Our Technology Future - Energy, Part One
The most salient issue of our future as it relates to technology has to be the creation, collection, storage, transmission, and use of energy. It informs, if not directs, everything we would hope to do in the future, the same as it has in our past. So is there any revolution out there?
This article was on MSN earlier in the week; http://news.msn.com/us/obama-takes-on-coal-with-first-ever-carbon-limits.
It has been a long, difficult slog in getting any movement on the use of carbon capture technology or many initiatives for the use of green technology. There are several reasons for that. First, its expensive enough that most individuals and more importantly companies want to spend the money on it, as suggested in the above article. Second, some interests, such as oil companies, have historically worked very hard to lobby against efforts to make green technology easier to access, or more affordable, or requirements of use. Finally, a lot of the technology already out there is either not fully developed or not fully understood.
But it has to happen. There is no way around the reality that there has to be a change and that we will need to make that change away from fossil fuels relatively quickly.
By many estimates the entire global supply of oil, every last drop, will only last between 100 and 150 more years. To put a little perspective on that, imagine a child born today. It is entirely possible that by the time they die of old age, or less morbidly by the time their grandchild is a teenager, there will have been an extraction of the last bit of oil available to be had from the ground.
That is a difficult concept for people to wrap their heads around. There is an unintended misconception in many people's minds that oil will just always be there, or even that like water or gold, we can juts start collecting it from asteroids or other planets, as though oil naturally manifests in outer space.
Of course, it doesn't. You won't see oil derricks on Mars or any other planet because there is no oil to be had there. Oil is a natural byproduct of the breakdown of the remains of dead creatures. Being that we haven't even found evidence of life anywhere else yet, hoping that there is oil out in the universe is a slim hope, much less oil that we could actually access or use.
So, even if you don't believe in global warming, the fact is that we are running out of oil fast. And the problems will start long before the last drop is gone. If you think there are too many wars over oil right now, wait until the cresting point where we are literally extracting as much oil as possible and the need further outstrips demand. How much we can produce domestically won't matter when even are allies are thirsty for oil and there isn't enough to go around. You'll be looking at the potential for chaos as nations vie to control their own little spigot for however much oil they can get. We need something else.
So back to the original question, what's out there?
Well, there's nuclear. Just saying it triggers a visceral reaction in most people. But nuclear is not in of itself a terrible idea. In fact, the most promising future tech, as noted in my past discussion on space travel, may well rely a great deal on nuclear power. Nuclear reactions power the universe. They are what keeps the sun burning. In effect that is the dream of nuclear physicists - creating a sun.
Or rather it's only a mini-sun. The sun releases a ton of energy. If we could create a small sun, control it, and harness the energy it releases, it would be a perfectly clean source of more than enough energy to sustain the world. Best yet, we would theoretically be able to use the most abundant material in the universe at very little cost. Unfortunately we don't know how to do any of that. A sustained reaction of nuclear fusion and fission is exceptionally difficult to do, much less control in a way someone can use that power in an appreciable way. Cold fusion - nuclear fusion at room temperature - is just one of the many difficult steps we haven't figured out yet.
But conventional nuclear energy technology does work, so what's the problem? Partly its the optics. There's little room between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, and so because we hate nuclear weapons, nuclear energy gets equally decried.
You then also have the knee-jerk reaction that we saw after the Fukushima disaster. You get a lot of hyped up reporting that tells only part of the story and then you get people panicked. Suddenly no one wants a nuclear power plant anywhere near them and is content to go back to using oil and coal-fire plants - both of which have sickened and killed far, far more than nuclear energy production has.
But there is also the big practical problem of the byproducts - nuclear waste. The good thing of the mini-sun idea is that there is no waste. you have continual fusion and fission - everything gets used and reused. But as it stands now, our nuclear power plants produce a lot of radioactive waste. We do not have a good means of taking care of that waste. It most gets stored somewhere, or as has been a long stymied plan, buried under a mountain somewhere.
So, nuclear is powerful but not terribly efficient. You can get a ton of power from it, but we can't get as much as it can potentially deliver. And we don't have a good means of handling the waste, which, if you plan on massively shifting to nuclear, will pile up and become a big problem very quickly.
There must obviously be another option then. There are... which I will discuss in tomorrow's post. This one's gone long enough, so please stop by again tomorrow for the conclusion.
This article was on MSN earlier in the week; http://news.msn.com/us/obama-takes-on-coal-with-first-ever-carbon-limits.
It has been a long, difficult slog in getting any movement on the use of carbon capture technology or many initiatives for the use of green technology. There are several reasons for that. First, its expensive enough that most individuals and more importantly companies want to spend the money on it, as suggested in the above article. Second, some interests, such as oil companies, have historically worked very hard to lobby against efforts to make green technology easier to access, or more affordable, or requirements of use. Finally, a lot of the technology already out there is either not fully developed or not fully understood.
But it has to happen. There is no way around the reality that there has to be a change and that we will need to make that change away from fossil fuels relatively quickly.
By many estimates the entire global supply of oil, every last drop, will only last between 100 and 150 more years. To put a little perspective on that, imagine a child born today. It is entirely possible that by the time they die of old age, or less morbidly by the time their grandchild is a teenager, there will have been an extraction of the last bit of oil available to be had from the ground.
That is a difficult concept for people to wrap their heads around. There is an unintended misconception in many people's minds that oil will just always be there, or even that like water or gold, we can juts start collecting it from asteroids or other planets, as though oil naturally manifests in outer space.
Of course, it doesn't. You won't see oil derricks on Mars or any other planet because there is no oil to be had there. Oil is a natural byproduct of the breakdown of the remains of dead creatures. Being that we haven't even found evidence of life anywhere else yet, hoping that there is oil out in the universe is a slim hope, much less oil that we could actually access or use.
So, even if you don't believe in global warming, the fact is that we are running out of oil fast. And the problems will start long before the last drop is gone. If you think there are too many wars over oil right now, wait until the cresting point where we are literally extracting as much oil as possible and the need further outstrips demand. How much we can produce domestically won't matter when even are allies are thirsty for oil and there isn't enough to go around. You'll be looking at the potential for chaos as nations vie to control their own little spigot for however much oil they can get. We need something else.
So back to the original question, what's out there?
Well, there's nuclear. Just saying it triggers a visceral reaction in most people. But nuclear is not in of itself a terrible idea. In fact, the most promising future tech, as noted in my past discussion on space travel, may well rely a great deal on nuclear power. Nuclear reactions power the universe. They are what keeps the sun burning. In effect that is the dream of nuclear physicists - creating a sun.
Or rather it's only a mini-sun. The sun releases a ton of energy. If we could create a small sun, control it, and harness the energy it releases, it would be a perfectly clean source of more than enough energy to sustain the world. Best yet, we would theoretically be able to use the most abundant material in the universe at very little cost. Unfortunately we don't know how to do any of that. A sustained reaction of nuclear fusion and fission is exceptionally difficult to do, much less control in a way someone can use that power in an appreciable way. Cold fusion - nuclear fusion at room temperature - is just one of the many difficult steps we haven't figured out yet.
But conventional nuclear energy technology does work, so what's the problem? Partly its the optics. There's little room between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, and so because we hate nuclear weapons, nuclear energy gets equally decried.
You then also have the knee-jerk reaction that we saw after the Fukushima disaster. You get a lot of hyped up reporting that tells only part of the story and then you get people panicked. Suddenly no one wants a nuclear power plant anywhere near them and is content to go back to using oil and coal-fire plants - both of which have sickened and killed far, far more than nuclear energy production has.
But there is also the big practical problem of the byproducts - nuclear waste. The good thing of the mini-sun idea is that there is no waste. you have continual fusion and fission - everything gets used and reused. But as it stands now, our nuclear power plants produce a lot of radioactive waste. We do not have a good means of taking care of that waste. It most gets stored somewhere, or as has been a long stymied plan, buried under a mountain somewhere.
So, nuclear is powerful but not terribly efficient. You can get a ton of power from it, but we can't get as much as it can potentially deliver. And we don't have a good means of handling the waste, which, if you plan on massively shifting to nuclear, will pile up and become a big problem very quickly.
There must obviously be another option then. There are... which I will discuss in tomorrow's post. This one's gone long enough, so please stop by again tomorrow for the conclusion.
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