Practical Fusion Power
18th June 2007
For decades they have been blathering about creating clean fusion power. It is always just around the corner. The US has spent billions of dollars in the last 50 years and still has no workable fusion reactor.
http://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion50yr_dean.pdf
Now we hear about an engineer with a new approach to hot fusion. He started work on this system back in the Eighties, got a government grant for research for 11 years, met every milestone and proved the validity of his approach. The next step would be to build a full scale working fusion power plant for about 200 million dollars. So, of course, the government cancelled any further funding for his project. As he points out, 200 million dollars is well within the reach of a lot of different countries and, since he owns the patents on his technique, he is free to cut a deal with any country that wants to develop real fusion power.
http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/2006-9%20IAC%20Paper.pdf
One of the reasons I am excited about his approach is that it would also be suitable for a space propulsion system that would have 10 times the specific impulse of any other system developed to date. http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML