"these machines are just going to be too big, and too costly" With the amount of money that we (America) will be selling this genius invention for (to other countries) will be enough to 1. Get us out of debt and 2. Enrich our country. There are too many positives to not act now. And besides, you all know China keeps everything under wraps, believe me when I tell you they are close if not closer to achieving fusion power than we are. So, let's get it together people, this is going to change the world right when we need it the most.
SPONSORED BY:
Could This Lump Power the Planet?
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
SPONSORED BY
If Moses is right, this may be the biggest technological breakthrough of the century. LIFE would produce energy with no carbon emissions, from a fuel that is cheap and abundant. One comparison fusion proponents like to use is that 10 gallons of water could produce as much energy as a supertanker of oil. We're talking about a solution to global warming, less dependence on foreign oil, and no more need to enrich uranium for nuclear fission—hence no uranium that could be further enriched to make nuclear weapons.
Fusion would be a disruptive technology like the Internet, touching every part of the economy. If the United States can be the first to commercialize fusion, we'll rule the market for green energy and create jobs for half a century as we build and sell power plants to the rest of the world. If someone else gets there first, we'll be buying our power plants from them. Fusion energy represents a potential solution to a looming crisis. The world's population is growing by about 100 million people each year. China and India now use much less energy per capita than we do, but as developing nations industrialize, demand for electricity will skyrocket. Add to that the likelihood that transportation will increasingly be powered by electricity, and we're faced with an insatiable demand. By 2030, global electricity generation will grow nearly 80 percent from 2006 levels, according to the World Resources Institute.
Power companies are already making the pilgrimage to Lawrence Livermore. "Utilities are looking at the future, and they do not have a story for how they're going to make carbon-free energy. Right now, renewables are difficult and expensive," Moses says. The good news is that in March of this year, when Moses and his team fired up the giant laser, they were able to produce more energy than anyone ever had before—just over a megajoule, which, Moses says, "was like breaking the four-minute mile." NIF fires the laser only a few times a day, and scientists are blasting capsules that contain just a tiny bit of deuterium and no tritium. The idea is to test the system and bring it up slowly. Moses says it's like getting behind a Ferrari for the first time; you go easy at first. In a few months NIF will move to a more potent fuel capsule that contains tritium and just a tiny bit of deuterium. By the fall of 2010 the team aims to start blasting capsules that contain the full dose of -deuterium-tritium fuel, and they will crank up the laser power to 1.4 megajoules.
If all goes well, by 2012 NIF will produce what Moses calls "a repeatable, re-liable platform." That means it will have worked out a system that utilities could use to start building prototype fusion re-actors. Moses distributes literature with ambitious timelines and even an artist's rendition of a commercial LIFE-engine power plant that looks as if it came from The Jetsons. As for the people who say NIF is a fiasco that will never work no matter how many billions of dollars are spent on it, Moses shrugs and says, "People live in a state of arrested development. They get stuck in one place. They say this can't be done because we couldn't do it in the 1960s. It's like saying we can't have cell phones because we couldn't do cell phones in the 1960s."
Of course, making fusion energy work will be a tad more difficult than making a cell phone. But if Moses and his team succeed, their creation will benefit virtually everyone on the planet. Even if NIF fails, that's a goal worth pursuing.
© 2009
Discuss