In 2007, the area of Arctic sea ice reached a record low. By comparison, here’s the current story:

   National Snow and Ice Data Center

Looks low by about 4 standard deviations. (Yes, too much geophysics & climate…)

Opportunity

Like most people with a conservative engineering mindset, I usually assume that major commercial technologies are designed to work reasonably close to the limits of current fabrication technologies (currently practical materials, subsystem performance, etc.). Then something like this comes along:

…an MIT-led team has designed a green airplane that is estimated to use 70 percent less fuel than current planes while also reducing noise and emission of nitrogen oxides (NOx)….the MIT team designed two versions: a higher technology version with 70 percent fuel-burn reduction, and a version that could be built with conventional aluminum and current jet technology that would burn 50 percent less fuel and might be more attractive as a lower risk, near-term alternative.
(MIT News, 17 May)

A new configuration with better aerodynamics, and a reminder that hundred-billion-dollar-scale opportunities are sometimes unexploited.

New thermal map of Asia
Nimbus II, 23 Sept 1966

The satellite soared over Earth in a polar orbit every 108 minutes, taking pictures of cloud cover and measuring heat radiated from the planet’s surface, and creating a photo mosaic of the globe 43 years ago. The resulting image is the oldest and most detailed from NASA’s Earth-observing satellites. It’s also the latest success story in what researchers call techno-archaeology: pulling data from archaic storage systems.

NASA Dives Into Its Past to Retrieve Vintage Satellite Data

Unfortunately, a lot of the old space data isn’t there anymore.

The Whale-Oil Shortage

There were special, durable tapes able to preserve irreplaceable space data. But when information technology regressed and these special tapes became scarce, what happened to the data?

…during the 1980s, the agency lost much of its old high-quality data. Its early tracking stations recorded satellite data on high-resolution master tapes that used whale oil to bind iron particles to the acetate. The whale oil made the tapes far more durable, but when commercial whaling was phased out in the mid-1980s, NASA couldn’t get such long-lasting tapes. So it reused old ones. NASA engineers taped over some 200,000 previously recorded master tapes, including high-resolution records from spacecraft as diverse as early Landsat satellites and Apollo 11, and preserved only low-resolution copies. “A huge amount of data was lost,” says Wingo.

Thermal maps from the 1960s… Polar ice coverage… “Already, the rediscovered Nimbus data are creating a stir among climate scientists.”

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up.

• Greenhouse Gases and Advanced Nanotechnology
• GOCE on a Mission of Gravity

The greatest problem with fusion power is rarely mentioned and scarcely on the research agenda: capital cost. When I discussed the problem earlier, in “Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water”, I hadn’t seen this quietly damning report, which I think is worth quoting:

From the introduction:

The goal of this activity is to provide guidance to the fusion energy sciences community based on industry requirements…

Buried among the discussions of plasma physics, neutron fluxes, and a host of practical engineering concerns, there is a page that briefly notes the “Achilles’ Heel” that makes the rest look like an academic exercise. There is no mention of the problem in the introduction or the conclusions:

From page 22:

Fusion fuel is cheap, but the capital costs are high. This may be the Achilles Heel of economic fusion power. The capital costs must be lowered by significant amounts — an order of magnitude of cost reduction would be highly desirable but probably not attainable. Traditional cost cutting efforts offer marginal improvements and will not be sufficiently effective. Innovative approaches that promise orders of magnitude cost reductions on major items must be aggressively pursued… [This will require] new fabrication and production technologies….

Emphasis added.

Translation: There is no known way to build a remotely economical fusion power plant, even if the fuel is free and the plasma physics works perfectly.

The report speaks of potential, unspecified, orders-of-magnitude reductions in fabrication cost, but what would other technologies look like if evaluated by the same rules?

Advances that would drop the cost of future fusion power machines into a range competitive with current photovoltaic devices are on a scale that would drop the cost of future photovoltaic devices to almost nothing.

(The above all refers to the leading proposal for fusion power, the tokamak approach. I haven’t seen an analysis in similar depth of the competitors.)

As I showed before, here’s the planned ITER reactor, including the high-vacuum chamber and its surrounding high-field superconducting magnets, together with the requisite particle accelerators, power systems, etc.,. Ordinary nuclear reactors are mostly plumbing; this is a fancy physics apparatus, more nearly comparable to the Large Hadron Collider.

For scale, note the person in the blue coat standing at the bottom:

See also:

• The Physical Basis of High-Throughput Atomically Precise Manufacturing
• Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water

Whole Earth Discipline:
An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.

After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed a few random pages. I consistently encountered substantial — often striking — new information and insights on topics where I’d been reading and following developments for years. Surprised, I did this a few more times, and then more, reading further. Fresh. Important. Wise. Readable and information-dense.

Stewart was the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, becoming a leading figure in the emerging environmental movement, years before the first Earth Day. Concerns about the whole earth have been a thread woven through a life in which Stewart has engaged areas ranging from sustainable communities to space development, from helping with the first public demo of a hypertext system to helping global corporations formulate business strategies for a turbulent and unpredictable world.

In Whole Earth Discipline his topics include genetic engineering, nuclear power, climate engineering, economic development, and the competing ideologies that surround them. In all of this, Stewart is politically sensitive and (in my view) overwhelmingly correct, yet far from politically correct. He kicks intellectual butt on both sides of most issues, but does so respectfully and from a principled moral center that itself demands respect.

Beyond its presentation of fascinating specific facts, and beyond its treatment of topics that could be books in themselves, Whole Earth Discipline is a book about how to think more coherently and effectively about what may be the greatest challenge of our time.

It may make a difference. I hope so.

A large piece of hardware

The plasma fusion research community has released conceptual designs for fusion power plants, and in every one that I’ve seen, “fusion power” means “heat used to produce hot gas”, usually by boiling water to produce steam. The gas drives turbines that turn generators, producing electric power with a typical efficiency of about 33%. In other words, 2 GW (fusion) = 2 GW (thermal) ≈ 660 MW (electric).

Here’s a larger image of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), intended to begin operational experiments sometime around 2018:

ITER will confine a 100,000,000 K plasma in a toroidal, ultra-high vacuum chamber surrounded by liquid-helium cooled superconducting magnets that produce a field several times higher than that of an MRI scanner. Most of the energy from the fusion reactions will be carried by neutrons; these both heat the wall and create radioactive material, some of it (tritium) to be extracted and used as fuel. In the proposed follow-on power-producing reactor, DEMO (~2030?), and in commercial machines (~2050?), the inner walls would be cooled by molten lithium or hot helium gas to extract the heat that ultimately drives the turbines. As is often remarked, the fuel would cost almost nothing.

DEMO would be somewhat larger than ITER, and is designed to produce about as much electric power as a medium-sized conventional nuclear plant.

In the ITER image above, note the man in the blue coat.

Pyrite
(a mineral crystal form)

A new paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology assesses the requirements for scaling solar photovoltaic systems to the terawatt levels needed to supply electric power on a global scale. The authors identify iron pyrite, FeS₂, as an attractive but unconventional alternative: The raw materials for pyrite aren’t scarce, and both the energy and monetary costs of production could be low.

In addition to having an outstanding K_lm value, pyrite is a strongly light-absorbing semiconductor with a band gap in the right range for use in composite materials systems for photovoltaics. This provides ample reason to study and learn to control pyrite growth processes at the atomistic level.

Biological examples show that protein molecules can guide crystal growth by selectively binding to crystal surfaces and surface features, and pyrite can grow under conditions that are compatible not just with proteins, but with living organisms. Development of a good crystal-shaping molecular toolkit could provide a route to a useful class of atomically precise fabrication techniques, and pyrite is an attractive target.

Pyrite may be relatively new as a serious candidate for photovoltaic applications, but pyrite basking in sunlight is a very old phenomenon, older than Earth itself. Pyrite crystals were an ingredient of the solar nebula from which Earth formed.

$150 per year
0.8 tons of CO₂

For residential customers in the U.S., the average price of electricity has recently* been at $0.115 per kilowatt-hour. This works out to almost exactly $1.00 per Watt-year:

Leave a 100 Watt light bulb on for a year, pay $100.

I found this surprising when I calculated it. The number is simple, memorable, and encourages conservation. Pass it on.

* Last November (source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)

Another number: 100 Watts, one year, over 1/2 ton of CO₂ emissions.
(based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration)

• To improve US fuel economy, stop talking about MPG!
• Ocean Acidification: The Other CO₂ Problem