What is the future of energy?

[nothke]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emerging_technologies#Energy

[nhnifong]

So about ITER, the awesome fusion reactor being built in france. Their website says that during peak operation, more than 1 GW of heat must be dissipated using cooling water. If all that heat is being produced, why do they have no plans to recover any of it with turbines?

[Tex_NL]

The goals for ITER are currently no to produce electricity. It is mainly a proof of concept. Only once it is proven sustainable fusion power is possible you can start thinking about siphoning off energy.

At the moment they are getting closer and closer to making it work. Imagine what you can do with over a gigawatt that is currently lost as heat.

[nhnifong]

Do they plan to retrofit ITER with turbines if it is successful or build a new reactor?

[LewisTherin]

Do they plan to retrofit ITER with turbines if it is successful or build a new reactor?

There are no plans to do so, the whole casing has been designed so that instruments and experiments can be fed in and out of the reactor to gather various bits of data. While that must include a mechanism for cooling (I'm not sure if part of the cooling loop is experimental as well), there's no research reason to then use that for power production, as the methods are very well established already. ITER's successor DEMO will basically be a bigger version with all the experimental gear stripped out in favour of maximising return energy (for example I think ITER only plans to use lithium blankets on a few wall segments as a proof of concept, presumably DEMO will aim for near 100% coverage to make best use of neutron capture for tritium breeding). So it's not until DEMO that you should expect to see power from a reactor dumped into the grid.

[Nuke]

i dont think a tokamak based reactors will work very well. i think a polywell type reactor would be more viable (and a lot cheaper to build than a tokamak). Bussard explained it better:

[rkman]

1 year from now: Fossil fuels 80%,

10 years from now: Fossil fuels 79%,

100 years from now: Fossil fuels 66%,

1000 years from now: Fossil fuels 15%,

10000 years from now: Fossil fuels 1%,

100000 years from now: Fossil fuels 0%,

The down slope of production from fossil fuel deposits is a lot steeper than that.

That's the reason why oil is now about 500% as costly as it was some 25 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_petroleum

Cantarell Field, Mexico

(one of the largest in the world)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field

1976: discovered

2003: 100% (2.1 million barrels per day peak production)

2012: ~25% (408,000 barrels per day)

I think the near- and medium-term future is for a combination of several 'green' energy production technologies, while the price of fossil fuels continues to rise and demand for it diminishes. Further into the future we might get fusion or some other fancy technology working.

Edited June 28, 2013 by rkman

[firerider521]

Antimatter's just going to take more energy than it produces. It's only good for storing energy(like in a rocket? ).

[Good_Apollo]

Complicated question. The future is very vague, who knows what technologies could develop. In the near future? In the the future we'll live to see or the future that may be slightly beyond our lifetimes?

For the foreseeable I see Solar, Fossil Fuels, Geothermal, Nuclear, Electrochemical (including fuel cells), and Fusion as being the dominant areas of potential power technologies in both our lifetimes and the next 2-3 generations. I don't think we'll see an end to Fossil Fuel dominance in our lifetime, however, I think at least by the second generation it will be gone either through depletion, necessity (environment or war) or the emergence of cheaper and more efficient technologies. I believe the most likely three candidates are nuclear, electrochemical, and fusion, as lasting possible replacements. We need more research to make them happen though.

Something will give though, and change will happen.

Edited June 29, 2013 by Good_Apollo

[JP_Parkly]

I really believe that Nuclear Fusion will be the power source of the future. Maybe within the next 10 years we will have achieved a sustained reaction, and within 20 years we will be using it to power countries. Anti-matter really does just seem like sci-fi (not the good, comes true after a while a la 'mobile communications device' we have seen). Anti-matter is exactly what it says on the tin, the opposite of matter. Considering that it takes immense amounts of energy to create AND store it, there is then the issue of controlling it, as it also destroys the matter it comes into contact with, hence being a very unreliable power source.

of course, these other sources like solar, tidal and wind WOULD be great if they were strong enough and reliable enough. The only use of the sun I can see is for solar-sails.

[jfx]

Dude.

Renewable Energy provided 22% of Germanys electrical and 11% of its total energy needs in 2012. And you talk about solar sails. ಠ_ಠ

There's a reason we pay 0.25€/kwh and it's not high voltage lines which are hand braided by blonde maids during full moons.

Oh and geothermal is pretty much dead in europe - it caused prety big earth quakes (5.x on Richter scale) below Basel and a village near me pretty much falls apart after test drills.

Edited June 29, 2013 by jfx