Nuclear Fusion

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NUCLEAR FUSION: THE SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY PROBLEM AND TO ADVANCED SPACE PROPULSION Gerald Black Aerospace Engineer (retired, 40+ year career); email: [email protected] Currently Chair of the Ohio Chapter of the Mars Society Presented at Mars Society Annual Convention, Washington DC, September 22, 2016 ABSTRACT Nuclear fusion has long been viewed as a potential solution to the world’s energy needs. However, the government sponsored megaprojects have been floundering. The two multi-billion- dollar flagship programs, the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF), have both experienced years of delays and a several-fold increase in costs. The ITER tokamak design is so large and complex that, even if this approach succeeds, there is doubt that it would be economical. After years of testing at full power, the NIF facility is still far short of achieving its goal of fusion ignition. But hope is not lost. Several private companies have come up with smaller and simpler approaches that show promise. This talk highlights the progress made by one such private company, namely LPPFusion (formerly called Lawrenceville Plasma Physics). LPPFusion is developing focus fusion technology based on the dense plasma focus device and hydrogen-boron 11 fuel. This approach, if it works, would produce a fusion power generator small enough to fit in a truck. This device would produce no radioactivity, there would be no possibility of a meltdown or other safety issues, and it would be more economical than any other source of electricity. Besides solving the energy problem, this approach would provide an enormous advance in space propulsion, making possible human travel from earth to Mars in only two weeks. INTRODUCTION The world’s energy consumption has been growing steadily over the years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Figure 1 shows the world energy consumption for each of the major fuel from 1990 to 2040. As is shown in this figure, the three largest contributors to the world’s energy consumption are petroleum and other liquid fuels, coal and natural gas. Although coal consumption is projected to plateau, liquid fuels and natural gas consumption are projected to continue increasing. Unfortunately, these three fossil fuels contribute to global warming and to pollution. The latest comprehensive report on climate change is the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change1. Per this report, warming of the atmosphere and ocean system has been unequivocal, with many of the associated impacts such as sea level change (among other metrics) having occurred since 1950 at rates unprecedented in the historical record. Furthermore, it is extremely likely (95 – 100 percent probability) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since 1950. In addition to the global warming problem, fossil fuels cause pollution that has a harmful effect on health, especially for people living in large cities. Per the World Health Organization (WHO), as of 2012 about 7 million people die annually because of air pollution exposure2. The WHO data reveals a strong link between pollution and deaths due to cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and respiratory diseases. Though it is obviously desirable to move away from fossil fuels, it is also necessary to pay close attention to the cost of the various energy sources. If the cost is too high, this impedes economic growth. This is especially true for the developing countries such as Africa. To successfully move away from fossil fuels, we need an energy source that is at least as cheap or cheaper than the fossil fuels. This is where the problem lies. Figure 2 shows the relative cost of various energy sources in dollars per million BTUs. Unfortunately, coal and natural gas are currently the two cheapest sources of energy, well below the cost of nuclear fission, solar, and wind energy. Nuclear fusion could be the solution to this problem if we can overcome the technical challenges to make it work and to be inexpensive. Figure 2 includes a fusion energy source known as focus fusion that would (if it can be made to work) be much cheaper than fossil fuels. Focus fusion will be discussed later in this document. In addition to needing a solution to the world’s energy problem, a large advance in space propulsion is needed to meet future needs. With today’s propulsion technology, a journey to Mars takes a minimum of 6 months. This needs to be shortened to limit the effects of radiation and microgravity on the human body. Human travel to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn using current propulsion would take so long as to be prohibitive. Advanced propulsion is also the key to bringing down the cost of space travel, since it would make possible reusable single stage to orbit vehicles. Nuclear fusion could also be the solution to advanced space propulsion. ADVANTAGES OF NUCLEAR FUSION OVER NUCLEAR FISSION Nuclear fusion has several advantages over nuclear fission. One critical advantage is safety. Nuclear fission reactors are susceptible to meltdown, thus having the potential to cause serious accidents or disasters such as happened in the U.S. with Three Mile Island, in Russia with Chernobyl and in Japan with the Fukushima reactors. There is no chance of a meltdown or any other accident affecting public safety with fusion power plants. A second important issue is nuclear proliferation. Fission reactors require enriched uranium. The problem is that the same centrifuges used to produce enriched uranium can also produce highly enriched uranium that can be used for nuclear weapons. By contrast, the fuels used for fusion reactors are lighter elements that cannot be used for nuclear weapons. Since some fusion fuels (such as deuterium-tritium used for tokamaks) do produce neutrons, there is a slight risk that a nation with the know how could utilize these neutrons to breed weapons grade plutonium from uranium 238. However, this risk is small compared to the nuclear proliferation risk of a fission reactor. Other fusion fuels (such as hydrogen-boron 11) produce no neutrons and thus have zero nuclear proliferation risk. A third advantage of fusion versus fission concerns radioactive waste. Fission reactors produce long lived radioactive waste. This waste must safely be stored for thousands of years, yet there has been no agreement on how to do that. By contrast, for nuclear fusion radioactive waste is either of little concern or no concern at all, depending on what fuel is used. Some fusion fuels (such as deuterium-tritium) produce neutrons and therefore would produce radioactive waste. However, this waste is relatively short lived (no more than about 50 or 100 years) and can be safely stored using conventional means. Other fusion fuels (such as hydrogen-boron11) produce no neutrons, and thus would produce no radioactive waste. A final factor is cost. Nuclear fission is very expensive compared to coal and natural gas as is shown in figure 2. For fusion power, the cost would depend on the design of the fusion reactor. A very large and complex reactor such as a tokamak would likely not be economical. However, smaller and simpler fusion devices (such as the focus fusion device) would be cheaper than fossil fuels. THE FAILURE OF THE GOVERNMENT FUSION MEGAPROJECTS Although fusion research began in the 1920s, it was not till the 1950s that serious efforts to develop fusion power devices were undertaken. By the end of the 1960s, many different fusion devices existed, and no one knew which device might lead to practical fusion power. In the 1950s the Russians invented the tokamak device (a magnetic confinement device), and they achieved a lot of progress with the tokamak during the 1960s. Inertial confinement fusion, whereby lasers blast a pellet of fuel to make it implode, was also heralded in the 1960s as a promising means of achieving fusion power. In the mid-1970s, administrators decided to abandon a broad-based approach and to focus nearly all fusion research on the tokamak and on laser based inertial confinement fusion. This led to two government sponsored megaprojects. The first megaproject is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Due to instabilities in the plasma, scientists found that tokamaks had to be very large to tame the instabilities and produce useful power. Many large tokamaks had already been built by several countries, but something larger than any one country could afford was needed to take the next step toward a workable tokamak. Thus, the European Union, India, Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and the United States banded together to fund and build the ITER reactor, which is under construction in southern France. See figure 3 for an artist’s drawing of ITER. The person in the lower left corner of the structure illustrates the immense size of the reactor. Progress on ITER has not gone well. The estimated date for full power operation has slipped from 2016 till 2027, and the cost has increased from $5 billion to $20 billion3. By contrast, the Large Hadron Collider (the European particle collider that discovered the Higgs Boson) cost $4.75 billion. Furthermore, this device is essentially a science project and is not intended to produce any electricity. It will take an even more capable and complex tokamak to contribute electricity to the grid. There is also the problem that, even if the tokamak approach works, it will probably not be economical. A workable tokamak reactor is likely to be so large and complex that it would cost billions to build. Another problem is that these reactors (which use deuterium-tritium fuel) produce neutrons that eventually make the walls and other parts of the reactor radioactive, weakening the parts, and limiting the life of the reactor. The second government megaproject is the National Ignition Facility (NIF). This facility was funded and built by the United States and is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. NIF is an inertial confinement device that uses lasers to blast a pellet of fuel, making the pellet implode. Laser bay number 2 of the NIF facility is shown in figure 4. There is also an equally large room housing laser bay number 1 and other rooms to the facility. Like ITER, NIF is a science project that is not intended to contribute electricity to the grid. The goal of this project is to achieve ignition, that is, to produce more energy from the pellet of fuel than is input to the lasers, thus proving that the inertial confinement method is a feasible path to fusion power. Unfortunately, NIF has also not gone well. The NIF facility was finished 7 years late in 2009, and full power operation commenced in 20123. However, nature did not cooperate. The computer simulations that had been done turned out to be grossly in error, and NIF is still far short of its goal of achieving ignition. Emphasis has now switched from using this facility to research fusion power to instead using this facility for research on maintaining our nuclear weapons stockpile. It now appears unlikely that this facility will ever live up to its name and achieve ignition. In hindsight, it has become evident that the decision made in the mid-1970s to abandon a broad- based approach and instead concentrate funding into tokamaks and laser based inertial confinement was a big mistake. Progress on both approaches has stalled, and neither approach offers much hope for practical fusion power. Another problem is that much of the government research is done in university lab settings, where the emphasis is not so much on making rapid progress but rather on understanding the science and producing scientific papers, and of course teaching the students how to do research. Thus, the research is done in a very methodical manner, and progress is slow. There is also a tendency to avoid risk, because if a new idea fails it might cause the whole project to be cancelled. Government funding of fusion research has been parsimonious and has fluctuated a lot. THE EMERGENCE OF PRIVATE FUSION EFFORTS Because of the sorry state of the government research, entrepreneurs decided that there must be a better way. Many entrepreneurs have started private companies pursuing fusion power. These companies have taken some old ideas from the early days of fusion research that were never adequately explored, and they have also come up with some innovative new ideas. Among the privately funded companies are Tri-Alpha Energy, Helion Energy, General Fusion, Lockheed Martin (Skunk Works), EMC2 and LPPFusion. There are many others also, but these are the companies that have the most funding and have been most in the news. Why might a private company succeed where the government has failed? There is an entirely different culture at the private companies. The private companies tend to spend less time on theory and writing scientific papers and instead tend to be more practical. They iterate a lot more rapidly, exploring various options, while spending as little money as possible on each option. And they do not fear failure. Private companies sometimes create breakthrough results, succeeding where the government or established companies have failed. Three examples follow. The first example is the invention of the airplane. In 1898, the U.S. War Department provided a grant of $50,000 to Samuel Langley to develop a piloted aircraft, and the Smithsonian provided him with another $20,0004. That was a lot of money at the time, but Langley failed. Then the Wright Brothers came along, and they succeeded without receiving any money from the government or outside sources. A second example: the first highly successful mass marketed home computer, the Apple 2, was not a government project, nor did it come from an established company like IBM. Instead it came from a new company called Apple, which at the time of the Apple 2 had just graduated from building computers in Steve Job’s garage. Reusable rockets are a third example. NASA did develop the space shuttle, but the space shuttle was a failure economically, since it cost a lot more to launch a payload on the space shuttle than on an expendable launch vehicle. The Delta Clipper, the X33, the X34, the VentureStar, the National Aerospace Plane, and the Space Launch Initiative are all examples of failed government projects to develop reusable rockets. Today, however, Blue Origin with the New Shephard launch vehicle and SpaceX with the Falcon 9 have begun producing the first practical reusable rockets. History has shown that private companies often succeed on hard problems where the government has failed, and that is what may well happen with fusion power. The private companies express abundant optimism, with just about all the companies predicting they will have a commercial fusion power plant operating within 10 years. Fusion is hard, however. With luck, success might come within 10 years, but it could also take much longer. LPPFUSION AND THE FOCUS FUSION DEVICE The remainder of this document will concentrate on the efforts LPPFusion, which is a private company founded in 2003 and located in Somerset, New Jersey. LPPFusion was previously called Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, hence the LPP in the company name. However, they changed their name to LPPFusion after they moved from Lawrenceville N. J. to Somerset N. J. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an investor in LPPFusion. I made an investment in this company because I find the approach that this company has taken very appealing, and I also believe that this company is well ahead of the other private companies in the race to develop a practical fusion device. LPPFusion is pursuing a “focus fusion” device, also known as a “dense plasma focus” device. This device was invented in 1964. Many different organizations have built and run experiments using this device, though no organization has had as much success with it as LPPFusion. At the heart of the focus fusion device are two electrodes, a cylindrical anode surrounded by a cathode. The electrodes are shown in figure 5. Each electrode is small and light enough to easily be held in one hand. LPPFusion’s experimental fusion device, named FF-1, is shown in figure 6. A very short and intense pulse of electricity is discharged across the electrodes. As the current pulse moves through the gas, the gas is compressed into filaments. The filaments then converge together into a single filament. Instabilities cause this filament to kink and twist itself into a tiny dense ball called a plasmoid. Instabilities in the plasmoid then create powerful beams of charged particles in opposite directions. There are 200 electrical pulses every second, which keeps the process going. For further understanding of how the focus fusion device works, see LPPFusion’s web site5, which includes more information and a video animation of the process. FUSION FUELS AND THE ADVANTAGES OF USING ANEUTRONIC FUELS Several different fusion fuels are under consideration for fusion power devices. The fuels can be divided into two categories: those that produce neutrons as a byproduct of the reaction and those that do not. Fuels that do not produce neutrons are called aneutronic fuels. Aneutronic fuels have several important advantages over those that produce neutrons. The government research with tokamaks and other devices has focused on using the combination of deuterium and tritium fuels for fusion power generation, where deuterium and tritium are isotopes of hydrogen. The deuterium and tritium fuse together to produce helium plus a neutron. These fuels require the lowest temperature to fuse together of any fusion reaction, and thus a sustained fusion reaction should be easier to achieve. This one advantage comes with several disadvantages, however, especially since substantial amounts of neutrons are produced. Deuterium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen and is commonly available. However, tritium is not plentiful and is radioactive, with a half-life of 12.32 years. Thus, the deuterium- tritium combination requires the breeding of tritium from lithium. Fortunately, lithium is plentiful and can supply the needed tritium, though the breeding process adds substantial complexity to the process. Care must also be taken to prevent the leakage of tritium from the reactor, since tritium is radioactive. The main disadvantage of deuterium-tritium fusion though is that it produces substantial amounts of neutrons. This causes several problems. Over time the neutrons make the reactor walls and other parts of the reactor radioactive, weakening the reactor materials and causing radioactive waste. The weakening of the reactor parts due to neutron bombardment limits the life of the reactor, and the radioactive waste must be safely stored for many years after the reactor is deactivated. These factors bring into question whether a fusion reactor using deuterium-tritium fuels would ever be economical. The other problem caused by the neutrons is that there is a slight risk of nuclear proliferation. This is because a country with the know how could use the neutrons to breed weapons grade plutonium from uranium 238. LPPFusion is planning to use the combination of hydrogen and boron 11 fuel in their fusion device. The hydrogen and boron 11 fuse together to briefly produce carbon 12, though the carbon 12 quickly divides into 3 alpha (helium) particles. Both hydrogen and boron 11 are plentiful and readily available. No auxiliary breeding process is needed, which simplifies the design of the device. The hydrogen-boron 11 reaction has the advantage that it is aneutronic, that is it produces no neutrons. Hence there is no weakening of the reactor parts from neutron bombardment, there is no radioactive waste and no risk of nuclear proliferation. Hydrogen-boron 11 fusion requires temperatures almost 10 times higher than deuterium-tritium fusion6, making sustained fusion power harder to achieve. This is certainly a challenge to overcome, since other devices have had trouble getting deuterium-tritium fusion to work. However, the focus fusion device is radically different from the other fusion devices. Instead of fighting instabilities as for other fusion devices, the focus fusion device exploits the natural instabilities of the plasma. In fact, LPPFusion with its FF-1 device has already achieved the temperature required for hydrogen-boron 11 fusion. A third fusion reaction that bears mentioning utilizes only deuterium fuel. Two deuterium atoms fuse together to produce either tritium plus hydrogen or helium 3 plus a neutron (the two branches occur with nearly equal probability). This deuterium-deuterium reaction has an advantage over the deuterium-tritium reaction in that it eliminates the need to breed tritium. It also produces fewer neutrons and the neutrons are less energetic. However, it requires a higher temperature for the atoms to fuse together, and for this reason the deuterium-tritium reaction is more practical for a commercial fusion power reactor. Since it doesn’t require the use of radioactive tritium fuel, the deuterium-deuterium reaction is routinely used to check out and test the operation of a fusion device, and only when the device is fully tested is the switch made to a more desirable fuel. This applies to tokamak devices, where they are first tested with deuterium-deuterium, and when fully tested the switch is made to deuterium-tritium. It also applies to LPPFusion’s FF-1 focus fusion device, which thus far has only been tested with deuterium-deuterium fuel. LPPFusion plans to switch to hydrogen-boron 11 fuel in 2017. For further discussion of fusion fuels, see reference 7. HOW DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION LOWERS THE COST OF FOCUS FUSION The method that has been used since the time of Thomas Edison to generate electricity is that the burning of fuel produces heat, the heat produces steam, the steam turns a very large turbine such as the one shown in figure 7, and the turbine runs a generator. This is a very expensive process. However, with focus fusion we can bypass this whole process and instead use direct energy conversion. The focus fusion device produces a beam of moving charged particles, and moving charged particles are electricity. This enables the electricity to be captured very cheaply through a high- tech transformer device as is shown in figure 8. That is why the focus fusion device would be as much as 10 times cheaper than any existing power source. The cost of focus fusion compared to the cost of other energy sources is shown in figure 2. THE SMALL SIZE AND BENEFIT OF A FOCUS FUSION POWER GENERATOR Figure 9 shows what a commercial power generator utilizing focus fusion might look like. Contrast this to the ITER tokamak reactor shown in figure 3. The figure of a person in the two figures illustrates the immense difference in size of the two devices. Not only is the focus fusion device much smaller but it is much simpler also. Each commercial focus fusion power generator would produce 5 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough to power about 4000 homes. It’s also enough to power an early human settlement on the moon or on Mars. These devices can easily be mass produced, so a community or city could simply purchase as many as needed. Having many focus fusion generators would provide the benefits of distributed energy. For many reasons distributed energy is preferable to centralized energy, where a lot fewer power plants produce hundreds of megawatts each and transport the power over long distances. Less electricity would be lost in transmission. It also eliminates the worry that a natural disaster or terrorism could knock out power for the entire metropolitan area of a big city. The focus fusion generator is small enough to be easily transported by truck. So, if there is a natural disaster and an electrical power plant is knocked out, these devices could easily be transported to the site to quickly get the electricity up and running again. Also, the benefit for developing countries such as Africa would be immense, providing cheap, clean, and easily installed power. Another benefit is that this device is small enough to easily fit in rockets of the size existing today. The benefit for space propulsion will be discussed later in this document. HOW CLOSE IS LPPFUSION TO ACHIEVING BREAKEVEN? An important goal for a fusion device is to achieve breakeven, whereby the fusion power produced exceeds the power required to maintain the plasma in steady state8. No fusion device has achieved breakeven, so if LPPFusion can achieve breakeven they will be ahead of everyone else. Three conditions must be met for LPPFusion to achieve breakeven using hydrogen-boron 11 fuel. First, the plasma must be heated to an extremely high temperature, namely 1.8 billion degrees (that’s 200 times hotter than the center of the sun). In fact, LPPFusion has already achieved this goal, which is a major accomplishment. This is a higher temperature than has been achieved in the tokamaks, and this accomplishment surprised many people. Second, the plasma must be confined long enough to achieve net energy, which is not very long. Only 8 nanoseconds are needed, and LPPFusion has achieved 20 nanoseconds, or 2.5 times the amount needed. Thus, LPPFusion has done very well on this score also. What is still needed is to increase the density of the plasma. LPPFusion must increase the density by a factor of 10,000, which is certainly a major challenge. However, LPPFusion has a plan on how to do this and is hoping to achieve breakeven within the next year or two. A switch from tungsten to beryllium electrodes and from deuterium-deuterium to hydrogen-boron 11 fuel will aid in reaching this goal. These experiments are planned for 2017. WHERE DOES LPPFUSION STAND IN THE FUSION RACE? It is instructive to examine where LPPFusion ranks in the fusion race versus the government and other private company projects. Figures 10 through 12 show how LPPFusion with its FF-1 device compares to the rest on 3 different figures of merit. The horizontal axis gives the ranking of the competitors. To ensure that the comparisons are on an apples to apples basis, the results shown are for the deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction only (since thus far the FF-1 device has thus far only been run with deuterium fuel). In figure 10 the figure of merit is the triple product, that is the density times the confinement time times the temperature. LPPFusion is in fifth place behind four large government projects. This is not bad, considering that LPPFusion has spent only about $5 million dollars total thus far and the four government projects have each spent roughly 100 times as much. The three companies that rank below LPPFusion on the chart are private companies, so LPPFusion is well ahead of all the other private companies. Figure 11 gives another figure of merit, the deuterium yield per unit energy input (aka the wall- plug efficiency). For this parameter, LPPFusion is in second place behind JET (the Joint European Torus). Two other large government projects are in third and fourth place, and the other private companies are so far behind they don’t show up on the scale shown. Finally, figure 12 measures the wall-plug efficiency (same parameter as figure 11) divided by the number of dollars spent on the project. This gives a measure of the bang for the buck. On this chart LPPFusion is in first place, ahead of 3 large government projects. It’s in first place because LPPFusion has only spent a total of $5 million thus far, and each of the large government projects have spent roughly 100 times as much. Again, the other private companies are so far behind they don’t show up on the scale shown. A CHANGE IN POLICY IS NEEDED A policy change is needed. Currently nearly all fusion funding is being spent on tokamaks and laser based inertial confinement. But progress on both approaches has stalled, and it is doubtful that either approach will lead to a practical fusion power device. I do not advocate cutting spending for the current government projects, since if breakthroughs occur the tokamak and laser based inertial confinement may yet succeed, and we are learning a lot that will be applicable to other devices. However, it is certainly time to take a broader approach and to increase funding for the numerous other fusion devices that show promise of being smaller and more economical. Also, currently almost no government funding goes to the private companies. Yet private companies spend money more efficiently than the government. Unfortunately, the private efforts have been starved for lack of funding, and that has slowed progress. The Department of Energy should foster a competition among the private companies. This competition could be modelled after the highly successful Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program that NASA used for cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station. It is important that several private companies receive funding, since it’s far too early to judge which company might produce the needed breakthrough. Contracts should be competed on a regular basis to ensure that the bulk of the funding goes to companies that are making the most progress. Funding for fusion power research needs to be increased. The Department of Energy’s fusion research budget for FY 2017 is only $398 million dollars, down from $438 million for FY 20169. That is only about one hundredth of one percent of the FY 2017 budget – a disgracefully low amount for something as needed as fusion power. Funding for magnetic confinement fusion (mostly for tokamaks) is less than half what it once was as is shown in figure 13. One reason that progress on fusion power has been so slow is that the effort has been so poorly funded and the funding has been so erratic. THE PROMISE OF FUSION FOR SPACE PROPULSION One of the benefits of fusion is that it could be the next big advance in space propulsion. This is because the energy density (amount of energy stored per unit volume or mass) of fusion fuels is several orders of magnitude greater than that of chemical rocket propellants. The best measure of propulsion efficiency is specific impulse. Table 1 shows the specific impulse for different types of space propulsion. The most efficient chemical rocket engines (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) have a specific impulse of about 450 seconds. Nuclear thermal rocket engines, which are rocket engines that use nuclear fission, would have a specific impulse of about 900 seconds. There are no nuclear thermal rockets today, but this technology is well understood thanks to work done on it back in the 1960s and thereabouts. The best solar electric engines currently available (that is, state of the art ion thrusters) have a specific impulse of about 4200 seconds10. The problem with solar electric propulsion, however, is very low thrust. Solar electric propulsion is great for long, slow missions and has been used very successfully on such missions as the Dawn spacecraft that visited the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. However, it is not suitable for human travel to Mars since the trip time would take too long. The focus fusion engines, however, would have a specific impulse of about 1,000,000 seconds11, which is orders of magnitude better than any existing rocket engines. With 1,000,000 seconds specific impulse the engine would have low thrust, but high thrust focus fusion engines are also possible. The specific impulse would be less than 1,000,000 seconds but would still be much higher than that of any space propulsion engines in existence today. This is a huge step change in capability. It’s like going from the sailing ships that they had at the time of Christopher Columbus to the ocean liners we have today. It would make possible missions we only dream of today. Focus fusion space propulsion would make possible human travel to Mars in only 2 weeks. It would also make possible human exploration of the moons of the outer planets, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus. It would enable a reusable single stage to earth orbit spacecraft with a large payload capability. Theoretically, a multistage focus fusion rocket could attain 1/3 the speed of light. That’s not as good as warp drive, but it does open the possibility of interstellar travel, at least for robotic probes. CONCLUSIONS Nuclear fusion could solve the world’s energy needs and at the same time provide a big advance in space propulsion. However, a policy change is essential to speed up progress. A broad approach should be adopted whereby many alternative fusion devices are explored. The Department of Energy should provide fusion research funding to several private companies. With adequate funding, private industry may well lead the way to the first successful fusion device. Fusion power research has been inadequately funded and this must change. The global warming and pollution issues underscore the importance of developing this technology as soon as possible. Fusion is hard, just like the invention of the airplane, humans landing on the moon and reusable rockets. All these things seemed impossible, but only up till the time that someone did it. REFERENCES 1. “IPCC Fifth Assessment Report”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report 2. “7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution”, March 25, 2014, www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air-pollution/en/ 3. “ITER”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Criticism 4. “Samuel Pierpont Langley”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pierpont_Langley 5. LPPFusion web site: lppfusion.com 6. “Aneutronic Fusion”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion 7. “Fusion Power”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuels 8. “Fusion Energy Gain Factor”, Wikipedia Encyclopedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor 9. “Fusion Energy Sciences Funding”, Department of Energy, science.energy.gov/~/media/budget/pdf/sc-budget-request-to-congress/fy- 2017/FY_2017_SC_FES_Cong_Budget.pdf 10. “The NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT): The next step for U.S. Deep Space Propulsion”, George R. Schmidt, NASA Glenn Research Center, IAC-08-C4.4.2, ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080047732.pdf 11. “Space Propulsion”, LPPFusion web site page, lppfusion.com/space-propulsion/

Table 1. Propulsion efficiency (specific impulse) for various propulsion types

Figure 1. World energy consumption by fuel. Credit: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Figure 2. Relative cost of various sources of energy. Credit: LPPFusion

Figure 3. International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Note the person in the lower left corner, highlighting the immense size of this reactor. Credit: ITER Organization

Figure 4. National Ignition Facility (NIF). The facility is a lot larger than shown. This photo only shows laser bay number 2. There is also a laser bay number 1 and other parts of the facility. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Figure 5. At the heart of the focus fusion device is a center cylindrical electrode (the anode) surrounded by an outer electrode (the cathode). Credit: LPPFusion

Figure 6. LPPFusion’s FF-1 experimental fusion device. Credit: LPPFusion

Figure 7. Large steam turbine used to generate electricity in conventional power plants

Figure 8. High tech transformer device for direct energy conversion in the focus fusion device

Figure 9. Commercial power generator utilizing focus fusion

Figure 10. Where focus fusion (FF-1) stands on the triple product parameter (density x confinement time x temperature) (5th place)

Figure 11. Where focus fusion (FF-1) stands on the wall plug efficiency parameter (second place)

Figure 12. Where focus fusion (FF-1) stands on the wall plug efficiency per million dollars spent (first place)

Figure 13. U.S. funding for magnetic confinement fusion. Most of this is for tokamak devices, though a small percentage is for stellarators and other devices.