The Holy Grail?

[unixronin]

The holy grail of sustainable power generation is clean fusion.  Cheap and abundant fuel, no chance of a criticality or meltdown, no radioactive waste that has to be stored for thousands of years, and any breach of the reaction chamber instantly quenches the reaction.  The basic underlying physics is conceptually simple, but making it actually work and produce net power in a harnessable and commercially viable way been an engineering nightmare.

Robert Bussard just may have finally solved the problem.  Over a year ago, in fact.  But the US Government won't fund him, apparently because scientists at the Department of Energy — which has its own rival development process — have stated they believe his process can't possibly work.  (But then, they've been unable to make theirs work either.)

Bussard’s work should be funded, agreed Frank Shoup, director of the systems engineering institute at the Naval Postgraduate School.

“I’m not an expert” in fusion physics, Shoup conceded, but he has followed Bussard’s work.

“It relies on a new principle in developing fusion energy,” he said.  “The fuel is totally abundant and cheap, there are no noxious byproducts like radioactive waste, it doesn’t produce carbon and it doesn’t pollute.

“The quick answer is, if it works, the payoff is so large it is worth funding to find out if it works,” he said.

Compared to what we're spending in Iraq, the funding Bob Bussard needs to develop this is pocket change.  Bussard needs $2 million.  The Bush administration spends that much in Iraq every eight minutes.  It's not merely "worth funding it to find out if it works"; if there's even a chance that this breakthrough could work on a large scale, not funding it is not merely short-sighted, it's insane.  Sustainable clean fusion offers a chance to completely stop burning all fossil fuels, and to solve the entire world's energy problems essentially forever, with no need for proliferation of nuclear fission technology.  What's more (and this should be a major argument, from the viewpoint of the US Goverrnment), given a viable clean fusion process, the ONLY reason for maintaining a nuclear fission program would be weapons programs.  (Radioisotopes for medical use can be made in an accelerator.)

Then again, maybe that's a possible reason why the US Government might not want a viable fusion process to be developed.  The US Government likes its nuclear weapons.  It might be embarrassing if the United States, too, was unable to pretend that its continued nuclear fission program was solely for peaceful purposes.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

no radioactive waste that has to be stored for thousands of years

The worst from fission reactors also does not have to be stored for thousands of years, because it has a short half-life. The long-lived material is also low activity.

Also, most of the plausible fusion reactions produce neutrons. Even supposedly aneutronic reactions like D + 3He turn out to have side-reactions that produce neutrons. You're still going to get radioactive waste from fusion reactors.

p + 11B is aneutronic but very hard to initiate and accordly the pay off of energy in/energy out isn't that great.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

sustainable clean fusion offers a chance to completely stop burning all fossil fuels

You may find that you're still using hydrocarbons, even if not from natural sources, because you can't fit a nuclear reactor into a car and because hydrocarbons have a number of properties that are convenient in a portable energy source, like being liquid at room temperature and a high energy density per volume. Synthetic hydrocarbons may offer some advantages over the natural variety, because you can more finely tune which particular hydrocarbons are in your fuel mix.

Because some would get diverted into materials like plastics, if you're drawing on sources like atmospheric CO2 for the C part of the hydrocarbons, the net effect might be that the synthetic hydrocarbons act as a carbon sink.


and to solve the entire world's energy problems essentially forever,

Oddly enough, reactions using T turn out only to have about as much potential from terrestial sources as fission. Mind you, it's not a low potential: I once worked out that all things taken into account, any given cubic meter of rock is worth about 135 gallons of gas on the basis of its 6Li content.

Any given chunk of rock is worth about 20x its weight in coal in terms of fission fuels.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You may find that you're still using hydrocarbons, even if not from natural sources, because you can't fit a nuclear reactor into a car and because hydrocarbons have a number of properties that are convenient in a portable energy source, like being liquid at room temperature and a high energy density per volume. Synthetic hydrocarbons may offer some advantages over the natural variety, because you can more finely tune which particular hydrocarbons are in your fuel mix.

A good point. However, with sufficiently cheap and abundant electrical power, and continuing advances in energy storage technology, combined with the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, I can see a plausible future in which internal combustion engines for vehicles become obsolete (except possibly for military vehicles). Aircraft do present a problem, true; I don't think running an airliner off of fuel cells is practical.

I don't think for one moment that cessation of the practice of burning fossil fuels as an energy source is going to happen tomorrow. But a viable fusion power process would make it possible. It goes without saying that there would still be engineering problems to be solved in order to actually do it.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes is negligible. CO2 resulting from mobile hydrocarbon combustion is approximately 2% of the annual total of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Power plants make up a much bigger source. Actually, unchecked underground coal mine fires account for 3-4% of the total itself, and putting all of those out should be a lot easier from a technical perspective than eliminating every internal combustion automobile on the planet.

Now, there's a lot of nasty crap that comes out of tailpipes that isn't CO2, and I won't deny that, but a tremendous percentage of it happens in countries we have minimal control over.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

Nah- large parts of our petroleum dependent infrastructure can be migrated with ease- tractors DON'T haveto go 500 miles from a fuel source, so electrifying them is easy. Cheap and clean and functionally unlimited electricity also makes reneweable fuel (such as ethanol) production much easier.

Granted, near TOTAL dependence on automobile infrastructure is hard to beat with anything short of suitcase sized reactors. But you can do a lot to produce renweable burning fuels.

But shit, people, Bucky showed we could cut our fossil fuel use by way more than half in a couple years with wind power and a properly distributed grid. decades ago. With Good Math. (his particular genius was in not thinking that wind power had to be in reservation sized power plants)

I think electrical storage capacity is a big issue- and so far it's not solvable in any kind of affordable manner. Lithium polymer batteries can do the trick, but they need a 90% reduction in cost to be usable. right now- think a 30mph bicycle with a 75 mile range for $9000. Throw the inefficiencies of 65 mph and and extra 1400 pounds to make it a "car" and you have to sextuple the batteries (which are 7800 of the cost)- Ain't gonna work.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure — "large parts" can, indeed, "be migrated with ease". But try electrifying a trans-Atlantic airline flight. About the only realistically feasible way to do it is to take your power plant with you.

We can probably convert to alcohol-burning turbines. I don't know whether doing so wholly solves the environmental problems involved in operating jet engines in the stratosphere. I rather suspect it doesn't.

What we might actually end up doing, if Bussard's process can be built into a sufficiently light and powerful reactor, is building airliners with onboard fusion plants powering super-conducting motors driving contra-rotating ducted fans.

But shit, people, Bucky showed we could cut our fossil fuel use by way more than half in a couple years with wind power and a properly distributed grid. decades ago. With Good Math. (his particular genius was in not thinking that wind power had to be in reservation sized power plants)

Oh yeah. When it comes to national power generation, decentralized generation is the way to go. Cut out as much transmission loss as possible, and increase the resiliency of the system to individual failures. The large-scale power-generation-and-marketing companies, however, will probably fight it tooth and nail. After all, if small local power plants supplying a town, or a suburb, or a neighborhood become feasible — well, hell, just ANY schmoe could compete with the utility companies. And that's downright un-American!

[koyote.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the point-

okay, passenger jets have HORRIBLE efficiency, and you could easily convert back to prop with ethanol and biodiesel fuels and so on, but airlines aren't the *key* infrastructure items that are trotted out by oil company, er, I mean, "independent" pro fossil fuel think tanks. They bring out tractors, fertilizer, and electrical power generation and home heating- all *really* easy stuff to convert if you have cheap juice.

non military jets, while a big deal, aren't a big enough deal for a bad peak oil scenario (realistic or not) to plunge us into strife. Especially because fedex going 435 mph instead of 550 mph and using turboprops wouldn't BE that big a deal in the long run.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I probably overstated that. I probably should have said something like "no radioactive spent fuel requiring reprocessing, and minimal amounts of radioactive waste".

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

A problem with overstating can be that people will react to the limitation of the real thing as evidence that they were mislead.

Actually, even something not intended as hype can have negative effects. Lots of people remember the phrase "too cheap to meter" but comparatively few know the context in which it was said.

"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter; will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history; will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace."

Lewis L. Strauss [New York Times, August 7, 1955]

Now obviously he's not talking of some short term developments there [1] but speaking in a now-outdated way about the possibilities of the future.

1: Well, "our children" does limit the time frame but if we suppose that he's talking about the kids born in the 1950s, we still have a good thirty years to make good on the predictions that have not materialized.