Nuclear Fusion False Hopes

When it sounds too good to be true… maybe it is.

Recently I got enticed by a story about a company called Zap Energy developing a nuclear fusion reactor. The article I read basically claimed that in two years these guys would likely start spitting out Fusion reactors at $4 million a piece. That boys and girls would have been insane if true. It would have allowed us to say bye bye to all energy problems. Global warming? Suddenly a walk in the park to solve.

The problem when reading stuff like this is that we so desperately want to believe in Utopia. We really want a super amazing solution just around the corner. Because we want it so dearly we stop asking critical questions when we get served up exactly what we have dreamed about.

Or rather there is a formula to this. It cannot be so obscure we have no idea what it is. But it also has to be complicated enough that we cannot really grasp whether what is claimed is sensible or not. Zap Energy fits the bill nicely.

Their idea is to ditch the complex framework of magnetic coils wrapped around a Tokamak coil. You know the donut shaped nuclear reactor which is most common. There are a whole host of alternatives to doing this. Anything from lasers to liquid metal. Zap Energy is going to use something called Z-pinch. They basically send electric…