ITER: Throwing Good Money after Bad

According to the journal Nature, European nations hope to redirect more than €1 billion (US$1.25 billion) earmarked for research grants to make up a budget shortfall at the experimental ITER fusion reactor.  In an article that appeared in the July 7 issue, the editors note,

The proposal has alarmed scientists, who say that it will rob researchers of vital funds at a time when governments are planning to scale back domestic research budgets in response to the global economic downturn.

This is surely an understatement.  If I were a European scientist, I would be screaming bloody murder.  Like the International Space Station, ITER is a white elephant whose potential benefits will never come close to justifying the cost of building it.  It’s projected cost has tripled since it was estimated in 2001.  The fond hopes of the aging scientists who have devoted their careers to the pursuit of magnetic fusion energy will not be realized.  Like the International Space Station, ITER’s real effect will be to serve as a huge financial vacuum cleaner, soaking up billions in research money that could be much better spent elsewhere, including in the field of fusion energy research itself.

The problem with magnetic fusion, at least in the form represented by ITER, is that, while it is scientifically feasible, it will never be able to compete with alternative methods of producing electric power in terms of cost.  There are certainly hundreds of reactor design studies out there that claim the opposite, but, as the future will demonstrate if ITER is ever built, they are all wrong.  Among other things, the cost of a tritium economy has been grossly underestimated.  Tritium is a heavy form of hydrogen whose nucleus contains two neutrons in addition to the usual single proton.  Mixed with deuterium, another heavy isotope of hydrogen with a single extra neutron, it will be an essential fuel material in reactors such as ITER.  Deuterium occurs naturally, and is relatively common.  In other than trace amounts, tritium does not.  It must be produced artificially.  In order to produce the quantities necessary to keep a reactor like ITER running indefinitely, it will be necessary to surround the burning plasma with a thick layer of lithium.  Fast neutrons produced by fusion in the burning plasma can then produce the necessary tritium in nuclear reactions with this material. 

However, there is a slight problem.  Tritium is highly radioactive, with a half-life, the time it takes for half of any given quantity to undergo nuclear decay, of something over 12 years.  In spite of the fact that hydrogen is a notoriously slippery substance, passing with ease right through some types of metal, it will be necessary to control and contain kilograms of this material in a working magnetic fusion reactor.  In addition to its intrinsic radioactive hazard, tritium must also be carefully guarded to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.  For example, if terrorists were able to secure enough special nuclear material to build a nuclear bomb, they could potentially greatly increase its explosive yield by using tritium in the process known as boosting.  All this, not to mention the legal challenges that NIMBY’s are sure to mount to avoid living next to such an objectionable material, is unlikely to be cheap.

This and other potential show stoppers will insure that magnetic fusion reactors like ITER will never be able to compete economically.  Don’t believe me?  Wait and see.  It would be much better to use the increasingly scarce research dollars now being used to fund this particular white elephant on smaller projects, including fusion research projects, where it could do some real good.  Who knows.  They might even result in the discovery of a way to finesse Mother Nature after all and build fusion reactors that don’t need tritium and are economically competitive.

ITER

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Quantum theory is one of the most important and least understood advances in physics over the last 150 years.  Beginning with Max Planck’s supposition in a paper published in 1900 that energy could only be emitted in quantized form, it eventually led to the realization that, particularly at the atomic and sub-atomic level, it was more accurate to represent objects and their interactions, mathematically at least, in terms of wave functions and probability distributions than in terms of the deterministic prescriptions of classical physics.  There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the implication of these discoveries touching the matter of free will (see, for example, here, here, and here, and Google will turn up many more examples).  As often happens in such philosophical speculations (and as some of the authors of the linked articles themselves point out), the various hypotheses occasionally go considerably further than is warranted by what we actually know. 

One can’t really say anything positive about free will unless one understands what it is, and to understand what it is, one must understand consciousness.  Unfortunately, we don’t.  We can be more confident in speaking about what free will is not.  For example, let us assume for the sake of argument that insects are not self-aware or conscious, and they only react to their environment via instinct.  They may seem to make decisions such as whether to fight or flee, admit another insect into the hive or nest or not, etc., but free will is not involved.  Machines could be programmed to react in exactly the same ways.  Proponents of free will believe that, somehow, the human mind can consicously override such programming, and deliberately make choices that are not pre-ordained by physical law or instinct.  These choices, in turn, can alter the outcome of events.  Again, without resorting to supernatural arguments, we cannot state positively that free will exists because we lack sufficient understanding of what goes on in the human mind to do so.  We literally don’t understand what we’re talking about.  We can, however, discuss whether it is even possible for it to exist to begin with.

In that limited sense, the implications of quantum physics are profound.  If everything in the universe obeyed the laws of classical physics, there would be no room for free will.  Given a certain initial state of the universe, everything in the future would be pre-ordained by physical law, or so, at least, it has seemed to many great thinkers in the past.  In principle, we could create mathematical models that would predict the future with absolute certainty, although, at least at the current state of the art, the complexity of the universe is so great as to put such models completely out of the question.  We would just be along for the ride, and free will would be just an illusion.  In a quantum universe, at least we have some wiggle room. 

True, we still don’t know at a fundamental level what all this stuff in the universe around us really is, or why it exists to begin with.  However, we can demonstrate with repeatable experiments that it conforms to mathematical models in which probability plays a significant role.  Now if, once again, we are given a certain initial state of the universe, the claim that the future outcome of events is pre-ordained by the laws of physics is not as plausible in such a probabilistic universe.  The mathematical models may be misleading us about the true nature of things, but, in principle, an infinity of possible outcomes becomes possible.  In such a universe, it is at least possible for free will to exist, although it is hardly certain, and the manner in which it exists, if it does, must remain a mystery to us until we learn a great deal more about the nature of our own minds. 

That is the implication of quantum physics regarding free will.  From a classical universe whose eventual fate was written in stone depending on its state at some point in the past, we have proceeded to one in which many outcomes are possible, and free will is, therefore, not completely excluded.  It seems a rather limited implication on the face of it.  However, it’s comforting that a universe in which what we think or do actually matters is, at least, not out of the question.