Fusion We Can Believe In

Just tell me if it's clean.

Well it can be any worse than the Tokomak technology that seems to be in vogue. Although I won't say Tokomak won't work it has some serious design problems.

1. Produces a high energy Neutron, instead of a nice slow burn.

2. Energy required to contain particles.

Bussard's Presentation on His Polywell Fusion Reactor

I've been using a low key small scale process with significant cost savings for quite some time now. It's called the:

"Use less more efficiently" non-cornucopian energy conservation scale.

It runs on technology thats driven by the low tech "needs" based method of propulsion as opposed to the high tech "wants" based method with its huge environmmental risk profile, so I can vouch for my little system which I believe is within everyones reach cost wise.

For the next decade or so that will be the best system. I use it as much as possible. House at 57 degrees, walking, biking, gardening, essentials only... etc.

In the decade after that, there will be severe belt tightening and no energy source or system regardless of how exotic or futuristic will make much of a difference.

I wouldn't want thermonuclear fusion to be viable anytime soon... it is highly unnatural (i.e no organism uses it vs. good old hydrogen fuel cell that has existed since the dawn of Life on the planet) and would only compound problems of overpopulation and destruction of the environment.

Humankind has to first control its primitive and animalistic instincts and learn to use strength of will to deal with problems.

How are you planning to go about preventing humankind from gaining access to fusion power? I don't think there's ever been a technology humankind has not pursued regardless of shrieks of protest that "we aren't ready". The only thing I can think of is human cloning and that's only a matter of time.

That's just like saying the sun is unnatural.
Something like this does have potential, although I would have to see it to believe it.

But the question when it comes to future applications is how well does this scale up? If it can't, that's actually OK, since tokamaks can't scale down very well. It is entirely possible they could compliment eachother.

Fusion reactions without the requisite mass to generate enough gravity to start it is what's unnatural. That's why fusion has been so impossible. You can't even start fusion with a ball of gas the size of Jupiter and we want to artifically squeeze hydrogen together in a reactor the size of a house? Not easy.

Isn't the squeezing and the starting of the reaction is easy enough? Controlling what happens when you do is the challenge.

Actually that is not neccesarily the case at all.

If polywell works, and they can even get the boron reaction working (boron is an extremely common element, and all reactants and products of this reaction are completely unradioactive) on a large scale, electricity could essentially become cheap.

On the talk polywell forums (google it) there is a board called "ramifications". One of them is that with unlimited economically free energy, very high-tech recycling methods can be used that literally burns waste down into its component elements to be collected and re-used. We currently have labour-intensive and health-hazardous processes to recycle e-waste to get the gold, silver, platinum and other metals out, but with economically free energy this technique could be used on pretty much any metal at all with much higher recovery rates and lower pollution.

Then, not to mention that many more environmental programs will become more economically feasible on a platform of cheap energy.

That's not even considering all the coal and fuel oil power plants that will be put out of business, should polywell prove to be everything that Bussard hoped for.

Hence "electrostatic confinement"!
holoscience.com

I agree...to doom the human race to extinction by making the planet uninhabitable through our wanton consumption.

Fusion Power; Blessing or Curse

True it isn't easy, but there have been major advances the last 20 years. A big problem has been our lack of (relatively) high temperature superconductors, which didn't come about until recently. Plus there were also issues with controlling the plasma, and other such things.

There is no such thing as 'economically free energy' for a couple reasons, not the least of which is if nobody from the government on down profits from it then nobody is going to be building it out of the goodenss of their hearts. The closest Humanity ever came to free energy was $3.00/bbl oil in the 1960's. It has been getting more expensive ever since then and I see no reason to expect the long term trend to end just because of the current short term blip we are experiencing.