Manufacturology

New era in energy innovation taking off?

Dur­ing the last week I’ve come across two inter­est­ing pieces of news that breethes enthu­si­asm about the future of energy. One was the talk of Microsoft founder Bill Gates at this years TED con­fer­ence. The other, reported on Jan­u­ary 28 by, is a claim by the National Igni­tion Facil­ity (NIF) pro­gram at the Lawrence Liv­er­more National Lab­o­ra­tory (LLNL) that U.S. physi­cists are likely to suc­cess­fully deploy a nuclear fusion reac­tor within two years (NIF/LLNL, DN, BBC, CNN).

Inter­est­ingly, Gates left out fusion from his top list of poten­tial break­through tech­nolo­gies pre­sented at TED. The rea­son was that, although the­o­ret­i­cally inter­est­ing, nuclear fusion has until now been asso­ci­ated with a too big risk of devel­op­ment fail­ure. Researchers at NIF/LLNL have now removed a major risk by suc­cess­fully devel­op­ing lasers capa­ble of com­press­ing and heat­ing a plasma to the degree that nuclear fusion occurs. This tech­nol­ogy is known as laser–plasma inter­ac­tion (LPI).

Artis­tic ren­der­ing of lasers com­press­ing a NIF tar­get pel­let. Image: Lawrence Liv­er­more National Laboratory.

Accord­ing to LLNL, the next step is to replace the dummy fuel pel­let with a real one con­tain­ing actual ignition–like frozen hydro­gen fuel for the fusion process. They claim that they will start the new exper­i­ments already this summer.

From a prod­uct devel­op­ment per­spec­tive, they have suc­cess­fully removed the great­est risk. The “value” of the emerg­ing fusion tech­nol­ogy has now increased significantly.

In Bill Gates’ talk at TED, titled “inno­vat­ing to zero”, Gates expressed his inten­tion to use his money for fund­ing research on devel­op­ment of the so–called trav­el­ling wave reac­tor. Accord­ing to Gates, this reac­tor is capa­ble of burn­ing U238, the 99% waste that is left over in the reg­u­lar fis­sion process which burns only 1% of the fuel.

So we have two inter­est­ing and poten­tially rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nolo­gies that shows sig­nif­i­cant promise. I don’t know how close the trav­el­ling wave reac­tor is to real­i­sa­tion, but appar­ently Gates finds it inter­est­ing enough to spend his own money, which he has so far used to spon­sor research on malaria.

If any of these inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies take off, it will lead to a rev­o­lu­tion­ary trans­for­ma­tion of society.

For the steel indus­try, the cost of energy, as well as the polit­i­cal and soci­etal desire to reduce CO2 emis­sions, has become a major con­cern. Labour unions, employ­ers and some regional politi­cians appear to have reached a con­sen­sus that reg­u­lar nuclear fis­sion is the only viable solu­tion (DN, Jernkon­toret).

Cur­rently, most inno­va­tion is tar­geted towards regen­er­a­tive sources and meth­ods for reduc­ing energy con­sump­tion. This includes my own research, which aims to improve pro­duc­tiv­ity in steel pro­duc­tion by cre­at­ing a fast pro­duc­tion flow that (among other things) uses less energy. Flex­i­ble steel­mak­ing and hot rolling tech­nolo­gies could poten­tially pre­vent a sin­gle steel plant from using up energy equiv­a­lent to a minor Swedish city. Every year.

Of course, with fusion or trav­el­ling wave reac­tors com­ing true, sav­ing energy may turn out to be insignif­i­cant. How­ever, I doubt that energy will be free even in the pres­ence of clean and infi­nite sources.

Hope­fully, these events sig­nal the begin­ning of a new era of break­through tech­no­log­i­cal advances that tar­get the avail­abil­ity of clean energy. This may be the most impor­tant prob­lem fac­ing today’s soci­ety. Myself I’m will­ing to pick up Bill Gates call: “Let’s inno­vate to zero!”

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