What is the future of energy?

[Canopus]

If you can discovered a isotope of uranium or plutonium that is not radioactive and dangerous. Its clean and last forever. You have infinite Energy then.

Very Optimistic. Nothing lasts forever and there is no healthy radiation.

[Promii]

In the near future I think the ideal would be solar with a nuclear base for stability and for where solar isn't feasible. In the far future, if we can solve the energy transportation problem, orbital solar would be perfect. Superconducting cable running down a space elevator maybe?

[Ben Kerman]

If you can discovered a isotope of uranium or plutonium that is not radioactive and dangerous. Its clean and last forever. You have infinite Energy then.

Can you explain that? Unless i'm missing something very, very obvious about nuclear fission this is impossible.

[ZedNova]

Thorium reactors for public power. And hamster wheels for vehicles.

[Promii]

Can you explain that? Unless i'm missing something very, very obvious about nuclear fission this is impossible.

Yeah, if the isotope wasn't radioactive, you would have no fission. It's a bit like asking for non-flammable gasoline.

[PakledHostage]

Or maybe we could build a large scale one of these and mount a generator to the water wheel? It would certainly be impressive...

[Canopus]

Or maybe we could build a large scale one of these and mount a generator to the water wheel? It would certainly be impressive...

I honestly laughed at this

[Themohawkninja]

It will probably be fusion power. Really, really far into the future might mean antimatter or some other new found exotic energy generation.

[nhnifong]

Antimatter is a way of potentially storing energy, not a source. It's not like we can mine antimatter from the planet. It has to be created in a particle accelerator consuming massive amounts of energy. It's a very troublesome way of storing it anyways.

[Mr Shifty]

Most definitely fusion! Nuclear fusion is the only reliable, renewable and non polluting energy source currently within our level of technology.

We who work in fusion research like to say that fusion has been 50 years from commercial realization for 50 years. Perhaps if ITER is successful, there will be more funding and the research pace will pick up. But, fusion energy is within our grasp now in much the same way that space flight was within Jules Verne's grasp.

[RedDwarfIV]

India is working on Molten Salt Reactors if I remember correctly. Though most everyone else is working on fusion. As we use the last of our fossil fuels, we will see a decline in their use - though maybe not if that project being worked in to literally make petrol from air pulls it off. Solar generally doesn't have the energy saturation to work, same problem with wind, which is why I think Germany's decision to shut down its nuclear power plants [remember, Germany's plants were statistically the safest in the world] was silly. Nuclear suffers from political problems and had bad connotations [unjustified in modern times] in the public view. Whilst I'm pro-nuclear fission, I don't see it becoming more popular with the enviro-sheeple any time soon.

Nuclear fusion has the potential for very high energy saturation with no carbon emissions. It will probably continue to be used up until antimatter surpasses it as an energy storage means [think most powerful rechargable battery you can make]. There is someone who is working on making antimatter easier to work with by adding electrons to it or something that will make it inert to matter by balancing its charge or something.

[nhnifong]

We have enough uranium to last about 100 years, and enough fossil fuels to last about 100 years too. I think that should be sufficient time to master fusion.

[RedDwarfIV]

We have enough uranium to last about 100 years, and enough fossil fuels to last about 100 years too. I think that should be sufficient time to master fusion.

Good.

I know there are American firms working on this too, but apparently Air Fuel Synthesis, a British firm, has already suceeded in producing petrol from air.

A British firm has produced the first 'petrol from air', it emerged today - in a pioneering scientific breakthrough that could end mankind's reliance on declining fossil fuels.

Air Fuel Synthesis in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside, claims to have made five litres of petrol since August using a small refinery that synthesises the fuel from carbon dioxide and water vapour.

Experts have hailed the incredible breakthrough as a potential 'game-changer' in the battle against climate change and solution to the globe's escalating energy crisis.

Within two years the company hopes to have a commercial-scale plant capable of producing up to a ton of fuel a day.

This from 19th October 2012.

[nhnifong]

You left out

Although the process is still in the early developmental stages and needs to take electricity from the national grid to work, the company believes it will eventually be possible to use power from renewable sources such as wind farms or tidal barrages.

So they've replicated part of what corn can already do for us, but with the freedom to supply electricity from any source. Neato! Hydrocarbons are a dense way to store energy and quite valuable given today's infrastructure.

However, I think it's still crucial that we migrate away from cars and their hydrocarbon burning engines, even if we can make the fuel entirely from renewable sources.

They just pose too many other problems for modern cities and they are a needlessly wasteful way to get around.

[Tommygun]

Or maybe we could build a large scale one of these and mount a generator to the water wheel? It would certainly be impressive...

Well you do sort of get that with hydroelectric dams, you just have to wait a lot longer for the water to recycle back through evaporation and rain.

I think wind, solar and possibly thorium reactors for near future and I mean the next 100 years.

Fusion always seems 50 years away, so who knows about that.

[jfx]

We who work in fusion research like to say that fusion has been 50 years from commercial realization for 50 years. Perhaps if ITER is successful, there will be more funding and the research pace will pick up. But, fusion energy is within our grasp now in much the same way that space flight was within Jules Verne's grasp.

Nuclear fusion is far closer than Spaceflight was for Jules Verne. Experiments like JET have already delivered energy (even if for a very short time). The only remaining problem is scale - which will be solved by ITER. Once that is done the only thing needed is serious political backing (think: nuclear boom after the oil crisis).

(sorry, german) You can see how close experiments got to asustainable fusion reaction (dark grey area) over the years

Also I don't get the excitement about thorium reactors. They are a huge reddit circlejerk. But the working THTR in germany showed huge problems:

proliferation - highly enriched fuel, great for terrorists (Hi NSA).

corrosion - helium does not cause it of course but the impurities of the fuel elements attacked the steel parts in the cooling circuit.

And with the discussed liquid salt reactors you get a wealth of new problems. The principle is easy. But if you want to run a plant without incident for 50+ years they are an engineering NIGHTMARE.

Edited June 27, 2013 by jfx

[OdinYggd]

Making gasoline from air is not new technology- it's a polymerization process that has been around for quite some time.

Just up till now nobody had succeeded in doing it on a scale larger than a chemistry experiment.

Petrol is a highly viable solution for energy storage because of its high density and existing infrastructure as well as being widespread enough to be easily understood. It doesn't matter where the petrol comes from, I think it's going to stick around for a long time. At best it might be diluted to some degree with Ethanol.

Long term we need either a new generation of nuclear fission built using the lessons learned from the disasters we've had (an unfortunate improbability due to politics and the unpopularity of the technology) or a renissance in coal burning technology- coal can be very nearly as clean as any other fossil fuel with the correct handling in the furnace, and improved methods of burning it have resulted in a coal far more effective than the smoke belching stacks of the 19th century.

The only way we're going to avoid those two solutions is if nuclear fusion is solved or some radical new source of energy comes out. No renewable powerplant known to date has the energy density required to meet demand on a large scale.

[falofonos]

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_%28EROI%29

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6053

The figures for EROI change depending on the source but there are a lot of good reasons to believe that some energy sources are being subsidised purely to make people rich rather than to solve any problems.

Fusion may well provide some breathing room but it all comes down to whether we can actually extract net energy from the process , including the sourcing of He3, building the plants, dealing with any hazardous waste and so on.

[Kryten]

Helium-3 is not necessary for fusion power. All plausible designs right now work on tritium-deuterium fusion; deuterium can be refined from seawater rather easily, and tritium can be produced by bombarding lithium with the spare neutrons from the reactor.

[nhnifong]

Would it be possible to achieve positive net energy fusion with a sufficiently large budget today, or is the technology blocked by limitations in scientific understanding?

[Kryten]

Mostly money, but there's still a good bit of scientific and engineering knowledge missing. We've reached the point where we're already building a reactor we're confident will produce net power (ITER).

[nhnifong]

Man I just spent like 30 minutes reading about ITER What a cool project!

[Mr Shifty]

Nuclear fusion is far closer than Spaceflight was for Jules Verne. Experiments like JET have already delivered energy (even if for a very short time). The only remaining problem is scale - which will be solved by ITER. Once that is done the only thing needed is serious political backing.

I'm a simple engineer, not a scientist, but you see where it says DIII-D on that chart? I was just sitting in the control room of that facility today trying to troubleshoot a problem with one of our diagnostic lasers. You might be right that fusion is closer than we think. I get the sense from the scientists I work with that they see useful results from ITER being at least 15 years away. And ITER is still experimental; not close to commercial; not even power generating. We run experiments every day still trying to verify models for plasma containment, characteristics, and disruption. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on diagnostic systems that are designed to investigate a specific region of specific types of plasmas for a very particular chunk of time during the plasma shot. It's incremental science; we're at the point where the barriers left to cross are the slow, methodical, grinding ones that take lots of trial and error and time and money in order to advance the science by tiny degrees.

[m4v]

I don't see nuclear fusion replacing fossil fuels, it's being researched for decades and still a reactor that produces net energy does not exist. A power producing fusion reactor is probably the biggest engineering challenge of today and I feel that people getting hyped over it are being overly optimistic.

Solar (plus other renewable sources) and conventional fission energy are probably the most feasible sources of energy that can save our civilization from the chasm that is going to open below our feet when fossil fuels run out.

[tomf]

It has been a standard joke that in the 60's fusion power was 50 years away and it still is, but the joke is becoming less true. The time frames are beginning to get a little shorter and the goal that is being talked about is getting more advanced. The first electricity producing reactor is scheduled for 2033 with commercial reactors 40-50 years away. I don't doubt these will slip further but I think it will be in my life time.