No Sleep 'Til Fusion

The Mark Suppes fusor story is going viral now.  There is an account at Gizmodo, which offers a much better overview than the first BBC piece, and stresses the pivotal issue that governs this and ALL fusion research:  

The problem with fusion has always been that we don't know how to get more energy out of it than we put into it. We know the energy is there. We know effective fusion is likely to take a lot of energy to jumpstart, but we don't know how (or if) we can ever get fusion going well enough to capture as much energy out as we put into it—the elusive break even point

This article makes another valid point that is often overlooked amid all the "free energy" excitement over a concept that is still anything but: 

As evening falls, Suppes wonders aloud if cheap fusion energy is even a good idea. "Would we just use up the planet quicker?" he asks, then shrugs and moves on. It's a good question. In every age access to easier energy has gone along with environmental destruction. From Native Americans fire clearing forests and the extinction of Australian megafauna to the Industrial Revolution fouling up everything else, we've always used energy for beating the hell out of the planet. Today tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil have poured into the Gulf of Mexico. Might as well try for the devil we don't know.

It goes more or less without saying that -- in the paradigm of the past one or two millennia -- the production and consumption of energy is a destructive process, as the situation in the Gulf painfully demonstrates.  But, if the process itself is clean, does that just unleash us for ever greater planetary destruction?

Philo T. Farnsworth invented a nuclear fusion process in part because he was looking for a means of propulsion in space other than liquid and solid fuel rockets.  If his vision is realized, we may yet need it for that. 

via gizmodo.com

Comments

[tom]

>Philo T. Farnsworth invented a nuclear fusion process in part because he was looking for a means of propulsion in space other than liquid and solid fuel rockets

ah , i thought it was dr bussard who thought of using fusion for space propulsion, interesting. i'll have to read up on Farnsworth.. thanks !!

[Richard Hull]

Farnsworth was looking for clean energy and not space travel. Bussard was the rocket man.

The current ONR funding of the Bussard effort is strictly the Navy looking for something other than fission to power future ships. Do not confuse this effort with space or public utility power, though both would be fall out from a successful effort.

Unfortunately, the endeavor is not looking even slightly successful and will certainly join a long list of blind alley fusion efforts.

[Brett Bellmore]

"The problem with fusion has always been that we don't know how to get more energy out of it than we put into it."

That is, of course, nonsense, and cold war probably would have been quite hot otherwise. The problem with fusion has always been that we don't know how to get more energy out of it than we put into it, *gradually, on a small scale". If you don't mind converting mountains into holes, we've know how to get that energy out for decades.

[Hu jintao]

hello!
I'm from China.
If you carry out this kind of experiment in my country, you will be killed 100 times!
fortunately, you are in america, a great country! good luck!

[Richard Hull]

I think the full verbage for the fusion man is in search of is "controlled fusion". Rarely spoken of as such, but naturally assumed by those in the "biz". Thus, the H bomb's over unity production is a bit obvious to the meanest intelligence, much as the common knowledge that millions of untamed watts are contained in a lightning bolt with no real hope of controlled conversion. Like the H bomb it is a powerful, one shot, go-no-go deal that is not a distributable source of public energy.

Those in the know and doing fusion, like us, speak to one another with the tacit assumption of the universally failed efforts of "controlled fusion" to produce continuous,over unity, outputs in the hands of man. The H bomb never enters our stream of consciousness for the above stated obvious reasons.

[Brett Bellmore]

Maybe it should enter your stream of consciousness, for the simple reason that it IS a proven way to get over unity. As I've remarked before, while digging through the archives at college back in the late 70's, early 80's, I found an engineering study on how to build a power plant around nuclear bombs. And there wasn't anything required that we couldn't start designing tomorrow, using proven engineering principles. A working reactor would cost less than what's been spent on ITER.

It's never a good idea to exclude what works from your stream of consciousness.