Tomorrow I’m headed out to Madison for the biannual Innovative Confinement Concepts conference, so I may be offline for a while, possibly until Friday. They claim there’s WiFi at the conference center, so maybe I’ll be able to post from there. I’ll certainly post a summary of goings-on.
The conference is a meeting of researchers working on so-called innovative confinement concepts (hence the name of the conference :-). An ICC is basically any fusion concept that isn’t a Tokomak or an inertial confinement scheme. Tokomaks (and acronym from the Russian for “Toroidal Magnetic Chamber”) are the current leaders in achieving fusion-relevant parameters of temperature, density, and confinement time. Unfortunately they are inherently pulsed devices, and they have other technical features that make them undesirable for power plants. People are working to make Tokamaks power-plant friendly, but progress is slow (as in everything related to fusion). The other mainstream fusion scheme is Inertial Confinement Fusion. This uses a solid pellet of Deuterium and Tritium which is compressed and heated by external energy input from lasers, ion beams, or X-Rays. Currently only lasers and X-rays are used, ion beams having fallen out of favor (for reasons similar to those for the loss of favor of ion beam weapons for BMD – it turns out the beams are damn hard to point and focus accurately if they have any decent amount of energy). I don’t think anyone at this point honestly believes ICF is a real contender for power plants (though I could be wrong). The main reason ICF has solid funding is that the physics of the capsule implosion are exactly the same as the physics of the fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon. In a weapon, X rays are generated by the detonation of a fission device, and passed via a carefully shaped reflector onto the surface of a Lithium Deuteride capsule, which implodes, fuses, and explodes. If you want to understand this process in detail, the ideal way to do it is to detonate small capsules under controlled conditions.
Anyway, the ICCs are the other guys, ranging in funding from ~$10 million down to ~$200K. They are the high-risk, high-reward segment of the fusion development portfolio. The designs range from minor variations on existing technology to outright Wile-E-Coyote designs. I personally believe that the ICCs are the best hope for getting fusion power on the grid in my lifetime, but that to really make things happen we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the fusion community. A lot of folks in the community don’t get basic economics, and have little idea about how technologies have historically come into the commercial sphere. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking to people about at the conference.
Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’m up to. If I can get decent net access I’ll post on the goings-on.