Meeting notice: The 03.July.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. 
at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from 
the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't 
recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. 
More details below.

Suggested topic: NT and the future of electrical power

The effort to generate electricity from fusion is one of the 
great enterprises of the civilization, a project that is in many 
respects to our age what Chartres was to its.  One difference is 
that everyone in the 12th century -- at least everyone in Paris --
knew about the project and understood what Chartres was for, 
whereas hardly anyone thinks seriously about the implications of 
a success in fusion power.  No energy planner anywhere, lay or 
professional, incorporates fusion into his or her consumption 
and production scenarios. 

Partly this because the road ahead is genuinely bumpy, but then 
that is true of many technologies, including nanotech, that have 
no trouble attracting dollars and media hype.   The major problem 
is that experiences surrounding fission, together with some 
premature predictions about fusion itself made in the 50's and 
60's, have (for the moment) soured the culture on any form of 
nuclear power.   

However, this attitude has prevented even technical people from 
tracking the gains made by the field in the 90's.  Few know how 
close engineers are to sustaining large, reactor grade plasmas at 
breakeven.  Some of those in the field even think that, assuming 
a level of public support that is of course not there at present, 
we might see a commercial reactor up and running in 15 years. 
See: 
www.ofes.fusion.doe.gov/More_HTML/Artsimovich/PKKawPaper.html.

At some point, however, the core argument for the technology is 
likely to force a reconsideration, that being the humongous spike 
that will emerge in power demand as the developed world struggles 
to the levels of consumption we enjoy in this country. Even under 
the most conservative assumptions (i.e., that our own power needs 
will not rise), world power demands will have to increase by a 
factor of at least five, and there are reasons (having to do with 
climate) that suggest that world energy capacity might have to go 
considerably higher than that.   And of course there are no
very powerful reasons to think our power needs will not go up.

Once we get the hang of making fusion reactors with reasonable 
life cycle costs -- admittedly a hard problem, but nothing 
forbidden by the basic physics  -- and have amortized the design 
costs, the generating capacity available to the civilization 
will increase without effective limit.  Average per capita 
consumption could increase to millions of Kwhs, assuming 
demand... 

Is there something about NT that suggests it might be the source 
of that demand?  Is there some natural synergy between NT and 
very large amounts of electricity?   

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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the first and 
third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant 
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