China, South Korea, Russia, Japan, the European Union, the United States and India are investing billions of SDRs, and potentially trillions in the future towards a large scale energy producing technology called Tokamak under the auspices of ITER, an international technology giant. The Tore Supra tokamak in France and the TRIAM-1M tokamak in Japan both produced long duration hot fusion energy. These are large units and produce temperatures of several million degrees Centigrade, very hot.
The target yield from energy going in to energy coming out is a power factor of 10, so that 100 MW going in would produce 1000 MW coming out.
So what are the economics of the tokamak? We know that the investment requirement is that of several monster large scale operations serving Europe, the Americas, and Asia. To say that the technology is capable of producing a new nation of technologies is probably an understatement. To also say that the implementation of the technology is not easily rushed, is also an understatement. Tokamac energy will take at least a generation to implement, and the people working on the tokamac projects are like modern day pyramid or cathedral builders.
Our future governments will be shaped by what these pyramid builders accomplish for instead of watching and worshiping the sun, they will be trying go build tiny suns here on earth. They will truly create the sun of light. We will organize nations of people and technologies around these gargantuan devices of the energy energy age.
The age of water is the age of energy is the age of the tokamac. Sounds almost religious until you realize that it is a form of sun worship and icon of the sun made here on earth to avoid using the sun that we have shining on us daily for free! Will our worship of our own sun blind us from properly using the real sun?
What seems to me that ITER is presently to a badly focused project that needs to be re-engineered somewhat to capitalize on what we are creating in parallel. The Tokamac has it's place, but we need to activate a more widespread field of operation that is more inclusive of the energy technologies we are developing in the here and now! Why do I say that? Tokamak's present focus has been on heat generation which drives heat based generators. Complementary to heat generation is chemical transformation to create chemicals. This is not to say that tokamak should produce chemicals, but it will have the capacity to do that!
Another thing tokamak creates is light. We should develop technologies that use the light directly and independently of technologies that use the heat, and those that create chemicals. From the light, we have also chemicals and heat.
Thus it seems to me that the scaling up of tokamak should be parallelled by our development of technologies that make use of the sun. These could then be complementary to large scale tokamac units, but in addition would be able scale down the technologies to produce economies of scale of mass production of small units that would be widely available when tokamac finally arrives for our great grand kids.
