Environment & Energy

I would think it would only take a modicum of intelligence to suggest that 50 years at MIT is less impressive than 75 years at a national lab where the fusion chimera has been chased as a primary focus, happily with some useful side products connected with the study of plasmas, but no usable energy to perform thermodynamic work.

It is easy to raise money with hype, much more difficult to deliver on the claims of the hype.

But then again, antinukes and "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes have a rather spectacular inability to understand what is real and what is not.

If one has ever attended a serious "fusion will save us" lecture by serious scientists - I've attended scores of them at PPPL - one can immediately recognize that they have only a very vague conception of how to withdraw exergy from the fusion reaction. At a recent lecture, during Q&A, I asked how long a fusion reactor has continuously run. The answer was less than an hour.

But let's bet the planetary atmosphere on it.

It would be interesting if rather than unicorns and hype and of course, so called "renewable energy" the "I'm not an antinuke" antinukes around here would recognize that for the last 70 years, nuclear fission has a spectacular record of producing clean energy more reliably and more safely than any other form of primary energy.

There is no evidence, none, that a fusion plant can run for more than a few hours, nor is there enough tritium on the planet to run a power plant for more than a few weeks with fusion. In fact, there's about 50 kg of the stuff, and the ITER experiment in France, if it even runs, will eat all of it in a few weeks or months of operations.