Centerfield

Don't those Frenchies realize that we already have a massive fusion reactor they can use for free?

OK, we are having a little trouble with running the power lines....

Something like 40% of all vehicles in Brazil run on sugarcane alcohol, and almost all are flex vehicles... They began their program back in the 70's to wean themselves of foreign dependance. And at the time they were a military dictatorship!!

Sometimes, just a few times, but not always, capitalism bites.

Fusion would be the killer ap that would get us off of oil and all fossil fuels for good. I would like to see a Manhattan Project type of effort to discover a sustainable way to create fusion power. If we invested half of what we have spent securing our sources of oil on developing fusion power we’d probably have it by now.

I visited Princeton's fusion reactor a few months ago. They achieved a net few milliwatts at one point (not during my visit). For anyone who doesn't already know, they have to put massive amounts of energy into the reactor to create temperatures high enough to sustain the fusion reaction. Usually, what they put in is greater than what is put out by the reaction. Thus the less than successful search for cold fusion. Whether it's cold fusion or not, someday they'll make it work. We'll all probably be dead, but so what.

Jeff Beck live with Jan Hammer!!! Bitch's Brew!!! Anything from Zappa!!! You didn't like any of that stuff?

Define "like." Sometimes I can appreciate the effort, but my general sense is that such experimentation is audible evidence of the sometimes unbridgeable gap between theory and practice. Lots of times the theory just rocks, truly inspires, but in practice, the product is unbearable. And sometimes the creative indulgence overpowers the need to buckle down and make something really work. I agree with Einstein that genius is much more perspiration than inspiration.

Reminds me of Eastwood's film on Charlie Parker. It shows him getting rejected and his stuff not sounding very good. And then finally his practice makes the work sound fully formed. And then the audiences start to get it. My sesne is that much of the rock fusion stuff never reached a stage of being fully formed.

I've tried to like Zappa, really I have. Perhaps it requires more patience and a stronger attention span than god gave me.

American farmers routinely brewed up their own ethanol to run their farm vehicles, until Prohibition stopped them. After repeal, federal regulations on distilleries kept them from starting up again.

Antoher good reason not to lightly meddle with the Constitution.

St. Johns County in Florida is now brewing some type of combination of cooking oils and the like to fuel their county vehicles. Interesting concept that could be explored a little more. Just as long as the roads don't start smelling like fried chicken! (This is the South, after all.)

I heard a radio interview this morning with a guy who goes to restaurants and takes their used cooking oils to use as fuel to power his bio-diesel car. He said it does smell like food. He was from somewhere, I think, in WA state, certainly in the Pacific Northwest. According to him there are a lot of people out there driving on vegetable oil. There's a centrist angle to it as the greens and the farmers can get together on this one. He said they have intersting meetings with an odd mix of conservative and liberal people agreeing on something.

We have been pouring billions in to fusion for decades. It kind of like a budgetary black hole. Although most of the money goes to making a better H-bomb, it always seems to be a dead end for power production. One of the biggest problems is that even if you reach the break even point (as much energy comes out as you put in) the energy is not in a usable form. The only viable schemes I have seen involves harvesting neutrons with U238 plating on the reactor to make plutonium. Seem kind of like missing the whole point of fusion.

From all the research I have done there doesn't appear to be any truly viable renewable energy source. When you add up all the energy required to mine the uranium and grow the bio-mass your lucky if you break even.

Remember if it was cheap to enrich uranium everybody would have the bomb.

While bio-mass products like ethanol and biodiesel require a lot of farming, fertilizing and energy intensive processing to be usable. (to make biodiesel you use lye and methanol, not very environmentally friendly) I believe they are currently using natural gas to make ethanol from corn.

Brazil's advantage is that sugar cane is relatively easy to process and slash and burn rain forest farming requires no fertilizer. Plus their labor costs are low.

Sometimes you choices just suck.

I believe wind is the winner when all the loses are added up, but I havn't seen an definitive study on the the life cycle requirements and production energy on making a wind turbine.

Kind of reminds me of the history of salt production. It was the oil of its day.
There was a salt version of OPEC and it was considered a military asset. You couldn't go to war unless you had enough salt.

Your points are well taken. Only a no-free-lunch approach that compares "energy input used to produce" with resulting energy output makes sense, IMO.

Many of the experimental appraoches have yet to bear fruit when placed on the no-free-lunch energy scale. But don't you agree that this isn't a reason to give up?

I saw an interesting program on a project that was using photosynthesis to grow fuel from I think algae growing in suspended water tubes. I thought this was promising if only because it seemed to be addressing the "let's try to find a winner on that NFL balance scale" approach. Seems to make sense to me that an organized and refined approach that pushes on all the problems (does it burn clean, can it be grown and harvested easily? how hard is it to make into fuel?) might get us somewhere good.

I agree that we should pursue wind energy more.

And it's interesting to note that, so far, the forms of energy we are able to use divide into 2 categories...the essentially non-renewable ones based on a fixed internal (earthbound) supply (oil, nukes) and the ones like solar, wind, and bio, that rely on harvesting energy sent to us from the sun, ultimately. (Granted, oil energy came from the sun). Absent fusion of soime chemical breakthrough, it makes sense that we eventually run out of whatever we have a finite amount of. So we'd be well served to keep finding better ways to capture the suns energy. At least until we can get that mining colony on Mars up and running.

A lot of new technology has promise, and in the end we have no choice but to keep looking. Current food production is very energy (oil) intensive. If we go back to horse power (the four legged kind) there is going to be a lot of hungry people.

At the same time my guesstimate is that we will have to do with less. Not the kind of message Americans like to here. Even if we could collect solar power with 100% efficiency, could the mega cities function on the solar power that falls on their footprint? And that's not even counting food production.

An interesting side note about solar. A lot of the solar panels use discarded silicon wafers from the microchip industry. If a silicon disk fails to meet microchip QA it may end up in a solar panel. The process for refining silicon into usable wafers is very energy intensive.

Thin film and multi-crystal solar panels use different methods but are less efficient at harvesting energy. (The solar panels on your calculator tend to be thin film)

And while we are on the topic of energy I just have to toss out this web site:
Otherpower.com

You can learn how to generate power from your Hamster, and how to carve a wind turbine from wood.

The big bottleneck isn't energy in to produce energy out. That's actually not such a big deal when using renewable energy in, especially perpetually renewable sources such as wind and solar, where the prime source is essentially free.

The big bottleneck is in producing transportable energy from non-transportable energy. Petroleum and other "burn" fuels are so useful and adopted because they're easily transportable. Electric energy is not. Internal combustion engines require an easily trasnsportable fuel that is reasonably stable. Electrical engines require batteries efficient enough and light enough to be usable.

All this talk of alternative fuels and no one mentioned the most obvious: Hydrogen.

BMW already has a set of cars that run on Hydrogen. GM is developing a hydrogen powered car. A Highschool built a car as a class project that you pour water into and it makes its own hydrogen to run on. Hydrogen is the viable alternative.

The only problem is that it's too easy to make, just evaporate some water. Who's gonna profit off of that?

Actually hydrogen is usually manufactured from natural gas. Splitting water by electrolysis is very energy intensive. Also hydrogen is hard to store, hard to transport and has a low energy density.

Batteries are a very weak link in the use of alternate power systems. However, grid-tie systems get around this by not using them. A "true sine wave" inverter synchronizes itself with the power grid and feeds energy directly. The power grid is used as the battery. When you have surplus energy it goes out to the grid, when you need more than you are making you draw from the grid.

Here is a new technology that shows promise in the storage and transport of energy.

It uses zinc oxide.

Yeah, that's the problem with hydrogen. Even if we have enough front-end energy to convert out a lot of it (seaside nuclear plant time!) it's not easy to work with. Those darn teeny molecules are slippery little suckers.