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."

Comments

Valuable as PR move more than anything?

[Salvance]

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.

Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything?

[AKAImBatman]

I hope you realize that there is a world of difference between a confinment fusion reactor and an Atomic triggered Hydrogen Bomb. One does not in any way, shape, or form imply the other.

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. :-/

Re:Valuable as PR move more than anything?

[Pharmboy]

?Not completely harmlessly, it would have the effect of a small dirty bomb when the materials in the fission trigger were powdered and spread.

If you bothered to WTFV (yes, it is an hour and a half...) then you would know they are talking about using Boron-11, which the waste products break down into all helium-4. Last time I checked, you can't make a dirty bomb out of helium, although you could make everyone talk funny. Sounds more like a Hank Scorpio plot...

This is one of the few kinds of technologies that you could share with any and everyone, AND would actually take away any reason for other countries to build breeder reactors. If Iran could choose between this and a fission breeder reactor that produces plutonium as a waste product, then their intentions would be clear by their choice. Either they wanted electrical power or bomb matierials.

Fusion?

[headkase]

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.

Yes, this is the ramjet guy

[Anonymous Coward]

" 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

IECs

[MadUndergrad]

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?

Re:Pseudoscience

[asuffield]

Getting a fusion reaction to occur is damn hard; getting a self sufficient reaction to occur is still beyond our reach.

Actually, you can get a self-sufficient reaction to work quite easily in a small lab rig. The hard part is combining "self-sufficient" with "multiple megawatts of power" and "cheaper than oil". You need all three at the same time before you've got a viable fusion power plant. JET was aimed at the second one. ITER's an attempt to get the first two to work at once. We still have to crack the third one - it's not enough to produce more power than you put in, you also have to produce more money than you put in. Converting expensive materials into cheap power is not practical in a capitalist economy, which is why the lab rigs are no use in the real world.

Oil companies defend the status quo

[nido]

Suppose technology developed to the point that the existing oil industry became irrelevant - free energy for all, with elegant, simple, low-cost fusion reactors in every neighborhood, and some sort of "cold-fusion" device powering every car. No more $100million nuclear fusion plants, no more need for gasoline or diesel. Would it not be in their best interest to muddy the water a bit, so to speak?

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:

To start the hunt, "Buffalo Runners", young men trained in animal behavior would entice the herd to follow them by imitating the bleating of a lost calf. As the buffalo moved closer to the drive lanes the hunters would circle behind and upwind of the herd and scare the animals by shouting and waving robes. As the buffalo stampeded towards the edge of the cliff, the animals in front would try to stop but the sheer weight of the herd pressing from behind would force the buffalo over the cliff.

-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.