Contemplations on the future of fusion (wrt"Japan Quake: Nuclear Plant Meltdown Fears").

[Chris Bradley]

"Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission said the plant may be experiencing meltdown."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20110312/twl ... d0ae9.html

I think such events polarise opinions into two camps, regarding fusion;

One camp thinks that all nuclear is bad, so best to keep on burnin' the black stuff until it all runs out, maybe with a few puffs of wind to eek it out. That condemns humanity to a few hundred years, thousand tops, as a globally-spread technological species.

The other recognises the limitations of fission power, its risks, decommissioning and the ultimately limited supply of U. But they do recognise the absolute necessity of nuclear power for the continued existence of techno-man, so see fusion as a modern 'holy-grail' - and it is, indeed, just that.

Some of us here are motivated by this situation. I do not suppose to suggest that any who are running amateur experiments actually think that one day they will be cutting the opening-ribbon to their new power station, but the last 5 decades have shown that the realisation of fusion power will be a matter viewed in the long-game, and time has already shown that no one person will be able to manipulate that game to their own view of how fusion history should look.

Amateurs who perform experimentation and report new findings will barely be given a second's attention by the mainstream of today who have fixated on one solution, but this is a historical saga we are in right now. Whatever nuclear solutions work out in the future will be as they are. For now, anyone 'tinkering' in new directions is doing so in a way that no-one can really yet say will not be significantly contributory to the future of mankind.

It is not only 'good' results that may paint this history: A well-honed and technically skilled experiment may yield a negative result that, in its way, might inform some future experiment not yet even contemplated. Or a basic, rough-and-ready test that ended with dubious measurements that look to be results on the wishful side of thinking might prompt some future in-depth investigation, or may even be held up in the future in its own right as a 'this-guy-had-the-right-idea' retrospective accolade. Such scenarios often do not appear to have an impact at the time, but history is not painted based on immediate impact alone. I'm talking about the long-game here, and the responses of individuals that all adds up to 'historical genesis', which is impossible to see in our myopic 'present-time'.

I do not mean to pass such grandiose sentiments on the 'future of mankind' so readily. It is, simply, that it seems to me to be self-evident that without viable and sustainable fusion power, there will be no 'future' that is capable of contemplating the 'historic' failure to gain fusion power. As such, those with the interest and the motivations I describe above may find themselves not merely minded to do so, but compelled to tinker and to see if they might find a bit-part in the stage-play extravaganza which is fusion power.

[David Geer]

I agree with you on this. From a technician's standpoint, a normal user/consumer doesn't care how it works as long as it works and doesn't really pay attention to normal good uses yet "freak out" on singular bad events. In the nuclear sense, we can look at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. Both had catastrophic failures with each ending in a different outcome but people paid attention even though dozens of other plants were working perfectly fine. When it came to the historical aspect, they lead to better safety and containment practices though the black mark they left on the nuclear energy society still remains to this day.

Even the few hundred years we have left of raw materials power production, when the amount starts reaching a critical extinction level, big-wigs from all over will start pouring everything they have into alternatives and maybe some of us will still be working on fusion power when that time comes and get a leg up on the "competition". Who knows... maybe with better funding, one of the members in this group will crack the problem and we can all reap the benefits.

We optimists must outshine the bumbling mass of nay-sayers and pessimistic mobs of people who fear the unknown.