Fusion Now

Posted by Rezwan on Jan 08, 2009 at 05:43 AM
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The Focus Fusion Society is committed to bringing immediacy to humanity’s quest for Fusion. This means:

1. Fusion energy needs to move to the fast track of development. Currently, it’s just an under-funded footnote in the “Energy Crisis” conversation;
2. Barriers to the discovery of fusion need to be overcome.  Many of these barriers are not technological so much as psychological; and
3. We all have a vital role in making Fusion happen.  We don’t need to wait for the government or some energy giant out there to solve the fusion puzzle. It is our puzzle and we can do it now.
4. A “fusion prize” would speed up the discovery of fusion.  As such, we will lobby, advocate and otherwise contrive to bring one into existence.

Fusion energy needs to move to the fast track of development.

For fusion to happen, it needs to become a top research priority.  Currently, it’s not, as noted here.  One of the most important things we are doing with this website is raising awareness of focus fusion energy as a non-polluting alternative to other fuels.

Fusion as a footnote in the Energy Crisis conversation

To move to the fast track, fusion alternatives need to become a big part of the Energy Crisis conversation. Currently, they are not.

According to most sources, the world today is caught in an escalating energy crisis. The crisis has profound economic, political and environmental impacts. If nothing changes, the conflicts, wars, environmental problems and poverty the world suffers now will get much worse.

A dead-end polarized energy debate

In the face of the energy crisis, to put it crudely:

• the right wing promotes nuclear fission reactors and downplays the security and long-term radioactive waste disposal issues that that implies.
• The left wing promotes renewables, even though they acknowledge that renewables won’t provide anywhere near the levels of energy that oil does. So, they say, we have to get ready for a low energy world - and all the conflict, regulation and inequality that that implies.

The Energy Crisis conversation is dominated by the nukes vs. renewables/low-energy-world debate. In all this, the possibility of unlimited energy derived from fusion is curiously missing. At best, fusion is just a tiny footnote in the “Energy Crisis” literature. And in that tiny footnote, they estimate that with conventional research efforts currently under way, we might have it in 50 years.

The principal barrier to the discovery of fusion is not a technological wall so much as a psychological one.

They say we might have fusion in 50 years [Actually, by 2050, which is 41 years, if all goes well]. What’s the hold up?  What are the barriers to developing fusion? There are many, but the most difficult ones are not so much technological as they are psychological.  [click here for a look at barriers.]

These barriers exist in the general public as well as in the fusion research establishment. For researchers, it’s not just a lack of funding, but also the fact that most of the funding goes to research on the tokamak, a large, unwieldy and very expensive device that has consumed billions of dollars in research money and is still very far from achieving net energy. The estimates that “we will have fusion in ~50 years” are based on the progress of this conventional research.

For a detailed breakdown of the 50 years, see the ITER website.:

• Timeline to “First Plasma.”  Click “Timeline” in the left navbar for their ten (10) year construction plan which “indicate[s] that, if the ITER Organisation is established in 2006, the first plasma should be possible in ITER by the end of 2016.” [Note: ITER has been established.  This part of their website hasn’t been updated as of 1/8/09] 
• Timeline to operational power plants  Click “Beyond ITER”, also in the left navbar, to see the timeline for an operational power-plant to come on line.  In their best case scenario, “it will be very difficult to commission the first commercial-sized tokamak before 2050.”

Note:  the timeline includes this disclaimer:

The steps beyond ITER are open at this stage. During the ITER construction and operation period, other magnetic confinement schemes or inertial fusion may show more promise than ITER, so the door is open for these schemes to supersede the tokamak in subsequent steps.  Certainly, the technologies developed for and tested on ITER: remote maintenance, tritium breeding high temperature blankets, and high heat flux components, will provide essential information whatever the confinement scheme used.  [emphasis added]

As you see, confinement schemes and inertial fusion are the only possibilities suggested here.  Other fusion alternatives are simply overlooked.  Is this just an oversight, an expedient, or part of a larger block in the conventional fusion approach?  For a better illustration of these blocks, read our comparison of the approach taken by the conventional fusion researchers and Focus Fusion. 

We all have a vital role in making Fusion happen.

Despite criticisms of conventional fusion research as listed above, the US Government is narrowly focusing its research funding on the ITER.  Results are not expected for several decades. In the meantime, the Government is cutting off funding for alternative approaches such as ours, and corporate sponsors are also not very motivated to pitch in. 

We can complain about this. We can wait for the 50 year conventional breakthrough (which won’t make energy any cheaper as discussed above). Or we can take action and get the job done ourselves.

In today’s world, individuals have more power than ever. With the internet, individuals can come together and amplify that power. People are active members of the global community with a direct role in tackling the problems we face.  Our experience with this website confirms this, as strangers whom we had no chance of meeting in person have come out of nowhere to further this project. 

In the several years that this website has been operational, more people have become aware of fusion alternatives, and we have managed to raise modest funds for some experiments.   The reflexive dismissal we faced in the early days is being gradually replaced with a sense of possibility and experimentation.  People are curious to see if this, and other fusion alternatives could work.  Perhaps this is because we have been improving our pitch, or perhaps fear of global warming and prolonged oil wars is making people desperate.  In any case, the barriers to fusion are eroding away, albeit still too slowly for our taste.  As such, we still have a long way to go to make the quest for fusion alternatives a part of everyone’s consciousness. 

Your participation in promoting fusion, via your discussions and debates in our forums, membership and financial support for this website, links to this site, telling your friends, lobbying and posting about fusion alternatives throughout cyberspace, are all important factors that can help bring about fusion NOW.

A “fusion prize” would speed up the discovery of fusion.

Technology prizes have been shown to stimulate innovation and advances in technology.  As such, we are dedicated to the creation of a fusion technology prize.  This means we have to find some rich people/organizations/governments to lobby or persuade to set up such a prize.  They’ll need an organization to publicize and administer the prize, and of course, some prize money.  Focus Fusion would be just one of the competitors for the prize.  Find out more about our fusion prize strategy.