Friday, May 27, 2011

25 million miles a gallon, are you interested?

Not yet available.  Maybe never, but wait!  Did you know that a basketball size of uranium has the energy equivalent of a million gallons of gasoline?  Don't like uranium?  How about fusion power?  Fusion power is even more powerful than fission based uranium power, much more powerful.  If, and admittedly this is a big if  -if you can master clean fusion, you can get a vehicle that can get some extreme gas mileage.

How to get to this point is the big problem.  Interestingly, fusion itself is not that difficult.  What makes fusion power difficult is getting useful energy out of it.  Fusion is so powerful that controlling it is a big challenge.  That is the challenge before us.  But the challenge is so great that it may be considered far beyond our capabilities for decades to come.  But such a dismal scenario may not be the case.

What would it take?  Just throwing money at the problem won't necessarily reach a solution.  The ITER project, which uses tokomaks in order to control the fusion process, hasn't been very successful.  Some have called it "Eater" because it eats up so much money.  Is there a better way?  A new way will be necessary, as opposed to "the way" which is what ITER means in Latin.  This blog has explored other ways to generate energy more cheaply and more abundantly.  I invite you to click on the Energy label at the end of this post and follow the posts for some of the new ideas out there.

No comments: