Solar energy will become competitive in 10 years and the world is set to enter the solar/hydrogen fusion era in 20 years, renowned theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku has told Gulf Times.
“The falling cost of solar, hydrogen, renewable, wind power, geothermal power and the rising cost of fossil fuels will cross within 10 years, causing market forces to kick in and push solar and then in 20 years, fusion power becomes a possibility,” he predicted
Read it at Peak Oil
Physicist sees fusion powering the world
by Gulf Times
Kaku has said this before, but it's worth reiterating for those that may not have heard him.
The problem is that the world doesn't have ten years to spare according to climate scientists.
If you have abundant energy, then taking the Carbon dioxide out of the air is not difficult, and neither is sequestering it.
ReplyDeleteThis ECAT system seems to still have "legs":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.libertariannews.org/2012/01/17/nasa-confirms-cold-fusion-is-real/
Resp,
Better wait ten or more years in case it's a hoax.
ReplyDeletehttp://shannonhubbell.com/blog/2012/01/capitalism-vs-the-climate/
Still a way to go to scale up fusion even if it were shown to be practical today. Other energy sources are already in the scale up stage. And we haven't really made a dent in scaling up conservation, which is the low hanging fruit.
ReplyDeleteMost warming is only on a local scale.
ReplyDeleteHowever, what about global cooling ?
No one ever rants on TV when a volcano goes off which in turn cools the earth.
It's an inconvenient fact that earth has processes that cool it.
The fluctuations cannot be ascertained.
What about the recent economic down cycle ?
Has anyone bothered to check data to see if all the factories and diesel generators in China having been turned off during the idle time along with all the other factories in the world contributed to at some correlation of cooling or pollution lowering or anything ?
Thorium has all we need:
ReplyDeletehttp://energyfromthorium.com/
Lot's of alternatives to petro for sure.
ReplyDeleteGovt can provide much needed help to accelerate alternative energy discovery and development via fiscal policy, ironically, the morons that Mike was debating on Fox this past weekend ALL agreed that the best thing would be for govt to "stay out of it". All useful idiots (morons) to the oil cartel.
"“Pound for pound, fusion releases 10mn times more energy than gasoline. An 8-ounce glass of water is equal to the energy content of 500,000 barrels of petroleum."
ReplyDeleteHamad is probably soiling himself right now....
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/man-name-sand-visible-space-190516989.html
Tom is right about efficiency, especially for heating and transportation. I like solar, but its still too expensive.
ReplyDeletehttp://nextbigfuture.com/2012/03/doe-sunshot-vision-and-halotechnics.html
"Achieving the level of price reductions envisioned in the SunShot Initiative could result in solar energy meeting 14% of U.S. electricity needs by 2030 and 27% by 2050."
27% by 2050 is not enough.
Right now is an Intensive Effort in generation IV nuclear reactors (thorium is my favorite), which you can do with MMT and not austerian economics. Also invest in some outliers:
http://focusfusion.org/
For questions about CC & GHG research your questions at:
http://www.realclimate.org/
Clonal/jeg,
ReplyDeleteDo either of you have anything on this ECAT system?
allegedly Home Depot this fall? BS?
http://ecatnews.com/?p=1784
Resp,
Matt, this whole issue has been an hoax time and time again.
ReplyDeleteUntil solid public proof I wouldn't bet my money on it. I hope I'm wrong though, would be nice if it were real, but right now too much 'history' and controversy to expect something out of it.
I'd say I am also skeptical on fusion, though I think it would be wonderful if it comes to fruition.
ReplyDeleteTo echo anon 07:20, what I've seen of Thorium looks interesting. Kirk Sorensen has some good online video's, including a TEDx talk. I don't know the details, but it looks like Bill Gates is looking at some Geothermal/Nuclear combo.
Forgetting these novel solutions, I think that Wind, Solar, Tidal, geothermal, hydrogen and conservation (incl. efficient design) moves us a long way down the path away from Coal and Oil.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteSee what you are saying, but we use over 300M gallons of gasoline per day, so to get rid of that, you have to "think big". Some of these renewables, although technically promising, dont seem to scale well so the % share just seems never to get anywhere.
I think it would take large scale roll out of some sort of next generation nuclear fission/fusion to generate enough energy to displace gasoline. Even with today's nuclear, Ive done some back of the envelope calculations and we could replace all of the gross energy in 300M gals of gasoline/day with an additional 2.5 nuclear plants per state.
Resp,
If and when the country and wake up to the consequences of negative externalities due to carbon-based energy, they hopefully voters will demand a Manhattan Project level response coordinated worldwide.
ReplyDeleteThis is what is required and the sooner the better. The world is already beyond the tipping point and while it is now impossible to avoid consequences, we do have the option of acting to mitigate the disaster.
Tom,
ReplyDeleteI see some parallels between our energy policy response and the response to unemployment.
People are typically off by orders of magnitude.
You get Eric Schmidt of Google at Davos asked about unemployment and his response is to create a few thousand "high tech" jobs in the "new" information economy when we have probably close to 20 MILLION people unemployed, what a moron. Then the moron lamestream media interviewer doenst call him on it to top it off.
Same thing in energy. We're using over 500 million gallons/day of combined gas/jet/diesel and they come up with "solar panels" or windmills or Solyndra or some BS.
No one seems to be able to understand the scale of the problem, hence they cannot come up with coherent commentary.
I think this fellow Kaku probably understands the scale, and he knows its going to take a revolutionary policy response rather than "free market" based incrementalism to ultimately address the petroleum issue.
Resp,
I have''t heard anything about the polywell fusión project from a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteA long-shot project for fusion power: the Polywell
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI remember the post where you mentioned the 2.5 plants per state. I don't disagree that our use is way to high to displace with existing renewables. I'd just like to pick some low hanging fruit to change 2.5 plants to 1.5 plants. I am not nuclear averse, though I would worry about nuclear in the hands of a capitalist. Maybe this is one of those public purpose issues ;)
I remember reading a good piece in Scientific American a few years ago that added up all the things we could do as slices of a pie, the pie fills up quickly. We've become lazy innovators as energy and labor were getting cheaper. Things won't likely remain cheap, question is, will we remain lazy.