WUWT- Long considered a joke, or a pipe dream, fusion is suddenly making enormous leaps.
The idea first lit up Dennis Whyte when he was in high school, in the remote reaches of Saskatchewan, Canada, in the 1980s. He wrote a term paper on how scientists were trying to harness fusion (the physical effect that fuels the stars) in wondrously efficient power plants on Earth. This is the ultimate clean-energy dream. It would provide massive amounts of clean electricity, with no greenhouse gases or air pollution. It would do it on a constant basis, unlike solar and wind. Whatever waste it created would be easily manageable, unlike today’s nuclear power plants. And fuel would be limitless. One of the main ingredients needed for fusion is abundant in water. Just one little gram of hydrogen fuel for a fusion reactor would provide as much power as 10 tons of coal.
Whyte got an A on that paper, but his physics teacher also wrote: “It’s too complicated.” That comment, Whyte says with a hearty laugh, “was sort of a harbinger of things to come.”
Indeed, over the next few decades, as Whyte mastered the finicky physics that fusion power would require and became a professor at MIT, the concept seemingly got no closer to becoming reality. It’s not that the science was shaky: It’s that reliably bottling up miniature stars, inside complex machines on Earth, demands otherworldly amounts of patience, not to mention billions and billions of dollars. Researchers, like Whyte, knew all too well the sardonic joke about their work: fusion is the energy source of the future, and it always will be.
That line took on an especially bitter edge one day in 2012, when the U.S. Department of Energy announced it would eliminate funding for MIT’s experimental fusion reactor. MORE
Back in the day, we did a LOT of machine work for Lawrence Livermore Labs NIFT program. Fusion Energy. We did work for them for about 20 years. And they were always 10 years away from making it happen. They still are.
Leave it to government, they create enormous amounts of Con-“fusion”.
Exactly what I came here to say – ‘cold fusion, always only 10 years away from becoming reality.’
Get Prof Brown on it. Maybe you can incorporate his Flux capacitor to speed development along. And don’t forget to put a emergency stop button on it. (In case it works to good)
If we had unlimited clean electrical power the left would have nothing to bitch about….oh wait, they ALWAYS have something to bitch about.
I see a Suicide in this Man’s Future.
I can absolutely 100% guarantee you that if true the warmist community is super pissed off about it. If true, nobody would be more pissed off about it.
There is absolutely nothing authentic about them, their hatred for humanity is what motivates them and anything that comes between them and control over the entire human race is to them like Kryptonite to Superman.
Might want to rethink that Bezos funding…
That was a waste of a rather long read. The article gives you the tease but leaves out the hard facts and engineering that will produce the results.
Interesting but more like an update of why we’re not there yet.
LFTR – Liquid Floride Thorium Reactor
It’s already been proprotyped and tested 50 years ago.
JUST DO IT!
Imagine if your home was removed from the tax roles and you could literally live in your home for free once you paid it off AND had virtually free energy, could grow your own food.
How would the government be able to control you? Oh they would. Just have an “existence tax” or tax you every time you left your property. Nice dream though.
What if we had a really long set of jumper cables, and….how far away is the sun, anyway?
I say, you’ll never replace fission chips!
Lots of maybes and we hope and blah, blah, blah. Noy asingle result, not even aprototype device. Their grants should have been cancelled. They’re running yet another fusion scam.
“Finally, Fusion Power Is About to Become a Reality”
Shorter: “No….not really”
I’ve got a patient who is a retired nuclear chemist from Lawrence Livermore. His specialty was nuclear waste. They can very reliably render the harmful stuff safe to store. Guaranteed it won’t leak. (See vitrefication). They have it down so it’s easily stored for about 300-500 years. If science never progresses, they can then put it another, bigger version of what we can currently make for another 500 years. Eventually we can use a space elevator and some kind of tugboat to crash it to a distant star that’s like our sun. It will be incinerated and just become one with the sun.
Come on! How hard can it be? Billions of suns are doing it by accident.
It’s only about 30 years out. It has been 30 years out for the last 50 years.