The Silver Bullet Blues—Stumbling Towards Energy Fixes
The Silver Bullet Blues—Stumbling Towards Energy Fixes
You see, during the full moon, I become a terrible raging thing, a werewolf. That’s why you must take this gun and be prepared to use it. It has a silver bullet. That’s the only thing that can stop me.
Lon Chaney as Frank Talbott into many werewolf movies
A silver bullet … or a crucifix … or a contrived delivery of sunlight is a dependable component of thrillers. At the last moment, the one crucial item defeats evil, and goodness prevails. The silver-bullet metaphor has even escaped the fictional realm. One often hears, “We need to find the silver bullet for …,” X, whatever X is.
Unfortunately, reality has few simple issues and fewer silver bullets. Instead, shortages of desired things and unwanted byproducts of producing those things can only be solved (or mitigated) by investing work and money and time. Magical thinking allows societies to stumble after silver bullets rather than making the practical investments to solve problems. Nowhere is this truer than with energy.
In World War II (1939–1945), a vast government program called the Manhattan Project researched and built bombs energized by splitting or fissioning the nuclei of heavy atoms. Two “A-bombs” on two Japanese cities ended the war. After World War II, there was a techno euphoria regarding fission power, called atomic. Surely something that destroyed whole cities could yield unlimited power. Thus, nuclear fission would replace all other energy sources, just as oil and coal had largely supplanted wood fuel. Policy makers expected that fission would provide electricity “too cheap to meter.”
Nuclear fission has, indeed, become a major power source. However, the price has been painfully high for several reasons. First, as energy gadfly Amory Lovins regularly points out, electricity and its associated distribution grid are an expensive way to boil water in your kitchen. The infrastructure is expensive, and roughly two-thirds of the energy is lost as waste heat at the generating site. Only electricity can run the stereo or the television, but burning fossil fuel at the end-use site is much cheaper than electrical heat. That is why fossil fuels predominate for these uses. This applies to all electrical energy systems.
Second, Enrico Fermi, one of the Manhattan Project bomb builders, said that nuclear power reactors should only be built if they were so safe that the operators could go out and have coffee to discuss any problems. Fermi’s advice was not followed. Instead, experimental reactors were quickly scaled up to ship power plants in sizes of hundreds of megawatts and then to thousands of megawatts (gigawatts). Later, and at great expense, additional safety features were added. Still later, the nuclear industry began to seriously consider inherently safer designs, but accidents at Chernobyl in the Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the United States had already made fission scary to large numbers of the world populace.
Last, but not least, there is tremendous worry and expense with safeguarding spent fuel that is still highly radioactive. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, synthetic gas, called town gas” was used for lighting, heating and cooking. Cities generated town gas by applying steam to partially burning coal. This produced a mixture of methane, carbon monoxide, and traces of various coal tars—oh yes, very poisonous if the pilot light went out. Eventually, town gas was replaced by safer, cleaner, and cheaper natural gas.
Left behind were millions of tons of ash, partially burned coal, and the aforementioned coal tars. Arguably, these waste products are as poisonous as the wastes from nuclear power reactors. Yet, there is one crucial difference, no budding terrorists will be tunneling into the old ash heaps to get bomb-making materials. Thus, spent nuclear fuels must be guarded very carefully.
The problems, real and imaginary, of fission power led to the next proposed silver bullet, fusion. Nuclear fusion is the combining of lighter atoms into heavier ones. The most common proposal is combining four hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. The theoretical advantages are that the hydrogen supply is unlimited (water), that lighter atoms have fewer radioactive isotopes, and that there is inherent safety because the reaction is not self sustaining.
Thus, in the early 1960s, it was confidently predicted that fusion would be a major power source within fifty years. That prediction has continued to this day—and the predicted delivery is still fifty years in the future.
What went wrong? Snake-oil-selling physicists sold a concept that was a few Nobel prizes short of practicality. Fusion works when a Lawrence number is achieved based on pressure times temperature. A fusion, or hydrogen, bomb works by having heat and tremendous pressure from a fission bomb. Since a power reactor cannot withstand the pressure of a bomb blast, it must have a correspondingly higher temperature.
Hunting the chimera of fusion power was a billion dollars per year for … many years. The great fusion power nirvana is still twenty years away … as it has been since the early 1960s.
There are several lessons here. Maybe the greatest is don’t count your chickens or your kilowatts until they’re hatched. The related wisdom is … that the little one and two percent real improvements in more oil from a well, or less waste heat up the chimney, or more efficiency in a chemical process are not exciting, but they are real.
The wonderful silver bullet may come, but small practical improvements pay the rent. Let us not sneer at minor improvements.
You see, during the full moon, I become a terrible raging thing, a werewolf. That’s why you must take this gun and be prepared to use it. It has a silver bullet. That’s the only thing that can stop me.
Lon Chaney as Frank Talbott into many werewolf movies
A silver bullet … or a crucifix … or a contrived delivery of sunlight is a dependable component of thrillers. At the last moment, the one crucial item defeats evil, and goodness prevails. The silver-bullet metaphor has even escaped the fictional realm. One often hears, “We need to find the silver bullet for …,” X, whatever X is.
Unfortunately, reality has few simple issues and fewer silver bullets. Instead, shortages of desired things and unwanted byproducts of producing those things can only be solved (or mitigated) by investing work and money and time. Magical thinking allows societies to stumble after silver bullets rather than making the practical investments to solve problems. Nowhere is this truer than with energy.
In World War II (1939–1945), a vast government program called the Manhattan Project researched and built bombs energized by splitting or fissioning the nuclei of heavy atoms. Two “A-bombs” on two Japanese cities ended the war. After World War II, there was a techno euphoria regarding fission power, called atomic. Surely something that destroyed whole cities could yield unlimited power. Thus, nuclear fission would replace all other energy sources, just as oil and coal had largely supplanted wood fuel. Policy makers expected that fission would provide electricity “too cheap to meter.”
Nuclear fission has, indeed, become a major power source. However, the price has been painfully high for several reasons. First, as energy gadfly Amory Lovins regularly points out, electricity and its associated distribution grid are an expensive way to boil water in your kitchen. The infrastructure is expensive, and roughly two-thirds of the energy is lost as waste heat at the generating site. Only electricity can run the stereo or the television, but burning fossil fuel at the end-use site is much cheaper than electrical heat. That is why fossil fuels predominate for these uses. This applies to all electrical energy systems.
Second, Enrico Fermi, one of the Manhattan Project bomb builders, said that nuclear power reactors should only be built if they were so safe that the operators could go out and have coffee to discuss any problems. Fermi’s advice was not followed. Instead, experimental reactors were quickly scaled up to ship power plants in sizes of hundreds of megawatts and then to thousands of megawatts (gigawatts). Later, and at great expense, additional safety features were added. Still later, the nuclear industry began to seriously consider inherently safer designs, but accidents at Chernobyl in the Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the United States had already made fission scary to large numbers of the world populace.
Last, but not least, there is tremendous worry and expense with safeguarding spent fuel that is still highly radioactive. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, synthetic gas, called town gas” was used for lighting, heating and cooking. Cities generated town gas by applying steam to partially burning coal. This produced a mixture of methane, carbon monoxide, and traces of various coal tars—oh yes, very poisonous if the pilot light went out. Eventually, town gas was replaced by safer, cleaner, and cheaper natural gas.
Left behind were millions of tons of ash, partially burned coal, and the aforementioned coal tars. Arguably, these waste products are as poisonous as the wastes from nuclear power reactors. Yet, there is one crucial difference, no budding terrorists will be tunneling into the old ash heaps to get bomb-making materials. Thus, spent nuclear fuels must be guarded very carefully.
The problems, real and imaginary, of fission power led to the next proposed silver bullet, fusion. Nuclear fusion is the combining of lighter atoms into heavier ones. The most common proposal is combining four hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. The theoretical advantages are that the hydrogen supply is unlimited (water), that lighter atoms have fewer radioactive isotopes, and that there is inherent safety because the reaction is not self sustaining.
Thus, in the early 1960s, it was confidently predicted that fusion would be a major power source within fifty years. That prediction has continued to this day—and the predicted delivery is still fifty years in the future.
What went wrong? Snake-oil-selling physicists sold a concept that was a few Nobel prizes short of practicality. Fusion works when a Lawrence number is achieved based on pressure times temperature. A fusion, or hydrogen, bomb works by having heat and tremendous pressure from a fission bomb. Since a power reactor cannot withstand the pressure of a bomb blast, it must have a correspondingly higher temperature.
Hunting the chimera of fusion power was a billion dollars per year for … many years. The great fusion power nirvana is still twenty years away … as it has been since the early 1960s.
There are several lessons here. Maybe the greatest is don’t count your chickens or your kilowatts until they’re hatched. The related wisdom is … that the little one and two percent real improvements in more oil from a well, or less waste heat up the chimney, or more efficiency in a chemical process are not exciting, but they are real.
The wonderful silver bullet may come, but small practical improvements pay the rent. Let us not sneer at minor improvements.
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