Fusion
Hint: OSE's stand on fusion energy: There is no such thing as radioactivity-free fusion. Even so-called a-neutronic reactions have neutrons associated with them, if not direclty, but by side reactions. Energetic neutrons have the property of breaking apart other neutrons. So there is no known way to harness fusion energy safely, unless we discover new laws of physics. So unless we accept nuclear radiation hazard as part of life, fusion is out of the question - just like fission. I don't think a case can be made that fusion or fission is appropriate technology, given that we have solar energy and hydrogen. Addendum: history happened around 2018, when the cost of solar dropped below coal and gas in most countries. Time to eradicate artificial scarcity is now. -MJ
Overview
Fusion is the process of combining nuclei, thus creating energy. Sustained fusion has been achieved many times by many different groups and people, but a fully functioning reactor that generates more useful power than is consumed has yet to be produced. We do have hydrogen bombs, but these are not so useful for practical power production.
Open Source Community
Simple fusors that create the radiation which power can be extracted from have existed for year, and there exists a growing community dedicated to making them. Most of these focus on creating a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor. Recently, several people have started making home-made polywells, taking advantage of new 3D printing techniques.
Coulter's Smithing is a project focusing on open sourcing a nuclear fusion reactor.
See Also
Prometheus open source polywell project
Lift Conference on an open source polywell
MJ Review
MJ Note: Take any article on the promise of fusion. Ask me what I think about it. My answer is likely to go something like this:
If there is any evidence that this could solve more problems than it creates, I'd be glad to add fusion to the GVCS.
Sorry, but that article is all far out hype. Worse than University science press releases. Maybe we can do it some day, but my opinion is that putting energy into fusion at this time is bad priorities, when there are much larger and more important issues to solve.
You have to appreciate first that in order to extract the energy from successful fusion (fusion can be done, that's not the hard part), one has to use some kind of 'pipe' to carry and heat water, to spin a steam engine (turbine). There are currently no known ways to build such a 'pipe' because the energetic neutrons (even in so-called 'aneutronic fusion') will destroy whatever 'pipe' you use. This is the brutal fact that articles of this nature all tend to ignore. The result is, one has to deal with a continuous stream of radioactive waste, so the concept of 'clean fusion' is a pipe dream, no pun intended. This is why I say that fusion is a bad priority because it will not likely be as clean as we like, and there are easier ways to achieve unlimited energy, or at least 100x nore than we use today. Ethically speaking, I would not want to work at a fusion reactor or make others do so. Fusion is just an artifact of a society that does not collaborate. Solving for true collaboration is our current work.
