Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy
251
Mad Like Tesla: Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy
251eBook
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Overview
Nikola Tesla was considered a mad scientist by the society of his time for predicting global warming more than a hundred years ago. Today, we need visionaries like him to find sources of alternative energy and solutions to this looming threat.
Mad Like Tesla takes an in-depth look at climate issues, introducing thinkers and inventors such as Louis Michaud, a retired refinery engineer who claims we can harness the energy of man-made tornadoes, and a professor and a businessman who are running a company that genetically modifies algae so it can secrete ethanol naturally. These individuals and their unorthodox methods are profiled through first-person interviews, exploring the social, economic, financial, and personal obstacles that they continue to face.
Also covered is the existing state of green energy technologies—such as solar, wind, biofuels, smart grid, and energy storage—offering a ray of hope against a backdrop of dread.
“Hamilton makes complex technologies comprehensible.” —Library Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770900738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/06/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 251 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mad Like Tesla
Underdog Inventors and their Relentless Pursuit of Clean Energy
By Tyler J. Hamilton, Crissy Boylan
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Tyler HamiltonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-074-5
CHAPTER 1
More Bang for the Buck?
A Quicker Path to Nuclear Fusion
"This is the ultimate greenhouse-gas reduction doo-dad if we can pull it off." — Doug Richardson, CEO of General Fusion
Nuclear fusion is keeping you alive. It's keeping everything alive — plants, bugs, bacteria, viruses, algae, fish, elephants, everything. Just look to the sky on a sunny day and you'll see the source. It's called the sun, which in essence is just an unfathomably massive nuclear fusion machine. Its gravitational pull is so intense that the pressure exerted on its inner core of gases — mostly hydrogen — keeps the temperature at around 15 million degrees Celsius, more than hot enough to trigger reactions that fuse hydrogen nuclei into heavier helium nuclei. When that happens, things go boom. The sun emits the resulting energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation, which travels 150 million kilometers before bathing Earth with life-sustaining sunlight. Without it, we are not. With just the right amount, life thrives.
The idea of somehow recreating this process here on Earth to generate near limitless amounts of safe, emission-free power remains a dream after more than half a century. We understand the theory. We know it can work. We've successfully triggered nuclear fusion reactions on this planet. What we haven't figured out is a way to tightly control it. The nuclear fusion we can achieve today is an instrument of death, not of life. It's called a two-stage thermonuclear bomb, and its design is intentionally uncontrolled. We got our first experience of its destruction in 1952 during a U.S. nuclear test called Operation Ivy; an experimental bomb code-named Mike unleashed 10.4 megatons of explosive energy on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That island, Elugelab, was entirely obliterated. The only evidence of its past existence is a two-kilometer-wide underwater crater. Scary.
But what if we could tame the fusion beast for the good of the globe? What if we could harness its power to create clean energy that is affordable, safe to produce, and which doesn't solve one problem by creating others, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons or a legacy of highly radioactive waste that remains dangerous for hundreds of years? And if we could, what would the effort look like? A high-profile international project with hundreds of lab-coat wearing scientists from several countries collaborating under a single umbrella? Billions of dollars, of course, would be required for such a monumental global effort and, if all went well, fusion power would begin feeding the electrical grid in about three, or more likely four, decades. If all this sounds familiar, it's because it's a general description of the controversial International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project, better known by the acronym ITER.
ITER has been a going concern for more than 25 years. It began in 1985 as a research effort shared between the United States, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and what is now the European Union, but a detailed engineering design that was acceptable to all parties didn't emerge until 2001. It wasn't until the fall of 2006 that members of ITER — now consisting of the EU, China, Japan, Russia, the United States, India, and South Korea — struck a formal agreement to move forward with the 10-year construction of an experimental facility in the south of France that could demonstrate just the feasibility of fusion power. The original cost of construction was pegged at 5 billion Euros, or $6.4 billion U.S. By fall 2010, it had ballooned to more than 15 billion Euros, or nearly $20 billion U.S. This enormous cost is what's earned ITER the label "controversial." It has been hobbled by United Nations–style bureaucracy and, without anything yet built, has seen its cost estimates triple in just four years. Some observers of the project, from both academia and industry, rightly wonder whether this is a worthwhile international investment or just a makeshift project for career nuclear scientists. Could $20 billion be better spent elsewhere? Can we afford to wait decades for the panacea of fusion power as we stand on the precipice of climate catastrophe? "I think [fusion power] will be solved," British scientist and climate expert James Lovelock once told me. "I just don't think it will be in time."
Michel Laberge shakes his head like a disapproving mother when he talks about ITER. "ITER is a dinosaur," he said. "It is so complex with all those countries involved. It's not moving at all." Laberge is founder and president of General Fusion, a small company located in a nondescript industrial mall less than an hour outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. You might call General Fusion the anti-ITER. This gutsy little company, armed with three dozen or so engineers, aims to demonstrate by 2014 that it can create a "hot" nuclear fusion reaction that gives off more energy — much more energy — than it takes to trigger it. It plans to do this with $50 million, not $20 billion. And it expects to be supplying fusion-based power to the grid by 2020, not 2040 or later. Bold, ambitious, potentially disruptive, and, as you'll find out, based on sound science. But try knocking on the doors of investors to raise money for such an endeavor, or ask someone in the tightly knit community of government fusion scientists for a helping hand. "They tell us it's totally impossible and that we're completely crazy. That's the consistent message," Laberge said. "From the scientific world, the economic world, the government — all of them — they just don't take us seriously. Their argument is as follows: we have billions of dollars, we have thousands of the brightest physicists working on this thing for years and years, and you and your little bunch in the boonies with 50 million dollars are going to make it? That's totally impossible, you flakes. Go away. We don't want to hear about it."
Dodgy Track Record
They don't want to hear about it because a number of high-profile fumbles have left a big embarrassing blotch on the history of fusion science. In 1958, a Nobel prize–winning scientist from the United Kingdom named Sir John Cockcroft gathered the nation's media to announce that he and his research team had demonstrated controlled nuclear fusion in a giant machine nicknamed Zeta. Cockcroft beamed with pride. "To Britain," he declared, "this discovery is greater than the Russian Sputnik." Commercially generated fusion power was two decades away, he predicted. Just months later Cockcroft was forced to admit that his observation of nuclear fusion and subsequent claims were an unfortunate mistake. Fast-forward 31 years to the infamous "cold fusion" claims of chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann. Pons, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah, and Fleischmann, a veteran professor of electrochemistry at the U.K.'s University of Southampton, had collaborated for several years when, in 1983, their Utah lab experiments demonstrated a nuclear fusion reaction at room temperature. It was a relatively simple setup: a cathode, in this case a rod made of the precious metal palladium, was inserted into a glass tube filled with heavy water, which is water with a high amount of a hydrogen isotope called deuterium. When electricity was applied to the cathode, it caused bursts of heat that Pons and Fleischmann believed to be a fusion reaction — the creation of new atoms caused by the fusing of deuterium in palladium. The output of energy, according to the two professors, was substantially higher than the energy going into the process in the form of electricity. They continued to refine their experiments until 1989 when university administrators, bursting with excitement about this ground-breaking discovery, jumped the gun and scheduled a March 23 news conference to announce this world-changing breakthrough.
Standing behind a podium in a university auditorium packed with journalists — a scene captured on video that, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, is now available on YouTube — Pons seemed quite confident about the discovery. "The heat we can measure can only be accounted for by nuclear reactions," he said. "The heat is so intense it cannot be explained by any chemical process that is known." He went on to paint a very positive portrait of the future. "I would think it would be reasonable within a short number of years to build a fully operational device that could produce electric power or drive a steam turbine." Fleischmann, acknowledging that much more research was needed to establish a scientific base for their findings, was equally optimistic about the "possibility of realizing sustained fusion with a relatively inexpensive device." A global fusion frenzy immediately ensued, with laboratories around the world attempting to replicate the Pons and Fleischmann setup. The state of Utah even coughed up $4.5 million to establish a National Cold Fusion Institute in Salt Lake City.
But something didn't smell right, and by the end of 1989 it had become clear that the claims were nonsense. All attempts at replication had failed or had been proven faulty. In November 1989, an advisory panel created by the U.S. Department of Energy reported that the Pons and Fleischmann experiments and attempts to replicate them "do not present convincing evidence to associate the reported anomalous heat with a nuclear process." Nuclear fusion at room temperature, the panel wrote, "would be contrary to all understanding gained of nuclear reactions in the last half century; it would require the invention of an entirely new nuclear process." The whole affair was a near death blow to the reputations of both men, who were accused of acting unethically. At best, their work was shoddy. They were lampooned. They ended up moving (fleeing?) to France in 1992 to continue their work at a privately funded lab. Pons never returned to the United States and ended up becoming a French citizen. Fleischmann left France in 1995 and returned to England where, for the next decade, he dabbled in cold fusion research.
As far as dabbling goes, there is actually a fair amount of cold fusion experimentation going on in the scientific community, despite the fact that the U.S. patent office has stopped granting patents to cover such work. One champion of cold fusion is Peter Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He continues to carry the cold-fusion baton as part of a shrinking group of dedicated researchers who are treated like pariahs by mainstream academics and scientists. One of the most recent demonstrations of cold fusion was conducted by Yoshiaki Arata, a professor of physics at Osaka University in Japan, in spring 2008. It had blogs buzzing but the mainstream media stayed far away.
The media, with the exception of the Italian press, has also steered clear of scientist Andrea Rossi and his partner Sergio Focardi, a physicist and professor emeritus at the University of Bologna. In January 2011, the two men demonstrated their own cold fusion apparatus, which they claim fuses nuclei of nickel and hydrogen to produce copper and huge amounts of excess energy. Rossi is apparently building a one-megawatt plant at his own expense for a company in Greece. A demonstration of that plant is expected in late 2011. But beyond fringe observers, will the rest of the world be watching?
The perception that low-cost fusion is a fool's game — a perception General Fusion must contend with every day — was further strengthened by a scandal related to another tabletop process, this one called "bubble fusion." Rusi Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering at Indiana's Purdue University and former scientist at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published a paper in 2002 describing how he had aimed high-frequency sound waves at a glass flask filled with a deuterium-rich liquid. Pressure created from these ultrasonic waves, which can't be detected by the human ear, caused tiny bubbles in the liquid to violently collapse and release a tremendous amount of heat. Researchers of bubble fusion refer to the setup as "star in a jar." Following this initial experiment, there were several research groups seriously exploring bubble fusion, but by 2006, and after burning through millions of dollars in funding, none of them were able to replicate Taleyarkhan's demonstration. It was around that time when Nature, the highly respected scientific journal, published an investigation of Taleyarkhan's work and concluded that "the circumstances surrounding the experiments reveal serious questions about their validity." The journal's investigation created such a stir that Purdue University launched its own probe and, in 2008, ended up finding Taleyarkhan guilty on two counts of alleged research misconduct; his research chair was subsequently taken away. So what was his misconduct? Taleyarkhan led people to believe that the bubble fusion effect he observed had been independently verified when, in fact, the "verification" had been conducted in Taleyarkhan's own lab. The U.S. Office of Naval Research, which funded part of Taleyarkhan's work, called the professor's actions "research fraud" and barred him from receiving any sort of federal funding until 2012.
To be clear, there is serious and important work going on in the areas of cold fusion and bubble fusion. Unfortunately, the blunders and bad apples of yesteryear have pushed what was already considered fringe science into an even more defensive posture, and researchers in the field are akin to lepers at a beauty pageant. General Fusion is thrown into the same category despite the fact that its approach doesn't involve tabletop setups, flasks, or collapsing bubbles. The foundation of its reactor technology was first developed in the mid-1970s by the U.S. Naval Weapons Research Lab and is well supported by known scientific theory. But because General Fusion is a small operation, because it's not an international effort backed by billions in government dollars, and because memories of Pons and Fleischmann and Taleyarkhan remain so vivid in the minds of so many, it has been branded another fusion fly-by-night that's not worthy of attention or investment. "Nobody takes us seriously," said Laberge.
Old Boys' Club
Should General Fusion be taken seriously? Let's take a moment to examine what the company is trying to do, and how that differs from the two generally accepted approaches to nuclear fusion today: ITER's magnetic fusion approach and the inertial confinement fusion work being done at the U.S. government's National Ignition Facility in California. At the heart of ITER's project is an imposing machine called a tokamak, which, when completed, will weigh in at 23,000 tonnes — half the weight of the Titanic and roughly equivalent to 67 fully loaded Boeing 747 jumbo jets. A tokamak is essentially just an electromagnet shaped on the inside like a hollowed-out doughnut. It's made of 48 magnet systems that, together, will create a magnetic field that's 200,000 times greater than what the Earth produces. The idea is to inject a gas-like plasma of deuterium and tritium into the cavity of the electromagnetic doughnut. Intense magnetic fields emanating from the walls of the cavity will keep the electrically charged plasma under control and at enough distance from the walls to prevent damage to equipment. The plasma will have nowhere to go, but because it will be energized it will race around inside the cavity of the doughnut like a dog chasing its tail. Before fusion can occur, however, the plasma must be heated up substantially — and by substantially I mean 10 times hotter than the core of our sun. This will be done by subjecting the plasma to a barrage of radio waves, electromagnetic radiation, and "neutral" beams. "The plasma will catch fire when it gets hot enough. It's called ignition," said Laberge, explaining the point at which the deuterium and tritium nuclei in the plasma begin fusing to form helium nuclei. At that stage, the trick is to simultaneously continue magnetically containing the plasma, harvest the heat for power generation, and keep the reaction sustained.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mad Like Tesla by Tyler J. Hamilton, Crissy Boylan. Copyright © 2011 Tyler Hamilton. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Cheering the Lone Runner 9
1 More Bang for the Buck?: A Quicker Path to Nuclear Fusion 29
2 Out of this World: Beaming Solar Power from Space 59
3 A New Spin on Energy: Turning Waste Heat Into Tornado Power 93
4 Copying Nature's Playbook: Capturing Efficiency Through Biomimicry 117
5 Not Your Average Pond Scum: Making Fuel Refineries Out of Algae 139
6 Secrecy in Cedar Park: Raising the Bar on Energy Storage 175
7 Searching for Miracles: Changing the World with an Open Mind 207
Conclusion: Reasons to Hope 227
Acknowledgements 241
Index 245
Reading Group Guide
I will never forget a private meeting I attended in Toronto on May 8, 2009, with British scientist James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory explains the Earth’s biosphere as a self-regulating entity quite capable of adapting to climate change. Humans, however, will be, in his view, a casualty of that adaptation. Commenting on the impact of climate change over the next few decades, Lovelock, two months shy of his 90th birthday, painted a shockingly grim picture. “Anything that overgrows its resources gets smacked back down,” he told us. “I foresee a loss of as much as 80 or 90 percent of the people on Earth by the end of the century. It’s a distinct possibility, and I don’t think there is much we can do to stop it. You have to make sure those who remain will be able to survive it.” I still recall looking around that room at a dozen or so people seized with despair as they listened to this otherwise lovable old man throw in the towel on behalf of humanity. Lovelock’s perspective may be extreme in its hopelessness, but you get the picture – we’re heading in the wrong direction on energy and need to change how we use it and where we get it.
Harvard University professor John Holdren, science and technology advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put it succinctly when he outlined the three choices we have in our faceoff against climate change: mitigation, adaptation, or suffering. “We’re going to do some of each,” he said. “The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.” The need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, become more efficient in how we use energy, and increase our use of low-carbon technologies – the core part of any mitigation strategy – has sparked an era of energy innovation that even Nikola Tesla would find unimaginable. “Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs across the globe are responding with unprecedented innovation,” according to Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an energy and environmental think tank based out of Washington, D.C. “Overnight, the energy business has begun to resemble the it industry more than it does the energy industry of the past.”
Another motivating factor relates to energy security. There’s a growing recognition out there that the fossil fuels we have come to depend on to power our economies are going to become more expensive and, from a price perspective, more volatile. I don’t think we’ll ever run out of fossil fuels, even though they are non-renewable. That’s because the cost of finding and extracting and bringing them to market is only going one way: up. We’ll simply start using less and less as they lose their competitive edge over alternative energy sources or technologies that help us use energy more efficiently. Creating climate policies that put a meaningful price on carbon will only accelerate this transition. “It should be apparent by now that the future is not going to look like the present. It simply cannot,” wrote geoscientist J. David Hughes, who spent 32 years as a scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada. Take oil – the cheap, easy-to-drill stuff is running out, and increasingly we’re relying on the more expensive sources that are harder and more energy-intensive to extract, where they’re not kept off limits to exploration. With China, India, and other emerging economies jacking up demand for fossil fuels, our current situation is not sustainable. “The party’s coming to an end,” warned Hughes.
This battle against climate change and concern over the rising volatility of fossil fuel markets, together with projections that the world’s population will reach nine billion by 2050, have major economic implications. One, which British economist Nicholas Stern drew attention to in 2006, is the cost of inaction that under a worse-case scenario would amount to trillions of dollars of lost global gdp. The cost of action would be small by comparison, Stern concluded. The second economic implication relates to the new industries and technologies – and jobs – that will be created as we tackle these growing problems. Already, countries are jockeying for position to become global leaders in a new “green economy,” and clean technology is the world’s fastest growing investment segment. “The green economy is poised to be the mother of all markets, the economic investment opportunity of a lifetime, because it has become so fundamental,” Lois Quam, founder of strategic consulting firm Tysvar and former managing director of venture capital firm Piper Jaffray, told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “To find an equivalent economic transformation, you have to go back to the Industrial Revolution.”
Clearly, there’s never been a greater need for new ideas and risk-taking, even in the presence of what may seem impossible or unlikely. Tesla, if he lived today and wasn’t trapped in a mental institution, would have been in his element. Does this “need” mean the transition to clean energy sources and technologies will come faster than past energy transitions? It remains to be seen. What is becoming evident is that the energy transition currently in play isn’t about moving from one dominant fuel or technology to another; it’s about moving from a handful of dominant sources to hundreds. “My strategy on energy technology is to build robustness, to build a portfolio,” says sdtc’s Whittaker. “Is there a single technology that’s going to save us? I wouldn’t count on it. It’s got to be a whole bunch of little things.” We like to think about silver bullets, but, to borrow what is perhaps an overused analogy, we should be thinking about silver buckshot – small projectiles moving together and capable of hitting a much wider target. And we don’t need to wait for new breakthroughs before we pull the trigger. Much can be accomplished over the next two decades by more aggressively deploying technologies we have today, including wind, co-generation, geothermal, solar- thermal power, solar photovoltaics, all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles, second-generation biofuels, and ground-source heat pumps. (For context, discussion of some of these technologies is included in the chapters that follow.) Just as important are the policies needed to support their widespread deployment. “You need intelligent government regulations infinitely more than you need a massive effort to find breakthrough technologies,” says climate blogger Joseph Romm, who was acting assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy during the Clinton administration.
I agree with Romm: the search for breakthroughs shouldn’t distract us from what we can and must accomplish now. At the same time, the hunt for true breakthroughs, as rare as they may be, is still necessary to sustain us over the long term. We need both leaps and incremental steps. The individual efforts profiled in this book may prove an “impossible waste of time.” They may lead to dead ends. Whatever the outcome, there is immense value in the journey. The left-behind morsels of innovations won’t necessarily go to waste. They can be picked up and used by others who embark on their own ambitious journeys. But there’s also a chance these efforts will lead to triumph. And perhaps years, but likely decades, from now we or our children will know, in hindsight, the degree to which these innovators’ labors improved our lives.Interviewed for an article that appeared on August 22, 1937, in the New York Herald Tribune, Tesla – 81 years old at the time, less than six years before his death – looked back on his life and seemed quite satisfied that he had repeatedly proved his doubters wrong. “They laughed in 1896 … when I told them about cosmic rays. They jeered 35 years ago when I discovered the rotating field principle of alternating currents. They called me crazy when I predicted the radio. And when I sent the first impulse around the world, they said it couldn’t be done.”
They have often been wrong.