Future Energy Needs and Consequences from a Physical Sciences Perspective Part 2

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Our Energy Future

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University of California San Diego

Our Energy Future

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This course is designed to introduce students to the issues of energy in the 21st century – including food and fuels – which are inseparably linked – and will discuss energy production and utilization from the biology, engineering, economics, climate science, and social science perspectives. This course will cover the current production and utilization of energy, as well as the consequences of this use, examining finite fossil energy reserves, how food and energy are linked, impacts on the environment and climate, and the social and economic impacts of our present energy and food production and use. After the introductory lectures, we will examine the emerging field of sustainable energy, fuel and food production, emphasizing the importance of developing energy efficient and sustainable methods of production, and how these new technologies can contribute to replacing the diminishing supplies of fossil fuels, and reduce the consequences of carbon dioxide release into the environment. This course will also cover the importance of creating a sustainable energy future for all societies including those of the developing world. Lectures will be prepared and delivered by leading UC San Diego and Scripps Institution of Oceanography faculty and industry professionals across these areas of expertise.

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Physical Energy Sources

Looks at some of the alternative energy options from the physical sciences domain, including wind energy, photovoltaic and photothermal energy, and nuclear energy. It also covers energy storage and electric vehicles, and energy efficiency and smart grid technologies.

Future Energy Needs and Consequences from a Physical Sciences Perspective Part 19:54

Future Energy Needs and Consequences from a Physical Sciences Perspective Part 215:45

Rencontrer les enseignants

Dr. Stephen Mayfield
Professor of Molecular Biology
University of California San Diego

[MUSIC]

Now for something completely different as they said on, on, on Monty Python.

This is a Department of Energy report that I worked through for this talk.

It's about 777 pages if you don't count the references.

And it's actually really well written.

So here is where we are on that.

Alright, everyone here is about super conductors.

What is this all about?

Why aren't we using it?

Like when I was a kid I thought by 2013 we'd have jet cars.

I mean, I have to tell you the future is a rip off.

You know, I was, I'm still driving the same car

and still airplanes are the same as far as I'm concerned.

I'm still sitting in a little seat but I don't get food anymore.

So, [LAUGH] so, what's the deal with superconductors?

Well, they've been around a while.

Here's the trick.

This is the Thiemens' view on superconductors in 20 seconds maybe 25.

It's the structure.

You have to have the right structure.

You have to have the right guy sticking in the structure.

And you have to cool it down.

And at that cooling down there is no more resistance.

It's like with the Borg resistance is futile right?

So you've gotten rid of the resistance at low temperatures and it's dropped out.

And this has been known for a long time.

This Onnes discovered this at, using liquid

helium that in, in mercury this happens.

Right around, just a little bit above that.

You know, it's like 451 degrees below zero.

So it's cold.

And it goes super conducting, no resistance.

If the world can be made of

superconductors boom we'd solve a lot of problems.

The problem, the, so where are we in this?

Why aren't we doing?

Why are you just sitting here talking?

We could be done.

We could be outside.

We could have some Rubio's that's sponsoring this and we'd be set.

Here's the normal electrons right?

They're doing, they're happy.

They're going out randomly.

They're doing their electron thing.

And they conduct electricity when so will to do it.

But what happens is in these structures when life is

right and you chill them off they do this pairing thing.

And it, and, and, part of them, this is the momentum part it's called.

One goes up and one goes down and one spins one way and one spins the other way.

And poof the resistance goes away.

And that's what you want.

You make these things called Cooper pairs.

You pair' em up and man the resistance is gone.

And so if you look at what's happened, so,

this is what's important for energy what's going on.

So it's gone along.

The temperature, what you do this is what's important.

If you have to do everything at a 400 degrees below zero forget about it.

You're not going to have trains that you cool with liquid helium.

Besides that we're running out of helium.

So here's time, what's happened.

Theory comes along around here in the 50s and then these new one comes up.

And the temperature that you have to cool to jumps up all of a sudden.

And is, and all of these different compounds have appeared.

This is important.

So somewhere around 2008 these new materials start

coming in where you have a shot at it.

because now you're getting up here you know, here's the lowest cold,

the temperature and [LAUGH] this is more in my world here in Antarctica.

It's about minus 123 so it's, it's not too, too bad in terms of doing it.

Living in it it's, it's not good.

The

other thing comes out of this besides this silver conductors

do something that's really, is really a good part of it.

It's actually where the equations turn out to be fun.

But what happens is when you, when you make a superconductor you get rid

of the resistance and that [UNKNOWN] makes

it but they have magnetic strangeness going on.

What happens is when, if you're inside of this box of a superconductor and you chill

it down the magnetic field inside of it

gets shoved out and concentrates on the surface.

So it responds really strange to people around it especially magnetic fields.

And that's what's happening here where this

guy's levitating because he's standing on a

superconductor or he's standing on a magnet

which is above a chilled down superconductor.

And it's this magnetic effect that causes it to levitate.

So this is another use of the superconductor.

Besides not costing you any energy in transmission it levitates.

And this is a good thing.

I'm actually on one here.

I'm actually 4'10".

[LAUGH]

So this has been the progress going through time.

And you can see once you get the

liquid nitrogen temperature you can start doing things.

You were, you're getting there.

And, and because you can make cables

with liquid nitrogen cooling and it's not horrible.

You could actually start thinking about doing

it if you crack this 77caret Kelvin Barrier.

And it's getting close.

So what's the deal?

And of course the power is a big thing for super conductors.

And levitation ships and whatnot is another part of it.

And all sorts of other parts that are to come with this.

But you've gotta crack the basic physics of this thing.

And here is the problem.

And the other part is this I'm going to mention this

a little quicker a little bit sooner a little bit later on.

Is if you want to do fusion not cold fusion but

real fusion you need superconductors to cool it to maintain the plasma.

And keeping those in something like a, a,

a, tokamak a, a, breeder reactor is a trick.

So if you can crack the superconductor thing to use in

areas like this to maintain a plasma you've gained a lot.

So, and also the levitation part on trains which people

are actually starting to build and also ships you gain big.

The problem is, the grand challenge in this

DoE book is, these new superconductors, there's no mechanism.

You can't make new materials easily because you don't know the basis of it.

The fundamental physics isn't known well enough.

Also, they have these things called vortices.

They were, they were mathematically modeled by a guy at Yale named Onsager and

a guy you may have of in the 1950's came up with a physical model.

A guy up in the, in this Small technical institutions in Pasadena

California, a guy named Richard Feineman came up with a model for this.

And there's these vortices, there's now one.

So you have the superconductivity but inside the

wire of this are 10 animators long is non-superconductors.

If you can control figure these guys out and pin

them Then superconductivity becomes even better in a closed loop.

So you gain.

Now, and then, here's the future in, of, of a superconductor site.

But you've gotta solve the basic physics before you

move into the materials part and the distribution part.

That's where the limit is.

Alright, here's some interesting factoids, my colleague, this one

that Brian Maple gave me the information for that.

And, and my colleague Ivan Schuller, in

the department of physics, gave me this factoid.

I like this, it's actually turns out to be true.

It's not that I don't trust my colleagues but, but I always check.

So the question is, which puts out more energy?

Which uses more energy, your refrigerator or your cell phone.

Alright that's easy a cell phone's little.

Turns out its, and, and your refrigerator is, that's big.

It's got a noisy compressor and it's pumping away.

Turns out it's your cell phone.

The reason is because you use 1.5, 1.6 gigabytes a month times 12 and it takes.

It's the computer storage associated with it that costs you the energy.

because you have to cool computers and it's

expensive, so it's about 380 kilowatt hours per year.

And a good refrigerator is something like 300, so there's savings to be

made; if you can make things smaller, more efficient and cooler.

But, that's a barrier.

In terms of the physics they're doing, that's a barrier.

Here's some hope.

All right, so part of this is from my the [UNKNOWN]

is that you have to worry about, how does this stuff work.

You really have to understand the physics at the nano level, how it works, to make

it go, to get into the applications, and

to make them respond, and also to make them.

So that's, that's where it's limited.

So part of it is, is this giant magnetic

resonance affect that, that, that my colleague is involved with.

And what it is is when you, it's, it's, a way a lot of these devices work, when you

put a big magnetic field on it, you get a

giant resistance, and that gives you rise to new properties.

They can be used for smaller more efficient materials.

And that's a forefront for doing these things.

But the basic physics there's a lot that's not known in order to exploit this.

Now the second part of this is going to other materials

and this is sort of what can be expected in the future.

The progress is actually in the last ten years it has really been remarkable.

Another colleague, Dmitri Bazov, the chairman of

the department of physics, has done this.

When you work with small nano materials like a

graphing, you make a quasi particle called a plasma.

What it is, is a light sets up a ripple of electrons.

But smaller than that is a ripple

of electrons which behaves like a quasi particle.

And you can, you can control these.

So, in a sense, you're packeting energy differently by not using m

electrons, but in fact, by using a quasi particle called a plasma.

And so that, in terms of doing this on materials like a

A synthetic graphite is really a different way of thinking about it.

And this is another one that's not like the jet cars.

It's got some hope.

Another one is in another part.

This is another colleague that I borrowed from.

Leonid Butov.

There's another quasi particle called a, a, an [UNKNOWN].

That when you shine light on it, it admits a hole pair, which is a virtual thing

between a posoton and an electron, and that can carry information.

You can trap these and handle them so your devices are more efficient and smaller and

you solve the cell phone problem by going

to a different type of transmission of energy.

When you send things across fiber optics you send it as a photon, but then

it ends up in a device and has to go in a circuit and that's electrons.

And then interfacing doesn't work right, and you lose time and energy doing that.

So,that's something else, that is by using different particles than

the garden variety ones, it's another new way of doing it.

Alright, homemade sun, where are we in terms of fusion?

That's something that has been out there for a long time.

So I borrowed some things on, so breeder reactors and I

borrowed this from my colleague Pat Diamond, who is an expert on

doing this And, and he also told me to mention that one

of our founding faculty here, Marshall Rosenbluth, was a leader in this.

George [UNKNOWN] here at UCSD in engineering, is also doing a lot of work.

And the progress with fusion is actually not bad.

If you compare it to the, the Mohr's Law.

And if you compare it to the development of energy, and it accelerates.

Accelerators, if you use the critical parameter of plasma.

Which is you have to take the energy.

This is not a plasma reactor.

This is actually my fingers, but if you take this you have to confine the plasma.

You can't let it leak out and get on the wall or you lose energy.

You can't poison it with stuff around or you

lose energy and it has to stay there long enough.

So they get a parameter out of that, which is what they're plotting here.

And it gets better all the time.

But the problem is, again in the basic physics, confining it.

And if you can confine it and avoid turbulence, you've got it made.

And part of the problem is, is just dealing with the plasma of how

these things work, which is known a

bit from astrophysics or planetary science from Jupiter.

And it's plasma pause, and the solar rotation, it's the same sort of problem.

So this is something where the knowledge is getting

better, it's longer term to solve this problem, right?

This is not a five year away sort of thing, or a ten year.

But it's a solve-able problem.

But that's, in a sense, where the problem is.

So, in my last 2.48 minutes here, for,

these are all areas where the progress of the science is going up rapidly.

They're brand new areas.

New quasi particles.

Plasmons.

Excitons.

You advance as in superconductor and you can see the rate with that's going up.

And, in terms of the catalysis for doing the end-to-end sort of thing.

So that's the part of it, but the

whole problem, and Steve said it very nicely, and

I'll borrow a little bit from him, is doing

the total part, which is taking that basic part.

But at some point, then you have to get it

in to some sort of operational equipment, machinery, transmission, or whatever.

And thirdly get it out into the public where you can use it.

So that duty cycle, if you will, is getting shorter all the time.

As well as the basic science gets to be done so that

those partners are talking to each other, in, in a seamless way.

Whether it's going to be the development of bio-fuels

and getting them out or, or getting them plasma

physics, in a way point where you can use

it or understanding how do you handle these quasi particles.

It's doable.

Recognizing where the boundary is, define it very well.

This is the way I think of it.

If you define the problem is what you have to solve

first then it's better rather than just randomly picking problems to go.

Like the superconductors the problem is there's not

a physics for the new variety to work.

It has to be solved boom that's easy to say.

It's hard to solve, but it's what, you know, for

people like myself and my colleagues that's what we like.

It's basic science man, that's what runs our motors.

Now I will tell you in the last 57 seconds

I have here, I have actually gone one step further.

You heard about the plasma and exo-ton Transmission using quasi-particles.

Transmission of energy is one thing, but what you really have

to do is be able to transmit in space and time.

And I've been working on this, and I'll show

you a picture of my early efforts in this.

And what it is, the only way to

solve all of this at once is transport, trans-teleportation.

This is a picture of my earliest effort.

This is out in the Israel desert in the bottom of a cistern in Lastada.

So it's working.

This actually is not me, this picture is coming

to you live from under the alles in the

south pole, where we're collecting more ice because it's

working, it's ,it's ,wait it's getting a little fuzzy.

I think that the, the plasma screen is, is breaking down a little here.

But you can see that there's a lot of

things going on, there's a lot of creative things going

on, there's a lot of hardcore science going on, but

there's a lot of interest in getting this science applied.

To work and make an energy difference in doing these things.

So, thank you for your attention.

[SOUND]

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