I am sympathetic with the desire to eliminate "messy" forms of energy production, storage, transmission and use.
England (esp. London) during the early Industrial Revolution understood that Coal was dirty and should not be used in cities... but they already had an appetite for it's utility and continued to make themselves ill for a long time. Even today, the world continues to use it.
Internal Combustion Engines seemed to be a great boon. Around 1905, Scientific American claimed a great victory for the automobile in NY City, almost completely eliminating the messy, fly-attracting, etc. "pollution" of horseshit. It took nearly 50 years for the exhaust of automobiles to begin to become a bother, and another 50 (today) for it to become a global threat.
As I was leaving college in my mid twenties, I was quite idealistic. I was a vegetarian. I drove a honda Civic that got 40+ mpg (@55mph). I looked at both LLNL and LANL as genuinely positive places to work for many reasons... the Fusion Energy projects at both labs (Magnetic Fusion Energy @ LLNL and Antares Laser Fusion @ LANL) seemed to promise (30 years ago) an unlimited supply of energy to feed our unlimited (oops, did I say that?) appetite. 30 years ago. It was on the tip of our scientific tongues 30 years ago. And here we are. Maybe it is imminent.
In a few years, I could no longer buy a car that got 40+ mpg. I would have thought it was an OPEC or Detroit conspiracy, but instead I discovered that in our haste to improve fuel efficiency we had tweaked out the emission of Nitrous Oxides... and to keep the air safe to breathe, and reduce emissions to (mostly) C02 and H20, we needed to give up a little fuel economy. Nobody knew that C02, for all it's relative benign properties (we breathe it out with every breath, plants suck it up like we suck up oxygen!), would become a problem. Wait... *many* people knew! And only a few listened (I wasn't one of them, I was still seeking the holy grail of "free energy").
I observed Solar and Wind energy projects with great lust. Free energy straight from the environment! Then the Eagles (and probably much less "important" birds) started falling from the sky as they flew into the blades unaware. The big solar farm in Yuma, AZ proved the scalability of solar, but oops! it seems you needed to have a "gradient" to produce power... a high grade (concentrated solar energy) heat source was not enough... you had to have a high grade medium for dumping the "waste" heat. In this case the Colorado River... until they discovered that raising the temperature of the water "a few degrees" completely destroyed the habitat for the creatures living there... oops! It has been idle (and dismantled?) since.
Fission Power has been a big player for decades, and an excuse for naming the Department of Energy, not the Department of WMD. It is a very high-grade, compact form of energy production. Too bad, the best processes can also be used to yield weapons grade by-products. Too bad, the low-grade "waste" can only be buried (if you can find someone with a back yard they don't mind burying it in) for hundreds of thousands of years, hoping for the best.
So here we are "wishing and hoping" for a "free lunch". Haven't we had our free lunches already? And discovered they all have a price?
If there is anything in the current round of "energy solutions" that I am hopeful about, it is "distributed energy". The more we can become responsible (and aware) of the energy we consume, by having to accept the consequences of producing it, the more likely we are to be thoughtful about how wasteful we are. Maybe.
Some of us became more responsible after the "recycle craze" because we saw how many bottles and cans we generated each week. Others of us patted ourselves on the back for how "green" we were and consumed twice as much! After all, we were being responsible for our "waste" by "recycling", never realizing that most of the glass and paper and steel was a loss financially (and maybe energy-wise too) to recycle... only Aluminum was a significant net-gain. Meanwhile we all felt pretty smug with our little blue or green containers at the curbside.
If we burn firewood, we breathe our own smoke and watch our own woodlots/forests deplete. If we dam our own river, we notice the loss of habitat downstream, and have to negotiate with our neighbors for the meager output of the hydroelectric plant (see Jemez Springs pre-WWII). If we put up a windmill in our backyard, we have to listen to it clatter in the high winds and climb up and oil it now and again, replace a blade or a bearing maybe. And do without power on the still days. If we accept GE's "mini-nuke" into our backyard, we have to explain to our children when they inherit the house from us why they will need to spend their inheritance on "waste disposal" or why it is no longer operating and there is a 10' thick layer of concrete poured over/around it and the house is outfitted with geiger counters.
You can say this is a fantasy... that we don't really notice these things, and we destroy our own habitat and environment anyway. I suspect you are right... but if we don't even see it when we live amongst it... if it is the Amazon Rainforest, if it is the ozone at the south pole, if it is the eddies of debris in the oceans, then we have no chance of curbing our appetites. Let the chickens come home to roost, maybe we will take it as a sign or portent.
But if we make up a high-tech, high-industry solution that we think "someone else" should put in *their* back yard. That someone else should finance and approve and make "work well", then I'm sad. I don't think that will work out so well. It hasn't so far. We are already complaining about the coal smoke coming from China, a half a world away... did we think they (or was it Europe) didn't find *our* pollution offensive when we were at our peak?
I hope Fusion researchers will continue to look for a "better way". I hope Wind and Sun Farmers will seek ways to provide alternatives. I hope Fission researchers will continue to look for "better ways". But maybe we need to change something more fundamental...
I think I'll go drive to ABQ and back, in a 4x4 pickup truck, by myself, on the same day, at 80 MPH. Gas is below $2.00 if you shop carefully.
- Steve who Rants
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"To measure the abundance of positrons in cosmic rays, the team used data from the instrument PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics), which launched aboard a Russian satellite in June 2006. Unlike previous antimatter-hunting instruments, PAMELA can pinpoint not just the type of incoming particle but also its energy."
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