Reply To: Bang or no bang

[delt0r]

And don’t get me started on “peer review”. ½ marginally competent volunteer editing, and ½ gatekeeping by status quo stakeholders.

I get tired of this. Of course peer review is not perfect, but just look at all the crap submitted to the the preprint archives. We need some filter. Also its mostly untrue. Not only does the DPF stuff get published, but other groups are now looking more at fusion possibilities and many in the field are taking it quite seriously. Even the polywell has had two peer reviewed papers, one very recently. ITER folk are *not* suppressing this work.

Talking about conversion, this attitude that its all “big physics” that is holding it all down is a big problem. Because they are not holding you down. If there budget is cut, so is yours. You won’t get that slice of the pie.

Personally I try to educate *if* others are interested. If not, meh. I don’t try to win over. Just facts, data, and why it is so tantalizing. A good example is that confinement time has been growing faster than Moore’s law! Yes its traditional fusion that is a dirty word here. But its is very good progress. If we keep that up for another 30 years even DD fusion becomes “easy”. Another is that boondoggles like ITER are boondoggles mostly because of politics, not science. It is very easy to show this with a little google. Next is the “dark horses”, that is Focus fusion, General fusion and a few others.

But most of all i try to point out the very low levels of funding. Even ITER is not that expensive. A 1GW coal plant cost a cool billion or so, and a plain old fission plant more like 10 billion. 1GW for a year is about 400Million of electricity. People don’t get the scale of the energy we use and the energy problem. We put more money into farm subsides than we do into solving our energy future.

My last point, if we are still on talking terms, in the long term nature of the problem. If it is going to take 50 years, so what? we are in this for the long haul. Getting fusion in 50 years is better than limping along without it for 100 because “50 years is too long”. Of course we could take our long term energy security more seriously and get it sooner if we go all “Manhattan project” on it.

Just for the record. I advocate a diverse funding portfolio. We don’t know which horse to bet on right now, or we would already have fusion.