Nobel laurate Rubbia warns aganst continued fossil fuel use
Italy's Nobel-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia called for a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels to avoid disastrous climate changes.
Speaking at the closing ceremony of the academic year at the prestigious Licei Academy, Rubbia said that fossil fuels had to be replaced as the primary source of power in the world and that it was time to turn to new sources, first among these solar and new generation nuclear power.
This because ''one can predict with a high level of certainty that the continued use of fossil fuels will dramatically alter the world's climate in a way which will affect every living organism on the planet,'' Russia observed.
Turning his attention to solar power, Rubbia said that in order to produce the world's electricity needs by the year 2050 it will be necessary to install panels which total a surface of 200x200km.
The nuclear alternative, he added can be achieved through new methods, for both fission and fusion, using 'light elements' of which there are ''immense reserves''.
Last year Rubbia warned that time was running out to reverse the trend in climate change.
''We are facing an emergency. We have ten to 15 years to change the world, otherwise the world will change us. And it will change us in terrible ways,'' Rubbia said.
Rubbia has won international acclaim not only for his work in the field of particle physics but also in driving forward the development of renewable energy resources.
He is currently professor at the University of Pavia, Italy and has recently worked on a project on solar thermal energy plants in Spain.
Rubbia won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1994.
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ADS Energy Amplifier
The fusion test ignition facility is just being started in California. For that money a complete working prototype power producing ADS system could have been built..
ADS systems can use all the uranium in the US spent fuel rods and could probably supply all the US power for decades on this fuel alone. The many more tons of depleted uranium can also be used. Then there is the all the known uranium ore bodies. After that the three times as much thorium can be used and then uranium can be extracted from the oceans. There is enough uranium and thorium for millions of years of full world energy where liquid fuels are made by combining CO2 with H2O with nuclear energy. Known processes can make liquid fuels cheaper than $150 oil.
In a million years fusion energy may be only 20 years away, but in the mean time there can be efforts made on how to get fission energy out of many heavy metals including lead, bismuth and mercury for when all the Uranium from the ocean is used up.
Some fusion reactions use tritium, but it requires a neutron to create tritium and only 14 MEV of energy is created by this fusion, but if the neutron is used to create U233 from Thorium, 200 mev or more can be obtained from the fission of U233 plus two and a half neutrons.
If they ever start operating, fusion reactors using deuterium will be the best source of neutrons for making Plutonium for Bombs.
Fission wastes can be adequately safely stored by several known techniques, but false theories and beliefs prevent them from being considered. The main false belief is that radiation from fission products is more deadly than radiation from the foods people eat. Concentrated radio isotopes from food that we eat is just as deadly as used fuel rods of the same radiation level. All radio active materials can be diluted so that they are safe, and they also can be shielded or removed to a distance such as the sun. It is thus, clearly, not necessary to spend excess money to reduce the exposure to radioactive materials to much less than nature does because life has built in radioactivity that it has survived for millions of years. Any money in excess of this would be better spent in treating cancers caused by smoking or eliminating many of them.
Twelve feet of water can eliminate most radiation as can twelve feet of concrete. One of the cheapest and easiest ways of storing radioactive fission products is to mix them with the mud in the lifeless mud of great depths of various places in the Ocean. Any efforts by any humans to recover such materials would be far more expensive than building new reactors to make more of them. Any leaks would be diluted by both the depths of mud and the miles of water above them. There is no possibility of the materials entering any water supply, but further it is known that most water supplies already are radio-active as are all soils.
There is already a too expensive facility being used to eliminate man used radioactive materials from the surface of the earth, and it is tunnels in a deep salt bed. It has survived all engineering tests, all regulatory tests and all court tests and is being used in spite of all people saying that there is no safe way of storing such materials. Life is never safe, and there is no perfectly safe way of doing anything. This facility, with all its expense, will not extend the lives of enough people by protecting them from radiation to make up a thousand man years. But it has and will provide employement for many thousands of man years, but the money could have provided many more man years of life if used for mosquito nets in some parts of the world, and the nuclear materials shoved down abandoned oil wells.
There are not enough used fuel rods to be stored to fill a foot ball field to the depth of twenty feet, and there are plenty of abandoned oil wells. But "used" fuel rods have at least 95 percent of their original energy remaining to be used in breeder reactors or ADS, Rubbia Reactors, Energy Amplifiers. The reprocessing of "used" fuel rods is necessary if we want to be GREEN and efficient for future generations. There is less justification to waste used fuel rods than there is to use tunsten lamps instead of fluorescent ones. ..HG..
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