[ExI] Written for another list

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Aug 05, 2012 at 12:23:45AM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 4 August 2012 22:09, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> 
> > I agree! Fusion, particularly Tokamak fusion is making fast breeder
> > power look like a bargain, by a factor of 100 at least. Throwing good
> > money after bad on ITER is not very sane. I reserve some judgement on
> > inertial confinement/laser ignition, but it's probably not going to
> > work out either (fusion must be a fertile breeder, too).
> >
> 
> I may be "ideologically" biaised in favour of fusion, but how could it
> *not* work?

How doesn't fission work? By virtue of being uneconomic, and 
unsustainable (because you can't make breeders work). It can't
compete with renewable, which is a direct or indirect 
product of hydrogen fusion in the Sun.

Now think of an energy source that's two orders of magnitude
more expensive, and probably not sustainable either (because
breeding factor for tritium in the lithium blanket don't look
too hot). Which is competing against a far more economic
form of fusion, even with wireless delivery.
 
> I mean, the physics behind it is clear enough, we have large-scale examples
> of working fusion before our eyes every time the sun rises, and it is hard

Gravitational containment works. Magnetic containment doesn't work
really well. Inertial confinement might work, but the economics
of it are quite iffy. I'm definitely down on tokamaks, though.

> to see what could prevent a solution of the related engineering probs.

It's not hard to see at all. It's extremely challenging, while
we have a working, scalable solid state source that's racing down
to beat the pants off dirty coal (and there is no longer any
cheap, abundant dirty coal).

How do you compete against that? You can't.
 
> And, hey, a puny 10-billion dollars have been spent on the half-hearted,

We don't have any money. We must raise trillions annually world
wide to prevent

http://gizmodo.com/5898896/1970s-study-predictions-are-still-on-target-for-2030s-decline-of-humanity

Do we have what it takes? So why are we not doing it?

> never-meant-to-be-the-real-thing ITER experimental reactor by a consortium
> of *a dozen* countries while the US alone spent some 80 times more for the
> oil war in Iraq.

This is in the past, and a little bird told me that will
be over soon. Out of budget.
 
> What is the worse bet in the mid-term? What could be achieved with a
> Manhattan-project kind of push?

Manhattan was 0.4% of GDP during peak, Apollo was 0.4%.
Right now you probably need at least 3% of world GDP
for the next 40 years (this is a WAG, it could be up
to 10%). World GDP is some 70 TUSD. So we need to
spend somewhere between 2-7 TUSD/year for the next
40 years.

As a quick check, we need about TW/year substitution
rate. That's some 3-4 TWp in terms of solar. As large
scale solar is or going to be 1 USD/Wp, that looks to
be on the low side, as missing synfuels, synthons, 
desalination, and fixing food in general.

Yep, we're fucked.