Are Renewables in Competition with Focus Fusion?
(8) Comments
Discuss In ForumsIf Focus Fusion is successful, will it mean that all the investment of time, energy, passion and money that has gone into traditional renewables is wasted? If we can get unlimited energy for a song, will all those solar energy companies go bankrupt? Is this a win/lose proposition?
The consensus seems to be that focus fusion is incompatible with other sources of energy. That it will eclipse them all. On the other hand, some of our forum members are looking for ways to integrate alternatives into a larger energy package.
Tasmodevil44 in his forum entry notes that:
One really great potential of unlimited, cheap fusion is that other things could potentially come “ riding - in “ on the back of it.
For example, not everybody wants to get their electricity from a centralized source. While a fusion reactor small enough to fit in a garage is certainly smaller than something like Three Mile Island or a large coal - fired plant, it’s still too big for an individual homeowner who wants total independence from the grid. However, photovoltaic solar panels are expensive to manufacture in large part due to the energy intensive process of extracting and refining ulta - pure quality silicon. But if focus fusion makes cheap and unlimited energy and silicon possible, then cheaper photovoltaics could then ride on the back of fusion.
Another example : Although it may never happen if the government DEA keeps up their absurd anti - hemp policy, focus fusion could assist in helping to grow more hemp for just about anything and everything in a more environmentally sound manner than is done today : food for a hungry population, building and construction materials, and renewable transportation fuels like biodiesel and butanol. This could be achieved if focus fusion can produce unlimited fresh irrigation water from the sea. Dump plenty of water on the deserts of the American Southwest and it becomes a major hemp growing region ( algae ponds, too). Dump water on the dry Australian Outback and you have a second major growing region. Pour water onto the Sahara Desert of Northern Africa and it becomes a third major industrial hemp growing region ...... so that all the poor in Africa now have plenty of food, construction materials, and renewable transportation fuels. Many other areas could produce more as well.
I could probably go on and on about all the other energy and fuel sources focus fusion could help to create. Such as hydrogen from seawater. Or even extract CO2 from the ocean to produce renewable transportation fuels like I discussed in some other post.
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Comments
The economic advantage of FF is so significant compared to renewables that there would have to be a truly unique requirement to justify using them. Isolation, or total independence might be two. I’d anticipate that over time (probably not all that much time) there will be variants on the FF design developed, including mobile units for large vehicles, which could be suitably sized for small installations.
Biofuels are dubious, though; they’ve already demonstrated that they directly or indirectly impact food supplies. Opening up of new agriculture spaces might mitigate that, but it’s far more likely that the shrinking oil demand will make biofuels unnecessary and uneconomical.
And the answer to all the questions in your lede is “YES!”
It’s a competitive world, for both products and ideas. Focus Fusion has the potential to transform our energy paradigm as soon as it can be widespread. This frees up petrochemicals to be used [up] more slowly, for synthetic materials, lubricants and the like, where they do societies more good than harm, rather than simply being oxidized for their energy.
It will also delete the requirement for biofuels, potentially freeing up more land for forested area to improve the lungs and filters of our planet. It may make the planet quieter by using electric motors vice noisy engines. Applications to aero and space propulsion (at least in the body-to-orbit high gravity regime) are further away, but with a lot of energy and a clean planet, we can buy time to research further applications. Add in better storage products, and possibly the scalability of focus fusion devices down to nano power sources for our computing and lighting needs, and a truly distributed, hardly interruptible power environment may be possible.
The largest and most difficult problem is population control. I don’t know what an optimal balance in population loading for this planet is, clearly, but it seems steps backward to crowd everybody in on top of one another on every hectare available, particularly if we want there to be plenty of wild lands to support the lives and evolution of other life forms beside our own.
jj;
The best record for projecting population belongs to the “Low Variant Projection” of the UN Population Database, the population will peak in 2030 at about 8 billion, and begin declining.
Of course, FF is a wild card; hard to say what effect it will have on population. But historically, improved living standards strongly rein in population growth. Only hungry people who expect to die young, or who are kept in breeding harems, have uncontrolled breeding.
Yep, the better (or at any rate, the more secure) the conditions, the less the population growth rate. The key factors are basic education, female emancipation, lower infant mortality (deaths promote even more births than deaths), better pensions (more security for the elderly, fewer births), and increased optimal investment per child.
I suppose the off-grid PV survivalist thing makes a kind of sense. Sounds limited though and what about those PV farms mentioned? Well actually, introduction of FF won’t floor electricity prices overnight. Building new PV farms should eventually become uneconomical; that doesn’t mean recouping costs from building them now is going to be that hard.
Seems like biofuels would only be relevant if a liquid fuel is still needed. In that case hydrogen from sea water might indeed be better. It doesn’t kill the rainforests, and it burns clean.
Really I think getting rid of biofuels (algae pools excepted) should be one of the selling points.
FF wouldn’t substitute for other expensive sources overnight, but pricing is substantially based on expectations of future returns and substitutions; the mere existence of FF would drive prices down to minimum operating levels. I would anticipate a screeching halt to all expansion and build-out of alternative plant, whether oil, coal, fission, or “greenie”.
What idiot would spend $1-$10/Watt for capacity when it is known that a $.05/Watt competitor is going to be on the scene, probably before your new plant even cranks out a single spark?
P.S. My enthusiasm for algal pools waned when I read about the fertilizer needed to keep them working. Those inputs are pretty substantial.
Edit:
Hydrogen is not a power source. It is a (very elusive, expensive) transport medium for energy generated elsewhere. Naked protons can sneak out of damn near any container!
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