THE SEARCH FOR POWER

Man has long sought to control power as well as energy. His own body is very limited in power, the rate at which it can do work, either in brief bursts, or for a sustained period of time. When he discovered the principles of momentum, leverage, tension, and the wedge, man could throw, pry, propel and split with a directed force for greater than the capacity of his own muscles. For most of his evolutionary history, his own body was the only engine man had. The invention of coke and the invention of the steam engine had synergistic consequences: from them sprang the complex of coal pits, railroads, and steel mills that were the structural frame work of the industrial revolution. Through the efforts of Newton and many of his successors, we know a great deal about how the forces of nature act, how to measure them, and how to predict what will happen if a certain conjunction of phenomena occurs. That is all we need to know to construct an industrial society and a technological world.
The English brewer, James Prescott Joule, devised Joule produced heat from work and found that the same amount of work no matter how performed, always yielded an equal amount of heat which went on to the first law of thermodynamics: that energy can neither be created nor destroyed in any observable process.

The terms renewable (income) and non-renewable (fund), used to describe energy resources, reflect man’s time perception. A resource is renewable if it can be grown or replenished at a rate meaningful to man. Renewable energy resources include food, solar radiation, fuel, wood, water power and wind power. A resource is non renewable if its rate of formation is so slow as to be meaningless in terms of the human life span. Coal, petroleum, and natural gas are formed over periods of hundred of thousands of years. These resources are for all practical purposes not renewable. The economic limit to exploitation of a non renewable resource further implies a time limit determined by the rate at which the resource is consumed. Technology can and has greatly extended the limits of both renewable resources, but such extensions are temporary and tend to benefit only some of the earth’s people.

In striking contrast to the dynamic, delicately adjusted energy system of the biosphere is the almost static energy system of rocks and minerals, where geochemical concentrations effected over millions of years wait man’s exploitation. The opening of large mines does change the energy system in a small area of the outermost part of the earth’s crust, but generally little energy is transferred and the mineral resource is not destroyed. Although for 99.9% of his existence as a genus, man used only renewable resources for his energy needs, now only about 10% of the world’s energy consumption comes from renewable sources; about two-thirds of that is food for humans and feed for animals; about 25% is wood, refuse of vegetable origin, and excrement used as fuel; the remainder is hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal, and wind power.

Although one could maintain that most forms of energy used by man (except nuclear, tidal, and geothermal) are of solar origin, the term solar energy usually refers only to useful heat and power obtained directly from the sun’s radiation. Solar radiation can be controlled by man for two purposes: to produce useful heat and to produce electric power. In a properly designed world more than 20% of mankind’s energy needs could be provided by solar heating. Other than social inertia, there appear to be no serious barriers to much greater use of solar heating and cooling. Buildings need to be specially sited, designed, and constructed, and the solar energy units need to be standardized and mass produced to be economic alternatives to present space heating and cooling systems.

Solar power is quite a different matter. It is technically feasible to convert solar radiation to electricity but existing technology is expensive and inefficient. Solar power enthusiasts are optimistic in their predictions of lowered cost. They gain eager follower because of the appeal of a pollution free completely renewable source of electricity in face of the mounting problems of pollution, risk, and ecological disturbance that accompany our increased reliance on fossil and fissile fuels.


SCIENCE SAVES THE OIL INDUSTRY

The drilling side of the oil business explaining the impact of recent technological advances in oil exploration and production through fancy charts and slides, potted histories, and personal anecdotes, they claim that oil business has been radically transformed. The technological changes now sweeping through the oil business promise to transform it almost beyond recognition. So much oil is pumped out of the floating sea platforms that it more than paid for itself in their first years of operation. With the help of advanced robotics and seismic know how, they drill elaborate multidirectional wells that twisted and turned their ways around obstacles beneath the ocean floor to hit giant pockets of oil.
The pace of innovation in petroleum is not really surprising when you consider t he economic prize. The global economy is utterly dependent on this filth, geographically concentrated and geopolitically risky hydrocarbon to run its planes, buses, and cars. This industry receives enormous subsidies and disguised incentives ranging from the under taxation of gasoline in many countries to the west’s military presence in the middle east, to free dredging of canals by America’s Army Corps of Engineers for the safe passage of oil tankers. All of these perversions of the market reinforce the petroleum economy and reduce the financial risk that the oil sector must absorb.

Experts are convince that there are few “elephant” giant fields left to be discovered on land. Even the discoveries in countries surrounding the Caspian Sea, often talked up by journalists and security experts as the next Great Game of geopolitics, do not add up to a herd of elephants. Within the context of the Mediterranean market, the Russian black sea ports are an important outlet for both crude oil and oil products into the region. Should the Russian oil industry rebound and its export infrastructure expand, then that would have a major impact on regional balances. To the disappointment of oil majors, there simply is not enough oil in the Caspian (compared to the enormous woolly-mammoth fields of the Middle East) to make a big difference in the global energy equation. Just about the only virgin territory left is under the ocean. Underwater drilling is , in itself, nothing new. After all, the north sea and near shores of t he Gulf of Mexico have for decades been important oil producing regions. Until recently, however, many geologists were convinced that offshore oil would be restricted to shallower waters. The sorts of rock conducive to oil accumulation, they argued, would be found only in ancient river deltas and other formations close to shore. Veterans of the oil business recall that the notion of finding oil under thousands of feet of water was ridiculed until just a few years ago. Now oil majors are betting that enormous amounts of oil are trapped under the deep waters of Brazil, West Africa, and of course, the Gulf of Mexico. As you fly out by helicopter from New Orleans to Ursa, the entire history of America’s offshore exploration unfolds below you in a scene, alive and crowded.


NUCLEAR ENERGY AND NUCLEAR REACTIONS

When coal, oil and natural gas are burned their hydrocarbons react with the oxygen in air to yield carbon dioxide and water. In the process energy is released. The source of this energy is the rearrangement of the chemical bonds of the various compounds involved in the reactions. Chemical bonds involve the outermost electrons of atoms. Nuclear energy results from rearrangements of the components of the nuclei of atoms, and because the forces between these are very much greater than those between the outer electrons of the atom, the energy released in nuclear reactions is very much greater than that in chemical reactions. Typically 100 million times more energy is released in a nuclear reaction than in a chemical reaction.

Nucleons stay together as a nucleus because the nuclear strong force of attraction is dominant in stable nuclei. Therefore, to dismember a nucleus into separate protons and neutrons work has to be done against this force. The amount of work that is necessary is called the binding energy of the nucleus. An alternative way of looking at this is to say that he total energy of a group of nucleons bound together as a nucleus is less than their total energy when they are separated. A mechanical analogy might compare the nucleons in the nucleus with marbles in the bottom of a bowl. The marbles remain together in the bowl unless kinetic energy is supplied to them, by stirring for example, when they may be able, while moving around, to fall over the upper edge of the bowl. In the same way, energy supplied to nucleons may cause the nucleus to disrupt.

Three categories of radioactive waste materials are recognized, as low, intermediate and high level wastes. When nuclear wastes are discussed it is usually the high level category of waste, which is viewed as presenting the most difficulties. About 30 tonnes of spent fuel are removed from a 1000 Mwe reactor each year and the high level wastes constitutes about 1 tonne of this. The total volume of material is small but it consists of high activity, high heat output isotopes. These result from the irradiation of the fuel itself and fall into two broad groups, the fission products and the actinides ( the heavy elements formed in the fuel by various neutron capture and radioactive decay reactions).

Nuclear power stations, for most of their history, have been seen by their operator as providing electricity more cheaply than stations fuelled by coal, oil and gas. Recently the claims have been reversed. This has been particularly so in the UK in the build up to and aftermath of electricity privatization. The reversal is partly due to changes in the accounting practices and procedures used, partly to the increased cost of constructing modern nuclear reactors to standards which satisfy the latest regulations, and partly to the recognition of higher downstream cost associated with fuel reprocessing, decommissioning and management of radioactive wastes.

Nuclear power made a very confident entrance into the arena of electricity production. Gradually, however, with growing environmental awareness a nd changing public attitudes to science and technology, concern has grown. It is most evident in the areas of safety, the possible long term consequences of exposure to increased levels of back ground radiation and what is to be done about high level radioactive wastes. Additional concerns are voiced about plutonium production and accumulation, the spread of nuclear power to countries which may not be sufficiently technically advanced to cope with its management, and the political and ethical problems associated with providing security for nuclear plant. The cost of electricity produced by nuclear power has also been queried and the claim that it is cheaper than that produced by its competitors has been contested severely for some years. These changing attitudes have had a widespread influence. They have also been gained support in the wake of the accidents involving the nuclear power stations around the world.

Nuclear power is at a crossroads at the present time. It is able to become one of the least polluting producers of electricity, but it has to overcome a legacy of distrust in a sceptical public. For there to be a resurgence in its fortunes it must re-establish its credibility. Any new major accident to an existing reactor would make this very difficult, where as serious power shortages or large price rises due to the implementation of expensive pollution control procedures with fossil fuel plants would enhance its prospects.

References;

Robert Hill, Phil O’keefe and Colin Snape; 1995, The future of ENERGY USE, Earthscan, London

Rose, D. J., 1986 ; Learning About Energy, MIT, Cambridge

Vaitheeswaran, V. V., POWER TO THE PEOPLE; How the coming energy revolution will transform an industry, change our lives, and maybe even save the planet; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, (2003)

Horsnell, P., The Mediterranean Basin in the World Petroleum Market, 2000, Oxford University Press