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Should Google Go Nuclear?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Nov 18, 2006 03:23 AM
from the gooboom dept.
from the gooboom dept.
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."
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Bussard Gets Navy Funding For Fusion Research 146 comments
UnreasonableMan writes to let us know that Robert Bussard, the fusion researcher whose talk at Google was discussed here a few months back, has won continued funding from the Navy. The word on this spread from Kent Brewster at the Speculations blog, who reportedly had the word from Bussard himself. (The link is to another blog that reproduces Brewster's post, because Speculations has no permalink.)
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Dr. Bussard Passes Away, Polywell Fusion Continues 79 comments
Vinz writes "Dr Bussard, the man behind the Bussard Collector and inventor of the Polywell fusion device, passed away last Sunday in the morning. He leaves behind him a legacy of EM fusion devices, and a team determined to continue his efforts. The news of funding extension for the construction of his WB-7 fusion devices made it to slashdot months ago (as well as his talk at google). They may be a serious candidate in the run to bring commercial fusion, and may work at lower scales than other projects. Let's hope the project continues in good shape despite his departure."
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Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's pretty much the same with our current fission reactors. There is no way that the design of the reactors would ever blow up like an Atomic warhead, because the warheads are explicitly designed to go super-critical in a very particular fashion, with the intent of burning the maximum amount of fuel possible in the shortest period possible.
There are actually shaped charges on the outside of the weapon to trigger this event. These charges *must* be properly aligned, or the weapon will never reach super-criticality. That's why the heros in the movie The Peacemaker removed one of the charges from the weapon. Without it, the normal explosives would detonate harmlessly. (There is another type of bomb that slams two carefully shaped, barely sub-critical pieces of Uranium together REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard. Again, you have the same problem of the design having to be precise.)
About all you can get from a fission reactor is the raw materials to make a weapon. And even then, it's best if the reactor is configured to produce the materials you need. It's pretty much the same way with a fusion plant. You can use or produce materials useful in nuclear weapons, but the reactor will be nowhere close to a weapon itself. The key safety issue is thus to ensure that sufficient safeguards exist to prevent the release of any poisonous radioisotopes back into the environment. (If the fusion reaction is completely clean, then this isn't a concern.) We wouldn't want another Chernobyl, which happened mostly because there weren't sufficient safeguards, and the ones that existed had been explicitly disabled (with authorization!) by untrained personnel.
The irony? They wanted to test the reactor to see if it would fail properly without the safeguards installed. Guess they got their answer.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything? (Score:5, Funny)
Because it helps further mankind's patriarcic domination of Gaia. A better solution would be to live a life in tune with nature, where people only inhabit the fruited plains of Africa, just coming down from the trees to forage for fruit (that has dropped to the ground; it's wrong to tear plants apart) and being led by matriarchs who aren't repressed by body image or hygiene.
Technology is for people who haven't learned to hate being human. Don't they realize that life would be better if only innocent animals inhabited the earth?
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Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Alert (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I think that Google would be far more trustworthy with nuclear weapons than Iran or North Korea.
Obligatory science fiction refernce: Vernor Vinge's "The Ungoverned"
Re:Google Goes Nuclear; Microsoft's Pants=Brown Al (Score:5, Funny)
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Fusion? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Informative)
So 1) what's the fuel,
Boron.
2) what's the waste,
Carbon and helium.
3) what's the risk of a meltdown,
No risk of meltdown, china syndrome, or other runaway problems. The worst case would be a conventional explosion.
and 4) is any plutonium (or other weapons-grade material) produced?
No.
He talks a good physics snow job; glibly spicing his words with equations that provide a certain kind of high energy ambience without actually conveying any information to his audience. In his own way, he is quite the showman.
However it did seem to me that he is saying that the theory behind his fusor engines has been proven, and that he is staking his reputation on that. I'm also pretty sure he is saying that the remaining problems are in the engineering, not the physics. So its like rocketships: we know it can be done but we don't yet know how to do it well enough to be really useful.
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Fusion, but might actually work (cor!!) (Score:5, Informative)
Within minutes, he had pointed out that his reaction did not produce neutrons. He clearly knew this is a key issue. He described the basic geometries of fusion reaction. He made a nice, clear description of the random walk nature of tokomak fields, and why that meant some of the contents would always head for the walls. His explanations involved nice, clear numbers, like how many times the ion should go through the dense region before it collided. This isn't a popular science gloss-over - I am pretty sure you are getting the real deal here. He argued the need for a 1/r-type field to contain the ions, and why this is best done using electrons guided by coils. I have some familiarity with saddle-field ion sources - not the same thing, but similar enough to recognize what he was talking about.
For those of you familiar with Hollywood Science, 11 years of research with a load of failed designs may not seem like an investment. Actually, it showed a lot of steady progress, with many orders of magnitude improvement. The only faintly Hollywood bit was the final experiment, and that rang very true to me. The lab is being shut doown; the apparatus is going into storage. We may get to use it again, we may not. Why not turn the current supply all the way up? You can do it safely enough if you stand behind the filing cabinet. Oops, it fried. Oh well, we got some numbers anyway. Yup, that's what a lot of science is like. It is much slower and less dramatic then you would believe.
The 'wiffle ball' effect is really cute. He is working with plasmas. You have charged stuff zipping about in magnetic and electrostatic fields. Unfortunately, that stuff is itself charged, and because it is moving, it has its own magnetic field. This usually means the plasma can work out within microseconds what it is not supposed to do, and start hosepiping, or wiggling, or whatever it was that it shouldn't. Just occasionally, you can use this self-will to your advantage. The microwave magnetron is an example (particularly cute that he used one inside his experiment to keep the ionization up). Well, I would see that you could concentrale positive ions using negative electrons, but wouldn't they hit each other and neutralize all the time? Well - no they don't, because the electrons will make fast lanes through the slower moving ions.
He had worked on space engines. He is one of the mad atom smashers from the fifties. Okay, let's see how his proposal stacks up in traditional Mad Scientist terms. Usually a good Mad experiment involves at least two of (a) space, (b) H-bombs, (c) superconductivity, and (d) a small country. A mad experiment needs a budget that is a mere 10% of the US annual defence budget/spending of fossil fuels. And, usually there is the requirement for government funding to pay for the bits that won't make a profit. Some biofuel proposals get well into the Mad bracket. This project has clear aims and costs. It is not huge. You can build it. Either it will work or it won't. If it works, then we can put it into ships and conventional power stations. Project Plowshare it ain't.
The only thing I might say against is that this may be just
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Buttons (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Buttons (Score:4, Funny)
Ummm... can you explain the downside?
Soko
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IECs (Score:5, Interesting)
About the $200 mil, apparently the power output of these scales as something like the 7th or 9th power of the radius of the device (don't quote me on these numbers), so while the prototypes tested so far produce piddling amounts of power, not nearly break-even, they supposedly confirmed the principles, and the $200 mil model should be big enough to be power-positive. I really hope Google decides to sponsor this. I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
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.
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Hostile Google AI Takeover?! (Score:5, Funny)
Published Papers by Dr. Robert W. Bussard (Score:5, Informative)
In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion." [science.gov]
Shane ;)
(yes, I'm shamelessly publishing links to my servers for all the Slashdot community to hit. After all, they have to have some reason to keep me employed!
Re:Oil companies (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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