While reading around I have gotten the most depressing news. What if the Chinese get there first? Or the Russians. There is a lot of technical stuff in the article and Dr. Bussard talks about why raising funds is so hard. Then he gets down to his current situation.
Bussard is getting discouraged.
"The [U.S.] government, I don't think, is going to do anything," he said.
So he has begun to look elsewhere. Last October he published a paper detailing his work for the 57th International Aeronautical Congress in Valencia, Spain. In it he named eight countries, including China, India, Russia and Venezuela, that "could logically develop interest" in his research.
In November, Bussard presented his work in a 90-minute lecture at the headquarters of the Internet search engine Google.
The lecture generated a lot of e-mail, but so far, no funding, Bussard said. His next effort may be a book-length publication detailing his fusion work.
Much as supporters Gay and Triola want to see Bussard's fusion work resume, they worry about the broadening appeal for funding.
"My concern is China," Gay said. "If they have more vision than we do, they could jump on it."
Triola shares the worry. "I think it's a matter of engineering now, not physics any more. Once Bussard gets enough publicity, one of our not-so-friendly allies, probably the Chinese, will go do it."
It will all depend on who owns the patents.
Current grid structures with no magnetic shielding are about 98% transparent. Dr. Bussard says he has improved that by a factor of 100,000. That would make the losses in the range of 2E-6 much better than the expected requirement of 1E-4 or 1E-5.
The critical thing to do now is to go ahead with the low power pulsed experiments with better instrumentation to verify the results and if that proves out go whole hog. Dr Bussard says that the full scale reactor will take 4 to 5 years to design and build. However, if a full scale reactor was run in a short pulse mode. Say 1 millisecond pulses once a second. Copper coils could probably do the job and test out the full scale reactor while the superconducting coils for actual power production were being contracted for and fabricated.
For a 100MW reactor operating in a 1 millisecond per second pulsed mode the total power involved would be about 100 KW. Very tolerable for a system designed for full load operation at 100MW.
Such a program would allow for faster evaluation and design changes before every thing is completed.
It might allow for a full scale proof in much less than 5 years and possibly reduce the cost to $20 million to $50 million instead of the $200 million required to build a power plant. Once we know what to do we can pour on the coal (so to speak ) with higher cost but much lower risk.
That is the big deal for every business. Managing risk.
Cheap and low cost energy does change all of the equations on what is and is not viable... just remember that as a crony capitalist system heading towards fascism, China can get scads of energy and *still* collapse. It is not an energy problem they face, but an internal systemic collapse as there is no incentive to get high efficiency equipment in. China does not see the value in its people as a multilpier of activity, and so productivity remains stagnant. In the west productivity is king, and anything that offers more flexibility and capability to individuals to be more productive is multiplied by their productivity factor.
The US, in particular, has been advancing in that realm faster than every other Nation on the planet for decades and that continues unabated. America transferring off the hydrocarbon energy base with more efficient energy production then multiplies its productivity and capability by its productive population. And as new devices and capability spread out into the population then entire Nation increases that by many fold.
Remember that Russia got to space *first*. Didn't help them much as they didn't have the economy to properly deal with it. If China suddenly leaps forward and gets a 1950's economy, remember that the US starts at a 21st century economy and takes a huge leap forward as such things as riding lasers into orbit become feasible. Knock the energy cost to orbit under $1,000/lb and suddenly you have a whole Nation looking up and out for *themselves* if they want to go. China does not have the infrastructure for that... the US and Japan *do*.
It is time to leave Rock 3 and head out from the cradle. That must be the goal for humanity: leave this place before the next mass extinction. If we can get cheap energy, then that day comes forward fast... very fast. Blindingly fast. China might get some nice bits and pieces, but the US and Japan as Nations will step forward. It isn't the energy question in China, its the infrastructure. They don't have it.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
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Should be:
... ">Bussard Fusion Reactor ...