plasma

Face it, we are never going to get the full Buck Rogers “let me just pop over there on my jetpack” sci-fi future experience if we keep relying on fossil fuels. The best we can hope for is an extension of our current cyberpunk dystopia, or maybe a gloomy 1970s planetary disaster novel. A staple of every “flying car and robot maid” sci-fi future is that they’ve moved on to more exotic forms of energy, like nuclear fusion. Unfortunately, in real life fusion is much more difficult and expensive to use as an energy source than fossil fuels. But that might change soon. University of Washington Engineers have designed a fusion reactor concept they say could actually be slightly cheaper to build than a coal-fired plant. The design is called the dynomak, which is a suitable Buck Rogersy word. It started as UW class project to design a reactor, but Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics and doctoral student Derek Sutherland