Watching our government in action is very much like observing a sucker at the poker table. The guy or gal who is always chucking away chips while drawing dead, but never wants to take a rational risk at a worthwhile pot.
I came across a diary last week by RimJob that makes this case and point. The diary links to a lecture by Dr. Robert Bussard that explains his efforts towards a revolution in energy production through fusion.
I took the time to watch the hour-and-a-half lecture. Though I’m not a scientist or engineer, it was absolutely fascinating. For those of you who don’t have that kind of time to spend watching the video, let me give you the very short version:
Over the past twelve years, Dr. Bussard has developed a prototype of a fusion generator that appears to work.
Dr. Bussard’s project has been eliminated by the Department of the Navy thanks to cutbacks to pay for the Iraq War.
The project requires $2-3 million to build a seventh prototype (it took six to get to this breakthrough point). This full size prototype can be completed in the short term (I believe he was talking one year or so, if memory serves).
If this seventh generation works, Dr. Bussard estimates that the project can be operational world wide in five to ten years, at a cost of $200 million.
The upside to this technology is almost unbelievable. Cheap. Clean. Basically limitless energy. Solving the world’s energy problems. The world’s water problems (the power required for desalinization plants is instantly affordable). The world’s global warming problems (to the extent it is not too late). Enabling very fast near space travel.
Watch it for yourself. Pretty amazing.
But wait, you say. This guy must be a kook.
Well, no. He’s an award winning physicist. I believe he is at Princeton now. Former number two guy at Los Alamos. Not exactly a crackpot.
Can’t be, you say. The government wouldn’t let a project like this get away. Think of all the cool weapons and propulsion applications.
This is the government part. Classic.
Bussard is thinking outside the box. Literally. We are spending billions (I think) researching fusion. All that research is conducted under the Department of Energy.
The mainstream thinking on fusion is to build a solid containment system, then get some particles to collide together. And suck up all the good energy released by the fusion of these particles.
But there’s a problem. The solid containment systems (like boxes) don’t seem to work. The technicalities are beyond me, but something about the electromagnetism of the particles or the fusion itself, is escaping from the solid containment systems.
Bussard’s idea is pretty simple, in theory. If the solid containment system isn’t working (it will never work in his view), then why not make a non-solid containment system. An electric or electro-magnetic containment system.
Problem is, since the U.S. is investing billions in solid-state containment systems under the auspices of the Department of Energy, we have created an entire industry of scientists and engineers whose very livelihoods depend on making this system.
So Bussard couldn’t even take his idea to the DOE. He had to make an end run. The project had to be re-routed as a low-budget project through the Department of the Navy, related to propulsion systems. The budget was deliberately left under the level where it would have to be reported as a line item in the Congressional budget, because if it was a line item, it would have been struck by pork-protecting legislators.
It took him twelve years to do it on a shoe-string budget. But the data from his last prototype (which was actually completed and tested by his small staff after their project was de-funded) apparently showed that they had been able to create a non-solid state containment system of relatively spherical shape. Pretty cool stuff.
But why haven’t we heard about this before?
Part of the deal under the Department of the Navy grant was no publication. He still hasn’t published his results. Though I guess they are being presented. Bussard wants this thing built. And he doesn’t care who does it. Chinese. Europeans. Chavez. Doesn’t matter. Bussard just wants his generator built.
Sounds a bit like cold fusion or something. We can’t waste $200 million on some crack-pot scheme.
Yeah right.
Iraq War. $6-10 billion a month. For a neo-con fantasy. Or a nightmare, I guess.
D.A.R.E. program. $700 million annually, through public and private funding. Provably ineffective at keeping kids off drugs. At least one study suggests the program itself might serve as a gateway to experimentation by kids.
Essentially free power for the entire planet. Priceless.
American government, and the people that allow it to operate. Fucking clueless.
So there you have it. Just one man’s opinion in the land that won’t accept the Theory of Evolution.
The American government. Getting ready to piss away another monster pot. Just muck those pocket Jacks, because there is an overcard on the board. Who knows if they can still win. Saving our chips so we can chuck them in on another global disaster. Invade Iran. ANWR drilling maybe. Oil company tax credits. Great bets all.
Also available in orange.
And I’m not even a Trekkie or anything.
Fascinating Joe. I’ll look at the lecture when I have more time. If this guy is on to something, it will be just like us to pass on it. (too much money yet to be made with “our” oil to get involved in something that would make black gold worth a whole lot less, eh?)
Thanks for comment. You’ll enjoy the lecture I bet.
Some confusion in the reporting here —
No one has ever seriously proposed a solid containment system, and electromagnetic systems been researched at costs of millions, then billions, of dollars for over 50 years. The government programs have, however, focused their resources so narrowly on one approach that it wouldn’t be greatly surprising if another, better, approach had been ignored.
I believe my non-technical self may have misunderstood some of the technical aspects of his lecture. As has been pointed out at dKos.
The comments there link to an excellent slashdot discussion of the topic.
Bottom line, he’s got a better mousetrap, or so he truly believes. Electic. Or electro-static. Or what ever one may call it. And it is a method that is being overlooked by the currently favored/funded branch of research.
And my point would be, it is certainly a worthwhile investment, when you look at the money we are blowing on completely stupid things that are proven not to work, or are in fact harmful to the world at large.
Thanks for the insightful comment.
I’ve listened to the lecture now, and his approach is indeed very different from those I’m familiar with. It is electromagnetic, but based on entirely different principles from those of the billion-dollar tokamak devices. This sort of thing deserves serious research funding unless someone has a really, really convincing argument that shows why nothing of this sort kind can work.
Thanks for drawing my attention to it.
Well, cool. I don’t believe I’m technical enough to comprehend his ideas completely. But you seem to be, and I feel like I’ve accomplished my mission for the fact you’ve heard about his idea. Very cool. Thanks for watching.
I’m far from understanding his ideas “completely”! I did take a class in plasma physics once, but it’s a nasty subject.
Watch the lecture video. It’s an hour and a half. Kick back–with a cup of coffee and a note pad.
Early on he describes what is wrong with Tokamak. I know enough to know he is right about the basic problem: Charged particles will gyrate around parallel magenetic field lines and won’t go anywhere, which is good–until they collide (which they have to do to create fusion) when they collide they migrate out of the machine–which is bad. Very bad. There are several ways to try to overcome the migration, and the believers in Tokamak believe that they may someday be made to work. On (relatively superficial) intuition–this is not my field–I don’t. I am not alone, though–there is now an aphorism: For fifty years now, cheap fusion power has been just twenty years in the future.
Dr. Bussard seems to have a deeper understanding, and also believes Tokamak will never work.
It is not mere sour grapes–nor is he being a crank–when he describes how tokamak is sucking the oxygen out of the fusion room. With large, centralized funding of science comes politics, and with politics comes fads unconnected to technical realities. I have been on both the right side and the wrong side of such fads.
He and his people came up with a different configuration in which the field has a gradient which contains the particles and leaks only at points rather than edges and surfaces. This is a great advance.
Secondly and more importantly–though I did not fully understand this part–he can let the particles fall through a potential field (I think he started with electric fields, and then because of technical problems switched over to magnetic field gradients) and so change the distribution of the energy of the particles so that they are all near the same energy. This is NOT a thermal (“Maxwellian”) distribution–which I think is more nearly what the tokamak uses and which necessarily has a broad range of energies. So more of the particles are at an energy where fusion can happen. This is an even greater advance.
As he himself says, the devil is in the details. High vacuums, high amperages, the need to suppress arcing, &c. He believes the system can be made to work: He describes achieving fusion in tests, but before they can get more energy out than they put in, on an operating basis, there are major engineering problems to overcome. He claims the physics is now mostly done.
About the physics itself: The basic concept involves college-level electromagnetic theory–electric and magnetic vector fields and all that. Nothing worse, until you start worrying about how to realize it physically (that is, build it).
Dr. Bussard is not a nut. He talks like an engineer, and as much of what he said that I could understand was correct. Your average scammer just isn’t (and doesn’t bother to be) that good.
Cheap, limitless energy? That I don’t believe, and really, we have been there before. Retrofitting electric power-plants? More credible–providing it works at all. But it looks like an honest technical gamble, not a crazy or fraudulent sceme.
This is an important line of enquiry.
If I could recommend this diary twice I would.
Thanks for comments Gaianne. And, if I might say, it is so nice to hear you say “magnetic field gradients.” 🙂
I only got this at a pretty superficial level. But it seemed pretty clear to me that for the money, it is a far more worthwhile project to be funding than, oh, say the war in Iraq.
You know what? I pray this guy never builds this device and I pray nobody else ever does either.
I think we’ve got enough “advanced” technology ruining our lives on this planet already and I can’t imagine that this thing won’t spawn some more horrific weapons or devices that make people suffer.
But that’s just me..
Pax
That’s an interesting perspective. Technology = Pandora’s Box. I won’t dispute it.
Well, it’s always a good idea to at least consider the contrarian view.
But honestly, why do nations fight? Resources. And if there were really such a thing as energy that was so abundant that it would be “too cheap to meter,” as the saying about electric power used to go, what is left to fight over? Oil? It wouldn’t be the limiting factor it once was. It would be relegated to a role as a lubricant rather than as a generant, since currently unfeasible concepts like maglev transportation would suddenly become possible. Water? If desalinization is easy and cheap fighting over water becomes pointless. Land? Well, they’re not making any of that any more, but one of the uses for this energy you mentioned was space travel. Generation ships might become a technical possibility. At least we humans might be able to escape the cradle.
In fact, there are only two things I can think of right off the top of my head that might be seen to be worth fighting over. (I will admit to the possibility of more, but hey, it’s early here and I haven’t even had my shower yet, much less breakfast.) One, of course, is tribal conflicts. Admittedly this will not stop Shi’as and Sunnis from fighting, nor Arabs and Israelis, nor Hutu and Tutsi, nor any other set of groups you care to name.
The second would be if people decided to fight over the sources of energy themselves. In theory there would be enough to go around, but if you got a couple of madmen bent on denying this resource to their perceived enemies, things could get interesting. It sounds like the perfect premise for a science fiction novel. Got time in your writing schedule?
Thanks for bringing this up. I’ll give the lecture the attention it deserves as soon as I can break some time free.
Good points Omir. I’d have to agree with you. I don’t really know if this holds to the seeds to salvation, so to speak, but generally, far more interest in enlightened science, and far less attention paid to “gay marriage” and “creationism” is a path I would like to vote for in a big way.
Here is to the first ship off the planet Earth. Number 6 on my “things to do before I die” list. Right after three minutes of stand-up comedy on amatuer night.
Yeah, my big issues tend to be science and technology rather than social. Of source I want to see the social stuff — better health care, better education, fairer taxes to pay for them, equal opportunity — but there are people who are far better equipped to fight for them than I am. On the other hand, with subjects like net neutrality or transportation technology, I at least have some idea what I’m talking about three times out of ten.
Nice to see you back and, um, not blogging.
But honestly, why do nations fight? Resources.
I try to recall a war that was waged definitely for resources. Was it World War I? Definitely not. Was it World war II? Nope, the Germans did not actually need more Lebensraum. Is this Iraq war for oil or other resources? Hmmm, the Iraq input only collapsed. What resources were sought in Vietnam, or by Napoleon? The “great” leaders really sought resources only when they ran out of them and were barely able to continue their fights. A far more efficient way to achieve wealth and abundant resources is trade.
What is war then anyway? You can look this way: there are two basic means to make a living for a tribe on this Earth. One way is hard work. The other way is robbing. War is frequently nothing but living on robbery. Look at Tchengis Hahn: what he was doing was “harvesting” the tribes of Central Asia, Russ, etc. At some point, making war is just as hard work as not making war. And at certain modern extremes (of carpet and nuclear bombings), that is just a criminal madness. You do not win any resources by burning villages and levelling cities.
Not really sure how fusion energy would spawn new weapons. We have had fusion weapons since the 1952 test of the hydrogen bomb.
On the other hand, a practically unlimited source of emissions-free electricty would completely revolutionize the world in so many positive ways that we don’t have time to list them.
The Law of Unintended Consequences has a corollary: any time you introduce a new technology, people are going to put it to use doing things you didn’t expect. The car led to drive-in movies and making out in places where parents aren’t watching. The iPod leads to podcasting and combines with file sharing to create an upheaval in entertainment.
You can bet that if there’s a source of limitless, cheap energy someone is going to use it to do something we didn’t expect, and maybe didn’t like. I just hope we can catch Magneto before he uses this reactor to taser all of Philadelphia, or whatever it turns out to be.
(I just asked my daughter, “Quick! Who’s the world’s most famous supervillain?” Without even looking up from what she was doing she replied, “George Bush.”)
This is true, you can never underestimate human cruelty. As a bit of a tech geek, I’ve been thinking of the most harmful possible uses of plentiful electricty and I guess making laser weapons more feasible is the biggest one I came up with. It would probably also make suburbs even more possible, leading to further urban decay. The thing with fusion power is that it’s just a new way to generate electricty, something that we have been doing for over a hundred years through a variety of other means. From what I have read about fusion energy, the methods that have been imagined so far seem relatively benign in terms of environmental impact or potential weaponization. But you’re right to point out that people have probably said that about countless inventions in world history.
…just a new way to generate electricity…
Yes, but in a sense it’s even more ordinary: just new way to boil water, like a coal-fired power plant but without the coal.
Indeed, nuclear fussion was a thing that destructive application was found very fast, while useful application is still eluding.
How much should we be scared of the fusion Pandora box? The Earth or anything on it can already be destroyed by available means multiple times – the bad guys have no need for something more terrible, actually. Did you notice their interest? I think that throughout civilisation people have learned a lot how to compete, strugle, exploit, destroy. But we might have learned not so much how to create and cooperate – we may know very little of what we might know here. Nuclear fusion might be one of the wonder things for more creativity and vast opportunities. The opportunities might be bounded only by an uncertain collective psyche, doubtful of good will continuation and afraid of overkill evils. Technology does not collapse civilisations – blind greed does.
As was said, this would be opening Pandora’s Box.
But considering the collapse of civilization we are facing with environmental problems and resource depletion–and the horrors that are bound ensue–a technology that might mitigate it cannot be dismissed out of hand.
If it works, it might finally kill off that Great Undead–the nuclear fission industry–with so many people now wanting to build new fission plants (and poison the Earth forever), just to buy a few years of self-indulgence.
Even if fusion machines become radioactive from use (a real possibility) they would be better than plants that become hot AND create vast amounts of undisposable waste.
But you are right: We have not even begun to imagine the possibilities for misuse.
Another worry: If these machines work, but are very hard to build, they will fix the current technical and economic centralization. Freedom and democracy will disappear forever–though it would perhaps not be as bad as the proposed Plutonium Economy which can only be run as a fascist terror state.
I haven’t looked at the claims or the “agreement” on how the research was to be presented, but something doesn’t sound right.
The way scientific research works is that someone does the research and then publishes the results in a refereed journal. The referees are (usually) three people in the field who review the paper (anonymously to the author) and provide feedback if revisions are needed or accept or reject the paper. In a highly competitive journal like “Physical Review” as many as 50% of the papers may be rejected. Many of these authors then resubmit to a less prestigious journal.
There are times when publication may be delayed or not done at all. This is common in the drug industry for competitive reasons, also when a patent is planned since prior announcement could damage the patent application. These cases tend to apply less to physics which there usually isn’t a product anticipated.
If the work was done under a government contract and was classified then there would also be no publication in the open literature, but there are mechanisms for distribution to others also working on the same classified areas. The fact that the work is being discussed would seem to indicate that it was not classified.
Many times the lack of peer-reviewed papers indicates weak science. The cold fusion case was a good example. I have no idea what the facts are in this instance, but one should take the lack of a scientific publication trail as a warning flag.
As for fusion in general, I’ve been proposing a Manhattan project-style effort for several years. There have been some interesting results in small scale fusion using high electric fields as well as sono-cavitation which can be done on a table top. My plan would be to ramp up the worldwide funding level to about $300 billion per year. Various review committees would review dozens (hundreds?) of potential projects and fund the most promising. Even if 99% failed, we only need one winner.
The cost is easily affordable. The US has spent this much on Iraq.
[For the record, I’m a retired physicist, but fusion wasn’t my area.]
Like your funding ideas. Seems to me Europe and Asia have taken the lead in science R & D, while we are fighting for slogans like a “New American Century.”
The lack of peer review publication is troubling. He discusses it openly. If my memory of the lecture serves, I believe he intends to publish. He has been listed to present the evidence at an international conference. And he has pattened some of the process. He indicates that the government contract discouraged publication, but does not go into details about classification, or whatever.
I think a fair way to proceed would be to round-up enough private financing for the $2-3 million prototype and peer review to follow to ensure the technology works. Then fund the rest.
I totally agree, a short burst of intense research would likely bring so many spin-offs that it would end up being at bare minimum a revenue-neutral proposition. The benefits of perfecting technology like fusion energy would leapfrog the US past other nations like Germany and Japan who have become leaders in wind and solar.
Yes, it certainly hasn’t had the kind of disclosure and review that would make me comfortable.
BTW, I’ve made some very negative remarks about the prospects for fusion power. I’d like to qualify these — what I’ve been reacting to is the tokamak and inertial confinement approaches. A very different approach would have to be evaluated on its own merits, so I should perhaps have criticised not “fusion” but something more like “the fusion approaches now getting serious funding”.
Have you considered putting up a link at European Tribune?
The folks there are very keen on energy issues and might be interested.
I’m not a member. And I’m not even sure I can post there, but I’d be happy if you would take any info they might appreciate, and take it to the European pond people. Frogs mostly, I bet.
I want to go to Europe. Extended vacation. Or permanent residency. And if I do — I’ll become a member of the Euro Trib for sure.
I pasted your diary entire, plus a few bracketed editorial additions and links re-inserted, into a diary at European Tribune.
Becoming a member there is no different than becoming a member here–same software! If I remember right, it takes the better part of a day to receive the e-mail confirmation and password code that actually lets you on.
Nearly half the regular posters at ET are American. Prominent nationalities (not in order) include French, Spanish, British, Hungarian, Serbian, Norwegian, Swede, German, and nationalized Finn.
Migeru posted a comment to the diary:
String Theorist Luboš Motl writes about Bussard’s lecture in his blog. No earth-shattering physics insights in his commentary, though.
Motl has a good, lucid summary of Bussard’s design. Sadly, he does not weigh in on feasibility.
Implicitly, though, he does NOT consider it a crank or crackpot sceme.
Link to Motl in comment below:
Here is the link to the summary on Motl’s blog of Sun 19 Nov ’06 titled “ITER’s competitor–IEC fusion.”
IEC stands for inertial electrostatic confinement.
There is another alternative worth considering,IMO.
As Biologists have recently established, it is possible for mice to live longer,healthier lives if they reduce their caloric intakes.
That leads me to think that if we, as a nation reduce our collective caloric intakes ,i.e Energy Consumption, we might be able to dispense with esoteric means like Plasma Fusion Generators to sustain a high enregy intensive lifestyle.
Seems intuitive to me.But then, our scientists find solutions to problems presented to them. Like the pollsters, no one asks them if it was possible for us to have an alternate lifestyle that dispenses with the need for huge amounts of energy.May be that is the right question to pose to men like Bussard.