continued...

The Promise of a Small Blue Star

Controlled fusion is already yielding to diligence and genius on a broad front. At the University of Wisconsin’s Applied Physics Department, Garden Earth Enterprise’s Monica Rix Paxson and Stephen Corrick and I witnessed the operation of a device called an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion system. It consisted of three concentric mesh spheres charged to high voltage in a vacuum chamber. When it was turned on a small pale blue star of sustained plasma formed in the exact center of the spheres. The pale blue star began to produce fusion power and was soon cooking along with millions of fusion reactions a second. It ran silently and smoothly. The whole device could not have cost more than thirty thousand dollars and consumed no more power than a color TV set.

Truly it is a long way from this simple device to a device producing net power, but let no one tell you that controlled fusion power cannot be released cheaply and simply. We have seen it. Other methods will also be found. Ultimately fusion will be mastered and widely used and have as many forms as chemical combustion does now.

Fusion, because of its difficult and technical nature will require large sums of time, money and effort (we estimate 24 billion dollars over ten years) to deliver power to the electric grid. By contrast, America spent 100 billion over five years to crush the Y2K bug. That is what an enormous, rich and capable nation does when it decides it must to something. We think the time has now arrived to place fusion power on the table as an option to stop global warming. We hope that you will agree.

Recycling of the Highest Order

When fusion reactors were first attempted, the machinery spread over many thousands of square meters. However, the latest fusion technology, including that at the University of Wisconsin, our own experiments with gravity and microwaves to trigger fusion and the laser initiated fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories all take place in an area not much bigger than a large desk. The implication is that commercial fusion reactors will be small enough to be dropped into the containment vessels of retrofitted fission plants and the boiler rooms of coal-fired plants. The existing turbines, electrical transmission equipment and wiring will be fully utilized allowing us to recycle our existing system to transmit clean electricity instead of dirty power.

A Bridge to the Other Side

The United States Congress passed a Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act (MFEE) in 1980 and then President Jimmy Carter signed it into law. The act committed this nation to a program to harness fusion in ten years. At the time, oil prices and supplies were being used by OPEC to throttle America’s economy. Soon after the MFEE Act was passed the price of oil dropped dramatically and a glut ensued. Since the prevailing attitude then became "What energy crisis?" the MFEE Act was then never funded; our bridge was built halfway and then abandoned.

With oil prices rising again 20 years later, we once again face our unsolved energy problem compounded now by global warming. Let us solve it this time once and for all. If Congress revives the MFEE Act, it can be predicted that OPEC will have an emergency meeting and the price of oil will be slashed within a month. But this should not dissuade us. We should press on and harness fusion this time. This will ensure that the price of oil will stay low until it is phased out.

Therefore, to make the transition to the new energy economy and to begin to reduce the effects of global warming, we really have only two choices to meet our high-end electrical needs: fission or fusion. Fission is the default solution, and one with potentially disastrous consequences. This is what we’ll get from living in denial until it’s almost too late and then grabbing desperately for easy options. So let us choose the light of the stars. Let us revive the MFEE Act and choose life.

By John E. Brandenburg, PhD

Co-author of Dead Mars, Dying Earth

for GardenEarth.com

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