Drudge links a headline about Iter Fusion’s apparent breakthrough:
If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand.
While I would of course defer to M. Simon’s expertise on this subject, I expect environmentalists to be the first to object to — and do anything to oppose — the idea of unlimited, low cost, power for human beings.
That’s because they want our species to die, not improve.
And if there’s one thing environmentalists hate more than the human species, it’s any idea that might reduce them to irrelevancy.
Comments
8 responses to “True sustainability is the enemy of all environmentalists”
If you’re cold and shivering in the dark throw another environmentalist on the fire.
I think you should check Doc Zero’s take on this apparent bullshit
dr kill, could you paste a link to Doc Zero’s take? Searching for things like “doc zero cold fusion” didn’t get me anything useful.
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/04/27/Bad-science-writing-101
dr kill,
The blanket is the most challenging part. Why? Because if it does not capture more than 90% of the neutrons produced by the ITER reactor (or any such design) it will not breed enough fuel to keep the device in operation.
The 90% number includes all neutrons produced. So the reactor must be completely covered in blanket AND the losses from material absorption must be quite small.
A typical fission plant need only capture 40% to 50% of the neutrons produced to maintain operation.
Doc Zero is correct, but really it’s worse than that, even. The ITER-DEMO-ARES tokomak path doesn’t have any plausible scenario to commercial power: even the most advanced designs have plant power densities an order of magnitude behind current light-water fission reactors, meaning even today’s LWRs will produce power for about a tenth the cost of what tokamaks will be able to do… in 50 years.
Meanwhile, some other paths that might conceivably lead to economic fusion power (FRC, Polywells) have to make do on scraps. It’s hard to even find anyone in grad school who has studied fusion systems that operate at the quasi-neutral limit; we got tokamak PhDs on the Polywell board who don’t even realize how many of their assumptions only hold under local thermodynamic equilibirium.
How did this happen? Simple: it’s classic government waste on behalf of its clients. The fusion community likes massive projects because of the employment benefits — ITER can employ dozens of PhDs for decades. Does anyone care if it costs $50B to achieve what can be done for mere millions with fission? Of course not, it’s all for “science.”
And don’t even get me started on the joke that is NIF, ugh…
I interviewed at the tokamak lab at MIT in 1982. When I asked how close they were to break even they laughed. Fusion energy is 50 years in the future. It has always been 50 years in the future. It always will be 50 years in the future. Meanwhile, the chocolate ration has been increased from 12 grams to 10 grams.
Tokamaks don’t work.
Also meanwhile, cold fusion people are still reporting anomalous heat, polywell looks promising and thorium fission is potentially rewarding. Where are the development projects?
Who exactly is getting rich from the fusion boondoggle? I’m sure a lot of managers have high paying jobs. It’s a good welfare program for Ph.Ds, the contractors who build the facilities are well rewarded and so on. But none of this adds up to support a large lobbying effort; I don’t think it’s going to Democratic campaign coffers either. It’s not another Solyndra or Fisker. So, what’s the big deal???