beside the suffering and the incompetence and all the other things Katrina and Rita revealed, two things have become clear:
- providing energy for all the major industry nations based on fossil fuels will lead into disaster
- all the industry nations depend way to much on oil, and every disturbance in that market creates substantial economical damage
The only way out of this is nuclear energy.
yes, you got me right. nuclear energy. not the one we're using right now, though. I'm talking about nuclear fusion.
"Wait,", i hear you say, "that's not gonna work, at least we don't know how!".
Yeah, you're right. we don't know. The big question here is: WHY DO WE NOT KNOW?!
For those who don't know what i'm talking about: here is a short technical introduction into fusion
All the other alternative energy sources, especially the 'regenerative' ones (wind, water, solar energy) lack efficiency, they simply take up to much space. The maximum amount we can get out of a solar cell for instance is 100% of the solar energy on the place that cell occupies. and that will not be enough, we cannot face 10 or even 20% of the planet with solar cells, that's not practical.
Decreasing energy consumption might be a good idea as well, but that's a long process. And think a second about, for instance, china. after telling them for 50 years that the 'western' life style is the way to go, i think we finally convinced them. And that means, they will ask for a car, and a fridge, and a air condition and so on .. energy consumption will not decrease in the near future, it will increase dramatically.
Your government and the forces behind it have understood the problem partially, one might question the response to that challenge ('what country do i have to bomb to get the oil under control'), but at least they figured "oil is energy, energy will be short sooner or later, so lets get it under control and make some bucks".
Unfortunately, that's a short time strategy as well, because it will not take as long as most people hope before oil becomes short. Might be 20 years, might be 40 .. but it will come, and most of us will see that day. Coal will take a bit longer to be consumed .. but producing a fuel that drives cars and planes out of coal is tricky ..
So whats the response of the powerful nations to this challenge (beside buying some more stealth bombers)? Close to nothing. No concepts, no strategy, successfully ignoring the problem, pretending everything is under control.
But back to my thesis, why do i believe that fusion reactors are the only long term solution? Let's have a look at the arguments against fusion:
- We don't have the technology. Sure we don't. We didn't have the technology to fly to the moon either, did that prevent us from going there?
- Isn't it dangerous, that's a little sun, isn't it?! In fact it's less dangerous that a fission reactor, because there is not a big amount of 'fuel' in the reactor, but a constant feed into it, stop the feed, and the reactor will shut down that very millisecond. it's not possible to have something like a melting core (someone says Chernobyl?)
- It doesn't pay off, way to expensive. Of course it's expensive. One compares fossil fuel power plants with a already built infrastructure and a oil price going against zero with a real bleeding edge technology. Beside the fact that we still don't know how to construct a reactor that runs continuously and produces energy, lets look at the boundary conditions. We have a unlimited supply of Deuterium in the Oceans. Tritium might become a problem if we run out of Lithium, but we are not bound to the Deuterium-Tritium process in the long run. There will be no radioactive waste, at least not much (the reactor itself will definitely become radioactive, that is something we have to deal with), no production of carbon dioxide or anything else that influences climate .. looks like a rather clean energy to me. And the amount of energy we possible CAN get out of it will by some order of magnitudes higher than everything we have now. It's all a matter of the technology. And technology is something we can "produce", all it takes are some brilliant minds, time and money.
So why aren't the brightest heads of the planet on the problem, why do we not throw all the money we can afford on it? Because our economical system would collapse, at least it would take some serious hits. Oil is so important in today's economics, and there is such a tremendous amount of money to be made, nobody wants to change this status. Of course, there will come a time, when oil is gone, so we have to make sure we are the last that still have it and enough power to protect it. That's what conservatism is all about, keep things the way they are.
There is one big project right now, a combined effort of the US, Europe, China, Japan and some others, that's ITER. That will be the first fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes, about 60 years after the russians have built the first fusion reactor prototype, the first tokamak. It's in construction stage now and should be ready by the end of 2016, then the research can actually start. According to the ITER website they expect the first "commercial-size" fusion reactor not to be available before 2050. Aren't we lucky that we have all the time in the world, no need to hurry?!