It's getting harder to block awareness that the world is facing an energy crisis that isn't going to solve itself (unless you're George W. Bush); unfortunately awareness is only the first step in dealing with it. The crisis transcends rising prices at the gas pump or geopolitics in the Middle East. A number of trends are coming together in a way that recalls "The Year of the Jackpot". Deeper understanding of just what the crisis is, is a prerequisite for making choices and developing effective solutions.
Supply is only one part of the problem. World oil supplies are maxing out even as growing economies and growing populations are pushing demand up. The decades-long trend of accelerating fossil fuel use which fills the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and drives climate change on a global level is another part of the problem. We can't keep using fossil fuels to meet energy needs if it also means wrecking the planet. Third, the nature of our economic and political systems is such that we can't keep things going as they are without vast supplies of energy. Too much social structure depends on the ability to keep the lights on, keep people driving, and buying stuff. (more)
The most critical part of the problem however is getting people to SEE there is a problem, agree on the nature of the problem, agree on a solution, and work cooperatively to solve it - especially when the solution is going to involve changes in the way things are. People hate change, especially when it involves personal sacrifice, inconvenience, and real pain. Or even if it doesn't.
The good news is, there may well be a Silver Bullet that can solve the energy crisis - or at least parts 1, 2, and 3. Tackling number 4 is going to be a bit more difficult.
Okay, what is a Silver Bullet? In this case it refers to a way to meet demands for energy while minimizing environmental and other costs. One of the frustrating things about implementing real solutions to the energy crisis is that there are multiple ways of attacking the problem, any combination of which could solve it, but figuring out just how to do it and pay for it is the major stumbling block. An ideal Silver Bullet would be one that is so superior to all the other solutions, it ipso facto becomes the default answer. It turns out there just might be one, and it's one that's coming in under the radar: nuclear power. Yeah, the "N" word - but not the one you're thinking of.
First a little background. Every nuclear reactor built to date runs on nuclear fission - the splitting of massive atoms in a controlled manner to produce heat to drive steam turbines which generate electrical power. A number of countries around the world use nuclear power reactors to provide a significant fraction of their energy. On the plus side, nuclear fission is an established technology, can provide power on demand, and produces no greenhouse gases at all.
On the minus side, fission reactors produce radiation and radioactive wastes which can be harmful for thousands of years. They are expensive to build and unforgiving to operate. If things go wrong, as at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, the results can be catastrophic. The fuel itself is scarce, environmentally challenging to mine, tricky to prepare for use, and inherently dangerous if not handled properly. Further, it can also be used to build nuclear weapons as well as run nuclear reactors.
For these and other reasons, nuclear power has been on the back burner (so to speak) for many years. That is changing though. The rising prices/shrinking supplies of oil coupled with the increasingly difficult to ignore consequences of greenhouse gases are reviving interest in nuclear power once again. There are new designs for reactors that will be inherently safer to operate. (Here, here, here.) But, that's not where the real promise lies.
There is another way to generate power with nuclear energy, but it uses a completely different process. It takes a lot of energy to hold a large atom together. Fission reactors are based on the fact that when massive atoms like uranium or plutonium break apart into smaller more stable atoms, energy is released (I'm simplifying greatly here.) But there's another way to get energy from nuclear reactions: FUSION.
Fusion works this way: when small atoms are squeezed together to make a larger atom, say two hydrogen atoms fused into a helium atom, it actually takes less energy to hold the helium atom together than was locked up in the two hydrogen atoms when they were separate. That left over energy is released by fusion. This is what makes the Sun and other stars shine - hydrogen atoms fusing into helium. (In a sense this means every alternative energy system that uses sunlight is effectively using nuclear power - if only second hand.)
The advantages of using fusion reactions to generate power are many. Again, no greenhouse gases are released. Fusion fuel is much more abundant than fission fuel (hydrogen versus uranium for example) and much safer to handle. It's not spontaneously trying to break apart, and can't be made into a bomb without tremendous difficulty. And, the nuclear reactions that lead to fusion don't have to produce all the kinds of radioactive leftovers you get when big atoms fission. (*Yes I know that's way oversimplifying - more later.)
So, why isn't fusion power the Silver Bullet we're all hoping for yet? Because it is much harder to get small atoms to fuse than it is to make big atoms fission when they're already inclined to do that all on their own. Scientists can produce fusion reactions now - but only by putting in more energy than they can get out. The goal is to make atoms fuse in sufficient quantities that the amount of energy released is greater than the amount of energy needed to get the reaction running in the first place.
They've been trying to crack the problem literally for decades, and they're not quite there yet. The best guess is that building a working fusion reactor will require billions of dollars and several more decades of research and development of machinery capable of dealing with temperatures in millions of degrees, radiation, and incredibly strong magnetic fields.
Or, something scaled up from what a bright high school student and a completely different approach can accomplish on a table top...
Stayed tuned for tomorrow's installment of The Earth, the Energy Crisis and the Silver Bullet,Part 2: It's Elementary.