Solar Energy: Pergamon International Library of Science, Technology, Engineering and Social Studies

Sydney

THE SPONSORS

The Science Foundation for Physics within the University of Sydney gratefully acknowledges the generous financial assistance given by the following group of sponsors, without whose help the 1974 International Science School for High School Students and the production of this book would not have been possible.

G. Hermon Slade

The Nell and Hermon Slade Trust

The Sydney County Council

Alexander Boden

Philips Industries Holdings Ltd.

Ampol Petroleum Limited

Mobil Oil (Aust) Limited

PART I

World Energy Resources and Consumption

Outline

Introduction to World Energy Resources and Consumption

Introduction

Chapter 1: Nuclear Fission, Nuclear Fusion & Geothermal Energy

Introduction to World Energy Resources and Consumption

by

J.L. TUCK, DR.

DR. J. L. TUCK

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, U.S.A.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Publisher Summary

This chapter discusses the world energy utilization. The future utilizations of energy and the population explosion that is linked with it is an extremely complex problem. To make the estimate of the energy consumption of asymptotic world, one assumes that the world’s per capita energy consumption rises to the current U.S. value. The result for asymptotic world energy consumption is 2.8 Q/year. Of the fossil fuels that are the main source of energy today, coal is the largest, good enough for about half a century at the asymptotic rate or for more than 500 years at the current rate. The usage of coal, which is likely to increase enormously in the United States, for conversion into oil and gas to replace the increasing shortage of natural hydrocarbons poses certain problems. The large energy options of the future are nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, geothermal, and solar energy.

One wonders whether the planners sitting in conference sometime in mid-1973 to choose the energy topic for the conference knew something ordinary mortals did not. For six short months later, by the year’s end, the energy crisis had come to monopolise the headlines of one-third of the world’s newspapers, children go to school before dawn in Florida, the price of petroleum rose by a staggering factor of three, and talk of a worldwide trade recession induced by the increased price of energy became widespread. The resulting outpouring of reports, symposia, tapes, etc., has reached torrent proportions in the U.S.A., such that it is totally impossible for one man to go through one-hundredth of it. Everything said here has probably been affirmed by somebody and denied by someone else. Some apology is perhaps due for this contribution to the flood. My excuse is that here in Australia you are far away from the storm centre. Though I doubt if you inhabitants of this fortunate land (the least crowded habitable continent that is still untroubled by population pressures and still with an almost untouched store of natural resources) will escape entirely unscathed. And Australia may even derive great benefits.

To explain this, let me anticipate what comes later. There are reports that Australia may be unusually well endowed with rich, that is, cheap, uranium. Although uranium is a depressed market at $5-$7 per pound now (1974), it is as sure as anything can be in this uncertain world, that there is going to be a world uranium crunch by 1985 just as there is a hydrocarbon crunch now. The price of uranium in the U.S., Europe and Japan will almost certainly reach $15 per pound and probably go much higher. But later, say by 1990, with almost equal certainty as breeder reactors come on stream, the demand for uranium will fall. If fusion power should come to undercut fission power (which seems unlikely but possible), then the bottom would fall out of the uranium market altogether.

So what should Australia be doing about its uranium deposits? To us, one of the satisfactions in addressing a selected next generation group such as this is that there is a reasonable expectation that there will be some among you who will one day be in a position to do something effective.

Before discussing the world’s energy resources and how they will last, we really must decide what is going to happen to the world’s population, and what the living style will be. Will it be like us, Americans who use 10 times more energy and resources than the world average today, or like well, Thoreau, or even Aboriginals? Is there going to be enough for everybody to eat naturally, or will population demand for food exceed the ability of agriculture to produce, and force us to manufacture our food synthetically. Energy availability has a feedback affect on that. One important way of making room for people is by bringing desert areas into agricultural use by desalination of sea water. But there is no hope for doing this at acceptable cost unless energy gets much cheaper. On the other hand, all the indications are that we have been living in the golden age of energy, which is ending, so that energy will never be as cheap again. The future utilisations of energy, and the population explosion which is linked with it, is an extremely complex problem. Some questions really have no meaningful answers yet. It is very easy to fall into a mood of the inevitability of disaster, as in a Greek tragedy, and many do.

Since I am of an incurably optimistic nature, let us dispose of the gloomy inevitability aspect quickly and get on to more encouraging matters. In the very long-term, as the great economist J. M. Keynes observed in another connexion, we are all dead of course. For our sun, creeping along its predestined path on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram in a billion years or so must snuff out or explode, whichever it decides to do, and effectively end all life in our solar system. (Though not in our galaxy—you see cheerfulness creeps in.) Now for the middle long-term: of course all fossil hydrocarbons, even coal will be gone in another millennium (hydrocarbons in a century.) But we won’t run out of energy, as I shall try to show, for there are energy sources—nuclear, geothermal, solar sunshine—capable of keeping us going for at least a million years. Longer than that I really am not prepared to go.

Now for the immediate future. In 20 years or so, it is going to be difficult, especially with hydrocarbons, but it can be sorted out provided we can avoid slipping into a nuclear war. Of course petroleum will never be as cheap again as it has been. As a matter of fact I believe it has been too cheap, so that its existence has delayed the due development of the other energy sources. So it could even be argued that the arrival of the current energy crisis is a blessing in disguise: it forces attention to the development of alternate energy sources at a time when most of us, the U.S. in particular, can still manage without foreign oil by a process of belt-tightening. If this were not to happen now but say in 1986, it would be much more unpleasant. There is another problem which will have to be solved: man’s wastefulness. It is true that our bodies are re-cycled, as the plants and animals are, and we even re-cycle automobiles to an increasing extent. But consider the ordinary tungsten filament light bulb which burns its appointed 1000 hours or so and goes to the dump. The materials in the burnt-out bulb are just as good as ever they were. In fact a thousand tons of burned out light bulbs would be a better source of aluminum and tungsten than most primary ones. It is a problem of resisting dispersal, sorting and keeping things together (which takes some energy, since it diminishes entropy) and we are going to have to learn how to do it.

Today at business and marketing meetings, the cost and organisation of the distribution of products is said to be the dominating topic. How quaint it will be if it comes to pass that someday such meetings have to discuss with equal intensity the cost of picking up their products after discard.

The matter of the closed ecological cycle, for plants and animals and the evil consequences of its incompleteness in present human society is well brought out by May in the two chapters entitled Terrestial Ecology Systems in the 1972 volume of this series, Brain Mechanisms and Control of Behaviour (ref. 1).

I find myself in such complete agreement with these articles and the following one by Maddox entitled Problems of Predicting Population that I propose them as required reading for these lectures. This assistance in my task is doubtless no lucky coincidence but part of the International School planning.

To display the population explosion, Figure 1 shows the population of the world N plotted against time on a linear scale. The uniqueness, violence and abruptness of the explosion is self-evident: obviously it can’t go on like this for centuries more, or we shall have nowhere even to sit down. By the way, the use of the linear scale for N rather than a log scale seems to me to be important: A one million increment to a population of ten million must be at least as damaging and probably more damaging to itself and the environment as would be one million increment to a population of one million.

Figure 1 Growth of world population.

From Figure 1, we see that N at the moment stands at about 3.5 billion (10⁹) and is rising at a rate that would bring us to about 7 × 10⁹ by the year 2000. Turning to Maddox (ref. 2), we see that he gives United Nations estimates for N of 7-8 billion by the year 2000 and still rising at 2% per year (equivalent to 15 billion by AD 2050). Using the euphemisms developing for the poor and developed for the affluent, he notes that fertility is higher in the poor than the affluent. They have to be satisfied with the simple pleasures apparently. Nature in a cramping environment, in man, as in many other forms of life tends to meet a threat to existence by increased breeding. Put another way, the partial differential δ(Fertility)/δ (number) is positive and therefore destabilising. It is a pity—no—let me guard myself against the sin of hubris—it would seem to be a pity—that the sign of the partial was positive. If it had been negative, then populations would have been self-stabilising, with a sort of built-in population thermostat. For populations, the break-point occurs when famine intervenes. Very interesting oscillations in populations can occur when predators, be it men on men, or foxes on lemmings are introduced into the problem. Students of the history of science are recommended to read Volterra’s The Struggle for Life (ref. 3). He developed in 1936 certain integro-differential equations to describe these effects.

As both May and Maddox report, world demographic statistics are incomplete, lacking, and the population predictions made from them, notoriously wrong. The trouble is that these predictions are usually too low. So what can possibly be done? One solution pointed out to me by Rosen (ref. 4) is: since fertility goes down with increasing prosperity, and prosperity is positively related to energy consumption, when the large energy sources which I shall discuss later, become available then if you hand out large amounts of energy to the poor, they will cease to be poor and stop multiplying. Perhaps it would work; but there is very little time. My own stubbornly optimistic hope is for the birth control pill. I do not see how this can do other than reduce fertility. The main objections to its use among poor people seem so far to be religious. The objections may have to be overcome, and also a longer lasting pill developed (reduced dose rate) to increase convenience. Such pill improvements are currently undergoing testing. Maddox does not mention the pill in his population discussion and it is doubtful whether current demographic statistics are good enough anyway to show up any fertility effects from the already quite extensive pill usage.

Parenthetically and not strictly germane to this discussion, the social implications of zero population growth and the pill are truly staggering: Thus 2.1-2.2 children per family, no births after 25, no child care after, say, 40, giving 30 to 40 years more of life to be devoted to what?—research, continuing education, art, social service,—what else? For the purpose of the discussion that follows, based on the foregoing, we will make the simple projection that the NT curve has a point of inflexion at the present, levelling off to an asymptotic world N of 7 × 10⁹ in the 21st century (Figure 2). This is optimistic I admit. It has the merit of agreeing with projections by others—notably by Brown, Bonner and Weir in the book (1957), The Next Hundred Years (ref. 5).

Figure 2 World population and energy consumption past and predicted.

Energy units

Traditionally, coal has been measured in tons, oil in barrels, gas in thousands of cubic feet, electricity in kWh and uranium in pounds. This is very confusing: as a matter of fact this confusion is probably the root cause of some serious anomalies in the price of energy. When fuel is being used to provide heat, say for a house, the rational way to price it would be in terms of its calorific value, i.e. in calories, or perhaps Btu. On the other hand when used to do work, then electricity converts one for one but the fuels, if they have to convert through a heat engine, do not. This is because they become subject to the profound laws of thermodynamics and have a conversion efficiency (Carnot factor) E, given by (T1−T2)T1. T1 is the upper temperature (absolute) of the cycle. For example, say the hot steam input to the turbine, T2 is the output temperature, where the steam is condensed. T1 for power plants has been slowly rising over the years as more advanced alloys allow of higher T1. Characteristic values are: central steam turbo-electric plant - 0.5., automobile engine at peak load - 0.38, at 1/10 load - 0.15., early gas cooled uranium reactor (Magnox) - 0.28, advanced gas cooled uranium reactor (AGR) −0.35.

There was much quiet amusement in scientifically informed circles in the U.S. recently, when a politically appointed new State energy czar, learning that the State’s natural gas power plants converted only a fraction of the gas heat into electricity, announced that such inefficiency would cease forthwith.

The Carnot factor pops up everywhere. A problem in the generation of electric power from the sun by the flat heat absorber panel method is to keep up T1 which tends to be considerably lower than in normal steam plants. This problem applies only to conversion. For house heating, a low temperature is no disadvantage. The lowness of the efficiency of a heat engine for a small difference between input and output can be turned to advantage in the heat pump. Instead of dissipating electricity to heat a house in a resistor, it is used to drive a heat engine backward, taking in heat from some source, a river or the air and emitting heat from the compressor. As much as 5 or 10 times as many calories can be obtained this way. At first sight it might seem that everybody would do this, actually such installations do exist in the U.S. The drawback is that the primary cost of the heavy machinery and its maintenance tend to overshadow the economy in energy.

The unit that has come into use for discussing global energy problems is the Q = 10¹⁸ Btu. It is an enormous unit, too large for many purposes, and during the last year, many studies have used the mQ