The Next Really Cool Thing – Fusion?

If you hang around the renewable-energy business for long, you’ll hear a lot of tall tales. You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.

Hang around long enough and you’ll even hear that in another 10 or 20 years hydrogen-powered cars or fusion energy will be a commercial reality. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard one of those stories, I could buy my own space shuttle. No wonder cynics often say that viable fusion energy or hydrogen-powered cars are “20 years away and always will be.”

But what if this time is different? What if a laser-powered fusion energy power plant that would have all the reliability of coal, without the carbon dioxide, all the cleanliness of wind and solar, without having to worry about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing, and all the scale of nuclear, without all the waste, was indeed just 10 years away or less? That would be a holy cow game-changer.

Are we there?

Read more . . .

Related articles

• Can Britain afford fusion? (bbc.co.uk)
• Saltwater Power Could Supply Energy for Most Dutch Homes (ecoworldly.com)
• Winter Cold Puts a Chill on Green Energy (nytimes.com)
• Germany announces ITER fusion-reactor supercomputer (theregister.co.uk)

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Tags: carbon dioxide, energy power, fusion, fusion energy, fusion reactor, green energy, hydrogen powered cars, Innovation, renewable energy business

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Innovation, NY Times, Project Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.