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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.
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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"
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I wonder if it'll have an "I feel lucky" button...
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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?
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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Oh this is a bad idea - when skyn^H^H Google becomes fully self-aware - it's going to have it's own incredible power source?!
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Yes. If $20 billion made a real fusion project, every oil company would be killing each other to get in on it. The ROI on that project is immense, and their shares and options would go through the roof. Not to mention the positive publicity...
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In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion."
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(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!
Oh get off it. First of all, oil companies are already quite secure in their profits. Oil's used for a hell of a lot more than just electricity. Everything plastic, for example.
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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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.
That's great, but we're not talking about purely hypothetical space propulsion mechanisms from 40 years ago. What does the Bussard Ramjet, hypothetical musings from 40 years ago, have to do with this story today? Nothing. They share fusion, but that in name only. And what of it that science fiction has appropriated his name? And that's before you launch into your tirade of name calling. When you do reference reality, you distort it and cast it in the worst possible light. To characterize the history of his research as "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," is distortion.
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.
Soo... there's the old adage that big claims need big evidence, and Bussard currently has rather an excess of one and a lack of the other. but for someone who chooses to discredit him for not being a bit short on concrete, verifiable data, your post itself is completely science free. In a discussion that is entirely dependant on science (his last prototype's malfunction is unfortunate and perhaps suspicious, but is by no means proof of hackery), I don't understand why people find what amounts to an emotional evaluation of his work useful.
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.
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If you want to prove that you're not full of it why not rebuild the last machine you built, which would be relatively cheap, to recreate the results you got the day before you had to close the labs down?
- Well the $200M will build ones which will be 50x better, one of them will be a dodecahedron.
Why is no-one funding you?
- No-one thinks outside the box. If you let me choose who goes on the panel who gets to decide whether it's worthwhile I'll pick some people who can think outside the box. There are lots of people in China and other countries who can think outside the box, and if I don't get funding here in America I'll give my patents to China for free and you wouldn't want that. (I'm not making this up, he literally threatened the audience with giving the tech to China for free)
How do you get the helium waste products out?
- We have a grid on the outside which lets the helium slowly come to a stop, we haven't tried this yet but it's an engineering problem. There are also serious problems with arcing due to the high voltages, but these are merely engineering problems not physics problems.
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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.
See the p-B^11 fuel cycle, too.
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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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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