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Should Google Go Nuclear?
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."
If Google pursues this, I don't think they'll do so for financial reasons, but rather for PR reasons (just like they used the installation of a relatively large solar capacity as PR). But nowadays $200 Million isn't that much to Google, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them support the effort to some extent.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
I watched the google video link of the presentation for a bit to just be sure - and - he does say fusion. I thought that fusion was perpetually 20 years off? If it's fusion, this will be the most important breakthrough in decades. Clean power without all that nasty global warming consequences.
Shh.
" The Bussard ramjet method of spacecraft propulsion was proposed in 1960 by the physicist Robert W. Bussard and popularized by Carl Sagan in the television series and subsequent book Cosmos as a variant of a fusion rocket capable of fast interstellar spaceflight. It would use a large scoop (on the order of kilometers in diameter) to compress hydrogen from the interstellar medium and fuse it. This mass would then form the exhaust of a rocket to accelerate the ramjet." - from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
My friend's father is one of the guys responsible for Bussard's (now-dwindling) Navy funding. The few million he got for his first reactors came from them. From what I've heard from him, Bussard is really onto something with his devices. Now, I've never met him myself, nor do I have enough physics under my belt yet to be able to critique the device, but it does sound pretty reasonable.
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 $200m?
The Bussard Ramjet is one of the finest pieces of Pseudo scientific speculation ever dreamed of and integrated into Science Fiction works. It is simple and elegant in concept, a machine that in theory would make interstellar travel easier than ever, but in reality unworkable. The Bussard Ramjet is a dream that cannot be.
Mr. Bussard is a dreamer, and his ideas are beautiful; Star Trek has named a large component of its star ships after Bussard. His fertile imagination leads to great science fiction. Even the Great Carl Sagan was inspired by the beautiful mind of Bussard the dreamer.
I too like Mr. Bussard a great deal, and respect and admire his numerous contributions to our culture and to science fiction. However, it has become clear to me that Mr. Bussard no longer is the man he once was. He, most unfortunately, appears to have become senile, vindictive and single-minded to the point of blindness; read what he says, how he defends his project while attacking all other research constantly.
Mr. Bussard today has become a pseudo scientific hack, a charlatan if you will. He has become a quack who is attempting to prove the magical results of his form of fusion while all other scientists deny his conclusions, and he repeat "Give me 200M$!" as the sole refrain of his incessant groveling for cash.
It saddens me to see that Mr. Bussard has chosen to challenge James Randi and every scientific skeptic on earth. Mr. Bussard has never been able to reproduce any of his results in front of impartial peers, under controlled conditions. Read his letter on JREF, and see for yourself.
Mr. Bussard claims to have tested his device a few times and achieved success, but whenever he tried to test it under controlled conditions, it failed - and he blamed some obscure technical malfunction for this inability to achieve any measurable results. Then he says that only by having 200M$ can he show that his techniques work - he will not rebuild his original demonstration machine, nor allow anybody to do so.
According to Mr. Bussard, it is easy to test for the proper operation of his machine, hence confirming that scaling the machine up in a 200M$ version would produce lots and lots of energy. However, he refuses to construct such a workable prototype and have it tested by independent experts.
Read it for yourself and tell me this man is rational.
He is supposed to be the founder of a "Energy Matter Conversion Corporation", but I cannot find a website of the company. Are there still technology companies without a website out there? In this field? Physicists started the whole www.
What are the rules in the USofA regarding corporate nuclear reactors?
Actually it would be pretty interesting to hear about such laws in other countries as well.
Try making plastic, nylon, lubricants, jet-engine fuel from deuterium.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I have to mostly agree with this: Bussard's talking tactics were pretty sleazy. His distinctions between "physics" and "engineering" problems were largely vacuous, and he glossed over a lot of stuff. He sounded a lot like a crank in several places, not least when he threatened (repeatedly) to give the tech to China. Also, his spiel on what this machine would do if it worked is unnecessary: we all know that a high-efficiency fusion machine would change the world, but we need to be convinced that he can build one.
He also suggested that the panel to decide whether this is workable should consist mainly of his 70+year-old friends, which is pretty shady.
However, you're casting it in slightly too negative a light. It's reasonable to believe that a lot of the trouble toward the end was due to the lack of funding, and that funding is actually unattainable for bureaucratic reasons. Furthermore, the first step of his research would be to rebuild the original machine with better coils, and take very, very careful measurements of the thing. This was indended to take a year and cost a few million dollars, which sounds entirely reasonable. His point about building small models is that his equations show that only a large machine can be at all efficient, so building a quarter-size or half-size machine would prove nothing about the engineering side. Once he's proved the physics, he wants to move directly to a full-scale demo.
There is even some small amount of merit in his distinction between physics and engineering problems. You obviously need a huge power supply to run this thing. We know how to build such power supplies, but they cost money and he doesn't have money, so he's running it from a capacitor bank for half a millisecond at a time. We know how to build fast-response gas injectors, but he doesn't have those either, because they also cost money, so he's using slow ones. We know how to build megavolt standoffs, but they cost money... On the other hand, his spiel on how easy helium extraction is may be entirely bullshit. He claims they have a paper on it, so they've thought about it and it's probably not complete bullshit, but it's not a standard affair in the engineering community. I also don't believe him that arcing is an engineering problem.
He's also clearly not lying, at least not about whether the machine is possible, because we all know he'll get caught in the first stage and that's not the kind of legacy he's trying to leave. However, it's quite possible that he's hallucinating the data, or reading too much into it, or something, and he's clearly got a serious case of tunnel vision.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Also, oil companies are some of the ones leading the alternative energy charge, believe it or not.
This reminded me of one Native American method for buffalo hunting:
In this analogy, the oil companies "leading the alternative energy charge" are analogous to the young men getting the herd to follow them. The oil companies lead the charge away from the truly revolutionary breakthroughs, towards business models where they're still relevant.
I met a physicist some 4 years ago who was working on his doctorate, on Cold Fusion-style research. At the time said he'd have to modify one of his papers to acknowledge some tokamak-fusion research that'd just been published - the experiment turned out just like he thought it would, but he had to mention it. Just finished his doctorate a month or two ago...
Scientific revolutions come in waves. Right now we have the old-guard (established energy companies & rogue energy terrorists) fighting to suppress the coming paradigm shift. They'll lose eventually, and we'll all be better off.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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