The Focus Fusion Society Forums Spreading the Word The fusion conversation experience

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  • #1218
    Rezwan
    Participant

    What is your experience talking about fusion? One on one, live conversations. How does it go?

    How do you approach it? What’s your favorite part of a fusion conversation, and what are some areas where it gets awkward?

    Use this forum to describe some conversations you’ve had. Identify them as:

    Great
    Mediocre
    Awkward

    And explain what made it so.

    Finally, what was the impact of said conversation? How can you tell? I suppose you need a before and after – what they thought about fusion (IF they thought about fusion) before, and what they think about it after.

    #10571
    TimS
    Participant

    Non-technical people always say “ick”. Their first reaction has been “is there radiation? OMG WTF how can you even think of more reactors!!!!!!” It is hard to explain to them that there is more radiation in a banana (radioactive potassium) than they are likely going to get from a reactor. It has been hard to get past this. There was no before and after, I don’t think I ever got through to anybody really.

    Now with Fukushima, I think they might have been right. The word “likely” suddenly changed…

    I haven’t talked about fusion since I discovered this serious aneutronic work. Changing “are likely going to get” into “can get” might make all the difference.

    #10574
    vansig
    Participant

    I try not to mention it to the NIMBY crowd; to them, “nucular” [sic] means deadly radioactive waste and no amount of discussion will change that. what might change that is, that important influences, (eg: GreenPeace UK) are beginning to change their position on nuclear energy.

    So, to the technical audience, they express some interest in hearing that fusion may be more than just Tokamak; but they usually end the conversation with “I’ll wait until I see peer review publications”.

    #11470
    Francisl
    Participant

    This is a great video demonstrating how to fire up an audience. Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

    #11471
    Brian H
    Participant

    TimS wrote:

    Now with Fukushima, I think they might have been right. The word “likely” suddenly changed…
    .

    Death and serious injury count from radiation at Fukushima: zero.
    Tidal wave: thousands.

    Anyone who cites Fukushima as evidence of nuclear risk is an uninformed *********.

    #11472
    Brian H
    Participant

    vansig wrote:

    they usually end the conversation with “I’ll wait until I see peer review publications”.

    And don’t get me started on “peer review”. ½ marginally competent volunteer editing, and ½ gatekeeping by status quo stakeholders.

    #11473
    Brian H
    Participant

    As for conversations, mini-aneutronic is so far out of the box for most people, they just mentally dump it in the “Yeah, now pull the other one” box. Referring them to LPPhysics.com and focusfusion.org sometimes works.

    I will rejoice to the skies when boron-break-even happens. That’s the killer clincher.

    #11474
    delt0r
    Participant

    And don’t get me started on “peer review”. ½ marginally competent volunteer editing, and ½ gatekeeping by status quo stakeholders.

    I get tired of this. Of course peer review is not perfect, but just look at all the crap submitted to the the preprint archives. We need some filter. Also its mostly untrue. Not only does the DPF stuff get published, but other groups are now looking more at fusion possibilities and many in the field are taking it quite seriously. Even the polywell has had two peer reviewed papers, one very recently. ITER folk are *not* suppressing this work.

    Talking about conversion, this attitude that its all “big physics” that is holding it all down is a big problem. Because they are not holding you down. If there budget is cut, so is yours. You won’t get that slice of the pie.

    Personally I try to educate *if* others are interested. If not, meh. I don’t try to win over. Just facts, data, and why it is so tantalizing. A good example is that confinement time has been growing faster than Moore’s law! Yes its traditional fusion that is a dirty word here. But its is very good progress. If we keep that up for another 30 years even DD fusion becomes “easy”. Another is that boondoggles like ITER are boondoggles mostly because of politics, not science. It is very easy to show this with a little google. Next is the “dark horses”, that is Focus fusion, General fusion and a few others.

    But most of all i try to point out the very low levels of funding. Even ITER is not that expensive. A 1GW coal plant cost a cool billion or so, and a plain old fission plant more like 10 billion. 1GW for a year is about 400Million of electricity. People don’t get the scale of the energy we use and the energy problem. We put more money into farm subsides than we do into solving our energy future.

    My last point, if we are still on talking terms, in the long term nature of the problem. If it is going to take 50 years, so what? we are in this for the long haul. Getting fusion in 50 years is better than limping along without it for 100 because “50 years is too long”. Of course we could take our long term energy security more seriously and get it sooner if we go all “Manhattan project” on it.

    Just for the record. I advocate a diverse funding portfolio. We don’t know which horse to bet on right now, or we would already have fusion.

    #11475
    Brian H
    Participant


    Talking about conversion, this attitude that its all “big physics” that is holding it all down is a big problem. Because they are not holding you down. If there budget is cut, so is yours. You won’t get that slice of the pie.

    Read some history. There was a concerted push decades ago to defund all but the main channel, i.e. the sure-thing Tokamak “which just needed to be built big enough”. And it would be impossible to cut Focus Fusion’s budget. It has none. It receives 0% of government fusion/energy research funding, to 100 decimal places.

    Which is why it’s going to be such a kick* when its “road not taken” short-cuts and short-circuits all the big job creation projects. Ideally, adequate private funding will continue and increase, keeping LPP out of the purview of and dependence on politicians and bureaucrats, who are currently, true to form, jerking around the “long term” funding of projects about whose merits they have only the foggiest.

    *I’ll let you guess where.

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