I’m still fuming.

I dropped Patricia off at LAX this morning on my way to work, to fly to Florida. She had a 7:40 flight.

She usually carries on, but today she had a couple pieces of luggage to check, so we decided that I’d park the car and help her check in. Now, to park at LAX is a minimum of three bucks for the first hour, but downstairs, at the arrival level, there are metered lots that take quarters, and I figured fifty cents would do me. Of course, this means that one has to enter the airport on the arrival level, which at 6 AM is almost empty since there are few arrivals that early. I cruised past an airport motorcycle cop, at the speed limit, or at least no faster than traffic. But he decided to pull out after me and turned on his flashers.

We pulled over, and he walked up to the car and informed me that we’d been pulled over because we didn’t have a front license plate. Now, I’ve been meaning to put it on, but the last time I tried, the screws that I bought at Pep Boys didn’t fit the holes on the front bumper. He took the license and registration (I’m a Wyoming resident, with a Wyoming drivers’ license), and took about ten minutes, presumably to run a check on this blatant and dangerous criminal. He finally came back with a ticket. It wasn’t a moving violation, and it could be dismissed, with a service fee, if I corrected the problem and drove to the DMV to get it signed off. Of course, because we’d pulled over into a side road heading away from our terminal, we had to backtrack to reenter the airport, costing even more time.

So to save a couple bucks, I now have to deal with the hassle of correcting a problem on a car that’s about to move to Florida, and we almost missed her flight. If I’d taken the upper level and parked up there, that cop wouldn’t have seen us at all, and there would have been much more traffic, resulting in many better things to do for whatever law enforcement was up there.

The coupe de grace, of course, was that, after all this, the metered lot ended up being closed.

Tomorrow I’m headed out to Madison for the biannual Innovative Confinement Concepts conference, so I may be offline for a while, possibly until Friday. They claim there’s WiFi at the conference center, so maybe I’ll be able to post from there. I’ll certainly post a summary of goings-on.

The conference is a meeting of researchers working on so-called innovative confinement concepts (hence the name of the conference :-). An ICC is basically any fusion concept that isn’t a Tokomak or an inertial confinement scheme. Tokomaks (and acronym from the Russian for “Toroidal Magnetic Chamber”) are the current leaders in achieving fusion-relevant parameters of temperature, density, and confinement time. Unfortunately they are inherently pulsed devices, and they have other technical features that make them undesirable for power plants. People are working to make Tokamaks power-plant friendly, but progress is slow (as in everything related to fusion). The other mainstream fusion scheme is Inertial Confinement Fusion. This uses a solid pellet of Deuterium and Tritium which is compressed and heated by external energy input from lasers, ion beams, or X-Rays. Currently only lasers and X-rays are used, ion beams having fallen out of favor (for reasons similar to those for the loss of favor of ion beam weapons for BMD – it turns out the beams are damn hard to point and focus accurately if they have any decent amount of energy). I don’t think anyone at this point honestly believes ICF is a real contender for power plants (though I could be wrong). The main reason ICF has solid funding is that the physics of the capsule implosion are exactly the same as the physics of the fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon. In a weapon, X rays are generated by the detonation of a fission device, and passed via a carefully shaped reflector onto the surface of a Lithium Deuteride capsule, which implodes, fuses, and explodes. If you want to understand this process in detail, the ideal way to do it is to detonate small capsules under controlled conditions.

Anyway, the ICCs are the other guys, ranging in funding from ~$10 million down to ~$200K. They are the high-risk, high-reward segment of the fusion development portfolio. The designs range from minor variations on existing technology to outright Wile-E-Coyote designs. I personally believe that the ICCs are the best hope for getting fusion power on the grid in my lifetime, but that to really make things happen we need a fundamental paradigm shift in the fusion community. A lot of folks in the community don’t get basic economics, and have little idea about how technologies have historically come into the commercial sphere. That’s one of the things I’ll be talking to people about at the conference.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’m up to. If I can get decent net access I’ll post on the goings-on.