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MIT Fusion Researchers Answer Your Questions
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.
And what do you think would be a better use of $ 80 billion - fusion power, or so many more months of spending on our bloated Department of Defense ?
2050 same date as in simcity 2000
Now THAT"S how to answer a /. ask!
We've made improvements. But yes, it's still 50 years off as always. Give us more money. Here is a chart showing why you need to give us *A LOT* more money.
Did we mention that you should give us more money? I mean, this isn't a money pit--we swear. But we do need about $80 billion if you can spare it. $80 billion and we can probably have it done in about 20 years--maybe. We're totally good for it, man. Honest.
jj must work on an oil derrick... like his daddy's daddy's cousins daddy...
Wow. You read the whole summary in under a minute and still had time for first post. Quite amazing. And there was absolutely no sarcam in my post. Nope. No sarcasm at all.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
If you want to know what the readers want to see, it is items like this, not videos, or other fluf. Focus on things like this.
So for the cost of a year in Iraq, we could have ended out dependence on fossil fuels. Forever.
Wow. You have a six digit UID and haven't realized in all those years that subscribers get to see stories in advance. Quite amazing. And there was absolutely no sarcam in my post. Nope. No sarcasm at all.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
That's a seriously impressive, detailed, thoughtful set of answers.
Glad that the interviewees decided not to hold back, and dumb down their responses; they know their audience.
Thanks!
Okay, I am definitely not a nuclear physicist and I did poorly in chemistry. Could I have the reader's digest form of this? I'm very curious about fusion because, on the surface, it appears to be cleaner than fission reaction. Does it still have background radiation?
Or, another way, ~$250 per person living in the USA.
$80 billion is not a lot of money. Even for the *chance* that it will solve the impending energy crisis, we should be glad to spend the money.
Why can't the Farnsworth device (FUSOR) be made to work with some smarts and a lot of money?
This interview gets my vote for the most informative posting on Slashdot this year. The questions were good and insightful, and the answers pitched at exactly the right level. Thanks, MIT Fusion Guys!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Let's put $80 billion in perspective (data mostly courtesy of XKCD http://xkcd.com/980).
$80 billion is:
4 new subway lines in NYC (~$17 billion each)
9 aircraft carriers (Gerald Ford class, ~$9 billion each)
Less than Apple's cash on hand (~$97 billion)
Slightly more than the F-22 Raptor program (~$67 billion, now halted/wasted)
Slightly more than President Obama's 2011 high-speed rail proposal (~$53 billion)
About half of the International Space Station (~$138 billion)
Less than half of the Apollo moon landing project (~$192 billion)
3 Manhattan Projects (~$24 billion each)
80 Instagrams
In the grand scheme of Humanity, $80 billion is a trivial cost if it could help solve the world's energy concerns. At least in my opinion.
If you'd read, you'd see the number is 40 years off. That's 10 less than 50!
I think you're being unfair with the money begging. Basically, here's what they'd said (by my reading): Fusion power is going to happen. It's a matter of when, not if. But if we want it in a timeframe that most humans are used to working (before most of us are dead and buried) we need to start taking it seriously. Insert allusions to the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Missions, both of which involved pouring a ton of money into a specific scientific problem.
I'm pretty disappointed they didn't talk more about the NIF. Pretty much every article I read about "Yet another fusion problem solved; thinks rosier than we thought!" has been work coming out of the NIF.
80 billion is a drop in the ocean compared to, say, USA military spending.
Plus... you actually get something in return.
No sig today...
I think it's pretty safe to predict that if fusion-based power plants are ever built at full-scale the cost per kilowatt won't be any lower than from whatever competing technology is generating the bulk of a country's power at that time. Between the onerous regulatory requirements that will be put in place, the greed of the contractors building the plant and the shareholder demands of the utility company we'll never see truly low-cost electricity. The fossil fuel problem may be solved but your pocketbook won't feel any better. Witness how expensive nuke plants got from first to last in the US.
And what do you think would be a better use of $ 80 billion - fusion power, or so many more months of spending on our bloated Department of Defense ?
Crazy idea, I know, but maybe a better use would be to leave it with the people who earned it?
Or, another way, $250 for each person's *descendent* to pay someday--since the average U.S. citizen isn't even paying for what his government *currently* spends, much less any additional investments.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Sad that the first response to a very good science article (kudos, slashdot!) is a money-worshiping luddite. Which oil company do you work for, anyway?
Shouldn't you be at Business Week or the Wall Street Journal or FOX rather than slashdot?
How many days of war in Afghanistan will that $80B buy? I not only have no problem with my taxes going to research, I encourage it. As does anyone else with more than a two digit IQ. I sure wish they'd end that damned war, though.
Free Martian Whores!
War with Iran! Definitely!
Nothing says money in the bank like that!
(At least for us oil-exporting nations!)
This is blinging
When did a 6 digit UID become "awesome"? I think I missed that day...
This is blinging
Many of the answers to that question seem to be "here's an area in which we've improved, and in which we need more improvement". The problem is that it doesn't then state how far along they are. Something like "we improved this from 10% to 50% and we think that 70% is enough" would be very different from "we improved this from 1% to 2% and we need to get to 70%"
Well, maybe I should put words in *your* mouth:
"I've already decided that this will never work, despite the evident progress in materials, modelling, computing power, and experimental results. Even though it's far less than the Apollo program, or a few months of the DoD budget - the prospect of fusion energy is a bullshit deal for taxpayers. There's no good reason to worry about energy needs, pollution, proliferation, environmental degradation, foreign oil dependencies and blow-back. If I can't charge my next iPhone with a Mr. Fusion, then it must be bullshit. The spin-offs from high energy physics research over the last century ... all bullshit."
I'd rather spend 80 billion on something that has the ability to fundamentally change our existance as we know it.
The biggest limitation on technology right now is energy. If we throw fusion reactors with a high Q factor in the mix, chemical processes which are right now too expensive will be trivial.
Take the Pacific Gyre. A fusion plant combined with a thermal depolymerization setup will render the used condoms into usable crude that can be used for making stuff (and not just burning).
Fuel for cars and vehicles? It was discussed on /. about being able to break apart CO2 from the air and use that as a potential fuel source. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to render liquified propane from CO2, because propane is one of the most idiot-resistant [1] fuel sources around, and if it leaks, it just disperses (or ignites), and doesn't post an environmental hazard compared to gasoline or diesel.
Oil companies won't be affected by fusion -- instead of petroleum being burned, it will be used for more projects such as plastics, cements, and other items. This allows them to keep selling oil, without having to resort to more damaging ways to find more places to drill.
For a government, 80 billion is not that big a number. I'd rather see it spent on something that might do some good, and the research knowledge gained is always usable in other fields.
[1]: I did not say idiot proof. There are always people who think that disposing of their propane bottles in a campfire is a great idea.
ITER: $20bn
$80 billion isn't much. It's only very slightly over 0.1 Iraq Wars (DOD estimate of the direct costs of the Iraq war is $757bn.) At only 0.1 Iraq Wars, you can hardly describe it as a money pit.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
What for The People's Fusion Research Kickstarter Project? Here is a crazy idea: Some people are just fine with their tax money going to fundamental research.
I tire of the tax trolls that plague this site.
I think there's good reason for that. You're basically asking them to evaluate their position on a continuum that isn't actually static. It may be that the next discovery, which for the sake of argument might be predicted to move the project along 10%, actually ends up cutting out half the upcoming work, or adds more unknown and unforeseen problems to be solved.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
That is a great strategy if there were no looming long term issues that would eventually affect those individuals. That is the point of government funding of these projects.
A tree doesn't care about a forest fire until it's neighbor is on fire.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
the banks got $800 bil just like that. And they didn't even promise anything. And that money hardly lasted a year before we were all in the same situation again.
Not only is $80 billion a drop in the bucket, as others have pointed out... but we'd be able to be pretty sure of it working out way before we'd spent the entire budget.
I just don't understand it. If the UK alone can spend £33 billion ($52 billion) on a high speed rail network, how come the WORLD can't spend $80 billion on solving the energy crisis? A much, much, much more important problem.
Workable, efficient fusion reactors would literally revolutionise the world.
If you'd read, you'd see the number is 40 years off.
It's 40 years if they go from ITER -> commercial viable reactor.. but further down, they say ITER will produce 10x more energy for minutes at a time. Pretty sure commercial reactors need to produce electricity for a bit longer than that. And I can't imagine anyone would attempt a commercial reactor when the prototype (ITER) can only operate for a few minutes.
It also assumes, they won't discover some problem with ITER, and that ITER will work as expected (ie: best case scenario).
The whole thing is incredibly optimistic.
I have a hard time it's 40 or even 50 years.. more like ITER (in 2030) -> some other reactor -> barely commercially viable reactor -> a demonstrably commercially viable reactor... then someone will actually build a commercial reactor from it.
Figure 2150... long after we're dead.
From the days this was possible...
[FUCK BETA]
I see Fusion as a long game. A long, long, long game that probably isn't going to see even minimal fruition before 2050. I'll be 100 in 2078. Why? It IS just that complex.
You can't look at it from money money money, and here's why.
From a laymans POV, think of it this way: You have to have the right materials housing the plasma (as yet developed and tested ; silicon-carbide note), with the right properties that don't degrade from neutron bombardment, to contain the plasma at certain energies (above this, but below that; >1x10^X K ), delivered by a static method rather than pulsed (see inductors above), to achieve an overall plasma point where you can then measure whether this combination of factors gives us what energy property output.
Now, change up the material design spec's and you must now rebuild the Reactor. That takes YEARS, if not a DECADE plus, to verify that the new spec's give you that 0.1 - 1.0+% increase in efficiecy from the old design. On paper is still theoretical untill you build the damn thing to verify!
Fusion is a long game project. Again, LONG GAME PROJECT! Think decades if not over a century. It is unlikely you or I will see it's benefit on the grid. Will your great-great-grandchildren? Depends on if we keep funding it now, and in our lifetime, or whether we kill it cause we don't see the immediate return on investment.
If you are truly worried about where taxpayer funding is going, I suggest you go investigate just how little goes to NSF, NASA, and what I call 'pure Science' endeavours, like Fusion. You'll see a good bit comes from private funding, and NOT from the Government.
At minimum, Fusion research pushes us are understanding in the areas of materials science, energy science, and whether the 'Law of Conservation of Energy' holds up over time. As of now, it does. That does not mean it always will. This is one way to test that!
Sounds like parts were run thru a PR filter and thus very suspect. For example, the real answer to :
Is the ITER project good science? Or is it a politically-motivated, pork-laden boondoggle?
is not a bunch of blah blah like in the answer, but simple observation and a hair of inductive and deductive reasoning... if it were politically motivated pork then we'd have politicians chomping at the bit to fund it and take personal credit for it. Since they're shunning it instead, its obviously not politically motivated pork, this is almost a "duh" moment. Not being pork doesn't mean its automatically good science, the question itself is a false dichotomy. For example my hamburger last night wasn't pork, yet simultaneously it was somehow also not good science. Although it did taste good. None the less, good science seems to be the goal for ITER, the people doing it seem to have a great track record for doing good science, and there seems to be no obvious reason to suspect they'll suddenly fail to successfully execute "good science". Whatever the hell "good science" is defined to be. That is the true answer to that specific question, not a bunch of "blah blah rah rah team".
You can also see in the tone how the liberal arts PR people shied away from altering the "science" answers and we got the straight stuff there, while they rammed all the "policy/political" questions thru a bullshit processor.
I mean, come on, that was embarrassing for an answer. My answer was much better. Let me paraphrase their answer. "1) Its good because I say its good, I'm from MIT therefore by authoritarianism doctrine you must agree with me. 2) Governments like it and government is always a force for good therefore it must be good. 3) We need more money (which seems to have nothing to do with goodness or badness, but it was a nice place to start begging) 4) The world will end unless we get more money (well, assuming the world ending is bad, I guess this is a decent argument) 5) You should be more politically active (nice sentiment, but WTF?)."
I will give them credit, that the policy Q's absolutely sucked, so demanding fantastic policy A's is both unrealistic and a silk purse out of a sows ear situation...
Overall, if you skip the icky policy Q+A and stick to the science Q+A it was an excellent factual article, my hats off to both the interview-ers and interview-ees.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The answers here make clear for the first time that I've seen in a public place in a long time what the function of NIF is - it is NOT a project oriented towards civil energy generation, but a weapons research project.
They are solving problems, sure, but they are solving problems for their needs, which don't necessarily have applicability to civil energy needs.
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!
True dat. The expression is now "Fusion is 49 years away"
Hey, hey, I tease. They're big boys with big toys and can take it.
When did a 6 digit UID become "awesome"? I think I missed that day...
Probably an order of magnitude after 5 digit UIDs became "really super awesome".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Cancel NASA and give fusion the money. Let private business deal with space.
You may have noted that there are no (or certainly not many) oil companies now, they are all called energy companies. This is because they already see the day when oil is too expensive for most people to use for energy, so they are diversifying into other ways of making energy. BP is a huge manufacturer of solar cells, for example. It is entirely probable that today's energy companies would be involved in the future's commercialization of fusion.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
...if we in the developed world want to keep sucking down power like we do today. In retrospect, who wouldn't trade 1/10 of the budget for Iraq for this? And if development remains IN THE USA the $ is not utterly lost like it is when we spend it on infrastructure (or destruction) in unsympathetic foreign countries...
Note the overriding theme of the answers:
1) with enough time and money we will get a working fusion reactor
2) and then everything will be great
I suspect #1 is largely true. However, I am largely of the opinion that #2 is absolutely *not* true.
Let's compare a fission reactor with a fusion one. To start with, the vast majority of the generation side of the system is the same - pumps cycle some sort of working fluid through the "core", cooling the core and heating the fluid. The heat in the fluid is then used to drive a turbine. So far so good, one might expect that the cost of this section of the system will be roughly the same between the two designs - or a coal-fired plant for that matter.
Now let's examine the core. The core of a fission reactor is basically a large steel boiler. There are numerous holes into the boiler, through which pass the cooling system and the control rods. Both can be extremely simple, to the point of being manually operated if you're brave enough. Now then there is the fusion core. It consists of a fantastically complicated vessel built out of extremely expensive materials (a number of which are mentioned above). The vessel is then wrapped in a series of superconducting magnets, which are even more fantastically expensive. Around that comes the lithium blanket, which is also expensive (and we have better things to do with that lithium, like make electric cars) and requires a complex and expensive system to recycle the tritium out of it. Controlling all of this is a ridiculously expensive control system which requires real-time reactions down to the milliseconds (again, as noted in the article) based on readings we don't even really know how to make.
And finally, the fuel. Uranium and thorium fuels are literally lying around for the taking, and processing them is essentially identical to the process for making iron - dump rock in, heat, separate layers of fluid, let cool. On the other hand, fusion reactors are based on deuterium, much of it supplied from a heavy water process that is far, far more expensive than nuclear fuel it's currently used with (Pickering, Darlington). That fuel is then used with tritium, even more expensive and crazy dangerous, to breed additional tritium. The breeding takes place in lithium, a flammable metal, which could release its entire load to the air if it catches on fire.
So, does anyone ever expect this to become practical? In order for that to happen, the price of U would have to rise several orders of magnitude, and the cost of D would have to fall close to zero. I grant this a probability that my calculator represents as 0.
I think I speak for everyone when I say, "Ow, my head hurts..." and "your student loans must be astronomical".
How about a Kickstarter project for say... $80billion...
Amazing, AAPL has the cash for an armada of 3 state-of-the-art aircraft carriers stocked with a fleet of F-22s. That's enough to reach Asia from their home base in Cupertino and one carrier away from being a suicide mission. On the other hand, if they launched from Hawaii...
It's about 24 feet of subway in Los Angeles, or a mile of above ground high speed (some day) rail connecting two ghost towns.
I could've easily had a sub-1000 UID. I just didn't think they'd catch on. :)
-l
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I agree with you in principle, but I wouldn't take any dollar figure at face value. It would probably be more fair to compare the $80BN figure to the pre-war estimate of what Iraq would cost, which was, coincidentally, $50-$60 BN, with an "upper end of a hypothetical" at $200BN. (And unlike the estimate for fusion, the war estimate was based on a previous, seemingly comparable situation - the Gulf War in 1990).
they seem to simultaneously be arguing that they're making progress on fusion, but that fusion can't make progress without increased funding.
I guess you didn't read it very closely then. They said something like "we're making considerable progress on fusion, but fusion will progress *much faster* with increased funding."
I just want to know when i can get one. that's all.
we won't have uranium and thorium forever, we won't have petroleum and coal forever. at some point, we need to harness fusion. and solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc.: boutique sources in terms of the energy demand of a growing population and growing richer population
in the future, they won't talk A.D. and B.C., they will talk A.I. and B.I. (after ignition and before ignition). Because this really will transform the human race in terms of what we can do and instantly rendering so many petty geopolitical and economic problems null and void
and if we never reach A.I.? then we may very well be talking about a future where civilization devolves, and never musters enough willpower and resources to attempt this again. fusion is that important to the future of mankind
oh and thank you MIT Researchers for answering my question, #17
followup question:
how does it feel to know the future of mankind rests on your shoulders?
because it does, it really does
more people need to understand this
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is moronic. It's like saying you've driven 1000km, you shouldn't need more fuel for the next 1000km. Equipment and research cost money. As our scientific endeavours become more ambitious, the costs get higher. The low hanging fruit is gone. It's why the Wright brothers didn't focus on stealth aircraft. It's why the LHC is orders of magnitude more expensive than the early synchrotrons.
It would make a lot more sense to plow funding into fusion than it does to give tax breaks and refunds to trillion dollar oil industries...
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'll be 100 in 2078. Why?
Presumably because you were born in 1978.
Presumably, because when you state this 'fact', it's just seen as a throw-away line. When MIT researchers in this field make a similar statement, it's worthy of consideration. BTW, is it lonely up there?
That's exactly the problem. They're describing their progress in order to justify the claim that they're 50 years away from fusion. If they don't know whether the next step is going to move the project a lot or show that they need to solve even more problems, then how can they know that they are some specific number of years away?
During the Obamacare debate, all kinds of financial tricks were used to limit the cost to roughly $1T over ten years. I argue, kill this divert the funding to fusion research. We would benefit more from solving our energy problem for the foreseeable future than we "benefit" from the mess that is Obamacare.
"Maintain thy airspeed, lest the ground rise up and smite thee." - Unknown
Thanks for pointing out the need to be published :
Dense Plasma Focus in the journal "Physics of Plasmas"
It's a start...
Can someone encode this transcript in a video format, please?
$80 billion over 20 years sounds like a reasonable level of funding to me. Sure, it's not money thrown at solar panel companies, but it's in the same vein. Worst case, we learn more about high-energy physics and fusion in particular.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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Peer reviewed journals? That's for academics trying to keep others out of the club. Grow a pair boys, and do as I do - just make it all open source - we keep no secrets, and yes, many of us dupe one another's results, we're doing science truer to the original ideals than the so called "pros" more often than not.
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One thing I don't like about tokomaks - energy disperses into too many degrees of freedom and while it radiates well from all of them (losses), it only makes fusion when there are near collisions. I'm working with an idea here that also takes into account various conservation laws tokomak (all thermal approaches) ignore - like spin conservation, to see if I can mess around with the relative probabilities of the 3 possible DD reactions - and it's looking promising.
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Focus fusion is interesting, but there are some engineering problems Lerner brushes off I can't go along with as easily. Bussard's thing - well, where's even a small scale one we can compare with Farnsworth/Hirsch/Meeks? All talk, no results - even amateur - so far. NIF is as they say, a way to test nukes without breaking some treaties about testing nukes, they add an energy spin to it for PR purposes primarily.
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See my sig for links to my work, and some of our group. It's not always at the top of the discussion boards, but there's plenty there, and some movies on DCFusor's youtube channel.
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Best of luck MIT - while I don't think tokomaks are the way - too many degrees of freedom - I hope for success for us all!
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I am one of those who is fine with my tax money going to fundamental research, but let's not pretend that it isn't being done by force. For me, the act of taking someone's money and spending it on something that I like has to be outweighed by the benefit to society.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Subject says it all. Thanks for taking the time to thoroughly answer the questions.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
The trick here isn't to look at the next competitior, it's not like there will be a lock on fusion technology to one company; at least not all that long. It's to look at the production model. Grid Electric is a 'natural monopoly', so I believe that the best model for it is as a customer-owned cooperative business. Their goal should be the stable and reliable production of low cost electricity for it's customers/owners.
Nuclear plants became expensive because of all the fear about them delaying construction and introducing byzantine regulation; that much capital is expensive when you're not producing income to pay off the interest.
I don't read AC A human right
Sure, as long as your business or the business you work for which is 'earning' all that money starts paying directly on a per-use basis for the infrastructure on which it depends - you know, roads, the education system which gave you literate workers, a legal and police system to stop anyone with a gun just walking in and taking your hard earned money whenever they feel like it, .. If you really don't think that stuff is necessary, I hear Somalia would love to have you move there and start a business.
And what do you think would be a better use of $ 80 billion - fusion power, or so many more months of spending on our bloated Department of Defense ?
Crazy idea, I know, but maybe a better use would be to leave it with the people who earned it?
Yes, that's crazy! Plus, it lacks compassion - we need investment money for the truly compassionate. You know, like federal bureaucracies always are.
Also, the way I've heard it, we already tried that free market approach and it didn't work. So, now, we need stuff like the Jimmy Buffet rules, for better fairness, because wealthy basketball players shouldn't be paying a lower rate on their earnings than Secretariat.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
>maybe a better use would be to leave it with the people who earned it?
so we can all freeze in the dark or die as the oceans rise. Great solution, genius.
Due you think that crowdsourcing might help? Anyone know what it takes to get an experiment going? I mean if we can get $2M for Wasteland 2, surely we could get at least $2M for a fusion experiment. Maybe more if we could get tax deducatable receipts... and a cool (or should I say "hot"? ;) ) t-shirt.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
"If" as in "If you had a real argument I'd like to hear it." Your post could be applied to any situation, just replace the names and numbers.
A simple comparison to the Apollo program satisfies me: fusion power is an equal scale investment, with equal scale societal achievement, higher long-term benefits to humanity, and with experts' opinions suggesting comparatively low risk. If we thought Apollo was a good bet at the time, this one's even better.
Just wanted the reITERate that sentiment.
80 billion is less than 1/7 the bank bailout of 700 billion.
I'm fine with, too, but that's a more appropriate response to a voluntary contribution, not a mandatory one. Is it more important that your neighborhood have a public library or that your family have heat in the winter? How about your children? Your grandchildren? What if the library on the corner was built and funded based on a monetary system that eventually meant that your grandchildren would work under involuntary servitude for a totalitarian regime, because they loaned your government the money for the library?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
With the problems of media bias from ALL sides, I fear this would be the biggest political hurdle. The graph of actual funding is sad, but not surprising. The way that most people think about fusion technology, you might as well be talking about teleportation and warp drive.
Cards on the table, I'm a fiscal conservative. At the same time, I realize research like this really requires government funding because the profit of these ideas will not be realized for decades, if at all. Unfortunately, in a down economy, the People want hand outs and ultimately, this is what gets you elected. I hate the system, but that's how it works.
Maybe these guys can do what the Corn people have done and just spend money on commercials and ads. Get people to understand that fusion may still be a "pie in the sky" idea, but that pie is getting closer to earth.
We don't live in Shouldland.
Thanks for the diagram with the project completion estimates. It creates a nice context for the "20 years away" predictions. The level of detail in the answers is great too.
Peer reviewed journals? That's for academics trying to keep others out of the club.
If you believe that then your hat needs an extra layer of tin foil. The neutrons are giving you a brain tumor.
Seems like the easiest solution would be to figure out how to get the DoD to pay for the research, the way they did for, e.g. ARPANET.
$80 billion is a trivial cost if it could help solve the world's energy concerns.
Yes. But the VERY key word there is "if."
"If" as in "If this doesn't run way over-budget and end up costing way more than $80 billion"
"If" as in "If fusion doesn't turn out to be a dead-end money-pit"
"If" as in "If we wouldn't be wiser to invest in other forms of energy generation"
"If" as in "If these researchers are objective in their evaluation, and not just trying to solicit more funding for themselves and their own program."
a) We threw 750B at the banks, just to prop the economy up. We can afford to do this at 10x the cost. Don't even pretend otherwise.
b) It isn't.
c) It's not an either/or proposition.
d) It's not like you have any evidence of a boondoggle. Protip: lack of progress isn't evidence of a boondoggle.
obligatory link.
So, funding fusion projects on kickstarter has been done before. The lack of meaningful rewards for supporters means that it's unlikely to ever be a great funding method.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Or, another way, $250 for each person's *descendent* to pay someday--since the average U.S. citizen isn't even paying for what his government *currently* spends, much less any additional investments.
Still seems like an incredible bargain to me. I am sure my children would thank me when we are no longer tied to fossil fuels.
If you'd read, you'd see the number is 40 years off.
It's 40 years if they go from ITER -> commercial viable reactor.. but further down, they say ITER will produce 10x more energy for minutes at a time. Pretty sure commercial reactors need to produce electricity for a bit longer than that. And I can't imagine anyone would attempt a commercial reactor when the prototype (ITER) can only operate for a few minutes.
It was stated that DEMO (the follow-on to ITER) will be exactly that.
It also assumes, they won't discover some problem with ITER, and that ITER will work as expected (ie: best case scenario).
Welcome to research. If it could be scheduled, it'd be engineering.
The whole thing is incredibly optimistic.
I have a hard time it's 40 or even 50 years.. more like ITER (in 2030) -> some other reactor -> barely commercially viable reactor -> a demonstrably commercially viable reactor... then someone will actually build a commercial reactor from it.
Figure 2150... long after we're dead.
I bet it will never happen - so long as such attitudes toward funding it prevail. They as much as said that in the interview no one seems to have read, as well.
You could fully fund it by eliminating the US Dept. of Ed.
Plus... you actually get something in return.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
$80 billion over 20 years sounds like a reasonable level of funding to me.
And it's also worth noting that that's ten times greater than the current US funding for the overall program.
But what is the point of getting experts to answer questions when seemingly the majority of commenters (and theoretically readers) will disregard their answers and/or bitch about tax?
Who cares? We're awesome now!!!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
http://wh.gov/QtE
Nuclear fusion is not a dead end after all. It is possible a well-conceived fusion reactor that produces more energy out than in by wisely using electrostatic acceleration. http://www.crossfirefusion.com/nuclear-fusion-reactor/overview.html
Estimated cost of entire fusion project to generating stage: $80bn.
Apple Inc. cash reserves: $97bn.
Fusion powered iDevices... Priceless?
(Or ???... Profit!)
>because of all the fear about them delaying construction and introducing byzantine regulation;
no, goddammit, no let this lie die at long last: fission plants are expensive because the are huge capital expenditures in massive plants that use esoteric materials and have lots of redundancy built in. You build a cheap plant you get a Chernobyl waiting to happen (why do you think nobody builds the comparatively cheap graphite-core-based plants anymore?). You build an expensive plant and you get electricity with reasonable margins of safety.
I am sure my children would thank me when we are no longer tied to fossil fuels.
Ha! I'm sure they'll be just as ungrateful and entitled as any other kids and find something to complain about. Doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to do though.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Did you bother reading a word of what was written, or did you just knee-jerk reply without doing so? Considering that yours was the first post, my guess is you thought you knew what you were talking about but don't.
tl;dr version of TFA: They're making progress, and spelled out what progress has been made and what progress still needs to be made.
Free Martian Whores!
When are energy prices actually going to go down as a result of all progress?
It was stated that DEMO (the follow-on to ITER) will be exactly that.
I acknowledged that in the first sentence. They want to go straight from ITER -> a commercially viable reactor (DEMO). Their 40 year estimate is the rosiest, most optimistic estimate they could come up with.
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)...
They then go on to make an over-optimistic prediction, based entirely on best-case scenarios, that it is only 40 years away.
They committed the sin they say others are committing.
This is why fusion has 'the reputation of being “always being thirty years away” (or fifty, or twenty)'...
So put your mouth where your money is.
Write your Senator/Representative and sign the petition.
I really don't see the equivilance between the Apollo program and fusion research.
The Apollo program did give us some great stuff but it's intended goal was to prove to the world that Capitalism had a bigger penis than Communism
While the primary goal of fusion research is more, safer, cleaner energy for the world. It seems a little more altruistic to me than putting foot prints on the moon.
That's a good point about capitalism vs communism motivation.
I still think it is a relevant comparison, in the sense that if someone can agree Apollo was the right bet (especially in light of your point), fusion research investment is at least as good of a bet. And the nice thing is we can work with the international community to share the burden.
America could earn some pride back if it spent less money on world policing and more on forward progress.
A better comparison would be with the money spend on nuclear research or the various wars and military shenanigans that protect our oil supplies.
There is plenty of money for all this science, we just keep wasting it on other stuff.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The UK is spending about 80bn Pounds on a new submarine based nuclear missile system... so that's something like $120bn. The UK alone could do it. The EU could easily do it.
For a similar sum we the EU could get about 80% of its power from solar thermal based in northern Africa too.
WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THESE THINGS?!?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Anything under 200k is pretty cool.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I hate to be a troll but...
For the price on one year in Iraq we could eliminate world hunger (or at least domestic hunger). Raise the Titanic (for less). Send a man to Mars or at least back to the Moon. Develop the perfect electric car/truck and end fossil fuel dependence.
Really we could do a lot with that money but we (as a set of nations) decided that we need to over power a nation and impose our will on them because we're right and they are wrong. Also all of them might want us dead. We're not sure why. Maybe because we keep invading in some form or another (economically or physically).
Is your immunity to nuance something you enable on demand or do you see everything in binary? Is this a practiced ability, or an innate blindness? Are you proud of it?
The enemies of Democracy are
The amount of cynicism I see here and in politics in general (as well as the amount of deception and poor management that ignited the mass cynicism in the first place) makes me think that the human race is screwed no matter what's possible or what happens. It seems like almost nobody is trying to make the world better anymore, and almost nobody believes in any progress.
At least, those answers were very interesting to read and give me a glimmer of hope for the future of energy. It's just too bad that hope is condemned to be just a glimmer until it is realized.
Here's some more hope, for those who are interested... just don't read the comments... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BltRufe5kkI
The military does have the ability to spend $80 billion and fundamentally change our existence as we know it.
Just not in a good way.
Is anyone else really disappointed that they didn't even mention, much less discuss, HiPER? For those not familiar with it, think "ITER, but designed for power generation rather than weapons research". It uses a weaker compression pulse, which is much easier to generate, along with a rapid heating pulse, using both the heat and pressure to achieve fusion at far greater efficiency and in a much smaller/cheaper facilitiy. It's mainstream hot fusion, no exotic schemes required, and has a lot of support in the scientific community. And its approach could readily beat ITER to economical fusion power. So why no mention of it?
Virgin birth, water into wine; it's like Harry Potter, but it causes genocide and bad folk music.
Best interview ever on Slashdot.
Thanks to everybody involved!
I see. So of the $3,000 dollars needed $3,785 was pledged - that's great! But...
What percentage of $8Bn is that? I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's like comparing atoms and apples.
Here's the money sentence from this thread: "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)."
They're going to repeal those pesky Laws of Thermodynamics...
"Is that apple on the backside glowing?"
Well; think about it.
Assume we build a nice bunch of fusion reactors, and enjoy all the wonderful benefits of "free fusion power" and a nice fusion powered civilization.
What do you think the first thing's going to happen after that? Someone else is going to come along and want to live right next to our shiny new fusion power plants. And we will need to defend them. So I think defense is still going to be an "external cost". Unfortunately.
Fortunately - a fuckload cheaper than going over to other countries and killing people to steal their oil and uranium and deposit our waste on their land.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Missed it by THAT much!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Will this provice unlimited access to energy? Will it allow us to build SC2-like battlecruisers that float in space at warp speed maximum and explore new stuff, conquer new, alien civilizations and spread the human race like some weird startrek offshoot?
How about, 10% of TARP, which was magically produced overnight, with nary a quibble, on the supposition that if we didn't do it, a few very wealthy bank CEO's would wet their pants with fear, and debt-ratings companies would be outed for the frauds that they so obviously were.
Seriously. $1 Trillion? For free-energy? Forever? Sounds like a deal to me. Where do I sign?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yes, because people who are trying to figure out how to heat there home s pay SO Much money into the system~
Between your complete lack of understanding taxes, and only being able to argue from extremes, it's clear you don't really have an argument. Just a repeat of what your echo chamber has told you to say.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Like nuclear explosions break those pesky Laws of Thermodynamics?
Shut. up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IF it works, the major reason to protect them will be gone.
You know, we can completly get out of 3rd world shit holes and watch their money dry up to the point where they are throwing rocks at each other.
Yes, they don't know for sure. that's why it's called research.
Frankly, it's worth the monetary risk.
Bear in mind the money doesn't get thrown into a pile and burned. It gets spent on researcher salaries, contractor, supports, and so on. So even if the spent 100 billion, and proved it couldn't work, that money was still circulating in society and adding to the economy.
And if it works? the benefits would be beyond measure.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You are obviously completely ignorant about the involvement of the Federal government's taxation system. I tried to use a simplistic example and it still went over your head - you're convinced that taxes, spending, and the costs of energy and housing are somehow completely unrelated. Sorry, but that is simply not the case.
This is the problem with the US political system. Idiots like you get to vote, and go pull the lever for the guy that says "Hey, you get free birth control", without a clue to the consequences to the overall economy when political influence counts for more than a people's abilities and ethics.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
iFusion, from Apple.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".
While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."
To explain why PhDs may think and act this way, read this book:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Just search on Widom-Larsen, LENR, and so on.
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379
Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame:
http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."
Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).
Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You know, they could really speed things up if whenever they get stuck, they just post an 'Ask Slashdot' question.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I would like to see an official response/perspective/justification/anything about this from Obama himself, not his administration.
Tax is a social contract no more collected by force than the rent on an apartment; as long as you have the choice to terminate the contract (ie. move somewhere else) you're not forced to pay, you're simply paying through implicit contract the commons for the land you're on, as set by the majority of the people in that segment of land.
toresbe
Lol ok well seen as you are using electricity to type your post I'm going to go ahead and assume you want to have electricity in the future.
Gotta love people who love to benefit from taxes without paying them.
Ok, so by lumping questions about "alternates" (questions 18-24) into one group,....and then calling in magnetized target fusion, which wasn't even listed as one of the questions.......my MIT colleagues have done a disservice to alternates and themselves. Magnetized Target Fusion (Magneto-inertial fusion) does publish. Just as openly as tokamaks. As a separate point, they should also know that any private companies trying to develop something new (usually small scale, because virtually no private company can get, or would even want to get venture funding to do tokamaks) have their own issues with patent rights, etc.
If you need money, and aren't getting it from the government, then why not appeal to the general public? I can't make a huge donation, but I would like to see the research continue, and if we could donate directly to research in the field that would become easier.
I know you're not going to get billions from Joe Randoms on the Internet, but if a couple thousand of us donated $10-20/mo, that would be a bit to help. Why not let us help pay for it crowd-sourced?
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Lol free birth control. Your comment has everything! Damn those women who want their comprehensive health coverage to be as comprehensive as it is for the men who want viagra.
Apple could own fusion in its entirety, and license the technology back to the rest of the world? Try explaining that sort of strategy at a shareholder meeting!
With each breath in, a flower somewhere opens; with each breath out, a flower withers away. In between lies beauty.
You really want to go there? Because Viagra coverage has been dropped pretty much all over. Not that there was anyone demanding government intervention to force anyone to cover it, anyway.
Besides, it's not me promoting it. It's the Democratic party itself. Just happens to be the most current form of vote-buying going on.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sure. Lets not bother spending tax money on public roads either. Buses and subways are out of the question. Why do we need a fire department anyway? Or a police force?
Oh hell that last one isn't so bad. You can just add not getting robbed to not getting sick in your nightly prayer, which is the only thing separating most Americans from hospital-induced destitution. And if there's no police to catch criminals, we can just save even more by not needing a legal system to prosecute them!
Fair enough. Of course I live in the "communist" state of Canada, where we believe in universal health care. I am not really well versed on the specifics of the American model, other than that it costs more per capita and covers a smaller percentage of Americans. Also, I don't have to worry about walking into a hospital and worrying if my insurance company is going to deny my lifesaving treatment because I forgot to cross a 'T' in my name (thankfully, there are no Ts in my names).
I'll just rely on a quick google search, with the first few hits challenging your earlier assertion regarding the coverage situation, at least as it relates to "your sides" arguments.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/08/05/289117/hannity-blasts-insurance-coverage-for-birth-control-defends-viagra-that-is-a-medical-problem/?mobile=nc
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91538
http://entertainment.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/09/10622742-bill-oreilly-viagra-should-be-covered-birth-control-should-not
I find it funny that I got roped into this. I think I'm slipping. My main point was how you started with an argument against funding fusion research, and some how you compared it to the ongoing and sexist controversy regarding women's reproductive health. Kudos. You, sir, are a grade A troll.
Annual cost of oil = $730bn
(20,000,000 bbl per day @ $100 bbl)
Big hairy deal. Solve the fusion problem tomorrow, and then what? You have unlimited electricity, that's what. The problem is, it will STILL take gasoline to power your car down the road. I mean, unless you can get the fusion reactor into your car, you're STILL going to need gasoline. Unless, of course, someone invents the magic battery that can power cars and trucks 300 miles and be recharged or replaced in a reasonable time, which is defined as how long it takes to refuel a car or truck right now.
We have tons of fairly cheap electricity anyway, with enough to allow it to take a couple hundred years to solve the fusion problem if we need it. Solar, geothermal, etc. will also make for unlimited electricity. Is it even a good idea to spend money on fusion when solar and geothermal power generation can achieve essentially the same thing? Probably not.
First, thank you so much for this. Someone else has already talked about Most Informative Post to slashdot this year. I agree.
Second, your point on peer review and secrecy is well taken. In the case of Polywell, the only reason it's known about outside the US Navy is the invasion of Iraq and now that they have enough money to pour into it once again, it's going dark again. Whenever I hear complaints against Polywell about peer review, I feel a bit like Bussard and his team are being painted with the Cold Fusion brush which isn't fair. It'd be nice if someone could take the data that's already out in the public and find enough funding, at least to try to duplicate their results. Or is the data that's out there even enough for that?
Whatever other things get blamed, I still say it's secrecy that hampers scientific advance more than anything else.
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
I don't want to belabor the point - the issue I was bringing up was about using tax-payer funded giveaways to buy votes, not about disparities in health coverage.
The links you found are opinions of pundits (that use inflammatory rhetoric because it generates viewership), and a 10-year-old article about coverage. If you looked that far you are bound to have discovered that my statement of fact was completely true - coverage of ED medication is mostly gone, and was dropped from public funded plans 6 years ago.
Yet you still decided to post a rebuttal knowing that I am right about that fact. Then you have the audacity to call me a troll !! Priceless.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
My main point was how you started with an argument against funding fusion research,
I completely missed this one - you actually stated my opinion as the opposite of the one I posted. Kudos for that one, I just about let it slide.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
as set by the majority of the people in that segment of land.
In other words, pay what the majority says or go to prison.
Don't get me wrong, I'm on board with taxes as a necessary evil - but I harbor no grand delusion that I'm not taking people's property by force. It's just, better a democratic government than a warlord - which is exactly what happens in places where the government is too weak to collect taxes. I'm not on board with the idealism of the "social contract", but I am on board with the simple pragmatism of paying taxes being better than the alternative.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ha ha, you're an idiot.
No, you're right. The original comment "leaving the dollars with those who earned them" was not yours and I misattributed that to you. You in fact appear to have said you agree with funding fusion research. You just went on to, what, suggest that public works projects might leave your descendants slaves to a totalitarian regime?
As I said, I don't have first hand knowledge about American coverage. I put up comments by pundits because they are the ones driving the sexists rants regarding female reproductive health. If you had some point worth making, you could have chosen a less politically charged and inflammatory topic to do it with. Why not make some connection to the Trayvon-Zimmerman controversy, too, while you're at it? You chose an inflammatory topic, and it was a stupid choice. That puts you in the same category as the pundits.
And it doesn't even really speak to whatever your point is because the pundits want employers to be allowed to drop birth control coverage from private insurance coverage. The controversy is not even touching tax payer "handouts" as Americans like to call it, and it's not "free" because the coverage is paid for.
Nonetheless, your comments have not been very articulate.
For example:
This is the problem with the US political system. Idiots like you get to vote, and go pull the lever for the guy that says "Hey, you get free birth control", without a clue to the consequences to the overall economy when political influence counts for more than a people's abilities and ethics.
I'm fine with, too, but that's a more appropriate response to a voluntary contribution, not a mandatory one. Is it more important that your neighborhood have a public library or that your family have heat in the winter? How about your children? Your grandchildren? What if the library on the corner was built and funded based on a monetary system that eventually meant that your grandchildren would work under involuntary servitude for a totalitarian regime, because they loaned your government the money for the library?
Seriously?!? Entire paragraphs that actually say nothing. Those are the ramblings of a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. You seem to think that your point is coherent and well formed, and yet you get frustrated when people don't "get" you.
Anyways, I'm done. You can have the last word if you want, but I'm not going to bother reading it.
You just went on to, what, suggest that public works projects might leave your descendants slaves to a totalitarian regime?
Well it's looking at a bigger picture, really. This type of research funding is generally a good thing, and will benefit everyone in the long run. But debt is a bad thing, and will harm everyone in the long run. When the debt is $16 trillion and growing, and unfunded obligations are $118 trillion and growing, and the largest external creditor is a totalitarian regime (China), you really need to set some priorities first.
You chose an inflammatory topic, and it was a stupid choice.
That's quite obvious at this point, you are correct. Yet these emotional issues are being used to drum up support and divert attention from the substantive issues, so they are difficult to avoid.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
in a fission nuke, the splitting atoms are cooled by water, which in turn ..."
is cooled by extracting thermal energy by running it thru turbo-machinary, which
then spins a electric generator: it think einstein said something along the line of "hell of a way to heat water
-
is this how a fusion reactor makes electricity? by heating up some "third-party"
medium (is this the divertor) -or- is it ideally a fusion reactor which
is ALSO a electric generator at the same time?
-
has a pure helium plasma been studied?
-
can a electric-motor -or- generator (with cooper winding) benefit from fusion reactor research?
(no time)
Those fools who signed up - don't they get anonymity? I mean, it's the Internet!
Oh, wait, I don't have to preview?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave. It's not theft unless you're being forced to stay in the area for which you're being levied a tax. International waters have no tax. Build a raft and see how well you'll cope with independence.
If you choose to stay and avail yourself of the commons' resources without contributing back - and if you're staying there, you are using them whether you want to or not - then you're not paying your debts and society has ways of penalizing that.
toresbe
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave.
That's not what we do. We say pay or sit in jail.
It's not theft unless you're being forced to stay in the area for which you're being levied a tax.
Who said "theft"? Taxes are completely different than theft - but they are a bit like robberies in that you are taking someone's property under threat of force.
Build a raft and see how well you'll cope with independence.
Well, I used the example of warlordism, but yeah I'm with you here. It is quite pragmatic to choose to pay one's taxes.
If you choose to stay and avail yourself of the commons' resources without contributing back - and if you're staying there, you are using them whether you want to or not - then you're not paying your debts and society has ways of penalizing that.
That's a nice rationale, but it still doesn't change the fact that, at the end of the day you are taking something through threat of force.
I'm not anti-tax - quite the opposite. I think you'll end up paying "taxes" one way or another, since someone will expect their protection money if there is no working government. Might as well pay a somewhat functional democratic-ish government rather than some warlord or mafia boss. I just don't necessarily agree with your ideals on the matter. If you want to know the why, I'll be happy to expand on that with you - but I just want to be clear that we agree that taxes are taken through threat of force so that our discussion can be more fruitful.
Taxes aren't the only way for a government to raise money, either. Many governments fund roads with tolls. Many governments get their funding by nationalizing an industry (oil being in vogue currently). Hell, the US government hasn't even had income tax for 100 years yet (almost...). In the Bahamas they wait until you die and then take your back taxes out of your estate.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave.
That's not what we do. We say pay or sit in jail.
I don't know how I can possibly make this point any clearer, and I almost get the feeling you are actively working to avoid understanding my point. Tax is a contract you sign by staying in a country. Both ends of the bargain are enforced by the legal system - the State gets in trouble if they fail to deliver on their end of the deal, too - but you are never forced to enter into the deal. Buying the product is voluntary, payment once bought is not; just like with any other product.
Saying "Tax is forced payment" is exactly as silly as saying "Buying a TV on credit is forced payment". Once you obtain the TV, payment will be taken through threat of force, but nobody forced you to buy the TV in the first place.
toresbe
Me neither.
Tax is a contract you sign by staying in a country.
So what? Let's say I concede your point and that I signed your contract when I was by chance born into your country. You are still enforcing a contract with threat of force. Any other contract I sign, there is not a threat of force on the other end.
"Buying a TV on credit is forced payment"
No, because the worst they can do if I don't pay is take the unpaid-for goods away. I cannot go to prison for violating a revolving credit contract. Recent law also allows garnishing of wages, but still no jail time.
I understand your point - you do not have to be any clearer. I disagree with your ideology, that is all. Do you agree that taxes are collected through threat of force?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Hi all, Geoff Olynyk here, one of the interview participants.
It was linked in the interview, but I wanted to point out that some of us have put together a website, fusionfuture.org with information about fusion and a really easy-to-use link to urge Congress not to cut fusion funding in the 2013 budget. They are planning to shut down the MIT fusion experiment (Alcator C-Mod) this fall!
If you go to the website (www.fusionfuture.org), and click the "Contact Congress Now" button at right, it literally only takes a minute to send letters to the Department of Energy and your Representative and Senators. We need your help to ensure that this important research continues in the United States!
Thanks everyone.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
This is not really a matter of ideology, it's more a matter of semantics.
Jail time for unpaid debt is not the exclusive domain of taxes. Six US states, and several nations, practice it. On the other hand, I have not found any indication that unpaid taxes in the US can trigger jail time. You can go to jail for evading taxes, but that's different; that's basically fraud.
So if your distinction is supposed to be that tax is collected by "threat of force" since there is a possibility of jail time then you are basing your argument, as best as I can tell, on a fallacy.
toresbe
what makes you think the DoD isnt doing secret research on this stuff? we'll find out 50 years later.
Some relevant tax statutes:
Jail time for unpaid debt is not the exclusive domain of taxes. Six US states, and several nations, practice it.
That's an excellent point, and I was not aware that any US states still had debtors prisons. I'm not a big fan of debtors prison (as you might have guessed), so I find this a bit disconcerting. Anyway, I happily retract my claim that taxes are different than other contracts in this regard.
That said, taxes are still enforced through threat of force :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
These laws cover tax evasion, not failure to pay tax, a distinction I made in the previous post.
toresbe
Is your "evasion" limited to the word "willful"? You'd have to be a hermit or have an IQ below room temperature to not realize that you have to pay income tax. There are many, many statutes dedicated to explicit tax fraud - I only clipped two that deal with deliberate non-payment.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"Evasion" is willful avoidance per definition. And I stand by my claim that there is no threat of force behind tax payment (unless payment is being willfully evaded) which is not present in any other debt situation.
toresbe
If one is not willfully avoiding and they are dragged into court, any subsequent avoidance will of course be willful. So the term "willful" realistically is only a speed bump. You will still owe the back taxes and you will still go to jail if you do not pay them.
Ultimately, not paying your taxes will still lead to jail time.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It does not magically turn into "willful" simply by passing through court.
I don't see the use of this discussion anymore since it's a circular discussion. The last few iterations have run thusly: I restate my point, you address something else.
I have someone to drink coffee with. It's more fun than this.
toresbe
It does not magically turn into "willful" simply by passing through court.
That's not my claim. My claim is that, once you have been told that you do have to pay taxes by a court, if you continue to not pay them, it is quite obviously willful. Further, you don't get a free pass on the taxes you were ignorant of - you still have to pay them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
putting aside the issue of the bias of authors who have a personal financial interest in increased funding
Do you know how poorly grad school and research jobs pay? If they were making decisions based on personal financial interest, they wouldn't have gone for PhDs and research, they'd go into finance like every other physics major out of MIT.
Dear Elector,
We like the sound of free energy forever. We have only two questions, which will help us decide if it's worth it.
1. Whose pockets does it line? We need to know so we can extract campaign funding from them.
2. How many elections into the future before this "free energy forever" happens? If it's more than two, it's not worth it.
We await your response.
Yours sincerely,
Your Elected Representatives
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How about, 10% of TARP, which was magically produced overnight, with nary a quibble, on the supposition that if we didn't do it, a few very wealthy bank CEO's would wet their pants with fear, and debt-ratings companies would be outed for the frauds that they so obviously were.
They were talking about the collapse of the banking system, which underpins the economy. I'm not saying how the problem was solved was correct, but the problem was a lot bigger than some wealthy CEOs wetting their pants.