NationStates Jolt Archive

Lets ignore the logistics, science and finance needed to get to this stage, but assume that sometime in the near future, fusion power as a reliable source of energy is discovered. It's cheap, the process can produce hydrogen from water thus creating it's own fuel, and above all, not bank breakingly expensive to build. It is relatively inexpensive enough in terms of power to cost ratios that any medium sized company (NOT MULTINATIONAL) can afford the construction of a small scale (several hundred kilowatts?) reactor. Also, future development on it promises that eventually, reactors small enough to fit on large vehicles may be plausible.

Now here's the rub. The lab responsible for producing this breakthrough and the plans for working reactors is funded by a private group who announces that in 2 weeks time when the plans are finalized, those plans, and the required technical know-how needed to build on such a reactor, will be made fully public. That means no monopoly, no strangleholds on the market or anything of that sort. They say that the technology will be free for all, with the only caveat being that they take no responsibility for it's misuse.

Also, the discovery is well ahead of similar efforts, preventing the issue of conflicting patents and such.

Given this scenario, what happens? What would the reactions of energy companies be? Given the implications, would the host government try to confiscate the research (although in that case, the group has backups in secure locations)? What would the reaction of the global public be? How would OPEC take this news that they've suddenly become significantly less important.

Discuss.

Humans beings very quickly cannibalize the totality of earth's oceans as fuel for their hydrogen powered fusion reactors.


New Thought Experiement:

Use animal waste and methane as a cheap, renewable, and eminently available resource. Free to use, easy to find, cheap to distribute, not hard to collect.


And the real kicker? Commercial hydrgoen is almost always produced from methane anyway, so we would almost unilaterally be better off since we wouldn't have to waste money on a procedure to change anything away from its base form.

NT

- snip -

Given this scenario, what happens? What would the reactions of energy companies be? Given the implications, would the host government try to confiscate the research (although in that case, the group has backups in secure locations)? What would the reaction of the global public be? How would OPEC take this news that they've suddenly become significantly less important.

Discuss.

1. The energy companies, desperate to salvage what they have, race to either build the first fusion plants and get them on the power grid. In theory, unless another group could come up with the money and the interest to build plants of their own (namely a government), they succede. They then have control of the market. On the positive side, they have to be much more careful with how they play with prices (since there will be no "Price per barrel variation" like oil has). On the down side, they remain monopolistic in nature. If governments choose to neither contract out the position, nor simply allow someone to fill the job for them, energy prices dive.

2. It seems unpractical to attempt to control said information. Given both the rate at which information can be sent, and the number of times it can be quickly fowarded to a milion more adresses, controlling this data would be next to impossible. That said, if the military capability of said technology was sufficient, almost any nation would make a futile attempt to clamp down on it.

3. The global public would, as a whole, be elated by the change. The clean nature of the energy would be a benefit to most environmentalists, the low cost would make everyone's pocketbook happier, and the sense of advancement would galvanize people into new and different investments in the tech market. There would be some distaste at the nature of the disclosure, as many business-people would see it as scientists attempting to undermine the very capitalistic nature of the patent system, but it would be muted in market enthusiasm.

4. OPEC would decay in short order as more infrastructure was built. As oil-rich countries began to lose their primary export, markets would collapse in most of them. The governments of Saudi Arabia, Venezuala, and Iran would fall within weeks of the oil crash. The effect would effectively gut the power-base of Al Quaida and lower the number of effective terrorist groups operating out of the middle east. However, the region would become more explosive as poorly-contained tensions left over from the colonial era were finally let loose. The political landscape would change greatly, and it is not unlikely that independant Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurdish states would replace Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and a small portion of Turkey.

5. As with all energy revolutions, there would also be an "industial" revolution which would revolutionize technology. Along with it would come an economic upswing (mostly based on optimistic investment and more available cash as people no longer had to pay an arm and a leg for gas). This bubble could last anywhere from 5 to 25 years.

6. The current ruling powers in most democratic nations would be reelected. Without the pressure of rising gas prices pressing at leader's heads, their popularity would rise sharply. Short of totally fucking up on the issue, Labor, Republicans, and all of their ilk would be reelected.

Wow... that was fun.

Humans beings very quickly cannibalize the totality of earth's oceans as fuel for their hydrogen powered fusion reactors.


New Thought Experiement:

Use animal waste and methane as a cheap, renewable, and eminently available resource. Free to use, easy to find, cheap to distribute, not hard to collect.


And the real kicker? Commercial hydrgoen is almost always produced from methane anyway, so we would almost unilaterally be better off since we wouldn't have to waste money on a procedure to change anything away from its base form.

NT

Until we suddenly have an ecological disaster from a worldwide environmental shortage of animal waste. Renewable energy is BS. Any energy which comes from this earth will impact upon it in some way. The amount of energy we require simply cannot be taken from the earth without some kind of ecological ripple effect. If we put up solar power panels all over the deserts of the world, the global temperature will drop, possibly also affecting natural convection currents. If you put up wind farms then there will be no wind. Tidal energy messes with the tides in a big way and screws with all surrounding wildlife. Geothermal cools the temperature of the Earths core (god knows what that could do to our orbit of the sun :eek: ) My point is there is no such thing as renwable energy from this planet, it's just too damn fine tuned. If we want renewable energy, we need to get it from somewhere where the consequences are of little import, like space, or mars. Apparrently scientists suspect there are large deposits of fossil fuels beneath the surface of the moon (Don't ask me how, a aerospace engineer was telling me about it), however, mining this would not be smart (Imagine the moon losing orbit!). So yeah space is it.

Renewable energy isn't BS; its just that some things have too high of a cost for the amount of energy we require.


You're right that the full of amount of power we use can't come from anyone source or even a few sources without causing major ecological disaster (or possible ones).


I'd love to get my hands on the moon from a resource perspective. The hydrogen in its soil would be delicious. And tossing rocks back to earth would be easy.


In the long run you are right, space is where we must go. How about we setup large solar collectors in stationary positions just above the earth's revolutionary path and we siphon energy collected from these solar panels. Wouldn't interfere with the earth's eco system, and the sun beams out just gobs of energy that goes off into space with no other purpose, so why not use it?

NT

petroleum companies starts investing in the new energy and as the world continues with its transition they would continue selling oil at even higher prices. Then with the increase of cheap energy they would start getting cash from their new investments and at the same time lower the oil prices to match. Quite simple, since they have greater capital normal companies couldnt match their compettiton, they can sell new energy cheaper than it costs until competition dies. Then increase prices again.

Energy companies enter the industry to diversify away from the increasingly unprofitable oil and gas sector and become suppliers of hydrogen products to the utilities and individual consumers.

Oil and gas services enter the hydrogen production industry and are involved in constructing infrastructure and facilities for the hydrogen producers. The companies diversify and react to the trend, and those that don't will go out of business or be bought. New companies enter to supply small-scale power systems while larger corporations are involved in the larger-scale sectors of the industry.

The economy changes for the better, and the fossil age begins to dwindle towards total obsolesence. By and large, it would greatly increase available energy, reduce costs and pollution, and increase competition in the energy sector. A grand slam by any measure.

http://fire.pppl.gov/fesac_dp_mtf_wurden.pdf

Magnetized target fusion is likely to succeed before any other effort.

It can also be scaled down to something that can fit in a typical bedroom.

1) The government seizes as much of the info as they can, and tries to supress it. Additionally, massive amounts of regulatory laws are pushed through immediately to try and control the industry.

2) Before the technology can leak out and before it can be developed for small business use or transportation, oil companies and OPEC raise their prices drastically. So much so that the rising cost of transportation spikes so high that many people in the lower and middle classes cannot even afford to use their cars to go to work. The combination of higher gas prices and huge demands on public transportation throw the budgets of local municipalities so out of whack that immediate tax increases must be pushed through to attempt to stave off bankruptcy. The efforts fail and the entire economic system is thrown into chaos. All sectors are effected from food transport to health care.

3) During the ensuing depression, the new technology is slowly put into place and the regulatory issues are reworked to the advantage of the folks who used to own all the power because they controlled the oil. When the "power" struggle is finally worked out, society settles back into similar economic patterns, except instead of oil being the most valuable asset to control, perhaps food (for example) is. But it is controlled by the people who used to control oil. The new energy technology is perhaps useful for transforming deserts into more productive land, so OPEC, while changing focus, still retains strength.

4) Eventually, some new technological breakthrough ensures that food (or whatever the new controlling commodity is) can be produced to satisfy the needs of the whole world cheaper, faster and more efficiently and the cycle repeats.

I predict the World would be awesome.

OPEC would not become defunct, oil is still needed for the production of plastics and many artificial fibres.

Geothermal Energy Generation does not cool the planet, that is as ridiculous as saying that windmills reduce wind. Or that Solar Panels make it darker.

[...]The amount of energy we require simply cannot be taken from the earth without some kind of ecological ripple effect. If we put up solar power panels all over the deserts of the world, the global temperature will drop, possibly also affecting natural convection currents. If you put up wind farms then there will be no wind. Tidal energy messes with the tides in a big way and screws with all surrounding wildlife. Geothermal cools the temperature of the Earths core (god knows what that could do to our orbit of the sun :eek: )Well, I was going to point out that 'unlimited free energy' would have an impact, given that if we are producing energy from 'nowhere' (in reality, from places where energy would otherwise be tied up, whether within a 'few' atomic nuclei or captured from the 'wasted' solar energy that's barely missing the Earth by plating the moon with solar panels) then the planet's 'free energy' is increased. That sort of happens with fossil fuels, but with them the energy-density-per-mass means that the waste products (CO2, etc) are of more concerns.

But at 'energy densities' available for release at level of fission technology, and assuming virtually insignificant fuel costs and a negligable material wastes (both of these problems I'm assuming to be significantly solved given the nature of this thoght experiments, as well as containment in the event of accidents (eg. traffic accidents between two fission-powered cars, or a fisson-powered plane having a fairly 'normal' "controlled flight into terrain" crash, events which aren't going to stop happening)), it's quite possible that individuals and corporations will go into 'energy overdirve' with the cheap energy, generating heat either relatively directly (heating systems in cold climates) or as by-product (mechanical friction, air-conditioner 'heat addage' while cooling in warm climes, there'll be heat whatever you use the energy for).

It could be significant. Of course, you could always now set up energy-hungry processes to balance things out (drawing in and processing greenhouse gasses into more inert forms on massive scales?) but the situation could very easily be mishandled (even assuming there are no other problems with the whole setup, which I imagine there are).


Oh, and "with solar power panels all over the deserts of the world, the global temperature will drop"... I would say (without looking too depply into it) that temperatures would rise...After all, while the sand does absorb the sun's heat, it also reflects a lot. Solar panels absorb as much energy as possible (for maximum efficiency) and I would imagine that the whole world's deserts covered with solar panels would be comparably world-warming as the loss of the ice-caps is estimated to be (ice is a better reflector, but it's generally at an acute angle to the sun), which is part of the "positive feedback" mechanism a lot of people worry about (world gets warmer, ice-caps get smaller, less reflection of sun's energy, world gets warmer still).

Similarly with "putting up wind-farms stops the wind". There will always be wind. 'All' you are doing is intercepting energy, but the energy still remains, and perhaps (utterly massive) quantities of windfarms powering the world's population centres would alter things, but they'd merely shift (a proportion of) the wind energy into the heat being distributed (as above, with the hypothetical clean fuel-source that started this thread) from the settlements that use the energy (and some from all points along the power-trasmission lines, etc). Natural convection currents will be changed, but hardly to the degree (or predictable manner) you suggest.

Tidal-energy harnassing isn't going to stop the tides rushing round the world. Even giga-engineering[1] projects such as setting up trans-Altantic barrier (i.e. almost complete north-south barriers from pole to pole every few degrees of longitude) isn't going to stop them, though will admitedly cause many problems that would utterly dwarf those of tidally-capturing single esturies, ecologically damaging as these are in themselves.

As to how much we could cool the planet by tapping into geothermal energy... Well, the Earth already releases a lot of energy through natural volcanic action. If we're indeed absorbing enough energy from the mantle or below to prevent natural releases of energy from vulcanism and plate techtonics from occuring then we're once more at the "wow" stage, but only changing things, not significantly cooling the Earth.


Actually, there is one way we can cool the Earth. With enourmous amoutns of energy at our disposal, we could power a 'heat pump' of some kind taking energy up to space. Perhaps projecting it off-world (a reverse to the orbital solar-station projecting to Earth idea, still being wary of heating up the local atmospheric column with your EM radiation, but no way of "missing and frying a city", at least), perhaps conducting it (up a specially-tasked space-elevator or three to radiate it away from the space-side of the geostationary 'equator-station' as waste energy...


All fanciful ideas, but we're talking about fanciful situations already, so please excuse me for testing the limits... ;)


[1] I mean that as "bigger than the current 'mega-engineering' of island-building, and it did occur to me that "tera-engineering" might be mroe appropriate, but that while the association with 'terra-engineering' might be attractive, it could also be distractingly so... ;)

Actually, windmills DO reduce wind, and solar energy panels do reduce heat.

The way it works is that a large field full of windmills catch a breeze coming through, which turns their blades, which stops the breeze. The force of the wind is stopped by the blades of the windmill. It would take a LARGE amount of windmills to do more than a tiny little bit of change, but it does happen.

As to solar energy panels, imagine a desert covered with them. When the desert is NOT covered, the sunlight beats down on the light colored sand and is bounced back as heat. The heat rises, and the large concentration of heat affects weather patterns. If you covered the desert with solar panels, the light hits the panels and is transformed into electricity, not heat. A large enough spread of solar panels would significantly change the heat pattern of the air, which would impact weather patterns.

These are NOT good reasons to stop exploring the use of these technologies. For instance, a CITY that has been built in an area previously covered with trees generates a great deal of reflected heat, which has already changed weather patterns. Solar panels covering the buildings of the city could actually help to reverse that process. Likewise, the wind patterns of such a city have already been affected, and windmills on tops of buildings might take advantage of the updrafts and such that these buildings already create without doing further damage.

Any use of energy on the planet affects the planet, whether it is a renewable source or not. If we were to start using plant oil instead of petroleum we would be drawing resources out of the soil. Composting would help, but eventually the cycle of burning the oil on the whole is pumping more of those resources into the air than back into the soil.

Our options in the extreme long term really are to either go off planet for power sources, or stop using power. Or perhaps to move off this planet and go elsewhere, reducing the stay at home population while moving out into the universe. Not the stuff of science fiction for long, I think. After all, what is science fiction but a prod towards what we MIGHT do? Consider Star Trek of old, and think how much the old communicator (which was a dreamed up object back then) resembles your cell phone. Jules Verne sent a man to the moon long before most of the world even thought the idea might be possible. But I ramble...

The way it works is that a large field full of windmills catch a breeze coming through, which turns their blades, which stops the breeze. The force of the wind is stopped by the blades of the windmill. It would take a LARGE amount of windmills to do more than a tiny little bit of change, but it does happen.But not stop. And you can't butt them so close to each other in such numbers horizotnally and vertically to avoid 'leakage' around the sides, and even if you did, the air still passes 'through' and is capable of doing useful work (albeit having lost a miniscule amoutn of its energy) if it hit a second layer of turbines. (Compare with secondary and tertiary turbines able to leech away more and more (but still not all) of the energy coming from fuel-fired boilers in traditional/nuclear power stations, and that's with the steam-stream being confined to a tube.

As to solar energy panels, imagine a desert covered with them. When the desert is NOT covered, the sunlight beats down on the light colored sand and is bounced back as heat. The heat rises, and the large concentration of heat affects weather patterns. If you covered the desert with solar panels, the light hits the panels and is transformed into electricity, not heat. A large enough spread of solar panels would significantly change the heat pattern of the air, which would impact weather patterns.I don't doubt that heat pattersn would be affected, but unless I misremember my abosrbtion spectra of sand-style silicon oxide and misunderstand the strive towards conversion efficiency in photovoltaic silicon panels, energy will be absorbed more by the latter[1].

If you're very good at keeping the energy from going upwards, you still have the problem that the energy will be used for some electrical or mechanicl purpose elsewhere, and eventually there'll be energy output (as heat) equivalent to energy input (by light), even if in bits and pieces and away from the original area. I'd say that the world, overall, would gain energy if you paved the deserts with solar panels, and eventually that'd warm the atmosphere up, not cool it down, everything else being equal.

But all that's small-fry to the amount of environmental impact that the paving of the deserts (to such an extreme) would do... If it isn't the radical changing of the local environments[2], it's the ancillery effects[3]. But that's just an argument (or at least a warning) about such giga-scale engineering projects, not a reason to not look to 'normal' scale energy-supply replacement schemes, especially when considering the faults of the ones being replaced.

[1] You can go blind in a desert, as with arctic areas and other snow-covered ones, without eye protection of some kind, and while the infrared may be trapped by the atmosphere, the fact that deserts show up as lighter than (say) ocean or rainforest when seen from orbit shows that a lot of light it reflected away into space. Compare with a totally blacked-out 'photovoltaic desert'.
[2] Beneath the panels, you'd get cooler and mroe shaded environment, allowing fauna and flora to re-encroach, and if you do manage to somehow prevent radiated heat, you'd encourage rainfall again, which would mean the areas you paved as 'useless desert' are changed from a parched ecosystem to one less dry... Probably not a rainforest (the panels forming the traditional canopy, at least in miniature) but who knows what you might get. And what areas downwind of the traditional desert you start to deprive of already sparse rain...
[3] What's the impact of the silicon processing? Even assuming local processing of local sands saves on transportation effects.

Until we suddenly have an ecological disaster from a worldwide environmental shortage of animal waste. Renewable energy is BS. Any energy which comes from this earth will impact upon it in some way. The amount of energy we require simply cannot be taken from the earth without some kind of ecological ripple effect. If we put up solar power panels all over the deserts of the world, the global temperature will drop, possibly also affecting natural convection currents. If you put up wind farms then there will be no wind. Tidal energy messes with the tides in a big way and screws with all surrounding wildlife. Geothermal cools the temperature of the Earths core (god knows what that could do to our orbit of the sun :eek: ) My point is there is no such thing as renwable energy from this planet, it's just too damn fine tuned. If we want renewable energy, we need to get it from somewhere where the consequences are of little import, like space, or mars. Apparrently scientists suspect there are large deposits of fossil fuels beneath the surface of the moon (Don't ask me how, a aerospace engineer was telling me about it), however, mining this would not be smart (Imagine the moon losing orbit!). So yeah space is it.

The Earth recieves more solar power each half day than has been produced from all fossil fuels since the dawn of mankind. There is so much energy available on Earth that it would take an amount of energy consumption equal to thousands of times the amount we currently consume to even begin to approach ecological limits. By the time that is a possibility, we're going to be getting energy from space and will have expanded far beyond Earth.

1) The government seizes as much of the info as they can, and tries to supress it. Additionally, massive amounts of regulatory laws are pushed through immediately to try and control the industry.

All governments? Remember, the information is being spread on a worldwide basis and backups are being stored in multiple servers globally in secure locations. Direct attempts to suppress/regulate said information would be nearly futile unless you had worldwide backing.


2) Before the technology can leak out and before it can be developed for small business use or transportation, oil companies and OPEC raise their prices drastically.

Hmm, how much of an effect would this have in a 2 week timescale? Assuming that once the plans for reactors are released, construction can begin immediately if you have a suitable site and construction materials (non-exotic).

Also, how would non-OPEC oil nations deal with OPEC hikes? Venezuala for IIRC is not part of OPEC.

As for space exploration uses, well, presumably, you could use a fusion reaction to create reaction mass (plasmafied air) as a new engine type.