The year that is ending has been rather a disappointing one for technological advance, and in particular the advance of two much hoped-for technologies that had been expected to enhance human welfare and human adventure.
This is no reason for despondency. Since we (hominids) began making stone axes over a million years ago, technological advance has often been slow and seldom been spectacular – although occasionally it has. The great strength of technological advance is that it accumulates. We keep the advances of our ancestors, who might have been cleverer than us, and add to them. We are always adding to them, although most of the time the additions are incremental and hardly noticed, except by specialist engineers and sharp-eyed customers.
It is important to understand that every technology has its limits, and usually the limits are small. For thousands of years the most important technology for land transport was the horse, but horse technology is very limited. I doubt if a modern horse can run even twice as fast as a horse a thousand years ago. Only once have we found a technology with enormous limits, and this is the transistor, invented in 1948. It was the foundation of the Information Technology (IT) revolution that has changed the world with astonishing speed. A modern computer is a trillion times faster than computers before 1948. If horse technology had advanced at the same rate, horses would now be able to gallop five times round the world in one second.
The two big disappointments of 2022 are nuclear fusion and space travel. Human welfare is dependent on the provision of plentiful energy and power. Beasts of burden such as the ox and the horse greatly improved our access to power thousands of years ago.
Two hundred years ago, coal powered the Industrial Revolution, with a dramatic improvement in human health, welfare, lifespan and fulfillment. In 1945 came the ‘atomic bomb’ (actually a nuclear bomb getting energy from nuclear fission).
Shortly afterwards came the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, getting its energy from nuclear fusion. In the 1950s, Britain generated commercial electricity from a nuclear fission reactor, and other countries followed suit. In 1990 nuclear fission provided about 17% of the world’s electricity – safely, cleanly, affordably. In the 1950s, the quest began to make commercial electricity from nuclear fusion.
Seventy years later, it has made very little progress, suggesting a technological limit. There was much excitement three weeks ago, when the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that on 5 December it had succeeded in getting more energy out of nuclear fusion than had been put in. This was hailed as a ‘major scientific breakthrough’. It was nothing of the kind.
For practical purposes, there are three forces in nature: gravity, the electric force and the nuclear force.
Gravity is the weakest; it is attractive and long range. The nuclear force is the strongest; it is attractive and very short range. The electric force is of intermediate strength; it can be attractive or repulsive, and it is long range.
Nuclear
If you force together the nuclei of two light elements such as hydrogen, helium or lithium, you get nuclear fusion, with a large release of energy. This is what powers the Sun and all the stars. If you split the nuclei of heavy elements such as thorium, uranium and plutonium, you get nuclear fission, with a large release of energy. This is what powers Koeberg. To fuse together two light elements, you have to overcome the electric force, which repels them, since their nuclei contain protons, which have a positive charge. (Like charges repel, unlike attract.)
The Sun uses the brute force of its massive size to produce enormous pressures and temperatures, which cause fusion. In a hydrogen bomb, a fission bomb is used as the initiator; the huge energy in its X-rays turns a thick plastic tube, separated from it, into plasma of terrible pressure and heat; and this causes fusion in a fuel of light elements inside it.
We cannot use this method for power. Instead, they have tried to squeeze light elements in electromagnetic containment or to bombard them with lasers, which is what happened on 5 December. They did achieve fusion for a short time with a tiny amount of fuel, about the size of a few grains of rice. It is true that the energy coming out of this fusion was more than the laser energy going in, but it is not true that this was the first time this had happened.
More important, the energy needed to produce the lasers was far greater than the energy produced by the fusion. Total energy in was much greater than the total energy out. With nuclear fission, using centrifuge enrichment, the total energy out is 50 times greater than the total energy in.
Nuclear fusion is said to be such a huge prize because there are such colossal amounts of nuclear fuel in hydrogen, helium and lithium. But the problems of getting commercial electricity out of it seem even huger. If, after 70 years, all we have succeeded in doing is getting a tiny amount of energy from a tiny amount of fuel at gigantic expense and a gigantic input of energy, how do we expect ever to make a commercial success from this technology?
Unless there is some sort of genuine breakthrough using nuclear or quantum effects that we have not yet discovered, I don’t see it ever happening. But we needn’t worry because nuclear fission can right now provide the whole world with clean, safe, reliable, sustainable, affordable energy for the remaining life of the planet.
Most exciting moment
Space travel has fascinated me since I was eight years old (a while ago). The landing on the Moon in 1969 was for me maybe the most exciting moment of my life, even though I was 400 000 km away at the time and could only listen to it on the radio. (The National Party had banned TV, thinking, correctly, that it would corrupt us with naughty ideas from abroad.)
If you had asked me then to predict space travel in the year 2022, I should have said we would have an established colony on the moon with weekend trips for tourists, and we would be developing another colony on Mars, after many visits there. None of this has happened. In fact, nothing has happened at all in manned space flight. This year, an American rocket, without humans, did return to the Moon but only after a failure at start-up and in creaking old technology scarcely advanced at all on that of 52 years ago. Part of the reason seems to be a certain ossification at NASA, the US space agency.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX seems to be making more interesting, more advanced, more useful rockets than NASA today. But most of the reason is, once again, technological limits. The only known technology for leaving the Earth is the rocket, which pushes mass (combustion gases) behind it to push it forward – using a law developed by Newton over three hundred years ago.
To escape the Earth’s gravity, you need a very cumbersome machine using enormous amounts of fuel. Distances in space are so great, it would take over fifty years to get to the closest star, Proxima Centauri. This is probably why we have never seen aliens from space: they’re just too far away, and the technology for space travel will always be too limited for them to reach us or us to reach them.
I think I’m most encouraged by modest technologies that advance slowly, without ever making headlines. Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are an example. Man has long sought effective lighting for night-time, first using fire, then candles, oil lamps, gas lamps and finally electric lamps. The first electric bulbs heated wires (in a vacuum) until they were white hot and so produced light. This was inefficient, with most of the electrical energy turned to heat. Then came neon tubes, which were more efficient but fragile and containing dangerous materials. And now we have LEDs, which are efficient, safe, long-lasting, and becoming ever cheaper. LEDs were first discovered in 1907, so their advance has not been exactly spectacular and seems to have required a painstaking attention to detail. I think they’re great.
2022 saw silly hopes aroused over magic pill technologies. These are the technologies that with ‘one simple trick’ or ‘one cheap pil’ will make you slim in one month, madly attractive to women in one week, solve the world’s energy problems in two years or make you a multi-millionaire overnight. The magic pill for energy in 2022 was ‘green hydrogen’. This is silly.
Most abundant element
Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is the worst carrier of energy you can imagine. To make it liquid at atmospheric pressure, you have to cool it to -252 degrees C, which is very expensive. It is very explosive over a wide range of mixtures in air. It is difficult to store as a gas since it leaks out of most material containers. Making it by splitting water solutions with electricity is expensive and difficult. Thermo-chemical production is better but requires very high temperatures.
Reforming of natural gas (methane) is the usual method of hydrogen production but requires high temperature steam and, of course, a fossil fuel. What will you do with this ‘green hydrogen’? Fuel cells work as a power source but are troublesome and expensive. Why bother with hydrogen when there are much better fuels available, such as petrol, diesel and liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which are cheaper, safer, easier to transport and use more reliable technologies? The answer I suppose is – groan! – climate change.
The unscientific belief that rising CO2 is causing dangerous climate change is behind most of the drive for magic pill energy technologies. Above 150 ppm, CO2 has no effect on the climate, and CO2 has never been below 150 ppm in the life of the Earth.
If we could just make politicians and academics aware of this simple fact, we could increase the health of humans and the environment by spending most of our time and money on developing practical technologies of known benefit, and only a minor part of it on interesting and exciting but probably not very beneficial technologies such as nuclear fusion and space travel – and a miniscule part on green hydrogen and other magic pills.
[Image: WikiImages from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend