What we learn from E=MC2 (Einstein), is that if we convert mass directly to energy the result will be equal to the mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. The speed of light squared is a huge, huge value, and so equally huge, nearly unlimited amounts of energy can be gotten from nuclear fusion.
There is so much potential that we shouldn’t even consider any other process to get our energy and should put all our efforts into nuclear energy.
The only problem is designing the reactor.
Fission Dead End
Splitting the atom, nuclear fission, has been developed for over half a century but has proven to be inherently complex and costly, and presents us with non-insurable third party risks: This tells us two things:
1. laws exempting the fission industry from third party risk are necessary for the fission industry to exist, which begs the question should it exist compared to other technologies that aren’t exempt, and
2. according to the best minds of the insurance industry nuclear fission has a good probability of causing unimaginable harm to society which is far greater than the probability of generating the profit needed to pay for the insurance against such events.
The conclusions of the insurance industry are also supported by facts, as the Chernobyl nuclear accident may have killed up to or over a million people, and it is difficult to argue this is an acceptable cost of electricity, considering alternatives do exist. And if even developed nations like Japan can experience 4 simultaneous meltdowns, endangering countless lives and the entire Japanese economy ... it’s time to abandon the idea.
Added to this are the problems of storing the nuclear waste safely, which is not only a costly technical challenge but requires a minimum of 20000 years of geologic and political stability. On-top of all these negatives there’s the problem of proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Must go for Fusion
So, we really need to go after fusion reactors.
However, smashing hydrogen atoms together costs energy, and so far no one’s even managed to completely prove on paper whether it can cost less energy to ram the atoms together than can be practically extracted from their fusing.
Generally, either lasers are used to super heat a pellet of hydrogen or electro-magnetic acceleration and containment is used. The fundamental problem is that the hydrogen atoms have significant electro-magentic forces keeping them apart and so it takes significant energy to overcome this with radiation (electro-magnetic disturbance) or magnets (electro-magnetic force).
Using a force to overcome the same force seems inherently contradictory. It’s not clear whether it could ever be practical and most experts predict it could take over a century to develop a commercial reactor, if it is possible at all.
On top of these fundamental problems, there’s also practical problems: First, no known substance can withstand (at close distance) the heat nuclear fusion can generate and, second, nuclear fusion is still radioactive, producing copious amounts of neutrons.
For the immense heat problem one solution is to only fuse tiny quantities of hydrogen at a time, but this would make the reaction not self sustaining representing a huge energy waste and compounding the energy input problem. For the neutron problem, this radiation is less dangerous than gamma radiation, but it wears down materials and, since neutrons are electromagnetically neutral, there’s no known way to stop them other than by simply letting them hit the walls of the reactor. Such fatigue and wear of extremely sophisticated equipment introduces more costs and the need to continuously replace these shield components. Even if we consider hydrogen as essentially free, we might have to consider the interior of reactors themselves as a sort of extremely costly fuel.
Impasse
Especially in the context of oil depletion, there is another problem which is that we need an energy solution fast: ideally 20 years before peak oil production occurs in order to scale the nuclear reactors, distribution system and electronic transportation infrastructure.
This opportune time to start may have very well been 20 years ago, as many experts believe the peak in oil production is occurring as we speak (as of 2011 we’re still on the "bumpy plateau").
So, today, not only is there incredible risks and costs to fission (the only reactors that currently exist commercially), the fission industry as it exists may lack the quantity of skilled technicians and engineers needed to actually build the thousands of nuclear reactors needed to offset oil depletion; and that’s assuming the government even has the money to pay for it. Only a handful of reactors are in construction today, it is doubtful tomorrow we could be building the hundreds of fission reactors that would be needed to be ready in 5 or 10 years time to fill the energy gap.
Nuclear fusion, though the only nuclear solution with acceptable insurable risks, is even more behind in terms of qualified professionals capable of physically building the yet-to-be-designed reactors. And if all this wasn’t enough, conventional nuclear reactors, both fission and fusion, are inherently centralized machines which then require a distribution system to bring to point of use. For conventional nuclear reactors generating electricity, replacing fossil fuels also requires scaling the electricity system many times its current size to supplant energy use that is currently non-electric (heating, transportation, etc.), an intractable problem in itself, not to mention building all the electric machines to replace the current fleet of fossil fuel engines and burners.
Considering these problems we need to think outside the conventional “box” design and find a new approach.
New Fusion Design Principle
So there’s real practical challenges facing what is obviously the best energy source available. Fortunately, I’ve come up with a solution to these problems.
What we require to get fusion off-the-ground is to search for some inherent force that will bring the hydrogen atoms together and so not have to apply this force ourselves — which requires a lot of energy and complex devices which are so far not working nor cost-effective.
Most nuclear fusion physicists concentrate only on the electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces. But these forces are in a natural balance in the hydrogen we find, and so are difficult to work against. There is however another force, that of gravity, which the hydrogen atom carries with it and actually attracts it toward other hydrogen atoms. Now, using a different force to overcome another seems much more promising.
Such a gravity based reactor, let’s call it the Nuclear Unlimited Solution, would not require any sophisticated equipment relying instead on natural, not artificial, attraction between the atoms. What’s more, since we are exploiting intrinsic qualities of the hydrogen atom, no equipment at all is needed to start the reactor and keep it going. We can thus keep the NUS at a sufficiently safe distance to avoid any breakdown of the materials we use to capture and transform the energy for practical uses. We could even put the NUS reactor in space to avoid any accidents. Since it’s self functioning we don’t even need any operators to monitor and maintain the reaction.
Though putting it in space may create some waste as energy will be radiated in every direction and not just at our Energy Receivers on the Ground (ERG), the premise of the need for fusion is that the energy is essentially unlimited so as long as the reaction produces more energy than it costs, any waste from not completely containing the reaction is insignificant: i.e. it would still be cost-effective to put our NUS reactor in space and only capture the energy coming towards us since all the energy is essentially free.
Design challenge
The only real design challenge is what is the optimum distance from the earth for our NUS reactor? It’s a very good question. If it’s far enough away in high orbit then the energy could be beamed directly to the point of use, solving the electricity distribution problem. Though in between our usage points there may be plenty of useless ground the energy will also fall on, so again we may be wasting a lot of energy, but just as we saw for the energy radiated in directions away from the earth, the energy is essentially unlimited so these losses don’t matter.
The whole reason to focus only on nuclear fusion is that such unimaginable quantities are produced, that we can afford to waste energy, as long as the reaction produces more energy than the reaction consumes. But, we would obviously still want the NUS to be close enough to beam us enough energy for the energy tasks we normally perform.
Optimum Distance of NUS reactor
After detailed economic analysis, it becomes clear that a distance that provides about 1000 watts per square meter is optimal. This is because most small energy tasks take up space, for instance a coffee machine takes up about a square meter for the device and the operator and consumes about 1000 watts. For more intensive tasks we might observe the relationship between the machine and the energy requirement is much larger, but if we dig deeper we find that these energy intensive tasks transform a lot of material, which in turn are distributed over large distances; so if we compare the whole area, say a sustainable, selectively managed forest that supplies a lumber yard, to the area of beamed energy provided by the NUS, we find it is a very favourable relationship and that only a tiny fraction of the forest is required to house our beamed energy receivers. And, for essentially any task that we do, we find 1000 watts per square meter is near the optimal ratio between the area required to house the activity and the power required.
Beyond this purely economic consideration, which is of course the bottom-line, we can also note that 1000 watts per square meter is a safe level, not only our materials, but our operators can be exposed directly to the beam without melting.
When we require an energy density greater than a thousand watts we can observe that our reactor at the prescribed distance acts as a point source and so the energy it beams to us is more or less in parallel rays. These parallel rays can be easily concentrated to higher energy densities giving us the ability to easily scale the energy density to what our task requires.
Transportation problem solved
But the economic benefits go further. Since our NUS reactor is positioned in a way that it also distributes energy directly to point of use, far fewer materials have to be transported to energy centers at the primary hubs of an energy distribution system.
Currently, as nearly all energy is supplied by fossil fuels, from relatively few sources that must be further concentrated in refineries, its only basic economics to deduce that material transformations should take place in concentrated locations, call them Systems of Energy Infrastructure and Technical Integration Centers, SEITIC. Though some efficiency can be further gained by economies of scale in these SEITICs, energy is of course needed to transport the material to the centers, if we had energy available on location the energy saved from not transporting it anywhere is much higher than lost to economies of local scale.
It is probable that only fossil fuels are an energy source dense enough, as well as easy enough to store and transport, to make economically viable the cost of transporting materials and people to these SEITICs. And so, if the price of fossil fuels goes up very quickly the cost of transportation surpasses that gained by economies of scale. So our fusion reactor distribution system may not as easily support the current transportation system, but it would easily power production closer to point of use, reducing transportation needs to a manageable level.
So, now that we have a workable economic model and scientifically sound fusion design that is guaranteed to work – since gravity is cumulative between the atoms, at some point it must overcome the pesky electromagnetic forces – we just work out were it should be positioned and how much hydrogen we need to start the process.
Optimum Distance
Well, we can note that we require roughly 151.888 ×10^29 kilograms of hydrogen to start a nuclear fusion reaction based on gravity (something like a 151 million quadrillion billion, maybe more). However, this could be an unreliable figure and would require the NUS to be fairly close to get us our 1000 watts per square meter where we stand, and this proximity could endanger our ERG operators if any anomalous fusion activity were to occur.
A detailed cost-benefit analysis reveals that the optimum size of a reactor would be about 2×10^30 kg, some 2 or 3 times bigger than the bear minimum but this is more than compensated by the reliability; theoretically providing a near constant rate of production at a safe distance for about ten billion years.
More power
Now, some might be concerned about what if we need more production? We always need more, right? so this question is just common sense. Well, since our reactor also distributes the energy almost everywhere, the possible points of use are huge, much greater than current human activity. So we wouldn’t encounter that problem for a while.
Furthermore, since our reactor must be in space in order to not overload the resistance of our receivers and pesky skin, we could in some distant future, when we’ve reached the ecological limit of receivers here on earth, put receivers in space. But that would be along way off considering our reactor would provide us with 172 petawatts of energy at the earths surface, which makes our current consumption of 15 terrawatts puny in comparison (a difference of a factor of 20 000 ).
Small detail
Now some may be concerned that this NUS reactor I’m proposing is some three-hundred-thousand times the mass of the earth, so it would be difficult to get into orbit. But, if we think a bit further out of the box we realize that instead of orbiting our NUS around us, we could place earth in orbit around the NUS!
What about the other side of the earth? I hear you say. Easy, we just rotate the earth so each place receives energy half the time. We can even rotate it at a pace that is in tune with our own sleep schedules, so the darkness half the time would even help us sleep! When you think of it, putting 3 smaller NUSs into orbit would be fairly inconvenient as we could never sleep!
Material Requirements
For the time being we just need to concentrate on finding roughly of 2×10^30 kg of hydrogen gas. Unfortunately, though rigorously feasible up to this point, such a quantity is 332 900 times greater than the earths mass, as noted above, so unlikely to be found here, even if we put all the oceans to electrolysis (but how do we do all this electrolysis to get hydrogen without our NUS source first!).
We could get it from the Orion Nebula some 1300 light years away, but the lead in time for such a project might not see a return on investment for thousands of years, possibly millions of years, and it brings us back to our initial problem of requiring a lot of energy to transport all that hydrogen here to start the process; spending huge amounts of energy to get energy is precisely the problem we’re trying to avoid by using gravity as a fusion driver.
From a brute engineering perspective, the simplest solution would be if such a collection of hydrogen already existed somewhere in the solar system. Since good engineering is about simplicity and reducing the number of parts and actions required in a task: If a required phenomenon is needed, a good engineer will search to see if it is already happening naturally somewhere. If something like a Nuclear Unlimited System reactor already existed relatively close by to the earth with the desired characteristics, it would save us the trouble of finding the 2×10^30 kg of hydrogen gas. So such an event would be most fortuitous, though considering the vastness of space extremely unlikely — perhaps a fools errand to even try.
Schedule
I propose that an observation program should start right away. Since such a natural NUS reactor, if it exists, would appear as a large sphere, white hot and clearly visible from earth, it may not take an astronomer to find it.
Each one of us, right now, can go outside and verify if there is a natural candidate for our NUS fusion reactor.
If observed, and several days, or years, of observation are accumulated for statistical significance, then our Nuclear Unlimited System is nearly complete. All that is left to do is construct our beam receivers, either collecting the beams as they come to us, through windows or on black panels for low temperature applications like heating water and space, or by focusing the distributed NUS beams onto a focal point that can boil our tea, melt our steel, and even provide mechanical power.
Though all this may be just a shot in the inhospitable darkness of space in which we live, such a natural NUS reactor, if found, may shed light on the solution to the worlds pressing energy problems, in terms of energy poverty, deforestation, the nefarious environmental consequences of fossil combustion, the energy distribution problem, the transportation problem, and the intractable social problems posed by SEITICs and Peak Oil.
Eerik Wissenz
RSS 2.0