SOME FLIES IN THE OINTMENT

But without wishing to diminish this credit, there are some dis-couraging points to consider.

So what took them so long to add the tritium? Money and radioactivity. The radioactivity is no big deal, as it dies away fast enough to incapacitate the reactor only for a few months. Money is another question. Tritium is not cheap, and malicious tongues im-plied that the British had done the feat as a PR stunt just after money was denied them in a sister project. This is most likely quite untrue, since the experiment had been planned for more than one year. More telling is the fact that the other Tokamak facility in the world, the TFTR in Princeton, had planned the same experiment for 1986-7, but funds were denied by the DoE. It is now planned for 1993.

When scientific breakeven is achieved, perhaps in a year or two, there remain 30 years (50 years, say the British) of technical development to engineering breakeven, where you don't just balance input and output on a razor's edge, but have such an ex-cess of output power that you can sell it by the megawatt. If the British forecast proves true, I shall be 117 years old.

With their usual enthusiasm for energy sources that are not available, the Greenpests broke out in jubilation, because fusion power, these nerds asserted, is not radioactive. Well, it is. First, in the regular old-fashioned way, tritium is radioactive (though not as much as radium, which it has replaced on the dials of luminescent clocks), and the stream of neutrons will induce radioactivity in any-thing that it hits, such as a lithium "blanket." When I say "old-fashioned," I mean alpha, beta and gamma radiation. But neutrons, which for some reason are not classified as "radio-active," are like gamma rays in that they will penetrate anything as well for the same energy (but it is usually higher), they are just as lethal for the same energy (but it is usually higher), and on top of that they induce radioactivity in other materials. Neutron radiation can, of course, be contained and handled by people who know what they are doing. But if Nader, Rifkin and the media hacks go bananas over gamma rays and regular radioactivity, they're going to be zonked out of their skulls by neutron radiation.

But here comes by far the biggest fly in the ointment: fusion is not needed as an energy source. It is fine for scientific research, but absolutely wasted for generating power. If it is energy you want, there is uranium abundantly available, and the fuel supply can be stretched practically to infinity by breeders. Fission wastes, com-pared to present electricity-generated wastes (partly disposed of in people's lungs), are so easily disposed of and so short-lived that if there were no other criteria, waste disposal alone should make nuclear fission the energy source of choice. But there is more, of course. If the access to it were not blocked by the econerds, there would be enough nuclear fuel to perform "miracles" like electrify-ing the roads for pollutionless transportation, or for making the deserts of California, Nevada and Utah bloom, providing more work than Americans alone can handle. But there are the Boat People, the Kurds, the Croatians, and millions of other refugees willing and able to work and literally "replenish the earth."

Such dreams are not thwarted by the limitations of technology, or even by the limitations of capital. They are thwarted by the limitations of morality of the Naders, Rifkins, Reilly's and of the American establishment.