Computer simulations said “Yes,” Reality said “No”

Energy is the lifeblood of civilization – the more the better. One of the great hopes for the last 50 years has been clean energy from fusion, and many very fine physicists have dedicated careers to this holy grail.  Perhaps the greatest hope for fusion has been the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

At the National Ignition Facility the plan is to compress a small bead containing hydrogen to the extreme temperature and pressure at which fusion will occur.  This compression would be accomplished with an extraordinary array of high-powered lasers that would all converge on to a tiny 2mm bead.  If all works well the enormous amount of energy to power the lasers would be more than replaced by the energy released by the fusion reaction.  The hope is to repeat this process with a new hydrogen bead 16 times a second, yielding a continuous supply of useful heat to generate electricity.

Scientist at the National Ignition Facilty expected that hydrogen ignition (the point where fusion occurs and more energy is released than invested) would occur last year.  But it didn’t.  According to ScienceNews…

A lot of that confidence came from computer simulations… Each simulation consisted of more than a million lines of code filled with numbers and equations describing every push and pull that nuclei in the fuel capsule would encounter once the laser fired. All the data included in the simulations were based on well-tested theories and rigorous experiments, including measurements from hundreds of thermonuclear bomb explosions. The world’s fastest supercomputers required days or weeks to spit out the results.

Many of these simulations predicted that NIF’s 192-beam laser would comfortably achieve ignition. They showed that a short, powerful laser pulse coming from all directions would compress the pellet enough to create heat and pressure more intense than that in the sun’s core, forcing hydrogen nuclei together to form high-energy helium nuclei and neutrons.

No such luck.

Ignition was a failure.  I am not condemning the scientists at the National Ignition facility.  In this type of endeavour failure is just a stepping stone to success.  In fact, I  have great admiration for the folks working on this project and I hope funding and research continues.

Complex simulations

Here’s the thing: those millions of lines of code were modeling something that is relatively simple.  Hydrogen nucleosynthesis is well understood.   The models had to simulate just a single compression and ignition event. There were only a few variables compared to the thousands of variables for something as complex as, say, the climate of the planet Earth.

I have a lot more faith in talents and mental horsepower of the quiet anonymous physicists modeling the relatively simple fusion of hydrogen than I have in some of the self-important bumbling climate modelers working on the vastly more complex climate of the planet.

Just consider the grand poobah of climate modelers, James Hansen.  Ira Glickstein did a nice job of pulling back the curtain on Hansen’s modeling skills with this …

James Hansen’s 1988 models vs reality, From Ira Glickstein, WUWT, 3/20/2013)

The folks at the National Ignition Facility run their experiments, perhaps sometimes chastened by the results, but wiser and closer to their ultimate goal.

Hansen’s experiments are run by nature and take decades, but when he is wrong he is hardly chastened.  Hansen retired from his position at NASA a few days ago.  The Washington Post reported that Hansen said he was retiring so he could “spend full time on science.”  Does that mean he wasn’t spending his time on science at NASA?  His friend, Bill McKibben was probably closer to the mark when he said Hansen ”decided to step down so he could engage in lawsuits and protests full time.”

Hansen was also predictably lauded by his friend Gavin Schmidt.  I guess McKibben and Schmidt haven’t seen the above graph.

Use wind turbines to compress air for compressed air cars?

Remember Tata Motors’ plan for a car that ran off of compressed air?  There was a lot of talk about this back in 2009.  They planned to bring such a vehicle, based on Motor Development International’s (MDI) technology, to market by 2011.  But there were many technical problems, with some potential show stoppers.  The compressed air car was not seen as terribly efficient because of various conversion losses, using electric or gas-powered motors to compress the air.

What if?

But what if the compressed air could be acquired without and electric or gas motor?

I have always wondered if this might be an ideal use of wind turbines.  Electrical energy from wind turbines, like electric energy from photovoltaics, suffers from the lack of a practical storage method.  Let’s say you want to run your electric car off of energy from a wind turbine.  Kinetic energy of the wind is converted to mechanical (kinetic) energy of the turbine, which is converted to electrical energy in the generator (suffering from grid losses as it is delivered to your charging station), which is converted to chemical energy in your battery, which then converted back into electrical energy for the magnetic coils of the motor, which is converted back into mechanical energy to turn your wheels.

What if the mechanical energy of the turbine  instead used to compress air or another gas?  A compressed air car pulls up to the storage tank of the turbine compressed air, fills up and drives away.  No generator, no transmission lines, no battery and no electric motor conversions involved.  This would take advantage of the best features of wind turbines and compressed air cars, eliminating some of the losses that make each of them less efficient.

Fluid compressing wind turbine system

I started thinking about this again today when reading about a proposal by Winhyne Energy Group to build a turbine system in Wyoming in which the turbine would compress a fluid instead of turning a generator.  The compressed fluid would them either turn a generator, or be stored to power the generator when the wind was not available.

Here is a schematic of a single turbine/single generator system…

Turbine compressed fluid system designed by Lancaster Wind Systems, Inc.

Couldn’t something similar be done to compress a gas?

New life for compressed air vehicles

While Tata Motors’ bold claims of bringing a compressed air vehicle to market by 2011 fizzled, the hope is not dead.  Last year Tata said it was done with its first phase of development and it “ has now been successfully completed with the compressed  air engine concept having been demonstrated in two Tata Motors vehicles” and that they were now in the second phase  and and that MDI and Tata “are working together to complete detailed development of the technology and required technical processes to industrialize a market ready product application over the coming years.”

Note that the recently announced Peugeot compressed air car, to be marketed by 2016, is not really the same thing.  This is a hybrid system has a gasoline or diesel engine and does not have an air tank that you “fill up” with compressed air.  Rather, is captures braking energy to compress air, which can then be used for acceleration.  This concept offers great fuel saving potential in cities where frequent stop and start driving causes large energy losses to braking.

An unfortunate event at WattsUpWithThat

Update 5:40 pm.  It appears that my comment has been reinstated at WUWT.  Thank you to WUWT.  All’s well that ends well.

I have been critical of RealClimate on a few occasions for deleting my comments (see here and here).  These comments were technical in nature and relevant to the posts.  But they were critical of the points being made at RealClimate.

I did not think I would see the day when something similar would happen at WattsUpWithThat.

There was a post yesterday at WUWT concerning the Organization Studies journal paper “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change.”  I wrote about that paper myself yesterday.

This morning I attempted to post a comment on the WUWT post.  I included many quotes form the original  Organization Studies journal paper.  I wanted to highlight those quotes by using the HTML ”blockquote” tag, which indents the quote.  I was typing in simple text editor, and unfortunately misspelled “blockquote.”  Then I copied and pasted that misspelling multiple times throughout my comment.

Then I copied and pasted the whole comment into the comment box on WUWT. When I pushed the “post comment” button in WUWT, I was able to immediately see my mangled comment.  The content was fine, but the formatting of the indents was strange.

Here is my comment, verbatim, with the proper blockquote fomatting…

I criticized this post by saying…

It is clear to me that the folks at IBD (and the folks here at WUWT who authored this post) either did not actually read “Science or Science Fiction? Professionals’ Discursive Construction of Climate Change” or did not understand it.

JustTheFacts responded with some quotes form the original journal paper and noted…

one might deduce that I had read some portion of the paper. In terms of understanding the paper, the data in Table 4 on page 1492 and the conclusions are quite clear, well educated professional experts with scientific training/geoscientists are quite skeptical of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) narrative.

Yes, yes , you are almost right about table 4. The point of the paper was the that these in Alberta leaned to the skeptical when it comes to global warming. That is why Alberta was chosen. That table is labeled “Frames’ relative positioning (percent) within their organization and industry.” Alberta was the laboratory, so to speak, in which the minds of the “deniers” (their word, not mine) could be probed and examined.

The important part of the paper, from the author’s perspective, is about “Framing experts’ identities,” where they try to figure out why these experts think the way they do. That is the type of approach that social scientists take – they want to see what makes you tick. That is why the social sciences probably should not be called sciences at all. It is easier for them to make up stories about why people think the way they do based on their “identities” and “relative positioning” rather than examining the scientific merits of their arguments. If you really think that this paper supports your (and my) view on expert opinion concerning global warming, I suggest you re-read the ”discussion and conclusion.” Here are some highlights…

Nor is this merely a binary debate of whether climate change is ‘science or science fiction’. There are more nuanced intermediary frames that are constructed by these professionals. Indeed, by differing in their normalization and rationalization of nature, they vary in their identification with and defensiveness against others, and in their mobilization of action.

Get it? They say deniers (their word, not mine) are “defensive.”

Or this. These professionals…

…engage in identity and boundary work – to varying degrees – to legitimate themselves as experts and delegitimate opponents as non-experts, while establishing the cognitive authority of their version of science versus others’ non-science. Defense can result from different worldviews and from identity threats.

Or this.

Our findings give greater granularity in understanding which professionals are more likely to resist, why and how they will resist, and who is more likely to be successful…

… an interest-based discourse coalition may be formed that has the potential to overcome the defensiveness.

Get it? Resistance may not be futile – but we’re working on it.

JustTheFacts, I have seen you do some good work here on WUWT. But you blew it this time. Please take this as constructive criticism.

There are lessons to be learned

http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2013/02/17/science-or-science-fiction-professionals-discursive-construction-of-climate-change/

So I went back, found a misspelled blockquote tag, corrected it,  added an apology to the top of my comment and reposted comment.

Rats!  When  the second version showed up I again discovered that there must be more than one blockquote error.  Mea Culpa.  I repeated the same process: correction, another apology, and posted again.

Still not right.

Note that none of these corrections changed the content in any way (other than the apology at the top), only the HTML blockquote tags were modified.

At this point, there were three versions of the same comment, all awaiting approval.

Eventually, one of them was approved, but had a moderator’s comment saying that two of the versions had been removed and that I should stop “spamming the thread.”  I figured a human being reading my posts would understand that I was not “spamming the thread” because of the prefaced apologies.  On the other hand,  an automated routine might interpret my comments as spam.

I responded with an explanation.  Here it is, verbatim…

Moderator,

thank you for removing my previous posts. Please note that I messed up the blockquote tags, which made the post difficult to read. After several attempts I almost got it right. Almost. The attempts to get it write (sic) were prefaced with an apology.

However, I was not “spamming the thread.” I sure hope that the “spamming the thread” note was an automated response – not the response of a human being.

Moments later, the approved version of the comment disappeared and was replaced with this form Kajajuk (who I assume is the moderator)…

Kajajuk says:

February 18, 2013 at 11:04 am

[dude . . you are drunk . .come back tomorrow . . mod]

Then my explanation was replace with this from Kajajuk…

Kajajuk says:

February 18, 2013 at 11:08 am

[snip . . i mean it, go home . . mod]

Now, I have seen other cases comments with formatting or content mistakes on WUWT  and have found them handled with good humor.

In this case, the content of my comment was  detailed and valid.  It was easy, or should have been easy for the moderator to see that.   My comment added a perspective that I did not see on any of the other comments.  But my comment was also highly critical of post.  In fact, if my analysis of the Organization Studies journal paper is correct, then the WUWT post author has made an embarrassing mistake.

As I said, I have seen some good work from JustTheFacts (the author of the WUWT post), but he got it very wrong this time.