Rashidas, this is a “Phase 2” question – what happens after feasibility is demonstrated. Many things in phase 2 are not clear, and changeable based on what happens now in phase 1. As Henning points out, anything we calculate about phase 2 now is de facto speculation. There’s a lot of proving yet to do. Aaron, you might want to be careful to say “if” rather than “once”. As MTd2 points out – LPP has many hurdles yet to overcome.
Yes, there’s a big backlog of explanatory materials. This is where the handy peer review process and feedback from fellow fusion scientists is helpful. We’ve been getting a bit of that (again, backlog in writing this up and posting it).
The good news is, by the time we get through phase 1, there will have been a lot of rigorous review of this process – we’ve got people looking over our shoulders, and that’s a good thing. If at the end of phase 1 LPP announces success – there will be a massive flurry of scrutiny and review. A thousand critical physicists will direct some tough questions. As those questions get answered to their satisfaction, we will be translating that into non-technical terms.
As for that being my job – this requires a team, ideally with expertise. It will certainly take more than one person to develop credible materials and conduct a quality education campaign.
For now, let’s start with basics. For a campaign to inform people about safety, first you need to be assured of the safety yourself. As LPP takes this concept from, well, a concept, to a real device, things change, new information comes out, and recalculations are required. Small changes, like changing the boron source (decaborane? Pentaborane?) will have different safety implications and required procedures. So the content of the safety information is still up in the air.
I would hope that we would be the most rigorous ourselves in addressing these issues and not waving them away.
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