|
Obumbles underfunded fusion research - but fusion (NOT solar) is the future
Scientific American - March 2017 issue - By Fred Guterledited for brevity John Holdren has heard the old joke a million times: fusion energy is 30 years away - and always will be. Despite the broken promises, Holdren, who early in his career worked as a physicist on fusion power, believes passionately that fusion research has been worth the billions spent over the past few decades - and that the work should continue. In December, Scientific American talked with Holdren, outgoing director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, to discuss the Obama administration's HOLDREN: I started working on fusion in 1966. I did my master's thesis at MIT in plasma physics, and at that time people thought we'd have fusion by 1980. It was only 14 years away. By 1980 it was 20 years away. By 2000 it was 35 years away. But if you look at the pace of progress in fusion over most of that period, it's been faster than Moore's law in terms of the performance of the devices--and it would be nice to have a cleaner, safer, less proliferation-prone version of nuclear energy than fission. My position is not that we know fusion will emerge as an attractive energy source by 2050 or 2075 but that it's worth putting some money on the bet because we don't have all that many essentially inexhaustible energy options. There are the renewables. There are efficient breeder reactors, which have many rather unattractive characteristics in terms of requiring what amounts to a plutonium economy--at least with current technology--and trafficking in large quantities of weapon-usable materials. The other thing that's kind of an interesting side note is if we ever are going to go to the stars, the only propulsion that's going to get us there is fusion. The reason we should stick with ITER [a fusion project based in France] is that it is the only current hope for producing a burning plasma, and until we can understand and master the physics of a burning plasma--a plasma that is generating enough fusion energy to sustain its temperature and density--we will not know whether fusion can ever be managed as a practical energy source, either for terrestrial power generation or for space propulsion. I'm fine with taking a hard look at fusion every five years and deciding whether it's still worth a candle, but for the time being I think it is. Note: other entrepreneurs and scientists think small businesses that are nimble can advance fusion a lot better than ITER run by a committee of nations. Michael Laberge of General Fusion (Vancouver) thinks the Moore's Law for fusion pretty much halted with ITER because that's what happens with a committee. Just look at the UN. He thinks the little guys can develop smaller fusion projects quicker. A few are in with MIT. Jeff Bezos (amazon) invested in General Fusion and Peter Thiel (paypal, legend, centipede) invested in Helion Energy. I'd like to buy shares in Helion if I could. Posted by: anon1 2017-03-02 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=482402 |