Over at a friend's house last night, we got to talking about some rather odd stuff. The talk turned to power generation - and I remarked that if I were to win the lottery (currently up to $171 million) I'd see about putting some of it to bankrolling Robert Bussard's Electrostatic Fusion concept. It's a blue-sky idea that showed some real promise, and it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the project were fed with a firehose instead of a garden hose. ($30 millon or so guaranteed over 5 years, instead of $2 million on an iffy basis.)
I do think we need to get off oil ASAP - but our current political systems are such that waiting for goverment to do it all (or even partially) is foolish. Just look at how long it's taken to get drilling started in ANWR - or building either new refineries or additional capacity in existing ones, despite the fact that for many years we've been faced with limitations in our distilling and refining chains and an increased dependence on imported oil.
Yeah, it's fine to gripe and pontificate about it in Congress, but have you noticed that there's never any movement on the issue? Apparently the problems aren't important enough to actually SOLVE, as long as some political use can be made of them. (And our politicians preferences must be taken into account, as the cancelled wind farm off Kennebunkport proves. NIMBY isn't just a theoretical concept - it's a very real problem...)
One thing OTPU (who was there) mentioned was that at the present time it's just about economically feasible to take coal and oil shale and convert it into heavy crude. The process is, unfortunately, energy intensive to a point where breakeven is quite difficult. So - why not use a pebble bed reactor/generator system to provide the electricity? There's companies ready to build them - but the current political situation again is iffy.
Part of the problem is that just as the internet enables the generation of self-assembling expert systems, the same occurs with self-assembling 'idiot' systems. You see a lot of it on the political side of things, where it doesn't matter what FACTS are, FEELINGS are much more important, and immediate reaction to and alleviation of those feelings is much more important than whether the action is proper, well-considered, and appropriate for both the short and long term.
One term that was bandied about was 'radioactivity'. To you or I (or anyone knowledgeable about the subject) it's pretty clear there are degrees of radioactivity. We're familiar enough with the subject to understand the concept of the half-life, that there's radioactive elements in darn near everything (including a granite countertop) and that it's the dose that does the damage.
But not everyone does. Radiation isn't a binary sort of thing, in that if there's any sort of radioactivity around you're gonna die a horrible death. You have to factor in the half-life of the material, and something with a half-life of four or five hours is a heck of a lot worse to have around than something with a half-life of 4.5x109 years.
However, it seems to some that half-life doesn't matter, and the longer the half-life the more proof there is that the stuff's deadly. There's degrees of radiation exposure, and what's considered safe in one circumstance would be considered dangerous in another.
Radiation and Nuclear Energy Interestingly, due to the substantial amounts of granite in their construction, many public buildings including Australia's Parliament House and New York Grand Central Station, would have some difficulty in getting a licence to operate if they were nuclear power stations.
At any rate - given a sufficient supply of electricity, the economies of scale for the liquification of coal and oil shale go WAY down. What effect, we wondered, would domestically produced diesel have at an after-tax price of about $1.50 a gallon? Consider that our transportation of goods is exceedingly dependent on trucks and trains and ships, all of which require massive amounts of diesel. Drop the fuel costs and what happens?
One thing that just struck me... drop the price the Saudis get per barrel to a half or a third of what they get now - and what happens in the ME? The ramifications are interesting indeed...
Another idea that was bandied about were MHD generators. They weren't ready for prime time in the '60's, but with their ability to burn even the dirtiest coal, perhaps they should be looked at again. One thing that OTPU mentioned last night was that apparently scrubber residues and byproducts from current power plants are of significant value. And I found this...
Clean Coal Technology Byproducts as Treatment Chemicals for Hazardous Wastes
In the fall of 1994 the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) embarked upon a two-phase program for the evaluation of the use of by-products from three advanced clean coal technologies, which have been installed recently at U.S. coal-fired utility and cogeneration plants, as treatment chemicals for metal-laden hazardous wastes. Treaters of metal-laden hazardous wastes generally use inexpensive chemical by-products, such as the calcium oxide manufactured in the production of acetylene from calcium carbide, to provide alkalinity for stabilizing metal ions which are mobile under the more acidic conditions present in the untreated wastes. They may also include a cementitious material, such as portland cement, to encapsulate small particles of concentrated hazardous species. By-products from advanced clean coal technologies, which are now being installed throughout the electric power sector, contain high levels of both alkalinity and pozzolanicity.
So... look at a three-way trade there. Use an MHD generator, burning dirty coal to power a cracking plant for coal an