by Tanada » Thu 17 Nov 2005, 22:22:26
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonteQuest', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('orz', 'R')udimentary wind farms, waterwheels, biological fuels come to mind.
These would smelt steel and lead to the development of nuclear power?
Are you serious?
I do not know about Orz, but it is a fact that steel was smelted, so to speak, with charcoal and/or hardwood as blast furnace fuels before Anthracite coal was discovered as an alternate fuel. Then the method of coking Bitumen coal was discovered and it became even easier to smelt iron ore into pig iron, and converting liquid pig iron into steel involves mostly blowing air through or over it to burn out impurities and or excess carbon.
Making iron from ore with wood is very expensive, it takes a lot of wood to get the energy you need. Using charcoal allowed mankind to shift from hardwoods to generally any wood you could burn with limited air supply. Switching to Anthracite was a huge advance in energy terms, but anthracite is a small portion of all coal. Switching to Coked bitumen coal was another big leap, it is the main bulk of all coal and cheaper to acquire than Anthracite, plus you get big bonuses in terms of volatiles like Kerosene and Tar from coke oven gas. The funny thing is we now know that you can put scrub wood through a coke furnace and get a lot of the same volatiles off of it, and have a valuable coke byproduct when you are done. There is no reason this would not have been discovered sooner if we had kept using charcoal instead of anthracite. A charcoal making furnace would have been developed to replace the primitive methods used 150 years ago.
Study the history of Iron, you might just be surprised what you can do with money, motivation, and biofuels.
Having said all that, there is an intrinsic limit on how much carbon you can harvest from bio-fuel sources and convert into coke to run your blast furnaces, that in and of itself would have slowed development of things like transcontinental rail roads in the USA, and technology today would be far lower than it is. That doesn't mean we wouldn't have technology, or the ability to discover radiation and fission.
Radiation was discovered by accident, it was found that certain ores would fog photographic plates or cause metallic objects between the ore and the plate to be pictured on the plate. That is how the term X-Ray was coined, a key used as a book mark was photographed accidentally onto a glass photography plate under the book when a lump of ore was placed on top of the book as a weight. The Curies spent years refining out the different trace metals in the ore and discovered that Radium was the metal which caused the X-Rays which had been detected by accident. They also retrieved portions of Thorium and Uranium.
Once radiation was a proven fact people tried all sorts of things to see what it was, in the course they discovered that natural radiation has three main forms Alpha particles, Beta particles and Gamma/X-ray radiation, and that if you collided alpha particles from highly radioactive sources with Beryllium metal you got another kind of radiation, neutron flux. Then they tried running neutrons into everything they could lay there hands on until Enrico Fermi tried it on Uranium, and discovered Fission.
Every step needed a proceeding step in order to be possible, but Fermi's discovery of Fission was at the morning of the Oil Age, petroleum was just becoming the primary energy source when Fermi made his discovery.
Take away Coal and Oil and you might delay the discovery of Fission a hundred years, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on that bet. Bio-fuels are very expensive to use, but they still are an improvement over muscle power, which was the only alternative when Fire was discovered
A limited amount of iron because of the lack of fossil fuels would probably make rail systems impossible, iron would just plain cost too much to use as a road bed for a large contraption to travel fast, but at the dawn of the age of rail canals were being built all over the eastern half of the USA linking Saint Louis on the Mississippi with Chicago, Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Eire PA, NYC. The network was huge and growing, until rail roads turned out faster and cheaper. The Eire canal linked NYC with everything on the Great Lakes and the Chicago canal linked the great Lakes to the Mississippi valley system. Canal boats were towed all over heck and back with mule muscle power, but at 3 mph you can get a long way with a lot of cargo in 12 hours compared to a mule train caravan. All of that was built before iron was cheap enough to support railroads, mostly with muscle power and hand tools.
In theory once Lewis and Clark mapped the Missouri river you had the ability to go by canal boat all the way to the headwaters of the Missouri river. A not too long road from there through the mountains would have got you to the headwaters of the Columbia river and canal boats from there take you to the Pacific coast. Without cheap iron the indigenes in the pacific coast might have gained 20 or 30 years before the flood of European settlement, but no more than that.
The canal network would serve the same resources as the rail network, but it would be more restricted in routes because of the need for plentiful water. The desert southwest without railroads would have not developed in the manner it did, and without cheap iron you don't have railroads. AZ south of the Gila river would probably still be northern Mexico, no point in the Gadsden purchase, it was bought as a rail route at gunpoint. No railroad, no political pressure to get the area from Mexico.
No cheap iron doesn't mean no iron, it would be available for about twice the cost of copper IMO, cheap enough for wagon wheels and wind driven water pumps. Pumping water from mines would have still been a big driving force behind pumping methods and would lead to steam powered pumps, which is how steam power was invented in the real world. Expensive iron means these pumps and steam engines would be very expensive, burning biomass coke in competition with the blast furnaces for a scarce resource. Sooner or later someone would come up with the idea of using fission to make steam instead of biomass, for the low pressure engines early in history it wouldn't take a lot of heat to run a steam plant to pump water. Making Uranium metal out of ore is basic chemistry, well understood by 1900, 1920 at the latest. Making a pile of natural Uranium get hot to make steam requires high math, but not high technology. The USA did it with math and carbon blocks in 1942, without fossil carbon fuels it might have taken another 100 years, but probably not because a lot of people would be motivated to find an alternative to burning biomass. Electricity generation was discovered with cheap iron but no cheap oil, even Tesla worked in a world where oil was a very minor energy source. With expensive iron and expensive copper and wood framing you can build a moderate pressure hydro electric dam and generator. With AC current you can refine expensive copper electrolytically recovering gold, silver, platinum, palladium and other rare metals which both pays for the process and gives you very pure copper which is better for electrical work than raw copper.
Marry the electric generator from a hydro plant with the steam from a fission plant and you have nuclear power, and you got there without fossil fuel in the above scenario, without concrete, and without speed
Hope this satisfies your question of how to get to fission without fossil fuels. I don't think it would be quick by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think we would have gotten there eventually. Oil and Coal were not used to start the migration of Europeans to America, Australia and South Africa, that would have happened anyway. Germ theory didn't happen because of Oil or Coal, it was half luck and half a careful statistical analysis of where people got sick in epidemics. Research into why some area's of a large city like Paris or London were pandemic filled while others were not. In particular the outbreaks of Cholera in London were a key lead in the research which in turn lead to germ theory and the knowledge that frequent washing in clean water plus soap and disinfectants could greatly reduce infections and the spread of disease. No oil or coal was needed for Germ theory.
The green revolution and the population explosion were direct artifacts of cheap oil and natural gas, limited fertilizer and limited pesticides would make the green revolution much slower, and wind powered shipping would make world grain shipments a non starter. Argentina, Australia and the USA would have never been shipping massive amounts of grain to India or China, and the Indians and Chinese would not have had huge increases in their local crop returns, so the population bomb would have burst or never appeared as a factor. Only high value added products would be shipped in a world of wooden wind driven ocean commerce, and wooden mule driven canal commerce.
Did I leave anything out?
