Excellent rant!
On Apr 15, 2009, at 1:14 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I am sympathetic with the desire to eliminate "messy" forms of
energy production, storage, transmission and use.
England (esp. London) during the early Industrial Revolution
understood that Coal was dirty and should not be used in cities...
but they already had an appetite for it's utility and continued to
make themselves ill for a long time. Even today, the world
continues to use it.
Internal Combustion Engines seemed to be a great boon. Around
1905, Scientific American claimed a great victory for the automobile
in NY City, almost completely eliminating the messy, fly-attracting,
etc. "pollution" of horseshit. It took nearly 50 years for the
exhaust of automobiles to begin to become a bother, and another 50
(today) for it to become a global threat.
As I was leaving college in my mid twenties, I was quite
idealistic. I was a vegetarian. I drove a honda Civic that got 40+
mpg (@55mph). I looked at both LLNL and LANL as genuinely positive
places to work for many reasons... the Fusion Energy projects at
both labs (Magnetic Fusion Energy @ LLNL and Antares Laser Fusion @
LANL) seemed to promise (30 years ago) an unlimited supply of energy
to feed our unlimited (oops, did I say that?) appetite. 30 years
ago. It was on the tip of our scientific tongues 30 years ago.
And here we are. Maybe it is imminent.
In a few years, I could no longer buy a car that got 40+ mpg. I
would have thought it was an OPEC or Detroit conspiracy, but instead
I discovered that in our haste to improve fuel efficiency we had
tweaked out the emission of Nitrous Oxides... and to keep the air
safe to breathe, and reduce emissions to (mostly) C02 and H20, we
needed to give up a little fuel economy. Nobody knew that C02, for
all it's relative benign properties (we breathe it out with every
breath, plants suck it up like we suck up oxygen!), would become a
problem. Wait... *many* people knew! And only a few listened (I
wasn't one of them, I was still seeking the holy grail of "free
energy").
I observed Solar and Wind energy projects with great lust. Free
energy straight from the environment! Then the Eagles (and
probably much less "important" birds) started falling from the sky
as they flew into the blades unaware. The big solar farm in Yuma,
AZ proved the scalability of solar, but oops! it seems you needed to
have a "gradient" to produce power... a high grade (concentrated
solar energy) heat source was not enough... you had to have a high
grade medium for dumping the "waste" heat. In this case the
Colorado River... until they discovered that raising the
temperature of the water "a few degrees" completely destroyed the
habitat for the creatures living there... oops! It has been idle
(and dismantled?) since.
Fission Power has been a big player for decades, and an excuse for
naming the Department of Energy, not the Department of WMD. It is
a very high-grade, compact form of energy production. Too bad, the
best processes can also be used to yield weapons grade by-products.
Too bad, the low-grade "waste" can only be buried (if you can find
someone with a back yard they don't mind burying it in) for hundreds
of thousands of years, hoping for the best.
So here we are "wishing and hoping" for a "free lunch". Haven't
we had our free lunches already? And discovered they all have a
price?
If there is anything in the current round of "energy solutions" that
I am hopeful about, it is "distributed energy". The more we can
become responsible (and aware) of the energy we consume, by having
to accept the consequences of producing it, the more likely we are
to be thoughtful about how wasteful we are. Maybe.
Some of us became more responsible after the "recycle craze" because
we saw how many bottles and cans we generated each week. Others of
us patted ourselves on the back for how "green" we were and consumed
twice as much! After all, we were being responsible for our
"waste" by "recycling", never realizing that most of the glass and
paper and steel was a loss financially (and maybe energy-wise too)
to recycle... only Aluminum was a significant net-gain. Meanwhile
we all felt pretty smug with our little blue or green containers at
the curbside.
If we burn firewood, we breathe our own smoke and watch our own
woodlots/forests deplete. If we dam our own river, we notice the
loss of habitat downstream, and have to negotiate with our neighbors
for the meager output of the hydroelectric plant (see Jemez Springs
pre-WWII). If we put up a windmill in our backyard, we have to
listen to it clatter in the high winds and climb up and oil it now
and again, replace a blade or a bearing maybe. And do without
power on the still days. If we accept GE's "mini-nuke" into our
backyard, we have to explain to our children when they inherit the
house from us why they will need to spend their inheritance on
"waste disposal" or why it is no longer operating and there is a 10'
thick layer of concrete poured over/around it and the house is
outfitted with geiger counters.
You can say this is a fantasy... that we don't really notice these
things, and we destroy our own habitat and environment anyway. I
suspect you are right... but if we don't even see it when we live
amongst it... if it is the Amazon Rainforest, if it is the ozone at
the south pole, if it is the eddies of debris in the oceans, then we
have no chance of curbing our appetites. Let the chickens come home
to roost, maybe we will take it as a sign or portent.
But if we make up a high-tech, high-industry solution that we think
"someone else" should put in *their* back yard. That someone else
should finance and approve and make "work well", then I'm sad. I
don't think that will work out so well. It hasn't so far. We are
already complaining about the coal smoke coming from China, a half a
world away... did we think they (or was it Europe) didn't find *our*
pollution offensive when we were at our peak?
I hope Fusion researchers will continue to look for a "better way".
I hope Wind and Sun Farmers will seek ways to provide alternatives.
I hope Fission researchers will continue to look for "better
ways". But maybe we need to change something more fundamental...
I think I'll go drive to ABQ and back, in a 4x4 pickup truck, by
myself, on the same day, at 80 MPH. Gas is below $2.00 if you shop
carefully.
- Steve who Rants
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"To measure the abundance of positrons in cosmic rays, the team used
data from the instrument PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter
Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), which launched aboard a
Russian satellite in June 2006. Unlike previous antimatter-hunting
instruments, PAMELA can pinpoint not just the type of incoming
particle but also its energy."
WIRED Science
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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