How To Win The War On Terror, Save The World, and Look Cool While You Do It

Is the 21st Century going to mark the end of civilization?

(If you are a new reader of this blog, now is a good time for you to scroll down, and read everything else I have written so far. You need some back story for this, and it is worth it, to understand this lengthy discussion.)

So far, I have drawn a lot of dots on this blog. Differences in cultures, definitions of terrorism, freedom, happiness, economies, democracy, science, our global connectedness. I have also pointed out how we as humans ignore what is before our eyes because it doesn't fit our world-view, and despite the fact that we would be better for it, we tend to cling to old modes of thinking long after they lose their validity. Now I wish to connect some of these dots, and open your mind to a few new concepts.

One of the points I made earlier was that the problems we face today are caused by the solutions of problems we faced in the past. So, what exactly are we facing? Let's list a few root problems.

- Global Warming & Global Dimming
- The balkanization of the world in the post-Cold War era
- The rise of China's and India's economies without a commensurate rise in resources
- The looming collapse of the ocean's ecosystem
- The ever-increasing population of humans

Now let's draw some lines and put together a list of emergent, or secondary, problems these factors create.

- The calamitous rise of oceanic water levels by century's end
- The start of (at least) another "Little Ice Age"
- The looming oil crisis, as demand will vastly outstrip supply very soon
- Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism, and continued instability in the Middle East
- Increased militarism in China, and possibly India
- Increased attempts at creating "utopian" dictatorships in less-developed countries
- Increased use of fission as a power source, thus enhancing the spread of nuclear weapons
- The repolarization of world politics, and a new Cold War (perhaps a new full blown World War)
- Widespread starvation, death, and ecological destruction like we have never witnessed

Feeling happy? Sounds pretty bad, I know. I think it is so bad that some wish not to believe in any of it, and try to take solace in God, saying that He would never let something like this come to pass. I think that the current US President has this view. However, if there is a God, he has never saved us from our self-inflicted calamities before. I don't think he will do so now.

Instead, we need to solve this problem ourselves, and, oddly enough, the solution may already be on its way. It could use your help, however.

As you may have noticed, I have a lot of interests. One of them is physics, in particular, nuclear energy. When we think of nuclear energy, it usually conjures up visions of atomic bombs and Chernobyl. This nuclear energy is based on fission, the dividing of uranium or plutonium atoms and releasing energy by annihilating a small piece of the original atom's matter. Except in France, the track record isn't too hot for fission. While there really hasn't been but one major, death-dealing accident, nuclear fission needs a special type of reactor called a "breeder reactor" to make it a viable, long-term energy source. These breeder reactors are really good at making weapons-grade plutonium, which makes the world less safe. Without them, however, uranium supplies on Earth are too small to last even a century of heavy use.

There is another form of nuclear energy called fusion, where light atoms are joined to create larger ones, releasing energy by annihilating some matter in the process. We are all familiar with it, as it powers the Sun. We humans have been doing fusion since the mid-20th century, and it is where thermonuclear bombs get their "big bang." Fusion, you might think, is a much more dangerous prospect than fission, given that it makes a more powerful bomb. Actually, fusion is quite hard to do. The "fusion" bomb has to use the energy of a fission bomb to detonate. A fusion reactor, if it goes out of control, doesn't melt down or blow up. It just stops. Also, fusion uses fuels that are way more common than uranium or even oil, and makes much less pollution and radiation.

So, why aren't we using it? The problem is that we haven't figured out how to make it create a steady, controlled stream of energy that gives us more energy than we put in to make it. You have to get the atoms to squeeze together, and, traditionally this has meant using a big metal donut called a tokamak, which is surrounded by lots of ultra-powerful electromagnets to create a containment bottle for the super-hot fuel, and uses high-powered lasers to get the fusion started and to keep it going. This takes up so much energy that it uses more than what you get from the fusion reaction, and it also makes it very expensive to attempt. Fusion hasn't had a lot of success. This may soon change, because of a research project that few people have ever heard of, using a technology that has been around for a long while.

In 1964, in both the US and the Soviet Union, independent researchers came across an odd phenomenon. If you took a metal tube, put a smaller one in the middle of it, electrically charged one positively and the other negatively, a ring of lightening, or more accurately, plasma filaments, would form inside the space between the tubes and rise to the top of it. (Ever see one of those weird gadgets with two wires that look like TV antennas, that has an electrical spark traveling up it in a Frankenstein movie? That spark is a plasma filament. Use two tubes, one inside the other, instead of wires, and you can make a ring of filaments.) Once at the end, the plasma filaments would twist around each other and shrink, momentarily forming a tiny object called a plasmoid. This plasmoid was seen to be a naturally-forming magnetic containment bubble, like one in a tokamak, minus the expensive, energy-eating electromagnets. It was theorized that, as it shrunk, it would force atoms in it to fuse together. This device was called the Dense Plasma Focus (DPF).

The problem was that, to get the fusion to occur, you needed to pour in a lot of energy into it to get it to make plasmoids that would ignite fusible fuel, and there was a lot of conjecture as to how or whether it would work. A few researchers in the 60's and '70's played around with it, but not much work was done. Then in 1986, a physicist by the name of Eric Lerner published the first quantitative theory of the DPF and the plasmoid, using the theory to successfully model quasars. He then went on to predict performance of various fuels for fusion with the DPF.

You see, there are lots of materials that can be used in fusion. We like to think that nuclear energy needs radioactive stuff to work. Uranium and plutonium are radioactive, right? Well, normal matter, in the right mixes and conditions, will fuse. What Lerner realized is that the DPF would be a great platform for fusing a particular kind of fuel that uses normal hydrogen and normal boron, often called proton-boron fuel. This fuel produces no nuclear waste, and comparatively little radiation. To top it all off, the components of the fuel, hydrogen and boron, are so common on Earth that we have literally billions of years worth of fuel. Think of that for a second. A clean source of electrical energy that can be used anywhere (even on cloudy or windless days) that we would practically never run out of? That is the biggest gold mine in history. No more fossil fuels. No more oil barons and sheiks. No more greenhouse gasses or smog. No more hot days. No more cold nights. No more reason for thirst, hunger, or poverty (beyond keeping-up-with-the-Jones's style poverty).

The problem with it was that you needed to heat it to a temperature higher than man had ever achieved, and the magnetic field of the containment bottle had to be in the giga-gauss range (thats a billion times the magnetic force of the Earth). There is also this phenomenon called bremstralung, which bleeds energy from fusion reactions in the form of x-ray radiation. Bremstralung has killed many a good idea in fusion, and there was no reason why it wouldn't kill plasma focus fusion.

Needless to say, most scientists were skeptical that it would work. But Lerner kept at it, continuing his research at a small company he formed called Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP). Despite funding cuts after the end of the Cold War, he continued to study the problems of getting the DPF to fuse proton-boron fuel. Experiments done in 1994 at the University of Illinois proved much of his basic theories, which in turn got the attention of NASA and JPL. In the '90's, NASA began a project called the Breakthrough Propusion Project, which tried to see if current ideas in physics could lead to more advanced engines for spacecraft. Lerner, realizing that the DPF could be the basis for a fusion impulse drive ala Star Trek, sent in his proposal, and was given a grant. At this point, research boomed, and in 2001 came a breakthrough. A team of physicists, lead by Lerner, at Texas A&M University, achieved a temperature of 1.1 billion degrees using a DPF, at the time the hottest temperature known to man (hotter than the core of the Sun), and hot enough to burn proton-boron fuel. Lerner developed a theory called the Magnetic Field Effect to compensate for bremstralung, and further testing showed that they could achieve plasmoids with 0.4 giga-gauss. Lerner was getting close to his goal.

Then, after 9/11, NASA had its budget cut, and the Breakthrough Propulsion project died, leaving Lerner and his colleagues stranded. Also, when they wrote a paper on their research, one of the physicists, Dr. Hank Oona, who worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was threatened with his job if he signed onto the paper. The other physicists backed away from the paper, for fear of similar backlash. Some say it is because Lerner has scientific issues with the current Big Bang theory, and this has made him enemies in the physics world. Some say that focus fusion was coming too close to putting oil men like George W. Bush and his friends out of a job. Either way, the group of researchers working on focus fusion had only the leftovers of their grant money to continue with. They went looking for other benefactors.

They found one in the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission (CCHEN). CCHEN formed a four-man team lead by Dr. Leopoldo Soto to continue the research began at Texas A & M and are working on it to this day. The government of Chile has put a million dollars into the project, no small sum for an average-sized South American country. But another $700,000 must be raised by LPP and its non-profit arm, the Focus Fusion Society.

I stumbled onto their website, www.focusfusion.org, several months ago, when on a search for the latest happenings in fusion energy. What I read there was amazing, as much for the quality of their science as the unbelievability that the US government wouldn't give them the small amount of funds needed to fulfill the goals of the project. The Focus Fusion Society is trying to garner donations, and perhaps find investors willing to fund the project to completion. They currently estimate that they will create the first commercial-grade fusion power plant on Earth in about six years from now. To give you some perspective, the ITER tokamak project, being funded in the billions by the US, China, Japan, France, Great Britain, Italy and others, estimates that they won't have a working reactor for 50 years.

So, assuming that I have peaked your interest, and you go to focusfusion.org, and, along with many others, give them a few bucks, what happens if the Focus Fusion guys reach their goal on time? What are the implications?

Well, I have already listed a few. Clean, non-pollutant fuel that doesn't need steady wind or steady sunlight, not to mention acres of land like solar and wind needs. But let me give you a full breakdown before you go to the website.

Focus fusion makes electricity directly. Coal, oil, and fission make it indirectly by heating water into steam, which then drives a turbine to create energy. Focus fusion takes a hydrogen atom (a proton) and a boron atom, and makes 3 helium ions out of them (plus a lot of x-rays). These ions are positively charged, and, once ran through a transformer, you get pure electricity. The x-rays are also captured by modified solar panels, and they give out electricity too. The total efficiency of focus fusion is around 90%. The best fossil fuel plants get 40%. When you tie in the fact that a garage-sized 5 MW fusion plant only uses 12 kg of fuel in a year, and with no steam turbines or teams of people needed to run it, the electricity that comes from a fusion plant is estimated to cost 100x less to make than current technologies.

100x less! I paid about $200 for my electric bill last month. That would mean it would go down to $2, which is too cheap to meter. Even with taxes and infrastructure costs, electricity could be cheaper than water is now, in a focus fusion world.

When energy is unlimited and practically free, you can do things that now are unimaginable. Water desalinization, advanced farming and soil reclamation, new transportation technologies, you name it. Poverty and hunger would only exist because of a lack of human will. The oil-rich yet politically-moribund nations would have to stop sucking from other countries to prop up their kingdoms and dictatorships. Islamic Fundamentalists would no longer have money nor status with their believers. And best of all, all the pollution from fossil fuels and nuclear waste would cease, clearing our skies and drastically brightening our children's futures. Quite simply, it would save us, if it happens. I believe it can, but will it? There is only one way to know, and that is to help the project finish its work. So, please, go check out the website, and make your own decision. And buy a t-shirt. I designed them, as a donation.

UPDATE: CafePress has donated a free Premium Store to the Focus Fusion Society to have for earning money. This will allow them to make black t-shirts as well as having a custom front-end to it. Because of this, I have to make some new designs, and the web dev's have to put together a new site, so it'll be a few before you can get a shirt. I will post when it is ready. If you have a good idea for a shirt design, join the focusfusion.org site and look in the forums for the t-shirt design thread.