One of the final projects in the Fusion Energy studio tackled the socio-political and environmental impacts of a future powered by fusion energy. They created a “future” blog full of articles, graphs, and videos to illustrate their arguments.

You may not realize it, but you use units of measurement every day. Consider the following statements, does one of them strike you more than the other?

“I lost 100 dollars.”   versus   “I lost 100 cents.”
“I’m 15 minutes late for school.”   versus   “I’m 15 seconds late for school.”

There’s a HUGE difference between each of these statements, and it’s because of the units. We use these “everyday” units so frequently we often forget they are even there. In the poem “Smart”, by Shel Silverstein, he reminds of us of how smart we can be if we just ignore the units. I’ll include an excerpt:

And then I took the quarters
and traded them to Lou
For three dimes–I guess he don’t know
That three is more than two!

This sounds ridiculous when we talk about money, because we all know money so well, we don’t even think of dollars and cents as units anymore. We understand that 1 unit of dollars is equal to 100 units of cents. But what if I told you these mistakes happen more often than you think…
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Istvan and David spent the day calculating how to power and propel a spaceship powered by fusion. The initial idea of using light to propel the spaceship turned out to be not efficient enough to travel to another solar system within the lifetime of a person. They discovered a theoretical limit to the acceleration which an ideal spaceship could achieve with a fusion reactor as its power source. A new idea is to use a Hall-thruster. More to come!

Here are the projects which the students will be focusing on for their final projects:

Fusion Powered Space Mission

The fuel of nuclear fusion is the most abundant element in the world. Hydrogen is found mostly in water on Earth, but the substance of interstellar and interplanetary space is composed almost solely of Hydrogen. A space mission of our days greatly depends on the amount of fuel the spacecraft can carry. In this scenario, researchers and designers will be exploring the possibilities a novel class of spacecraft, the fusion spaceship could afford us. What minimal size of such a ship must be, what route it should take through space to find the most dense fuel-fields, how fast it would be able to travel are only a few of the most important questions the team will have to tackle.
Once the fundamental concept of the spacecraft is described along with the equipment and capabilities it must have (for instance that of mining the interstellar space for hydrogen), the development team will have to come up with a preliminary design which will then be elaborated and prototyped in 3D.

Future Landscapes with Fusion

The way our cities, roads and large scale structures are built are to a large extent determined by our power usage and the way we are able to cater to our thirst for energy. In a future environment where fusion energy is available, many of our ways would therefore change. If fusion were to become a cheap and essentially unlimited energy source or if we are projecting into the far future when all fossil fuels will have been depleted, we would have to rely strictly on the kinds of energy (electricity) such power plants could provide.
In this project, the team will be asking the question what the city or more broadly the country of a fusion future would look like. Research and imagination have to be coupled quite tightly together here since our energy usage has surprisingly far reaching consequences from vehicles to farming to home structures and appliances. All ideas will be sketched and the final concept drawn in detail.

Power and Life with Fusion

Change has never been a simple issue. Even inside communities and even with new ideas and technologies which are beneficial to most, there are always struggles and compromises which have to be made. This scenario takes us into the near future where fusion would be available, and the questions about how we would distribute the produced energy, who would benefit from it, who could even build the reactors, what would happen to the countries now relying on using or selling fossil fuels are all bound to come up.
Beyond the political scene, this one simple change might and will probably effect our everyday social interactions as well: new kinds of jobs would appear, some of the old ones cease to be, our different energy use strategies might cause changes in lifestyles etc.
The task of this team is then to research the socio-economic consequences of our new energy technology and present its results in a creative form in the vein of classic sci-fi.

Yesterday we headed to MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. We started the tour by looking at real Plasma and how a magnetic field can change the direction of it.

This is the room that houses the fusion reactor.

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