|
A cheap, clean, efficient, and limitless source of
energy – such a discovery would change our world. No longer would we be
enslaved to oil nor chained to coal; no more would we struggle to power our
societies without destroying our environment.
It is nothing less than today's Holy Grail. And just
as thousands of people in years past spent their lives searching for the
chalice that held Jesus' blood and bestowed unspeakable powers to its holder,
so too do thousands of people today dedicate themselves to the search for
this ideal energy source.
Nothing yet fits the bill. Oil, coal, and gas are
relatively cheap, but are dirty and limited. The clean sources – such
as wind, solar, and geothermal – are expensive and inefficient. Nuclear
power is abundant and efficient, but the startup costs are very high, the
accidents are scary, and the waste products are long-lived and dangerous.
From there we move into the fringes of energy
science, into the weird and wacky world of cold fusion, abiotic oil, and
scalar energy. Are these tenable? Leagues of people certainly think so. If
there's any chance that one of these oddball options could actually offer a
solution to the biggest challenge facing our world today, it is certainly
worth a little investigation.
So that's what we will do today: take a tour through
the extremes of energy looking for a development with real potential. I like
to say that my team leaves no rock unturned in our search to uncover,
understand, and assess the wide world of energy.
Underneath these rocks, however, live some pretty
strange creatures.
Cold
Fusion
Nuclei are powerful little things. Busting them
apart in nuclear fission reactions already provides us with the
world's most efficient source of energy – nuclear power.
While fission is the science of breaking large
nuclei apart, nuclear fusion is the science of joining two small
nuclei together. Both processes generate incredible amounts of energy, but
fusion has one key advantage over fission: neither the original reactive
material nor the products are radioactive in most fusion reactions.
Nuclear fusion is real. It happens in the core of
every star in the sky. In our sun, hydrogen atoms combine to create helium.
The power generated in these reactions is astonishing: the fusion reactions
amongst the nuclei in just one milligram of hydrogen churn out as much energy
as 300 pounds of TNT!
Of course, it also happens in a very high-energy
situation. These hydrogen fusion reactions occur in the core of the sun,
where the temperature is more than 8 million Kelvin. All that extra energy is
needed to overcome the incredibly strong repulsive force between two
positively charged nuclei, known as the Coulomb force.
Here on earth, scientists have come up with three
different setups that reliably generate fusion reactions – but all
three require the incredibly high temperatures and pressures found in the
core of the fusion-fired stars of the night sky.
That's where cold fusion hits the first of
many snags.
To explain all those snags, let's step back a bit. Cold
fusion gained notoriety in 1989, when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann
– then one of the world's leading electrochemists – reported that
their tabletop fusion experiment had generated heat. They also reported
detecting small amounts of nuclear-reaction byproducts, including neutrons
and tritium.
The byproducts indicated that a nuclear reaction had
occurred, but the heat generation went against all accepted nuclear
knowledge. A fundamental tenet of science is that total energy in a closed
system is constant: energy can change form, but it cannot arise out of
nothing nor simply disappear. Fleischmann and Pons seemed to have observed an
increase in heat energy in a system with no additional energy input. The
higher temperatures could only have resulted from an unaccounted term in the
energy-balance equation – a new energy source.
Breathless media reports on the discovery quickly
raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy. But every other
scientist who tried to replicate the result failed. Then it became apparent
that their instruments were not properly calibrated, suggesting that the
readings were perhaps not reliable.
And when their nuclear reaction by-product numbers
didn't add up – they reported 4,000 neutrons per second plus traces of
tritium, but the branching ratio for fusion reactions that produce tritium
says the reaction would have shot out 1012 neutrons per second, a
lethal dose – Fleischmann and Pons admitted they had not actually
detected either byproduct.
Cold fusion became the laughingstock of the
scientific community. Regardless, the lure of figuring out how to catalyze a
fusion reaction under reasonable conditions and capture the immense energy
released is so tempting that researchers around the world continue to chase
the cold fusion dream.
However, more than two decades after the failed 1989
experiment, cold fusion researchers still haven't been able to generate a
single theoretical model or a single experimental method that can produce
replicable results. A few groups have reported success in tabletop fusion
experiments, but even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the
experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent or reproducible.
That hasn't stopped one researcher from marketing
his cold-fusion product. According to Andrea Rossi, a bit of ordinary nickel
and $50 worth of heavy water can supposedly create enough energy to supply
the average American for a lifetime. Oh, plus a "secret" catalyst
– because the man with the only developed cold-fusion system in the
world refuses to tell anyone how it works.
Rossi regularly gives impressive but inconclusive
demonstrations of his E-Cat system – inconclusive in that Rossi
provides little explanation, and the demonstration does nothing to remove
doubt about what's going on and whether the E-Cat actually generates more
energy than it uses.
E-Cat supposedly combines ordinary nickel powder
with hydrogen gas under modest pressure. A few electric currents are shot
through the chamber, along with the "secret mix" of catalysts. And
according to Rossi, bam! – we have cold fusion between the
nickel and the hydrogen to produce copper!
A container of water that heats to near-boiling
during the process is supposed to provide evidence that the reaction
generates energy. And by the end, the initial pile of nickel powder has
become 90% nickel, 10% copper.
Except that it is undoubtedly all a big fake.
Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegal has written a great, in-depth
explanation of why the E-Cat cannot work. The short version is this:
First, so much energy is required to overcome the
tremendous Coulomb barrier that these nickel-hydrogen fusion reactions do
not even take place in the center of the sun. Even though there is
abundant nickel and hydrogen in the sun, these reactions simply don't happen.
But let's pretend they were taking place in Rossi's
low-pressure, low-temperature dream machine.
The claimed reaction would produce five isotopes of
copper, all of which are unstable and immediately radiate their excess
energy. Three of the copper isotopes, representing 95% of the initial nickel,
degrade back into nickel, releasing positrons, gamma rays, and neutrinos. The
other two emit their excess energy in the form of gamma rays and remain as
copper.
So theoretically, these reactions could produce some
copper, if you could get over that massive Coulomb barrier in the first
place. But if they were happening, these degradation reactions would be
spitting out positrons and gamma rays – a lot of both – which are
lethal to soft beings like us. That's why large fission reactors have massive
shields.
The E-Cat has two inches of lead shielding, which
would block 96% of the gamma radiation. The problem is that the other 4%
would kill you, Rossi, and everyone else in the room. In addition, the gamma
rays would be easily detectable, even with primitive equipment, but guess
what? Even with highly sensitive equipment, no gamma radiation was detected
near the E-Cat while in operation.
And finally, all of the copper in the universe comes
from another mid-star fusion reaction, this one between hydrogen and neon
that produces magnesium plus a free proton. That free proton attaches to a
nickel nucleus, creating unstable isotopes that decay into the only two
stable isotopes of copper in the universe. This very specific set of
reactions produces the copper-isotope ratio that we find on earth: 70%
copper-63 and 30% copper-65.
Can you guess what the ratio of isotopes was in the
copper "created" by the E-Cat? Yup: 70-30, exactly as in nature.
Impossible from the supposed reactions and suspicious to the point of being
completely unbelievable.
Fusion reactions emit energy. If we could convince
two nuclei to shack up despite their tremendous repulsive force, the energy
released could be the Holy Grail we seek: abundant power created efficiently
and cleanly from minimal inputs.
But it just is not happening. Cold fusion is many
things – including a mental exercise for theoretical physicists and a
hoax from Andrea Rossi – but legitimate is not one of them.
Scalar
Energy
I would start with a description of what scalar
energy is… but aside from words like "hogwash" and
"drug-induced dreaming," I know not what to say. Instead, I'll let
Bill Morgan, one of scalar energy's louder proponents, do the describing for
me. This is from an article titled Scalar Energy – A Completely New World
Is Possible.
"The greatest
scientific discovery in the history of the world has happened over the last
few decades and it has gone largely unnoticed because of the great secrecy
with which it has been held by all who know of it. It is the discovery of a
completely new kind of electromagnetic waves which exist only in the vacuum
of empty space, the empty space between the atoms of our bodies as well as
the empty space we see in sky at night. All of empty space.
"These
waves constitute a kind of ocean of infinite energy, and it has now been
discovered that this abundant energy can be coaxed to pour into our
3-dimensional world from their 4-dimensional realm, to be used to do work,
provide electricity, power all transport, and even heal the body of almost
all disease. This is the new world of scalar electromagnetics, the zero-point
energy, the energy of the absolute nothingness which existed before the world
began."
Morgan goes on to explain that scalar energy is
comprised of "longitudinal" electromagnetic (EM) waves , a new kind
of EM radiation that is completely separate from the transverse EM waves that
we use to connect mobile devices, transmit television signals, and heat
leftovers in microwave ovens. Transverse EM waves modulate in three
dimensions, but these fancy new longitudinal EM waves modulate "in the
direction they are going, accordion-like, that is, along the axis of time,
the 4th dimension."
At this point, Morgan admits that the significance
and meaning behind all of this remains a mystery even to him. Thank goodness
– here I thought I was the only one who was confused.
Apparently, matter is compressed energy, and scalar
energy is compressed time, and both are compressed by a factor of the speed
of light squared. And because Einstein once used c2, the
entire concept is legitimate.
Oh, and the supposed father of scalar energy –
one Nikola Tesla – was apparently paranoid about others stealing his
ideas, so he rarely wrote any of them down, and upon his death the government
swooped in and confiscated any notes he had made, and now Big Oil is making
sure those secrets stay locked away. Right.
(I should note: Telsa was without a doubt an
absolute genius. He was father of numerous inventions that are the foundation
of our modern society, many of which were credited to others for various
reasons. Check out what is perhaps the greatest version of Tesla's résumé ever created. However, inserting Tesla's name into
the scalar energy argument lends zero legitimacy to this nonsense. Sorry!)
If only the government would admit the existence of
scalar energy, apparently we would have a cure for cancer and AIDS, be able
to manufacture UFOs, develop machines capable of mass mind control, earn a
Ph.D. in a few months, and of course be free of the oil curse. Oh, and the
secret government testing of scalar-energy devices explains crop circles and
glowing orbs of light moving through the night sky.
Abiotic
Oil
The third item on our top-three list of fringe
solutions to the global energy crisis is abiotic oil. Abiotic-oil proponents
believe that oil does not come from buried, rotting vegetation and busy
bacteria, but from CO2 and H2 gas rising through the
deep layer of the earth's crust and happening upon some zirconium, which
prompts the gases to join together into the long-chain hydrocarbons we know
as oil.
Were it true, the abiotic oil theory would mean that
oil is a sustainable, replenishing resource. In fact, abiotic oil enthusiasts
believe deep pools of crude oil will slowly refill all the world's oil
fields.
Oil as a renewable resource, continually
manufactured in the depths of the earth – not hard to understand why
this is a popular theory. Too bad it's completely wrong.
The debate about oil's origin has been going on
since the late 19th century, and from the start there were two
camps. On one side sat those who contended that oil was either primordial
– that it dated back to earth's origin – or was created through
an inorganic process. The other side was populated by those arguing the
biogenic line: that oil is produced from the decay of living organisms that
proliferated millions of years ago and were buried under ocean sediments in
fortuitous circumstances.
By the late 20th century, the vast
majority of scientists had lined up on the biogenic side. A small group of
scientists, mostly Russians but including a handful of Westerners led by the
late Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, held out for an abiotic
theory.
They argued that hydrocarbons existed at the time of
the solar system's formation and are known to be abundant on other planets
where no life is presumed to have flourished in the past. It all meant oil
had to be abiotic, seeping upward from nearly limitless pools near the center
of the planet.
If only oil companies would drill in the right
places, they would discover these deep pools – or so went the argument.
Well, the Swedes took that challenge to heart. Under
Gold's direction, a Swedish group drilled in search of a deep, abiotic pool
of oil for six years… and all they came up with was 80 barrels of
sludge, which was likely their own drilling residue.
I'd call that a fail.
Meanwhile, Big Oil has been using the biogenic
theory as the practical basis for their successful exploration efforts for
the past few decades. It is now very clear who was correct, and who wasn't. Sorry,
Dr. Gold.
Cold fusion, scalar energy, and abiotic oil are not
the solutions to our energy crisis. They aren't even theories – they
are dreams, fantasies imagined by people who want to revel in the glory of
weaning the world off oil without doing the hard work that is necessary to
generate a real solution.
There are lots of people out there doing that hard
work today, developing efficient, effective ways to tap into solar, wind,
tidal, and geothermal energy. These inventions will one day wean us off oil,
but that day is still a long way off. The methods we have today to tap into
these natural energy sources are inefficient, expensive, and often unreliable.
And while we await that day, we will continue to
rely on oil, the price of which will continue to climb and climb.
Unless one of you happens to have figured out a
perpetual-motion machine.
While cold
fusion, scalar energy, and abiotic oil are illusory sources of power, what's
all too real is the escalating competition for recoverable crude. As a
result, we expect demand for "black gold" to ignite the greatest bull market of the 21st
century.
|
