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]

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.