•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Would you believe…

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

I have just been watching an interview on television with Eugene Cernan, the commander of the last Apollo flight to the Moon, 35 years ago, and the last man on the Moon (On BBC TV's perennial "The Sky at Night"). Part of the discussion was around the technological hurdles, and the learning process, that NASA undertook, in response to Kennedy’s famous challenge. (“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon…..”) Cernan repeated the fact that has become a cliché, “We went to the Moon with less computing power than you now have in your cellphone,” which while a good line isn’t entirely true, there was a fair bit of computing power, it just wasn’t very portable and it was all back in Houston and Pasadena.
Less frequently quoted is the bit of Kennedy’s speech that precedes the section quoted above: part of it reads, “…the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfilment.”
What, we might ask, would represent a similar challenge today? The search for “clean” energy is an obvious candidate. Like the lunar landing project as viewed from 1961, there’s one obvious prospect that looks a reasonable bet, though in just the same way, there’s high risk it also might not work. I mean nuclear fusion – apologies to the sustainable-energy mindset, for the duration of these paragraphs we are working from the premise that a techno-fix exists.
What’s appalling about the work on fusion is the timidity of the timescale. From where we are today, we build ITER; then we go on to the next step; and so on, all organised serially. Even the most optimistic observers don’t anticipate generating any grid power before mid-century. On most eco-catastrophe scenarios, we just don’t have that long. We pretty much understand the physics – all that’s left is engineering. How can we settle for dragging it out over half a century? We need that energy source now - and, if it turns out that taming the physics really is beyond us, better to find out sooner rather than later.
Many people, if asked what motivates the West’s involvement in Iraq, would cynically (and glibly) say, “it’s all about oil.” Whether or not you choose to believe that is up to you, but consider this: For the money – or even a fraction of it – that has been spent on that venture, we could now be well on the way to a working fusion reactor, and to making irrelevant the whole business of burning distillations of long-dead plants.

(Add your comments)

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission