Reply To: Bill Gates

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Not to seem laconic but “if” is the problem: if it works and if its as cheap as advertised, if not well at least it makes a nice x-ray generator :p

Aside for the “if” my focus is on the energy economy. Grossly cheap electric power from focus fusion power plants (F2) will automatically out-compete just about everything else. Anyone that has enough money to make conventional power plants will already have enough to make arrays of F2s, in fact because of the scalable nature of F2 reactors (~5MW a piece, potentially small enough be shipped on a semi-truck) it might be cheaper to forgo maintenances on some types of existing power plants and phase in F2s on the spot! Grossly cheap electricity will also change the economic order of fuels: today fossil fuels are the cheapest sources of energy in most places, F2 will flip the order around with electricity the cheapest, hydrogen (from electrolysis of water) second cheapest, followed by hydrogenated depolymerization of biomass. One problem is that F2 powered coal to oil conversion would also become economical and competitive with F2 powered biomass to oil (hydrogenated depolymerization), biomass would not add any net CO2 to the atmosphere, coal as we all know does. So even though F2 would cure our energy problems via the automatic demand of economics, it would still require both a political and social conscience demand to make sure it also cures are environmental problems. I think that was Cara initial concern, Cara obviously wants a perfect pollution free world and erroneous believes solar means that: solar will not provide enough cheap energy to clean up all polluting systems, we would still suck every last drop of cheap oil and dig up coal for decades to come. F2 on the other hand could achieve that, because with F2 even garbage is economical to recycle, coal could be dropped out because of its environmental concern without worrying about its economic side-effect because the alternatives will be there and they will be cheap.