I’ve been known on occasion to mock fusion for being eternally 25 years in the future, and this article on the latest potential advances doesn’t really help me assess how credible the people and approaches that star in it actually are. But there is some eyebrow-raising information in the background that gives some context to the long wait for the fusion dawn.
In particular, a report from the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration in 1976 projected that if $9 billion per year was spent on research, practical fusion energy could be achieved by 1990. Reduce that to $1 billion per year, and the projection was “Fusion Never.” And guess what?
“[$1 billion]’s about what’s been spent…Pretty close to the maximum amount you could spend in order to never get there.”
The current annual spending of US government on fusion research: $670 million. In contrast, the estimated annual cost of US fossil fuel subsidies is $650 billion.
There is, of course, no proof that $9 billion/year would have actually moved working fusion’s perpetually 25 years away horizon any closer. But opting for ‘definitely not enough money to work’ whilst demonstrating the ability to throw an order of magnitude more money elsewhere in the energy sector is, at best, poor strategic foresight. At worst, it looks a lot like what you’d do if you wanted to make it look like you were pushing for an energy breakthrough without materially threatening the status quo.
With the incidental bonus of turning that potential breakthrough into a punchline. My scoffing suddenly feels a little hollow.
The ‘you get to play outside!’ pitch is a popular one in geoscience recruitment, but these data support the notion that this is not broadly appealing beyond a self-selecting few.
More pertinently, digging into the data a bit more, it seems that the problem is not that students feel a career in geoscience can’t do some societal good (2nd row of the figure below), but that they’re really unsure how (1st row, and to some degree also the 4th).
Some of this might be solved by promoting the more altruistic career options made possible by a geoscience degree. But I do wonder if there might also be some deeper structural issues with how we teach Earth Science. Are we really matching our course and degree offerings to these careers, or do we still too narrowly focus on careers in things like mapping and resource exploration, not recognizing how much doing so narrows our pool of potential recruits?
“As a discipline, [Earth Scientists] find ourselves in the strange position of having a role in causing, finding and solving…climate change”
In order to help save the future, we must reckon with our dirty past (and arguably, present). The fact that our degree programs largely look like they did 30 years ago might be one sign that we have yet to fully do so. And perhaps this lack of reckoning further contributes to our struggles with undergraduate enrollment: we are still perceived more as part of the problem than part of the solution.
The Melbourne quake is a long way from any recognizable plate boundary – the closest one is more than 1000 km away. It is what we can an intraplate earthquake – one that occurs within a plate interior. This is in contrast to the interplate earthquakes that occur at plate boundaries*.
Map of Australia showing the location of an intraplate earthquake in southern Australia and the plate boundaries that are a long way from where this earthquake is. Source: USGS
To understand why we can get earthquakes inside a tectonic plate, you need to understand why we get earthquakes anywhere. To produce an earthquake, you need:
differential motion between two bits of the crust;
a fault that can accommodate that differential motion by motion along its surface (and has some friction so that the motion is not continuous)
At plate boundaries, the source of differential motion is obvious: you’ve got two chunks of crust moving in different directions. And at its most simple, a plate boundary is a planar break in the lithosphere. Add a bit of friction, and voilà: periodic interplate earthquakes accommodating that motion.
So what’s going on inside plates? The key point is that plates are moving because they are under stress. They are being pushed and pulled at their edges, and are strong enough internally that they translate rather than deform internally in response (in technical terms, they are a stress guide).
Two possible responses to a push on the edge of a block are shown. If rigid, then the whole slab moves sideways; if not rigid, then deformation near the pushed edge dissipates the stress. Sketch by Chris Rowan
For example, the Australian plate is being pushed by a mid-ocean ridge to the south and pulled by a subduction zone to the north, so it is moving north.
Modified from USGS location map.
So the rocks that make up the plate are under stress due to these forces. But particularly on continents, the rocks which make up the plate are different depending on where you are, and sometimes bear billions of years’ worth of tectonic scars (pretty much everywhere has been a plate boundary at least once). In other words, there are variations in the strength of the plate.
And if the strength of the plate changes, then so does its response to stress – the strain. Weak bits will deform more than strong bits.
Response to a slab with a weaker zone in the middle; mostly translation, but some deformation in the weak zone. Sketch by Chris Rowan
The differential motions we’re talking about here are very small compared to those that occur across plate boundaries, so it takes much, much longer to build up enough elastic strain on an intraplate fault to generate a significant earthquake. So they are very good at taking us by surprise – because there have been no large earthquakes in the relatively short length of time we’ve been paying any attention to such things, we may not have even considered the risk of an earthquake happening there. When buildings and populations are totally unprepared, even a relatively smallish intraplate earthquake can have an outsize effect.
*If you’re thinking “interplate” and “intraplate” sound very similar and easily confused – yep. I have learnt to my cost that they should be annunciated v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y in lectures.
Via Liz Hide on Twitter, a thought-provoking acknowledgement of the important role the in discovering and excavating the paleontological treasures in many museums’ collections.
On a similar theme, I think of the story of Alfred Wegener and continental drift. The data Wegener used to such great effect to hypothesise the existence and break-up of Pangaea was not collected by him, but collated from many other sources.
Those sources – maps and descriptions of rock units, fossils and geological structures from every continent – surely relied on indigenous knowledge of where to find the good outcrops, and detailed exploration surely occurred with the help of locals.
Wegener’s achievement is not tarnished by acknowledging he was standing on the shoulders of the many people, all over the world, who built the foundations of the geological datasets he used – and we still use today.
How many of you had “Cuyahoga River catches fire” on your 2020 bingo card?
Yet that’s what happened today.
A tanker-car collision/fire near the Cuyahoga River in Akron this morning spilled burning fuel into a storm sewer and then the river, so the river caught fire. This is the first time in 51 years and 2 months that the Cuyahoga River has burned.
When it comes to fires on the Cuyahoga River, the burning river jokes are inevitable. But there are some real, substantive differences between this small fire and the fires of 50+ years ago.
Today we have a clear point source of the fuel and fire making it into the otherwise nonflammable river in Akron.
50+ years ago, there were many, many point sources & non-point sources of pollution that made the river itself flammable (in Cleveland, near the mouth), and all it took was a sufficient spark. The Cuyahoga burned more than once (13 times before today), and so did rivers in other industrial cities in the US.
The Cuyahoga’s historical fires made it the burning river that “sparked” the environmental movement in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Both local grassroots and national efforts have led to dramatic improvements in water quality since then. The Cuyahoga River still has some issues, but flammability isn’t among them. NE Ohio is justifiably proud of the rebirth of its rivers and its history of environmental work. And we should be.
Today’s event reminds us that we need to keep our environmental protections strong and not backslide on regulation. We need to fill the gaps in those regulations, not widen them.
River fires need to remain extraordinarily rare, small, easily-contained events that are sobering reminders of our history, not re-enactments.
And today’s events should spur us to better manage stormwater, so that the river to roadway connection is indirect, not a pipeline for a blaze. The same connection that allowed burning fuels to reach the river today, allows road salt, metals, and many other pollutants to enter the river every time it rains or the snow melts. These direct connections between roads and rivers are everywhere and they are a major remaining source of pollution for rivers like the Cuyahoga. If you care about the health of rivers and streams (and apparently, if you don’t want them to risk catching fire), you should be pushing for stronger stormwater management, including retrofitting stormwater controls into existing roadways and developed areas.
If you want to learn more about the environmental history of the Cuyahoga River, I highly recommend this documentary. Today’s accident and fire occurred a short distance upstream of the Akron Gorge Dam, which features in the film as one of the last major impediments to water quality on the middle river. The dam is currently slated to be removed sometime in the next 3 years or so.
[Photo by Cuyahoga Falls Fire Department, via Akron Beacon Journal. Story here: https://www.beaconjournal.com/…/one-dead-in-fiery-route-8-n…. My heart goes out to the families of the people killed and injured in the accident, and my sympathy goes to those who faced the disruption of evacuation from nearby homes and workplaces or a significant time spent stuck on the road.]
Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.
For lot's more videos on soil moisture topics, see Drs Selker and Or's text-book support videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoMb5YOZuaGtn8pZyQMSLuQ/playlists
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Nice plan for content warnings on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Now you need a Mastodon/Fediverse button on this blog.