Interview with Dennis Peterson - three time Climate CoLab winner
This is an expanded version of the interview we had with multi-year Climate CoLab winner, Dennis Peterson.
Dennis's 2013 proposal, 'It's the 21st Century. Where's My Fusion Reactor?' honored him with a Popular Choice At-Large Award for receiving more votes than 97% of all 2013 finalist proposals. He was initially granted the Popular Choice Award in 2010 and 2011 for proposals on carbon pricing and a 7-point plan to reduce carbon emissions.
Tell us about what progress has been made on your proposal?
I'm not directly involved in fusion research, but I try to help out where I can. The project that's easiest to get involved in, for an interested layman, is focus fusion, because it's the smallest and cheapest, and takes a very open approach. So I'm a volunteer board member of a nonprofit called the Focus Fusion Society. The FFS works with LPPhysics, a private company working on focus fusion. Right now we're helping them with a crowdunding campaign for their next piece of equipment, which is a new reactor core made of beryllium.In 2012 they got a paper published in Physics of Plasmas, showing they'd attained the temperature and confinement time needed for boron fusion. Now they need to increase the plasma density by a factor of 10,000. The beryllium core should take them partway there, and the other two steps are to increase the input power and switch to boron fuel. If their theory is correct then they'll get net power at that point, in 12-18 months if they get the funding. If it turns out they're wrong, at the very least it should be interesting science.
Eric Lerner, their chief scientist, was just invited to speak at the Oxford University Scientific Society. Recent speakers have included Nobel winners Roger Penrose and Sir Tim Hunt.
Focus fusion is the project I'm personally involved in but there's also been progress with other experiments I mentioned in the proposal. General Fusion for example is about to start building their full-scale reactor.
What motivated you to get involved in this topic?
With my 2010 and 2011 CoLab entries, I convinced myself that we have the technical abilities to address climate change. What we lack is the political will.
When we presented to the U.N. in 2011, the former environmental minister of France said "All these ideas are great, but how do you make them actually happen? That's the hard part. And what are you personally doing to make them happen?"
That question made me refocus from the things I'd been thinking about until then, like carbon prices and nuclear fission, to something that could overcome the political issues. And the one thing that seemed like it could, is fusion, especially boron fusion. The main reason is that it has the potential to be much cheaper than any fossil fuel.
And of course that would make a huge difference. Coal had a lot of political power, but then fracking made gas a lot cheaper and now a lot of coal plants are shutting down. If you get the economics on your side, without needing subsidies or fees, then you usually win.
The drawback is that fusion is a big technical challenge, and boron fusion even more so. But fusion is progressing exponentially, much like Moore's Law. It's about 10,000 times better now than it was in 1970. It's close enough now that private investors are getting involved. We might just have a shot at this.
Part of the reason for this progress is that fusion is much less regulated than fission. With fission, you need to go through a difficult approval process just to start experiments. But high school students build and run small fusion reactors and nobody bats an eye.
What are some barriers to action on your idea (e.g., technical issues, funding, manpower, outside groups)? What specific support would be helpful for your proposal to be implemented and effective?
Funding is a big issue. There are a couple well-funded private companies, but most of the U.S. fusion projects are government-funded and many are getting shut down. We're spending most of our fusion money on building ITER in France. ITER has its advantages but it's not expected to lead to commercial power before 2050, and it's unclear that it would be economical even then. That's not much of a climate solution.
Even if we were to take a fairly conservative approach and stick with tokamaks (the design used by ITER), we could at least fully support projects like MIT's Alcator C-Mod. It has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, much stronger than even ITER will have. I got to visit it during the Colab conference last year, and they hadn't been able to run the machine for a year because of funding issues. I've heard that right now they have funding to run it a little but are slated for complete shutdown in 2015. That's insane.
The non-tokamak projects have gotten hit even worse. MIT's levitated dipole is one that's lost funding for energy research entirely.
Focus fusion luckily doesn't need much money. But it's further from mainstream fusion research, and they've had trouble getting even the little bit of money they need, even though their results so far are quite good. If the crowdfunding is successful that will help a lot.
Outside of Climate CoLab, what climate related work are you now interested in?
Fusion is the only climate work I'm doing at the moment. But I am getting into some other things related to collective intelligence. I'm a software developer, and I'm working on some ideas for advanced hypertext.
What advice would you offer to people interested in entering Climate CoLab contests?
If you're an amateur like me, don't be intimidated! The fact that it's MIT scares some people off, but one of the main goals is to get ideas from the general public.
What information on climate change would you like to share with the Climate CoLab community (e.g, favorite quotes, statistics, or issues that you want to raise)?
There's a great quote by Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
