Slashdot Mirror

colinneagle writes "Would you believe the Inspector General from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it would violate the privacy of Americans for the IG office to tell us how many people in the United States had their privacy violated via the NSA warrantless wiretap powers which were granted under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008? The Act is up for a five-year extension, but Senator Ron Wyden said he'd block FAA renewal until Congress received an answer from the NSA about how many 'people in the United States have their communications reviewed by the government' under FAA powers."

First time accepted submitter at.drinian writes "Last week, we heard about the many applications for new top-level domains that have been put forth by various businesses and organizations. ICANN, of course, has come under heavy criticism for its process. If you didn't have the accumulated baggage of 30 years of DNS, how would you redesign things? .public and .private TLDs only? No TLD control? Country-level domains?"

First time accepted submitter Quillem writes "Muthu Alagappan, a 5'9" biomechanical engineering undergraduate at Stanford, made a presentation at this year's MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference which might well do to basketball what Moneyball did to baseball. His contribution revolves around a topographical analysis of NBA games which contends that there are really 13 positions in basketball — not just five. Besides a rather patronising — but informative — read in Gentlemen's Quarterly, there are earlier stories over at Wired and NYT blogs. Muthu's talk and slides are also available."

MikeatWired writes "We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it's closer than we thought, writes Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Danger Room. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) — it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon's unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots."

MikeatWired writes "We like to think of the drone war as something far away, fought in the deserts of Yemen or the mountains of Afghanistan. But we now know it's closer than we thought, writes Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Danger Room. There are 64 drone bases on American soil. That includes 12 locations housing Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles, which can be armed. Public Intelligence, a non-profit that advocates for free access to information, released a map of military UAV activities in the United States on Tuesday. Assembled from military sources — especially this little-known June 2011 Air Force presentation (.pdf) — it is arguably the most comprehensive map so far of the spread of the Pentagon's unmanned fleet. What exact missions are performed at those locations, however, is not clear. Some bases might be used as remote cockpits to control the robotic aircraft overseas, some for drone pilot training. Others may also serve as imagery analysis depots."

Vigile writes "Today AMD is making an announcement that is the first step in a drastic transition for the company by integrating an ARM Cortex A5 processor on the same die with upcoming Fusion APUs. Starting in late 2013, all AMD APUs (processors that are combinations of x86 cores and Radeon SIMD arrays) will also integrate an ARM Cortex A5 processor to handle security for online transactions, banking, identity protection and DRM integration. The A5 is the smallest Cortex processor available, and that would make sense to use it in a full APU so it will not take up more than 10-15 square mm of die space. This marks the first time AMD has licensed ARM technology and while many people were speculating a pure ARM+Radeon hybrid, this move today is being described as the 'first step' for AMD down a new road of dexterity as an IP-focused technology company with their GPU technology as 'the crown jewel.' So while today's announcement might focus on using ARM processors for security purposes, the future likely holds much more these two partners."

An anonymous reader writes "In an end-run around slow Internet backbone providers, Netflix and Google (plus a dozen more large content giants) are in a bitter fight to deploy servers and dominate the consumer edge of the Internet. This Wired article provides some of the first graphics of this fight and how it is changing the underlying Internet infrastructure. The source of the article (DeepField blog post) also has some pretty interesting commentary."

MikeatWired writes "OpenLogic announced on Thursday that it will provide CentOS Linux — and service-level agreement (SLA) support — through Microsoft's new Windows Azure gallery. Yesterday, Microsoft announced support for Linux instances on its cloud service, among other cloud news, in what Wired Enterprise's Cade Metz dubbed an Amazonian facelift. OpenLogic's Steven Grandchamp writes in a blog post that for 'enterprise developers and IT folks who are multi-source and multi-platform, today's announcement is good news. The Windows and Linux worlds take one step towards each other.' However, Grandchamp notes that despite Microsoft 'maturing its views on open source' with 'significant work' with Node.js, Hadoop, and Samba, the open source community 'will meet [Linux on Azure] with overall wariness and skepticism.' 'Some will view this with hope and a positive step; others will continue to be cynical,' he writes. 'For me, it's part of a larger overall process that continues to signal open source coming of age. What major vendor doesn't have an open source story now? It's such an ingrained part of development, from legacy to mobile to cloud, that we can't live without and we are figuring out how to love living with it.'"

MikeatWired writes "OpenLogic announced on Thursday that it will provide CentOS Linux — and service-level agreement (SLA) support — through Microsoft's new Windows Azure gallery. Yesterday, Microsoft announced support for Linux instances on its cloud service, among other cloud news, in what Wired Enterprise's Cade Metz dubbed an Amazonian facelift. OpenLogic's Steven Grandchamp writes in a blog post that for 'enterprise developers and IT folks who are multi-source and multi-platform, today's announcement is good news. The Windows and Linux worlds take one step towards each other.' However, Grandchamp notes that despite Microsoft 'maturing its views on open source' with 'significant work' with Node.js, Hadoop, and Samba, the open source community 'will meet [Linux on Azure] with overall wariness and skepticism.' 'Some will view this with hope and a positive step; others will continue to be cynical,' he writes. 'For me, it's part of a larger overall process that continues to signal open source coming of age. What major vendor doesn't have an open source story now? It's such an ingrained part of development, from legacy to mobile to cloud, that we can't live without and we are figuring out how to love living with it.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of software security company F-Secure, writes that when his company heard about Flame, they went digging through their archive for related samples of malware and were surprised to find that they already had samples of Flame, dating back to 2010 and 2011, that they were unaware they possessed. 'What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That's a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general.' Why weren't Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu detected earlier? The answer isn't encouraging for the future of cyberwar. All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered and the fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. In the case of Stuxnet and DuQu, they used digitally signed components to make their malware appear to be trustworthy applications and instead of trying to protect their code with custom packers and obfuscation engines — which might have drawn suspicion to them — they hid in plain sight. In the case of Flame, the attackers used SQLite, SSH, SSL and LUA libraries that made the code look more like a business database system than a piece of malware. 'The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can't protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets,' writes Hypponen, adding that it's highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven't detected yet because simply put, attacks like these work. 'Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn't. We were out of our league, in our own game.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Brandon Keim reports that the war on drugs has a new front, with chemists fabricating synthetic mimics of marijuana, dissociative drugs and stimulants. So far lawmakers appear to be a losing the war, as every time a new compound is banned, overseas chemists synthesize a new version tweaked just enough to evade the letter of the law in a giant game of chemical Whack-a-Mole. 'Manufacturers turn these things around so quickly. One week you'll have a product with compound X, the next week it's compound Y,' says forensic toxicologist Kevin Shanks. 'It's fascinating how fast it can occur, and it's fascinating to see the minute changes in chemical structure they'll come up with. It's similar, but it's different.' During the last several years, the market for legal highs has exploded in North America and Europe. While people raised on Reefer Madness-style exaggerations may be wary of claims that 'legal high' drugs are dangerous, researchers say they're far more potent than the originals. Reports of psychotic episodes following synthetic drug use are common and have led to a variety of laws, but so far the bans aren't working, as the drugs can be subtly tweaked so as to possess a different, legal molecular form. One obvious alternative approach is to ban entire classes of similar compounds; however this is easier said than done. 'The problem with that is, what does "chemically similar" really mean? Change the structure in a small way — move a molecule here, move something to the other side of the molecule — and while I might think it's an analogue, another chemist might disagree,' says Shanks. 'That's the crux of the entire problem. The scientific community does not agree on what "analogue" essentially means.""

An anonymous reader writes "Wired is reporting on a massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation. Kaspersky Lab, the company that discovered the malware, has a FAQ with more details."

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times reports that Facebook has resumed its stealthy efforts to create a smartphone, apparently to assert its position in an Internet increasingly accessed via mobile devices, and to counter products and moves made by major competitors Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. The Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg has gotten personally involved in the project, which has recently landed several iPhone/iPad engineers from Apple. Wired ran a similar story a month ago, reporting that Facebook has ramped up its "Buffy" code-named collaboration with HTC on a phone which will probably be Android-based, support HTML5 and include a large touchscreen and high-quality camera (for Instagram). Facebook won't confirm or deny these reports."

New submitter strangebush sends this quote from Wired about Van Jacobson's work on the TCP/IP protocol in the '80s, which helped stabilize early computer networks enough for them to eventually grow into the internet: "'I was getting a bit per second between two network gateways that were literally in the same room,' Jacobson remembers. ... In 1985, Berkeley ran one of the IMPs, or interface message processors, that served as the main nodes on the ARPAnet, a network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense that connected various research institutions and government organizations across the country. The network was designed so that any node could send data at any time, but for some reason, Berkeley's IMP was only sending data every twelve seconds. As it turns out, the IMP was waiting for other nodes to complete their transmissions before sending its data. The ARPAnet was meant to be a mesh network, where all nodes can operate on their own, but it was behaving like a token ring network, where each node can only send when they receive a master token. 'Our IMP would just keep accumulating data and accumulating data for about twelve seconds and then it would dump it,' says Jacobson. 'It was like the old token ring networks when you couldn't say anything until you got the token. But the ARPAnet wasn't built to do that. There was no global protocol like that.'"

symbolset writes "In the long running dispute between Motorola and Microsoft, Judge David Shaw of the ITC recommended Monday an import ban on Xbox 360 S consoles, as they are found to infringe Motorola's patents (PDF). The judge also ordered Microsoft post a bond of 7 percent of the retail price of all unsold U.S. Xbox inventory. The decision will go to the ITC's board of commissioners, who will either uphold the recommendation or overturn it. 'Microsoft argued that Shaw's exclusion order does not serve the public interest because it would leave consumers of video game consoles with only two options to satisfy their needs: the Sony Playstation and the Nintendo Wii. Shaw rejected that argument, finding that the public interest in enforcing intellectual property rights outweighs any potential economic impact on video game console buyers.'" This follows news last week of Microsoft winning an import ban on Motorola's Android devices.

Fluffeh writes "Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said, '[this] turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.' Republican Senator Thomas O'Mara added, '[this will] help lend some accountability to the Internet age.' The two are sponsoring a bill that would ban any New York-based websites from allowing comments (or well, anything) to be posted unless the person posting it attaches their name to it. But the bill also goes further, saying New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, must 'remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.'"

Fluffeh writes "In recent times, it seems many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers, destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it. But in a surprising twist, the U.S. Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra. The letter contains an awful lot of lawyer babble and lists many court cases and the like, although some sections are surprisingly clear: 'Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.' There is a lot more and it certainly seems like a firm foothold in the right direction."

Fluffeh writes "In recent times, it seems many Police Departments believe that recording them doing their work is an act of war with police officers, destroying the tapes, phones or cameras while arresting the folks doing it. But in a surprising twist, the U.S. Justice Department has sent letter (PDF) to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department — who have been quite heavy handed in enforcing their 'Don't record me bro!' mantra. The letter contains an awful lot of lawyer babble and lists many court cases and the like, although some sections are surprisingly clear: 'Policies should prohibit officers from destroying recording devices or cameras and deleting recordings or photographs under any circumstances. In addition to violating the First Amendment, police officers violate the core requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process clause when they irrevocably deprived individuals of their recordings without first providing notice and an opportunity to object.' There is a lot more and it certainly seems like a firm foothold in the right direction."

TheGift73 tips an article discussing a new study (PDF) which found Americans are now more worried about cybersecurity threats than they are about terrorism. Here's Techdirt's acerbic take: "Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."

TheGift73 tips an article discussing a new study (PDF) which found Americans are now more worried about cybersecurity threats than they are about terrorism. Here's Techdirt's acerbic take: "Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."

dynamo52 sends this quote from Ars about a breach involving a Bitcoin exchange: "More than $87,000 worth of the virtual currency known as Bitcoin was stolen after online bandits penetrated servers belonging to Bitcoinica, prompting its operators to temporarily shutter the trading platform to contain the damage. Friday's theft came after hackers accessed Bitcoinica's production servers and depleted its online wallet of 18,547 BTC, as individual Bitcoin units are called, company officials said in a blog post published on Friday. It said the heist affected only a small fraction of Bitcoinica's overall bitcoin deposits and that all withdrawal requests will be honored once the platform reopens." Reader linhares points out a forum post discussing how the attacker(s) hinted at a 'mass leak' in the near future. This attack comes shortly after a leak of a different sort — an FBI document (PDF) about Bitcoin found it way onto the internet. It seems they're worried about the virtual currency's potential use in criminal activities.

AstroPhilosopher writes "Researchers at the Federation of American Scientists have discovered documentation (PDF) that allows the military to keep footage from drones for up to 90 days to determine whether further investigation is warranted. Besides using footage from natural disasters and monitoring of domestic military bases, all that's truly required is for an operator to 'accidentally' have the camera running while flying."

Fluffeh writes "Although the DHS has spent around $90 million upgrading magnetometers to the new body scanners, federal investigators 'identified vulnerabilities in the screening process' at domestic airports using the new machines, according to a classified internal Department of Homeland Security report. Exactly how bad the body scanners are is not being divulged publicly, but the Inspector General's report (PDF) made eight separate recommendations on how to improve screening. To quiet privacy concerns, the authorities are also spending $7 million to 'remove the human factor from the image review process' and replace the passenger's image with an avatar."

Fluffeh writes "Although the DHS has spent around $90 million upgrading magnetometers to the new body scanners, federal investigators 'identified vulnerabilities in the screening process' at domestic airports using the new machines, according to a classified internal Department of Homeland Security report. Exactly how bad the body scanners are is not being divulged publicly, but the Inspector General's report (PDF) made eight separate recommendations on how to improve screening. To quiet privacy concerns, the authorities are also spending $7 million to 'remove the human factor from the image review process' and replace the passenger's image with an avatar."

New submitter crazyjj writes "As reported in Wired, a recent National Research Council report indicates a growing concern for NASA, the NOAA, and USGS. While there are currently 22 Earth-observing satellites in orbit, this number is expected to drop to as low as six by the year 2020. The U.S. relies on this network of satellites for weather forecasting, climate change data, and important geologic and oceanographic information. As with most things space and NASA these days, the root cause is funding cuts. The program to maintain this network was funded at $2 billion as recently as 2002, but has since been scaled back to a current funding level of $1.3 billion, with only two replacement satellites having definite launch dates."

bonch writes "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a hip-hop website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement for prerelease music tracks. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence. Unsealed court records (PDF) show that the government was repeatedly given time extensions to build a case against Dajaz1.com, but the RIAA's evidence never came. The RIAA has declined to comment."

bonch writes "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized a hip-hop website based on RIAA claims of copyright infringement for prerelease music tracks. They held it for a year before giving it back due to lack of evidence. Unsealed court records (PDF) show that the government was repeatedly given time extensions to build a case against Dajaz1.com, but the RIAA's evidence never came. The RIAA has declined to comment."

Freshly Exhumed writes in with a Wired story about a nerd/super-villian dream come true. "Marine biologist-cum-TV personality Luke Tipple attached a 50-milliwatt green laser to a lemon shark off the coast of the Bahamas in late April. The escapade was sponsored by Wicked Lasers, a consumer-focused laser manufacturer based in Hong Kong that produces some of the most brilliant — and potentially dangerous — handheld lasers in the world. 'This was definitely a world first,' Tipple told Wired. 'Initially, I told them no. I thought it was a frivolous stunt. But then I considered that it would give us an opportunity to test our clips and attachments, and whatever is attached to that clip, I really don't care. It was a low-powered laser that couldn't be dangerous to anyone, and there's actually useful applications in having a laser attached to the animal.'"

Harperdog writes "Noah Schactman has a great piece on the Airborne Laser, the ray gun-equipped 747 that became a symbol of wasteful Pentagon weaponeering. Despite sixteen years and billions of dollars in development, the jet could never reliably blast a missile in trials. Now the House Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces wants the Airborne Laser to be used to defend us against the threat of North Korea's failed missiles."

wiedzmin writes "The House approved Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act with a 248 to 168 vote today. CISPA allows internet service providers to share Internet 'threat' information with government agencies, including DHS and NSA, without having to protect any personally identifying data of its customers, without a court order. It effectively immunizes ISPs from privacy lawsuits for disclosing customer information, grants them anti-trust protection on colluding on cybersecurity issues and allows them to bypass privacy laws when sharing data with each other."

MikeatWired writes "Google will tightly integrate its new Google Drive online storage service with an upcoming version of its Chrome OS operating system, says Sundar Pichai, who oversees development of the company's Chrome products as well as its Google Apps online services. Chrome OS is Google's effort to move all applications and data onto the web (and its Chrome browser), but the OS still hasn't mastered the art of moving files from place to place. By integrating Chrome OS with Google Drive — the online storage service Google introduced on Tuesday — the company seeks to correct this problem. 'With Chromebooks, [Google Drive] is even more powerful,' Pichai says, 'because it just starts working naturally. Your local drive is also Google Drive. This makes it really powerful because you just don't think about it.' Basically, Google Drive — a service that operates on the web — will perform as if it was the local file system. If you open the 'save file' dialog box on Chrome OS, for instance, the system will take you straight to Google Drive. 'We'll effectively integrate [Google] Drive into the native file system of Chrome OS,' says Scott Johnson, Google's Google Drive product manager. 'All the core OS functionality will use [Google] Drive as a place to store data — if that's what you opt in to.'"

MikeatWired writes "Google will tightly integrate its new Google Drive online storage service with an upcoming version of its Chrome OS operating system, says Sundar Pichai, who oversees development of the company's Chrome products as well as its Google Apps online services. Chrome OS is Google's effort to move all applications and data onto the web (and its Chrome browser), but the OS still hasn't mastered the art of moving files from place to place. By integrating Chrome OS with Google Drive — the online storage service Google introduced on Tuesday — the company seeks to correct this problem. 'With Chromebooks, [Google Drive] is even more powerful,' Pichai says, 'because it just starts working naturally. Your local drive is also Google Drive. This makes it really powerful because you just don't think about it.' Basically, Google Drive — a service that operates on the web — will perform as if it was the local file system. If you open the 'save file' dialog box on Chrome OS, for instance, the system will take you straight to Google Drive. 'We'll effectively integrate [Google] Drive into the native file system of Chrome OS,' says Scott Johnson, Google's Google Drive product manager. 'All the core OS functionality will use [Google] Drive as a place to store data — if that's what you opt in to.'"

CWmike writes "Google built a 'clean room' version of Java and did not use Sun's intellectual property, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, testified in court Tuesday. Schmidt said its use of Java in Android was 'legally correct.' On this day seven of the trial, Schmidt gave the jury a brief history of Java, describing its release as 'an almost religious moment.' He told the jury that Google had once hoped to partner with Sun to develop Android using Java, but that negotiations broke off because Google wanted Android to be open source, and Sun was unwilling to give up that much control over Java. Instead, Schmidt said, Google created the 'clean room' version of Java that didn't use Sun's protected code. Its engineers invented 'a completely different approach' to the way Java worked internally, Schmidt testified."

An anonymous reader writes "A Wired story claims Amazon's cloud now hosts enough companies and traffic to generate 1% of all Internet traffic (and visits from 1/3 of daily Internet users). An amazing number if true. And a little scary for one company to host this much cloud infrastructure."

AstroPhilosopher writes "In a move similar to Hollywood's attempt to have the Supreme Court ban VCRs back in the 80's, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Univision are set to appear in court next month to urge a New York federal judge to block Aereo. 'Aereo lets those in New York who want to watch on their iPad what they can pull down for free from the public airwaves to their TV with an antenna.' The networks, however, say Aereo will cause irreparable harm to their business. Aereo's conduct apparently causes them to 'lose control over the dissemination of their copyrighted programming, disrupts their relationships with licensed distributors and viewers and usurps their right to decide how and on what terms to make available and license content over new internet distribution media.'"

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who downloaded source code for the investment firm's high-speed trading system from the company's computers, was wrongly charged with theft of property because the code did not qualify as a physical object under a federal theft statute, according to a court opinion published Wednesday." Adds the submitter: "The RIAA's definitely got to give Goldman Sachs their secret recipe ..."

You recently got the chance to ask a group of MIT researchers questions about fusion power, and they've now finished writing some incredibly detailed answers. They discuss the things we've learned about fusion in the past decade, how long it's likely to take for fusion to power your home, the biggest problems fusion researchers are working to solve, and why it's important to continue funding fusion projects. They also delve into the specifics of tokamak operation, like dealing with disruption events and the limitations on reactor size, and provide some insight into fusion as a career. Hit the link below for a wealth of information about fusion. 1. What have we learned?
by jank1887

Fusion is one of those technologies that is always '50 years away,’ even 50 years ago, maybe even 50 years from now. So, looking at what's actually happened recently: What do we actually know now that we didn't know 10-15 years ago that gives support to the notion that we're making progress? Or, what are the 'big' things we know now? Similarly, what are the things we still don't know that we could reasonably expect to find answers for in the next 10-15 years?

MIT Researchers: As researchers in this field, we have heard the expression "Fusion is 50 years away and always will be" more times than we would like to admit. The implication of this statement is that no real progress has been made in the field, which is simply not true! We have made a great deal of progress, even in the last 10–15 years (which have been very lean times for funding). We’ll try to summarize some of the new findings, in no particular order:

1) Internal Transport Barriers/Reversed Shear operation –
We have actually discovered a way to improve upon the performance that we get in H- mode plasmas. These improvements come in the form for so called internal transport barriers. In the past 10–15 years we have begun to understand how to modify the current flowing in tokamak plasmas so that we create effectively what is a barrier in the middle of the plasma. Like the edge barrier in H-mode plasmas, this barrier restricts particles and energy from escaping the plasma and enhancing the overall performance. 2) I-mode –
In just the last 5 years, a new operational regime has been discovered on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT. This is termed the I-mode, or “Improved L-mode” regime. When the tokamak is operated in this manner it exhibits excellent energy confinement properties, keeping the plasma hot. At the same time the plasma does an excellent job of expelling impurities which dilute the fusion fuel and reduce the number of fusion reactions which can occur. It is particularly important to us as it was first observed on Alcator C-Mod, and is now under active development at many other tokamaks around the world.

3) Development of Predictive Models –
Great advances have been made in the development of predictive computer models, such as gyrokinetic and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) formulations. Years of experiments have revealed that plasma turbulence is often primarily responsible for the loss of particles and energy from fusion reactors. In the past 10–15 years we have developed advanced models which are thought to contain sufficient physics to simulate plasma turbulence and predict the performance of future fusion devices. At this time we are in the process of validating these models, i.e. comparing them directly with experiment to ensure they are correct, but we are approaching the ability to reliably predict the performance of fusion plasmas without the need for a fusion reactor. This can motivate engineering design and operational choices for future fusion devices.

4) Self-acceleration of the plasma (intrinsic rotation) –
Over the past decade, it has been discovered (on Alcator C-Mod and elsewhere) that plasmas can spontaneously rotate, at speeds of tens of kilometers per second. (Imagine the donut-shaped plasma spinning on its axis.) This turns out to have beneficial effects for stabilizing turbulence at the edge, as the spinning plasma causes the turbulent eddies to break up before they can carry hot plasma out of the core. This is an exciting area of research that could have big implications for the performance of a tokamak reactor.

5) Disruption mitigation –
One of the main problems with a tokamak is the ‘disruption’, when the plasma energy is suddenly lost, stopping any fusion that is occurring and requiring a restart of the reactor. (See the question below for a lot of detail about this!) In extreme cases, these disruptions can cause damage to the wall of the tokamak – which would require repairs before the machine can be restarted. Over the past decade, we have developed techniques to mitigate these disruptions, causing the plasma to come to a rapid shutdown that does not negatively affect the wall condition. Work is underway to scale these techniques up to a reactor-size device (ITER).

6) ELM control/avoidance –
Another longstanding problem with tokamaks is periodic ‘bursts’ of energy from the edge called Edge-Localized Modes (ELMs). In today’s devices, ELMs are not a problem, but in ITER and future reactors, they could carry enough energy to damage the wall in the divertor region (where most of the energy comes out). There has been rapid progress lately (past 15 years) in ways to control these ELMs by making them more rapid and smaller, such as using resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) coils to distort the shape of the confining magnetic field, or ‘pellet pacing’ (firing small pellets of deuterium fuel into the machine 50–60 times per second, which triggers an ELM), or vertical ‘kicks’ in which the control system suddenly jogs the plasma position a few centimeters vertically, also triggering an ELM. Between these techniques and the recently discovered I-mode (which doesn’t have ELMs), this is a problem that is well on the way to being solved.

7) High-Z walls –
This is a particular point of pride for Alcator C-Mod. Running a tokamak with walls made of refractory metals has many advantages because of the extreme capacity of these materials to absorb heat loads, but there are disadvantages as well, such as how radiative these high atomic number elements are if they get into the plasma as impurities, or how metallic materials distort when they melt, rather than ablating like carbon-fiber composites. Alcator C-Mod (which has a molybdenum wall) and other tokamaks have recently shown that it is possible to reliably run a tokamak with high-Z refractory metal walls, which will almost certainly be a feature of future reactors.

2. Power Loss Scenario in Alcator C-Mod?
by eldavojohn

Not to raise any fears -- rather out of genuine curiosity -- what happens when the magnetic fields that hold the 90,000,000 degrees Celsius plasma in place fail or loser power on the Alcator C-Mod? I understand it's probably in prototype mode, but what sort of safety advantages or disadvantages do Alcator C-Mod designs offer over conventional, large-scale designs? Does the plasma come into contact with the toroidal superconducting coil? Then what?

Geoff Olynyk answers: Actually, that’s exactly what my research is on! The event you describe is called a "disruption." Holding a hot plasma stationary using magnetic fields without it ever touching material surfaces is very difficult – Richard Feynman once compared it to trying to "hold Jello with rubber bands." For any number of reasons, like a magnetic coil losing power, the control system not being able to juggle the plasma position quickly enough, or the plasma hitting a stability limit (pressure or density goes too high), it’s possible for the plasma to hit the wall. The most important thing to know, though, is that when this occurs (and it does, frequently, in today’s experiments – although it’ll have to be a very rare occurrence in a real power reactor so it produces uninterrupted electricity), it is no risk to the environment or to safety.

To understand what happens, you have to realize that the plasma is very, very light. In the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, it has a mass of only about 0.001 grams – about one- fiftieth as much as the smallest drop of water you can get from an eyedropper. (This is with a plasma volume of about a cubic meter – a fusion plasma is actually a pretty good vacuum!) So even though it’s very hot, it doesn’t actually have a lot of thermal stored energy to flow into the wall if confinement is suddenly lost. There is actually more energy stored in the current flowing in the plasma (in C-Mod, about a million amperes), which also gets deposited on the wall. In C-Mod, thermal stored energy is about 50– 150 kJ and magnetic stored energy is almost 1000 kJ. The problem is that as we go to larger machines (like ITER, or a reactor), the amount of stored energy in the plasma scales like the cube of the size, and the wall area only scales like the square of the size. So the energy deposited per square meter of wall area gets worse (larger) as we go up in machine size.

The plasma doesn’t hit the superconducting coils - it hits (really, deposits its energy on) the “first wall” of the chamber closest to the plasma. So, we do two things to make sure that the walls can survive these disruption events. The first is making them out of materials that can take a blast of heat, like tungsten, or else materials that ablate away rather than melting, like carbon fiber composites. The second is to develop “disruption mitigation” systems which can cause the plasma to radiate all its energy evenly over the entire wall surface, spreading the heat out and lessening the chance of causing localized melting. But I want to stress again - disruptions are an operational problem, meaning they might cause a power plant to be offline for a while, but they’re not a safety problem. There is no chance of a runaway reaction or meltdown in a fusion reactor.

3. Ubiquitous Fusion Power
by monsted

When will fusion power my house (or vehicle)?

MIT Researchers: This is obviously an impossible question to answer, but we can give some thoughts about when it might happen, and why. First, the current official plan is that ITER will demonstrate net fusion gain (Q = 10, that is, ten times more fusion power out than heating power put in) in about 2028 or 2029. (Construction will be done by about 2022 but there’s a six-year shakedown process of steadily increasing the power and learning how to run the machine before the full-power fusion shots.) At that point, designs can begin for a “DEMO”, which is the fusion community’s term for a demonstration power plant. That would come online around 2040 (and would putt watts on the grid, although probably at an economic loss at first), and would be followed by (profitable, economic) commercial plants around 2050.

This seems like a long time, and it is, but it’s important to understand that this is not the only possible path. You might say that we’re not a certain number of years away from a working fusion power plant, but rather about $80-billion away (in worldwide funding). We’ll get into this more in response to one of the other questions, but there are other experiments that could be done in parallel with ITER that would certainly speed up the goal of a demonstration power plant, if there were the money for it. Here is a graph based on a 1976 ERDA (predecessor to today’s DOE) fusion development plan, showing their four paths to a reactor, as well as a business-as-usual funding case that would never lead to a reactor, and in black is the actual funding amounts. (All values are adjusted to 2012 dollars.)

In the U.S. at least, fusion funding hasn’t been anywhere close to what would be required for a “crash program” to get to a reactor. If it were, it would probably be possible to have a demonstration reactor in about twenty years. (This is not actually that long - given that it takes almost a decade to build a large fission reactor or hydroelectric dam!)

Fusion has a reputation of “always being thirty years away” (or fifty, or twenty). We want to address that head-on here: aside from a few over-optimistic predictions made in the very early days of magnetic fusion research (the 1950s), this reputation is undeserved. The reason it has taken so long to get to breakeven (ITER) is because since the end of the 1970s, funding for fusion research has been continually slashed, up to today, when the U.S. is proposing shuttering one of three remaining tokamak experiments, the Alcator C-Mod device at MIT that we all work on. Despite this, progress has been continuous. But if we had the money, we would be getting there quicker.

4. What are the economic numbers for a successful, commercial reactor?
by kestasjk
I know that the economics of larger reactor = more economical are well known with tokamaks. Does this mean you have a good idea of the minimum cost / generating capacity of the first commercial reactors? If so, what do those numbers look like?
7. Lower Limit on Tokamak Design
by gyepi
Are there any good guesstimates on how small a tokamak-based fusion reactor (which produces more energy than it consumes) can become? Theoretical limitations on the size of the reactor would have obvious implications for pragmatic issues.

MIT Researchers: Questions 4 and 7 are similar and we answer them together here.

The current thinking is that a tokamak fusion reactor will be about 1 gigawatt electrical, and about 2–3.5 gigawatts thermal (depending on how high-temperature the blanket is and thus how thermally efficient it can be). This is about the size of a current fission reactor or large coal-fired power plant.

Fusion researchers are working on smaller designs, though! At MIT, some students are working on a concept for a 350–500 MW (thermal) class fusion reactor, which would be cheaper to field and thus more likely to be built by private industry with limited access to capital. This is still early work, though, and the economic analysis is not done yet.

Cost estimates for a new technology like fusion cannot be terribly reliable, but several studies suggest that, with suitable developments in science and technology, the costs could be competitive with other methods of electricity generation. We recommend you read the ARIES-AT study (google it), which goes through all the factors that go into the cost of electricity (COE) for a fusion reactor, and compares their concept to other electricity generation options (fission, fossil fuels, etc.) A key advantage of fusion is in what economists call "external costs." These are costs borne by society as a whole and not by the generating industry. Environmental pollution, nuclear proliferation, and military operations to protect oil supplies are all examples of external costs for energy.

5. What Problems are Holding Back Successful Reactions?
by Bucc5062

Can you explain to a non-scientist what the biggest stumbling blocks are for an effective fusion reaction? Is it truly a matter of throwing money down an energy hole, or are there verifiable, measurable benchmarks that lead us from one step to the next? I.e. we’ve achieved X, now we need Y; when we get Y, we get Z and then achieve fusion. Is it the technology holding us back, the politics, or the science?

MIT Researchers: We know exactly what we need to do. Not everything has a solution yet – that’s why it’s still a research project! – but we generally know what the big challenges are to get to a working magnetic fusion reactor. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• 1 – Non-inductive current drive. We can’t rely on inductors to drive the plasma current since they are inherently pulsed (not steady-state). We think that lower hybrid current drive might be the solution, and are actively researching this on Alcator C-Mod.
• 2 – Confining a 'burning plasma.' This is the big question that ITER will resolve – can we really confine a plasma that is dominantly self-heated – that is, most of its energy comes from fusion reactions rather than external heating. Will new instabilities appear? Or can we confine the plasma as we expect we can.
• 3 – Confining a steady-state burning plasma while avoiding off-normal events. We have to do both of the previous points at the same time! And we can’t have disruptions too often or else the power plant won’t have a high enough duty factor. The goal is to have disruptions (which require a shutdown) occur less than once per year.
• 4 – Validated predictive capability for fusion-grade plasmas. We have made great progress in this field already (see our answer to an earlier question), but it’s not at the point yet that, say, fluid mechanics codes are, where Boeing can design an entire plane in the computer before ever building a scale model. We need our models of fusion plasma behavior to be accurate and reliable enough to design first-of-a-kind machines that we are 100% sure will work the way we think they will.
• 5 – Diagnosing a burning plasma. It’s really hard to tell any of the properties of the plasma even today, when we use pure deuterium fuel (instead of ‘live’ deuterium–tritium fuel), and our plasmas are colder than they would be in a reactor! You can’t, for example, stick a thermometer in to tell the temperature! We have to use subtle effects like bouncing a laser beam off the electrons and telling the temperature from the Doppler shift of the laser from the moving electrons (a technique known as Thomson scattering). Making these diagnostics work in the reactor environment, with higher plasma temperatures and a ferocious flux of neutrons coming out, is a great challenge.
• 6 – Better understanding of plasma–wall interactions. The plasma is confined by magnetic fields, and ideally doesn’t touch the wall at all, except in a very small area called the divertor. This means that the material challenges in the divertor are severe – we have to figure out a way to operate the plasma so that it’s hot in the center, but cold near the divertor, so that it doesn’t erode the wall too fast. This will be a limiting factor on how long you can run a fusion power plant for before you have to shut it down in order to do maintenance. Ideally, we’d want this to be every 2 years or so, like fission power plants today.
• 7 – Materials for plasma-facing components. We need to develop new materials that can withstand the high temperatures of the wall of a fusion reactor while resisting neutron damage and not becoming too activated by the neutrons that will pass through them. (There is some progress on this front with ferritic steels and silicon carbide.)
• 8 – Magnets that meet the plasma physics requirements and allow reactor maintainability at reasonable costs. (Some of us are working on demountable superconducting coil concepts that may eventually be the solution to this!)
• 9 – Design and materials for tritium fuel cycle and power extraction. Fusion reactors will breed their own tritium fuel from deuterium – this process has to be experimentally tested on a large scale (which will obviously require a burning plasma tokamak).
• 10 – Reliability, availability, maintainability, and inspectability (RAMI) of the reactor designs. We have to show that our concepts for reactors really are as good as we think they can be.

The point is that it’s not a money pit. There are unsolved challenges, but we know what they are, and with adequate support, these challenges will be overcome. This is why we are urging everyone to go to fusionfuture.org and write Congress asking them to keep supporting U.S. fusion research! (It’s very easy – there’s a link at the right on the website.)

6. NIMBY
by GeneralTurgidson

How do you explain the safety/benefits of fusion to a generation of people terrified of nuclear anything?

MIT Researchers:This is where fusion really shines. The two big problems (at least, perceived problems) of fission reactors are the risk of a meltdown, and what you do with the high-level radioactive waste. Fusion has neither of these issues!

Regarding the first, the reason why a worst-case accident in a fission reactor can be so devastating is because there is a lot of fuel in the reactor at any one time. There are well known accidents at Chernobyl (where the reaction ‘ran away’, making more power than the reactor was designed to handle) and Fukushima, where the fission chain reaction was safely shut down, but the cores melted down when the tsunami knocked out the cooling systems, due to ‘decay heat’ which is produced by the used fuel even after shutdown.

In a fusion reactor, it’s a completely different story. There will be less than a gram of fuel in a reactor at any one time—fresh deuterium–tritium fuel is continually added as it is burned—and so a runaway reaction is simply not possible. Decay heat isn’t a problem in a pure fusion system, again because there just isn’t any fuel sitting there undergoing nuclear reactions once the reactor is shut down. In general, this is one area where it’s a benefit that a fusion reaction is so hard to sustain! We have to try really hard to keep the plasma hot enough to undergo fusion in the first place, so if we just turn off the heating and fuelling systems, the fusion reaction will shut down very quickly.

As for the second benefit of fusion (waste), the reaction is completely different from that in a fission reactor. In fission, uranium (or other heavy elements like plutonium) split into pieces, producing hundreds of different isotopes, some of which are radioactive, with half-lives ranging from fractions of a second to millions of years. In fusion, the reaction is simple, deuterium + tritium helium + neutron. So there is no “waste” from the unburned fuel – any tritium that isn’t burned gets pumped out of the chamber and recirculated back in.

This is not to say that there will be no radioactive waste from a fusion plant. The reactor vessel itself will become activated because of the flux of neutrons passing through it, and will have to be treated accordingly when the plant is decommissioned (after, say, a 50-year operational period). But it’s important to note that this kind of radioactive waste is of a much lower level – it won’t have to be stored for very long before it will be “cool” enough to simply bury in the ground safely. And there is active research going on into new materials for fusion reactors that are more resistant to activation by neutrons, such as ferritic steel and silicon carbide.

Finally, fusion has great advantages for nuclear non-proliferation. Creating enough fission power plants to avoid climate change would mean that the plutonium moving around the world would be enough to create about 100,000 nuclear weapons. For fusion, it is much more difficult to use a reactor to make fuel for weapons. This is also something that we think a nuclear-skeptical public will appreciate about fusion power.

All of us are strong supporters of fission power, and we agree that at times, the nuclear power industry has not received a fair shake when compared to other sources of energy. But we think that the advantages of fusion power speak for themselves, and the public will be able to understand the risks and will support the construction of these plants. Obviously, having media that are able to explain things clearly and fairly are a necessity.

8. What do the numbers really look like?
by Erich

ITER is a hugely expensive project, and won't produce a commercially viable power generation system. In a lot of areas where research is done on things which don't work yet -- rockets, bridges, transmission systems, etc -- there's a general idea of how things might be able to "scale up" to meet the goals. Is tokamak fusion really in sight of being a commercially viable source of energy? If we need unobtanium to make a commercially viable reactor, wouldn't it make sense to wait until the materials are viable before making even larger tokamaks? Or is it still worth learning from these new, bigger, more expensive reactors?

MIT Researchers: You are exactly correct in your statement; ITER is an expensive project which will not produce electricity upon completion. However, ITER’s main purpose is not to put watts on the grid, but to demonstrate the scientific feasibility of fusion by creating a Q=10 plasma (10 times as much energy out as we put in). We do have a good idea of how to proceed with devices following ITER, namely DEMO, a full demonstration fusion power plant which will use the steam cycle to generate electricity from the fusion reactor. The basic layout of a reactor can be found here: http://www.fusionfuture.org/what-is-alcator- c-mod/c-mod-for-energy/

Although there is still plenty of research which remains, fusion is in sight of being a commercially viable energy source. We believe that we now understand the physics well enough to create the appropriate plasma conditions (this will be demonstrated on ITER) and we are working on the engineering challenges that lay between us and a commercial fusion reactor.

It is obviously impossible to predict when fusion will put power on the grid since the estimate can change drastically based on demand and overall funding levels. You are however, correct in noting that some of the biggest challenges involve the discovery/ development of materials which can resist the unique and harsh conditions associated with fusion reactors, namely, high heat and neutron fluxes. Due to its importance to the success of future devices, this is a very active and important area of research.

The international fusion community is attempting to address these issues in the following manner: Given the scope of the ITER project and the time required to build and test it, we are planning on constructing a materials testing facility named, IFMIF which stands for International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility. This facility should be operated at the same time as ITER and will be addressing the materials issues associated with an eventual fusion power plant while ITER is demonstrated the scientific feasibility of a fusion reactor.

Given the time-scales for reactor construction, we think it would be unwise to wait for this materials testing to be complete before starting new machine construction. Addressing the remaining problems in parallel will most likely result in the quickest path to fusion energy.

9. Careers in Fusion?
by benjfowler

As practicing researchers, can you tell us about the health of the pipeline of young researchers coming into the field? Is there a glut of trained physicists at this stage, or is there still a need for trained specialists to enter the field, especially with ITER and follow-on machines coming online in the next couple of decades?

Nathan Howard answers: At this point in time fusion is actually a pretty healthy field in terms of young researchers and with emergence of the next generation devices such as ITER, there should be an influx of researchers stepping up to meet the need for trained specialists on these next gen devices. Currently in Europe and Asia, emphasis on fusion research is ramping up to support the research needs. These newly trained researchers are going to be the scientists working on ITER in 10-15 years.

Unfortunately, the US fusion program is in danger of going the opposite direction of the Asian and European programs. The current proposals made by the US are threatening the health of fusion in the US. The President’s 2013 budget proposal calls for drastic cuts to the domestic fusion budget to pay for increased funding for the ITER budget. However, if these cuts continue, there will not be a field for the young researchers to enter and the US fusion program is in danger of dissolving before ITER comes online.

This does not mean that a need for trained specialist will not remain, it just means that the young researchers in Europe and Asia will be filling these positions. Dr. Stewart Prager, the head of Princeton Plasma Physics Lab said it best, “We have a clear choice before us: The United States can either design and build fusion energy plants or we can buy them from Asia or Europe.”

As a young researcher myself, I am particularly affected by the choices that the US is currently making. Myself and other graduate students have been urging others who support fusion research to contact congress and tell them to continue to fund domestic fusion research. We put together a website, www.fusionfuture.org, which provides more information and people the ability to quickly and easily contact their congressmen to tell them to support research. Please support US fusion research and check out the site.

12. Patents?
by Anonymous Coward

Will patents get in the way of your research?

MIT Researchers: In general, we find that the tokamak labs of the world are extremely cooperative; patents have never been a problem. It does seem likely that the technologies supporting power plants will be highly patentable, but the sort of scientific knowledge we’re accumulating at present really isn’t. At some point, we expect to move from a collaborative to a competitive phase – but we’re not there yet.

11. What level of investment would get fusion going?
by Tragek
Do you think a program the size of the Apollo program could kickstart fusion to general availability? Or would a smaller program suffice?
14. What could you do with unlimited resources?
by petes_PoV
Given $1 trillion, the pick of the best brains in the world to work willingly on the project, a large enough location away from any and all governmental regulation and every facility you could ever need - when would fusion be commercially viable?

MIT Researchers: Questions 11 and 14 are similar and we have answered them together.

Any kind of question asking about a hypothetical massive increase in funding is tricky to answer. We probably couldn’t even spend a trillion dollars if we wanted to – just because it would take a long time to get enough people trained in plasma physics and fusion energy.

We can say this: an increase in funding would allow for different paths to be tried in parallel, like stellarators, tokamaks (ITER), spherical tokamaks, etc. Plus, we could build a facility in the United States to study the problem of plasma–wall interactions, which is a very important topic that has not been adequately studied up to this point (see our answer above about what steps are needed to get to a reactor).

We think that we’re roughly $80-billion away from a reactor. At current levels of funding (worldwide), that’s about 40 years. Even given access to huge amounts of money, it’s unlikely that a working reactor could be built in less than a decade – there are just too many facilities to build between current devices and a full-scale reactor in order to ensure success. But we could certainly do it faster than 40 years!

We want to note that “crash” programs like Apollo or the Manhattan Project succeeded because they took risks – they started work on building their systems before they had done all the homework. That is inherently risky, but these risks are mitigated by pursuing alternatives in parallel. Something similar could be done in fusion, given the money.

15. Your favorite books?
by eldavojohn

I'm not a physicist (software guy), but I've taken a few physics classes. At an early age I found a tattered copy of George Gamow's One Two Three . . . Infinity, which, although incorrect in some parts (I guess that's why they revised it and that's why 'speculations' was in the title), was perfectly written for my then-fifth-grade mind. It set me on a path toward science, and a few weeks ago I saw the same 1960s Viking Press edition and flipped through it, noticing what was slightly off and remembering it. I've since grown to love other obvious books by authors like Hawking, Penrose, Hofstadter, etc. So, quite simply, what are your favorite books for all minds, young and old? Also, can you annotate which are written for the layman's entry into the given field and which are written to encompass the field for the researcher? I find that some books start off with the jargon so strong and the references and footnotes so thick that you start to have to re-read every paragraph, as they're clearly condensing entire historic papers into lengthy sentences. Any fiction books worthy of influencing your work and desires?

Ian Hutchinson: My all time favorite novel is Godric by Fredrick Buechner. It's a wonderful first-person portrait of the prior life of a medieval hermit. My favorite physics teaching text is the Feynman Lectures on Physics, which comes from a remarkable effort by the most widely acclaimed american physicist of the 20th century to explain really advanced physics to undergraduates.

I really don't enjoy the genre of books that combine science popularization with metaphysical speculation. They are of course quite popular, but most are philosophically naive in a way that I find annoying.

Anne White: I like detective/adventure stories. I also enjoy reading plays, poetry and short stories – some authors I read over and over are Wolfgang Borchert, Julio Cortazar, Ray Bradbury and Samuel Beckett.

Recently, I've enjoyed reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.

Influential books/stories that I remember reading when I was young : The Pearl (John Steinbeck), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), Flatland, and Ender's Game.

Dennis Whyte:

• For science non-fiction books, it’s a tie: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould.
• Novel (in general subject area of science): The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson
• Speculative fiction: Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein

Geoff Olynyk: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. It’s a bit long, but is a fascinating, well-written exploration of the project to develop the atom bomb (both in the U.S. and elsewhere).

This is not a science book, but The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter (sold in the United States as Nation of Rebels) changed my life. I was into counterculture, "culture jamming," anti-advertising, that kind of stuff, and this book made me seriously reconsider all of it. I now understand that trying to be unique is futile in a world of seven billion, and I should just try to be a good person and do good for the world (hence working on fusion!) Potter’s follow-up The Authenticity Hoax, explores the search for authenticity in more detail, but it’s not nearly as good of a book as Rebel Sell.

Nathan Howard: I first became interested in physics by reading about astrophysics. I was specifically interested in black holes and so one of the first books I read (after some of the popular books by Hawking which are written for general audiences, e.g. A Brief History of Time) was a book by Kip S. Thorne called Black Holes and Time Warps. I really enjoyed this book. It did not require much technical background, just some basic mathematics, and it gave good explanations of black holes, relativity, and gravitational waves.

16. Why is fusion more useful than exploiting thorium?
by gestalt_n_pepper

I understand that in the long term, we would want fusion. But we face increasing energy problems over the next 50 years and severe energy problems before 2100. Wouldn't it make sense to allocate research and development resources to something that we know works?

MIT Researchers: First of all, fusion will be putting watts on the grid before 2100. It’s not going to be tomorrow, but it’s not going to be a hundred years, either.

We know how to build thorium fission reactors. It's been done. They have none of the major attractions of a fusion reactor in terms of safety, fuel resources, reduced waste, or non-proliferation. Worldwide thorium fuel resources are about the same as those of uranium. Thorium reactors might become part of the commercial fission reactor mix in the future, but they don't offer transformative possibilities for nuclear power the way fusion does.

That said, we think that the that the scale of the energy/climate problem demands that we (meaning: government and private industry where appropriate) pursue multiple lines of development into new energy sources. Obviously nobody wants to waste taxpayer money, so all proposals have to be evaluated for chance of success – but today, it’s limited by funding more than by a lack of good ideas. This shouldn’t be the case.

The key thing we want to get across is that it shouldn’t be a contest between “fund fusion” or “fund thorium research”. Fusion is extremely important for humankind and should be funded – if thorium fission also has promise, it should be funded too.

17. How is fusion power harnessed?
by circletimessquare

The talk is always about reaching break-even with fusion. What about capturing the power? Are we generating heat that will drive steam turbines? What schemes exist for capture and harnessing the power generated by fusion?

MIT Researchers: In a magnetic fusion reactor, each deuterium-tritium fusion produces a 3.5 MeV (mega- electronvolt) alpha particle (helium nucleus) which deposits its energy in the plasma (this self-heating is how you can have an ‘ignited’ plasma which doesn’t require much or any external heating), and a 14.1 MeV neutron, which deposits its energy in a thick lithium blanket surrounding the toroidal reaction chamber. But in the end, all of it comes out as heat!

For a conservative fusion reactor design, this heat would be removed by a primary cooling loop (high-pressure steam or some sort of liquid metal) which would give the heat to a secondary steam loop (Rankine cycle) in a heat exchanger (steam generator). The steam would then turn a turbine, producing electricity, just like in a fission or coal power plant.

Of course, with a thermal process like a steam cycle, one is always limited by the Carnot efficiency, which increases as the temperature of the high-temperature reservoir goes up. So there are also designs to use a very high-temperature (800–1000 C) gas cooling loop and a Brayton cycle.

But the short answer is: the alpha power is captured by the plasma, and the neutron power is captured by the blanket. It all comes out as heat, which is used to heat a working fluid, which turns a turbine, producing electricity. This is not expected to be a technological problem – the challenge is in getting a confined thermonuclear plasma to produce the fusion energy in the first place!

19. Fusion Milestone Prizes?
by Baldrson

In 1992, with the assistance of fusion technologists such as Robert W. Bussard, I developed legislative language for a series of 12 milestones, each of which would be awarded a $(1992)100M prize for the achievement of objectives toward the attainment of practical fusion energy. This legislation also provided a grace period during which scientists and technologists that had been working on the US fusion program would be provided full salaries, without obligation, during which time they could seek support for their ideas to achieve these milestones. This legislation presaged a number of other prizes including the X-Prize and BAFAR / CATS prize. In 1995, Robert W. Bussard submitted this legislation to all relevant Congressional committees, copying all US plasma physics laboratories. Needless to say, the legislation wasn't passed. Do you think the time is right?

MIT Researchers: We think that the current approach, in which government-funded labs are not in direct competition, but have to justify their funding to the agency (in our case, the DOE), is the best option for the moment. Perhaps the X-PRIZE approach might work for the alternative concepts? (see our answer below regarding Polywell/Dense Plasma Focus/ IEC etc.)

20. ITER
by MpVpRb

Is the ITER project good science? Or is it a politically-motivated, pork-laden boondoggle?

MIT Researchers: ITER is absolutely good science. Governments representing over half the population of the world are backing the project because it is the logical next step – a prototype reactor that will produce ten times more fusion energy than heating power put in, for a few minutes at a time. It is also pushing forward the development of fusion reactor technology (materials, control systems, remote handling systems, etc.). The U.S. fusion community endorsed ITER as the best option for a next-step experiment at the Snowmass II conference in 2002 (see proceedings here).

All of that said, the cost of ITER has risen substantially from the original estimates, and because overall magnetic fusion funding has remained nearly flat in the United States, the U.S. contribution to ITER is threatening to swallow up the entire domestic program. This is starting with the planned closure of Alcator C-Mod in September 2012, but unless more money is allocated to fusion research, all three U.S. tokamak facilities are at risk in the next few years.

Graduate students at Alcator C-Mod have put together a web page explaining the problem: http://www.fusionfuture.org/faq/the-fusion-budget-problem/ and we urge you to go to this website and click the link to contact your member of Congress and urge them to fully fund a strong domestic program and the U.S. contribution to ITER!

21. NIF
by Grond

Is the NIF approach even plausibly capable of generating electricity in a useful way? Or is it purely a research platform / smokescreen for nuclear weapons research?

MIT Researchers: The primary mission of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is "stockpile stewardship." That is, to ensure that U.S. nuclear weapons continue to be a credible deterrent. This is why NIF is funded by the National Nuclear Security Agency (the agency in charge of the nation’s nuclear stockpile), not the DOE Fusion Energy Sciences program. Thus, the weapons research mission of NIF is not a smokescreen, but is actually the publicly acknowledged primary objective for the facility.

Some researchers at NIF believe that their inertial fusion approach can be used for an energy source as well. We don’t want to speculate here on the plausibility of the LIFE (Laser Inertial Fusion Energy) concept. There is a National Academy of Science review of the prospects of inertial fusion energy under way right now; the final report is expected to be published before the end of this year.

18. Dense Plasma Focus
by mbradmoody
Do you see any merit in the "dense plasma focus" approach to commercial fusion power production, specifically the work of the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics group?
22. Focus Fusion / aneutronic fusion?
by mwk88
Focus Fusion Society is posting research on their project to do aneutronic (e.g. Proton Boron (pB11)) fusion. The concept sounds great, and as an engineer, I find several parts of their design, such as direct extraction of electric power, to be elegant. Is this credible research or pie-in-the-sky? I have not seen much mention of them in mainstream fusion research.
23. Polywell Fusion
by mknewman
What do you think of the efforts at EMC2 Fusion and Polywell Fusion? They seem to be making real, measurable, and open results, but the mainstream physics community seems to ignore this progress.
24. What’s wrong with IECs / Fusor?
by claytongulick
Why aren't IEC reactors based on Farnsworth's designs taken more seriously? From what I understand, IECs have been more effective at producing fusion, and they are cheap to build. People even build them in the garage. From everything I've read, no one really takes the "fusor" seriously in the fusion science realm, and it's considered a dead line of inquiry. I've never understood why.

MIT Researchers: These four questions (18, 22–24) are answered together here.

None of us are experts on inertial electrostatic confinement, magnetized target fusion / dense plasma focus, or Polywells, and so we don’t want to say too much about the specifics of those designs. We can say the following:

1. The amount of money that is being spent, especially in the United States, on fusion is far lower than the field deserves, given its track record and potential. This sounds self-serving, but we think it’s justifiable based on the facts. The graph we posted above shows how the fusion budget is far lower today than it was thirty years ago, even as we continue to make steady progress toward a reactor and the seriousness of the coupled energy/climate problem becomes more obvious.

The alternate confinement concepts program has also seen cuts. (“Alternative” in DOE Fusion Energy Sciences parlance means, basically, anything that isn’t tokamaks, stellarators, or laser [inertial] fusion.) The Levitated Dipole Experiment, an innovative magnetic-confinement arrangement based on planetary magnetic fields, was cancelled just as they were about to add significant auxiliary heating for the first time. And these small-scale alternative confinement projects are not very expensive! Some of these alternative concepts may very well be promising and deserve taxpayer money to be developed.

2. But on the other hand, these groups need to show that they deserve funding. It’s not enough to just tease these promising results and be secretive about the methods or technologies. Public funding can only come when the details are published in the open literature, and subjected to the scrutiny of peer review and the wider community reading the papers. The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago - so it’s very important for the proponents of these alternate concepts to push the researchers to publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. Whatever negatives the tokamak might have, one thing you can’t say about it is that the research has been too secretive, and this has allowed the funding agencies to make the judgement that the tokamak is currently the most promising route to a fusion reactor, which is why this line of research gets the most money.

Special thanks to Dr. Martin Greenwald, Prof. Ian Hutchinson, Asst. Prof. Anne White, Prof. Dennis Whyte, Nathan Howard, and Geoff Olynyk for taking the time to answer our questions.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy."

dsinc contributes a link to Neil deGrasse Tyson's short piece in Wired on how we could deal with the very real threat of killer asteroids, writing "In 2029 we'll be able to know whether, seven years later, Apophis will miss Earth or slam into the Pacific and create a tsunami that will devastate all the coastlines of the Pacific Rim." From the article: "Saving the planet requires commitment. First we have to catalogue every object whose orbit intersects Earth’s, then task our computers with carrying out the calculations necessary to predict a catastrophic collision hundreds or thousands of orbits into the future. Meanwhile, space missions would have to determine in great detail the structure and chemical composition of killer comets and asteroids."

theodp writes "Wired's Cade Metz has the scoop on the move away from U.S. network equipment stalwarts, calling it of the best-kept secrets in Silicon Valley. 'Cloud computing is an arms race,' writes Metz. 'The biggest web companies on earth are competing to see who can deliver their services to the most people in the shortest amount of time at the lowest cost. And the cheapest arms come straight from Asia.' Or, as Joyent's Howard Wu puts it, 'It's kind of like buying couches. If you buy one, you go to a retail store. If you buy 10,000 couches, you go straight to the factory.'"

CowboyRobot writes "The US Navy is months away from requesting bids from contractors to construct a laser weapon for its ships, now that the technology is feasible. 'The key point came last April, when the Navy put a test laser firing a (relatively weak) 15-kilowatt beam aboard a decommissioned destroyer... the Martime Laser Demonstrator cut through choppy California waters, an overcast sky and salty sea air to burn through the outboard engine of a moving motorboat a mile away.'"

Fluffeh writes "David Maurice House, an MIT researcher and Bradley Manning supporter, was granted the right to pursue a case against the government on Wednesday after a federal judge denied the government's motion to dismiss. 'This ruling affirms that the Constitution is still alive at the US border,' ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement. 'Despite the government's broad assertions that it can take and search any laptop, diary or smartphone without any reasonable suspicion, the court said the government cannot use that power to target political speech.' The agents confiscated a laptop computer, a thumb drive, and a digital camera from House and reportedly demanded, but did not receive, his encryption keys. DHS held onto House's equipment for 49 days and returned it only after the ACLU sent a strongly worded letter."

head_dunce writes "Now that Red Hat has officially posted more than a billion dollars in revenue, ($1.13 billion to be exact), the company's PR department sent this funny list of quotes predicting doom. For instance, 'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."

New submitter inhuman_4 passes along this quote from an article at Wired: "Last December, Microsoft scored a victory when the ITC Administrative Law Judge Theodore R. Essex found that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents. But the ruling could also eliminate an important Microsoft software patent that has been invoked in lawsuits against Barnes & Noble and car navigation device-maker Tom Tom. According to Linus Torvalds, he was deposed in the case this past fall, and apparently his testimony about a 20-year-old technical discussion — along with a discussion group posting made by an Amiga fan, known only as Natuerlich! — helped convince the Administrative Law Judge that the patent was invalid."

politkal writes "According to the FBI's internal inquiry on counterterrorism training, the FBI taught agents that the Bureau 'has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedoms of others;' that agents should 'never attempt to shake hands with an Asian;' that Arabs were 'prone to outbursts' of a 'Jekyll & Hyde' nature." Even better: "That review, now complete, did not result in a single disciplinary action for any instructor. Nor did it mandate the retraining of any FBI agent exposed to what the Bureau concedes was inappropriate material. Nor did it look at any intelligence reports that might have been influenced by the training."

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Science World Report: "Astronomers hunting for rocky planets with the right temperature to support life estimate there may be tens of billions of them in our galaxy alone. A European team said on Wednesday that about 40 percent of red dwarf stars — the most common type in the Milky Way — have a so-called 'super-Earth' planet orbiting in a habitable zone that would allow water to flow on the surface."

MikeatWired writes "Jon Udell writes that when it was recently discovered that some iPhone apps were uploading users' contacts to the cloud, one proposed remedy was to modify iOS to require explicit user approval. But in one typical scenario that's not a choice a user should have to make. A social service that uses contacts to find which of a new user's friends are already members doesn't need cleartext email addresses. If I upload hashes of my contacts, and you upload hashes of yours, the service can match hashes without knowing the email addresses from which they're derived. In the post Hashing for privacy in social apps, Matt Gemmell shows how it can be done." (Read more, below.) "Why wasn't it? Not for nefarious reasons, Gemmell says, but rather because developers simply weren't aware of the option to uses hashes as a proxy for email addresses. A translucent solution encrypts the sensitive data so that it is hidden even from the operator of the service, while enabling the two parties (parents, babysitters) to rendezvous. How many applications can benefit from translucency? We won't know until we start looking. The translucent approach doesn't lie along the path of least resistance, though. It takes creative thinking and hard work to craft applications that don't unnecessarily require users to disclose, or services to store, personal data. But if you can solve a problem in a translucent way, you should. We can all live without more of those headlines and apologies."

MikeatWired writes "Jon Udell writes that when it was recently discovered that some iPhone apps were uploading users' contacts to the cloud, one proposed remedy was to modify iOS to require explicit user approval. But in one typical scenario that's not a choice a user should have to make. A social service that uses contacts to find which of a new user's friends are already members doesn't need cleartext email addresses. If I upload hashes of my contacts, and you upload hashes of yours, the service can match hashes without knowing the email addresses from which they're derived. In the post Hashing for privacy in social apps, Matt Gemmell shows how it can be done." (Read more, below.) "Why wasn't it? Not for nefarious reasons, Gemmell says, but rather because developers simply weren't aware of the option to uses hashes as a proxy for email addresses. A translucent solution encrypts the sensitive data so that it is hidden even from the operator of the service, while enabling the two parties (parents, babysitters) to rendezvous. How many applications can benefit from translucency? We won't know until we start looking. The translucent approach doesn't lie along the path of least resistance, though. It takes creative thinking and hard work to craft applications that don't unnecessarily require users to disclose, or services to store, personal data. But if you can solve a problem in a translucent way, you should. We can all live without more of those headlines and apologies."

AstroPhilosopher writes "Recently Wired, USA Today and other news outlets reported on a new spy center being built to store intercepted communications (even American citizens'). Tuesday, Gen. Keith Alexander testified in front of Congress refuting the articles. Alexander even went so far as to claim the NSA lacks the authority to monitor American citizens. It's an authority that was given to the NSA through the FISA Amendments Act signed into law by Bush and still supported today by Obama."

New submitter srussia writes with this quote from Wired: "DARPA director Regina Dugan will soon be stepping down from her position atop the Pentagon's premiere research shop to take a job with Google. Dugan, whose controversial tenure at the agency lasted just under three years, was 'offered and accepted at senior executive position' with the internet giant, according to DARPA spokesman Eric Mazzacone. She felt she could not say no to such an 'innovative company,' he adds. ... 'There is a time and a place for daydreaming. But it is not at DARPA,' she told a congressional panel in March 2011. 'DARPA is not the place of dreamlike musings or fantasies, not a place for self-indulging in wishes and hopes. DARPA is a place of doing.' For an agency that spent millions of dollars on shape-shifting robots, Mach 20 missiles, and mind-controlled limbs, it was something of a revolutionary statement. The shift was only one of the reasons why Dugan was a highly polarizing figure within her agency, and in the larger defense research community."