I have to agree with that criticism of lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. It blows an alternative energy sources chances out of the water by assuming that the world infrastructure would be converted all at once and instantly. Thats just not true.

You'd see the most modern (read Western) countries attemping the conversion first. And you'd see a gradual implementation with the already converted infrastructure lessening the dependance of future conversion on oil.

You wouldnt just get a wind turbine system online and not devote it to the production of more wind turbines. That would be a serious misallocation of resources.

I think it is well within the reach of Western governments to attempt a conversion coupled with a concerted reduction of our current usage.

The lifeaftertheoilcrash.net example of how conservation of energy will only accelerate Peak oil was contrived at best. It assumes that only companies would attempt to limit their energy usage whilst ignoring the end consumer user.

They also assume that the money saved would sit in your bank account and be then lent to further investment in more ways to waste oil. I think thats a bit of stretch as well. If you, as a consumer, saved the money you would normally of spent on your electricity bill on something else e.g. a photovoltaic cell for your home or plants for your garden. How does this accelerate peak oil?

[edit on 11/4/05 by subz]

The drive to an oil-less world is currently underway. One of the primary reasons that Hydrogen cars still make 25 barrels of oil to produce is the heavy reliance on oil-based plastics in today's fabrication process. Japanese firms however have discovered a way to make plastics from a corn-based product, so that could help greatly.

As for fusion: The international fusion research generator is being built in France last I heard, and is primarily a project of EU member states. There are high hopes that the system will produce an incredible amount of power without highly radioactive waste with a long half-life. The primary problem will be the synthesis of deuterium (aka heavy hydrogen) which is the main fuel of fusion. It is naturally occouring (sea water will probably be used as fuel) and we do have enouhgh of it for millions of years of use, but it's hard to extract because it is widely diffused thoughout the ocean.

I actually have higher hope for hot-fusion which is basically a controled solar reaction held within massive electromagnetic feilds. However the fuel injection system would theoretically be designed in such a way that in the event of a feild failure the reaction would cease and the matterials go intert. The reactor would be destroyed but there would not be an explosion or release of radiation.

One must remember also though that even with the best predictions fusion will not overcome the high startup cost for at least 20 years, and nobody is saying we are running out of coal (the primary fuel used in electricy production) any time soon.

~Astral

Originally posted by The Astral City
nobody is saying we are running out of coal (the primary fuel used in electricy production) any time soon.

But you use oil powered equipment to get the coal out of the ground and transport it to the power plant. There is nothing that isnt dependant on oil in our society.

[edit on 11/4/05 by subz]

seekerof, you're in dangerous waters. you're agreeing with me.

i think you're absolutely right(that COULD be a play on words). the 'left' science magazine. "21st century science and technology" recently spotlighted the promise of cold fusion technologies and SUCCESSFUL experiments and theories.
dr.tadahiko mizuno of hokkaido university
the ENEA group of frascati italy
dr. akito takahashi of osaka university
texas university
also, the original pons and flieshman experiment has been reproduced. the secret missing ingredient was apparently ultrasonic sound.

cold fusion has been swept under the rug, literally SUPPRESSED by the 'establishment'. however, the underpinnings of the theory are too wide spread to keep it in the freezer any longer. cold fusion will change society more than any previous technology since the automobile. removed from the yoke of the energy barons, people will become more autonomous. we will live in a frictionless society with war as a distant memory. just watch.

Originally posted by subz

Originally posted by The Astral City
nobody is saying we are running out of coal (the primary fuel used in electricy production) any time soon.

But you use oil powered equipment to get the coal out of the ground and transport it to the power plant. There is nothing that isnt dependant on oil in our society.

[edit on 11/4/05 by subz]

true, but most heavy hauling equipment is DIESEL powered(because it has always been a cheaper alternative to gasoline. the current investments in biodiese(hopefully towards algal) will help power most of the excavation equipment that could bring power to these industries. maybe even algae ponds at mining sites....nevemind fuel distillates from coal could prolly be used for some aplications.

The thing that worries me is that oil is used for many other things like making medicine and plastics, we should not be wasting such a resource by simply burning it away. If we only used it for manufacturing and not energy then it could last for 100s if not 1000s of years by which time we would have very well established alternatives.

Originally posted by ufo3
The thing that worries me is that oil is used for many other things like making medicine and plastics, we should not be wasting such a resource by simply burning it away. If we only used it for manufacturing and not energy then it could last for 100s if not 1000s of years by which time we would have very well established alternatives.

Thats a damn good point there. Perhaps such hard to enforce decisions such as harshly curbing our usage of fossil fuels is why we've seen such an erosion of our civil liberties lately. Are they setting the stage for a harsher reality where the good of whole superceeds the rights of the few? Maybe but I dont trust our politicians with that power.

Do a google for "salt water generator" You will be amazed of all the products avilable already.

Mostly small handy stuff. But there aren't any real problem in upsizing it to bigger more efficient generators.

Well from what I saw it's simply a battery that you can reacharge more effectively as it looks to work on the same principles but the lack of details make it very questionable. As to Cold Fusion I have doubts it could every be used for large scale power production simply because most energy extracted from a reaction be it chemical or nuclear is from the heat and by definition cold fusion produces little of this. I for one hold much more hope for true fusion being the staple of future power production and indeed our way to continue the exploration of space.

Originally posted by Amur Tiger
Well from what I saw it's simply a battery that you can reacharge more effectively(...)

Yes, of course it is not comparable to nuclear fission.
This "battery", as well as a nuclear powerplant can be defined as a battery, uses water and salt instead of plutonium. The "waste" the salt water generators produce is mere water. No need to worry about how to take care of radioactive waste for the next 1 million years!

Of course, it would be nice if we just shipped all the nuclear waste with a spacebarge to the sun, but as far as I know, that technology is rather far away still. Now we don't want a spaceshuttle to blow up in the atmosphere loaded with radiating waste, do we?

And those clever scientists has discovered that people, languages and writings change radically over a million years, so to dig it down and put a sign of an exclamation point over it would most likely be a fiasco. If the sign where even there at that time, it could be interpreted as to "dig here". and in the ground, the barrels would most likely have broken into pieces, and the fluids would have leaked into the ground/created a sea of death.

Instead of using nowadays technology which consumes extreme amounts of energy, which requires nuclear technology, my belief and hope is that alternative powersources, different niche-products, will fill in the spots where applicable as soon as they are developed. For instance, I can't really see any reason for why old russian lighthouses has to be driven by atomic batteries. -These are by the way easily stolen, and has become a problem.

Actually I just remebered some high school science facts, salt isn't an element and neither is water therefor this certainly isn't a nuclear reaction, the fact that nobody picked this up sooner(me included) is kinda sad we're not going to deny much ignorence this way.

Reminds me of Back to the Future, where Doc Brown comes back from the future with a "Mr. Fusion" that he dumps can of beer, the can, some egg shells, coffee grounds, and a banana peel into.

Where we're going, we don't need... power lines.

The thing I think would be great about a device like this is that we could just dump all our trash it and get rid of it.

We would be very sorry if we just shot our nuclear waste into space.

Who knows what application we might have for it in the future. We could figure out some way to use those radioactives and they aren't exactly plentiful.

I see no problem with the Yucca mountain site. Nuclear waste is nothing compared to the pollution we daily get a dose of from our cars.

I agree that we use petrolium foolishly, but how will we replace the smaller engines in small machinery and 2-cycle engines? Is it feasible to have a weedwacker powered by deisel?

6-12 months of world consumption to replace ALL 700 million vehicles????

That's an EXCELLENT deal. We oughta take it, as it will have payoffs for decades.
I would have thought that the oil consumption of a car manufacture would have been
far larger.

What is the average working lifetime of a vehicle today? I'd guess 15 years.

Note, that you cannot look at developed countries and see "there aren't many vehicles older than 10 years, certainly not half"---because people sell older cars, and many of them are subsequently purchased in less developed countries.

All the more reason to encourage/force higher mileage vehicles now, while the economy is still good and people can afford them: because new cars today will be what we're driving when Peak Oil really starts to bite in 5 to 10 years.

With Peak Oil, there isn't going to be any sudden moment of a "crash". There will be an ever more strict squeeze.

funny how the average horsepower of even small cars keeps going up and up. really #ing funny.

i've come to the conclusion, after much deliberation, that (most) people just don't think before they do stuff. idiots. we could all be getting hundreds of miles to the gallon by now. we could have improved mass transit to make it more convenient and palatable. instead, we get sucked into the culture of speed and status. stupid human virus, consume your host and die.

According to the article, the heated crystal gave off some fusion byproducts, but you notice it wasn't sustained, wasn't "cold" fusion, and used more energy than it gave off.

I consider that in interesting piece of the puzzle, but hardly a "breakthrough"!

And again, I have to ask why anyone would want to design a replacement for our oil infrastructure around an energy source which is -- at least right now -- non-existent?

Is palladium a nuclear catalyst and can a palladium nuclide make deuterons? The answer is yes to both questions and here is what I found. I found one and only one possible palladium nuclear catalyst reaction that can make hydrogen-2 from hydrogen-1. Don't know if this proceeds at room temperatures. The scientific method is theory followed by experiment.

110AG 2- IT to conserve spin-parity.
46-Pd-110 0+ + 2x 1-H-1 -> 47-Ag-110 1+ + 1-H-2 1+ [+0.550 MeV]
1p+2n+1p 1p 1p+2n+1n 1p+1n
46Pd-110 0+ stable σn=0.733b
2x 1-H-1 0+ stable σn=0.332b
47-Ag-110 1+ 1↑ 24.6s ß-»110CD=99.7% EC»110PD=0.3%
1-H-2 1+ stable σn=0.51mb

1p 1p
| |
1p+2n+1p

The two protons connect center and middle as shown and then a (2P,D) reactions proceeds.

Above is the nuclear reaction that comes from Nuccalc, a software program I wrote to automatically apply the conservation laws without mathematical errors. Silver-110 can end up in an IT where the decay product is almost exclusively 110PD. So palladium-110 can be a nuclear catalyst to convert protons into deuterons.

The third line of the equation is face nucleons of the particular nuclide above. I have a model for the nucleus of the atom and the entire fill sequence. The two protons connect in such a way that element building cannot occur but a (2P,D) reaction occurs on the face of palladium-110. Palladium-110 temporarily becomes silver-110 and then decays back if the decay occurs from the silver-110 IT. If the decay occurs from the ground state then cadmium-110 is the final product and cold fusion is a consumptive process.

I turned my attention to fusion of two hydrogen-2 or one hydrogen-2 and one proton and found palladium-106 to be the most likely nuclear catalyst.

I am the supernova physicist for the US government with more experience with fusion equations than anyone else in the entire world. The standard set of nuclear reactions given in physics books for the proton-proton fusion cycle don't work unless there is a nuclear catalyst upon which the reaction proceeds. Conservation of spin-parity is the reason. Hydrogen-2 has no 0+ IT so two protons of 1/2- and 1/2+ cannot fusion without a nuclear catalyst. Only I have the model for the nucleus of the atom and all the other tools to do a search of the entire table of Nuclides for the best cold fusion nuclear catalyst.

Does anyone want to pay me for my services and really get cold fusion into high gear? I am located in Idaho Falls if you want to find me.

Not knowing what cold fusion is, my science seems to be lacking.
This term hit the newspapers 20 years ago with Bill Lyne at
the head of the storm.
I assume nothing has resulted.
According to Bill he misled the investigators who ultimately found
nothing.
He might have divulged what he did on the mis lead but do not think
he said how the experiment was done right.
So he keeps all his experiments secret like Tesla but don't think reading
Tesla would help in the cold fusion area.

ED: Recalling more after reading the above, I recall the use of
silver amalgam if that was what Lyne used or just another
curve ball.


[edit on 2/14/2009 by TeslaandLyne]