II wasn’t thinking about weapons grade plutonium. But like oil there is only so much of the stuff on this rock.
If we have a massive switch to nuclear power I wonder how long will that supply last at the new levels of demand?
What will be the effects of rising plutonium be when the demand for the stuff goes up?
When will that supply peak? What source of energy is next? Where will the waste be stored?
A good few thousand years. It’s hard to say exactly because we haven’t really started looking for Uranium because we don’t use much of it.
It’s really Uranium that we mine as an energy source, not Plutonium.
As for the effects of demand on Uranium supply, it will be a lot les than the effect of rising oil has been in the last 100 years. The actual extraction of Uranium is a very small amount of the cost associated with using. It costs more to build the power station than it does to feed it. That contrasts sharply with coal or oil power where just supplying the fuel is the largest part of the procedure. As a result as Uranium becomes scarcer and harder to get at it will have far less effect than an increases scarcity of oil or coal.
When will it peak? Impossible to say. Far enough in the future that it’s not worthwhile to worry about it.
What source will be next? Impossible to say. Consider that only 500 years ago the only real energy source was trees and animals, and just 50 years ago the only source was trees, animals and coal/oil. That gives you some idea of the futility of trying to predict what conditions will belike in several thousands years time. Several millenia ago we were still using stone tools and agriculture was considered to be a revolutionary new technology. The advances that far into the future will be even more unpredictable for us than the advent of nuclear power would be to a bronze age farmer.
Waste storage is the big problem, but it’s not as big a problem as most people make it out to be. Most of the waste produced is low grade, it’s contaminated overalls and tools, that sort of stuff. It’s not highly dangerous and can be safely stored in properly constructed facilities in the middle of a city of you want to. More sensibly you would construct the storage warehouse in desert or tundra or similar ‘wasteland’.
The high grade waste is the spent fuel and the reactor itself and associated bits. Even that can be stored safely by encasing it in the right type of concrete and burying it. But the good thing is that it decays naturally, so the longer you leave it sit the safer it gets. As a result you can fence off the area around a decommissioned reactor and let it sit, after all it was already designed to contain material far more radioactive than what is in there. The longer you let it sit the easier it becomes to dispose of. The reactor itself might only cover a few hectares so it’s not like it’s impractical to ‘lose’ this amount of land every 20 years or so even if it needs to be permanent.
So the waste problem is far from being insoluble even if it is unpopular with the public.
Oh…you mean uranium then. Plutonium, IIRC, isn’t used in power generation but for weapons. I don’t think you need to worry…uranium is pretty common, and unlike oil (well, there are theories that oil might be formed by other means then organic, but thats just a theory) its pretty much common throughout the solar system, so we aren’t exactly limited (in theory) to whats just on this rock. Besides, there are things like breeder reactors and ways to recycle uranium (which, produce plutonium if my memories from college are working)…so I don’t think it will be a major problem. The only real problem is how to dispose of the waste, and to my mind thats minor when put up against our current power generation waste. Its really just a matter of engineering.
Centuries at least…giving us lots of time to find something like Fusion, which is only a ‘few decades’ away, right? 
Seriously, fission power generation can certainly provide for a good long time.
-XT
Just curious. I am not against Fission, though I would prefer to see it in the hands of the Navy rather than Civilians. Admiral Rik. He left behind a strong legacy.
The upcoming use of fuel cell Technology based on biomass seems to have an awful lot of promise with minimal resource depletion & pollution. No greenhouse gas.
Am I wrong? Wouldn’t this be more palatable to the general public?
By the way we have a 6700-watt solar panel system on our roof, which produces roughly 2/3 of our electrical energy needs.
I’d rather just see us ‘steal’ South Africa’s pebble bed design and put them everywhere, but thats just me. I don’t think the problem is with our nuclear power industry (though I do think they need to modernize their designs and take advantage of new advancements) but with public perception.
I might be way off on this, but my understanding of using biomass is that you basically use it as a base for hydrocarbons that you crack to produce your hydrogen (or other hydrocarbon products I suppose). You still need energy to do the cracking. Also, again IIRC, most of the current biomass technology DO create greenhouse gases (just like plants do…methane being the chief one), while nuclear creates none at all. Maybe a combination of technologies will be the key, using biomass AND nuclear (and other technologies too).
The problem with solar, at least with the present technology, is that it doesn’t scale up well for large scale power production (and of course its dependent on the weather).
My thoughts on what we need to do is a large number of small, safe and efficient reactors instead of the huge mammoth beasts we presently have here in the US…pebble bed reactors that require a minimal staff and are very safe and reasonably inexpensive. You plop one down in every middle-sex town and village throughout the country and you are in business. Then its just a matter of waste disposal…which I think is also less if you use that technology.
Its a matter of education and will. If we REALLY want to put a dent in green house gas emmisions then we need to embrace this technology whole hog and encourage companies to reseach, develop and deploy it on a large scale. This will form the basis of a long term shift from using hydrocarbon based energy sources (well, in burning them to produce energy anyway) and will reduce our dependence and reduce our emmissions as well. Then we’ll see if it actually helps any. At the least though it will greatly reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy which I think is pretty important (doubt the Saudi’s will agree, but oil will still be an important resource reguardless…we just won’t have to burn it anymore to light our houses and drive our cars :)).
-XT
It may be more palatable, but it isn’t workable nor is it true to say that it has minimal resource depletion & pollution and no Greenhouse emmisons.
The problem is that biomass has to come form somewhere. For it to be commercially viable it is going to have to be capable of regular and consistent harvest, which means it has to come from fairly fertile and productive land. Fertile and productive means that it is either coming form what is currently cropland, or else we start cutting down forests and woodlands.
A conversion of cropland to fuel production has two problems. The first is that the lost cropland has to be replaced to keep people fed. That in turn means that we have to destroy wilderness area by either cutting down more forests and converting them into farms, or else irrigate deserts. Both the destruction of forests and the use of irrigation water represent resource depletion, and given the amount of energy needed it’s a huge resource depletion we’re talking about. Added to that crop production and irrigation aren’t anything like pollution free. They need fossil fuels to pump water and produce fertiliser and pesticides. They also result in erosion, chemical runoff and various other types of pollution.
Of course destroying forests to produce biofuels is inherently destructive of a resource.
Then of course there is the problem that plants aren’t very productive or energy dense. Even if we covered the entire US in farms producing biofuels the energy return probably wouldn’t be enough to meet current demand, while the low energy density means that it costs a hell of a lot more money, energy and greenhouse gases to tranposrt a Joule as timber than a Joule as coal.
There are some specific instances where we can efficiently fuel power stations with coppicing trees, or use sugar to produce ethanol, but they are every much the exception and can’t possibly replace fossil fuels to any significant degree. That’s not to say that biofuels don’t have their place. They still represent a great energy storage medium with no net CO2 emissions if they are ‘driven’ by nuclear power. They just aren’t a practical energy source.
This probably what the future holds. Not an attempt to convert entirely to nuclear or entirely to biofuels or entirely to solar. Rather a combination of different solutions where practical. 2/3 from solar and the rest from nuclear for example.
Actually the articles I’ve read in the past seemed to indicate that the bio-mass in question could be grass clipping & other compost. My wife is reading into this now to refresh our memories. The technology is also still 5-10 years away if I understand correctly.
http://www.eerc.und.nodak.edu/centersofexcellence/biomass/fuelcells.asp
Good links on Biomass Fuel Cells
As soon as you here that technology is just a decade away that’s a red flag that it is currently totally unfeasible and nobody has any idea how to make it work. I’m sure that someone once said that technology was a decade away and it was there a few decades later, but I can’t actually think of any.
The problems with using grass clipping or garden wastes are
But there’s nothing you and I can do
You and I are only two
What’s right and wrong is hard to say
Forget about it for today
We’ll stick our heads into the sand
Just pretend that all is grand
Then hope that everything turns out ok
The Ostrich by Steppenwolf
Umm, are you joking?
Fuel Cells are household units. The Propane version work very well already. 5-10 years in to gear up production. Technology already works, but still very pricey.
The Grass clipping a kept in large piles known as compost. I have a huge supply already. A small yard would provide a good supply for a house. This is extremely feasible for the Burbs & rural areas.
Not so feasible for Cities.
Or for those of us who live in the desert and have no (or very little) grass. 
Of course, solar would work out here and in fact a lot of folks have solar cells on their roofs.
-XT
Obviously I am missing something here.
Your first link says that a research project is under way “to economically convert biomass into a high-purity stream of hydrogen for use in fuel cells.” No mention that it works. No mention that it is intended for individual houselholds.
The second link mentions cells powered by “corn stover, alfalfa stems, obsolete seed corn and oat hulls” and “integrated with farming operations”. It speaks of the need for “farmer cooperatives, rural electrics, ethanol producers, and state officials”. This is clearly not aimed at household use, it is aimed at integrated use by farming communities.
So if someone already has a propane version that works with household refuse can we have a reference for that please?
The next problem is that yes, grass clippings can be “stored” as compost, but compost by definition rots. That means the amount of fuel present is decreasing dramatically over time.
And can I have a reference for your claim that a small yard would produce a good energy supply for a house using this technology?
Umm, the propane version is strickly propane to hydrogen. No Bio-mass involved. Already available commercially. Not a great savings in moneyhowever, but cleaning than any other fossil fuel burner.
http://www.fuelcelltoday.com/index/0,1571,,00.html
http://web-japan.org/trends/science/sci030723.html
Companies that are selling:
http://www.smartfuelcell.de/index.php?id=1&L=1
This would be business model
http://www.utcfuelcells.com/utcpower/products/purecell/purecell.shtm
Fuel Cell Industry group
The real trick is to get the hydrogen from Bio-Mass
I’ll need to go through Wired & Sci-Am to try and get details.
I will do so in next post, tomorrow if I can’t find it during Daily Show.
Yeah thanks, I look forward to it. I was already well aware that portable fuel cells exist. That technology is old. However I was very surprised to here you claim that such cells exist that can produce a good energy supply for a house from the lawn clippings of a small yard.
So far none of the references suggest that any of these cells work on lawn clippings, much less being able to provide a significant proportion of houselhold energy in that way. Claims that the technology to do so are just a decade away ar pie in the sky unless someone has a working protype system.
This is the beginning of working Bio-Mass Fuel Cells
It is in infancy and needs to scale down, thus my 5-10 years estimate
http://egov.oregon.gov/ENERGY/RENEW/Biomass/FuelCell.shtml
Keep in mind, Tech needs to advance. Cost effectiveness includes expected increase in Oil & Nat Gas cost. Also will need Government tax subsidies in an attempt to promote cleaner energy.
Some related Sci-Am articles.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E4C95-A2CB-126E-A2CB83414B7F0000
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F2A6A-2C3B-1D6D-90FB809EC5880000
I think they had a more in depth article last year. If anyone subscribes, could you please help me out. I am getting out of my depth.
My research was from looking into Water Heaters, Furnaces, Geo-thermal, Fuel Cells and Solar power. I settled on Solar as NJ has a rebate system in place where they cover 70% of the installation cost.
Geo-thermal was too expensive of a retro-fit and Fuel cells are not cost effective yet.
Please tell me this was enough Blake, I feel like I’m researching a college paper at this point. There is alot of exciting new energy sources coming into play.
Oz has some sort of Solar Chimney project that blows my mind.
http://www.enviromission.com.au/index1.htm
http://www.globalwarmingsolutions.co.uk/the_solar_chimney.htm
jrfranchi not one of those sites mentions using household green waste to generate power. They are all talking about using big industrial/municipal plants. Not only that but two of them are discussing the use of sewage, not plant material.
The one article that is about the use of plant material not only isn’t talking about household waste, it specifically says that it is “for industrial applications”, not household use. Moreover it isn’t even commercially viable yet. The article makes it clear that there are numerous problems to be overcome and that this is very much experimental technology that might work one day… and might never work. And to cap it all it isn’t producing electricity, it’s producing hydrogen gas. Unless we want to put another hydrogen fuel cell on top of this process, which will increase the cost and decrease the efficient\y we are never going to get household electricity from plant material using this process.
This is all a far cry from your claim that within 10 years we will have fuel cells that provide enough power for an entire household from the lawn clippings of a small yard. These are all large scale industrial processes that will utilise harvest trash, sewage and other material that has already been collected.
None of this in any way addresses the problems I raised concerning the impracticality of lawn clippings as a fuel source. It doesn’t get around the problem of collecting lawn clippings into a central facility for processing, nor does it suggest that this process could ever work at les than industrial scales. It doesn’t explain how highly variable material could be used. It doesn’t explain how lawn clippings could be stored for more than a few months.
To say the least your claims that we were 10 years from having household fuel cells that would generate all a household’s energy from lawn clippings was optimistic. If we are lucky in 10 years time we might have an industrial fuel cell technology that can produce hydrogen gas from industrial quantities of farm waste. But nobody working on the project is making that claim.
I certainly see no evidence yet that even hints that we could effectively produce electricity from lawn clippings using household fuel cells.
So no, sorry but that’s not enough. It’s actually nothing at all because it doesn’t even mention production of electricity from plant material using fuel cells, nor does it mention the use of household rather than industrial material in any fuel cell whatsoever.
This isn’t a case of researching a college paper. It’s just a case of deciding whether your casual dismissal of the problems associated with the use of household green waste was warranted. Your dismissal hinged entirely on your belief that we were just 10 years from producing electricity from household green waste in the home. So far there’s no evidence that we can produce electricity at all from plant material. And although we can produce hydrogen which could potentially then be used for electricity production that is experimental technology that no one claims is going to happen within the next 20 years and no one suggests will ever be anything but industrial scale in application.
Simply put you haven’t actually addressed any of the problems that make the use of lawn clippings totally unworkable.
Okay. I will continue search for old articles over next few days.
1 point:
The articles mention using straw as bio-mass, I would think grass have a higher value. I don’t know about leaves and pine needles.
Mix in a liberal amount of fruit & vegy waste. Only a small percent compared to grass clippings but a few more garbage bags not going to the dump.
I may also have to search through Sierra and Green Peace. It may turn out the article I read was in one of their newsletters. If true, then I will have to concede your points as they as often guilty of overstating the facts and underestimating time. I did say up front I was sure.
I think it is reasonable by 2010 that hydrogen and Propane used to create hydrogen fuel cells will be much more common place, powering buses, and available at still high cost to homeowners who want a system in place of a generator.
I am giving science credit that in 5 years a home model using bio-mass should be just becoming available and in 10 years they will be affordable on the high end.
If we can build it now on large scale then we can scale it down. This may be too optimistic, so I will look for the articles.
Two points.
Firstly green grass and table scraps may have a higher energy value per kg. It all depends on the species involved in producing the grass and the straw. However old grass won’t. The higher energy value in grass will be due to sugars and starches present. In grass clippings these decay fast, which is why the compost heap gets super-hot for the first week only. This makes the issue of seasonality of fuels supply and difficulty of storage even more problematic.
The next problem is the issue of scale. Straw can be collected by the megaton. Grass clipping by the kg. What is practical using straw is not in nay way an indication of what is practical for lawn clippings. Straw is an effective stock feed too. Lawn clippings are not. It’s a scaling problem.
Given that they are becoming more commonplace by the month that’s hardly a surprising conclusion to come too. It seems inevitable unless some major disater befall, such as discovering they cause birth deformities.
The problem is that we can’t build it now on a large scale. We have one highly experimental unit that generates only hydrogen gas, not electricity. There is no reason at all to believe even that will be operational at industrial scales in 5 years time. We have no operational system at all that can produce electricity from biomass aside from sewage.
There is no practical basis for claiming that we will be able to produce industrial hydrogen from biomass in less than 10 years. There is no basis at all for claiming that we will ever be able to generate electricity form biomass except via conversion to hydrogen or other gases.
We can give science all that credit if we like, but when the technology doesn’t even exist at an experimental level the it is credit that is totally undeserved. It’s the wildest sort of speculation, precisely the type that has kept controlled fusion just 10 years away for almost 50 years.
Forgive giant post. Please see part I bolded below
Still not the article I remember reading, but at least i didn’t pull 5-10 years out my ass.
Somewhere I read the 5-10 time frame.
I doubt I will be able to cite it. I also now strongly suspect it was an environmental publication.
If this is true than the time factor should probably be doubled.
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/092204/Fuel_cell_converts_waste_to_power_092204.html
Fuel cell converts waste to power
By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News
Fuel cells extract energy from fuel chemically rather than burning it, which in general is more efficient and produces less pollution than combustion engines that burn fuel.
Hydrocarbons like fossil fuels and plant matter are widely used as fuel in fuel cells, but they produce carbon monoxide as a waste product. This carbon monoxide gets in the way of the fuel cell reaction.
Carbon monoxide is usually removed using the water-gas shift reaction, which uses water to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The reaction is relatively slow and occurs at temperatures of at least 227 degrees Celsius, requiring fuel cells to contain heating and cooling equipment and a supply of water.
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have found a way to use the carbon monoxide to produce more energy in a reaction that can take place at room temperature.
The method could eventually be used in portable systems that use renewable fuel produced from plant matter, said James Dumesic, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The process could also be used to treat wastewater and contaminated gas streams, he said.
Fuel cells are made up of electrodes, an electrolyte – a pool of chemicals that bathes the electrodes – and fuel, which is used up as the cell produces energy. Like a battery, fuel cells generate a flow of electricity by pushing electrons out one electrode and receiving them back through a second electrode.
A fuel cell generates electricity when fuel flows into a negative electrode, or cathode, and air flows over the positive electrode, or anode. Oxygen reacts with water in the electrolyte and forms hydroxide ions, and the fuel reacts with the hydroxide ions to form water; this releases two electrons per hydrogen molecule.
The researchers got the idea for a different kind of fuel cell when they observed that the carbon monoxide left over from this reaction could be combined with oxygen to release more electrons during a water-based reaction using membranes made from gold nanotubes. The tiny tubes are 200 nanometers in diameter, or one-fifth the diameter of an E. coli bacterium.
At the nanoscale in an aqueous solution, gold catalyses chemical reactions fairly quickly even at room temperature, according to Dumesic. With this in mind, the researchers added a chemical reactor step to the fuel cell process. The reactor consists of a gold nanotubes membrane surrounded by water that contains dissolved polyoxometalate, a metal complex that has a high affinity for electrons.
The gold nanotubes convert carbon monoxide and liquid water to carbon dioxide, hydrogen ions and electrons. The polyoxometalates are positively charged and thus readily combine with the negatively-charged electrons.
The polyoxometalates are then pumped past the fuel cell anode along with the hydrogen molecules. There the anode strips off electrons from the polyoxometalates and hydrogen. The polyoxometalates, restored to a positive charge, are returned to the chemical reactor to continue the carbon monoxide processing cycle.
In order to make the system work, the researchers had to make their own fuel cell electrodes. The platinum electrodes normally used in fuel cells tend to have hydrophobic properties in order to avoid problems with water condensation, said Dumesic. Water condensation can inhibit the transport of hydrogen and oxygen.
The researchers realized that the standard type of electrodes did not allow the fuel cells to take advantage of their observation that the catalytic effects of the gold nanotubes in carbon monoxide oxidation are greatly improved in water. “Especially the anode [had to] be strongly hydrophilic to facilitate the aqueous polyoxometalate solution transport,” Dumesic said.
The researchers’ made one type of hydrophilic electrode from gold nanotubes and another from carbon membranes. “We spent a substantial time to resolve this issue and [are still] improving the performance of this electrode,” he said.
The researchers’ system has the potential to reduce carbon monoxide levels to below 1,000 parts per million, said Dumesic. “Our process can clean the hydrogen stream by removing carbon monoxide [at a] very high rate even at room temperature, without significantly consuming the hydrogen.”
Unlike the water-gas shift reaction, the researchers’ process does not require energy to remove carbon monoxide from a stream of hydrogen, said Dumesic.
The researchers experiments show that gold nanoparticles that are 7 to 10 nanometers in diameter would make the chemical reactor step more efficient than the nanotubes in the researchers’ current prototype because of the greater surface area of the smaller bits of gold, according to Dumesic.
Using the fuel ethylene glycol, which is produced from corn, the process can extract about 60 percent of the energy that can be produced from octane combustion, Dumesic said.
**The researchers are refining the method to develop portable, practical fuel cells that run on fuel produced from biomass, said Dumesic. The method could be ready for practical use in five years, he said. **
Dumesic’s research colleagues were Won Bae Kim, T. Voitl and J. Rodriguez-Rivera. The work appeared in the August 26, 2004 issue of Science. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), DaimlerChrysler Corporation and the Department of Energy (DOE).
**Timeline: 5 years ** Funding: Corporate, Government
TRN Categories: Energy; Materials Science and Engineering
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, “Powering Fuel Cells with CO via Aqueous Polyoxometalates and Gold Catalysts,” Science, August 26, 2004