Reply To: Magnetized target fusion

[Rezwan]

Aside from being unethical, I don’t think it’s necessary. You can be up front about the uncertainty and yet gain support for fusion – See post on Tyson and the need to make stuff up to advance research.

Meanwhile the Discover article shows how easily fusion scientists turn off any potential funders. Glen Wurden, the guy with the “Dark Horse” concludes with:

If someone tells you we’ll have fusion energy in three years, that is not going to happen. Even if you want to solve the energy problem in the next 30 years, fusion is not the answer, and I say that as a fusion scientist. If you want to solve it in the 50-100 year time scale, yeah, I think it is the answer. I like to ask other physicists, ‘How many miracles do you need for your concept to work?’ There isn’t a single concept that doesn’t need an engineering miracle or two or three. Not one. But if you can count the number of miracles on one hand, you might say your concept is viable – you only need one handful of miracles. That’s where fusion research is: How many miracles do you need?

I’ve talked to Glen about this. He’s not saying that fusion won’t work – but that it’s not the solution to the energy crisis, because that’s a short term problem. Energy crisis is happening NOW, and fission is ready now. Fusion’s going to take some time. They may get LIFE and ITER to work in some decades – but it will be very expensive. And he’s not sure if his own MTF will ultimately work. But he’s dedicating his life to getting it to work.

By and large, this is what fusion scientists are like. They are committed to solving this issue, but pretty humble about it.

In contrast, the public, Congress, everybody else, just wants their reactor, now. And they’d like someone else to pay for the research, and they don’t want to bother with speculative ideas. All have a vague idea that it’s really expensive, so they don’t see the merit of small donations and small projects.

We just have to keep working at building a fusion-funding culture. Build a respect for the problem, and help people see themselves as explorers supporting exploration rather than consumers of the finished energy product. Also break down the larger fusion endeavor into smaller, affordable projects.

Footnote on Wurden’s predictions. Last year I called and spoke with him about that paragraph. He was pretty firm on the idea that the energy crisis is a short term problem and he recommended fission. For fusion you need long term commitment. Then he critiqued NIF and explained what they were up against to extract useful energy. At the FPA conference, after listening to Michael Dunnes’ presentation on LIFE, it seemed that a lot of Wurden’s criticisms were answered. And indeed, I caught up to Wurden and Dunne talking about it afterwards and Wurden was acknowledging that the LIFE team may actually be on to something. But he left it at: “Send me those papers. Show me the data”. Or words to that effect. This was thrilling to me because it suggests that LIFE may actually have a commercial reactor in 20 years.

And that could raise confidence in the possibility of fusion. Confidence, let’s face it, has been lacking. With confidence should come more interest in trying other approaches. If it’s doable one way, it may be doable, cheaper, others. A win in any fusion effort will lead to more exploration – to an improved fund and investment-raising environment.

But even the NIF guys are careful to say, “Either it will work, or we’ll discover some interesting physics.” Something that the public, Congress, investors, just don’t like to hear.