Fusion research, as currently practiced, is a waste of money. After 50 years and billions of dollars, there has not yet been a proof of principle for a workable design. This contrasts with nuclear reactors. Because reactors are governed by linear equations, achieving criticality even at essentially zero power in the Fermi reactor in 1942 provided the needed proof of principle. In addition to the scientific, engineering, and economic hurdles to be overcome, fusion power will have to face up to the same political obstruction that confronts fission power today. Fusion is "clean" only so long as it is impractical. Tritium will supplant plutonium as bogeyman. Even proton-boron fusion is not totally aneutronic, as the website admits the existence of neutron generating side reactions. Mr. Lerner, how will you answer when some guitar-twanging hippy asks "how many neutrons are safe?"? We need to put our research and development funding into breeder reactors, proof of principle established at EBR-1 in 1951. After we are energy sufficient and no longer importing oil, we will be able to afford our fusion toys, and with a well planned research program, and in the absence of pressure to succeed, it might possibly succeed. Advice to Japan: Instead of abandoning nuclear power, understand how your nuclear facilities came to be sited in coastal areas that, as attested by stone tablets erected centuries ago, were known tsunami zones. Invite the insurance companies, the government, and other parties that are expected to share the burden of covering accidents, to participate in the design process together with the nuclear industries and utilities. Re-read your W. Edwards Deming, whose principles of good manufacturing and quality control were the major contributor to the success of your electronics industry years ago. Right now, in your fit of pique, you are importing more hydrocarbon fuels, dumping more pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and having been granted an indulgence to buy Iranian oil, you are helping to finance their nuclear weapons. -- Gene
________________________________ From: Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2012 3:38 PM Subject: [math-fun] Fusion energy derision
From: Rowan Hamilton <rowanham@gmail.com> - When I was just a boy, I used to be a plasma physicist working on fusion research. I worked on a tokamak at UT and later on a multiple mirror plasma device at Berkeley. There are many issues to be resolved in this field. Tokamaks resolve one by getting rid of magneto-hydro-dynamic instabilities induced by the cylindrical symmetries of solenoidal devices. The actual extraction of usable energy is another issue that may not have been resolved. (I left this field a long time ago.) But I know that the break even point of a tokamak fusion reactor generating enough (unextracted) energy to sustain the reaction was reached way back in the 1980's at Princeton's TFTR.
--actually, break-even has never been achieved anywhere, though some lies have been told to try to get funding from gullible governments. Indeed TFTR did tell that lie, but their current web pages retract the lie, claim they never achieved break-even, and pretend they never told the lie in the first place. I speculate this was probably because the ITER project put pressure on them to stop lying, because ITER's goal was to ultimately achieve break-even, and they did not find it convenient for that lie to persist, since then there was no reason for ITER to get funded. Even if TFTR had achieved breakeven, which they did not, it would be only in a totally useless sense having nothing whatever to do with actually-usefully-extractible energy. In any real sense they were off by an enormous factor from breakeven and so will ITER.
TFTR incidentally after lying to the surrounding community saying no safety risk so just quit complaining and let them go ahead with a tritium run don't worry [this run was totally unnecessary from a science standpoint, but useful for a public relations fundraising standpoint -- it was utterly stupid since even a brief run with T made the whole enormous place too radioactive to go in for about 1 year and extrapolations from all-D to T runs were readily makable mathematically]... then managed to leak away their entire stock of tritium into the Princeton/Plainsboro area where I lived at the time.
Then the claim to the community ("it is utterly impossible that we will leak") changed to "oh don't worry, that tritium's probably in the upper atmosphere by now" with zero supporting evidence given for that claim. Tritium is very hazardous.
I've got a very low opinion of fusion research and researchers, in case you did not notice. They lie, they lie huge, they do it often, they endanger thousands cavalierly, their entire projects are utterly pointless in the sense that even success beyond their wildest dreams represents failure from an engineering/economic view, and they've had a many decade history of astonishing incompetence and overhypitude.
Eric Lerner's company, in contrast, would if it succeeded, genuinely succeed, and do so at a cost far smaller than TFTR. I just do not believe they will succeed, and I also believe in the big bang contrary to Lerner's book "The big bang never happened."