Dispairing Of Fusion, Building ITER Anyway

New Scientist excerpts a paper written by the late William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which claims that fusion is 50 years away, and always will be.

"The history of this dream is as discouraging as it is expensive," wrote William Parkins, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the second world war, who later became the chief scientist at US engineering firm Rockwell International.

Sadly, Parkins passed away while his lengthy paper, which makes its case on engineering grounds, was being edited. But Donald Kennedy, Science's editor considered the paper important enough to run the piece posthumously, in a condensed form, and to stand behind its conclusions personally.

...

​​​​Advocates of the technology insist it is too soon to give up, and that great progress has been made. "I was less convinced 30 years ago [that fusion could become practical] but we have made incredible progress," Miklos Porkolab, director of the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told New Scientist. "The science is going to work," he said, "and the rest is economics."

It's a good thing that the ITER folks haven't been paying attention (or maybe they should), because they've finally green-lighted the Cadarache, France site. How long before the shovels get busy?

In perhaps related news, the Z-machine has produced temperatures in excess of two billion degrees Kelvin, and producing more energy in X-rays than was input in electrical power. The researchers are busy rechecking their calculations...

So Much For That Collapse

LiveScience has the scoop on a non-Jered Diamond version of the end of Easter Island, something that JD at Peak Oil Debunked got to earlier in the day. Apparently, Easter Island didn't so much collapse as never get there: the population wasn't all that big to begin with, so by the time Europeans arrived, there wasn't much to decline.

"The collapse was really a function of European disease being introduced," Lipo said. "The story that's been told about these populations going crazy and creating their own demise may just be simply an artifact of [Christian] missionaries telling stories."

You can be sure Diamond will continue to get lots of speaking engagements and book advances, though...

Californium, Here He Comes: Taleyarkhan Investigated

Thanks to John Atkinson for passing along this New York Times story that Rusi Taleyarkhan is being investigated by Purdue University for "extremely serious" concerns about his research. In particular, Brian Naranjo, a UCLA grad student, has concluded that the reports of fusion look suspiciously like the decay products of Californium:

Instead, Mr. Naranjo said that the pattern of particles seen in the experiment much more closely matched that given off by californium, a radioactive element that is used in Dr. Taleyarkhan's laboratory. With $350,000 from the Defense Department, Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at U.C.L.A. and the thesis adviser to Mr. Naranjo, has tried to build a replica of Dr. Taleyarkhan's apparatus and has not seen any signs of fusion.

Dr. Putterman said he told Dr. Taleyarkhan of the calculations last week on a visit to Purdue. "He didn't have any clear answers," Dr. Putterman said. "From my perspective, his answers were not satisfactory."

Californium is present in Dr. Taleyarkhan's laboratory, stored in a closet about 15 feet from the experiment — close enough to generate the results reported in Dr. Taleyarkhan's paper if it had been stored improperly.

Update 3/8: Nature has more on this, including the actual paper (PDF) on Naranjo's UCLA website. That publication has another couple of articles on the topic, including "Is Bubble Fusion Simply Hot Air?":

In late 2003, [Purdue University factulty member Lefteri] Tsoukalas managed to lure Taleyarkhan away from his position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and in the spring of 2004 Taleyarkhan arrived full-time at Purdue. By this time, the team had completed several experimental runs, but had not seen any evidence for bubble fusion.

Once Taleyarkhan had arrived, lab members became increasingly concerned by his actions. Jevremovic says that he would sometimes examine the equipment and claim that it was producing positive results, referring to an oscilloscope that he had. She says that she was uncertain about how the oscilloscope fitted into the experiment so she asked him for the raw data, but never received any. "He said: 'Look, there's a peak', but there was nothing to see," she says. "I started questioning it."

It gets worse: earlier claims that others had reproduced his earlier results appear to have been published in a non-refereed journal, a special issue of Nuclear Engineering and Design that was edited by Taleyarkhan himself. Tsoukalas, who had been unable to reproduce Taleyarkhan's results but declined to publish his findings at Taleyarkhan's request, is now pressing forward with their release in Nuclear Technology. Taleyarkhan also removed lab equipment without which it was "very difficult to triple-check our results", according to Tsoukalas.

Finally, Nature has a summary article, whose concluding paragraph reads,

And the US Department of Energy, for whom Taleyarkhan was working when he first reported his claims, has abandoned its patent application relating to bubble fusion, after the patent office said it would throw it out last year (see 'A sound investment?'). .

Taken together, the overall message from many people close to this work is that there is no longer any hope that this line of publications will yield a viable fusion energy source. For some this is almost liberating: those sticking with bubble fusion are freer than ever to explore other approaches to it, or to try other kinds of studies on acoustic chambers and the behaviour of collapsing bubbles. For others it is now the end of bubble fusion. There are other kinds of science to be done.

Japanese Researchers Make Gasoline From Cattle Dung

Moo:

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted 1.4 milliliters (0.042 ounces) of gasoline from every 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.

"The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said.

About 500,000 metric tons (551,155 U.S. tons) of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.

What A Difference Four Months Makes

In which JD catches Matt Simmons retracting the principle selling point of Twilight In The Desert. Yow.

Why We Don't Want A Federal Energy Policy

Mainly because it generates insider pork, like this mega-tax-credit for synfuel producers:

Buried in the huge budget-reconciliation bill, on which House and Senate conferees are putting the final touches right now, are a few paragraphs that accomplish an extraordinary feat. They roll back the price of a barrel of crude oil to what it sold for two years ago. They create this pretend price for the benefit of a small group of the politically well connected. You still won't be able to buy gasoline for $1.73 per gal. as you did then, instead of today's $2.28. You still won't be able to buy home heating oil for $1.60 per gal., in place of today's $2.39. But a select group of investors and companies will walk away with billions of dollars in tax subsidies, not from oil but from the marketing of a dubious concoction of synthetic fuel produced from coal and dependent on government tax credits tied to the price of oil.

From 2003 through 2005, TIME estimates, the synfuel industry raked in $9 billion in tax credits. That means the lucky few collectively cut their tax bills by that amount, which would be enough to cover a year's worth of federal taxes for 20 million Americans who make less than $20,000 a year and pay income taxes. How important is the tax credit to synfuel producers? In its latest annual report, Headwaters Inc., a Utah-based purveyor of synfuel processes and substances, says flatly, "Headwaters does not believe that production of synthetic fuel will be profitable absent the tax credits."

The essence of the thing is this: federal synfuel programs were set with a target price of $50 a barrel as the minimum these operators needed in order to break even. For years, with actual crude prices well below that seemingly-far-away threshold, the synfuel producers got year after year of tax breaks. But with oil well over $50/barrel, and looking to stay that way indefinitely, the producers have started hammering Congress to raise the threshold.

The culprits appear to be Senators Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.). <Insert crack here about "the best government money can buy".>

George Olah On The Methanol Economy

Getting back to something I wrote about last year, George Olah talks about the methanol economy instead of the hydrogen economy:

TR: [...] methanol is a way of storing energy, not a source of energy like gasoline. Where will the energy come from?

GO: The beauty is we can take any source of energy. Whether it's from burning fossil fuels, from atomic plants, from wind, solar, or whatever. What we are saying is it makes a lot better sense, instead of trying to store and transport energy as very volatile hydrogen gas, to convert it into a convenient liquid. And there's a fringe benefit: you really mitigate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

TR: How do you make methanol?

GO: One approach is to produce methanol by converting still-existing huge reserves of natural gas, but in entirely different, new ways. Today, methanol is made exclusively from natural gas. Natural gas is incompletely burned, or converted, to synthesis gas, which can then be put together into methanol. Now we have developed ways to completely eliminate the use of synthesis gas.

The second approach involves carbon dioxide. We were co-inventors of the direct methanol fuel cell. This fuel cell uses methanol and produces CO2 and water. It occurred to us that maybe you could reverse the process. And, indeed, you can take carbon dioxide and water, and if you have electric power, you can chemically reduce it into methanol.

So the second leg of our methanol economy approach is to regenerate or recycle carbon dioxide initially from sources where it is present in high concentrations, like flue gases from a power plant burning natural gas. But eventually, and this won't come overnight, we could just take out carbon dioxide from air.

I really like this as an idea, simply because it means we're recycling the carbon dioxide whenever we burn fuel.

From Tar Sand To Crude

MIT Technology Review has a nifty photoessay on how Albertan tar sands eventually becomes crude oil.