I’ve brought this up before but it didn’t seem to garner much interest. I am hopeful that with oil at $100/barrel and gasoline well over $3/gallon that this idea might now take hold because it has the potential to significantly improve fuel economy, power, and reduce emissions. This is something I feel fairly passionate about because I’ve done it! It’s not a hypothetical for me, I’ve modified a vehicle and put quite a few miles on it.

Let me start by stating my practical experience. I put a water injection system on a 1968 Rambler American with 199 cubic inch V6 engine. This car was a mid-sized passenger car weighing approximately 3200 lbs.

Without water injection, the engine really did not have adequate torque for how the car was geared (2.7:1 rear end and three speed manual transmission). It was picky with respect to fuel and knocked under heavy load. The fuel mileage without water injection was approximately 16 MPG city, and 22-23 highway. Tuneups were necessary every 10,000 miles or so and the spark plugs would be significantly dirty by that time.

I added the Edelbrock water injection system. The Edelbrock is flawed in major ways. The only really good aspect of the Edelbrock is the adjustable controller that can adjust water volume according to both vacuum and RPM. The problems with the Edelbrock are that the tank is far too small and the pump is integral to the tank making it impossible to just replace the tank, and, there is no filtration system so the injector rapidly becomes clogged.

The literature recommended about 1/10th the amount of water to fuel; however, I found optimal performance with city driving happened with approximately as much water as fuel, which made the 1 gallon tank useless. On the freeway when the engine was not so loaded, 1:10 ratio was closer to, but not quite, adequate.

The mileage improvements were not realized with just the addition of the water injection system, but with adjustments made possible by it’s addition. Stock, the engine would ping under load with the factory specified 6 degrees before top dead center initial advance and with the factory carburetor jets. The water injection totally eliminated this ping.

I found it possible to increase the initial advance to 14 degrees with no pinging and a great improvement in power across the entire RPM range. Particularly, the lack of pinging improved the usable low end torque significantly making the car a lot more pleasant to drive.

The 14 degrees initial advance and water injection both had the net result of significantly increasing the idle speed, so I was able to cut down on the idle settings quite a lot and save fuel. Also, no longer relying on fuel to cool the peak cylinder temperature, I was able to jet the carburetor a couple of jets leaner, as well as lean out the idle mixture, without pinging, and still obtain significantly more horsepower than stock.

The limit to how lean I could idle it was where it would start to miss. I added an MSD multistrike ignition system and that extended how lean I could set the idle without missing.

With these modifications, I now got 30 MPG on the highway, around 23 MPG around the city (I could stretch that to 25 if I really grannied it). What’s more, this car had no catalytic converter, but I had some tests done on it to see how clean the engine was and it came well within current smog requirements, far cleaner in fact than a brand new catalytic converter equipped GMC van we compared it to. An additional benefit is that it almost totally eliminated the need for tune-ups. Still had points but since they switched no current with the MSD ignition, they lasted; and after ten thousand miles I’d pull the plugs out and they’d look like I just pulled them out of the box.

Since much of what wears an engine is acids that are formed when incomplete combustion products react with water vapor, the almost total elimination of those products also had to be good for engine wear. Unfortunately, there were other aspects of the car that were mechanically bad, in particular the three speed no synchronizing gear in first transmission and completely inadequate brakes (at least for the way I drive), that ultimately lead me to sell it before the engine could approach true old age.

I’m convinced that even greater fuel economy and power could have been obtained by raising the compression ratio since there was absolutely no sign of pinging even on the worst obtainable gasoline.

These modifications approximately doubled freeway economy and improved city driving economy by more than 50%, while at the same time improving the power and response of the vehicle and cutting pollution at a cost far less than hybrid modifications. However, I see absolutely no reason this technology could not be combined with hybrid technology to gain the additional benefits provided by hybrid technology and such a combination might easily yield full sized drivable vehicles with fuel economies exceeding most motorcycles.

A factory equipped car would have two similarly sized tanks, one for water and one for fuel, and since the economy would be much higher, the fuel tank could be approximately half the present size so really no additional space would be required in total for the water storage, it would simply displace some of the fuel storage.

In a conventional engine, much of the heat energy is absorbed by the cylinder walls and thus not available to provide propulsion. In addition, the higher cylinder wall temperature reduces the overall temperature difference from fully compressed to fully expanded, and thus engine efficiency.

Water injection provides droplets of water vapor that are vaporized into steam by the flame. This simultaneously cools the flame while turning into steam and increasing in volume providing greater push to the piston. Less heat is lost to the cylinder walls.

Water injection allows a leaner mixture which would otherwise result in excessive cylinder temperatures, pinging, and engine damage. This in turn provides better economy as well, and reduced in carbon monoxide emissions. I also found the hydrocarbon emissions to be greatly reduced, in fact both hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide were almost unmeasurable. Nitrous oxides were reduced enormously as well, and the need for EGR eliminated as the water vapor provided all the positive benefits of EGR with none of the negatives side effects (reduction of power, etc).

If American car manufacturers weren’t such dolts they’d catch on to the fact that this is an inexpensive technology that would allow them to produce a car that could compete with the Japanese hybrids for economy, efficiency, and pollution specifications, while at the same time being much less expensive and having no battery pack to wear out.

Alternatively, they could combine this with hybrid technology and produce vehicles that were more efficient, more powerful, and lower in emissions than the Japanese hybrids at a similar cost.

Other possibilities also occur to me; for example, there is a class of carburetors referred to as “supercarbs” that various experimenters have built that use engine vacuum to vaporize fuel and provide replacement heat from radiator water, etc.

These carburetors can provide extreme improvements in efficiency because instead of feeding gasoline as droplets which then take energy from the flame to fully vaporize as they combust, feed it as a vapor. This results in slightly better combustion but the main efficiency gain comes from the fact that energy to vaporize the fuel is drawn from radiator waste heat not from the flame.

These super carburetors have not been practical for the most part because such a totally vaporized mixture is prone to pinging, and so far the inventors have been largely unsuccessful at working out metering and mixture issues over the full RPM and power range of the engines. None the less, I’ve seen some incredible mileage result from these. Water injection would at least eliminate the pinging issue and while it might be a stretch for the home experimenter, a modern closed fuel cycle approach applied to supercarb technology, combined with water injection, might yield efficiencies greater than fuel injection.

American car manufacturers are dolts, or at least run by them, so I’m sure they’ll continue to try to produce and sell inefficient SUVs while gas is $3+ a gallon and wonder why their losing billions of dollars a quarter.

Edelbrock no longer makes the water injection unit but there are other companies that do, such as “FJO” and AquaThrust. They tend to be more pricey than Edelbrock was (Edelbrock unit cost under $300 while the AquaThrust is almost $800). If you do decide to do this pick a unit with a separate pump, add a filter inline before the injector, and use a tank approximating your gas tanks capacity.

FJO Water Injection:

Aquamist Water Injection System:

AquaTune Water Injection Systems:

This is in response to a comment left by a poster regarding the Bussard reactor. This video of a presentation given at Google provides a very good overview of the operation and development of this reactor.

There is hype coming from some chemist at Penn State University that claims a serendipitous discovery that salt water; when irradiated with radio waves; burns.

This is dumb people; it’s not going to power your cars or your homes. All that has been discovered is that salt in water is conductive; and radio waves induce radio frequency currents in conductors, thus causing electrolysis, the emission of hydrogen and oxygen; and that hydrogen when burned in a stoichiometric mixture with pure oxygen burns damn hot, about 1700 °C hot; but it doesn’t generate more energy burning than the energy put into breaking the water down in the first place.

There are real energy solutions out there; this isn’t one of them. If you want to make energy from water; the way to do it is first to separate the water containing deuterium molecules from the rest of the water. This can be done through repeated distillation because the water with deuterium molecules has a higher boiling point.

Next electrolyze the water to get hydrogen, deuterium, and oxygen. Separate the hydrogen from the deuterium, any number of possible ways that this can be done; since the mass to charge ratio for deuterium is twice that of ordinary hydrogen, it’s not real difficult.

Now, take the deuterium and put it in a spherical tokamak with a lithium blanket; add a strong confining magnetic field; some heating current; and in a some D-D reactions will take place; you’ll get some protons, some tritium nuclei (proton+two neutrons), and some neutrons. Some of those neutrons will collide with the lithium and create more tritium nuclei.

After about a day there will be enough tritium generated for D-T reactions to predominate and at this point the reactor becomes a net producer of energy and continues to breed tritium from lithium.

The Tokamak science is understood well enough now that we could build such reactors if the people really in power didn’t oppose their construction. But the banks and oil companies have a lot to lose. The oil companies built platforms costing billions of dollars that take decades to recoup the costs; almost free environmentally friendly and unlimited energy would undo that. And the banks that loaned money to build these things don’t want that to happen either.

An alternative; build a Bussard reactor and use boron and hydrogen as the fuel; much cheaper (about 100x) in terms of capital expense; much more efficient as the energy can be drawn directly as electricity; and much cleaner; no neutrons means no neutron activation; no neutron embrittlement. The Bussard reactor requires no superconductors magnets, no exotic rare earth materials, and no extensive shielding, it can’t explode, melt down, and it neither produces radioactive waste nor requires radioactive fuel.

The Bussard reactor is much smaller than a Tokamak but still too large for cars; probably too large for trucks, but possibly could be fit in a large airplane, and definitely in in ships and trains.

These are some ways we can get large amounts of energy from water; we can get much smaller but still substantial energy from water by taping it’s latent heat or motion. We can build devices that generate energy based on the temperature differences between deep and shallow water, or between water and the air above it. We can tap energy of it’s motion by using undersea turbines, or tidal energy by damming inlets; or by taping wave motion by using a float and a anchored objects relative motion to generate electricity.

But we won’t get any net energy gain from bombarding saltwater with radio waves and burning the gas that results; always we will get less energy than we put in this way. Perhaps if we all throw some salt over our left shoulder the Penn-state chemist will go away.

I am writing more in the forums and less in the blog because the forum is interactive; affords the opportunity to categorize thoughts; and in general has more tools available.

Tonight I wrote an article about Human Potential; how we can achieve it; ad why I do what I do. Please take a look at this article.

Representative Jay Inslee sent me a letter regarding The New Apollo Energy Program. Given that I suggested to him that we needed to embark on an Apollo scale national program of energy independence and sustainability, I am happy that a bill was drafted utilizing the concept in the name, unfortunately it didn’t utilize the concept in the content.

Apollo was a national program that took us from barely achieving manned space flight to landing on the moon and returning in eight years.

The New Apollo Energy Program does essentially nothing over the next 13 years. This is not acceptable.

See the letter and my point to point response to it in our Future Forum here:

http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook/future/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17

Gingersnap13 said,

I was impressed with the Zero Energy Home you wrote about. Quite spendy, though. Thought you’d be interested in hearing about this brand new green and sustainable living concept on the market that was invented in Oregon. It’s called the NW Modern from ideabox and the man who created this home was also the brains behind the e-rated appliances, the predecessor to the Department of Energy’s Energy Star Program.

It is is sustainable and green in both building materials and construction. For the environmentally responsible consumer this cabin is cool and sleek. I mean we’re talking living large here in 400 sq. feet of luxury in a clever high end pre-fab home with a very intelligent design. It’s definitely on the affordable side, too, with homes starting at $74,500.

The research I’ve done shows that ideabox uses environmentally friendly products and construction with wireless technologies. I’ve heard that you can live large in a small space, so ideabox must’ve worked off of that concept! We’re considering it for my mother-in-law who wants to live on our property.

Here is some more information I found on how environmentally friendly ideabox is…

• Wireless technology because power lines are SO last year.
• Standing seam metal roofing – sustainable and fire retardant.
• Fiber-cement siding for low maintenance.
• Galvalume corrugated metal siding for an industrial look and efficient construction.
• Bamboo flooring because it’s sleek and renewable.
• Energy Star appliances and lighting for the best in energy efficiency.
• Marmoleum countertops, made from renewable resources.
• Fully insulated walls for maximum energy efficiency.
• Energy-efficient ENERGY STAR labeled windows to regulate temperature.
• Less than 2% construction waste because materials are ordered to size.
• Low volatile organic compound paints for better, healthier indoor air.
• Duo-flush toilets for water efficiency.
• Day lighting; windows in all exterior walls and interior re-lite strategies.
• Tankless water heaters to reduce electricity use.

Check it out at http://www.ideabox.us. Pretty neat concept.

Perhaps not a solution for everyone but might well be a viable solution for some. I’ve added IdeaBox to the sidebar resources. Thank you.

The human creature differs from the rest of the animal kingdom in the degree to which our behavior is learned rather than genetically predetermined.

Depending upon who you ask, chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor 5-6 million years ago, or in another version, diverged 10 million years ago, then interbreeding and hybridization occurred, and they diverged for a second time 5-6 million years ago. A chimp-human ancestor baby with a birth defect was born. A retarded baby which had a slowly developing brain. The mother of that baby nursed it along in spite of it’s slow development, and while it was slower to mature, when it did, it was mentally far more capable than it’s peers. By delaying development, the brain remained in a plastic state much longer, and so could learn readily and be influenced by and adapt to the environment to a much greater degree.

Although there were numerous failed attempts along the way, eventually a descendant of this retarded human-chimp ancestor became modern humans. The slow developing brain eventually enabled it to out-compete it’s fellow fast developing chimps and other primates.

For many millions of years people lived in small groups competing with other groups for resources and our social skills evolved to aid our survival in that environment. Females chose to mate with males who seemed to have the ability to protect and provide for them and their off spring.

For males, it was easier to acquire substantial resources by taking them from other males than through more effective or intense hunting or foraging efforts. In addition, stealing resources from other males made their victims less reproductively competitive. Females mated with males with more resources sexually selecting for aggression. For men, greater aggression meant more reproductive opportunities.

Deception was also selected for since another way for males to acquire resources was through deception of his peers. In addition, it wasn’t actually necessary to have resources, only to convince a potential mate that he had them. Thus deception was doubly advantageous and thus genetically selected for.

The invention of agriculture and the civilizations that resulted changed our living environment from one in which we lived in very small groups to one in which we formed large cities and lived together in much larger groups. Our population grew and we developed better transportation technologies, we came to a point where we now live in large interdependent groups of cities, states, and nations.

This current state of affairs, living in groups of millions in nation-states is relatively recent event and our genetics have not yet adapted to the new reality. Women still seek men that they believe will be good providers and defenders and unfortunately deception and aggression are still seen indicators of these qualities. In a nut shell this is why women are attracted to jerks and not “nice guys”.

These things largely happen on a subconscious level. They happen on a deeply ingrained instinctual level. Women will sleep with military men who will impregnate them, go off to war, and get themselves killed providing nothing. Or they’ll sleep with bad boys, people who will obtain resources by stealing, bullying, or through the use of deception. On a conscious level they know the likely outcome is not favorable in todays environment, but on a subconscious level they see these traits as indicative of a good provider.

Men in positions of wealth and power, start wars, take great risks, and they know that what they are doing. They know this is not in the best interests of the species as a whole, but whether or not they are consciously aware of it, they are driven towards aggression, driven to seek wealth and power at all costs, because they are the product of generations of ancestors who reproduced successfully because they were able to acquire resources and impress potential mates. Today large nations have hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, each capable of obliterating hundreds of thousands to millions of lives in seconds. Behaviors which favored the survival of the species in the past now threaten our extinction.

Until recently, I had wondered about something I’ve observed time and time again. Rich people aren’t content to be rich, they need to be richer than other people. I read about a study in which men were given the opportunity to receive $5 from a researcher gratis, the only condition was that when they received $5, another man whom they did not know would receive $20. Men who had high testosterone levels turned down the $5, while men with low testosterone levels accepted it. Why would they care if someone else got $20? Because the fact that someone else got more gives them a competitive breeding advantage. On the surface this seems absurd because $5 is nothing compared to a normal income. However, the part of our brains making these decisions isn’t the modern more evolved portion, it’s the primitive portions that evolved eons ago which are not so good with math or logic let alone ethics.

Now I’m not saying this is a conscious effect for most people, on the contrary, most people would deny it, women will say they marry for love, men will make up excuses for their behavior. For most people it takes place in a primitive portion of the brain at a subconscious level, but not for everyone.

However, we’ve evolved bigger brains capable of far more complex reasoning, but it is difficult for us to override the primitive brain. It still provides the “drive” for everything we do. The trick, I believe, is awareness. The more we as a species become aware of what goes on in our primitive brain, of our genetic programming, of our distant past and history, the more effectively our more recently evolved larger brain can override that programming and choose behaviors that are more appropriate for todays environment.

Women can influence the development of our species by making some conscious decisions with respect to their choice of mates. Does it really make sense to allow someone headed for Iraq to impregnate you? Dead people really don’t make good providers no matter how macho they might appear. Does it make sense to propagate genetic traits that are harmful to our species and the planet as a whole? No it doesn’t because it will ultimately harm or eliminate your descendants. So choose wisely.

Men, particularly older men who’ve done all the reproducing you’re going to, consider how irrelevant the number of your offspring are if the entire civilization collapses? Perhaps it’s time to put some of that wealth into the preservation of civilization? Helping people in poverty get out of it will ease the overpopulation problem, and the likelihood that your offspring and their offspring and future generations that follow, will survive. This is completely contrary to your genetic programming but remember that genetic programming largely evolved when clans and small tribes and a global population of perhaps a few hundred thousand existed, not nuclear equipped nation-states and six and a half billion people.

You powerful oil company execs out there, you need to allow, encourage better energy technologies to evolve so that poverty and in the long term, overpopulation, can be eliminated. All your money won’t mean anything if there is no civilization producing goods that you can buy, no potential mates that you can impress. Use that big brain for the betterment of mankind.

Haliburton, you could be making just as much money building infrastructure in impoverished areas as in rebuilding after war and providing support infrastructure during war.

GE, you make your turbines can be used to power civilian or military aircraft, they can be used to make electricity, you also make wind turbines. Presently, the demand for large wind turbines exceeds the capacity to manufacture them because the economics of power generation from wind are so favorable. Why not shift your production facilities to producing additional wind turbines, the whole economy will grow as the result of the increased energy input and in the long run you will profit more than if you place your emphasis on military products. Military products destroy infrastructure and economies, and in the long run this means less money circulating to buy your products. So GE, why not do the right thing and manufacture products for peace?

Raytheon, you guys make missiles and torpedos and military radar. But you also make Beech aircraft, civilian radar, and a variety of other products. Your focus though does seem to be on destruction, I don’t know if there is any hope for your company.

Powerful men you really need to think in terms of future generations. If you have a billion offspring in this lifetime, it will mean nothing if no future generations survive.

Women, you really need to put some conscious thought into your selection of mates so that future generations are genetically more adapted to present day conditions.

I corresponded briefly with a US soldier in Iraq today. He was an extremely angry young man. I’m not sure young man is even an appropriate term because he displayed a lack of maturity and an inability to hold a rational conversation. The answer to every question I posed to him was, “You’re a pussy” or “You’re a fagot”, but not once did I get a straight answer to a single question. I tried very hard not to be inflammatory but asking him to think was inflammatory enough I guess.

In this first video, on youtube, the caption justifies this driving by saying that soldiers have to drive this way to minimize risk of attack. If someone drove this way in the states they’d be shot dead in the first mile. I can’t help thinking that it is exactly this sort of behavior that provides the incentive for Iraqi’s to attack our s0ldiers. I know if someone invaded our country and behaved this way, I would be putting a substantial amount of effort into devising ways to put them out of my misery.

They’re not going to stop, OPEC is going to bleed the rest of the world for everything they can get. I’d like to draw your attention to this article in the Guardian.

The long and short of it is that OPEC has seen that the worlds economy didn’t totally collapse under the high pricing so they’re going to jack it up some more with additional production cuts.

We need to become independent of OPEC and other foreign sources for our energy needs. By keeping supplies tight, they not only drive prices up but they keep stocks low so that any natural disruption then becomes a major disaster.

In this country we grow our food, transport our food and other goods, with oil. As things currently stand, if we don’t have oil we don’t eat, and most of the folks supplying it to us aren’t our friends. It is best we face up to that and take care of our needs domestically. It’s not that we have a shortage of energy resources here, we just lack the political will to do what we need to do.

Folks, it’s time to ditch the Bronco’s for a Prius hybrid, better yet a modified plug-in hybrid. We have enough surplus generating and transmission capacity on the grid at night to meet almost all of our commuting needs and that would free up a huge amount of energy.

Much of our nations power generation has shifted from coal to natural gas because it’s cleaner and natural gas plants can also be throttled to meet load demand changes better.

What we should be doing now is massively investing in renewables and in bringing controlled hydrogen fusion online. It is something we can do technically, it is only political will that we are lacking.

There are criticisms to both because they raise some potential issues but they are problems that can be solved. First with respect to many renewables, wind and solar for example, there is the fact that the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing. That is true, but by increasing the capacity of our transmission line, geographical diversity can do much to alleviate these problems.

Peak electrical demand does correspond to peak sunlight so that’s not an entirely unhappy variable. Down in the south, solar power generation can provide capacity exactly during those times when air conditioners require it.

No matter what we do, increased energy demand is going to require that we boost our transmission capacity. There is a relatively inexpensive way of doing that, convert existing AC transmission lines to high voltage DC. This substantially increases capacity while at the same time eliminating radiative losses. Eliminating radiative losses has a nice side effect, eliminating increased leukemia risks for those who are located near transmission lines.

High voltage DC has many other advantages in addition to reducing costs for lines longer than 500 kilometers, increasing capacity, reducing line losses substantially, and eliminating low frequency AC electromagnetic fields. In addition to these advantages, high-voltage DC lines eliminate the problem of cascading failures. They eliminate problems of phase synchronization and even allow the interconnection of grids with different frequencies. They are immune to space weather.

The last consideration is one we really should give special attention to because the last solar cycle was the most intense on record but indications are that the next cycle will be even stronger. While this is happening, the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening and appears to be headed for a possible reversal (it’s hard to say if it will became in the past sometimes it’s dropped to zero and then rebuilt in the same direction), but regardless it’s weakening and thus will afford us less protection from what the Sun is doing.

The next solar cycle will peak in 2012, so that’s less than five years we have to prepare the grid for this increased activity. By the way, because I know a lot of people believe the world is ending in 2012, or believe that the Earth will flip on it’s axis, let me make it clear this is only a magnetic flip, not a physical one, and the end date of the Mayan calendar is only a function of the number of digits and the number base used, it’s not any different than saying our calendar will end in 9999, in reality if we somehow manage to survive to that time, we’ll just add another digit, and if the Mayan calendar were still in widespread use I am sure the same thing would happen. Our ability to keep track of time is not a prerequisite for the continuation of the planet anyway.

If we convert our grid to using high voltage DC for all the long distance interties, and increase the capacity (which would be an automatic result of converting anyway), then geographical diversity will do a lot to alleviate the issues of reliability of wind and solar. Long distance interties are really the lines we have to worry about anyway, it takes a substantial length of wire for enough voltage to be induced by magnetic fluctuations caused by space weather to blow out transformers.

The reason that AC lines are affected and DC lines are not is because the transformers that terminate long distance lines have close to zero impedance at DC, so very low frequency voltages induced by space weather magnetic fluctuations cause very high currents to flow through these transformers and burn them out.

On a DC line, induced voltages cause some change of the voltage at the terminating station but the chopper electronics that convert the power back into AC simply adjust for it and no harm is done.

On long AC transmission lines there is also a problem of power phase shifts. If a line is near capacity, the heat causes it to sag more, the longer length of the span increases the distance the current has to travel and introduces a phase shift. With DC lines this is not an issue.

DC lines require less buffer around them and so have a smaller right-of-way foot print. If AC lines are converted to DC, some of that land can be used for additional lines or reclaimed for other purposes.

There are many renewable sources which are more constant in nature. Geothermal produced constant output and we have abundant geothermal resources in the west, and in spite of the comment from someone saying aside from Mt. St. Helens and Yellowstone, they are not proven, that is not the case. The USGS has done drilling and other research projects have been funded. There are also, contrary to popular belief, geothermal resources on the east coast, however, they are much deeper and thus costly to tap.

Another source of power that is more consistent is ocean current generation. Essentially like a wind turbine under water. The ocean currents are much more constant than wind and thus offer a relatively stable source of power.

Other sources of power are ocean thermal, which takes advantage of temperature difference between surface and deep water, and off the western Washington and Oregon coasts where the mid-ocean rift is very close, there are large sources of heat difference that can be exploited.

There is wave technology that simply uses a float riding on the waves, working against something anchored to the ocean floor, to drive a generator and produce electricity. The waves are of coarse variable, but the more diverse our sources the less problematic the variability of any one source is.

To whatever degree we can replace the use of natural gas for electricity generation, that natural gas can be liquefied and used to displace imported crude oil. So without converting our transportation system to electricity or hydrogen power (the hydrogen is generated from electricity) we can still displace imported oil even in the transportation sector. Of coarse one area where we could replace oil directly with electricity is in the railroads, North America being the one continent where this hasn’t been done, and the one that can probably benefit the most from doing so.

It is now possible to find solar panels for under $3/peak watt, last year it was around $5, the year before that around $6. Now the sub $3/peak watt panels are mostly thin film types which do not have the high efficiency of mono-crystal silicon panels, but they still can contribute significantly to our energy needs. Even silicon panels though I’ve been able to find under $5/peak watt new.

Given that oil is going to only continue to go up over time, an investment in renewable energy will only get better with time.

Controlled nuclear fusion has also met with some criticisms but they are based upon outdated information and narrow thinking. The first criticism I’ve heard is that we’re still 50 years away. Presently, we invest only as much money in 20 years as we spend on imported oil in two days, so yes, if we continue investing at that rate it is 50 years away, but it’s not 50 years for any scientific reason, the science has largely been done, these things could be built today.

The second objection, it was claimed that they were too large for commercial applications, around 10GW when the typical nuclear plant is around 1GW (typically two 500 MW reactors). China built the three gorges dam, presently producing 14 GW and they plan to go to 23 GW at completion, and they’re not only getting that power to the grid but transporting it half-way across the country just fine. High voltage DC transmission lines are doing the job. The Grand Coulee dam generates 6.8 GW, we manage to get that to the grid even with old fashioned AC infrastructure.

With hydroelectric projects we don’t have the luxury of locating them where the load centers are. Even with nuclear fission we don’t have this luxury because of the needs for large amounts of cooling water and the safety concerns of locating a nuclear fission plant near a population center. With controlled hydrogen fusion we do have this luxury because we don’t have the risk of meltdown or massive radiation leaks and thus can locate them near population centers without safety concerns. In such an environment, the waste heat can be utilized instead of spent heating up a river. Even in circumstances where it must be radiated, the availability of almost free and inexhaustible fuel make achieving the absolute highest efficiency not quite as important and thus we don’t have to heat a river to get the lowest possible sink temperatures.

The 10GW figure is based on old information anyway. Today it would be entirely possible to build a fusion plant in the 500MW range. The reason for the higher power specifications earlier was because plasma confinement improves with scale, and a certain minimal confinement is required to reach commercial break-even. Commercial break-even is where the energy produced by the fusion is commercially viable after all the energy requirements are considered, that is after you heat the plasma, run the plant refrigeration to cool the magnets, account for thermal and generating efficiency losses, and the over all cost of operation, after you do all of these things you can still generate enough power to be commercially viable.

A few years back, you did in fact need to build a plant of around 10GW to achieve this, given the state of the art at the time. However, improvements in the understanding of the plasma physics, combined with new controlling techniques that use neural networks to dynamically control the containment field, combined with better magnet technology particularly in the superconductive realm which is required in a commercial plant, all of these things have improved enough to where a 500MW plant is now doable, and with a spherical Tokamak design that can probably be reduced to about a third of that.

A Tokamak fusion plant will be capital intensive, although, the same British group (now part of the EU) that designed the START and MAST reactors (both of which outperformed their design specifications) went on to design a 500 megawatt commercial spherical tokamak reactor that would cost less than an equivalent sized fission reactor to build, yet it has not been funded. Once built, the fuel for these is essentially free, or at least so inexpensive that it won’t even be a measurable component of the overall expenses.

I do believe the Bussard fusion reactor, if someone actually will fund a full-sized prototype, has the potential for being several orders of magnitude less expensive to build, and can be physically small and light enough that it will find applications in transportation. Probably not small enough for a passenger car or truck, but definitely small enough for ships, airliners, trains, and large trucks. In a ship you could build the capacity for extracting deuterium from seawater and never have to fuel. Just run the thing until the ship rusts away.

But, the Bussard design needs more development before we’ll know for sure if it will be practical, the Tokamak’s could be brought online as power producers now, not 50 years from now, if only we had the political will.

It wasn’t like this twenty years ago. I used to bring my kids down here and they’d go out in the water. Now it’s just gross as are many other bodies of water in the Puget Sound region. I used to go swim in Green Lake almost every weekend but back then the waters were only slightly green now Green Lake looks like a toilet that needs badly to be flushed.

Nutrients that promote the growth of algae and other aquatic plants choke the water near the surface and block light from reaching the depths starving the deeper waters for oxygen and killing off life there.

These nutrients come from inadequately treated sewage and animal wastes as well as lawn fertilizer. What is more important? Bodies of water we can swim in and life can flourish in, or a nice pretty green lawn? Personally, I’d opt for clearer waters at the sound.