Star Power

As fusion power progresses, the Alberta Council of Technologies urges the province to take a leading role in developing the power of the sun This article appears in the August 2009 issue of Oilweek; graphic from here

By Peter McKenzie-Brown
During the Second World War, celebrity physicist Albert Einstein suggested in a now-famous letter to American President Roosevelt that nuclear chain reactions in large masses of uranium could release “vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements.” And, he speculated, “Extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.”

While America had only poor-quality uranium, Einstein noted, “There is some good ore in Canada.” The ore used to create the first atomic bombs came from a rich deposit of uranium and radium along the shores of Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories.

During the long days of summer, a wartime mining company hired local Indian men to carry 40-kilo burlap bags of ore from the mine to the Mackenzie River. They carried those loads for long hours, for months on end. When the bags ripped apart, they shifted the spilled ore off the trail, but took the contaminated bags to their temporary village. Years later, the ore-carriers began dying of cancer, and the community now known as Deline became a village of widows.

Canada was thus an important contributor to the first nuclear age, which was born of the fission of radioactive elements. Within a decade, the United States had made tentative steps toward a different kind of nuclear age – one based on nuclear fusion. This system smashes together light atoms like those of hydrogen. As it turns lighter elements into heavier ones, fusion releases vast amounts of energy.

This is the principle behind the hydrogen bomb. It is star power – the fuel that keeps the Sun and the countless other stars alight. As a human invention, its only practical use has been as an unused weapon of violence and terror. Until now.

"[Fusion ignition] is imminent and will be one of the most extraordinary technologies discovered by mankind. We will be reproducing the physics of the sun.”

On March 10, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs in California trained 192 high-power lasers onto a point the size of a couple of match-heads. The ensuing reaction generated more than a million joules of energy – enough energy to theoretically light up 10,000 100-watt light bulbs.

The American effort was costly, but its implications were huge. That step suggests the birth of a nuclear age in which virtually limitless amounts of inherently safe and environmentally attractive will be cheaply available.

Compared with carbon or uranium fuels, fusion generates little radiation and no greenhouse gases or air pollution. Since it uses small amounts of fuel, it is likely to have little impact on land and habitat. The day before this extraordinary American achievement, a standing committee of the Alberta Legislature met to consider a proposal by which Canada would become involved in these revolutionary technologies.

Canada would not supply ore, as we do for nuclear fission. After all, the fuels needed for fusion are abundant around the world. Instead, we would help develop technological expertise for the second nuclear age.

Visionaries: The proposal came from a small, minimally-funded and loosely-organized group of visionaries provincially chartered as the Alberta Council of Technologies. Clearly, the goal of the media relations surrounding the meeting with the legislature was maximum public awareness. In this, they certainly succeeded.

The idea is to prove that controlled nuclear fusion can become the world’s energy future. Theoretically, it could provide clean and nearly limitless electrical power for humankind, with everything that implies. It could mean a reversal of global warming and the reversal of policies by which agricultural products are transformed into fuel. According to Dr. Perry Kinkaide, the group’s chairman, his council was asking the province to contribute to a demonstration of fusion ignition.

Fusion ignition, he said, “is imminent and will be one of the most extraordinary technologies discovered by mankind. We will be reproducing the physics of the sun.” When you get into the physics of this “imminent” technology, which talks about creating temperatures so hot (up to 100 million degrees Celsius) that they can only be enclosed by magnetic fields or lasers, it’s like tripping forward through a time-warp. Yet new technologies – demonstrated by the test at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories – have changed the picture.

Adds Allan Offenberger, a retired University of Alberta engineering professor and another program proponent, it is the new technology of “inertial confinement” of the heat of fusion that is changing everything. Inertial confinement uses laser beams to quickly heat to ignition a “fuel pellet” of simple atoms like the commonplace hydrogen isotope deuterium and the much less stable hydrogen isotope tritium. Because this process rapidly induces fusion, you don’t have to confine the fuel at all. The advantage: a relatively simple reaction chamber design.

Even so, this is a long-term proposition. A demonstration project isn’t likely for 25 years, say, with commercial facilities following a decade after that. However, the promise is great. Once the bugs have been worked out, the fusion energy could be very cheap.

To begin to develop expertise in this area, the proposal suggested that the province pony up $4 million this year and commit to another $17 million, total, in the two fiscal years following. The proponents argued that if Alberta scientists don’t get in on the ground floor, they will fall behind in expertise. Joining the project later, they argue, will be more expensive Once the province got its foot in the door, the proponents call for an intensive program of R&D “to develop inertial fusion as a viable energy technology.”

This phase would cost perhaps $40 million per year. Eventually, according to the council, having expertise within the province could lead to commercialization of the technologies. Perhaps the province could become “a provider of high power lasers, reactor systems engineering and related technologies for fusion energy and other applications.”

According to Offenberger, the aim is to create a safe, relatively cheap and clean method of producing electricity based on fusion. One attraction of this form of energy, he says, is that huge amounts of energy could be created with less than a kilogram a day of two types of hydrogen fuel. Also, there is no chance of meltdowns from this form of nuclear energy, which produces no hazardous wastes. The only waste products are heat and, from the size plant the group visualizes, about a kilo of helium per day.

The proposal also points out that there could be huge savings on transmission costs “because (fusion) plants can be located close to electricity users.” Canada is the only major industrial country without a fusion research presence. Given the country’s energy wealth, proximity to the United States and trade surpluses, perhaps that’s not unreasonable. I put the question to someone with the broadest imaginable view of electricity supply and demand within Alberta.

Technological Dominance: At the time of our interview, Martin Merritt was completing his term as the Alberta government’s Market Surveillance Administrator. His job was to make sure electricity and natural gas markets within the province were free and fair. Although he was quick to say he had no expertise in nuclear fusion, he surmised that “The best place to do this would be in the US, where the problems of energy supply, environmental problems, worries about global warming and the need to remain technologically dominant are so powerful. Europe also has those problems. In that sense, the timing seems perfect” to be developing these technologies.

By contrast, he opined, “Alberta’s main reason (to become involved) is that as an important energy power, we have many reasons to have an oar in developing energy technology.” He added that “Alberta needs to get around the (environmental) brush we’ve been tarred with. Perhaps adopting this form of energy could earn us green credits.”

Perry Kinkaide’s Council of Technologies, however, sees an urgent need for Canadian involvement. In a document on the council’s website, the group argues that “The window of opportunity is closing fast for Alberta and Canada to participate in a global partnership for developing ‘fusion,’ the ideal solution for meeting the world’s primary energy requirements – forever! Participation will secure our position as an energy superpower as the world transitions to fusion, with significant socio-economic and environmental spin-off benefits.” In this compelling commentary, the organization addressed “the need for fusion energy and the prospects of a revolutionary new technology for its achievement.”

Citing significant environmental, health and safety implications, it also noted that “the strategic fit of fusion technology with the demands of North America’s coal-based electric power industry as plants reach end-of-service and require replacement.” What is needed immediately, they insist, is an action plan “to ensure Alberta’s and Canada’s place in the emerging fusion-energy economy.” While the notion of fusion energy is closely tied to the generation of electricity, perhaps it could meet an oilsands challenge which went untried during the optimistic early years of the first nuclear age.

Fifty years ago, Richfield Oil Company proposed an experimental plan to release liquid hydrocarbons from the oilsands through the expedient of an underground nuclear explosion. The company proposed detonating a nine-kiloton explosive device below the oil sands at a site 100 kilometres south of Fort McMurray.

Thermonuclear heat would create a large underground cavern and simultaneously liquefy the oil. The cavern could serve as a collection point for the now-fluid bitumen, enabling the company to produce it. This idea came remarkably close to actually taking place. The project received federal approval in Canada, and America’s Atomic Energy Commission agreed to provide the device. But before the pilot could take place, public pressure for an international ban on nuclear testing had mounted.

As the late Ernest Manning once told me, when he was premier the federal government withheld approval and thus killed the plan. Perhaps in the second nuclear age, energy from nuclear fusion could become a safe and realistic heat source for producing and refining the dense oils Canada is famous for. This idea may sound far-fetched until you consider that in Peace River Shell is already testing the use of electric heaters to refine bitumen carbonates in situ, deep inside underground formations. When you start talking about a second nuclear age, nothing seems impossible.

Going West in China

by David DuByne As I gazed out my office window into the grey smog covering Chongqing, a city district of 30+ million people in central China, I began to think about the expansion of this economy. Here are my thoughts. The Chinese government continues the Go West Campaign. It is designed to convince those who are heading into big cities looking for work to go to the western cities and spur the same economic boom that is occurring along the east coast. This includes upgraded and new infrastructure, additional energy generation, and the intensification of natural resource extraction in the western regions. Every road throughout the nation is being refinished with concrete. From highways to one lane roads that were formerly dirt, nearly every road in every province is being upgraded to allow movement of goods and people at a faster pace. This would account for China’s usage of 45% of the world’s cement year upon year. This is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 8.5% (or 90 million metric tons) during the 2006-2007 period. Traveling by rail through Sichuan Province and everywhere else, parallel rail lines beside existing lines are being built for rapid transit and high speed delivery of goods and people. From now to 2010 the Chinese government plans to complete an additional 19,800 kilometers of new tracks and up grade 15,000 kilometers of existing routes. Where development and economic growth compete against environmentalism, conservation always falls on deaf ears. One of the most pristine areas in the western part of Yunnan province is the Nujiang Valley, which will have a series of 13 dams built that will cover a 700 kilometer section of the valley built by Huadian Corporation. This one of the last two major dam-free rivers in China. The 100 billion kilowatts per hour of generated electricity would be for factories on the EAST coast of the country. In addition the power will be used in new factory complexes that are slated to come into the western region to take advantage of tax breaks and special incentives to relocate there. One of the biggest tourist draws in Yunnan province for trekking is in the Tiger Leaping gorge, but a series of eight dams along a 564 kilometer section of the Jinsha River to provide power will alter the gorge. Lancangjiang Hydropower Development Corporation, a subsidiary of China Huaneng Group states “the dam will have an overall capacity of 20 million kilowatts, it is almost the same size as the Three Gorges Dam, but the water storage capacity in Tiger Leaping Gorge reservoir will be even bigger.” In addition to electricity generation, this dam is supposed to help solve the siltation problem that is threatening to block the Yangtze Three Gorges Dam 1500 kilometers downriver. The new hydroelectric power sources will be for mining operations in the western portions of China as resource extraction heats up. China’s internal mining capacity will only keep consumption of metals for manufacturing at the break even point. Mining as an industry has seen 20% growth year on year. Antimony and Molybdenum along with Gold, Silver, Copper, Aluminum, Zinc, Nickel and Lead are leading the growth. Roads leading to the Myannmar border are being expanded to four lanes as new sea ports and oil loading platforms are within easy reach and accessible in the Bay of Bengal from the west of China. A new natural gas field discovery containing 3.8 trillion cubic meters near Dazhou in the N.E. part of Sichuan Province was instantly slated for smelters, in addition to the hydroelectric power set to come on line. The new find of oil in Bohai Bay is just a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of this insatiable economy; at best it will add 200,000 barrels per day of production, and that was the amount of new increased oil usage country wide for last year alone. The Chinese government is giving incentives for recent graduates to relocate, or “population transfer” as its sometimes called, to the second and third-tier cities of the west. Job placement and minimum guaranteed salaries are but a few of the gems offered. Additionally students who use state loans to finish their university studies may have their loans waived. The loan, up to 24,000 yuan (US$4,000) per student, is paid by the Chinese government if the graduate promises to work in a western or remote region for at least three years. On a recycling note not a single plastic bottle, cardboard box or glass container goes uncollected by the endless stream of individual collectors digging through the road side rubbish bins, back alleys and street curbs looking for the new treasure of China, recyclables. Cities are scoured by collectors daily for anything that can be sold as scrap. I watched as an old apartment building was torn down by hand and a woman emerged from the building with a bag if old light switches. At first I thought she would use the complete switch, but she took out a small hammer and broke them into pieces, carefully separating the copper from the plastic. Recycling is an enormous multi-billion dollar business, gobbling up our western throw away products and growing expodentialy larger every year. Ethanol production is skyrocketing as the largest ethanol producer China Agri Industries which is the grain-processing unit of Cofco Ltd., China's largest grain trader is planning to open two more refineries this year, a 100,000 ton project in Hubei and a 300,000 ton project in Liaoning.These projects will use sweet potatoes as the feed stock. An additional 1 million tons of capacity, awaiting permission, will be added by the end of 2008. China Agri is using several different feedstock grains and plant to produce ethanol. As it was explained, diversifying feedstocks reduces the reliance on a single crop in case of crop failures. Sinopec and PetroChina have teamed up with China Agri in the downstream ethanol blending business. Lastly, as I listen to the never ending car horns below, I remembered reading a recent article stating that an estimated 3000 cars are added to Chongqing's roads every day and presently 70% of the city’s road space is filled during the day. My own experience of traveling six miles the other day taking me two and a half hours, with 30-40 storey buildings along the entire distance makes me a believer. There is much talk around the world saying again and again that China’s 8-10% growth rate cannot be sustained, that may be true along the east coast, but as economic productivity flattens out in that part of the country it grows in the west. New land routes to the sea via Myannmar are providing an economic kick start in this region. The boom is in its infancy, and if it turns out anything like the massive growth in the east, the growth will be long and continuous.

David DuByne is from the United States and is presently living and teaching Business English in Chongqing, China. He and webmaster Marc Hastenteufel are translating www.daveseslbiofuel.com, an English teaching web site devoted to bio-fuel and oil depletion, for those studying English around the planet into Mandarin Chinese. Robert Rapier, an expert on cellulose ethanol, gas-to-liquids (GTL), and butanol production, also provides technical assistance for content throughout daveseslbiofuel in the renewables and conservation section.

Village of Widows

Although he was a life-long pacifist and supporter of human rights causes, Albert Einstein will ironically be remembered also as the man who convinced US president Franklin Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan Project. The Anglo-American atomic weapons effort took place during World War II. It led to the use of nuclear bombs in anger, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it opened the Pandora’s box of atomic energy.

In a now-famous letter, Einstein suggested that nuclear chain reactions in large masses of uranium could release “vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements.” And, he speculated, “extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” While America had only poor ores of uranium, Einstein noted, “there is some good ore in Canada.” Therein lies a tragic story.

At the end of 1998, a Canadian Indian named Cindy Gilday described that tragedy to a United Nations conference on Human Rights. She spoke on a panel considering whether the environment, the economy and human rights were “cross currents or parallel streams.”

Amoco had sponsored Ms. Gilday’s presentation at the conference, held in Edmonton, Canada to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The program brought together many of the world’s foremost human rights activists. One speaker after another described the global struggle for human rights. (Many of the speakers have themselves been jailed for having had the impertinence to suggest, for example, that their national governments endorse democracy.) They argued forcefully that human rights are universal, and do not conflict with cultural or religious values.

Ms. Gilday’s presentation spoke to the experience of one band of Indians during the Second World War. Those Indians lived a traditional nomadic existence, very few spoke much English, and they knew almost nothing about the war. As it happened, however, their traditional territory was near the uranium mine being developed for the Manhattan Project.

The ore came from a rich deposit of uranium and radium along the shores of Great Bear Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. During the long days of summer, a wartime mining company hired local Indian men to carry 40-kilogram burlap bags of ore from the mine to the Mackenzie River. They carried those loads for long hours, for months on end. When the bags ripped apart, they shifted the spilled ore off the trail, but took the contaminated bags to their temporary village. There, the burlap found many uses.

Years later, the ore-carriers began dying of cancer, and the community now known as Deline became, in Ms. Gilday’s words, “a village of widows.” Eventually, the Aboriginal people became aware of the connection between radioactivity and cancer. They also came to understand that they had unwittingly helped contaminate their remote northern homeland with radioactive waste.

According to Ms. Gilday, the families of the men who served as ore-carriers during the war have wounds that are yet to be healed. “Like most Native Americans, their culture, spirit and their very beings are linked intimately with the well-being of mother earth. This has been compromised by uranium mining contamination....If their environment is compromised, their lives are compromised.” She argues that their wartime experience involved a breach of human rights, which no government has ever attempted to redress.

The contrarian could suggest that everyone who dealt with radioactive elements in the early years faced unknown risks. After all, radiography pioneer Marie Curie herself died of cancer.

But whichever side of this argument you take, Ms. Gilday’s story illustrates three powerful trends in modern society. The dynamic relations among public health, safety and the environment comprise a single issue. Another is that many of the world’s indigenous peoples have learned to mobilize public opinion in their effort to reclaim traditional landsand livelihoods. The third is that moral claims based on human rights have economic and political force. Each has powerful implications for globally organized business.

When the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, Soviet representative Andrei Vishinsky dismissed it as just a “collection of pious phrases.” Sadly, for the first two decades of its existence, Vishinsky’s assessment seemed to be accurate. But the declaration has been gathering momentum since the 1970s.

Today, western democracies expect their leaders to raise human rights issues when they visit such countries as China. Large corporations that buy from Third World sweatshops or operate within countries that are the worst abusers of their citizens frequently find themselves the targets of boycotts and picket lines. And countries that systematically violate human rights often find the world’s economic powers imposing embargoes and economic sanctions upon them.

No one understands this better than South Africa’s Anglican archbishop emeritus, Desmund Tutu. As a critic of the former South African system of Apartheid, Mr. Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize. His moral influence led to intense international economic and diplomatic pressure, which eventually led to abandonment of that system of institutional racism. This was one of the great recent victories for the human rights movement.

The keynote speaker at the UN’s human rights conference, the charismatic archbishop characterized South Africa’s victory over Apartheid as a “spectacular victory over the forces of evil and wickedness.” In his introduction to a wide-ranging address on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which he had led, this tiny little man added a small but enormously significant comment – with enormous humility, and to thunderous applause. “Our victory is your victory,” Mr. Tutu said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support.”

After centuries of human rights abuses, Archbishop Tutu said, “We in South Africa are a wounded people, in need of reconciliation. By enabling this reconciliation to occur, perhaps God is setting up South Africa as a beacon to the world.” He chuckled about “the perverse sense of humour” of the Divine, which could make a troubled country like South Africa a beacon of hope for such countries as Bosnia, Rwanda and Serbia.

The movement that Mr. Tutu so articulately represents has gained great strength in recent decades. Why?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a group of related international agreements, including the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949, have created a body of thought respecting human rights, war crimes and humanitarian law. International bodies are giving this body of law some teeth. And publicity promoted by human rights groups is combining with TV screens full of graphic scenes of humanitarian disasters to increase public concern. Victims are no longer seen as someone else’s problem.

There is also the question of the moral high ground.
A very large percentage of the world’s human rights activists are driven by a sense of higher purpose. Albert Einstein, a Jew, famously remarked that “God does not play dice with the universe.” Cindy Gilday talked about the “culture, spirit and very beings” of American Indians as being “intimately linked with the well-being of mother earth.” And Archbishop Tutu’s profession speaks for itself.

While spiritual values are no doubt one important value behind the human rights movement, “the struggle for democracy” is another. In a notable book by that name published a decade ago, Canadian authors Patrick Watson and Benjamin Barber put the point concisely. “We found that to tell the story of democracy is also to explore the fundamental human urge towards self-mastery and liberation: the inclination to speak openly, communicate freely, pray according to one’s beliefs, dance to one’s own tune, think as one pleases – but to do so in the company of other men and women in a spirit of cooperation.”

Many forces are guiding the human rights movement. The expansion of democracy is one. The human spirit is certainly another. A sense of the Divine, perhaps, is a third. And a growing body of international law underlies all three. Whatever the causes of this remarkable movement, everyone, everywhere, is a beneficiary.