Fusion!
Posted on May 29, 2006
Filed Under Technology
Can I just say that £6.8bn would buy a heck of a lot of solar panels? I realise there are all sorts of likely benefits for physics and materials research but the main headline about the new investment in nuclear fusion is certainly all about the theoretical energy potential:
“Take the lithium from the battery of a single laptop computer, add half a bathtub of water, and it can give 200,000 kilowatt hours of electricity – the same as 70 tonnes of coal. That’s enough to power one person in the UK for 30 years… This says to me that you have to give it a go. You’ve just got to give this thing a crack!”
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, head of the UK’s fusion research programme in Oxford Today
Sounds great but others aren’t so enthusiastic, saying the idea is “as discouraging as it is expensive”. Even if you listen to the most optimistic proponents, they say it might work in 50 years time (provided oil prices make the economics attractive). In the meantime, it’s still consuming more electricity than it generates.
It seems that fusion research in the past has been plagued by “unrealistic expectations regarding our abilities”. Doesn’t this sound familiar? It’s just like electricity from nuclear fission going from being too cheap to meter to costing the taxpayer £70bn (and counting) just to clean up the mess.
I would love to see a full cost-benefit analysis comparing the investment of this money in fusion and microgeneration. Any takers?
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