Reply To: Iconography

[Brian H]

Alex Pollard wrote: In my pitch I like to emphasise that the expenditure on focus fusion research will be quite small, and it will not take long to determine whether it is viable or not.

That is, I don’t assume that focus fusion will definitely work because I don’t want to come across as a zealot who has seen the light and has some “miracle” solution. People have no way of knowing how credible the concept is, and they won’t instantly take our word for it. Focus Fusion may well end up being a miracle solution, but we don’t know that yet.

And as a way explaining why it gets so little attention, I lead into this by talking about how misguided institutional science can be.

I directed Jerry Pournelle to the site. Here is an excerpt from his Dec. 29 Current Mail column:

A little energy ‘rithmatic

In your Dec 18 view you note, “One hundred 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plants should cost about $150 billion (the first two might cost $25 billion each, but the hundredth will be less than a billion).”

Taking the low end of your scale, the capital cost per Watt is $1. I remind (and update) you about my own fave candidate, Focus Fusion. It has just received paltry ($1.2 million) but adequate funding to push hard for the next 2 yrs. or so to prove break-even plus with proton-Boron11 aneutronic fusion.

At ~$250,000 per 5MW generator, that’s $0.05/Watt. Or 1/20 your best case nuclear (fission) plants. And zero waste disposal costs.

I hope and anticipate that mass-produced FF generators will be being produced in their thousands under generous licensing terms all over the planet before any of those dinosaur Fission behemoth projects will have broken sod. Which will put an end to them tout suite.

Brian Hall

I had some correspondence with Mr. Hall, but it’s not really relevant. Obviously I would love to have electricity at a much lower investment rate; and I know there is a lot of theory about Focus Fusion. To the best of my knowledge they haven’t actually generated any electricity with the system, and the numbers look too good to be true. Of course many things that look too good to be true turn out to be true — alas a lot more don’t.

I have no special knowledge about Focus Fusion. They seem to have raised some money so their demonstrations must be effective, but I don’t know anything that isn’t easily available to everyone else. I can hope that their theory works out and all will be well.

On the other hand, I don’t intend to stop pushing for more conventional sources of energy, particularly nuclear fission, which we know how to build. I have seen great promises of new developments used to stop investment in what we can do — cake tomorrow but never today — many times before, and the promised new systems don’t live up to the promises. I can sure hope that this system will do it, and that it has been neglected by most energy research establishments by mistake or misunderstanding or misplaced skepticism. I really wish mankind had access to some new and cheap energy sources, and I encourage those who have the training and abilities and access to go find out about Focus Fusion; but I don’t agree that we should neglect what we know how to do in the hopes that new science will bring new techniques soon enough to make further investment in power generation a waste of resources.

The following is from the June 2008 issue of Discover:

A focus fusion reactor could be built for just $300,000, says Lerner, president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in New Jersey. But huge technical hurdles remain. These include increasing the density of the plasma so the fusion reaction will be more intense. (Conventional fusion experiments do not come close to the temperatures and densities needed for efficient hydrogen-boron fusion.) Still, the payoff could be huge: While mainstream fusion research programs are still decades from fruition, Lerner claims he requires just $750,000 in funding and two years of work to prove his process generates more energy than it consumes. “The next experiment is aimed at achieving higher density, higher magnetic field, and higher efficiency,” he says. “We believe it will succeed.”

I wish him very well, but my experience has been that even if it works as advertised it will be a decade or more before there is any practical application, and two decades before this system puts power into the grid. I sure hope I am wrong on that, but I don’t think it would be prudent to abandon more conventional power generation means in hopes that this will make such investment needless. It hasn’t yet broken even in energy input/output, which is the first demonstration that will be needed. Once it does that, we can get very excited; but it will still be a while after break even before it adds energy to the grid.

The US is in the Coming Energy Crisis I predicted back in my columns in the 1970’s. It will take us time to get out of it. New technology will help, but I doubt we’ll get out of this on the cheap. That would take a miracle.