Nuclear Fusion Is Almost Here
Fountainhead News: May 24, 2017
There exists a company in the UK called Tokamak Energy. In the late 90s you might remember news and even movies around the concept of breakthrough energy, in this case nuclear fusion. It’s trying to mimic the reactions inside our sun, here on Earth.
Once it’s achieved, it means clean, sustainable energy for the world’s population. You might remember Elizabeth Shue’s and Val Kilmer’s The Saint from 1997, in which she is a scientist working on cold fusion. A box office success, it told the story of a thief who wanted to steal her formula. International intrigue followed as they are chased by a Russian crime syndicate.
You might be surprised to learn that the word Tokamak is Russian word meaning a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma in the shape of a torus. Methinks they were inspired by Hollywood. Or was it the other way around?
Back in reality, the science had yet to catch up to the fiction. What began in 2009, Tokamak today believes it is nothing more than an engineering challenge and is only years away, not decades.
The roadmap to nuclear fusion, from their website:
- Build a small prototype tokamak to demonstrate the concept (achieved 2013)
- Build a tokamak with all magnets of high temperature superconductor (achieved 2015).
- Reach fusion temperatures in a compact tokamak (we are aiming for 100 million degrees in 2018).
- Achieve energy breakeven conditions — where we could get at least as much energy out of the machine as we put in to drive fusion reactions (we aim to achieve this by 2020).
- Produce electricity for the first time by 2025.
The news is that after their machine was turned on for the first time, it achieved plasma inside its core. A major milestone for the technology, with the next step being the installation of further magnetic coils to increase the temperature to that in the center of the sun.
No big deal, it’s only 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, which they hope to complete by this fall.
But that’s just the first step. In order to get to fusion they have to go about 7x hotter than that to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Now that’s a hot dog (insert Silicon Valley reference here).
But they are a startup. And so they require funding. And resources. And bright engineering minds. The future is not certain. Especially if it doesn’t get the invesment in both monetary and human capital.
This is why spending your precious time and resources here on Earth on something as trivial as derivative CRM apps for social media video filters isn’t just a waste of time. It’s actually harming our species as a whole.
You don’t care until you get that Air Conditioning bill this summer and complain about how it went up 4x than the usual price. The 1% may not think it’s a huge deal. But for middle America and most of the rest of the world, it’s a giant deal.
You become what you spend your time thinking about. Be careful. You might not like how your own personal roadmap plays out. And if you’ve never thought about it, maybe now is the time.
— Sean
Read More on the Energy Channel.
