Nuclear Fusion and Hydrogen Fuel

Two Pipe Dreams

The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -(your tax dollars at work; subsidized fusion research)

masks, a space shield, my brief background in physics and classified laser beam research, debunking fusion and hydrogen energy hype, and a comparison with nuclear fission

First – from Justin Hart  “..Masks Do Not Work”- The Cochrane Review poured over 78 mask studies and concluded there was little to no evidence that facemasks provide any efficacy against viral transmission.

Also - ‘nother subject - I don't know if you saw "Highlander 2" or not (I didn't) or if you've heard about the latest crazy idea that we could cool the earth by somehow erecting a giant metal shield in space to block out the sun, but the "UnSkooled" substack article (pardon its unkind description of our president) is a fun read. It does occur to me that blocking the sun to avoid overheating the earth might be rather counterproductive for all our solar farms which rely on the sun. Foot on the gas and the brake at the same time? check out this opinion article from Irina Slav’s substack comparing the crazy sky shield idea with the movie ‘Highlander 2’

on to the main topic - energy:

early laser beam research, 1963

When I was fresh out of college with a degree in physics, my first job was with classified clearance to work in research for the Griffiss Air force Base in upstate N.Y.  My job was to try to find new materials that would work well as lasers. We had a ruby crystal rod with both highly polished and perfectly parallel mirror ends that would lase in the lab, if hit with enough energy, and it would shoot out a narrow light beam energy pulse that could burn a hole in a razor blade. But the energy wasn’t free. In order to activate the laser for one split second pulse, we had a bank of capacitors that stored up energy to zap the ruby crystal with. That bank of capacitors was huge; taking up room space of about 6 feet cubed, or 216 cubic feet. Those capacitors stored up energy soaked up from the electric grid.

energy today

Zoom forward to 2023. Energy in any form is very much in the forefront of the news. Climate change, formerly called global warming, is so feared* that there is a frantic search for sources of energy that won’t increase “carbon emissions”, which are thought to cause global warming. They don’t, but that’s beside my point.

   *Global warming is not feared by Jesus followers because they have faith that His word is true, and they’re familiar with God’s promise after the whole earth was devastated by Noah’s Flood. It’s in Genesis 8:22:

“While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
And cold and heat,
And summer and winter,
And day and night
Shall not cease.”

pipe dream #1

The ultimate dream of a vast source of “clean” energy is nuclear fusion. There is a big difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission. Nuclear fission power plants rely on controlling a reaction with radioactive Uranium 235 atoms.

fission works; fusion doesn’t

Nuclear power plants are a great source of energy, and they are tried and proven and working.  But there are zero useful fusion reactors. Compared to fusion, nuclear fission isn’t very hard. If you take some uranium-235 and shoot a neutron at it, the uranium absorbs the neutron and becomes uranium-236. However, this uranium-236 is unstable and will break into pieces to give you nuclear fission. In the process, energy is released. Lots of energy. Even better, it also creates extra neutrons to break apart even more uranium. A chain reaction

Fusion, on the other hand, is very difficult. Instead of shooting a neutron at an atom to start the process, you have to get two positively charged nuclei close enough together to get them to fuse. Without the electrons, atoms have a positive charge and repel. This means that you have to have super high atomic energies to get these things to have nuclear fusion. High energy particles are the problem. Fusion takes more energy than you’ll ever get out of it. If you’ve ever tried to push the same (north or south) poles of two magnets together, you’ve experienced what it means for identical electromagnetic forces to repel each other, and how much energy it takes to overcome that repellent force. (it’s pretty close to impossible)

So in more than one way, fission and fusion are opposites. Instead of releasing the energy that it takes to hold the unstable U235 atoms together, fusion attempts to force positively charged hydrogen atom nuclei together.

TANSTAFL

When I had a commercial kitchen equipment repair business, I used to order a very special, expensive type of wire from TANSTAFL in Chicago. The wire was nickel-clad stranded copper, covered with a Teflon coating, and further encased with an abrasive resistant fiberglass outer shield. We used it for high temp applications, like wiring in pizza ovens, fryers, etc. One day, placing a telephone order to Chicago for a 500’ roll, I asked how they came to name the company “TANSTAFL”. He said it stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch”. I got quite a kick out of that, and have never forgotten it. There’s always a cost, even for things that may appear to be free. Government subsidies come to mind. Somebody has to pay for them. (guess who?) The same principle applies to energy.

Nuclear fusion “breakthrough” hoax

Last December, scientists at the National Ignition Facility claimed to have actually produced net energy with fusion. I’ll debunk this for you, below. At the time, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm gushed “This is a landmark achievement for the researchers and staff at the National Ignition Facility who have dedicated their careers to seeing fusion ignition become a reality, and this milestone will undoubtedly spark even more discovery.” (notice, the scientists involved in this have their ‘careers at stake’. That’s a pretty good motivation for making fusion sound good.) She later tweeted "This is game-changing, world-improving, lives-saving history unfolding in real time. Absolutely astonishing" What’s astonishing to me is how she could say such a thing, when in fact we aren’t even anywhere close to getting more energy out of fusion than what is put into it, as I’ll explain later. I have to assume that she doesn’t really understand the situation at all. (By the way, under 2022’s fusion program, researchers in the National Ignition Facility lab received about $8.28 million, with $3.13 million from DOE and $5.15 million in matching funds from the Lab’s IPO and industrial partners.  Under the fusion program, DOE national lab scientists and engineers can apply for two types of grants.) (notice, this research is subsidized with our tax dollars)   whole article

Second go around

on Tuesday, 8/8/23, “1440 Daily Digest” picked up this story from Arstechnica, with quotes from the Financial Times: (my little comments or emphases in italics)

“Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (NIF) in California have used the world’s most powerful laser (actually it took 92 lasers at once)to fuse the nuclei of hydrogen isotope.  .. according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results. 

“Fusion reaction experiments at the DOE’s National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory require 192 laser beams to align on a DT (deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen) target smaller than a pea. ” Energy.gov

  (Depiction of the deuterium (D) and tritium (T) fusion reaction, which produces a helium nucleus (or alpha particle) and a high energy neutron.)

“Initial data from the July experiment indicated an energy output greater than 3.5MJ, two of the people with knowledge of the preliminary results said. (1W=1000J/s) That energy would be roughly sufficient to power a household iron for an hour.  The NIF also makes a maximum of one shot a day, whereas an internal confinement power plant would probably need to complete several shots a second. However, the improved result at NIF, coming “only eight months” after the initial breakthrough, was a further sign that the pace of progress was increasing, said one of the people with knowledge of the result… We plan on reporting those results at upcoming scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.” Notice, this isn’t even peer-reviewed yet. “Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce" no long-lived radioactive waste, and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.” !! Wow! If we only had 192 powerful lasers and enough energy to zap them several times a second – no problem

debunked!

Here’s the kicker in the Arstechnica article and the apparently overlooked statement that totally debunks the pipe dream of nuclear fusion… “Energy gain in this context only compares the energy generated to the energy in the lasers, not to the total amount of energy pulled off the grid to power the system, which is much higher. Scientists estimate that commercial fusion will require reactions that generate between 30 and 100 times the energy in the lasers. That is, they were only kidding when they said there’s a net energy gain – actually, there’s a huge cost of energy when you factor in how much grid energy it takes to fire up those lasers.

the other pipe dream – hydrogen fuel

It’s ironical that nuclear fusion, trying to force two hydrogen nuclei together even if it takes way more energy than we’d ever get out of the process, is the opposite of trying to separate hydrogen from their normal, very strong nuclear bonds with oxygen H₂O water and CH₄ methane. Yet both endeavors are rather hopeless as energy sources, because it takes so much energy to separate the hydrogen bond.

most hydrogen is produced from CH₄  methane

Guess what – when you separate hydrogen from carbon in methane, you release a lot of carbon. From Global Witness speaking of producing hydrogen from methane -   “While not as bad as using electricity generated using fossil fuels (instead of renewables), the process still releases huge amounts of carbon – each tonne of hydrogen produced releases eleven tonnes of CO2, equivalent to driving 72,000 km in a passenger car.” It gets worse – “Shell’s Quest site in Alberta, Canada, has been lauded by the company as an example of how it is taking action on the climate crisis. However, just 48% of the plant’s carbon emissions are captured, falling woefully short of the 90% carbon capture rate promised by fossil hydrogen advocates. When the plant’s overall greenhouse gas emissions are factored in, it has the same carbon footprint as 1.2 million petrol cars…. But aside from some limited uses, for the most part it is both cheaper and more efficient to simply use renewable electricity directly, rather than adding the extra step of producing hydrogen.” When you convert from one form of energy to another, you always lose efficiency…

or from water…

cost of converting from one type eneregy to another confirmed by another source, engineer Werner Antweiler  “making hydrogen from water with renewable energy requires a significant amount of extra electricity, and this results in a huge efficiency loss…” …and worse…

hydrogen fuel cells not efficient

Antweiler goes on..“Fuel cells are not perfectly efficient converting hydrogen into electricity. Some of the energy is lost as heat in the process. The tank-to-wheel efficiency of fuel cells is reckoned to be only about 40–45 percent.”… There are two types of energy losses that need to be accounted for when calculating the kWh needed to drive 100 km: well-to-tank (WTT) that accounts from source to hydrogen tank, and tank-to-wheel (TTW) in terms of fuel cell efficiency and propulsion in the vehicle. Combined, these two energy losses translated into a well-to-wheel efficiency. A recent study by Whitehead et al. (2018) shows that fuel cells only have a 22% efficiency…”

From usc.edu    “There’s virtually no pure hydrogen on Earth because it’s so reactive. Most hydrogen is made from methane [natural gas] in a process that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Hydrogen can also be made from water using electrolysis, but that requires electrical energy. To get that, we’re back to burning fossil fuels.”….” …and worse…” Hydrogen in vehicles must be compressed in expensive high-pressure tanks, which requires — you guessed it — energy. Current hydrogen vehicles use fuel cells to convert the chemical energy to power. Fuel cells are very costly because they are complex and require expensive materials such as platinum.”

In this picture of ideal hydrogen production from ‘green’ renewable energy, notice how many conversions (some energy is lost to heat in every conversion; 2nd Law of thermodynamics), and many other costs aren’t mentioned - like transport and compression

Wikipedia: “However, current best processes for water electrolysis have an effective electrical efficiency of 70-80%, so that producing 1 kg of hydrogen [which has a specific energy of 143 MJ/kg (‘MJ’ for million joules) or about 40 kWh/kg (kWh for kilowatt hours)] requires 50–55 kWh of electricity.”  In other words, in the best case, it takes 50 kWh of electricity to make H₂ with 40kWh potential energy!

next week - I’m thinking, I’m thinking…we’ll see what comes up - subscribe for free; self-imposed minimum weekly publishing every Thursday