New from the DARPA 'Believe It or Not' Factory: Hand-held Fusion Power

Sometimes you just couldn't make this stuff up: Mega military masterminds were looking at chip-sized particle accelerators this year with the "Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams" project.  The idea was so far ahead of what's actually possible it might as well have been a cyborg unicorn, but that didn't stop three million dollars of (presumably) awesome research in the field of "I don't care if it's normally the size of a building, I want to put it in my phone!"

This was at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose entire mission statement is "Think of crazy, cool or literally killer applications."  The chip-scale project was an attempt to miniaturize devices that hadn't even been built yet: you might notice that our current fusion projects, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) are currently
a)  Extremely cool
b)  Several buildings big
c)  Not actually working yet

The DARPA version instead made Doc Brown's "Mr Fusion" reactor look like last year's model, optimistically aiming for hand-held fusion power.  Very optimistically.  Suicidally optimistically, in fact, as the 2010 budget has been released and it seems that either somebody spotted the extreme impossibility of the chip-scale project, or it's already working and the conspiracy nuts are right.  Either way, the project is nowhere to be seen. 

It might sound utterly insane, but such advanced or eccentric projects are essential for the furthering of science and technology.  If we only aimed at things that looked reasonable there would be no such word as "breakthrough."  Or electricity.  Or penicillin.  Advancing far beyond the realm of the reasonable can lead to surprising spin-off technologies, and every once in a while it even gets what it's going for.  Not this time (obviously), but anyone analyzing research spending line-by-line simply doesn't get how progress works.

Darpa's handheld fusion reactorhttp://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/darpas-handheld-nuclear-fusion-reactor/

Comments

[bitirim]

thank you

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[pariah]

Penicillin was a serendipitous discovery and not an advanced or eccentric project.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Is this really DARPA or SyFy's " Eureka " on steroids ?

Seriously, DARPA has had some improbable ideas tha had some basis in reality, like a flying submarine & small surveillance robots. Their strangest project was " Project Stargate ", which, contrary to its title, was a project dealing with remote
( psychic ) viewing. No worries, it's declassified now.
Imagine MacGuyver with a large budget & more materials to work with - That's DARPA.

[My Reference Frame]

Budget numbers in this area of government activity rarely reveal everything.

[Narendra Nath]

All dreamy ideas are worth trying up unless proved fruitless.The only condition is financial limits and pratical spirit of adventure duly wetted with logic and intelligent planning and execution.

[Rick]

Well, scientists are making progress on table-top accelerators, so maybe chip sided machines are not that far out of the question.

http://www.zimbio.com/CERN+Hadron+Collider/articles/iTwFRRqlZ43/BELLA+Building+Table+Top+Accelerator