1st August 2022
“In another half billion years or so, the Sun will expand and probably evaporate the oceans and make life impossible on Earth.”
Elon Musk[1]
How far ahead should humanity think? And what issues should influence our perspective? This article will attempt to address these two questions.
A huge swathe of humanity is forced to think no further ahead than where the next meal will come from, or what shelter they will have tonight. This is cruel beyond belief and something the rest of humanity should not accept. Humans need to be able to think ahead at least a year or two to establish themselves, ensure income or at least food supplies, in particular if they are of child-bearing age. Being able to think a decade ahead is a privilege afforded to a minority, maybe a majority in developed countries, though that has been shattered somewhat in the last 2 years.
Developed countries are so because they are to some degree industrialized and have access to vast energy resources to power their economies, but they also have the political and economic stability to be able to employ them. Societies without the wherewithal to employ energy resources will remain ‘poor’ or at least they won’t ‘develop’.
The issue for those ‘developed’ societies is to sustain access to adequate energy supplies to maintain their standards. Most people in developed societies have little idea that a halt to energy supplies would lead to complete economic collapse, political instability and probably rioting or anarchy, in particular because about half of them are stuck in cities with little access to replacement energy or food supplies.
So now we begin to see a few areas where we really need to think carefully long-term. The 4 to 5 year political cycle just doesn’t cut it. To the great credit of our founding fathers, they thought generations ahead and bequeathed us nation states, mostly with structured constitutions that provided the legal and political frameworks to enable our development. Those in turn enabled us to employ energy and technologies that have led to astounding human progress (depending on how one defines that, because not all of it seems worthy of the term). All of that progress can be suddenly reversed if we now fail to secure long-term energy supplies.
To date we have relied on a mix of sources, beginning with simple fire using wood, then coal, later oil, ultimately gas and nuclear. Also, for many centuries (starting in 9th century Persia) we have used windmills to pump water, grind grain, which also often employed water wheels. All of these sources can be broken into three broad categories:
- Nuclear, with the oldest origin, employing concentrated radioactive materials created during the formation of the Universe starting about 13 billion years ago and deposited in the Earth’s crust between 4 and 5 billion years ago,
- fossil fuels (oil, coal, gas, lignite, peat), deposited over millions of years from decaying vegetation,
- wood, water flow, wind, wave, tidal and solar energy, all of which derive from the Sun in one way or another, but are not so much deposited as delivered on a continuous basis.
The first two are in stored forms and have high energy densities, making them very useful, for example, as fuel for cars. But having been so-to-speak ‘left to us’ they are to all intents and purposes capped. New nuclear materials are not forming in the crust. And while there may still be some formation of fossil fuel deposits, given that the currently proven reserves were produced over millions of years, any amount that may be created each year is tiny by comparison (eg: peat bogs grow, but in millimetres per year).
Apart from wood, the latter ‘renewable’ sources do not appear in stored form and they do not have energy densities as high as some fossil fuels or nuclear materials. However, collection using wind turbines for example can convert relatively dispersed wind energy into exactly the same high-density high-utility energy produced by nuclear and fossil fuel power stations, namely high voltage electricity – it is EXACTLY the same. However, even though un-stored renewable energy can be used at the moment of generation, energy can have higher utility in a stored form for certain applications, like transport, so it is necessary to store at least some renewable energy.
Importantly, renewable energy sources are not capped. They will continue to be delivered to Earth until the Sun swallows it in about 4 billion years, or as Elon Musk suggests, it makes Earth uninhabitable in around 500 million years. Think of it this way, if a human generation averages 25 years, that’s 20 million human generations away. Even that is hard to comprehend – say roughly two generations for every person living in London or New York.
So how long will the effectively capped fossil fuels and usable nuclear fission last? 100 years, two or three hundred years. In fact it doesn’t really matter, because these are just moments in the overall timeline of our planet. We need to assume that human life will continue, as to assume otherwise is to accept defeat and make this whole exercise pointless. And assuming continuity means we need to think well beyond a mere few hundred years, which is only a few generations away.
A contender often posited is nuclear fusion – a technology where very small atoms like Hydrogen or Helium are smashed together at unimaginable pressures and temperatures, producing enormous quantities of energy. This is the technology of our Sun, but it is also the technology of the Hydrogen Bomb. Fusion power has been worked on for many decades already and there is a prototype reactor (ITER) being developed at Cadarache in Southern France. I worked on this topic as an Energy Adviser at the European Parliament in the 90s and noted that the ‘product’ was always 50 years away. That is still the case. One part of the plan is to mine Helium3 on the Moon would you believe, to use it as fuel.
The ‘product’ will be a huge reactor using the technology of nuclear weapons to produce equally vast amounts of electricity (and even more energy as waste heat). That’s all very well until it has a failure and half of France goes offline, or it blows up scattering radioactive material around Provence, forcing people to leave. Unfortunately, it places power, not just electrical power, but political power in the hands of technocracies. We have learned to our bitter cost over the last two years that this, in and of itself, is a very bad idea. To be fair, such an energy source, though not renewable, could last hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
But my late friend and mentor Dr Hermann Scheer MdB often said that he favoured fusion, pointing out that we already have a perfectly reliable fusion reactor at a safe distance of 93 million miles, which won’t break down (or swallow us) for say another 4 billion years. One wonders what arrogance and hubris makes humanity want to control such power and what evil purpose it would be put to. He felt we should benefit from the warm glow of our friendly Star, pointing out in his book “The Solar Economy[2]” that it delivers, continuously, 15,000 times humanity’s total energy needs.
On reflection, this means we can step over the consumption limit imposed by geology (eg: peak oil) and move humanity onto an even more energy intensive basis, though we would have to be careful to make sure that doing so would not do even more harm.
And there is a nice subtlety about this last point. Using energy that arrives from the Sun diverts it to other uses like powering vehicles and in the end returns it to the biosphere as heat, where it would have ended up if we hadn’t collected it in the first instance. However when we release vast quantities of energy that has been stored for millions, even billions of years as oil, gas or nuclear materials and add it to the biosphere, we must do harm, given heat is already an issue, apparently. In addition, we are warned that adding greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a bad idea - the numbers suggest that we are increasing the CO2 level in the atmosphere by 1% per year (and that is increasing), so a doubling in a century. Even if we find out that the forecasts were over-estimates being manipulated by nefarious interests, this is in addition to the heating effect and cannot be wise.
When considering energy sources, it is wise to make sure that the energy released (output) exceeds the energy required to release it (input), and to be really useful a source needs to yield several times the energy input. This is referred to as Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and can be expressed as either a ratio or a time period (in which the input energy is returned). As we use up the easier near surface oil, gas and coal and have to go deeper or further offshore, this ratio declines. Also tar sands in Alberta and Venezuela’s heavy crude have lower ratios, raising doubts about their real economic value. Similarly as the richer Uranium deposits are used, nuclear’s EROI drops and soon enough, the effort won’t be worth the candle (unless of course the real purpose of nuclear is military). As things stand we are moving closer to the point where our economies stagnate because the EROI has fallen too low, and that position is irreversible and terminal with finite resources. Fortunately, as we progress renewable energy technologies and build larger installations, the EROI improves, although to be fair, situating solar further away from the equator or putting turbines on less windy sites has the opposite effect. Nevertheless, the key point is that these sources are not depleting, so this fundamental cause of declining EROI is not applicable. We can indeed envisage accessing these sources and producing more than enough energy for all of humanity for the next 20 million human generations.
There is one more factor that we ought consider when thinking about matters in the long-term – nuclear waste. Highly radioactive fuel rods are removed from nuclear reactors after the decays in the fuel contaminate it. Those rods have to be stored in cooling ponds for many years and later put in safe storage to prevent theft leading to processing for nuclear weapons. We’re talking materials with very long radioactive ‘half-lives’ (up to a million years), requiring hundreds (maybe thousands?) of years of storage. If on the other hand those fuel rods are chemically reprocessed, the fissile materials used for weapons can be separated and (maybe) secured (indefinitely?), but the remaining waste is far more concentrated and toxic, also having to be stored for vast periods of time, with cooling for the foreseeable future. In summary, we have a technology that provides energy for some decades and then consumes both energy and cost, while imposing security risks for hundreds if not thousands of years (very many human generations).
So we see that good planning for our energy future requires us to think in terms of at least hundreds and probably thousands of years. The factors we need to consider include:
- addition to as opposed to diversion of energy in the biosphere,
- chemical alteration of the atmosphere (and indeed the oceans beneath it),
- security and cost legacies to future generations, never mind genetic legacies from radioactive contamination caused by accidents, tests and operational releases,
- continuity of energy sources over time,
- capacity to meet demand,
- smaller decentralized sources with local democratic control versus larger centralized sources.
If we start by looking past the next hundred to 2 hundred years, we will see that both fossil fuels and nuclear fission are essentially irrelevant. Fusion is a hubristic illusion that will place vast political power in dubious technocratic hands, compromising our democracies (never mind the technical risks).
If one takes the time to work through these arguments, and genuinely thinks long term, it is virtually impossible to argue for any source other than renewables:
- they do not add energy, but divert it,
- can do so safely on a scale well beyond what is available to humanity today,
- while not altering the biosphere,
- while admittedly causing some pollution & non-recyclable materials today, do not leave long-term legacies,
- offer locals power over their energy and their lives, and finally,
- can do so effectively indefinitely, or at least until the earth reaches its sell-by date.
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[1] on Lex Fridman, 12/11/2019 youtu.be /smK9dgdTl40, approx. 36 mins in
[2] Page 62 (published in 2002 as a translation of his original German version from 1999), all based on his earlier work on “Sonnenstrategie” / “A Solar Manifesto” originally published in 1993/4. The 15,000 number he quotes has surely reduced somewhat since then.