Should Google Go Nuclear? 419
Baldrson writes "One of the founders of the US Tokamak fusion program, Dr. Robert W. Bussard, gave a lecture at Google recently now appearing as a Google video titled 'Should Google Go Nuclear?'. In it, he presents his recent breakthrough electrostatic confinement fusion device which, he claims, produced several orders of magnitude higher fusion power than earlier electrostatic confinement devices. According to Bussard, it did so repeatably during several runs until it blew up due to mechanical stress degradation. He's looking for $200M funding, the first million or so of which goes to rebuilding a more robust demonstrator within the first year. He claims the scaling laws are so favorable that the initial full scale reactor would burn boron-11 — the cleanest fusion reaction otherwise unattainable. He has some fairly disturbing things to say in this video, as well as elsewhere, about the US fusion program which he co-founded."
Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just fusion. There's some fission involved too in the particular chain of reactions he wants to use. But it's fission of light elements, and Bussard claims it won't produce gamma rays or speeding neutrons.
In fact, pure fusion reactions do produce neutrons that go flying off and have to be captured, which means that they produce harmful radiation. The seeming lack of neutrons is what makes many very skeptical of cold fusion claims. But the reaction chain he proposes involves fusion and fission and produces no neutrons or gamma rays.
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple of things:
1. We already rely on large corporations for our power. What exactly would change?
2. I presume that the initial reactor at least would be intended to meet Google's growing demand for power. Nuts to the rest of us.
Re:Oil companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oil companies (Score:1, Insightful)
I will also point out that nuclear fusion isn't going to be a hundred percent clean process. There will be some radioactive by products. Just not anywhere on the scale of nuclear fission.
Re:Buttons (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually one of the biggest safety advantages of fusion of fission. With a fission reactor, loss of control or containment doesn't stop the fission reactions from occurring, since fission occurs naturally in Uranium, whereas with a fusion reactor, loss of containment or control stops the reaction, as fusion does not occur naturally in Deuterium or Tritium under terrestrial conditions.
Re:Oil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know enough to be able to evaluate the ideas. But from what I know of Tokamak research, it deserves every helping of scorn that he heaps upon it. It has been a ridiculously expensive failure. About as useful for advancing the cause of fusion power as string theory has been for advancing our understanding of physics.
This post of yours is very elegantly written and completely trashes Mr. Bussard. In its way, it's exactly the same level of attack as he levels against other fusion research.
In my mind, taking 1/20th of the budget allocated to 'traditional' fusion research and allocating it to weird fusion research seems like a very prudent investment. Especially when traditional fusion research has been promising results in 20 years for upwards of 40 years. Mr. Bussard wants 1/75th of the budget. Let him have it and see if he can produce something repeatable.
Re:Oil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not. Oil companies know even better than you do that their oil wells are not going to last forever, and they want to be ready when they do start drying up by already being leaders in the next power resource. They are generally not stupid nor abnormally immoral. They do want to make a buck, but they are good at thinking long-term.
(Note: I am talking about most large oil companies other than Exxon/Mobil. Those guys in particular seem a little on the retarded side.)
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:2, Insightful)
If anyone thought this was viable, he would be buried in funding. Google would have to take a number and wait in line.
Now, it's possible that he's right, and everyone else in the field is wrong, but the odds are against it, and he's still a nutcase.
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:3, Insightful)
If by "around my town" you instead meant "in the world", I direct your attention to the JET project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JET [wikipedia.org]
And it's (not yet build) follow up, ITER:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [wikipedia.org]
Both use the toroidal design. JET is even older than I am, and has already achieved fusion.
What we don't have yet is fusion power plants. But then again, that isn't what Bussard is proposing in TFA either; he (like all other fusion researchers) is still at the R&D stage. So, while I'm all in favor of giving this guy some funding to see what he can do, it isn't as if he's going to magically jump over the hurdles that fusion research has faced these past fifty years. Getting a fusion reaction to occur is damn hard; getting a self sufficient reaction to occur is still beyond our reach.
(Note: This says nothing of whether I think Bussard is a nut. I haven't seen enough compelling evidence for or against. Whether he is or not is irrelevant; what matters is if he can produce a repeatable fusion experiment that actually pans out.)
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
I just love it when people say "I dont know crap about x" - and then proceed to have an opinion on x anyhow, and act as if it should be taken as a valid one.
No - it's exactly *different* than Mr Bussard's attack, in that it lays out his specific failures and behaviors that trip the 'kook' flag. Whereas Mr Bussard's attack is nothing but mudflinging and blaming unspecified others in the goverment for not funding his research - even though he cannot (or will not) actually demonstrate he has something worth funding. (This is, in and of itself, reason to apply the 'kook' label.)
I just knew this petulant and ignorant whine would show up [whiny voice] But the promised, they did! They did![/whiny voice] Grow the fuck up - R&D isn't amenable to precise scheduling and prediction, especially when working at the frontiers of science and technology.
At best he deserves a couple of thousand for a few copies for a paper ready to be submitted for peer review. Demanding money, and refusing to supply the data required to determine what that funding is to be used for is ludicrous.
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
Although the Slashdot moderators appear to have found your handwaving and strawman rather clever.
If you do not find at least plausible his explanation of a hold on publishing and loss of funding due to alternative energy research being cut from the Navy budget due to spending pressures on R&D coinciding with the Iraq war, without evidence to the contrary, you are simply unreasonable. Do you really believe, having provided no evidence to this effect, that this man is attempting to swindle potential investors out of $200 million? This borders on libel.
You imply Bussard is engaging in deception, yet you offer no evidence of this other than handwaving and your science fiction strawman. Do you assume everyone is attempting to deceive you until proven otherwise in a controlled experiment? Did you even watch the presentation of the story you are commenting on? I doubt it.
What are these "results" you claim he purports to have found but can't reproduce? The claims he makes of his tests are not remarkable. You appear to present the issue in a purposefully antagonistic manner. He does not, to my knowledge, claim to have demonstrated a fusion device that would be capable of producing greater useable energy than is required to power it. And in this sense, there is nothing remarkable about what he claims to have found in his results. Certainly nothing paranormal.
And what on earth should Randi have to do with this? Randi is an excellent foil for psychics and dowsers, but he is not a physicist.
And he is not asking for $200 million for himself or his company. If this is the form funding to see these tests realize took, he would accept this, but as he says, he is an old man and is tired. He only wants to see his vision realized, even if that means it is carried out by another company or by another country.
And infact in the proposal he presents, the first step involves only $2 million, and is intended to reproduce the results of earlier tests in an environment where engineering, and lab control and instrumentation are fully funded in order to improve the reliabilitty of the results. This is more than the paltry prize offered by Randi. Although I fail, again, to see why Randi would have any interest in verifying unremarkable claims of nuclear fusion.
This is not some nut playing with magnets and tesla coils in his garage.
Re:IECs (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't in the ATX Power supply manufacturing busininess either, but that didn't stop them designing a new one.
Hi its me, the pot (Score:4, Insightful)
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody outside of science fiction writers and science reporters in the press said that fusion was going to be easy. It's been clear from the get-go that it's an incredibly hard field to develop. What was said by the people in the field was along the lines of "if we start seriously working on this now, it'll pay off in a matter of decades". Had we actually put the money in at the time, we'd be further along today.
But we didn't. Those "huge budgets" that people claim fusion sucks up? They're a pittance, and in almost all cases, the cost is spread among several nations. Expressed as a fraction of those countries' annual budget, fusion R&D is a minor expense. Moreover, political bickering (the bane of any multi-national project) has gotten in the way more than once, most recently with the question of where to build the ITER project.
Simply put, we're barely trying, and given how monumentally hard it is to build a working fusion reactor, that minimal effort has had predictable results. Saying "X years ago, they said we'd have fusion" assumes that R&D happens magically, without any human element.
Nothing to fear, Chevron's here! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would the company leadership care anyway? It's not like they're going to be there when oil becomes unprofitable (Which is long after it becomes scare, for obvious reasons I hope, it becomes more profitable before it becomes less). Don't believe the damn ads. No company, is planning 20 years into the future, particularly not an american company. When they start spending 3 and 5 billion dollars, that will be the indication that they actually care. Until then, its just money to get people like you to like them.
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:4, Insightful)
You are obviously not a researcher and have never attempted to get research funding.
If you have something that you can prove will work, to a layman, you'll still have to fight for funding. If you can't prove ahead of time that your experiment will be a success, buy a lottery ticket instead. Better odds.
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
James Randi is not a trained diviner, psychic oder medium either. In order to assess the question, if something works, it is not necessary to understand how it works. If Bussard won't indeed produce any verifiable experiments then he's just not doing science.
not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
You might be right tough that he is a kook as I did not hear him addres the biggest problem with IEC: bremsstrahlung. Every time you have to accelerate a ion it will leak some radiation in the form of bremsstarahlung (braking radiation). The ions you want to fuse each have to pass the center of the well a couple of thousand times (depending on density and temperature) just to have the chance to meet another ion close enough for fusion to occur. Pump more energy into it, and more radiation leaks away and you will never be able to break even.
The other thing that is fishy is the strange reason he gave why they did not publish for 11 years. If you don't publish essentially you are not doing science, even after the embargo they did not release the floodgates and publish all the articles they had written over time but could not publish. He is promising a 100+ paper, but appearantly it is not ready yet. WTF? you had 11 for that and one year you knew for certain what situation you'd be in now. On october 1 they sould not have been doing last minute experiments, but been submitting all their articles to every journal respectable enough. They would have had a much better chance to get funding with a couple of influential papers to their name. In science it's publish or perish, and they chose not to publish.
The other countries threat is hollow too: if they had really cared about the subject, they would have had no problem moving to another country just to keep their lab going. He is still here...
Re:Pseudoscience (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it isn't. But I regard with great suspicion anybody involved in mainstream fusion research who doesn't want anybody to pursue anything else. Tunnel vision happens everywhere. And while it seems that Mr. Bussard may suffer from it, I have no doubt that people who have their entire careers wrapped up in magnetic confinement have it even worse.
If the original poster had given even a shred of a reason why the idea wouldn't work, especially if (s)he gave a pointer or to to some pages describing why it wouldn't work in detail, I'd be all impressed and credulous. As it is, Mr. Bussards idea of confinement with electric forces doesn't seem particularly ridiculous to me, and it seems like it deserves to be on an equal footing for funding.
I stand by my claim that the original poster engaged in exactly the same kind of mudflinging and ad-hominem attack that Mr. Bussard did and from the shield of 'Anonymous Coward' no less. Neither of them deserve any respect for engaging in such attacks, though I submit that the anonymous coward was being much nastier for trashing an individual rather than an idea. But I also see no evidence presented that his idea stands a lower chance of working than the magnetic confinement ideas that have been being pursued for all these years.
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd even go so far as to say that cheap energy for all would save the world. I'm not normally a doom and gloom kinda guy, but it seems to me that the path we're headed on right now leads to civilization breaking down.
With cheap and bountiful energy, the US would care a whole lot less about what's happening in places with oil. And in turn those places would care a whole lot less about the US. Many parts of the world could be made to be much more pleasant places to live, and the general cost of getting things done plummets.
Right now there are many, many people in the world who are extraordinarily unhappy with things as they are, and would take down civilization if they could. They lack only the means, not the motive. Eventually, and inevitably, the means will become more and more accessible. Suicide bombers, for instance, are an expensive weapon. They work only once, at most, and are difficult to cultivate. Recently there was a story of Israel wishing to develop a lethal insect-sized robot. While not practical today, sooner or later it will be. And not long after that, cheap enough and available enough to use in place of suicide bombers. At that point the equation changes, and destabilizing society on a larger scale becomes much easier to do.
The only way to save the world is not through force, but rather improving the lives of everyone, everywhere. And nothing would take anywhere near as large a stride towards that end as cheap and plentiful energy for all.
The way to stop terrorism is not by spending a trillion dollars killing people, but rather spending that money on figuring out how to make things better.
Re:not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
He did point out the French for e.g. did not believe him. He said that many thought that if his tech was so good, why didn't the US Government fund it? I think when he says it will be invented somewhere if not in the USA, he is talking about it long term. I do not believe he was threatening, just that he sees the development of fusion in this way as inevitable, I think he truly believes this is the only way of doing it in a way that can prove economical.
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, high density power sources may open up new lines of weaponry (directed energy, magnetic propelled projectiles, ionizing plasma for destroying biomass like humans), and even new defenses against nuclear weapons (which would make them more likely to be used).
Also, I doubt that whoever discovers this "free energy for all" would dare to allow all to have it, much less for free. It is such a powerful economic advantage that any country with that technology would far surpass the rest of the world, resulting in more inequality, not less. With ridiculous amounts of free energy, we could afford to mine/assemble everything here and be nice and isolationist. Who knows, maybe wars will be fought over this technology? Those in power are often reluctant to give it up...
I'd like to see fusion power get to the point where it's a useful substitute, but you should be very careful what you wish for. "With great power comes great responsibility" they say, and if mankind has proven anything over the least fifty thousand years, it is that it is anything but responsible.