Present and discuss all sustainable energy solutions and their implementation tools by energy type, quantity, annual investment and cost from now ’til 2050 and beyond. Show the positive impacts of sustainable energies on economies, jobs and health. Provide energy information input to the United Nations Rio+20 Anniversary Summit.
(Emphasis added.)
The technologies being discussed are:
Solar, Hydro, Wind, Geo & Ocean Thermal, Bio Energy, Novel Energy Technologies
Cold fusion researcher Francesco Celani is doing a presentation on LENR at the conference, and also chairing the “Novel Energy Technologies” working group. I don’t know if anyone will be presenting anything related to more conventional high-energy plasma fusion at the conference, but what I have read about the conference doesn’t give me much hope.
Take a look at this chart, and this one, for their opinion of nuclear power. They also have an energy forecast questionnaire and a job forecast questionnaire. “Nuclear power” gets one category in both questionnaires. To be fair, LENR is not mentioned at all, and I get the impression it was a late addition to the conference agenda. I suppose it’s a bit late to bring this up, but I wonder if plasma fusion could also have found a place on the agenda, possibly also under “Novel Energy Technologies”, or if the odds were already stacked against it.
I note that the Rio+20 summit is June 20-22. There’s also a “World Future Energy Summit” next week in Abu Dhabi. Again, I haven’t noticed any particular mention of nuclear fusion there. However, I did see a link to the Zayed Future Energy Prize website. Might be something to take a look at.
]]>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
If the U.S. government set the policy that all federal R&D dollars will go into energy sources that are not yet at $125 per megawatt hour in total system levelized cost, then no federal R&D would go to coal, natural gas, nuclear, win, geothermal, biomass, or hydro.
That would leave only solar and fusion getting federal R&D money.
And that’s good policy. You should only spend federal energy R&D dollars to bring down the cost of energy (and into conservation / efficiency R&D and maybe carborn capture). You’d leave tax incentives in place for everybody else doing clean and/or renewable energy. But R&D would all go to bring down the cost to $125 per megawatt hour in total system levelized cost.
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What should happen next?
It would seem that tax policy is vital to future growth of clean fusion—every bit as important as federal R&D budgets, if not more important.
Thoughts?
]]>What are the leading candidates today for a clean fusion cluster?
While there has been some H-B fuel research at Duke and UW-Madison and a little research at Texas A&M, there would have to be more activity before any of these metro areas (or states) emerge as leading contenders.
Northwest Washington state is still in the running, especially if Helion goes aneutronic. (The company in Vancouver, Canada, is nearby).
Los Angeles is a possibility, but the company in Foothill Ranch is so secretive that it’s hard to see this being built around them. However, if NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Cal-Tech get involved, there could be a clean fusion cluster in L.A.
However, at this point, the two most likely candidates are New Jersey and New Mexico.
New Jersey, meaning, primarily, the area of Trenton, Princeton, Lawrenceville, and Middlesex. This area has LPP and the leadership of the Fusion Focus Society as well as Princeton University and the state capital of New Jersey.
And New Mexico, meaning, primarily, the metro area of Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Socorro. This area has ECM2, Los Alamos National Labs, Sandia National Labs and its Z Machine and mission to transfer energy tech to the private sector, UNM and New Mexico Tech, and the state capital of New Mexico.
It would seem that the best thing for clean fusion would be for both the Albuquerque are and the Trenton area to form a clean fusion cluster—and for the two clusters to compete with each other for supremacy.
Thoughts?
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Is this true today of the ECM2 team or any other team? If not, what is the best guess?
If this is true, it’s a game-changer and it will be somewhat easy to persuade policymakers to move this direction.
]]>If true, and if it’s cost-effective, this would be of very significant interest to federal policymakers, including Congress, and could help accelerate fusion R&D funding.
First, is this true?
Second might it be cost-effective?
Third, has anyone thought about the use of aneutronic fusion to clean up fission-produced nuclear waste, comparing and contrasting aneutronic with D-T for this purpose?
]]>Steps involved include organizing/platform (maybe we could outsource to avaaz) and, more importantly, crafting the message - something that works for the fusion alternatives and is easy to act on for the congressperson. This is a specific type of campaign.
]]>We need to continue the efforts to “Keep Calm” and try to change the narrative that all nuclear power is inherently catastrophic. If Focus Fusion (which doesn’t use fuel rods or steam!) were to be successful, it will mean another way out from under the cycle of pain of fission runaway reactions, exploding and burning refineries, loss of power delivery due to global political instabilities. It would mean a much faster solution to these problems. It falls on us to continue the efforts large and small to change the way people define the discussion of energy solutions.
I’ve marched in “No Nukes” demonstrations and attended the fundraising concerts in the past, but that was against weapons and old style fission nuclear power plants. Now I’m alarmed at the looming global crisis that has changed the equation of what we have to consider for energy options. I’m all for renewable energy but fear it’s ascendency will come too late. Focus Fusion is an alternative and has a lot going for it to be made intrinsically safe and should be seriously considered along with renewables as a viable alternative worth pursuing.
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