Re: Basic Choices and Constraints on Long-Term Energy Supplies

[Ludwik Kowalski <kowalskil@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>]

On Sunday, Jul 25, 2004, at 14:27 America/New_York, John Denker wrote:

> Did y'all see the article in Physics Today?
>
> Abstract:
> > Population growth and energy demand are exhausting the world's fossil
> > energy supplies, some on the timescale of a single human life-span.
>
> The whole article is free-for-all (at least temporarily) at
>    http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p47.html
>
> I recommend it.
>   -- Written at an accessible level.
>   -- Mostly dispassionate, mostly sticks to the facts.
>   -- Some useful footnotes.
>
> ===============
> On the down side:
>
> Once again we observe that the energy industry uses the
> word "energy" to mean something significantly different
> from the standard physics energy ... something more akin
> to free energy.
>
> I suppose I can understand why a utility doesn't want to
> talk about "free" energy :-) ... maybe they could call it
> "useful energy", but it makes things really messy when
> they just call it "energy", especially in the same
> sentence with technical physics terms such as entropy,
> as happens in one place in the Physics Today article.
>
> This kind of terminological snafu drives students nuts.
>
> I don't know how to fix it.  It's like one of those
> Shakespeare plays where everybody on stage is pretending
> to be somebody else.....

To illustrate the idea of "a single human life-span" let me observe
that the world population was
close to 1.8 billion when I was learning geography at the age of ten.
It was probably slightly above
one billion when my parents were born. And now the world population
already exceeded 6 billion.

For how many decade would oil (and coal) be available at this rate of
growth, even if the amount of undiscovered fossil fuels is 100 larger
than what is known to exist? It is not too early to start planning for
the post-oil civilization. So far the only practical solution (in terms
of costs) is nuclear. That does not mean that better reactors should
not be developed to replace what we now have. According to some
experts, most of fission products can now be destroyed in hybrid
reactor-accelerator setups. What is left, they write, will decay to an
acceptable level in about 500 years. If this is true then radioactive
waste can be kept in man-made cement structures (ground level
pyramids?). Building a structure that can be counted upon for many
centuries is possible today, I suppose.