Reply To: Military Effects

[Lerner]

I don’t agree with Asymmetric that the experimental evidence supports Siefe’s conclusion that fusion is impossible as an economical energy source. The international government-funded fusion effort has been on the wrong track for 40 years, when it first narrowed its focus to the tokamak. Not only DPF but all other alternatives have been funded at considerably less than the level needed to even explore their viability. There is also a fundamental misallocation of effort on DT fuel. Lacking direct conversion to electricity, it is unlikely that DT fusion will be much cheaper than existing sources.
I also don’t see that FF-1’s slipped dates are equivalent to the DOE’s. Theirs are based on some fundamental errors, including concentrating on one route, ignoring the problems of DT fuel for economical energy, and ignoring the physics of instabilities that was already known back in the 1970’s. A lot of folk said that the single-track on the tokamak was wrong back then.
So far, our delays have been based on our having too few people with the right skills to rapidly utilize existing technology. We took 20 months to redesign our switches, even though there is no doubt that switch technology can synchronize reliable firing of 12 switches. We took a year to get rid of arcing, even though existing technology shows it is possible to avoid arcing at our current densities. We are held up right now by a leak, even though vacuum much tighter than ours is easily attainable with present technology. So I don’t think our delays—so far—show anything at all about the chance for success. They do show we don’t have enough money to hire enough people that have the skills we need.
Nor is it fair to say we have had only failures—achieving 160 keV ion energy and confining the hot ions for 30 ns is solid success.
What is needed in fusion research is a compete redirection of the government-funded fusion effort to multiple lines of effort and to emphasis on aneutronic fuels, not an abdondoment of the fusion goal.