure silicon or gallium arsenide wafers to give the wafers conductivity. The pure silicon wafer is a great insulator and no use to anyone in the semiconductor world unless it is forced to be a conductor and that is the job, one of them anyway, of the ion implanter. They use mainly arsenic, boron, or phosphorus ions which give electron way stations to silicon, thus making it a 'semi' conductor.

Even the industrial implanters use 30 to 50 kilowatts of energy just for one rather small machine which fits into a small room.

Imagine a vacuum system MILES long with cryopumps every few feet to keep the vacuum level as low as possible, a LOT lower than we need in the ion implanter world. We can start an implant at about 1 E -6 vacuum level but accelerators need vacuum more like 1E-12 level, a million times less leftover molecules floating around, absolutely needed because the ion beam or particle beam is going so close to c as to make not much difference, a single molecule would wreck havoc on the main beam so they try to eliminate them.

All of the above takes megawatts, maybe 100 mw or so. That is why you don't get much bang for the buck making antimatter on earth.

Which makes it much much more attractive to capture native AM in space.

It doesn't get destroyed very easily because of the gap between atoms being so wde, it would be like two cars on the freeway with no other traffic and they are a mile apart going in opposite directions, they just don't crash into each other that often.

So there is a lot of this diffuse AM out there if you can capture it and there are designs about that will attempt to do just that. Like I said, one such design is a very large chicken wire fence affair, 200 meters or more in diameter, charged up to 100 million volts and it preferentially (at least that is how the theory goes) attracts AM inside where it is further guided to magnetic traps.

The tiny caveat being it has yet to be built so it is still speculation as to whether it will really work or not. Time will tell.

Originally posted by sonhouse
It is the energy needed to just accelerate the ions in the first place and the cooling needed for the cryopumps that maintain the ultra high vacuum. That is my field, cryogenics, cryopumps and the like. Cryopumps work by cooling down a 'tree' of activated carbon chunks about the size of a grain of rice, but a bunch of them on the cooling tree column. It get t so it is still speculation as to whether it will really work or not. Time will tell.

It is the energy needed to just accelerate the ions in the first place and the cooling needed for the cryopumps that maintain the ultra high vacuum. That is my field, cryogenics, cryopumps and the like. Cryopumps work by cooling down a 'tree' of activated carbon chunks about the size of a grain of rice, but a bunch of them on the cooling tree column. It gets cooled down to about 10 degrees kelvin or so and the activated carbon has incredible surface area inside each chunk so an air molecule comes colliding with the carbon and that carbon is so cold the molecules check in but they don't check out, like a roach motel. Thing is, each one of those cryopumps needs an auxiliary cryopump compressor that is just like a common air conditioner compressor except the gas in this case is helium not some CFC. So the helium gets compressed and sent into the cryo cold head which connects to the 'tree' I mentioned. It is a two stage pump and the outer stage gets to about 100 K but the inner cage gets to 10 degrees K which is cold enough to trap incoming gasses.

All that takes quite a bit of energy, about 3 kilowatts, but an accelerator needs hundreds of them. That is in addition to the energy it takes to bend and shape the beam, usually with magnetic fields, and the newest ones use superconductors which does cut down the energy use dramatically over standard magnets I am used to. I used to work for Varian and associates in the ion implanter division and that machine is a small version of the big guys like at Cern but for industrial use.

that's interesting, and you given me some ideas; in the far future, a giant particle accelerator specifically for manufacturing antimatter for space travel (asp for space travel to other solar systems) could be built on one of Saturn's moons, more specifically, on Rhea because this moon is the largest relatively airless moon of Saturn (equatorial diameter of 1,528km). The reason for building such a thing there would be because, judging from what you just said above, this would make it much cheaper to make antimatter because the extreme cold temperature there would mean you can use superconductors but without the usual cooling energy costs to cool the superconductors plus it would be naturally just a few degrees above absolute zero and there would be a near-vacuum there thus reduce the energy costs of running the cryopumps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhea_%28moon%29 The temperature on Rhea is 99 K (−174 °C) in direct sunlight and between 73 K (−200 °C) and 53 K (−220 °C) in the shade.

But I assume it would still take a lot of energy just to accelerate the ions in the first place unless something else clever is done?
Perhaps, instead of using ring-type accelerators, it would be more energy efficient to make antimatter using linear particle accelerators? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator
I really don't know enough about this to hazard a guess.

Originally posted by humy
[quote] It is the energy needed to just accelerate the ions in the first place and the cooling needed for the cryopumps that maintain the ultra high vacuum. That is my field, cryogenics, cryopumps and the like. Cryopumps work by cooling down a 'tree' of activated carbon chunks about the size of a grain of rice, but a bunch of them on the cooling tree column. i/Linear_particle_accelerator
I really don't know enough about this to hazard a guess.

just had another thought, this time on the problem of how to better store and safely hold antimatter for a spaceship/space-probe:

if we can produce solid magnetized crystals of antimatter iron or, better still, a single large strong solid antimatter permanent magnet made of an alloy to give maximum magnetic strength then that would be much more easily and compactly confined within a vacuum chamber surrounded with magnets than tying to confine antimatter ions. But making such a magnet would be very difficult! It would mean first making various antimatter chemical elements and then, using nothing but magnetism and voltages in vacuum chambers, combine them atom by atom to form the solid permanent magnet; which is difficult and complicated.

Presumably such a method of making such a magnet out of ions of various chemical elements would be first tested out not using antimatter but using ordinary matter. That why many of the technical problems can be ironed out via physical simulation using ordinary matter before using the much more costly and dangerous antimatter for making a magnet.

I am not sure exactly how you would use such an antimatter magnet for thrust.
Perhaps one way such an antimatter magnet can be used for thrust is fire ions of ordinary matter on just one side of it with the vacuum chamber open at that side and the tiny explosions would cause so much energy to fly off and into outer space through the opening in the chamber on that side that it would push it (photons have momentum) and the force would be transferred to the magnets stopping it from touching the side of the vacuum chamber on the opposite side and therefore push the whole spaceship?
Anything wrong with that idea?


Obviously our technology is currently no where near being able to do that. This is for the far future.

Originally posted by humy
After doing just a bit of skeptical research, I stand corrected:

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1108/19antimatter/
“....James Bickford, the senior member of the technical staff at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, has calculated that Earth’s antimatter belt contains 160 nanograms of antiprotons. This in itself doesn’t sound much – pure ...[text shortened]... king antimatter with conventional particle accelerators is so ridiculously energy inefficient?

Even if it was 100% efficiënt you won't get more energy out than you put in. At best antimatter could be a fuel, not an energy source, and probably not even that as it's pretty hard to contain in bulk quantities.

I don't know about the "mother lode" but if there were such a thing it probably wouldn't pay off to go there and try and harvest it. There are plenty of energy sources on the Earth and even if they do run out there are plenty of renewable ones.

A colleague of mine told me about some survey where they asked people about possible future technology. Apparently physicists were the most pessimistic. QED.

Originally posted by moon1969
I got no reply on this post in the debate forum. I will go with science over Republican right-wing ideology. Below are excerpts from an article by a rare moderate Republican, a diminishing breed in the Republican Party.

[b]The Danger in Republican Climate Denial
by GOPLifer

. . . Republicans can’t be blamed for harboring skepticism, but ...[text shortened]... emissions reductions envisioned by the cap and trade program that we did not implement.

[/b]

Well...that's true, but consider your audience. These are the same people who advocate more guns, as a solution to gun violence!