Yes, another news flash: Petroleum today closed at above $129/barrel, again, a new record high. This nightmare is becoming all too real. Well, bear with me on Black Energy, for next week I will switch to Green Energy.
Future of Nuclear Energy
In 2005, France was selected over Japan as the site for the next major international experimental fusion reactor. With part of this fund, Japan will be upgrading their JT-60 tokamak to superconducting operation. Greenpeace protested.
The $13 billion project is the most expensive international science effort ever to be launched. The 500 megawatt magnetic confinement reactor (remember, there are two kinds: magnetic confinement/torus/tokamak and inertial confinement laser) will be located near Marseille at Cadarache, and is projected to sustain plasmas to demonstrate fusion in 2016. It is reported that just the deuterium in Lake Geneva provides sufficient fuel to meet global energy needs for several thousand years. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Project, actually formed in 1985 during the Cold War, announced its agreement in Moscow in 2005, and includes the U.S. and China as partners. Construction will take a decade, cost $6 billion and produce 10,000 jobs. Much of the remaining $7 billion will be for associated R&D and the group will be chaired by Japan. If successful, a demonstration plant will be built in the 2030’s, with the first commercial fusion plant expected in mid-century. Not to be totally left out, though, China took only five years and spent $37 million to build a superconducting tokamak, with India ($45 million) and South Korea ($330 million) not far behind on theirs.
There is an $8 billion project, called the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operations in Geneva by 2008. This is a particle accelerator nearing completion at the French-Swiss border, five miles across and 300 feet underground. The expectation is that the beams of proton will attain 99.999999% the speed of light and set the stage for the next new theory to merge quantum theory and relativity. This experiment shifts high-energy physics, for the first time, away from the United States, so we are, with some futility, trying to develop the International Linear Collider, an even bigger particle accelerator, for $12 billion. Remember, these projects only provide more information, and, as we will later learn, the annual U.S. Department of Energy renewable energy budget to kick our addiction to oil, is less than $1 billion/year.
All this super physics harkens me back to the Superconducting Supercollider, another particle accelerator, which took ten years of planning and mobilization to the point where tunneling and excavations were nearly complete and a laboratory staff of 2,000 employees were assembled in Texas…when it was summarily cancelled in 1993, because at more than $8 billion, Congress deemed it to be too expensive. Mainly, we had won the Cold War, and it wasn’t necessary anymore to show how terrific a country we were, plus, two Democrats, President Bill Clinton and Texas Governor Ann Richards, had no desire to uphold the legacy of the previous Republican administrations. This is yet another example of how politics can change priorities, sometimes for the good.
Finally, cold fusion. What is the difference between conventional hot and controversial cold fusion? Wired Magazine, perhaps, said it best, comparing the four stories high 300 million degrees Celsius, Joint European Torus (JET) fusion power experiment, costing a billion dollars, located near Oxford, England—with the $50,000 room temperature fusion laboratory of Edmund Storms in Santa Fe, Mexico. Size and cost! Storms maintains an international cold fusion data base (http://home.netcom.com/~storms2/). Oh, maybe there will never be such a thing as cold fusion. But we don’t know for sure, yet, and I, frankly, think it will be re-invented again, and soon. I might further add that I consider fusion, hot and cold, to be white energy.
In 2005, France was selected over Japan as the site for the next major international experimental fusion reactor. With part of this fund, Japan will be upgrading their JT-60 tokamak to superconducting operation. Greenpeace protested.
The $13 billion project is the most expensive international science effort ever to be launched. The 500 megawatt magnetic confinement reactor (remember, there are two kinds: magnetic confinement/torus/tokamak and inertial confinement laser) will be located near Marseille at Cadarache, and is projected to sustain plasmas to demonstrate fusion in 2016. It is reported that just the deuterium in Lake Geneva provides sufficient fuel to meet global energy needs for several thousand years. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Project, actually formed in 1985 during the Cold War, announced its agreement in Moscow in 2005, and includes the U.S. and China as partners. Construction will take a decade, cost $6 billion and produce 10,000 jobs. Much of the remaining $7 billion will be for associated R&D and the group will be chaired by Japan. If successful, a demonstration plant will be built in the 2030’s, with the first commercial fusion plant expected in mid-century. Not to be totally left out, though, China took only five years and spent $37 million to build a superconducting tokamak, with India ($45 million) and South Korea ($330 million) not far behind on theirs.
There is an $8 billion project, called the Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operations in Geneva by 2008. This is a particle accelerator nearing completion at the French-Swiss border, five miles across and 300 feet underground. The expectation is that the beams of proton will attain 99.999999% the speed of light and set the stage for the next new theory to merge quantum theory and relativity. This experiment shifts high-energy physics, for the first time, away from the United States, so we are, with some futility, trying to develop the International Linear Collider, an even bigger particle accelerator, for $12 billion. Remember, these projects only provide more information, and, as we will later learn, the annual U.S. Department of Energy renewable energy budget to kick our addiction to oil, is less than $1 billion/year.
All this super physics harkens me back to the Superconducting Supercollider, another particle accelerator, which took ten years of planning and mobilization to the point where tunneling and excavations were nearly complete and a laboratory staff of 2,000 employees were assembled in Texas…when it was summarily cancelled in 1993, because at more than $8 billion, Congress deemed it to be too expensive. Mainly, we had won the Cold War, and it wasn’t necessary anymore to show how terrific a country we were, plus, two Democrats, President Bill Clinton and Texas Governor Ann Richards, had no desire to uphold the legacy of the previous Republican administrations. This is yet another example of how politics can change priorities, sometimes for the good.
Finally, cold fusion. What is the difference between conventional hot and controversial cold fusion? Wired Magazine, perhaps, said it best, comparing the four stories high 300 million degrees Celsius, Joint European Torus (JET) fusion power experiment, costing a billion dollars, located near Oxford, England—with the $50,000 room temperature fusion laboratory of Edmund Storms in Santa Fe, Mexico. Size and cost! Storms maintains an international cold fusion data base (http://home.netcom.com/~storms2/). Oh, maybe there will never be such a thing as cold fusion. But we don’t know for sure, yet, and I, frankly, think it will be re-invented again, and soon. I might further add that I consider fusion, hot and cold, to be white energy.
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