Fusion of the Future
This article is an interview with Professor Boyd Blackwell from the Australian Plasma Research Facility on how important fusion is for next generation energy sources:
PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Plasma fusion gives you essentially limitless energy from sea water and in the future lithium which is also rather abundant, not as abundant as sea water but there’s tens-of-thousands of years in the short term, millions of years of energy with virtually no carbon impact and very little but I wouldn’t say no radioactive waste, about 100 times less radioactive waste through incidental processes than nuclear fission.
WALEED ALY : And when you say limitless, you can’t really mean that can you. There has to be some kind of limit doesn’t there?
PROFESSOR BOYD BLACKWELL : Well, there would be, but I think the world’s approaching its capacity for population fairly rapidly, so assuming that the world population live at about the standard that the first world live right now, then we can only consume energy at a reasonable rate and we will be sensible and reduce our energy consumption, it might take a while for people to do that, but already a lot of progress has been made in that direction. So there are limits on how much we use, but the amount of energy available will supply a huge population on the earth beyond its capacity I guess for 10,000 years with the technology that we’re working on right now and a million years for the technology of the next generation, that would deuterium, deuterium fusion.
This interview appeared on the Institute of Plasma Physics and Laser Microfusion website, here.
