The announcement this week that the governments of the world are to spend $13 billion building the ITER experimental nuclear fusion power plant in France seems at first glance cause for mild celebration, even though fusion power is expected to be commercially available only in 2045. On closer inspection however it’s an opportunity missed, an example yet again of governments using the Admiral Zheng He approach to technological progress.

Admiral Zheng He, for those who dozed off during their medieval Chinese history class, was the leader of no fewer than seven gigantic expeditions (1405-33) to discover new lands and display the glory of China and the Ming Dynasty. Zheng He’s fleets had up to 317 ships, many of them over 440 feet in length and with 3,100 tons displacement — the largest of Columbus’s 4 ships, the Santa Maria was only 125 feet long and displaced 280 tons. Spread over a 28 year period, Zheng He’s expeditions displayed China’s majesty to rulers across the Indian Ocean and down to Madagascar – all places where Chinese traders had already been. In the result, Zheng He discovered no new lands at all, missing out on the chance to discover the Americas 70 years before Columbus or sail into Lisbon harbor and overawe Prince Henry the Navigator, at that time making the first faltering steps towards an altogether smaller-scale effort that would actually yield results.

In Zheng He’s case, China failed to make discoveries because the objective of displaying China’s status overlaid that of finding new lands, so the fleets were impossibly over-engineered and no new lands were found. In the case of fusion power, there is an overriding desire to use the project to demonstrate cooperation between nations. Thus it has taken 21 years since the ITER project was first mooted (by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985) to begin moving ahead with actual construction and further progress seems equally likely to be achingly slow. In both cases therefore, outside political considerations were allowed to supersede the purpose of the project, preventing it from attaining its objective, at least in any reasonable time-frame.

Fusion power, in which isotopes of hydrogen are combined to produce heavier elements and yield energy, is much too important to be doomed by the Zheng He approach. Viewed rationally, fusion power is a very attractive power generation alternative. It uses hydrogen isotopes as fuel, not uranium like conventional fission nuclear power, and its main waste products have relatively short half-lives (tritium has a half life of 12 years, for example) thus presenting a far less difficult storage problem than the waste products of fission power, with their 10,000 year half life. (Even the ancient Egyptians knew how to build structures that would remain solid for a hundred years whereas stability for tens of thousands of years is a problem humanity has not yet provably cracked.)

Terrorists would be unable to achieve much if they captured a fusion power reactor, since in order for the reaction to work, the plasma needs to be heated to over 100 million degrees – if removed from its environment it immediately cools and stops reacting.

It is the heating mechanism, not the raw materials, that has formed the principal obstacle to fusion power. While this means that the bomb-manufacturing capability of a fusion power reactor is effectively nil, it poses a formidable technical obstacle. Theoretically, in order to cause deuterium to react with tritium and produce a fusion reaction, the atoms must be moving with energy equivalent to a temperature of 1 billion degrees Celsius. In practice, somewhat lesser heat than this is sufficient, since some atoms in a hot plasma will move faster than average, but even at 100 million degrees, the current target, the reaction is difficult to sustain.

Being carbon-neutral, fusion power is potentially a huge building block in the fight against global warming. It isn’t a “magic bullet“– it solves only the problem of power generation and not the problem of transportation, which appears both quantitatively more important and more difficult to solve. Nevertheless, unlimited power generation without hugely dangerous waste products and without any global warming effect is a highly attractive alternative, that’s worth devoting large resources to attain. Once up and running, a fusion power plant will produce extremely cheap power; its principal costs are those of capital and waste management, both of which will rapidly benefit from economies of scale once the technology has been properly developed.

The Stern Report postulates an enormous economic cost from global warming, mostly arising after 2100, and suggests we should spend annually 1% of world Gross Domestic Product in an effort to alleviate it. On any reasonable timetable, fusion power will be available well before 2100 and will cost far less to implement than 1% of world GDP (which would currently be around $500 billion per annum.) Needless to say, rational observers regard the Stern Report as hopelessly alarmist – most credible models of global warming show a warming effect from human-related carbon emissions of well below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100. Nevertheless, if we’re going to spend money on combating global warming, fusion power is among the best ways to spend it.

This isn’t what environmentalists will tell you. Global warming is a favorite cause to such people, because it allows them to clutter up the countryside with useless windmills, erect solar power arrays all over cloudy Germany, and generally waste other people’s money on technologies which to their fuddled late-60s sensibilities “feel” environmentally benign. Even private-sector-oriented operations, like the monthly “New Energy Finance” leave nuclear and fusion power out of their catalogue of exciting “new energy” deals, without any theoretical justification for doing so beyond a probably accurate suspicion that a portion of their readership would feel outraged to see nuclear and fusion power included.

While “new energy” of doubtful technological or financial value is allowed to enjoy all the benefits of the current orgy of hedge funds, private equity funds and funny money generally desperately seeking places to invest, fusion power is condemned to be developed by the clammy hand of government. The result is technological progress at a glacial pace. Since the first success in heating plasma by laser to the required temperature, in the early 1970s, the private sector has produced digital watches, personal computers, cell-phones, fiber-optics, Viagra and the Internet. The public sector, on the other hand, has failed to produce a working full scale fusion power plant (and is still almost 40 years from doing so, on its own timetable) and has failed to send humanity beyond the Moon, or even back to the Moon.

If sufficiently energized, as in the days of the Manhattan Project which took less than 4 years to produce an atomic bomb, the public sector can move relatively quickly. However in both the nuclear and space cases the ridiculous requirement has been imposed that progress must be made by a consortium of governments, each of which has its own political objectives, its own electoral timetable and its own environmentalists, and the combination of which thus slows progress to a glacial rate. This appalling waste of time and money demonstrates that the public sector isn’t sufficiently energized by the prospect of fusion power and won’t be while the airwaves and the bureaucracy are dominated by anti-nuclear environmentalists.

The principal non-technical obstacle to the development of fusion power by the private sector is government itself, not as a subsidized competitor (since it is so inefficient) but as a provider of permits, regulator of safety standards, etc. For a major new project of this type simply obtaining permission to begin building can take a decade or more, far beyond the time horizons of most entrepreneurs or, in these days of short term stock options, of most company managements.

The solution is for either one government or, if necessary, a consortium of governments to designate a large lightly-inhabited area such as the Gobi Desert or Yellowstone National Park a Fusion Progress Area, in which fusion power experimentation could proceed without the need to obtain safety permits, hold public hearings or draft Environmental Impact Statements. Naturally, common law protections of safety, hazardous waste management and the environment in general would still apply, but entrepreneurs would not have to devote hundreds of millions of dollars and (more important) years of their lives to obtaining the relevant paperwork.

In the current atmosphere of feverish speculative investment, further action would almost certainly not be necessary. Trial fusion power plants would quickly be funded, by infrastructure investment funds, new energy funds, power companies and possibly eleemosynary billionaires fed up with trying to get stuff done in Africa, and within a maximum of a decade the technology would have been developed by which a full scale fusion power plant could be constructed. The first such plant would probably also be built within the permit-free zone, so that bugs could be ironed out without inordinate delays, but once a bug-free plant design had been achieved, the successful innovator could replicate his plant anywhere in the world, albeit at the cost of the usual permitting nonsense. Whoever won the Race to Fusion Power, we would have the technology available to ramp up to worldwide roll-out well this side of 2020.

The Emperor Chengzu, Zheng He’s patron, died in 1425 and his grandson Xuanzong canceled the program in 1433, believing it to be a waste of money. Given the program’s structure, he was right to do so, as would be economy-minded leaders who cancelled the current fusion power research and space exploration programs. As Columbus was to demonstrate, however, there is a better way to manage these projects.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)