Would fusion power be a good thing or a bad thing?

[GliderGuider]

There's been a lot of discussion recently about Dr. Bussard's Hail Mary™ fusion reactor. To me the traction the idea is getting speaks less to its technical viability than to our desperation, but that's probably just me being curmudgeonly. Maybe I ate a bad bit of tofu for breakfast.

In order to counter my dyspepsia, I'd like to assume they will in fact work and will start to supply significant amounts of power within the next few years. For the sake of discussion let's say they are generating 25% of humanity's current energy consumption in 20 years.

Will this be a good thing or a bad thing?

Why do you think so?

[hobbit709]

1. Fusion reactors don't have the fission reactor problems

Unfortunately, we don't have a working, energy gain fusion reactor yet. Lots of hydrogen available.

[The2ndWheel]

2. Bad thing, since it will expand our desire for control

I share that thought about our desperation.

Doesn't matter much, since we're well beyond being able to do anything else but continue our expansion. Too many people, and we all want more.

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. Information on Bussard's fusion system

First off, Bussard has been thinking of fusion for decades. One of his ideas, the Bussard ramjet proposed in 1960, has so captured the imagination that it is now a staple of science fiction.

Here is a news article on the proposed project: http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/nextnews7.24b.html

Governor Schwarzenegger to research Revolutionary Radiation Free Fusion Reactor

In a move sure to impress environmentalists and further cement his Earth friendly image, Governor Schwarzenegger is set to launch a multimillion dollar research effort into a revolutionary new source of clean non-polluting power.

The project is focused on the Inertial Electrostatic Fusion reactor invented by the award winning American physicist Dr. Robert W. Bussard. The Radiation Free Fusion Reactor has the potential to change the whole landscape of energy generation, which is usually a choice between bad and worse options that include Nuclear, Coal and Natural Gas systems.

...

Fusion is the energy that powers everything in the universe. The sun's energy comes from fusion. Alternatively, fission is the process whereby heavy atoms, which are nearly unstable, are split into two radioactive atoms. Fusion, on the other hand, is when two light atoms merge.

The fusion process invented by Dr. Bussard takes boron-11 and fuses a proton to it, producing, in its excited state, a carbon-12 atom. This excited carbon-12 atom decays to beryllium-8 and helium-4. Beryllium-8 very quickly (in 10-13 s) decays into two more helium-4 atoms. This is the only nuclear-energy releasing process in the whole world that releases fusion energy and three helium atoms -- and no neutrons. This reaction is completely radiation free.

IF the technology works, I think this would be a good thing.

[FogerRox]

21. That California story is probably a false alarm

[phantom power]

4. fusion without tritium would be a coup. fusion with tritium, not so much.

[FogerRox]

22. Actually Farsworth's 1930's fusor created fusion

IIRC with D-D fuel, Hirsh and Farnsworth made a better fusor in 1968 that used D-D. Bussards last reactor improved upon the 1968 fusor results by 100,000. Bussards goal is to burn boron which generates near zero neutrons= very good..

IEC Fusion for Dummies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmp1cg3-WDY

[Buzz Clik]

5. Science scares me.

Coal is our friend.

[TheWraith]

6. Is this even really a serious question? Of course it's a good thing.

Fusion provides all the concentrated energy benefit of fission reactors, with little to no potential downside. The only byproducts are helium and tritium, which are both inoffensive gasses, and in any event are useful to us if we can capture them. Besides which, you can put a fusion reactor anywhere, with little to no security concern--it has no significant overlap with nuclear weapons technology, and even in the case of a catastrophic loss of containment, it would basically just slag the reactor core.

Yeah, you're being curmudgeonly.

[GliderGuider]

7. Think of a bigger picture

I know all the technical advantages of fusion power for human use, I've been a supporter of the idea for a long time.

Is there any reason the rest of the planet's inhabitants might not appreciate a fusion-powered humanity? If so, should that matter to us?

[TheWraith]

8. Can't see why.

Energy is the basic staple of increased civilization. Fusion promises to deliver it, and in one of the safest dense energy forms yet created.

From my perspective, unless one is rooting for some kind of return to the dark ages, we need to keep increasing our energy production, and fusion is the best way. You want to worry about the demands on the planet of industrialization for the rest of the populace, just think about how taxing it would be without a completely innocuous clean energy source. Not to mention, the best way to reduce the birth rate, and thus overall population growth, is by increasing the standard of living and the level of civilization.

[GliderGuider]

9. How about these issues?

We have fished out the oceans.
We have strip-mined the topsoil.
We have depleted the water tables.
We have caused enormous expansion of deserts and shrinkage of forests.
We have destroyed countless habitats, resulting in a spike in extinction rates.
We have appropriated 25% of the world's net primary productivity for our own use.

All of these have required energy and people to accomplish.

Is the foregoing a problem? If not, why not?
Would having more energy and more people improve the situation? If your answer is "yes", why do you think so?

[phantom power]

10. On that note, I've been thinking about the converse question...

which is: "if we collapse back to some kind of low-energy civilization, will that prevent us from overrunning and damaging the planet?"

I have more of a suspicion than an answer, but my suspicion is that humans can, and have in the past, accomplished environmental destruction without the accoutrements of a high energy civilization.

At any rate, it seems like a question that has bearing on your desire to influence some form of post-collapse ethical system.

[GliderGuider]

12. Without a new social organizing principle, the answer is "No".

In every place on earth that early man migrated into, the large fauna was extinct within a few thousand years. The pattern is clearly visible, and this implicates human agency in the extinctions. And this was humans in very small numbers armed only with pointy sticks. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dallan/nre220/outline4.htm">Ecological Role of PreHistoric Humans

There is no question in my mind that humans (even ethically and technologically "naked" humans) are innately and enormously destructive to their environments. That suggests to me that we can only bring that tendency under control by choosing the right ethical clothing. Since I don't believe in "The Perfectibility of Man", the implication is that such a new costume will be hard-won indeed.

We might not succeed. There is no reason to expect that simply because we're smart we'll get a free pass out of our demonstrated nature. But what better thing to hope and work towards than a civilization that takes the responsibility of its own intelligence seriously?

[phantom power]

14. I think the only hope is if the memory of what happened survives intact.

What happened, and why it happened. And I think it probably has to survive in more than just mythological form.

[GliderGuider]

17. Absolutely.

This is another reason why knowledge retention projects would be crucial in the event of a collapse. "Don't burn the black rocks like our ancestors did. That's what made the air bad."

Our descendants' disgust for us is likely to reach mythic proportions, though. And that's not a bad thing if they're to avoid retracing our footsteps.

[Dead_Parrot]

20. Well, disgust mixed with wonder

Think of the way we react when we look at something like a pyramid or Machu Picchu: Then imagine someone from the 18th century looking at the remains of the Suez canal, whatever is left of Manhattan or just a broken shard of CD catching the light.

They'll wonder how we could be so smart and so stupid at the same time.

I guess that's not new, though.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. Ask the Moa, the British Wolf, or the Syrian Elephant

Or for that matter, an Easter Island forest. It's amazing what you can do with a pointy stick. :(

[tom_paine]

11. Interesting perspective, and a very valid one as well

What if we gain access to this mighty power source and use it to destroy ourselves or our biosphere?

Absolutely a concern.

But outweighed by the immediacy of our species' need if we are to survive, IMHO, and by producing 25, or 50 or even 75% of our energy from a pullution-fee methodology, I believe the attendant risks are acceptable, since if we can't create sustainable societies or a tremendously powerful clean fuel to power energy-intensive "unsustainable" (but may be with such an increased, pollution-free energy budget), we'll probably be extinct in <5000 years, maybe a lot sooner.

[qazplm]

15. you can fish without "energy"

you can mine with a shovel
you can deplete water with a dam
you can plant and use fire (ok technically energy but not the type we are talking about) to turn areas into deserts.

Point being, this has nothing to do with energy.

The more clean power we have, the better for the environment.

The more clean power we have, the less we have a need to drill for oil or coal or natural gas.

The less "energy" we put into those activities the more we can direct towards other activities and with cheaper power also comes cheaper products, which helps the poor, but also means research into other positive areas is increased.

Are all of the things you listed problems? Completely? No. The myth that environmental damage only comes from human activity is just that. Is it a problem that we damage the environment excessively? yes and we need to fix it, but nuclear fusion is not likely to be a net detractor to that goal.

[GliderGuider]

16. Over the last century our energy production has gotten much cleaner

Hydro and natural gas, and even oil, are much cleaner than wood and coal that were our primary energy sources a century ago. And there's no question that we're using more energy than we did a century ago. So we are using more clean(er) energy than we did a century ago. Products are also cheaper, both in dollars and energy intensity, than they were a hundred years ago. Is there any evidence that environmental damage has been correspondingly reduced over the last century? Does the fact that there are now four times as many people in the world figure into the damage?

Of course not all environmental damage comes from human activity. A more useful understanding, though, is that human activity has always caused environmental damage. The more humans, or the more activity, the more damage. This is the message of the ecological equation I=PAT (Impact is the multiplicative product of Population times Activity times Technology).

Other evidence for the influence of energy comes from the close correlation of population increase over time with per capita energy consumption over time:


Based on that correlation it's likely that introducing more energy into human civilization is going to increase our population as well as our activity. Is that likely to reduce the pressure on the ecosphere?

[Dead_Parrot]

19. There's a sobering graph

Especially if you've got a mirror handy. :(

[TheWraith]

23. That's a false correlation.

Having more energy doesn't cause population increase. Population increases all on its own. More energy correlates to more civilization, which traditionally means a decline in population growth. But most of the planet still has very little civilization.

[GliderGuider]

26. That's a very strange interpretation

You seem to imply that more energy will lead to a decline in population at some point. Given that it hasn't yet - and we've been increasing our per-capita energy consumption exponentially for at least 2000 years - when would you expect this effect to kick in? Maybe there just aren't enough of us yet?

"But most of the planet still has very little civilization." How exactly do you define civilization? Most of the planet looks pretty "civilized" to me.

[bananas]

30. Not strange, not even controversial

(edited to swap the quotes around)


From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

Demographic transition
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In demography, the term demographic transition is a theory describing a possible transition from high birth rates and death rates to low birth and death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy. Usually it is described through the "Demographic Transition Model" (DTM) that describes the population changes over time. It is based on an interpretation begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson of prior observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years. Most developed countries are already in stage four of the model, the majority of developing countries are in stage 2 or stage 3, and no country is currently still in stage 1. The model has explained human population evolution relatively well in Europe and other highly developed countries. Many developing countries have moved into stage 3. The major exceptions are poor countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and several Middle Eastern countries, which are poor or affected by government policy or civil strife, notably Pakistan, Palestine, Yemen and Afghanistan.<1>

<snip>

You can find lots of studies with results like this:
"Ec is the critical annual energy per capita at which the population growth rate becomes zero. This quantity has typically been in the range of 2 to 3 toe/cap.a"

From: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:ub8zaqa5_rwJ:sunsite.utk.edu/jiee/pdf/2003_03india.pdf+%22birth+rate%22+%22per+capita+energy%22+iaea
or http://sunsite.utk.edu/jiee/pdf/2003_03india.pdf

FUSION ENERGY IN INDIA’S
LONG-TERM ENERGY FUTURE
John Sheffield
May 2003

<snip>

2.1.1 Fertility Rate, Death Rate, And Population Growth

It appears that there is a need for a greater annual energy use per capita to change a society
from the developing phase to the developed phase. In the developing phase, it is
commonplace for parents to have far more than the two children required to sustain the
population, often to improve the chance that the parents will be looked after in their old age.
Consequently, the population grows, leading to higher energy demand. As societies become
more affluent, and particularly when the women are wage earners, smaller families become
the norm. In this situation, energy may be used to raise the standard of living rather than just
deal with the burgeoning population. In fact, energy itself may be viewed as an important
facilitator in this transition, because its availability influences educational opportunities, the
standard of living, health, and job opportunities. One cannot prove a cause and effect
between per capita energy use and fertility rates (population growth rates), but historical
trends for the developing countries have followed such a course (see Appendix A).

These points may be derived in part from data in United Nations Demographic and Statistical
Yearbooks, which provide information on fertility (average number of children born per
woman), crude death rate, life expectancy at birth, population, population growth rate, and
per capita energy use.

<snip>

APPENDIX A—WORLD POPULATION GROWTH RATE AND PER CAPITA
ENERGY USE

<snip details>

Ec is the critical annual energy per capita at which the population growth rate becomes zero. This quantity has typically been in the range of 2 to 3 toe/cap.a, as shown by extrapolating the mean of the curves in Figure 3 to the x-axis. It may be viewed as reflecting cultural differences between countries, i.e., do social or religious customs, or politics dictate a preference for large or small families?

<snip>

[TheWraith]

31. Bingo. It's quite simple.

In industrialized nations, the population growth rate is very low. More energy means more development, which means a higher standard of living, which translates to low birth and death rates. It's in places like India and China, where the standard of living is incredibly low on average, that the birth rate goes through the roof.

[GliderGuider]

32. Ah, our old friend the DTM.

One interesting place to look at with respect to the DTM is Kerala, a state in southern India with a population of 30 million, quite low per capita income (~$500 or so, in the middle of the pack of 14 Indian states), but with a TFR of 1.7 compared to the Indian average of 2.9 and an infant mortality rate of 12 compared to the Indian average of 65. This was achieved deliberately through the education and empowerment of women, along with the provision of a very good health care system and family planning - all originally introduced by a Communist government in 1957. Industrialization isn't the only way to get there.

And that's a good thing, too. According to the Indian study you quoted, it might take a per capita primary energy consumption of around 2.5 toe/yr (similar to Portugal) to achieve a stable population through that mechanism alone. Right now the global average is 1.65 toe/cap/yr, so it looks as though we still have some growing to do. Stabilizing the current population of 6.6 billion this way would require an increase of around 50% energy production.

Primary energy production has growing at 2% for the last 10 years, and population is currently growing at just over 1% pa. Assuming we achieve population stability at 2.5 toe/cap/yr, just for grins I plugged those rates into a spreadsheet to see when the population would stabilize, at what number, and at what total energy consumption. It turns out that it stabilizes in 2050 at a population of 10 billion and a total energy consumption 2.5 times what we use today.

There's a wrinkle to keep in mind though. The oil supply has peaked and estimates of its medium term decline rate range from 3% to 6% per annum. Assuming a gentle decline of 3%, we'll be down to a quarter of today's production by 2050, with all that implies for the global transportation network. Not to mention that we'd need to make up that 3 billion toe/yr in addition to the 14.5 billion toe/yr extra we needed to begin with.

And then there's the question of the impact 10 billion middle class consumers would have on the planet's ecology. After all, the big fish are already pretty much gone, the aquifers are depleting, per capita grain production is falling, and global warming is already mucking with the world's weather.

Does it seem realistic that we will achieve a nice balance of 10 billion people sucking up 2.5 times the energy we do today, especially given the rest of the global situation? Not to me it doesn't.

[GliderGuider]

33. More on per capita energy consumption and Total Fertility Rate

I got interested in how strong the correlation might be between per capita energy consumption and TFR. I already had a spreadsheet with per capita consumption for most countries, so I added the TFR for those countries and made a scatter chart. I added a linear trend line to get the correlation coefficient. In order to get the best correlation I could around the area of interest (2.5 toe/cap/yr), I had to throw out a few very high-consumption countries including the USA and Canada. Altogether 55 countries with 5 billion people are represented. Energy consumption data came from the 2007 BP Statistical Review, and the population and TFR numbers are from the CIA World Fact Book.

Here's the result:



Note the weak correlation coefficient of 0.31, which would indicate that there are other factors at work on the population numbers besides per capita energy consumption. But in general the graph does support the Demographic Transition Model.

[4bh0r53n]

27. other way around

"having more energy doen't cause population increase"

no but population increase increases the demand of energy...

[tom_paine]

29. Yes, but whatever the risks, massive amounts of clean-burning energy

are likely needed at this point to save us as a species. Though you may be right and that which was supposed to save us could destroy us. It may well be that the technological way is a dead-end, a death trip, but with the record of science continuing to uncover the layers of the palimpsest of knowledge that seemingly still has no end, I don't know that the outcome in the event of the discovery of large-scale, controllable, clean-burning fusion can be any greater than 50-50%.

Compare that to the probably <10% chance we have under the "fossil fuels paradigm" to survive another 5000 years (maybe a lot less, but I think there will be colonies of people in the artic and antarctic jungles stil ekeing out a survival in the business-as-usual-scenario in 5 millenia), and those seem pretty good odds.

Finally, some concrete ideas which, if you are incorrect and we won't kill ourselves with this, among the largest energy sources possible, will instead save us:

1) The pollution-reduction of 50-75% over a rapid period of time, call it 15-30 years as we rapidly (this is a best-case scenario) convert our power generation to clean fusion is self-evident.

2) But how about this little gem: The ability to cease and desist from mining ANYTHING out of our own planet Earth. Think that would help heal the land, the water, the fauna, and the rest of the biosphere a little bit? Think of all extractive industry does to add to problem #1: pollution. In my opinion, ceasing and desisting with nearly all earthly minear extraction industries (one presumes there will still be a certain amount of timbering, fishing, farming, but even these industries will be transformed by an increased energy budget of orders of magnitude...again I understand that here lay the "tripwires of doom" in your scenrio/contention...I understand but I am pointing to a possible best-case scenario in which we don't trip on these wires) is nearly as important to the ecosystem as a 50-75% reduction in pollution from power generation.

My point is, ultimately, our last chance to avoid a catastrophic crash of the kind that will, by necessity, reduce the carrying capacity of the earth to 1-2 billion thus returning us to an energy-poor existance.

Maybe that is a good thing, as many think, but I am not there yet. I still believe that "Star Trek" (whatever the realitites are about the existance or non-existance of alien intelligent species) is possible and should be possible.

Probably we disagree on that. And who knows, as the beginning stages of the looming environmental catastrophe unfolds, maybe I will come around to your view, as I think it is, which is that human should cease striving for the stars and be content with an agrarian existance.

ON EDIT: I just read your explanatory post below and I really do not think we are that far apart on the realities of the situation, just that I continue to hope for a "Hail Mary" discovery of that which we should have been looking for all along, what with the sun sticking it's fusiony face in ours every day, as a reminder, "I'm here, I'm here - just figure me out and your species can reach the starrs!"

Is this idealistic and unrealistic to hope for and believe that it is 10% possible still? Perhaps.

[TheWraith]

24. So what, we should curl up and die? That's not a solution.

Perhaps, instead of wailing and gnashing our teeth, and bemoaning the horrors of human civilization, we should try actually fixing things. Because the alternatives are the status quo; deliberately trying to kill our entire species; or a return to the dark ages which some fools seem to view as being somehow desirable or neccessary.

[GliderGuider]

28. Here's what I think we we should do

But first:

I certainly don't think a reduction in human population (not a "return to the dark ages", that's a loaded term intended to reframe the discussion) is desirable. It would cause a lot of people a lot of pain, and I certainly don't desire that. Is it necessary? Possibly, if you're a tuna or a sequoia or a golden frog - the continuation of your species might depend on a reduction in human ecological impact that is most easily achieved through a reduction in our numbers. It's possibly also necessary if our growing impact ends up inadvertently taking out a link in the ecological chain, one that turns our in hindsight we depend on for our own survival. Like phytoplankton, for instance.

But more than that, a reduction in our population is probably inevitable. No human intention or action is implied by this statement. It's just that all the signs point that way.

So what should we do?

Pretty much what we are doing, as far as I can tell. There are wide variations in our individual judgments of what the situation is, where it's headed, and what the best courses of action are. That's a good thing, because it will result in a lot of different things getting done. In a dynamic system like ours, that maximizes the chance that some of these things will actually help, and minimizes the chance that any mistakes will be fatal. My assessment of a helpful course of action will differ from yours, as it should. If we all decided to follow a single course of action and it turned out to be wrong, to consequences would be guaranteed catastrophic.

My preferred course of action is based on my assessment of the situation. That is that we are headed for an inevitable collapse of industrial civilization, and I see no possible technological, biological, sociological or political means of avoiding that. Now if that's the case, the best thing we could do IMO is to ensure that the people who do emerge from the bottleneck are armed with the ecological knowledge and insight required to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization on the next go-around. I think the mechanism for transmitting that knowledge and value-set are already in place. As I describe in my article Population Decline - Red Herrings and Hope:

This is a very bleak picture. If I am right, there is precious little that we can or even will do to stem the coming decline. But people need hope to keep on going. Why should we not just all slit our throats right now, or at least go on a final frenzied binge of consumption since it's all going to come to an end anyway? Are there signals of hope that we can use to rally ourselves and continue being good, kind, moral, helpful people? In fact there are.

I've just come out of a two-year episode of depression and despair brought on by realizing the inevitability of the decline of this cycle of human civilization. What brought me out was a spiritual (though emphatically NOT religious) transformation that I describe briefly in "The Spiritual Effects of Comprehending the Global Crisis". Upon more reflection it turns out that the spiritual perception that I describe is more correctly and usefully understood as a conversion to Deep Ecology as defined by Arne Naess in 1972. I am convinced that such a "spiritual" realization is essential if one is to emerge from the inevitable despair and resume a functional life.

Now, what about hope? After all, the last thing in Pandora's Box was "Hope". Since we are staring deeply into that box right now, what new revelation might we take as a hopeful sign? The state of affairs right now seem utterly hopeless. Ecological devastation, oil depletion, population growth and socioeconomic instability are converging to give humanity the thrashing of its life, in the process reducing the human community to perhaps one billion members before the end of the century.

In fact there is a hopeful sign, but only if you change your perspective.

Start from these three realizations:
1. The genetic imperatives that drive our reproduction, consumption and competition guarantees that we will not change our civilization's value set voluntarily or preemptively.
2. Humanity is like yeast. We reproduce and consume until our ecological niche is stripped of resources and poisoned by waste, then we die off.
3. Humanity is like cockroaches. We are resourceful, adaptive and hardy, and you can't kill us all.

These three facts mean that although we are heading for a bottleneck, some portion of humanity will survive to regroup and rebuild in a massively damaged, resource-poor world. On our way through the bottleneck we will lose much of our physical and social capital. The one and only good thing about this, from a species, biosphere and planetary perspective, is that the existing socioeconomic structures will be forcibly and involuntarily stripped away, leaving room for new structures to take their place.

The change in perspective involves not looking forward from our current situation into the decline. Rather, step forward a couple of hundred years and look back. what I believe you will see is the rebirth of the next cycle of civilization.

The question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?" How will we ensure that our descendants will eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?

I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.

American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.

Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream.

I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process. But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.

My perception of the future may not be to your taste, and if you don't share it then perhaps my vision of Hawken's movement won't resonate with you. On the other hand, the movement exists, and even if I'm wrong it's exactly what we need. No matter which way the world unfolds we need millions of people beavering away fixing local problems and addressing global ones however they can. There is no single "right" way to view or respond to what's going on now.

The best answer is just to get involved. After all, "If you're not part of the solution, you'll be part of the precipitate".

[FogerRox]

25. The only byproducts are helium and tritium, in an ITER style Tokamak

Bussards goal is to build a 100mw proof of concept that burns boron. Specifically, Fusing a proton and a Boron11, P-B11 fusion, this reaction is aneutronic, produces no neutrons.



WB6 in late 2005:

[skids]

18. Good thing overall but...

...doesn't solve the problem of centralized corporate control over power sources or energy network robustness. Though IIRC these can be relatively small so community coops might be possible later on.

[JohnWxy]

34. Whatever, its a far-off thing - 20 to 30 yrs easily.