[HN Gopher] The chase for fusion energy
___________________________________________________________________
The chase for fusion energy
Author : bpierre
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-11-25 01:32 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Let that sink in for a moment, there are 17 companies doing
| research on a hugely important topic with only 2.4billion in
| funding(disclosed). Magic leap alone has burned more money than
| that. Theranos has burned almost a billion.
|
| Elsewhere in the world, people have to scramble to get money to
| do groundbreaking work and in the US you get thrown after you for
| knowing the right people.
|
| I'm not saying the other places in the world are good places to
| be. Caring about every penny you spend is definitely not how you
| want to run a company doing groundbreaking work, but there's
| definitely a middle ground.
| willis936 wrote:
| Applying generalizations to a unique problem is a recipe to
| make the wrong conclusions.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Let that sink in for a moment, there are 17 companies doing
| research on a hugely important topic with only 2.4billion in
| funding(disclosed). Magic leap alone has burned more money than
| that. Theranos has burned almost a billion.
|
| > Caring about every penny you spend is definitely not how you
| want to run a company doing groundbreaking work, but there's
| definitely a middle ground.
|
| Private business allocates funds toward profit. Apparently,
| investors don't see much potential return on additional funding
| compared to, e.g., electric cars, phones, online retail, etc.
| An investment's value can be calculated, in one sense, as risk
| x potential profit. Given the latter is very high, investors
| arguably must perceive the former as very poor, though possibly
| they perceive that the companies don't need more funding at
| their current stages (i.e., it's marginal return on additional
| funding that matters for investors, not total return on all
| funding).
|
| The people of a country, through government, can allocate funds
| toward work based on importance and regardless of profit. Such
| work, such as basic science, is where the market fails.
| (Probably much of the basic science behind fusion was already
| funded this way.) Per the OP, we've allocated $22 billion
| toward ITER. So fusion is pretty well funded.
| snek_case wrote:
| In my experience, the amount of money invested reflects the
| collective belief that a given technology is going to succeed
| and be profitable. Investors will act like fusion research is
| not worth investing in all the way until someone actually
| achieves self-sustaining fusion for the first time. Then,
| funding will rush in and investors will walk over each other
| like it's black Friday to throw their money at fusion
| startups, which will start popping up like mushrooms.
|
| It will be just like deep learning. There wasn't really much
| investment in neural network research and hardware until the
| field started having some big breakthroughs, at which point
| cash started flooding in and the community got extremely
| excited. I think we'll see fusion breakthroughs in the next
| decade or two, and it's going to be interesting.
| trophycase wrote:
| Or they can just let someone else pay to invent it and take
| the innovation the last mile.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I'm asking a genuine question, out of ignorance, but - aren't
| the tech behind Theranos and Magic Leap the kind of thing you
| can easily patent and protect - whereas if someone discovers
| how to make practical fusion, they get a nobel prize and now
| the world knows how to do it?
|
| Fusion is undoubtedly critical to our future, but I think I can
| see why the investors don't think it's a profit machine in the
| same way as a new commercial gadget.
| bawolff wrote:
| If something is patented it means you have to disclose how to
| do it.
|
| I dont see why you couldn't patent a fusion reactor. You can
| patent the underlying science, but the physical realization
| is patentable. If you manage to pull it off, you are probably
| super rich. However the risk of failing is much higher, and
| the time horizons are much longer than a silicon valley
| startup.
| simonh wrote:
| Fusion energy is a very high risk and very long term
| investment. Meanwhile plenty of billions are being spent by
| governments and academic institutions (ok, arguably the same
| thing) around the world on fusion research.
|
| In almost every thread here on fusion someone eventually says
| something along the lines of "what we need for fusion is a
| Manhattan project", but ITER by itself is costing more than
| that in inflation adjusted terms. Fusion has soaked up massive
| investment and continues to do so.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents (and
| particularly not nationalistic tinged ones).
|
| This one wasn't quite as egregious as the other flamewar
| tangent in this thread (now collapsed) but it's still a change
| of subject into something less interesting, more generic, and
| more inflammatory--and that's what the site guidelines ask
| everyone to try to avoid here. It makes discussion more
| tedious, more repetitive, and usually nastier.
|
| There's lots of interesting material in the OP and clearly
| that's what a thread like this should be engaging with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Why don't you just put that mentioning any country in a less
| than 100% positive way in a comment is against the rules?
| There's more and better discussion under the "flame war"
| threads than the entire rest of the comment section.
| bigbaguette wrote:
| Just for the comparison, the French submarines Australia didn't
| want in the end were 65 billions
| colechristensen wrote:
| I mean, depends on how you slice it and what you count, but
| ITER had an initial budget of 6 billion and updated total cost
| estimates between 20 and 40 billion dollars or euros. That one
| fusion project is probably the most expensive human effort
| since the ISS and its successor is already being planned.
|
| Yes there's a lot of dumb venture capital going around, but
| there's also a lot of money going towards trying things beyond
| searching for the next unicorn tech fad.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I would bet $10,000 that the technology behind the first
| commercial fusion reactor does not come from ITER.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think it will definitely contribute. For example SpaceX
| also could learn from expensive mistakes like the Space
| Shuttle . I think it will be the same with ITER.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes. Don't put wings, flaps, rudder, and landing gear on
| a rocket.
| dogsgobork wrote:
| Except SpaceX's Starship design does include moveable
| wings/flaps.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd call them fins, which are used to orient the rocket,
| not provide lift.
| djenendik wrote:
| So a rudder?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Look at the size of the rudder on the space shuttle vs
| the size of the fins.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What basis do you have for saying that it won't? Offering a
| fake bet isn't evidence or reason.
| Fordec wrote:
| Probably because Wendelstein 7-X is making progress at a
| far faster rate than the ITER model has the current goal,
| without accounting for delays, for a 2050+ delivery time
| for the PROTO reactor.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >for a 2050+ delivery time for the PROTO reactor
|
| when a scientist tells you 2050+ it means they don't know
| and everything is being made up as they go along. It
| means 'outside the realm of any realistic estimate, but
| close enough to feel tempting so you don't immediately
| remove funding'.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Imagine you have a software need that two contractors are
| working on. One says it will take 2 years. The other says
| 2 months, and says they are writing code faster.
| Fordec wrote:
| Except they aren't "writing code faster" but started 8
| years later and the industry now has these things like
| source control, GPUs and cloud computing and a new
| project is moving far faster with the new tools than the
| competing, existing project stuck in development hell
| that is still running in a server down the hall entirely
| composed Itanium 2 processors of and written in PHP 4.
|
| One project started in 2007 planning activation in 2025
| and planning reactions in 2035. The other started in
| 2015, activated 2017 and steady state reactions have been
| delayed from the original Sept 2021 plan to 2022. It's
| not even close the results so far.
| Yizahi wrote:
| It most probably will come only from ITER/DEMO or similar
| scale project. Yes, it is drowning in the bureaucracy,
| politics etc. and in generic market this would be a ripe
| case for disruption and doing "move fast, break stuff"
| approach. But the fusion problem is so fundamentally hard
| that it is simply not possible at all in this case. Core
| problems like stability, preventing whole assembly becoming
| radioactive, actual conversion to the electricity are so
| impossibly hard that startup approach won't handle it, even
| if they had trucks with free cash queuing outside.
| piva00 wrote:
| What about all the physics and engineering knowledge that
| required empirical and practical experiments to test
| hypothesis? The technology itself might not be from ITER
| but the development of the knowledge for it will definitely
| have been impacted by ITER.
|
| Don't really understand your point.
| whazor wrote:
| Didn't ITER offer a lot of research positions and resulted
| in many papers and books on fusion? Think about all the PhD
| students that studied there. Sounds like ITER is
| foundational both in knowledge and in talent for commercial
| fusion reactors. I know that the technical university I was
| in had mathematicians working on models useful for ITER.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Physicists having been maintained on a payroll will be
| the only material outcome of ITER, in the end, along with
| a likelihood of hundreds of tons of radioactive slag to
| dispose of. (If canceled before they light it up, it
| could be productively scrapped at a fractional penny on
| the dollar. Once it's hot, it becomes an indefinitely
| expensive liability.)
|
| There are few other places just now to train up plasma
| fluid physicists. The main beneficiaries, though, are the
| contractors. This is a gravy train that just doesn't
| quit. The reasons so much money easily goes to it have
| far more to do with corporate welfare for otherwise
| mainly-military contractors, and maintaining a population
| of hot-neutron physicists ready to draw on for weapons
| work, than any conceivable expectation of competitive
| power generation.
|
| But the main product of the Tokamak-adjacent projects is
| lies. They cultivate the confusion between "Q>1" meaning
| more kinetic energy of neutrons emitted than microwave
| photons injected and magnets energized, vs "Q>1" meaning
| electrical power to the grid exceeding grid power
| injected. There are at least two orders of magnitude
| between the two Qs. Achieving the former leaves you very,
| very far from the latter. ITER itself makes no pretense
| of ever producing so much as one watt-hour of grid power.
|
| Thus, any system resembling ITER (particularly ITER
| itself) is a technological dead end. A fusion power plant
| that relies on hot neutrons would necessarily cost many,
| many times as much to build and operate as a comparable
| fission plant. Big fission is already not competitive
| (perhaps mainly from deeply entrenched official
| corruption, but so what?) and gets less so every day. We
| have yet to see whether small-scale fission can work,
| economically. It has failed before.
|
| The Helion and TAE systems would be "aneutronic",
| generating power electromagnetically, without a side trip
| through neutrons, heat, and a turbine. They _have a
| chance_ to be useful, because they would be cheap to
| operate, even at a small enough scale to leave little
| scope for official corruption. TAE is taking the harder
| road, chasing hydrogen /boron fusion, which reactants are
| both extremely abundant. Helion is chasing
| hydrogen-2/helium-3, which is more plausibly achievable,
| but helium-3 is very scarce, so they would need to
| synthesize it themselves by _also_ fusing hydrogen-2.
|
| The Princeton FRC reactor project, not mentioned in TFA,
| is working on a shoestring NASA budget, hoping to loft a
| 2 MW space-probe propulsion test in 2035. That _might
| work_ , and they would not need much helium-3 for that.
| They could probably get something done much earlier if
| ITER were not pissing away all the money, but moving
| money from public to private purses (as with NASA's SLS
| and DoD's F-35) is ITER's true purpose.
| jabl wrote:
| I don't know what kind of plasma physicists you know, but
| the ones I know are idealists motivated by a desire to
| solve one of humanity's grand challenges. They wouldn't
| want to touch nuclear weapons work with a 10ft pole. To
| the extent there's a brain drain, it's not to weapons
| work but to various data science type positions in
| industry (for twice the pay, FWIW).
|
| As for aneutronic fusion, there are reasons to be
| skeptical it can even in principle be made to work (see
| e.g. PhD thesis by Todd Rider). I'd be happy to be proven
| wrong, though.
| moonbug wrote:
| cool story, bro.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| It's true that ITER will not produce net power and that
| the administrators have misled the public about the
| difference in Q factors. You can have a reactor which
| produces more thermal power than you put in to it that is
| still a net power drain when you factor in the rest of
| the plant operations to keep it going. All clearly
| explained in this great video.
|
| https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY
|
| There is a real risk that by focusing on the wrong Q
| factor you sink all your budget in to plants which can
| never work as a real power plant.
|
| Still I am hopeful that ITER will be sufficiently
| valuable as a research system that we do move closer to
| commercial fusion power.
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| i don't disagree. but there are valuable side effects. like
| engineering technology learned. a place and economy for
| physicists to "work". The web came from CERN, think of all
| the things we got from the moonshot. we get a lot from big
| science projects if not the end goal.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Investing in the wrong fusion approach will almost certainly
| just burn money instead of hydrogen.
|
| ITER is a shining example of how to do this maximally wrong. It
| is a path only to ongoing expenditure, not useful energy.
|
| There are some smaller startups doing interesting things such
| as using superconducting coils with much higher field
| strengths. They might be able to leapfrog ITER. If any of them
| can demonstrate net positive energy, then _and only then_ the
| human race should throw tens of billions _at that_.
| runnerup wrote:
| Investing in the wrong ~~fusion approach~~ "tech startup"
| will almost certainly just burn money.
|
| The point GP is making isn't that fusion is a guaranteed win
| -- GP gave examples of other failures. It's probably their
| belief that there's more money in fusion than Magic Leap.
| rndphs wrote:
| > then and only then the human race should throw tens of
| billions at that.
|
| Yeah we should hold out before spending tens of billions on
| fusion research... Meanwhile, 1.5 trillion gets spent on a
| failed fighter jet program...
|
| The amount of money spent on other projects is so, so much
| greater than that spent on fusion.
| piva00 wrote:
| > There are some smaller startups doing interesting things
| such as using superconducting coils with much higher field
| strengths. They might be able to leapfrog ITER. If any of
| them can demonstrate net positive energy, then and only then
| the human race should throw tens of billions at that.
|
| Show me examples of startups and private ventures that did
| completely fundamental research required for their
| engineering efforts on a product. At least one that wasn't
| mostly based on technology and research created by the public
| sector.
|
| I really don't understand how neoliberalism got so powerful
| as an ideology to force people to think that smaller startups
| are really better at fundamental, unprofitable research than
| tax-subsidised government research programs.
|
| There is no place in the neoliberal "free market" ideology
| for private companies (even less smaller startups) to pour
| money into expensive research for 10-20 years with the
| unknown if it's even feasible and possible, much less
| profitable.
| wahern wrote:
| > ITER is a shining example of how to do this maximally
| wrong.
|
| ITER is an example of what happens when you dither and drag
| things out for _decades_. If member states had made a major
| commitment to not only fund ITER, but to have it built within
| 5-10 years and _actually_ done so, it would have been money
| well spent.
|
| If you wait long enough _all_ designs for _anything_ will
| become outdated. An operational ITER would have provided, and
| still can provide, crucial experience and data. But the cost-
| benefit ratio is now much poorer for the delays.
|
| This is the lesson of SpaceX--not a lesson about financial
| frugality or simplicity of engineering. SpaceX has spent far
| more money than will be spent on ITER, and its designs are
| not known for their elegance. The world is awash in both cash
| and talent. The lesson is about process and pace and
| iteration--all that cash and talent is wasted if you don't
| _apply_ it. Optimize for _time_. Emphasize process over
| product, as the former makes for the latter, not the other
| way around. When you have confidence something is worthwhile,
| as with ITER at the outset, don 't hold back.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I just don't think ITER is really that expensive compared
| to other stuff like defense, oil subsidies, returning to
| the moon and so on.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You can't really compare ITER and SpaceX. SpaceX has worked
| on a breakthrough in engineering, one that had seen
| research in decades past as well (the DC-X rocket achieved
| vertical landing from a few kilometers in the 1990s before
| the project was shut down; they would have almost certainly
| reached orbit if they were allowed to continue a few more
| years).
|
| On the other hand, ITER is breaking entirely new ground on
| the engineering side, and it even requires fundamental
| research. It is not even known if what ITER is setting out
| to do is fundamentally possible given realistic engineering
| constraints instead of idealized models.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| To be fair to SpaceX, all (two) full flow staged
| combustion cycle engines prior to Raptor were test
| articles that literally never left the ground.
|
| The Raptor family is a major, major innovation.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Don't forget that ITER is a big research project that tries
| to answer a lot of questions and put things together into a
| working prototype. That's not as shiny as doing interesting
| things in selected areas but somebody has to start building a
| whole machine. I think by design it will be outdated by the
| time it's done but that's a good thing. Somebody has to go
| first and pave the way for the next generation.
|
| Considering the potential payoff of fusion I believe this
| money is spent way better than than on things like returning
| to the moon or a lot of defense projects.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > In this respect, advocates of fusion technology say it has many
| parallels with the space industry. That, too, was once confined
| to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and
| imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private
| enterprise. This is "the SpaceX moment for fusion", says Mowry
| ...
|
| I don't think that's a good comparison. SpaceX didn't develop
| ground-breaking firsts like Sputnik and the moon landings; they
| took something we've done for 50 years and do it more
| efficiently. Government agencies are the ones with helicopters
| flying on Mars, who visited Pluto, developed and operate the
| space telescopes, etc. Fusion energy generation is like the
| Manhatten Project.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I dont understand this notion that the literal Government is
| building and flying all of these things and that private
| companies achievements mean nothing.
|
| Ingenuity was build with multiple non Government contractors.
|
| The Lunar Module was developed and built by Grumman under
| Government contract. Rocketdyne developed the J2
|
| Boeing/North American/Douglas designed and built the Saturn 5.
| Why do people attribute all of these vehicles to the Government
| when they are were contracted to private companies to be built?
|
| Its very strange that people deny that SpaceX created modern
| reusable boosters and they fall back on the damn DC-X project
| when a) McDonnel Douglas was the manufacturer of it b) it was a
| prototype that never made it to orbit, c) is widely considered
| a failure
|
| Meanwhile SpaceX is absolutely trouncing every other company
| with Launching ability while Beoing, given every single
| possible kickback from the Government can't launch their
| Starliner for another year after already a year of delays.
|
| They have developed the only full flow staged combustion cycle
| rocket that has ever gotten off the ground, something even the
| Soviets couldn't manage.
| friedman23 wrote:
| > Why do people attribute all of these vehicles to the
| Government when they are were contracted to private companies
| to be built?
|
| Because the alternative doesn't fit their ideological world
| view.
| folli wrote:
| Only governments (used to?) have the financial muscle to
| bankroll literal moonshots. From that standpoint it didn't
| matter so much if all the genius engineers are employed by
| the government or by a subcontractor.
| ohiovr wrote:
| Modern rocketry was essentially invented by a loner that few
| took notice until WW2
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| And also consider that most of SpaceX funding comes from
| contracts from NASA, rather then investors or profits.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Although they do seem to be shifting to more commercial
| flights now that launch costs are lower and the results are
| more predictable.
|
| And I'm not sure if you consider launching starlink to be
| "commercial", if you considered it to be an internal customer
| of the launch service then it seems like it should count.
| virgilp wrote:
| > didn't develop ground-breaking firsts
|
| - First full flow staged combustion engine that actually flies
|
| - horizontal flight, vertical landing (belly flop)
|
| - booster reuse on an orbital class rocket
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Yeah that was so funny to read that about the company that
| was the first to demonstrate reusuable boosters!
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I know this is included in booster reuse, but it demands
| being emphasized:
|
| SpaceX is landing rockets at sea on comically small
| platforms.
| m0zg wrote:
| We'd have electricity beaming out of our asses by now if we
| didn't attack Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and instead spent $2T
| on fusion R&D. And hundreds of thousands civilians would be
| alive, on top of that.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, since you obviously don't intend to use this site as
| intended after the countless warnings we've given you, and this
| was such an egregious flamewar tangent, I've banned the
| account.
|
| If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email
| hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll
| follow the rules in the future.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| baud147258 wrote:
| hey, just wanted to thank you for the work you're doing here
| on HN. Thanks again, have a nice day.
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| I don't see why spending more money would have led to anything
| other than a more expensive failure. There are fundamental
| physical reasons why controlled fusion is unlikely to be a
| practical commercial power source. Nature is not impressed by
| how big your budget is.
| willis936 wrote:
| As someone who has spent a few years on this problem: what do
| you think are the the fundamental physical reasons why
| controlled fusion is unlikely to be a practical commercial
| power source?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What are your thought? You have actual expertise to
| contribute. No need to test the GP.
| willis936 wrote:
| I see no physical limitations. There are engineering
| hurdles primarily addressed by materials. Making HTS
| coils cheaply is a big deal and a WIP problem. Test
| reactors such as ITER and SPARC need to be built as
| platforms to experiment with first wall and blanket
| designs. Making nuclear facilities is expensive. I
| personally do not see any showstoppers here, just
| expensive work that needs to be done.
|
| Will fusion ever be economical? I don't have a crystal
| ball, but properly charging for the economic cost of
| carbon emissions is necessary before answering that
| question. I also can't predict how much cheaper reactors
| would be than test machines and how long they would run
| for. The science needs to be funded to answer these
| questions. When society decides these answers are worth
| 5x F-35s then we'll have our answers.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks! One quibble:
|
| > The science needs to be funded to answer these
| questions. When society decides these answers are worth
| 5x F-35s then we'll have our answers.
|
| Isn't society funding ITER for $22 billion, and much
| else? The American and UK people are investing in some of
| the companies, per the OP.
| willis936 wrote:
| The 5x F-35 is hyperbole. ITER is currently being funded
| and does account for about 80% of the current global
| fusion research budget. Fair enough, its results will be
| valuable. US pulling of funding throughout the Reagan era
| slowed progress by a few decades. We won't make up that
| lost time no matter how much money we spend. For now all
| the eggs are in the basket and we wait for the results.
|
| MIT's HTS coil winding is the space to watch now imo. If
| it isn't all smoke and mirrors then we could see real
| test reactors for less money than ITER in our lifetime.
| leephillips wrote:
| Having less money might have increased progress. I tend
| to agree with my old boss, David Montgomery, that the
| eagerness to build big machines distracted the community
| from investigating the basic plasma physics and
| hydrodynamics that we needed to understand first.
| willis936 wrote:
| It's not an eagerness to build big machines because they
| are fun, but out of necessity to push the experimental
| regime forward.
|
| Given constrained budgets theory has continued to thrive.
| Cutting edge turbulence models are being made by
| theoretical plasma physicists. This is a problem no other
| engineer wants to touch with a 10 foot pole yet has
| incredibly far-reaching implications for many engineering
| fields.
| leephillips wrote:
| Unlike designing a fusion reactor, or going to the Moon,
| here nature is fighting you every step of the way. There
| are a host of instabilities working against confining a
| burning plasma. It's not that it's impossible to create a
| practical reactor; it's that mitigating all of these
| natural processes will lead to a device of immense
| complexity. The key point is this: even the most optimistic
| fusion fans say we might have grid power from fusion, if
| all goes really well, in another 30 years or so. Look at
| the recent progress in photovoltaics; the only remaining
| obstacles are in energy storage, which also has seen great
| progress in the last few years. Is there any serious doubt
| that in 30 years we could have a solar power economy if we
| really wanted it? Why, in that case, would we choose fusion
| instead, even if it worked? It would be more expensive,
| more prone to failure, more fragiley centralized, and it
| comes with some hazards: low-level radioactive waste,
| tritium, and more. So I'm not saying that it's impossible.
| It's not a perpetual motion scheme. However, further
| expenditure aimed at fusion energy is simply pointless.
| smaddox wrote:
| Helion is projecting a small amount of net electrical
| energy out of their next reactor, which they project to
| come online in 2024. And that reactor is designed
| primarily for producing He3, which they will use in their
| follow-up reactors designed for power generation.
|
| So any fusion fans who still say we won't have grid
| energy from fusion for another 30 years are either
| misinformed or not very optimistic.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Some brilliant investor-speak from Helion's FAQ:
|
| "A handful of organizations have performed bulk fusion,
| where a large volume of particles reaches temperatures
| high enough for fusion to occur on a large scale. [...]
| none of the organizations that have managed to do bulk
| fusion have done it in a practical way that can be used
| to make electricity."
| smaddox wrote:
| Seems pretty straightforward and accurate to me. Helion
| is already re-capturing most of the energy from each
| pulse. I'm not aware of a single other approach that has
| demonstrated direct conversion from plasma energy to
| electric energy.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Hint: The United States first demonstrated _bulk fusion_
| in 1952.
| m0zg wrote:
| See Moon landings and the Manhattan project for an example of
| what unlimited budget and the best brains were able to
| accomplish in this country between the 40s and 70s. Then it
| all went way downhill precisely because of this kind of
| reasoning, utter lack of vision and ambition, and
| mismanagement. And even if this were an utter and complete
| failure in the end, it'd have generated priceless knowledge,
| and hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern civilians would
| be alive. No matter how you slice it, this would have been a
| _way_ better way to spend taxpayer money.
|
| That's if it were a failure. If it were a success, we'd end
| global warming, attach a ginormous rocket booster to the
| world's economy without dooming the planet, kick the stool
| from underneath several authoritarian/theocratic regimes, and
| who knows what else.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Those were intelligently chosen projects; many more were no
| doubt rejected. Just throwing money at things doesn't work;
| beyond the obvious cost, there also is opportunity cost: it
| takes money from other valuable investments.
|
| What makes you say that management and vision declined?
| NASA does incredible things, as does NIH, NSF, etc.
|
| > this would have been a _way_ better way to spend taxpayer
| money.
|
| In order to do research, you need freedom, and political
| and economic stability, and those require militaries - not
| solely or most importantly, but necessarily. Sometimes
| militaries will be misused or used inefficiently, but there
| is no option to just spend all the money elsewhere.
| leephillips wrote:
| This is a fantastic comment. Mainly because you said what
| I was thinking of saying but couldn't muster the energy.
| delecti wrote:
| > Those were intelligently chosen projects; many more
| were no doubt rejected
|
| It's comparatively easy to say that with hindsight. There
| was about as much reason in 1940 to predict that making a
| nuclear bomb was feasible with enough resources as there
| is today to think the same about fusion power generation.
| Both started from the standpoint of "theoretically
| possible, but levels and levels of unknown engineering
| challenges."
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > It's comparatively easy to say that with hindsight.
|
| Yes, and I omitted an essential factor: All the funded
| projects that failed and are mostly forgotten.
|
| > There was about as much reason in 1940 to predict that
| making a nuclear bomb was feasible with enough resources
| as there is today to think the same about fusion power
| generation.
|
| My impression is that it was believed to be a very likely
| project, and mostly a race with the Nazis. An excerpt
| from Einstein's letter to FDR, credited with kicking off
| the project:
|
| _In the course of the last four months it has been made
| probable--through the work of Joliot in France as well as
| Fermi and Szilard in America--that it may become possible
| to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of
| uranium by which vast amounts of power and large
| quantities of new radium-like elements would be
| generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could
| be achieved in the immediate future.
|
| This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of
| bombs, and it is conceivable--though much less certain--
| that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be
| constructed._
|
| https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/einstein-
| szilar...
| leephillips wrote:
| There is a fundamental difference between the two--a
| difference that meant we knew we could probably build a
| fission bomb, and, later, fission reactors, but that
| controlled fusion is and will always be impractical.
| Nuclear fusion happens spontaneously in nature. The
| problem is _keeping_ it from happening, and controlling
| the process. During the Manhattan project there were
| tragic events were fisson happened _accidentally_. Fusion
| is different because you must actively maintain
| conditions that nature is trying to disrupt.
| unsung wrote:
| > Nuclear fusion happens spontaneously in nature.
|
| True, but you mean fission :)
| leephillips wrote:
| Dang it. Yes, I did. Thank you.
| leephillips wrote:
| There might have been a choice even better than war or a
| doomed fusion program: we could have spent the money on
| improving infrastructure, healthcare, education....
| ohiovr wrote:
| Lets get to the point, really. The only way magnetic confinement
| will ever achieve confinement times conducive to technologically
| useful power output will come from electromagnetic field
| strengths beyond what we are capable of doing at the present time
| with bitter superconductor magnets. And should we discover the
| secret to making this superlative magnetic field, we will need
| structures capable holding it together without smashing itself to
| bits. Stronger magnets mean tighter and tighter gyroradii. Every
| atomic collision pushes the plasma to the edges and there is no
| magic to stopping it. There is really no such thing as magnetic
| confinement. The magnetic fields only slow the progression to the
| walls. It can work if the progression is slow enough. 17 telsa
| magnets is only a fraction of the strength needed for anything
| practical. Go for 100 teslas or come back and say it will be
| another 30 years.
|
| Whoever figures out the hypermagnet will be just one step away
| from producing net fusion that is useful. I'd say divert all
| attention to that instead of new tokamaks. We know tokamak will
| work (economically too), if it only had the secret ingredient of
| unbelievably powerful magnets.
| hoseja wrote:
| >(albeit often state-assisted)
|
| The journo always has to point this out, despite SpaceX simply
| being the cheapest, best option even for government launches.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| PDF version if (like me) you find the animated slide images
| distracting without actually providing any additional useful
| information. I only wish this link had been at the top of the
| article rather than the bottom.
|
| https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.md/RLkQ3 also works
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