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?

[Paradise Pete]

This is one of the few kinds of technologies that you could share with any and everyone

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.

Buttons

[Jedi Alec]

I wonder if it'll have an "I feel lucky" button...

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:IECs

[DrSkwid]

But they are in the power-consumption business, and plenty of it.

They aren't in the ATX Power supply manufacturing busininess either, but that didn't stop them designing a new one.

Re:Fusion?

[Omnifarious]

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.

Hostile Google AI Takeover?!

[OverDrive33]

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?!

Published Papers by Dr. Robert W. Bussard

[shanec]

For all the inquisitive types out there, here are a couple other references to Dr. Robert W. Bussard's work from the DOE perspective;

• An advanced fusion energy system for outer-planet space propulsion
• Design concepts for the interstellar ramjet

In addition, there are 101 references for "Electrostatic Confinement Fusion."

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! ;)

Fusion, but might actually work (cor!!)

[Richard Kirk]

I have worked a bit in nuclear and pulse power industries. I had never heard of this guy, though I had actually known about the ramjet. I have always had deep scepticism about nuclear fusion. It is touted as a clean source of power, but I knew that the traditional D-T fusion gives off this 14.5 MeV neutron and a powerful gamma. This is highly penetrating radiation, which will tend to make your whole plant radioactive. It could be stopped by 15 cm of Al, but it could also be stopped by a few mm of depleted uranium, which would then give out more energy. If you could build a fusion reactor, it might then make economic sense to shroud it in what is effectively a fast breeder reactor. Now a fast breeder aren't as dangerous as their stupid name suggests, but they aren't exactly clean consience-free energy either. Okay, that's where I come from. Now here is what I thought of the video.

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