A Step Farther Out (39 page)

Laser fusion research, like all other fusion research, suffered a budget cut in the first years of the Carter administration; according to the Soviets it is a very promising line of development. JEP Spring 1978]

Finally, there's electron-beam inertial confinement, which is only carried on at Sandia Laboratories (a nonprofit corporation) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I visited the labs recently, and came away a believer.

At the time of my visit the Sandia electron-beam fusion program was funded at about $5 million a year; nowhere near enough, in my judgment Electron bombardment may just be
the
way to go.

They've already achieved fusion with this method. Not breakeven; but both US and Soviet experiments have definitely produced several billion fusion neutrons. The Soviets are attempting to cooperate with the US, but once again, when Rudikov came to the US to tell his results, we classified his talk However, it's definite that he reported obtaining fusion neutrons, because that was announced in the Soviet popular press. (Evidently the Soviet Union isn't interested in keeping it a secret from whomever we are keeping in the dark.)

Electron-beam fusion has always been the least-funded of the fusion research programs, in part because it doesn't
need
as much money.

I have watched a man spend four billion dollars an hour on electricity. It made him unhappy. He wanted to spend a trillion an hour. It happened at Sandia labs: they were zapping a pellet with electrons. Of course they didn't spend four billion bucks an hour for very long: a few nano-seconds, to be exact, so the total cost of the electricity was a few dollars; but if they could have kept it up!

The Sandia equipment is impressive. It's also massive, as you'd expect, considering that they handle millions of volts. To get that they have to charge up enormous capacitance systems. Sirens wail, red lights flash, needles crawl across dials, just like in a good science fiction movie, and finally the technician puts his fingers in his ears. I didn't, in time, and the noise of a couple of mega joules arcing into a target is not easily forgotten.

Even so, it's not enough. That's what costs the money: building equipment that will handle those voltages without breakdown (and breakdowns are
spectacular
around there; I didn't see one, but I saw insulators the size of a desk with inch-deep gouges burned into them). Then there's the triggering problem: that system has to discharge all its energy at the
right
time, and the right time is measured in billionths of a second. It's amazing that they can do it; but they can. I saw it done. Incidentally, the voltage amplifier systems they use are called Marx generators, which gives rise to a number of puns, political jokes, etc., and worse; when they were ready to fire someone shouted "Harpo's ready!" and another man said "Stand by to fire Groucho." Then there was the zap! and a million joules flowed for a few nano-seconds.

Mega-joules. A joule is 10
⁷
ergs. I was duly impressed until we got to talking after the experiment. The reason they don't have fusion yet is they just can't pump enough power through the system fast enough, but don't get discouraged. The amount of power needed isn't so very large after all. In fact, we calculated that a Sears Lifetime Battery contains about 4 mega-joules, and if we could just discharge that sucker in a couple of nano-seconds we'd have fusion.

They're building a system that they expect will do just that.

At the moment Sandia hopes to be at the squash court stage by 1983: that is, by then they hope to have proved that electron bombardment inertial confinement fusion will work and can, with a lot more skull sweat and good engineering design, eventually be part of a useful electric power system.

They're doing that on five million dollars a year. This is the system I mentioned in the beginning of this article. I think it deserves more money, because with more money they may get to the squash court before 1980. They don't promise it, but then they don't need much more money either; a doubling of their present five million annually would not only let them build more hardware faster, but also let them coordinate some theoretical work going on around the country, and bring in other scientists as consultants.

So: if you're in a mood to write your Congresscritter about energy problems, you might mention that here's a slot where, in my considered judgment, a few million bucks will do a lot of good. Please don't support this because you think it will get us to the year 2000; it's unlikely. Don't support it because you think it will eliminate our need for nasty plutonium. Do it as a present for your children; do it because we could use some decent national goals, and cheap clean fusion power is one of the better gifts the US could offer the world.

Do it because we can afford it, and it's something we ought to do.

* * *

Since I wrote that, a number of things happened. First, many of my readers did send letters to Congress. Second, President Carter cut the budget for electron-beam inertial confinement fusion research. Third, Congress restored the budget.

At present writing, the chief scientist involved with this research spends as much time in Washington trying to keep his budget as he does in the laboratory trying to make neutrons. He has never met the President, although while he was in Washington Mr. Carter gave an afternoon to Mr. Lovins of "soft energy" fame.

And finally, in Fall 1978, Princeton University announced temperatures of 60 million degrees in their magnetic confinement fusion research facility. This was a real scientific breakthrough; but the news announcement also contained a statement from the Department of Energy: "This achievement does not change the national timetable to fusion energy." Of course it does not: we have no national timetable. The expected date of useful fusion energy in the United States is never.

I don't know why, but the present administration does not seem to want fusion energy.

Larry Niven used to live behind a garbage dump. Well, you wouldn't have known it, of course; although his sister used to say he lived in the 'wrong part" of Bellaire, it is not characteristic of that fabled community that you know the municipal sanitary land fill—read garbage dump—is only about half a mile away. On the other hand, the access road to the dump is clearly visible from the San Diego Freeway, and when I drove to Larry's house—which was pretty often back in the days when we were writing THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE and INFERNO—I couldn't help seeing the endless stream of huge trucks trundling up into the Santa Monica Mountains with their loads of refuse.

Surely, thought I, we ought to be able to do
something
with that stuff besides bury it in what might otherwise be a very nice wilderness area.

Those who would save the world seem to do so in waves. There are fads in the eco-crusading business, and just now garbage is the big one. I say fad because the 1974
opus
AN INDEX OF POSSIBILITIES: ENERGY AND POWER, contains not a single index reference to "trash," "garbage," "waste," or "sewage," and only one tiny reference (under "methane") to use of any of these materials; yet it was supposed to be a compendium of all the ideas on how the energy crisis might be solved. Now, however, you can't pick up a work of that sort without finding article after article on how we could be saved if only we'd
use
the energy in our sewage and garbage. Unfortunately, none of the articles I've seen give any
numbers;
they're very similar to the wistful thoughts I had while driving to Larry's house. There's so much waste and trash that surely we can get a lot of energy out of it; can't we?

I don't know. Let's see.

Let's begin by looking at the present energy situation. That turns out not to be easy as you might think; the data aren't collected together into one place, and even when you find the figures they're all mixed up. It takes a lot of patience and determination to come up with a meaningful composite. Energy analysts don't seem ever to have heard of the metric system. Everything is given in terms of British Thermal Units, or tons of coal equivalent (and not everybody has a common figure on how many Btu there are in a ton of coal) or barrels of oil per day (ditto about Btu/bbl.) or kilowatt-hours, or whatever they're enamored of.

I've put together as good a picture as I can, and I've converted everything into ergs (I grew up with the cgs system; if you like the mks system, divide by 10
⁷
; if you like feet and pounds, get hip). The results are given in figures 35 and 36, which show where the US energy comes from and where it goes.

Now true: the growth projected in Figure 35 makes a number of assumptions which I haven't bothered to list (it assumes a constant real increase in GNP, for example) and the percentages in Figure 36 are going to change if the US population continues stable; but at least we've got something to work with, a way to see just how big a problem we're facing.

__________

 
(Calculated from tables in ANNUAL REVIEW OF ENERGY for 1976)

__________

Now that we know how much power we need, let's find out how much garbage we have to deal with. Actually I shouldn't use the term "garbage" with its strong negative connotation: as the authors of the energy-from-waste section in ANNUAL REVIEW OF ENERGY for 1976 point out, it's precisely that term that makes the most talented administrators avoid the municipal departments of sanitation, and makes waste-collection a job at the very lowest end of the social scale. Instead I suppose I should say "urban mineral resources" or some such. Anyway, we need to know how much of it we have to work with.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which hasn't heard of the metric system either, guesses that we produce about 3.32 pounds per capita each day (1.51 kg for the more up-to-date among us). Looking at my own household that seems about right. The figure refers to
municipal wastes,
which is everything thrown away such as trash and garbage, but does not include sewage. Since there are about 250 million of us, we get a rough figure of 415 thousand
tons
each day, or 15 million tons each year, which probably explains why the cities are running out of sanitary land fill. In metric terms we have 13.7 million tons annually, still a respectable sum. We'll stay with English system for a while because the energy figures I have for what we can get out of municipal waste are, of course, given in Btu/ton. Sigh.

Incidentally, the ANNUAL REVIEW article also gives an estimate of 250 million tons municipal waste daily, of which 175 million is domestic; and that simply can't be right. It may include sewage, which we'll deal with separately; but it's still far too large.

All right: we have this incredible pile of waste, now what can we do with it? Well, if it were dry we could burn it, with due regard to cleaning up the stack gasses to avoid pollution; and in fact that's what's done with a lot of it (and sometimes without worrying about the pollution aspects, either). Few places make any effort to capture the energy from that burning waste. The stuff is merely incinerated to reduce the volume. Surely there is a significant amount of energy released, though, and if we can tap it, will we be independent of Arab sheiks and Liberian tankers?

__________

 
(Calculated from tables in ANNUAL REVIEW OF ENERGY for 1976)

__________

The standard figure for the energy content of municipal waste is about 10 million Btu per ton, but there's a joker, that's per ton of
dry
weight. Unfortunately, a lot of municipal waste is anything but dry, and it takes a good bit of energy to get the water out of it before it will bum at all. Still, let's assume we've dried it, somehow, and it's all ours.

We cannot yet burn it in steam boilers. The stuff consists of all kinds of things: discarded metal beds; tin cans; old Six Million Dollar Man toys; food scraps; dead animals; discarded vacuum cleaners; coffee grounds; and you name it. It must be pulverized and sorted, and that takes energy. It also takes either a very high or a very low technology: that is, one way to sort it is by human labor, but we'd probably have to increase the size of the army before we could put the unemployed to work doing
that;
thus we have to build highly sophisticated equipment, with magnets, grates, air-stream sorters, and the like, and those cost money, and municipalities raise money primarily through property taxes, and home-owners are ready to revolt already; but let's assume all those problems solved, and we've done the sorting. How much energy can we get from our rubbish?