Reply To: What are you doing to promote Focus Fusion…

[Brian H]

I have just come across yet another “opinion leader” worth twigging, I think. David JC MacKay* of Cambridge, UK, has written a book called Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. It dissects the plausibility of many aspects of AGW and its proposed remedies, in the course of which he discusses fusion as a possible fossil fuel substitute. But he restricts his consideration to DD and DT versions. He has a deeply backed-up email inbox, so there’s no saying how soon he’ll get to see it, but I submitted the following though his official site:

In your Sustainable Energy book, you spend some time on DD and DT fusion. Did you look at all at pB11 fusion?

I ask because the research firm Lawrenceville Plasma Physics has made exquisitely good use of <$2 million in funding over the last 2 years to reach the point of testing their design for a tiny (hand with fingers pointed up) generator of the DPF type. It now appears that they may reach "scientific breakeven" by year-end or thereabouts. If so, everything changes.

It is an aneutronic variety of fusion which takes much higher temps to ignite and returns less overall energy, but the energy is in a directly usable ion stream, almost none in “hot” neutrons that other fusion models use to heat water to run a Carnot Steam turbine. The resultant payoff is very large.

Bottom line, if it works it will permit installation of capacity just about anywhere at 1/20 the cost of best current plant prices, and sell power at 1/50 – 1/20 of current best retail pricing. [UK and US, respectively.]

It uses no Lithium, btw, so will not compete with the battery industry! The fuel is boron, about 1 lb. per GW-yr.

It would require extensive revisions to your book. Every single renewable you consider would be economic roadkill, so fast it wouldn’t know what hit it. Most conventional power sources would never be upgraded or even given expensive maintenance; it wouldn’t be worth doing anything except running the least expensive plant down for a while and then scrapping it.

The physical footprint is about 400 cu.m. per 5MW unit.

If you don’t want to be blindsided like the rest of the world in a few months, check it out.

(The mention of lithium is because he takes it as an input for the DT fusion models, and considers global supply as a concern.)

* David MacKay FRS is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

Nine months after the publication of ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change.