From Nautil.us:Giving society cheap, abundant energy . . .would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.– Paul Ehrlich, “An Ecologist’s Perspective on Nuclear Power,”
May/June 1978 issue of Federation of American Scientists Public Issue Report
This privateer is developing a way to power the world with water and borax.
The modern quest for Promethean fire is underway in an anonymous office park in Foothill Ranch, California, an hour southeast of Los Angeles. In the park, along a meandering drive, you will find a huge, modern warehouse building with “TAE Technologies” emblazoned on the door. Inside, you will find a 100-foot-long, $200 million fusion-energy experiment named Norman. And in a second-floor office, upstairs from that looming machine, you will find the would-be Prometheus himself: Michl Binderbauer, TAE’s boyish-looking and relentlessly upbeat co-founder and CEO.
In keeping with the rest of the TAE headquarters, his office looks spare, functional, and slightly unfinished. The most striking object adorning the room is a large whiteboard next to his desk, its upper three-quarters jammed with equations and crude engineering sketches for upgraded fusion devices. Across the bottom, within the low reach of little hands, the business notations give way to a whimsical set of drawings created by Binderbauer’s two young children. At first he seems bemused that these silly scrawls, of all things, are what draws my attention. Then he rolls with it and recalls a recent conversation with his 10-year-old son, who had just learned about climate change in school:
“He’s a precocious kid. He asked me, ‘Is this right? Is this really what’s happening?’ I told him, ‘I hope not. If Daddy can help, it may not happen.’ So now when people ask him what I do, he says, ‘My dad is trying to save the planet’.”
Like so much of what Binderbauer, 51, says, the story sounds too good to be true and yet utterly sincere. As he sees it, his save-the-planet strategy is no do-gooder’s dream; it is the perfectly logical end point of a perfectly rational analysis about the state of the world. His indisputable starting proposition is that the world needs a growing supply of energy. Then he asks, how are we going to generate it? Coal, oil, and natural gas are causing disruptive and deadly climate changes, so fossil fuels cannot be the future. Nuclear power produces no direct carbon emissions, but it leaves behind radioactive waste and—fairly or not—faces bitter public resistance.
Solar and wind power are environmental darlings, but expanding them significantly will require vast new infrastructure to make their clean electricity available when and where it is needed. “Relying solely on solar and wind is a fool’s hope, I think,” Binderbauer says. Several recent studies, including a major technical analysis in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, back up his assessment: We simply do not know how to build an electric grid that can handle the inconsistent way that the sun shines and the wind blows. Even if renewables come to generate the majority of our electricity, they need to be combined with so-called dispatchable power that can be switched on at any time.....MUCH MORE
All those considerations, taken together, imply that we need something completely new in the global energy mix. Binderbauer argues that the most realistic something is fusion. Physicists know that smashing together atomic nuclei (the ultra-dense centers of atoms) and causing them to merge can release a tremendous amount of energy, far more than is possible by burning coal or natural gas, with no carbon pollution. They have dramatic proof that the process works: Fusion is what powers the sun, and it is what gives a hydrogen bomb an explosive kick. But after eight decades of research, nobody has been able to create a machine that can make fusion happen gently, steadily, and efficiently enough to generate electricity.
Binderbauer aims to be the one to crack the code. He predicts that TAE could go from Norman to a demonstration fusion reactor within five years, and then—if everything goes right—to a prototype for a commercial fusion power plant another five years or so after that. His timetable is at least a decade faster than that of the biggest government-run fusion efforts. A handful of other private fusion startups have recently sprung up, promising their own speedy paths to fusion, but TAE has the most funding—more than $600 million—and, laid out here in front of me, the only fully operational test reactor. The company also has the most audacious plan, pursuing a novel type of fusion reaction that would take in hydrogen and boron (common elements of water and laundry detergent) and spit out nearly limitless clean energy.....“I started to understand why the available concepts were flawed.”
It's not just Erlich who thinks like that, here's Amory Lovins:
If you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.
– Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth–Plowboy Interview,
Nov/Dec 1977, p. 22
