Inventor: "I've just created my most perfect work: a new type of paper airplane."

Funding agency: "Wow great but what does it do?"

Inventor: "Oh, right now it's useless, but soon I'll just scale up the concept and we'll have a cheaper space shuttle!"

Shame on the University of Washington for hyping its research with this exact logic. Touting the "great potential" of a new cheaper-than-coal fusion plant, they see reality and choose to look the other way. Or maybe they're just incredibly naive.

To quote the press release: "Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't been penciled out". BS! Let's talk about the real obstacle to fusion power. The report itself actually leads us to the culprit.

Among many statements ranging from meaningless to wrong, this is the one that dodges the heart of the matter: "They [researchers] have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output." (Emphasis added.)

What is keeping fusion energy from reaching market? The fact we don't understand how to do it well yet. It's impossible with current science. Why? Precisely because we don't know how to scale it up. We can make little demonstration fusion reactors like the one in this report, but expanding them to become large enough to produce useful power eludes our grasp. The entire problem of current fusion devices is scaling them up.

The basic idea in this proposal is a magnetically confined plasma device that uses a geometrical plasma configuration called a spheromak. It's a magnetic field bottle built to trap plasma inside. It's a sibling of the tokamak, the best known and best working of the current fusion devices. The idea is quite old, dating to the 1950s. Several of these machines were built in the 1970s and 1980s, notably by the lead investigator of this work.

The press report claims that the spheromak device is simpler than the tokamak. This is only true to a point. There are fewer external magnets in such a device. Enormous electromagnets require very high electrical current, so the spheromak needs less power. However, part of the magnetic field confinement of the plasma is performed by the magnetic field produced within plasma itself. (Travelling charged ions produce magnetic fields calculable with the laws of electrodynamics.) While this idea sounds simpler, it's actually more difficult in many ways: you have fewer magnets for external control, and the internal plasma configuration is actually much more complicated.

This very difficulty is why the world's biggest and best fusion projects are tokamaks and not spheromaks. The extra control magnets and simpler plasma configuration inside the machines have allowed them to be scaled up to larger sizes much more easily.

So, not only is scaling up the entire problem with magenetic fusion, this device is probably much more difficult to scale up even than current tokamaks, which have not yet been economically scaled up and may not be for several decades.

RCS enthusiastically supports fusion research and increased funding for fusion projects. However, we do not tolerate misleading information being reported.

(AP photo)