Nearly a dozen years ago I wrote an article for The Huffington Post on Star Power for Humanity. The latest June issue of Scientific American featured Star Power: What is the future of fusion energy? You can click on that link for the full article. I'll summarize:- This past December, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNR) claimed a breakthrough in attaining net positive with their laser fusion system. No one had ever done that before.
- As an aside, I worked there in the 1970's on that project, and left because I could not envision the laser that would accomplish this task. Can you believe that was around half a century ago?
- The bad news is that net positive is a long way from commercialization. And certainly, that intriguing ultimate laser has not yet been invented.
Well anyway, this article was written by Philip Ball, a British science writer who is my same age. He has a PhD in physics from Bristol University. Easy to read Sci Am article with no equations.
His next book will be How Life Works, which has not yet been released.- Says Ball, commercial fusion is 20 years away, or maybe 30 or 50...or more.
- But fusion is the answer to global warming. The question is whether it will arrive in time.
- Enrico Fermi, who built the foundation for the first atomic bomb, envisioned a future for fusion reactors.
This I again add. I worked for Edward Teller at LLNR. He invented the Hydrogen Bomb. That is also star power, but uncontrolled.- Says Omar Hurricane of that lab, We're basically making stars on Earth.
- The most popular fusion design does not use a laser, A Tokamak reactor is currently being pursued by ITER in France. Stands for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and, appropriately enough, this acronym in Latin means "the way." But the magnetic confinement process (a laser uses inertial confinement, which minimizes materials issues) is awesomely difficult to develop and there has been a series of delays. A remarkable international alliance proceeds, but I don't see commercialization until after 2050, if ever. That other pathway using a laser has the USA as the clear world leader.
Various private initiatives are also in the running, but with minimal funding.- The Father of the Tokamak, Soviet fusion visionary Lev Artsimovich, once said that the world will have nuclear fusion when it decides it needs it.
More recently, Ian Chapman of the UK has said, when we realize what climate change will do as an existential threat, the delivery of fusion will accelerate enormously.
If only the U.S. government had chosen to develop thorium for power, we might not today be troubled by these problems. More than a decade ago I had dinner with the undisputed champion of this pathway, Kirk Sorensen. Watch his TED talk on this subject.
Then, on the other hand, we have Star Power, or fusion, which is inherently safer with fuel said to be available for many centuries, if not forever.
- But commercialization will take time...maybe too long.
Further, there is the controversy about fuel availability.- Stars use hydrogen (also called protium) to produce energy.
- Humanity cannot currently attain the conditions in the middle of these hot bodies, and require a combination of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen.
Tritium might not be so readily available.- However, sufficient funds have historically been allocated to develop both forms of fusion, so those who know must be comfortable with the ultimate availability of the fuel for fusion.
- I accept that viewpoint.
In any case, I still have not written off cold fusion, which remains sufficiently intriguing.- Plus there can still be the Hydrogen Economy, a world someday operating with a combination of green electricity and hydrogen. This gaseous fuel will especially be crucial for next generation aviation, articulated in my HuffPo of 14 years ago.
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