An optimist's fusion power timetable, October 1971.
Fusion will be and needs to be achieved. But when? Its primary fuel, deuterium, exists in sufficient quantity to satisfy any conceivable energy demands for thousands of millions of years. The cost of obtaining it from water is less than one per cent the present cost of coal. Is fusion power a distant dream or a near-term possibility? The first applications could come in the 1980s. This report on progress in fusion research was adapted from physicist Richard F. Post’s presentation last April 26 to the National Academy of Sciences Symposium on “Energy for the Future.” Post is head of the magnetic mirror program in controlled thermonuclear research at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, California.
>Read more: Fusion power: The Uncertain Certainty
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The sales pitch for the holy grail dream of nuclear fusion energy electric power generation began with the initial experiments that began in the 1950s. Since then many dozens of machines have been built and experiments have been run on them. It’s likely that over $100-billion USD have been expended in the effort. Some of the researchers have become masters at snowing naive investors who have come to rely upon the experimenters for the investors ‘critical assessments.’ The sales pitchers have tended to omit key evaluation parameters while pitching misleading information. For example Richard F. Post stated the following. “Its primary fuel, deuterium, exists in sufficient quantity to satisfy any conceivable energy demands for thousands of millions of years.”
The most likely fuel needed is a 50/50 mix of deuterium and tritium isotopes. This has been well known since the 1950s. Tritium is extremely rare and radioactive. These are the reasons it has rarely been employed in the vast majority of the experimental machines. Currently its commercial price is about $30,000 per gram. The experimenters assume that the commercially practical reactors will generate their own tritium fuel once the technology is proven to be practical.
The quest for this new energy source continues to be driven by those who have become so immersed in the field that they have lost track of how dire our situation has become.
All promoters of nuclear energy are in line with the vast majority of the Earth’s 8.0+ billion humans who have masterfully excluded the following warnings from their consciousness. They continue to assume that we have at least 20 years left to turn this ‘Titanic’ around, through the use of their favorite technology. I urge readers to search for the following two article titles.
IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)
UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
* This statement was made 5.8 years ago.