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Fusion Power, Climate Change and Pascal’s Wager

BBC, Religion, Skepticism, Uncategorized, Viewpoint, WeatherAction, Webcomics, climate science, environmentalism June 16th, 2009

This post may seem a little schizophrenic, but bear with me.

The BBC website, also known as the media arm of Environmental Panic Inc., produced a fascinating article on the struggle to fund the next experimental setup to produce fusion power.

An international plan to build a nuclear fusion reactor is being threatened by rising costs, delays and technical challenges.

Emails leaked to the BBC indicate that construction costs for the experimental fusion project called Iter have more than doubled.

Some scientists also believe that the technical hurdles to fusion have become more difficult to overcome and that the development of fusion as a commercial power source is still at least 100 years away.

At a meeting in Japan on Wednesday, members of the governing Iter council will review the plans and may agree to scale back the project.

As long as I’ve been alive, fusion power has been 100 years away, so no change there. What is interesting are the reasons for the funding crisis – the costs have soared:

Iter was formally launched in 2006 as collaboration between the European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, China, India and South Korea. The plan was to build the world’s most advanced fusion experiment within 10 years for a budget of $6bn (£3.6bn).

But the grand scheme has been dogged by soaring costs caused by more expensive raw materials and increases in staff numbers. Emails seen by the BBC indicate that the total price of constructing the experiment is now expected to be in excess of $16bn (£10bn).

Professor Sebastien Balibar is research director for the French national research laboratory in Paris. He says that if the rising price of Iter is met by cutting back other research programmes that would be a disaster for science.

“If Iter is built on money having to do with energy or oil, that is perfectly good, I hope it works and in one hundred years I hope we know how to control a fusion reaction. But if it is taken from the public support of research in physics or biology then I would be very upset,” says Professor Balibar.

But hold on a second! $16 billion is a lot of money for you and I, but this is spread over the entire project over many years, and represents a fraction of the money being spent on climate change with economic vices being talked about to curtail the future use of fossil fuels, something that will cost trillions of dollars (and no, I’m not exaggerating on that at all).

Shouldn’t fusion power be at least as high a priority as carbon caps and other techological “fixes” to the non-problem of climate change? Here at least is a source of power that no environmentalist can claim is affecting anything – other than the fundamentalist greens who reify the Hunter-Gatherer existence and who insist that people should coerced into single child families or even no families at all, for the benefit of the “environment”. People like:

Sir David Attenborough CVO CBE,   Naturalist, broadcaster and trustee of the British Museum and Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew; and a former controller of BBC Two.
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta,   Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge
Professor Paul Ehrlich,   Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University
Jane Goodall PhD DBE,   Founder, Jane Goodall Institute, and UN Messenger of Peace.
Susan Hampshire OBE,   Actress and population campaigner
Professor John Guillebaud Former Co-chair of OPT, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health, University College, London. Former Medical Director, Margaret Pyke Centre for Family Planning.
Professor Aubrey Manning OBE,   President of the Wildlife Trusts and Emeritus Professor of Natural History, University of Edinburgh
Professor Norman Myers CMG,   Visiting Fellow, Green College, Oxford University, and at Universities of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, California, Michigan and Texas
Sara Parkin OBE,    Founder Director and Trustee of Forum for the Future and Director of the Natural Environment Research Council and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and Head Teachers into Industry.
Jonathon Porritt CBE,   Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Sir Crispin Tickell GCMG KCVO,   Chancellor of Kent University, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin Institute, and former UK Permanent Representative on the United Nations Security Council

…in other words, wealthy people with no experience of grinding poverty, famine or high infant mortality – or any shame or self-regard.

But back to the article. There are scientists who believe that the experiment won’t produce any useful power or insight because of technical issues with the design of reactor.

MIT professor Bruno Coppi has been working on fusion research in Italy and the United States for many decades. He believes that Iter is the wrong experiment; it is too costly, will take too long and may not deliver fusion. He says we should be looking at other options.

“We are pressed for time, the climate situation is worse. I think we should go with a faster line of experiments. Iter should admit its limitations and it will give a limited contribution to fusion, but to get to ignition you need to follow a different road,” he says.

Another huge hurdle is how to contain gases that are 10 times hotter than the Sun. The materials required simply haven’t been invented yet.

Professor Balibar explained: “The most difficult problem is the problem of materials. Some time ago I declared that fusion is like trying to put the Sun in a box – but we don’t know how to make the box.

“The walls of the box, which need to be leak tight, are bombarded by these neutrons which can make stainless steel boil. Some people say it is just a question of inventing a stainless steel which is porous to let these particles through; personally I would have started by inventing this material.”

Quite. There are serious issues that need to be dealt with before you build very expensive experiment which is guaranteed to fail. But then there are the pseudoscientific arguments for why ITER should not be built:

Dr Holtkamp says the view that the project is to be scaled down is wrong.

“Fusion is not going to be the alternative in the next 20, 30 or 40 years, that is correct. But there needs to a long term plan; 40 years is little more than a generation. We need to think about the next generation and the many after that.”

Professor Balibar says that the end result of the ballooning costs and increasing technical challenges will be a further slowing of the path to fusion.

“The consequence of all these difficulties is that it’s not going to be tomorrow that one succeeds with fusion. But the energy problem and the climate problem are urgent,” he says.

“The global warming is now – one needs to find a solution immediately, one cannot wait 100 years. The solution to the climate and energy problem is not Iter, (it) is not fusion.”

Those of us who live in the real world must still be wondering where the global warming has gone – nor why this should be an argument against a potential technology which will help prevent this dread climatic misadventure.

And then I found myself thinking about Pascal’s Wager again. Blaise Pascal was a brilliant thinker until he had what I can only term a religiously inspired nervous breakdown and never produced anything useful again.

But his Wager was a simple binary bet on whether G-d exists or not. He averred that it is better to believe in G-d than not, because the reward for being a believer if the proposition is true far outweigh the negative impact of disbelief, especially if G-d did not exist, the result would be the same.

The fact that Pascal could produce such transparent claptrap and think it a valid argument, is testimony to how desperate some people are to win an argument – especially when evidence is not on their side.

But the larger point about Pascal’s Wager is about whether it is better to believe in something that is most likely to be false, just in case it might come true, has me thinking about the whole idea of Fusion power in the first place.

Here we have a situation where the massive funding is for an unproven technology with obvious technological obstacles that no-one knows how to fix, with the faith that sometime in the future we will be able to harness limitless energy without producing any nasty waste.

And it is faith that is really driving the dream of fusion power – not evidence that fusion power can be controlled safely. Its a Utopian dream wrapped in a fallacious argument of unlimited return for relatively small cost of willful suspension of disbelief.

I don’t know which is worse: the spending of vast amounts of money to address a non-problem or the spending of massive amounts of money to pursue a very unlikely outcome. Its as if science and politics have joined together in unholy matrimony to produce a compulsive gambler betting his food money on a ticket on the National Lottery to save himself from being attacked by a Yeti.