{"id":3729,"date":"2006-11-16T09:05:40","date_gmt":"2006-11-16T17:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/11\/16\/3729.html"},"modified":"2006-11-16T09:05:40","modified_gmt":"2006-11-16T17:05:40","slug":"bussard-on-safe-cheap-fusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2006\/11\/16\/bussard-on-safe-cheap-fusion\/","title":{"rendered":"Bussard on safe cheap fusion"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr. Robert Bussard, best known in the sf world as inventor of the Bussard ramjet, has spent the past 15+ years working on building a cheap, safe fusion reactor. He spoke at Google last week about the project, and the video of his talk<\/a> is now available on Google Video.<\/p>\n

His proposed process \"converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product\" (to quote the video description). His talk was fast-paced and highly technical; I didn't understand more than a tenth of the technical details, and anyone who's not a physicist or an engineer may want to skip a lot of the technical parts. But even if you do skip most of it, it's worth watching the introduction and the less-technical parts, and the cool photos of the prototype machines.<\/p>\n

If you don't have time to watch the (90-minute-long) video, there's a posting from June at randi.org (written by Bussard, posted by someone else) that provides a brief summary of what happened<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bussard's group had what appeared to be a huge breakthrough late in 2005, literally days before they had to shut down the lab because their funding had run out. Their prototype more or less self-destructed in the final test.<\/p>\n

Bussard now says he needs about $150M-$200M to turn this into viable technology. Part of his talk is an extended utopian discussion of what effects cheap energy would have on society; that segment starts around 1:01:30 in the video and runs to around 1:06:30. (It's pretty much what you would expect, but it's fun to watch his enthusiasm and, yeah, hyperbole.)<\/p>\n

I certainly can't judge the science here on its merits, but I found the talk fascinating.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Robert Bussard, best known in the sf world as inventor of the Bussard ramjet, has spent the past 15+…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}