STAR POWER FOR HUMANITY

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.

So on the one hand we have fission power using heavy elements like uranium and plutonium which is rapidly gaining obsolescence for cost and a range of unknowns ranging from terrorism potential to radioactive waste storage to accidents. Chernobyl and Fukushima feed those fears.

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.

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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