Describing anything complicated to a general audience is tough.
Most people fundamentally misunderstand the issues around fission and its economic viability even though there’s hundreds of nuclear reactors. No base load power isn’t inherently a good thing, it was actually coined to describe a downside. Clarifying just that misunderstanding gets info market forces, investments, and engendering to a non trivial level but you essentially need to condense it down to an infographic or people will lose interest. I have no idea how you could pull that off in an interesting manner.
IMO, the trick is to narrowly address the common misconceptions. Flat paper airplane wings provide lift, therefore Bernoulli’s principle isn’t why wings work. However that doesn’t extend to actually explaining complex topics.
In the fusion case though, hype has been raised to the point of being outright false or even fraudulent. It’s not just a question of “describing something complicated”.
It’s very easy to tell people that the latest experiment only produced 1% of the power that was put into it. Instead, they were told that the “net energy gain” was positive, and that this was a major breakthrough that brings viable commercial fusion power significantly closer.
I suppose, when you have experiments costing tens of billions of dollars being funded by the public, that this kind of corruption of the truth is inevitable. But that quite understandably undermines public trust in science communication.
Those experiments have basically nothing to do with fusion power and everything to do with validating computer simulations of nuclear reactions.
The fig leaf of nuclear power generation is why you get the seemingly ridiculous Q factors based on energy in the pellets. Otherwise the obvious suggestion to cancel the program if ITER demonstrates Q = 10 while these things are Q = 0.01 could gain steam.
> Those experiments have basically nothing to do with fusion power and everything to do with validating computer simulations of nuclear reactions.
then news reports should say "nuclear fusion computer models improved by 5% today" and be on page 94, instead of lies about fusion power progress on page 1.
Consider the implications of what you’re saying. “Highly classified program developing radar absorbing paint announces new milestone with 5% better performance.”
Energy Secretary Granholm said the following at a press conference: “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society.”
> “This astonishing scientific advance puts us on the precipice of a future no longer reliant on fossil fuels but instead powered by new clean fusion energy.”
> “This monumental scientific breakthrough is a milestone for the future of clean energy.”
> “This significant advancement showcases the future possibilities for the commercialization of fusion energy.”
As I said, there are plenty of ways to put out press releases that don’t claim world-changing results where none exist. The idea that this was a necessary cover for the weapons applications is laughable.
Most people fundamentally misunderstand the issues around fission and its economic viability even though there’s hundreds of nuclear reactors. No base load power isn’t inherently a good thing, it was actually coined to describe a downside. Clarifying just that misunderstanding gets info market forces, investments, and engendering to a non trivial level but you essentially need to condense it down to an infographic or people will lose interest. I have no idea how you could pull that off in an interesting manner.
IMO, the trick is to narrowly address the common misconceptions. Flat paper airplane wings provide lift, therefore Bernoulli’s principle isn’t why wings work. However that doesn’t extend to actually explaining complex topics.