Our ship docked in Halong Bay, and I've had a lot of recent coverage because of our  Diamond Princess cruise through this area , so I will today focus on Fusion, the greatest hope for sustainable energy into the long-term future,  Today, only a history. There are two kinds of nuclear reactions. Fission:  splitting a heavy nuclei, like Uranium.  An Atomic Bomb gets energy from fission. Fusion:  joining light nuclei, like, like isotopes of Hydrogen, Deuterium and Tritium.  A Hydrogen Bomb uses fusion. Some  fusion history . In 1920, British physicist Francis Aston discovered that the mass of four hydrogen atoms is greater than the mass of one helium atom, which implied that energy can be released by combing hydrogen atoms to form helium. This concept provided the first hints of how stars produced energy. Henry Russell observed that a star's heat came from a hot core rather than the entire star. Mark Oliphant, working with Ernest Rutherford and oth...

Energy Matters today from the American Energy Society's 19August2024 issue : Global warming remediation. Seems awfully expensive, but the largest Direct Air Capture and Storage of Carbon Dioxide, 36,000 tons of CO2/year, is the plant at Mammoth in Hellisheioi, Iceland. The biggest one in the U.S. was launched this month in Northern Oklahoma.  5.000 tons/year. Said to cost $200 per metric ton, about the highest of all the options. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)  can cost today as low as $50/ton. However, this "low" cost would still increase electricity cost by 5 cents/kilowatt-hour in a coal-fed powerplant. Implementation is increasing , but very slowly, because there is still no carbon tax. Industry is experimenting and will not move forward unless real decisions are made to combat global warming.   Cost prohibits any use at home, so applications range from heavy industry to natural gas processing to hydrogen production. CCS is especially necessary in synthetic fue...

I've lived a life where I have been able to professionally dabble in pure fantasies. Three years with the U.S. Senate working on energy and the environmental legislation.  I drafted the bill that created the national hydrogen program in 1979.  Worked on laser fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ( SETI ) at the NASA Ames Research Center.   I had a full career in renewable energy, directing the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii and co-founding the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research. Here is a  nine-year old posting providing some details on my experience with fusion .  in the mid-1970's I remember having an apartment adjacent to Wente Brothers, and watching the Watergate hearings.  That was almost half a century ago.  At the  end of 2022 : Lawrence Livermore first achieved a net energy gain in a fusion experiment using lasers. That...