December 2015 - Oil and coal, the two primary components of the eneregy category known as fossil fuels, have powered the world for over 150 years. They've played a big part in helping to transform the world's economies and lifestyles, but they also come with side effects that cause serious damage to our environment. During the past few decades, these social costs, as economists call them, have resulted in significant research and investment into alternative power sources, most notably, solar and wind for the generation of electricity, and batteries for the powering of automobiles.

But there are other alternative energy sources that could be even better than these current favorites, alternatives that aren't dependent on the sun shining or the wind blowing or having to find a re-charging station every hundred miles. Here are updates on two of those possibilities, nuclear fusion and hydrogen fuel cells.

Nuclear Fusion

TIME magazine recently had an interesting cover story discussing where we currently stand with respect to the development of nuclear fusion capability. Unlike nuclear fission, which is the technology used in all of the world's nuclear power plants today, and which has its own serious deficiencies, nuclear fusion is almost too good to be true: it uses hydrogen, the world's most plentiful element to produce its energy, rather than the scarce element uranium which fission uses; it leaves no radioactive waste as fission does, waste that is expensive to bury and then has to be monitored for hundreds of years; its reactors will shut down if something goes wrong, they don't start melting down as fission reactors do.

The theory of nuclear fusion as a power source is not new; in fact, it goes back to the 1920's. So why is it we don't see any power plants using nuclear fusion today? It's because we still haven't been able to fully harness the fusion process and get it to work. While fission generates energy by splitting atoms, fusion generates energy by smashing atoms together and merging them. Fusion is what takes place naturally within stars, but replicating that process on earth requires extremely high temperatures for extended periods of time.

(image from eteknix.com)

Research into nuclear fusion has been going on for decades, but some people think the difference maker today may be that, in addition to research funded through government grants, a number of small companies are being bankrolled by some serious big money to solve the problem of making fusion work.

Typically we don't see basic research of this magnitude, at this stage in the research cycle, funded by the private sector because most investors expect a reasonably fast return on their investment - just think Mr. Wonderful on Shark Tank. And those investors who are willing to even consider putting their money into basic research aren't willing to do it for long periods of time. That's why government support of basic research is so critical.

But if you read the names of the investors who now are players in the nuclear fusion space, you'll see, for the most part, they've already made their fortunes and they know the difficulty in solving the fusion problem, so they aren't in it just to make a quick buck: Amazon's Steve Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and the investment firm Goldman Sachs. They're willing to spend a lot of their own money on basic research because the endgame is so critical: a long-term, clean solution for generating power.

It's a shame that the ultra-conservative Koch brothers aren't interested in something that really could change the world for the better, or they would be participating in this venture as well. Instead, they have announced their intent to spend almost a billion dollars during the 2016 election cycle to buy candidates who will support policies that favor the Kochs' fossil fuel-based energy holdings. Nuclear fusion could power the world for centuries, leaving a legacy that the Kochs could be proud of, rather than a short-term legacy designed to make a handful of billionaires even richer than they currently are.

Will this new push on nuclear fusion research produce favorable results? We can't say for sure, but as one of our readers once told us, "If you can imagine it, it eventually will happen." So we'll be keeping abreast of any developments, anxious to see what advancements do get made over the next decade.

Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Like electricity via batteries, hydrogen fuel cells provide another clean alternative to gasoline for powering cars and buses. This technology is considered 'clean' because, unlike the air-polluting exhaust that is output by gasoline engines, hydrogen fuel cells output only water.

The practical problems with making hydrogen fuel cells work, though, include first having to produce the pure hydrogen that the fuel cells require. Current production methods of steam hydrocarbon reforming and gasification of low sulfur coal are expensive, potentially polluting, and energy intensive.

A recent study in Germany, however, produced pure hydrogen via a process called methane cracking, where high temperatures are used to break down methane into its component parts of hydrogen and carbon. Although this is a very preliminary study that will need to be replicated and expanded, it is a significant development, one that could have positive long-term ramifications.

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