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What is Focus Fusion? • Learning Center • Electricity • How Green Is It? •

What’s wrong with the energy picture today?

Posted by Rezwan on Jul 14, 2006 at 05:41 PM
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Today, the vast majority of energy is produced the same way it was at the end of the 19th century, by burning fossil fuels. We owe a great deal to these fossil fuels as they have have launched humanity into an unprecedented era of prosperity. However, this power source was not enough to propel everyone into prosperity. We’re literally “running out of gas” while billions of people still remain trapped in poverty.

Furthermore, these 19th-century sources are polluting the environment through emissions, mining and extraction processes, oil spills and so on. Fears of Global Warming pit the interests of economic growth in developing countries against an ominous spectre of global destruction. The not-so-subtle message here is: “Sorry you poor Third World people, too late. You missed the boat. You need to stay poor and not pollute while the rest of us enjoy life and dump our toxics in your back yard.” The prices of fossil fuels are high, draining the world economy, trapping entire continents in a web of debt. The struggle to maintain control of fossil fuels, especially oil, has led to continual wars and millions of deaths.

All these issues are an indicator that we have “maxed out” on the utility of fossil fuels as the source of our power. Renewables, while wonderful, cannot hope to replace that power anytime soon (and possibly not ever). New energy sources are urgently needed.

Click on these links for a discussion of the energy crisis and the relationship of energy to security (and geo-political tensions), poverty (the economy), and the environment.

Note that most conversations about these topics take the world “as is”. Thus, the strategies and analysis of these conversations are grounded in a limited resources paradigm and involve many unappealing choices and tradeoffs.

The idea behind Focus Fusion is that we don’t need to make these trade-offs. We have the technology to develop stunningly cheap power plants that produce electricity directly, without the use of heat to run a steam engine. We hope to develop highly reliable, compact, modular designed power plants that can be brought on-line quickly, have no emissions or radioactive waste, and can be put anywhere.

Instead of huge power plants costing several hundred million dollars each, serving a large region, you can have many smaller “mom-n-pop” plants for a fraction of the price that serve smaller locations and offer greater local control and security. Rolling blackouts will be a thing of the past. The fuel for these plants is dirt cheap and abundant. It won’t run out for billions of years. In sum, Focus Fusion proposes the possibility of cheap, clean, abundant, decentralized energy easily accessible to everyone.

This is a radical departure from the energy supply story we are all used to. And it fundamentally changes the equation of all the strategies and analysis that are currently in place regarding energy and global welfare.

Energy Crisis