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Commentary
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U.S. releases latest Climate Change Strategic Plan |
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The Bush Administration has just released a Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan. According to the press release the Plan "details measures to accelerate the development and reduce the cost of new and advanced technologies that avoid, reduce, or capture and store greenhouse gas emissions". While the overall scope of this effort is laudable and many of the separate elements are certainly worth pursuing, the general approach is to deceive the public by making it appear as though there were some kind of concerted U.S. effort to reduce greenhouse gases.
The normal approach to strategic planning would be to identify the problem and then prioritize the approaches to solving the problem. Instead what we have here is a patchwork of programs which were being pursued for many other reasons and which could have an important impact on future climate conditions. And even the programs that are described may be relegated to the unfunded mandates category that is so prominently a feature of this government. While the current Fusion Energy Sciences Program is described as part of this Plan, the actual timescales for carrying out the necessary research are vague or nonexistent.
The entire report is available at the Climate Technology website . The curious reader might want to compare this plan with the recent policy speech by Al Gore at New York University. Gore advocates a more aggressive approach to dealing with climate change.
“… we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.”
It is precisely this last concern that must be kept in mind when looking at this shiny new strategic plan. It is a necessary step but far from sufficient to solving the challenge that we face in climate change. And the resources that might be used to address the needs of this plan are being dissipated fighting a needless conflict in Iraq — jw
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The U.S. Oil Addiction |
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Physicists Persevere in Quest |
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Physicists persevere in quest for inexhaustible energy source
University of Wisconsin - May 30, 2006
MADISON - As gas prices soar and greenhouse gases continue to blanket the atmosphere, the need for a  clean, safe and cheap source of energy has never seemed more pressing.
Scientists have long worked to meet that need, exploring alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar power. But, after decades of quiet progress, the spotlight is now on another potentially inexhaustible energy source.
Seven countries signed an agreement in Brussels last week (May 24) to launch construction of the multibillion dollar International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France. The largest fusion-energy experiment ever conducted, ITER is the culmination of years of research by scores of scientists, and is poised to answer long-standing questions about the real-world viability of fusion energy. The United States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation are joint sponsors of the project, which will experimentally generate up to 500 million watts of energy.
An international collective of physicists and engineers is working to both complement and lend expertise directly to the ITER initiative - and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are firmly placed among them.
"[ITER] is a major threshold that we've been waiting to get to for 20 years," says Raymond Fonck, a UW-Madison professor of engineering physics and the chief scientist of ITER's U.S. project office. "The project is the No. 1 priority in fusion research in the country and the world, and essentially takes us to a regime we've never been to before."
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Science Magazine is calling attention to the preparations for experiments on EAST, the new superconducting tokamak in China. The Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei has done an exemplary job in completing construction on a new tokamak capable of operation for extended pulses (up to a 1000 seconds). This will allow experiments that simulate operating conditions for the much larger ITER experiment being constructed in France. China, Korea, and India have all taken up the challenge of constructing a superconducting tokamak (most existing experiments use short pulse, copper coil magnets) that follow the general concept of the Tokamak Physics Experiment, a project at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab that was cancelled by a short-sighted U.S. Congress in 1995. There is now no such capability in the U.S. and scientists here are developing proposals for long distance collaboration on the new Asian tokamaks.
ENERGY ALTERNATIVES:  Waiting for ITER, Fusion Jocks Look EAST
Dennis Normile*
HEFEI, CHINA--The official launch of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project next week will mark a coming of age for fusion research in Asia. When the $11 billion effort was initiated in 1985, ITER's four original backers--the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the Soviet Union--accounted for nearly all worldwide research into harnessing fusion, the process that powers the sun, to produce energy. But now the three newest ITER partners, China, South Korea, and India, are showing that they didn't just buy their way into one of the biggest physics experiments since the Manhattan Project: They are contributing crucial expertise as well.
The first new Asian fusion tiger out of the gate is the Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which in March completed testing a machine that has never been built before: a fully superconducting tokamak. This toroidal vessel isn't the largest or most powerful device for containing the superhot plasma in which hydrogen isotopes fuse and release energy. But until India and South Korea bring similar machines online (see sidebar, p. 993), it will be the only tokamak capable of confining a plasma for up to 1000 seconds, instead of the tens of seconds that machines elsewhere can muster. ITER, expected to be completed in Cadarache, France, in 2016, will have to sustain plasmas far longer to demonstrate fusion as a viable energy source. But researchers from China and around the world will be able to use IPP's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) to get a head start on learning to tame plasmas for extended periods. "This will make a big contribution for the future of fusion reactors," declares Wan Yuanxi, a plasma physicist who heads EAST. (Complete article at Science)
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Patrick Moore on Nuclear Energy |
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The Washington Post has just published a contributed editiorial by Patrick Moore, one of the founders of GreenPeace, that makes a very strong case for nuclear energy as a critical next step in combating global warming. Patrick Moore (see his site at Greenspirit) is one of a number of rational environmentalists who are strongly advocating nuclear energy systems as a better alternative to the fossil fuel power plants that provide most of world's electrical power. Given the timescale on which the world is pursuing fusion power, and indeed, in almost any future that we can envision, nuclear energy, will provide a likely and viable bridge to fusion power systems. |
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