At Bloomberg Tyler Cowen muses about how wonderful a world of “clean, cheap energy” would be:
Maybe nuclear fusion cannot be used to fly a jet plane, but perhaps it could be used to produce relatively clean hydrogen fuel, which could then be deployed in ways fusion could not. A chain reaction would occur, eventually bringing cheap, clean energy across the economy.
As an inveterate traveler, my first thought is that I would be able to get everywhere much more quickly. How about a supersonic or perhaps suborbital flight from Washington to Tokyo? A trip to Antarctica would no longer seem so daunting. Many remote places would be transformed, one hopes for the better.
One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice would become faster yet, but would trains on the Acela corridor?
Next in line: Desalinating water would become cheap and easy, enabling the transformation and terraforming of many landscapes. Nevada would boom, though a vigorous environmental debate might ensue: Just how many deserts should we keep around? Over time, Mali and the Middle East would become much greener.
How about heating and cooling? It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors, so Denmark in January and Dubai in August would no longer be so unbearable. It wouldn’t be too hard to melt snow or generate a cooling breeze.
Wages would also rise significantly. Not only would more goods and services be available, but the demand for labor would also skyrocket. If flying to Tokyo is easier, demand for pilots will be higher. Eventually, more flying would be automated. Robots would become far more plentiful, which would set off yet more second- and third-order effects.
Cheap energy would also make supercomputing more available, crypto more convenient, and nanotechnology more likely.
Over at his own blog, Tyler links to that piece. The comments there are mostly the typical bickering but there are a couple of good points made.
I agree with the commenters at Tyler’s place who are confident that practical small, modular nuclear fission reactors are more proximate that practical fusion. It should also be pointed out that the primary factors that make large nuclear fission facilities expensive and time-consuming to build are a) financial and b) regulatory. Look up “ALARA” (“as low as reasonably achievable”). The effective outcome of the highly subjective and constantly moving ALARA regime for regulating radiation emissions from nuclear power plants is to make it impossible for them ever to be cost-competitive with non-nuclear power generation.
Wind and solar power will never actually solve the carbon emissions problems their proponents claim for the simple reason that they are unsuitable for baseline power. They require almost entirely fossil-fuel backup power generation which always needs to be running. That’s why I say that although I think there are niches for wind and solar power, if you genuinely want a carbon-free future, you want nuclear power, whether fusion or fission.
At this point it looks highly likely that China and India will realize the future of “clean, cheap energy” before we will.
Colorado already shuts down a lot of its back up fossil fuel plants when wind conditions are good. Old article. They are doing even better now. When you have excess wind power generating hydrogen has been bandied about. Not sure where it goes.
Steve
“At this point it looks highly likely that China and India will realize the futuer of “clean, cheap energy†before we will.”
It is ironic. And France is well, well down the road.
Almost makes you think “clean, cheap energy” isn’t the real objective in the US, or the UN.
The nostalgic need to cling to windmills and solar may mean that this generation will need to pass away before energy nirvana can be possible.
“Aliens” not withstanding, the tokamak machine is a dead end:
W. D. Metz (1976), Science, vol. 192, p. 1320; vol. 193, p. 38.
W. E. Parkins (1978), Science, vol 199, p. 1403.
J. A. Krumhansl (1997), Physics Today, March, p. 15.
The first problem is that after 50 years of heavy investment no tokamak machine has achieved sustained power generation. In fact no tokamak machine has produced more power than it has received.
More importantly is the cost. The engineering analyses cited above indicate that the electricity from a successful tokamak would cost 10 times as much as that from a fission reactor. That estimate was from a period when fission reactor power was much more expensive than that from any other source. There’s no reason to believe that fusion power will ever be cheap.
There is also an issue with radioactive waste. Neutrons escaping magnetic containment will activate trace elements in the structural steel, producing a low level radioactive waste. They will also cause embrittlement.
That problem is nowhere near as big as the high level radioactive wastes from fission reactors, but it still needs careful disposal and containment, like radioactive medical wastes.
People keep proposing alternatives to the tokamak, but none of them has shown any promise.
If you take AGW seriously (I don’t), then the only alternative is nuclear fission. For full decarbonization, we need to be operating about 1,000 1,100-MW reactors. Small modular reactors won’t do because of the high cost of their power (economies of scale bites again).
We also need to triple (quadruple?) the capacity of our electrical transmission networks all the way from the power stations to individual homes.
It is pretty clear that the deluded ideologues who control this country will go down the renewables road to disaster, meaning energy shortages, deindustrialization, reduction in agricultural production, true poverty for everyone, greatly increased death rates (especially during extreme cold weather), and serfdom for the masses (you and me).
Enough rain for one day. Here in north-central Ohio we got ½ in snow Sunday and another ⅛ to ¼ last night. Just a few patches left. Cold as Hell.