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To fuse or not to fuse… Reader ‘CountingCats’ reports that the next developmental stage of the Polywell fusion device has been funded.
Now let us cross our fingers, and perhaps the more religious among us do their thing, that the next scale up version continues to show positive results. If it does, then we will have plenty of cheap energy at the top, from small local power stations, as well as at the bottom.
God, this is an interesting time to be alive!
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Maybe this has been covered, but if fusion is that great then why hasn’t it been privately funded? Why is some rich investor – Elon Musk, for example – not in fusion?
Well that would require capital. Given that a war has been waged against the accumulation of capital in private hands for time immemorial it is difficult to get enough of it in one place at one time to take on some of these tasks. Things are only getting worse in this regard.
The other answer is that Polywell fusion is most likely a dry hole. I remember enough of my undergraduate fusion studies to believe that it is not a likely candidate for providing the big breakthrough. I don’t think any of the current methods will prove practical but there are certainly things like thorium reactors that would prove a good interim measure while we wait for fusion studies to mature. There are lots of companies who would invest in fission reactors were they only allowed to do so.
There are a few private projects dealing with Cold Fusion and “similar” technologies.
Next Big Future by Brian Wang have many articles about various projects:
http://nextbigfuture.com/
God, this is an interesting time to be alive!
All those curves we have seen in the past, the ones showing the exponential increases in human knowledge? Well, it looks to me as if we have gone past the curve, passed through the takeoff point, and are now on the arm trending upwards.
Times are just going to get more and more interesting, so long as the Luddites can be held at bay. And I think even they are on a hiding to nothing.
The more religious among us?
Well that depends which religion you’re talking about, I guess.
The environmentalists and the global-warming crowd (and they are certainly religions) won’t be hoping for this to work: the last thing they want is a cheap supply of clean energy.
They want to force us to regress back to the Stone Age; too much of this sort of thing and they’ll need to find a new excuse.
Ben Franklin: I doubt your undergraduate fusion studies even touched on IEF(Polywell). If Tokamaks and Laser inertial fusion don’t work, what are we left with for fusion as a future power source? The folks working on Polywell think they haven’t sen any show stoppers yet.