Initial Responses

If polywell fusion is developed, in what ways will the world change for better or worse? Discuss.

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TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

scareduck wrote:
TallDave wrote:Remember, this is the country that produced Osama bin Laden and most of the 9/11 hijackers
Because of course the people running Saudi Aramco are just like Osama bin Laden.

I'll take "Collective Guilt" for $500, Alex ... sheesh ...
You do know that the royal family controls Aramco, and that they are spending billions to spread a Wahhabist ideology that is essentially the same extremist philosophy Osama preaches?

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabi
. A study by the NGO Freedom House found wahhabi publications in a number of mosques in the United States preaching that Muslims should not only "always oppose" infidels "in every way," but "hate them for their religion ... for Allah's sake," that democracy "is responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century," and that Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslims were infidels.
You are aware that about half the suicide bombers in Iraq come from Saudi Arabia?

I'll take Blindingly Obvious for $1000 -- DAILY DOUBLE!! Thank you Alex, I'd like to bet everything on Saudis continuing to be irrational.

That's not to say they won't take some pragmatic measures to try to sustain their petrokleptocracy as the oil runs out, but there isn't much evidence that reason and enlightenment are their guiding principles. The "scientific discovery cannot contradict Allah's will, as defined in the Koran" paradigm has been ascendant for many centuries, and particularly so in Wahhabist SA.
Last edited by TallDave on Thu Feb 21, 2008 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

That sounds plausible to me. So it wouldn’t surprise me if oil companies tried to slow things down for a time. In the end though, there is going to be so much money at stake, I don’t see them doing this for long.
Well, again, you have to realize that Polywell will create wealth for people, but may actually greatly reduce the amount of money power companies make even as it greatly increases the amount of power people can buy. The price-demand curve is elastic, but at some point you don't really need any more energy, no matter how cheap it is.

In the 1990s, something called the Internet was developed. Prior to this, a long-distance call generally cost a fair amount of money. Then one day someone realized "Hey, we could send voice as packets too! And the price is distance insensitive!" I worked with a guy from Brazil who talked to his family back home every day for six hours -- for free. Great for him, but not such a good deal for the phone companies, and they screamed bloody murder. The telco eq sector went into what analysts called a "nuclear winter" by 2001. Some stocks lost over 99% of their value. A great deal for the great mass of people, but deadly to established players in the telco industry.

As price-per-bit-per-mile fell, it was very disruptive, and the only people making money were the pure new-tech players (and even they took it on the chin toward the end). The old-tech players did everything they could to stop it. If price-per-kilowatt-hour does the same, the effects will be similar -- and the power producers know it. And it's even worse for them than for the telcos, because this would be a paradigm shift from scarce-resource to intellectual property (just imagine if prior to the Internet bits were a limited commodity that had to be dug out of the ground).

The highly misleading Pimentel ethanol study was a oil-industry volley at something somewhat less dangerous, and it's still widely cited today despite being thoroughly discredited as having extremely flawed assumption. Expect more of this, aimed at IEC fusion, then attempts at regulation, and finally lawsuits.

http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/pdfs/Ethano ... buttal.pdf

Will it come to violence? Nah, not likely. Again, the vast majority of people will benefit. The losers will be certain corporations, and corporations generally prefer lawyers and lobbyists to violence.
Last edited by TallDave on Thu Feb 21, 2008 8:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

rj40 wrote:Thanks for all the responses. This is very interesting stuff. And now for the 24.864760137 slug gorilla in the room: what about the chances for violence? People displaced at work or otherwise ill affected by this technology? What about terrorism? Should we expect an upswing as terrorists realize a big chunk of their funding (not all of it!) would be drying up? Do you expect Polwell facilities to be prime targets? What could we do, if anything, to ameliorate the situation?
I want to focus on what I bolded.

I do believe the current war is due to the fact that our Wahabi friends were already anticipating the end of the oil era from plug in hybrid/multifuel vehicles. They believed (as did the Austrian Corporal) that they had one roll of the dice. They made point on the first roll and have been hitting snake eyes ever since. Thanks to a rather unpopular politician whose name rhymes with Rush. :-)

==

What can we do to ameliorate the situation? Not much. If we can get electrical costs at the bus bar for electrical energy to come in at less than natural gas, BFRs will be used as peakers. If it comes in at coal prices and can be modulated over a 2:1 range it will replace base load and peaker plants. If it comes in at 1/2 coal prices or less - watch out. It will be very destructive and there is very little that can be done about the disruption.

Once we get a working design, I can see producing 1,000 100 MW plants a year within 3 years of a pre-production prototype.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Correct, most oil goes to transportation, while Coal goes to electrical generation. IIRC we get 52% of our electricity from coal, so the first casualty is the coal fired plant.
Yeah, and with flexfuel mandates on the horizon, the coal-methanol process may become the primary use for coal, as it's now cheaper than gasoline. They might just convert from power plants to methanol "refineries."

Heh, they might even be powered by Polywell. That would be pretty funny.

MSimon
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Post by MSimon »

TallDave wrote: http://www.ncga.com/ethanol/pdfs/Ethano ... buttal.pdf

Will it come to violence? Nah, not likely. Again, the vast majority of people will benefit. The losers will be certain corporations, and corporations generally prefer lawyers and lobbyists to violence.
Even the guys you quote in the pdf only promise an energy gain of 1.3 for alcohol.

You can't run a civilization on such low gains. you need a minimum of 5X and better 10X. Beyond 20X the added gain does not get you much more added output.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

The problem with all the ethanol studies is that claims of being energy negative or positive is dependent on where you draw the system boundaries. MSimon is right, you can't run an energy-intensive civilization on such low returns.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

MSimon wrote: You can't run a civilization on such low gains. you need a minimum of 5X and better 10X. Beyond 20X the added gain does not get you much more added output.
Yes and no; if the process is easy, efficient and repeatable enough, in theory you can produce infinite energy from a .00001% gain, but of course it's never that easy, efficient, or repeatable in the real world.

Another perhaps more useful way of looking at the gain is 5 gallons of ethanol produced per gallon of gasoline expended in growing it (this ignores total energy for things like fertilizer, which will have non-petroleum inputs, but since you're probably willing to trade cheaper coal energy for precious liquid fuel (which is much more expensive right now) you don't really care). Now keep in mind, that's for corn.

Corn is not going to fuel the country; it requires pretty good soil and is finicky in general, probably because it's been being bred for thousands of years (wild corn, or teosinthe, actually produces cobs only a couple inches long, and is so different from our corn that for a long time botanists did not believe it was even the same plant), and is fairly resource intensive to cultivate.

Switchgrass, otoh, can grow just about anywhere, and since the whole plant can be used in a cellulosic ethanol process, the output per hectare is quite a bit higher. Overall energy gain is much better, about 80%, and you get 20 gallons of ethanol for a gallon of gas expended. They are currently building a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol production plant in Louisiana. The cost is currently estimated at about $2.25 a gallon, but there is lots of room for improvement, probably down to $1/gal. .

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

We probably can fuel the country with a mix of corn, switchgrass, and methanol from coal -- and it will break OPEC.

China, btw, is the 3rd largest ethanol producer in the world. They are building ethanol plants as fast as we are.
Last edited by TallDave on Fri Feb 22, 2008 12:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

Problem is, nobody has developed a scalable enzymatic process for converting cellulose into ethanol. Cellulose is tough to crack for a reason.

Edit: WRT China building corn ethanol facilities -- well, they stopped, at least for corn ethanol.
Last edited by scareduck on Fri Feb 22, 2008 12:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

rj40
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Post by rj40 »

TallDave wrote:
Will it come to violence? Nah, not likely. Again, the vast majority of people will benefit. The losers will be certain corporations, and corporations generally prefer lawyers and lobbyists to violence.
I think I agree here. I don't expect oil workers or coal miners to go nuts - at least, not en masse. :D

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

SunOpta thinks they've solved that problem.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zht ... &id=951516
CRAC has announced their intention to construct sufficient cellulosic ethanol facilities to generate 330 million gallons of ethanol by 2012. SunOpta provided its patented systems and technology to CRAC in September 2006 and the plant began production of ethanol from local corn stover in October 2006. This facility is reported to be the first cellulosic ethanol production facility operational in the People's Republic of China. The SunOpta system is currently operating on a continuous basis and steps are currently being taken to scale the SunOpta process up to full commercial levels for use in future plants in China.
Uncle Sam is also throwing billions at the research.

rj40
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Post by rj40 »

MSimon wrote:What can we do to ameliorate the situation? Not much. If we can get electrical costs at the bus bar for electrical energy to come in at less than natural gas, BFRs will be used as peakers. If it comes in at coal prices and can be modulated over a 2:1 range it will replace base load and peaker plants. If it comes in at 1/2 coal prices or less - watch out. It will be very destructive and there is very little that can be done about the disruption.
Sorry, but what is a bus bar or BFRs and peakers? I am still trying to learn all this stuff. :oops:

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

There are a lot of companies who have hurled press releases around on cellulosic ethanol. SunOpta is presently facing a stockholder fraud lawsuit after they restated their 2007 earnings, which tells me there's a lot less there than meets the eye.

rj40 -- bus bar == grid. peakers == small power plants run to meet peak load (daytime A/C in sunny climes), as opposed to baseload plants, which pretty much run all the time (nukes and most coal-fired capacity).

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

Also, keep this is mind: if Polywell works and produces electric power at an order of magnitude below current costs, one of the first things that people will do is use it to make liquid fuel via gasification.

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

If the energy input is suddenly that cheap, this is a no-brainer, because there is biomass available with negative cost.

So you take your cheap Polywell energy, combine it with your cheaper-than-free biomass, and produce very expensive liquid fuel. It's a license to print money.

TallDave
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Post by TallDave »

scareduck wrote:There are a lot of companies who have hurled press releases around on cellulosic ethanol. SunOpta is presently facing a stockholder fraud lawsuit after they restated their 2007 earnings, which tells me there's a lot less there than meets the eye.

rj40 -- bus bar == grid. peakers == small power plants run to meet peak load (daytime A/C in sunny climes), as opposed to baseload plants, which pretty much run all the time (nukes and most coal-fired capacity).
That does seem a bit dodgy, but I remember Rambus and other startups having similar issues. Licensing revenue can be a contentious issue (just ask Eli Whitney).

In the end, they either have a tech producing cellulosic ethanol at a reasonable cost or they don't. We'll find out soon.

scareduck
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Post by scareduck »

Rambus was a first-rate patent troll. They hung out at the DRAM makers meetings even after they signed an agreement saying they wouldn't patent anything discussed in the meetings and did it anyway. Really a pretty shabby organization.

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