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Creating the Trans-Pacific Fusion Economy
The LaRouche PAC Basement
Research Team held a webcast on
Dec. 6, 2013, under the above title, featuring presentations by Benjamin
Deniston and Meghan Rouillard. Moderator Jason Ross opened with a quote from
the American economist Henry Carey's 1851 pamphlet, "The Harmony of
Interest," which identified "two systems" before the world:
one, the British System, which "looks to pauperism, ignorance,
depopulation, and barbarism"; the other, the American System: "the
only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating, while
equalizing, the condition of man throughout the world."
Once again, said Ross,
"two systems are before the world, which present themselves today as the
trans-Atlantic world and the Pacific orientation."
The two presentations
reproduced below (edited for EIR), represent the intention to revive the
American System of economic advancement and scientific discovery on behalf of
the general welfare.
A New Idea of Physical-Economic Progress
Benjamin Deniston:
We're going to engage in a discussion on the prospects for creating a new,
global economic system. And looking at the reality of the shift already
ongoing toward the Asia-Pacific region of the planet, we have a serious
orientation toward growth, toward progress. We're going to discuss both the
specific projects involved in this pro-development Pacific orientation, and
the governing economic principles, the concepts, the new ideas that need to
govern this new era of development of mankind.
As
we published in a special report, "Nuclear NAWAPA XXI, Gateway to a Fusion Economy,"
here is the region of development that we're looking at (Figure 1).
We can see that we're looking at an integrated concept of development,
stretching from the Mississippi in North America, through the western half of
the continent of North America, with the keystone project being NAWAPA XXI
[North American Water and Power Alliance], which we'll get into more detail
on. That takes us up into the Arctic region, into Alaska, into Northern
Canada, with the prospect of developing not only the northern components of
NAWAPA, but the long-awaited Bering Strait rail connection, a tunnel
connecting the tip of Alaska with Siberia—a set of tunnels, most
likely—enabling high-speed rail transportation and connection between these
entire land-masses of North America and Eurasia, and development projects
stretching into Siberia, down into China, and Southeast Asia. And we already
see an orientation from China, with the proposal of the Chinese President for
a New Silk Road orientation, which is a similar concept of developing the
territory, now moving across Eurasia, toward Europe.
What
we have focused on in our work with Lyndon LaRouche, on the prospect for this
development program to be made a reality, is the key role of fusion power as
the driver. And to get into that, and some of the related issues, I'm going
to discuss the need to develop a new idea of physical economic progress, a concept
that I think has been lost to many Americans following the past decades of
zero-growth ideology.
This
is a type of progress that is unique to mankind, and it was more familiar to
older generations: the idea that people saw their lives, their work, their
employment, their commitment as a generation, to improving the conditions of
life for those who came after them. The idea that every generation should be
a successive stage of development, a successive improvement in what should
be, and can be, an endless process of development for mankind.
And
I stress endless.
Because there is a very large Solar System, and very large galaxy sitting
before mankind. So the idea that there's any limit to the potential growth
for many, many, many generations down the line is hard to imagine. Their
conditions of life, their living standards, their benefits, have been
physically created by the actions of their parents' and grandparents'
generation, and they in turn see their actions as the causal force creating a
better society for the next generation.
This
has to return as a governing concept to the United States, a very anti-green,
anti-zero-growth, pro-development concept. And every individual inherently
has the right to participate in that process of successive generations of
development.
The Secret Driver of Economic Growth
Where
does this potential for progress come from? If you take a physical approach
to economics, which Mr. LaRouche has specialized in, you could study what we
could call the productive powers of labor: the ability for a labor force to
produce more needed goods than it can consume. There are certain requirements
for society, physical requirements: Mankind's existence depends upon these
physical economic processes—food, agriculture, industry—the physical means of
existence for society.
Now,
for mankind, you have an interesting phenomenon, where a potentially smaller
portion of the population can end up producing more of those needed goods,
and at a higher quality. You have a concept of the productive capabilities of
the labor force, driven by scientific and technological progress, which then
enables fewer people to produce all the food requirements, or industrial
requirements; you free up more of your population to participate in science,
in education, in Classical artistic activity. You free up more of your
population to develop and focus on the creative aspects of society, which
then become the real secret driver of economic growth.
But
again, even this idea of increasing the productive powers of labor,
increasing the productivity of a labor force—where does that power really
come from? I want to try to illustrate this by going to a reference that Mr.
LaRouche has often made, going back to the evidence of the use of fire by a
human-type creature, way back in the deep history of mankind. And what I
would want to emphasize about this, is when you see the existence of the
first use of controlled fire, as a means of controlled activity, you see
evidence for what I would call a non-biological existence of the human
species, evidence that the human species defines its existence, not by simply
the nature of the biological body, but as a function of something completely
different, that doesn't exist in any other animal species that we know of.
So,
you have the emergence of fire. Fire is used to cook food. Fire is used to
provide warmth. Fire is used to make tools. Fire is used to generally improve
the conditions of life, to enable a larger population, a larger population
density, fundamentally changing the relationship of the human species to the
biosphere around it, the environment around it. And, to illustrate this, you
can take one way to look at it: If somebody were to try to study this change
in ecological terms, the standard methods used to study the nature of an
animal species and its relationship to the biosphere, you would see a change
that you would only think would be attributed to biological evolution, an
evolutionary upshift to a higher-order species.
But
for mankind, there's no biological change. Mankind's development doesn't
depend upon biological shifts, but it comes from a unique force which we
identify as the creative powers of the human mind, a seemingly immaterial
process. If you tried to weigh a scientific discovery, or smell a scientific
discovery, or taste a scientific discovery, you'd have a hard time. But we
see that scientific discoveries have controlling effects in the universe;
they are physically efficient in changing mankind's ability to act and
improve the planet, and improve the conditions of life on the planet.
So,
this is the unique power of mankind, and completely transcends any idea of
biological existence, any sense-perceptual idea of what the human being is.
This process of the development and application of the creative powers of the
human mind, is the essence and the core of what makes mankind uniquely
mankind. And so, it's been through this process that mankind has become the
most powerful force on the planet.
Energy-Flux Density
I
think the work of the Ukrainian-Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky in
discussing this, is very profound, very apt. He titles one of his books Scientific
Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon: the emergence of
scientific thought as now a controlling geological force on the planet.
One
thing to look at here is a shadow of this process, an effect of the growing
power of scientific thought and technological advance, and that is the
concept of energy-flux density, the measurement of not just energy usage, but
of the rate of energy usage, either per individual in society, or per area of
the national territory. And this becomes an important corollary, an important
shadow, an important effect, associated with the development of human society
at higher and higher levels.
We
can look at a case study of this in the history of the United States (Figure 2),
where we see the development of the U.S. economy from its founding, up to the
present, associated with the process of increasing the power per individual,
in this case measured in kilowatts per capita, in society. The point is the
relative change, the relative increase. And each revolution, each leap, to
higher levels of energy-flux density, as is indicated in Figure 2, can be
divided by the fuel source associated with those shifts. And you can see that
there is a succession of moving to higher- and higher-order power sources
that are associated with not only increasing the energy-flux density, but you
could, referring to the earlier example, describe it as almost a species-type
transition, where there's a fundamental revolution in mankind's power for
action, power for control, power for improvement of the economy, of the
biosphere, of the territory he's inhabiting.
Each
of these shifts comes with totally new degrees of freedom in society; new
chemical processes, new resource bases are opened up. Materials that weren't
accessible before for any efficient utilization, now become tools of use for
the betterment of society.
Now
this was the case up until—as you can see in Figure 2—the period of 1970, and
after, where you had a levelling-off of increase in energy-flux density. And
I should just note that this chart shows a levelling-off; this particular
illustration doesn't necessarily convey the decline process—the zero-growth,
green paradigm—that took over the United States following the assassination
of Kennedy, a process of attritional collapse. We were wearing down our
infrastructure, using up our existing resource capabilities, and having to
expend greater and greater amounts of economic activity just to maintain a
certain mode of existence. That has brought us to the point that this whole
system now is breaking down.
And
a huge component of that has been, over this last 40-year period, the
outsourcing of productive jobs, the shifting of jobs out of the United
States, and to places like China; not just any jobs. The actual jobs that
create and sustain the physical means of existence have increasingly left the
United States: We don't have the in-depth capability in the United States to
have a full economic recovery program by ourselves, because of the
destruction of the U.S. industrial capability. And one of the most important
factors in the recent period, was the shutdown and dismantling of the auto
sector, which represented one of the last in-depth, large-scale industrial
machine-tool capabilities of the United States, famous for what it allowed us
to do during the World War II mobilization, where we could out-produce our
enemies by orders of magnitude.
That
would be the type of force we would need to apply to an economic recovery
today, to make NAWAPA real, to make these high-speed rail projects real, to
make the Bering Strait project real.
Toward a Fusion Economy
Figure 3
shows the same energy-flux density over the history of the United States,
with three different approaches. I'm going to start with curve C,
showing how the energy-flux density per capita was expected to grow as of the
assessments in 1962 by the Kennedy Administration. This was largely based on
understanding the power and the role of nuclear fission as the next
revolution in mankind's economic potential.
Now,
if you look at curves A and B,
these are estimates that include the prospects for a higher-order source,
which again needs to become the driving factor in the recovery and the
development program today, which is fusion, thermonuclear fusion. Fission,
the splitting of heavy elements, is hundreds of thousands of times more
powerful, more energy-dense, than any chemical fuel. Fusion is millions of
times more energy-dense that any kind of chemical fuel—coal, oil, oxygen,
hydrogen, what have you.
So,
estimate A, the top
curve, is a rough approximation of our own analysis in the Basement Team as
to what the rate of growth very well could have been, had we continued a
serious pro-growth orientation since the early 1960s. Curve B
is an approximation of what type of growth could have been seen had the world
gone with Mr. LaRouche's SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] program, which
included, as an integral part, what some were referring to at the time as a
second industrial revolution, a new economic revolution based on fusion-era
technologies—the development of plasma-processing technologies, laser-based
manufacturing systems, technologies moving toward the domain of a fusion
economy. And those were the prospects we had before us.
I
want to emphasize that this could have been done. And the prospects for
fusion—there's kind of a bad joke going around on fusion, where they say it's
perpetually 30 years away. If you asked the community in the mid-1970s, how
long will it take us to get to fusion power, to build a demonstration fusion
power reactor, they said, 30 years. If you ask people today how long will it
take to build a demonstration fusion power reactor, they will say, 30 years.
So, it's this bad joke that fusion is always 30 years away, and the lie had
been spread that this is because it's too hard: There are technological
challenges you just can't overcome; there are scientific challenges you just
can't overcome. It's just too complex. All this money's been dumped into it,
and it's not going to happen; it's just too hard.
Multiple Designs for Fusion Reactors
That
is not true. And I want to take a minute to really emphasize this point. We
have the results of a 1976 study by the U.S. Energy Research and Development
Administration [ERDA]. This was a precursor to the Department of Energy. It
was a four-volume study, the first in-depth study of what it would take to build
a demonstration fusion system. And they were serious: They were not just
talking about one reactor. They were saying there are different avenues to
pursue; there are different designs that show different potential prospects.
We don't know exactly which ones are going to play out the best, so we'll
pursue multiple designs for fusion reactors. There are certain infrastructure
and materials challenges involved, so we'll build systems to develop the
materials needed. We'll build systems to provide the fuel.
It
was a full, comprehensive study, not just on the science, but the
engineering, and everything involved in making fusion a reality. [ERDA] said:
How quickly can we do it? Well, it depends upon the level of investment. We
know we need to build these systems. We know we need to build these types of
reactors, these test systems and demonstration reactors. The current flagship
project, ITER, being built in France, which is itself an excellent machine,
but under this idea, it would have been completed by the 1980s as part of a
staged process.[1]
They
[ERDA] said, if we put the maximum effort into it, just say this is a top
national priority, we'll fund whatever needs to be funded to develop fusion
power, because we know this is going to be a revolution for all mankind: With
fusion, the oceans become an effectively unlimited supply of fuel—so you're
effectively talking about the greatest revolution in human economy we've had
up to this point. If you give the full maximum efforts, you can see here the
yearly budgetary requirements (Figure 4),
and they predicted, by about 1990, you could have a demonstration fusion
reactor putting power on the grid, demonstrating the potential for fusion
technology.
They
had various estimates of slightly slower paths, and the slowest that they
suggested was the "moderate" path, which expected to provide a
demonstration reactor by 2005. So, again, it could have happened by now.
They
also made a point that should be very heavily emphasized, which is, if you
don't provide a certain level of investment, we know
that we probably won't make the breakthrough. If you don't provide a certain
minimal level of investment, then we know we're probably not going to be able
to have the density of activity to actually get an operating fusion system.
This was indicated by asking, what if they just continued the projected
budget of 1978 into the future? And the conclusion was that it's very
possible that you would never get fusion power under that type of investment.
You just don't have enough money to build the systems you need, to figure out
the questions, and to take those answers and implement them in the next stage
in any type of effective way.
So,
that was known as of the mid-1970s.
Figure 5
shows the actual funding. And this makes clear that we never even tried. The
idea that fusion is always 30 years away, is just a bad, sick joke. We never
even tried. The commitment was never made to seriously make this a reality.
The
reason I emphasize this is because the prospects for fusion power are there.
What needs to change is the zero-growth paradigm. The reason that fusion was
never pursued, that it was suppressed, the reason fission was never pursued
in any serious way and was suppressed, is because of this zero-growth, green
paradigm, which, as you saw in the energy-flux density curves, also
contributed to the complete levelling of any growth of energy-flux density
per capita over the past 40 years, and as we're experiencing right now today,
has led to the complete destruction of the U.S. economy.
The Prospects for Fusion Power
Now,
I want to focus on two case studies to illustrate some of the potentials, the
prospects, for fusion power, fusion technologies. And the reason why I wanted
to emphasize these funding curves was to make the point that we are much
closer than most people admit. A few independent estimates by different
sources looking into this, have given 10 to 15 years as a rough, completely
feasible range of time in which we could develop a demonstration fusion power
reactor. So, you're looking at a prospect of 10, 12, maybe 15 years, if we
actually decide to do it, which, as you can see, we haven't done.
This
is going to be critical, not because we're going to be able to have fusion
reactors next week, but because the trans-Pacific development program has to
be centered on fusion as the driver, the technology driver, the power driver,
for the whole program. And to give a brief sense of why that's the case, I
want to look at two case studies.
For
the first one, I'm looking at the question of productive powers of labor.
This can be seen if you examine the history of iron production, throughout
the history of the United States (Figure 6).
Iron is a useful case study to examine. It's the most used element to human
society, by weight, of the entire Periodic Table. It's the main component of
steel, and so iron is an integral part of the core, the backbone, of any
modern industrial economy.
Now,
if we look at the history of iron production, and at the energy-flux density
of the production methods—again, the point here is not to get stuck on the
nature of the measure itself. Here, we are looking at billions of joules per
square meter, per hour, or gigajoules per square meter per hour. The point is
you're measuring a rate of flow of energy, per area, per time, of the blast
furnace that's producing the iron, in this case.
The
point is, the relative changes: In the 1830s, wood/charcoal- based
technologies, you had the energy-flux density value of these metrics of 2.6,
which enabled production of about 10 tons of iron per worker per year. This
is the idea of productive power of labor. How much could each individual in
society produce?
Now,
as you see the energy-flux density increasing, up to the 1860s, with the
beginnings of coal, up to 1900, 1950, 1970, you see a continuous increase in
energy-flux density of production methods. This is associated with moving to
coal, to coke, a dense form of coal; moving to technologies to actually blast
pure oxygen into the furnace, to have a higher temperature, a higher rate of
activity. And as you can see, an order of magnitude increase in the
energy-flux density is associated with almost a 20-fold increase in the power
of labor. Each individual operative, each individual worker, in the iron
industry as a whole—the amount that he produces per year went up
dramatically—from 10 tons of iron per year, to 183 tons in the space-era
technologies of the 1960s, before we entered a collapse phase. It's actually
declined significantly since then.
People
talk about jobs. What kind of jobs? We need high-technology jobs. The kind of
jobs that Obama has created, jobs for jobs' sake, jobs at Taco Bell, jobs in
the service sector, don't necessarily mean anything to society. We need jobs
that are associated with high technologies, high energy-flux densities,
around new science-driver programs that are associated with increasing the
productivity of each individual, incorporating new scientific discoveries,
new scientific concepts, into the means of application, into the means of
production.
It's
also useful to note [in Figure 6] that in addition to the production per
worker, the production per amount of energy also increased. This is measured
in trillions of joules, but the point is, the amount of iron produced per
unit of energy went up in this case, many-fold, going from 4 tons per unit of
energy, to 80 tons.
Now,
this can continue to much higher levels, especially if you go to a fusion-era
system, where you can look at energy-flux densities going an order of
magnitude higher, or greater, dealing with plasma-based processing systems.
We are able to super-heat a gas, such that it becomes a plasma—the protons
and the electrons separate out. You have a magnetized gas that you can
increase to incredibly high temperatures. We haven't even found a limit to
the temperatures we could raise these things to. And you could engage in
materials processing, industrial processing, at much higher degrees of
efficiency.
In
the chart (Figure 6), you can see that you can further increase the
productivity per unit energy, up from 80 to somewhere between 200 to almost
300 tons per unit energy. And again, this was just taking iron as a case
study. The same applies for other metals: for aluminum, for cement
production. You generally can increase the productivity of all types of
manufacturing and materials processing.
What Are 'Natural Resources'?
This
also opens up a completely new mode of chemistry, a completely new concept of
natural resources. The very idea of natural resources, using that term,
really implies a fraudulent concept. It implies the resources are defined by
what's natural,
what's there,
what they are. But that's not true; that's a total fraud. The resources are
defined by something completely different.
Take
uranium, for example: 150 years ago, uranium didn't mean much of anything to
human society. I was told by one person that there was some slight usage of
uranium to tint the color of glass for glass-making. So, it was a resource in
that sense, and that was it. It was pretty much otherwise a constituent
component of dirt and rock, relatively useless.
Today,
it's one of the most energy-dense forms of power fuel that we have available
to us. What changed? Did the uranium change? Did the resource itself change?
Where was the change?
We
had an entire scientific revolution, coming out of the turn of the century,
in which individuals such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein were central
figures—they didn't develop every aspect of nuclear fission technology, but
they were leading figures in a revolution of investigating the domain of the
very small, and Einstein's discovery that matter and energy are actually
interrelated and part of the same thing, which is a governing principle
behind the energy-release of fission and fusion reactions.
Certain
leading, remarkable individuals, drove a scientific revolution, which then
completely transformed mankind's access to natural resources, such that now,
things like uranium, and fusion fuels from ocean water, become conceivably,
potentially, natural resources. It enabled higher modes of energy-flux
density. All this as a shadow, as an effect, created by the power of the
scientific thought of mankind, the power of scientific discoveries, which is
the source of progress.
The NAWAPA Revolution
So,
now I want to take one more case study, to look at this in a slightly
different fashion, which is the NAWAPA program—which is a continental water-
and power-management program, and this can be used to illustrate a second
example of the role of energy-flux density, which is energy-flux density
applied per area of territory.
As
most inhabitants of the North American continent are aware, we have a major
desert in the Western region of the continent. We have here the map (Figure 7)
illustrating the precipitation—rainfall and snowfall—yearly average, for the
entire continental territory. The purples and dark blues and blues are very
high levels; the brown, the yellow are very low levels. So, you can see the
East Coast, for example, and the whole Eastern third of the continent has a
much higher range of precipitation over the whole territory.
The
West Coast, the Western third, has, overall, very little; and the black
arrows represent major river systems; the thickness of the arrow corresponds
to how big the river is, how much flow of water comes out of the river. The
Mississippi is the largest, and other major systems are indicated by the
arrow systems.
What
you see on the West Coast is an interesting phenomenon, where there's
actually a very large amount of precipitation along the northern coast, along
a small strip of territory, just inland of the Pacific Ocean. And that's
because you have a very large mountain range right along the Western coast of
the continent, which blocks a huge amount of moisture from the Pacific Ocean
from travelling inland, and bringing water into the inner regions of the
continent. The moisture flows through the air, hits this mountain range, is
forced up to a higher elevation where it condenses, and falls back down as
rain and snow.
And
then, much of this water—which the Sun works very hard to evaporate from the
ocean and get it up in the atmosphere and make it do something productive,
like participate in plant life, participate in the growth of crops and
forests—this water that had to go through the whole process to get onto land,
then just runs right back off into the ocean, because it hits this mountain
range and falls back in. So, it's a completely wasteful natural orientation
of the continental system.
The
bars on the left (Figure 7), are just another way of expressing this, which
is the water availability for different regions of the continent. The one on
the far left is the average for the entire continent of North America; the
very tall bar next to that is the Northwest region, which I was just
describing, where you have a very, very high amount of water availability on
average. The third bar, the very low one, is the entire Southwest. So the
entire southwestern quarter of the continent, stretching from California,
Nevada, Utah, down into Mexico—this entire region has a very low level of
water availability per area.
Now,
the point is that the way this exists naturally makes for a very low level of
productivity of the continental water cycle. As I mentioned, the oceans are
being evaporated by the Sun, it's bringing new water onto the continent; that
water participates in processes on the continent—rivers, forests, grasslands,
agriculture, human society—and then the water eventually returns to the
oceans again. There are a lot of complexities in the details, but as a whole,
you can easily conceive of the entire thing as an input-output system. And
what we measure with NAWAPA, is how we can increase the productivity of that
water cycle, increase the productivity of every unit amount of water; how
productive is the average gallon of water, for example.
In
Figure
8, we can see what NAWAPA will do to redistribute the
water. You can see the redistribution proportions in the graphs on the left.
It will redistribute a relatively small percentage of the water available in
that northwestern quadrant, which you can see on the map, highlighted in
blue, and through the system of rivers, canals, tunnels, we can bring that
water down into the Southwest, and down into the high plains regions, and
actually have a more equitable distribution of the water of the system.
Now,
what we've done with the Basement Team, in working through this project, is
not only revive this original project, which was designed in the early 1960s,
but look at the application of the potentials of nuclear fission and
thermonuclear fusion to enable a greater utilization of the entire water
cycle. You can create a much more efficient system by using nuclear fission
and fusion systems, than you could otherwise.
The
original NAWAPA design was dependent upon hydropower running some of this
collective water off into the ocean, to generate electricity, to then use
that electricity to pump the rest of the water throughout the continent. If
you use higher forms of power, with nuclear fission, and we should really be
thinking about fusion, you can actually utilize more of that water, bring it
down into the Southwest, and what you're doing is a very interesting subject
of the application of higher energy-flux density, literally increasing the
productivity of the entire continental water cycle.
The
amount of green plant life that can be created by the North American water
cycle, can increase. The amount of plant life and photosynthetic activity, be
it in cropland, grasslands, forests, the amount of productive utilization of
water, can be increased such that on average, you can literally say the value
of the average gallon of water of the North American system would be
increased by NAWAPA, and further increased by the NAWAPA XXI nuclear-driven
program.
And
this also carries greater multiplier effects, because of water that's inland,
when it evaporates off the land. On the West Coast, 60% of the water, it's
estimated, that evaporates from the land area of the West Coast, will end up
falling back down again as rain on another part of the continent. And that
can be increased even further by the role of plant life itself, especially by
forests. And forests will actually increase the flow of water from below the
surface up into the atmosphere, and then fall again as rain.
So,
through this entire system, driven by the application of a fusion driver, we
can dramatically increase the productivity of the entire continental system.
So,
these two case studies illustrate why thermonuclear fusion has to be our
critical driver in this whole program.
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