Since my last – pre-Covid – article in this series there have been several new players on the “Hot Fusion” front but the most obvious one from a Kiwi point of view, is Open Star.

 

It achieved national prominence in the local media thanks to a gushing interview of its founder, 31 year old Dr Ratu Mataira by Radio NZ just last year where the interviewer immediately requested “auto gas-lighting mode” with her “treat me like a five year-old” invitation.

 

Thankfully, Dr Mataira at least treated her like an educated adult but, understandably, couldn’t go into any depth, including historical.

 

So, although Henry Ford’s “History is Bunk” remark may be worth remembering, we might remind ourselves that the search for (safe) Controlled Nuclear Fusion (the basic theme of this, my whole series) began with the Uncontrolled versions – the Hydrogen Bombs first developed in the fifties – and is thus 75 years old.

 

We might also note that the key assumption of all “Hot Fusion” devices is that, if only to mimic the Sun (and all other stars), we “must” work with very hot plasma.

 

Accordingly, endless streams of breathless Science Reporters (going back 75 years) have successively parroted the “Ten Times Hotter than the Sun” phrase.

 

All this ignores the long established phenomenon of “Quantum Tunnelling” that “Cold Fusion” is partly based on – as simply trying any number of Fusion or 2-2 reactions on my own site, Nanosoft, would show.

 

Like it or not, Open Star is ultimately based on the Tokamak, invented by the Soviets in the late fifties: basically a donut/bagel shaped loop which seeks to magnetically confine the plasma. If that magnetic confinement fails (as they still mostly do, within milliseconds!) the reaction instantly stops. That reaction is typically the “DT” one, in which Deuterium and Tritium exothermically produce heat – and fast neutrons which ultimately poison the surrounding metal.

 

The ultimate Tokamak-based project is ITER – the internationally based effort which has, so-far, cost 50 Billion dollars (give or take) but has yet to produce a single joule of excess power.

 

Naturally, all the more recent startups – now including Open Star – seek to use modern approaches to finesse the shortcomings of ITER. Apparently, Open Star will use the Levitated Dipole approach. I must admit that I had never heard of this technique but, googling it, I found a range of previous papers. A key one from about 20 years ago, has analyzed the phenomenon in some depth and is here.

 

A little more digging would reveal that LDE research by MIT itself was actually dropped in November 2011 by the U S Department of Energy. Even so, MIT, Columbia University and now Open Star still believe LDE has promise.

 

But we might cringe at the built-in name-dropping: Did they really have to call them the “Rutherford” High Temperature Superconductors? Or that it emerged from “Project Eureka” (did they do a Streak)? Or, for that matter, that it was “Marsden Funded”?

 

But who knows? There are some investors out there, who have noted that, given a possible million-fold return of whichever Hot or Cold Fusion startup ultimately succeeds, it may be wise to “bet on every horse in the race”. But that strategy assumes that every team is or will be openly researching and publishing and that there are no startups outside the range of Google.

 

P. W. Power

July 2024