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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."
He needs two hundred dollars for some good lecture slides.
I found it totally incomprehensible. The only thing that makes it watchable is a kind of exasperation and disbelief in his voice at the large efforts of others which are "wrong". This is a bad sign. He's old, he only needs USD200m to get this thing to work, and it is based on research from the 1920s. Why hasn't it been realised yet? If he's waiting for new technology, then that's a Pandora's box.
If it can be done with bamboo leaves and snot then this lone wolf is right and all the tokomak (not just ITER, but also JET) people are wrong. Seems unlikely.
No 200M, don't pass Go.