As a practical response to a growing energy crisis and global climate change, fusion power isn’t exactly ideal. But it does promise a great deal of advances in scientific knowledge, and if the technology develops successfully over time, it’ll probably be very useful in space-borne applications. So, fingers crossed for the first test run of China’s experimental superconducting tokomak reactor, scheduled for mid-August.
2 thoughts on “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”
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Not ideal?? You must be jesting. Without up and running fusion power plants in 20-30 years billions of people are going to die horribly.
It’s a plausible scenario – but I would contend that if a tenth of the money invested in fusion research worldwide over the last few decades had instead been ploughed into refining our knowledge and abilities as regards various renewable energy resources, ones that we already had basic (if inefficient) working examples of (solar being the most obvious example), we would already have sufficient power generation at our disposal that fusion research would become an exciting and fascinating branch of futurist science, something to work on as we plan an eventual foray into the solar system, rather than something to hurry towards in desperation for a quick solution to a crisis. But then, we all know the saying about hindsight, I guess…
It would take much less effort, money and research to achieve efficient renewable energy sources in a short period of time. Whether that will occur is dependent on which way the money flows. If the end result is cheap clean energy, I don’t care about the route too much – but it strikes me that the shorter, less rock-strewn path would be the wiser one to take.