On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 13:36:33 -0600, "Morris Dovey"
wrote:

J. Clarke wrote:
| On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:58:06 -0600, "Morris Dovey"
| wrote:
|
|| Prometheus wrote:
||| On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 07:28:00 -0600, "Morris Dovey"
||| wrote:
|||
|||| Ultimately, we'll need to move beyond fueled technologies
|||| altogether. The path from where we are to there appears to me to
|||| be bumpy and uphill - and our largest challenge appears to be
|||| that of preparing our offspring to make that journey and produce
|||| sound decisions en route. My biggest worry is that we're not
|||| meeting that challenge.
|||
||| I don't know that that is accurate- even with your projects, the
||| sun is used as fuel. Can't get something from nothing, but some
||| things are free, while others are not.
||
|| Yes, the sun consumes fuel - let's get past that. It consumes it's
|| fuel and will continue to do so no matter what. It was doing so
|| before humans appeared on the scene and will probably still be
|| doing so long after we're gone.
||
|| The practical difference is that the fuel cost of solar radiation
|| is nil; and that the supply is (for practical purposes)
|| inexhaustable. The energy delivered is limited to roughly a
|| kilowatt per square meter over half of the planet's surface at a
|| time.
|
| The fuel cost of fusion in a terrestrial power plant should also be
| nil or close to it. So why do you want to push solar instead of
| continuing to work on fusion?

You're being a bit free with your assumptions. Get in contact with
Greenough at PPPL and ask him who the person was with no project
connection who pushed him hardest for progress _NOW_ (starting in '76)
on Princeton's tokamak. If he hadn't a really good sense of humor (and
been a very gentle kind of person) I'd probably be missing teeth.

I asked what it'd take to expidite commercialization and was told that
it'd take on the order of a billion and a half (1976) dollars; and
that PU couldn't find it. /I/ certainly didn't have it; so all I could
do was beg the guys to work faster and smarter with what they did
have. When the first toroid was built, they invited me to stop by and
have a look see. (To imagine the magnetic pinch bottle and the
annhilation of atoms produced in an object that size inspired real
awe.)

I never saw the finished reactor. I understand it was assembled and
run at Tom's River for ten years or so before being dismantled. When I
saw that announcement I called one of the engineers and asked him to
say "Hi" to the guys I'd known and tell them that they'd dazzled the
hell out of me. BTW, there's a guy who worked on the project after I
left the east coast who lurks here on the wreck and can certainly
provide better info than I.

Fuel for the tokamak (if I understand it's operation properly) is
tritium (as in heavy heavy water) - not something one can order up in
bulk from any existing source. If you can supply the tritium and the
construction money, I think the guys with the real-world experience
(not to mention myself!) would probably be pretty happy to help make
it happen...

Uh, the Princeton Large Torus was an experiment. "Expediting
commercialization" was not feasible 30 years ago and if someone
knowledgeable gave you a number for it he was very likely trying to
get you to go away--there was not enough known then to produce a
commercial reactor and most of the scientists and engineers working on
the project _knew_ that not enough was known.

Currently the largest working fusion device other than weapons is JET
I believe, which has achieved theoretical breakeven. The next step,
for which something like 2.5 billion dollars has been committed, is
ITER, which should produce fusion energy at the level of 10 times
breakeven in the 2010-2015 time frame. Once it is running and if it
works as designed, then the next step would be to use that fusion
energy to generate electric power resulting in a self-sustaining
system--that would be in the 2030 time frame. After that a commercial
prototype would be developed in maybe the 2045 timeframe.

Attempting commercialization in 1976 could have swallowed the entire
US GDP with no result.

As for burning tritium, the D-T cycle is the easiest, so that's what
the development designs are working on. Once there are reactors
actually running in commercial service development to the point of
burning ordinary hydrogen should be possible.

The thing is, we don't need a new energy source now, today. Fission
will carry us for several hundred years, at which point commercial
fusion should be commonplace if the econuts don't find some way to
kill them.

|| We can expect that at some point, we'll have exhausted the
|| planetary supplies of petroleum, coal, natural gas, and uranium.
|
| And by that time we should have fusion reactors online.

Eh? They should be online _now_! We just have more "important" things
to spend the money on.

All the money in the world would not have them online now. Too much
research that depends on the results of other research that needs to
be done yet.

|| Long before
|| they're gone, their prices will increase to the level where
|| ordinary folks won't be able to afford to buy either the commodity
|| or the energy produced from it.
|
| And when that point is reached, then it will become economically
| viable to use some other source. But until that happens a crash
| program to go to some alternate energy source will _increase_ the
| cost to those consumers, not _decrease_ it.

Hmm. Other than the wild (but usually silent) enthusiasm for fusion to
which I just confessed, who's advocating a crash program to go to some
alternate energy source? Not I - nor has anyone else I've read here.

Then what, exactly, _are_ you on about?

|| I'm _not_ an advocate of converting everything to solar for the
|| simple reason that it isn't the best source of energy for all
|| applications. All energy sources have their own unique set of
|| advantages and disadvantages; and I've found it interesting to
|| search for applications and problems that match up with the
|| particular advantages and disadvantages of low-to-moderate
|| temperature (100F-1000F) solar heating.
||
|| What I'm doing has nothing intentional to do with global
|| warming/cooling. It has to do with finding more cost-effective
|| ways of doing things already being done with other technologies. I
|| see economic and social benefit in significantly reducing heating
|| costs, in pumping liquids, and providing refrigeration with simple
|| (few or no moving parts) devices and using freely available energy.
|
| Well, all of this is nice if you can make reliable equipment to do
| those things with operating and maintenance costs and initial
| purchase price low enough that the average person can afford them.
| But even if the lifecycle cost of a solar house is less than a
| conventional one, if the up front purchase price is twice as high
| then many people just plain can't dig up that much money at one go.
| The fuel cost is not the only cost.

Well then - by your criteria all this is pretty nice indeed. You may
surprised to learn that the up-front construction cost /can/ be
considerably lower. Whether or not that translates into a lower
_purchase_ price is a different matter entirely.

Huh? How does one build a solar house that is cheaper than a
conventional house?

The up-front purchase price for solar equipment is all over the place.
If you want to hammer /me/ on this one, you'd better look up panel
prices at my web site and do some comparisons with similar products
from elsewhere. This isn't a subject I feel I should be discussing in
a newsgroup (but I'm tempted.)

"Solar equipment"? A proper solar house doesn't use "solar
equipment", it uses design.

I'm not sure how too say this as gently as I'd like; but your comments
indicate that you have considerable catch-up reading to do.

Coming from someone who thinks that fusion could have been
commercialized in 1976 for a couple of billion dollars, that's
actually humorous.