An "Earthquake" At The IEA

I don't like writing about oil much, but this amounts to the IEA hitting the panic button. Years too late, but ...

LONDON: The rapidly growing appetite for fossil fuels in China and India is likely to help keep oil prices high for the foreseeable future - threatening a global economic slowdown, a top energy expert said Wednesday.

The unusually stark warning by Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, about the impact of Asia's emerging giants comes as the agency prepares to issue its influential annual report next week, which will focus on China and India.

In preparing the report, Birol said he had experienced "an earthquake" in his thinking.

"China plus India are going to dominate growth in the oil markets," Birol said during an interview at an oil industry conference. During the past 18 months, he noted, more than two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand came from China and India alone.

Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia.

Partly as a result, he added, the annual report would predict that oil prices, now at about $93 a barrel, could remain at levels much higher than thought possible in the past. This, he said, heightened the risk of a serious global economic slowdown.

"We may see very high prices that will come to a level where the wheels may fall off," Birol said. "I definitely believe that if prices stay at these levels, there will be a slowdown of the global economy."

Navy Funds EMC2 Efforts

Via Power And Control, the Navy is funding EMC2 Corp. to find out whether Bussard's claims about the WB-6 unit were correct, to the tune of $2M. The Defense News article's physics are a bit off, though:

Bussard received nearly $2 million under a U.S. Navy contract in August to continue work on an inertial electrostatic confinement reactor he had developed. The reactor uses magnetic fields to confine electrons, whose negative charge causes protons and Boron 11 atoms to fuse. The fusion sets off a chain of reactions that produces electricity.

The electrons actually get in the way of the process (see brehmsstrahlung radiation).

New (To Me) Blog: Energy From Thorium

Now on the sidebar.

What To Do With Those Neutrons? Part 2, Neutron Effects

Interesting citation here indicating that "[f]ew previous studies have shown measurable effects on the mechanical properties of HY-80 steel if irradiation levels are below 1x10¹⁷n/cm²." Nevertheless, it it would be useful to see what kind of radioactive changes the neutrons might induce in said steel. Using the wise-uranium.org calculator, for fast neutrons bombarding 1 kg stainless for a year, we get the following (slightly reformatted):

Neutron flux = 647.0e9  per cm2s
Irradiation = 1 a;  Delay = 0 h 
 
    Original      Reaction      Activation       Half-
    Nuclide                     & Decay (~>)     Life
                                Products

710.0 g Iron:
          Fe-54    (n,3n) ->           Fe-52    (8.275 h)
                                    ~> Mn-52m   (21.40 m)
                                    ~> Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,p)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-54    (n,t)  ->           Mn-52    (5.592 d)
          Fe-54    (n,A)  ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Fe-56    (n,2n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-56    (n,p)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)
          Fe-56    (n,t)  ->           Mn-54    (312.7 d)
          Fe-57    (n,3n) ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Fe-57    (n,p)  ->           Mn-57    (1.470 m)
          Fe-58    (n,t)  ->           Mn-56    (2.578 h)

190.0 g Chromium:
          Cr-50    (n,2n) ->           Cr-49    (42.09 m)
                                    ~> V-49     (330.0 d)
          Cr-50    (n,t)  ->           V-48     (15.97 d)
          Cr-52    (n,2n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-52    (n,p)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-53    (n,3n) ->           Cr-51    (27.70 d)
          Cr-54    (n,t)  ->           V-52     (3.750 m)
          Cr-54    (n,A)  ->           Ti-51    (5.750 m)

100.0 g Nickel:
          Ni-58    (n,2n) ->           Ni-57    (1.503 d)
                                    ~> Co-57    (270.9 d)
 
          Ni-58    (n,3n) ->           Ni-56    (6.099 d)
                                    ~> Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,p)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-58    (n,t)  ->           Co-56    (78.77 d)
          Ni-58    (n,A)  ->           Fe-55    (2.700 a)
          Ni-60    (n,2n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-60    (n,p)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-60    (n,t)  ->           Co-58    (70.81 d)
          Ni-61    (n,3n) ->           Ni-59    (75.00e3 a)
          Ni-61    (n,p)  ->           Co-61    (1.650 h)
          Ni-62    (n,t)  ->           Co-60    (5.271 a)
          Ni-62    (n,A)  ->           Fe-59    (44.64 d)
          Ni-64    (n,2n) ->           Ni-63    (100.1 a)

There's a fair number of short-lived isotopes there, which usually means you'll end up with a mess of radioactivity. I'm still working on calculating all the decay products.

A very cranky, opinionated look at this was on talk-polywell, but I missed it earlier.

Update 10/18: Back to our 1 GW reference case, this means radiated power from fast neutrons (just the ¹¹B + α reaction) ends up as

7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s * 2.7x10⁶ MeV/neutron * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV = 316 kW

M. Simon suggested that a 500 MW Polywell device would throw off 5 kW of neutrons. I'm not sure how he derives that figure, but I'll ask.

Robert Bussard Passes

Via Slashdot. Also at New Energy And Fuel and Power And Control. I'm speechless.

What To Do With Those Neutrons?

One problem bugging me about so-called aneutronic fusion is the large numbers of neutrons it actually would produce in practice. To illustrate this, let's go back to an earlier post I wrote about a hypothetical 1GW commercial fusion reactor. Remembering that 1 GW = 1 GJ/s

1 GJ/s / (8.6x10⁶ eV/reaction * 1.602x10^-19 J/eV) = 7.3x10²⁰ reactions/s

Per Wikipedia, 0.1% of all fusion reactions would end up creating a neutron anyway from the ¹¹B + α side reaction. (Update 10/17: This ends up being a 2.7 MeV neutron, well over the threshold of a fast neutron, at 1 MeV.) This means that 7.3x10¹⁷ neutrons/s will be generated from the most widely discussed "aneutronic" fuel out there! That's a simply enormous number. Contrast this with reported background radiation at 2,420m above sea level of 65±3 neutrons/cm²*h. (I'm still trying to come up with a neutron flux figure for a commercial fission reactor.) But assuming a completed ICF device is something like 3m (rounding up a bit) in approximate diameter, and that neutrons are sprayed uniformly (this may not be a good assumption), that means you now have to deal with

4*π*(3m)²*1x10⁴cm²/m²*7.3x10¹⁷n/s = 6.46x10¹¹ n/cm²*s

In a fission reactor, you can use regular water to moderate those neutrons. But what do you do with a fusion reactor?

Coming soon in part 2: how this will affect the parts of the fusor itself thanks to this neutron activation calculator.

Update 10/15: A much better nuclide decay calculator at BNL.gov. "Nuclear Wallet Cards Search" seems almost designed to be impenetrable to Google.

New Sidebar Links, And The Determinism Of Pessimism

Three new sidebar links (and some culling of older ones, which I didn't document): IEC Fusion Technology, itself an offshoot of Power And Control, which I linked to about a month ago; and Talk-Polywell, which mostly is a bunch of guys praying Robert Bussard is right and Todd Rider is wrong.

On this subject, FuturePundit recently ran a piece about the former chairman of Shell, Lord Oxburgh, admitting peak oil production will occur within the next 20 years. What was interesting was the ensuing comments section, and in particular, Paul Dietz' comments about Bussard's reactor:

It cannot prevent electron-ion interactions. Let me run you through the argument to illustrate the two horns of the dilemma.

Polywell has a putative central interaction region where the ions are energetic and are to undergo nuclear reactions. This interaction region CANNOT exclude electrons. If it did (assuming it even could), the space charge of the ions would limit the ion density to a low value, preventing anywhere close to practical (let alone the promised 100 MW!) power levels.

So, there are electrons in this region. There are two possibilities: the electrons have energies approaching those of the ions ('hot' electrons) or the electrons are significantly less energetic ('cold' electrons).

In the first case, bremsstrahlung power exceeds fusion power.

In the second case, the rate of energy transfer from the ions to the electrons greatly exceeds fusion power. This power would have to be recovered and reinjected with extremely high efficiency. Rider's thesis, IIRC, showed that if the electron temperature were half that of the ions, the recirculating power would exceed the fusion power by a couple of orders of magnitude.

These two cases overlap; in the intermediate energy case both occur.

Re-reading Todd Rider's doctoral thesis "Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium" (note to self: link off the Polywell Wikipedia page — the damn thing keeps moving), it seems a complex net of impossibilities. Want to use a magnetic trap to keep electrons away from the ions? Then you induce synchrotron radiation. And then there's the thermalization problem, which, as far as I can understand it, means the ions will need so much energy to keep them inside the device that, unless you're very very efficient about getting them back in, you'll lose them to the outside of the box before they have a chance to fuse.

Rider, of course, seems to have gone on to become a biomedical researcher, a choice maybe not surprising considering the hopelessness invested in his doctoral dissertation. Maybe he's right, but I do have to ask a hopefully useful question: what was the role of his thesis advisor was in drawing those conclusions? Overseeing Rider's project was Lawrence Lidsky, a long-time MIT fusion researcher who wrote a seminal 1983 paper entitled, "The Trouble With Fusion". Despairing of ever surmounting the engineering challenges, he gave up on fusion altogether, and one wonders just how much that colored Rider's research and paper.

Contradicting Rider: "Maxwell Don't Live Here" claims to have a bunch of answers to why IEC fusion could actually work, bolstered by some recent research at MIT.