Bussard Gets Navy Funding For Fusion Research

UnreasonableMan writes to let us know that Robert Bussard, the fusion researcher whose talk at Google was discussed here a few months back, has won continued funding from the Navy. The word on this spread from Kent Brewster at the Speculations blog, who reportedly had the word from Bussard himself. (The link is to another blog that reproduces Brewster's post, because Speculations has no permalink.)

Comments

Re:Tom Ligon (ex-colleague from Bussard) disagrees

[XNormal]

IIUC, this means Bussard won't be getting any new money for now but the money already allocated for the project will resume flowing.

Note that the $200 million number is for Phase 2 (full scale 100 MW reactor). Phase 1 (validate and review WB-6 results) was estimated at $3-5 million so "two orders of magnitude below $200 million" is in the ballbark.

Re:More info

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean, cheap power... what the nuclear age has so long promised but failed to deliver. Oink oink, flap flap.

A big if...

[Flying pig]

It's interesting how every new energy generating technology that doesn't actually work yet "could" be running in a 10 year time frame, but it never happens. I suspect the world was seduced by the fact that conventional nuclear energy did get up and running fairly quickly - because nobody knew about the dangers at that time, and because the principle of getting a load of radionucleides to get hot and boil a steam kettle wasn't exactly rocket science. Since then we've had fuel cells (over 50 years old and nowhere near large scale commercialisation, plus there may well not be enough catalyst in the world to make it feasible), wave power, bioethanol (fine until you want to power a first world economy) and hydrogen, which might come good in 30-40 years time. Peoppe have been taken in: Mercedes built (in Europe) a small car platform designed to accomodate either fuel cells or efficient batteries, but it's unlikely to happen in the platform's lifetime.

Even wind power, which has been around in rotary form for over 1000 years, is proving slower to adopt than expected. Wind power is very conventional technology, but scaling up is quite hard and taking a lot more than 10 years.

So here we have a process based on a rareish isotope of boron, which will require major engineering developments just in the delivery and manufacturing system alone, along with a novel method of extracting power which has never been used on a commercial scale. A bit different from piling fuel rods and boiling water.

Being practical, let's say three new technologies to be industrially scaled along with the infrastructure, regulatory and planning issues and call it at least 50 years to real commercialisation. It's unsurprising, given the need for real energy output contribution by, say, 2030, that this is not likely to get much funding.

Re:See the device in action

[Ihlosi]

I can't believe the gov't doesn't just immediately fund the full-scale reactor,

I can't believe any government that has $200M to spare doesn't immediately throw the money at the guy.

Heck. I can't believe any corporation that has $200M to spare doesn't do it. $200M for what amounts to the license to print money ?

Re:More info

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not possible that people "walked out" because they had other scheduled work to do?

Re:Paul Allen Knows Something More...

[holomorph]

Paul Allen's science advisors don't necessarily know enough about fusion to be capable of evaluating whether or not Tri-Alpha's scheme will work or not. Even the guys at Tri-Alpha know it probably won't, but it might, and the investors (including Paul Allen) are aware that it is a very high risk investment, but they have enough money that they feel it is still worthwhile. After all, if someone does come up with a workable fusion power machine those that funded it stand to make a lot of money.