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Fusion Power By 2020? Researchers Say Yes and Turn To Crowdfunding.
Luminary Crush (109477) writes "To date, the bulk of fusion research has been channelled towards a plasma containment and stabilization method. This is the approach used by ITER's tokamak reactor, the cost of which could exceed US$13.7 billion before it's online in the year 2027 (barring further delays). Researchers at LPP Fusion, in a project partially financed by NASA-JPL, are working in a different direction: focus fusion, which focuses the plasma in a very small area to produce fusion and an ion beam which could then be harnessed to produce electricity. It is small enough to fit in a shipping container, can double as a rocket engine, and would cost US$50 million to produce the working 5 MW prototype. To reach the next hurdle and demonstrate feasibility, LPP Fusion has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise $200K."
but which they claim is scientifically sound and only relies on well-established science
Given how ideas speak for themselves in physics (and science in general) more than their messengers, the obvious question is why hasn't everyone jumped on it yet?
As they leave, the electrons in the beam interact with the electrons in the plasmoid and heat up the area to over 1.8 billion degrees Celsius, which is enough to get fusion reactions.
Yeah, except the temperature is irrelevant, the combination of temperature, density and time isn't. What worth is the former if they don't have the latter?
Ezekiel 23:20
..also, here's a TED talk about fusion power https://www.ted.com/talks/michel_laberge_how_synchronized_hammer_strikes_could_generate_nuclear_fusion
Its called sun. We only have to recieve the gift by wind turbines or solar panels.
14 billion? That's less than it costs to supply that little adventure in the Iraqi desert with toilet paper!!!
So at what pledge tier do I get a Mr. Fusion?
Seriously, I'm happy to through some cash their way, but you'd think that for something this significant they'd be able to find $200k from actual investors or research funds to take the next step, especially since they are apparently already funded by JPL.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
They didn't have much credibility to start with, and turning to crowdfunding only makes it worse.
It is not a mass market product with quick deliverables, it is an industrial solution. So the natural financing source would be venture capital, rather than crowdfunding. If they have to turn to indiegogo, it can only mean they failed to convince anyone relevant and are desperately trying to ride the "fusion is cool" fans, and disappoint them in the process.
As much as I would love to see fusion plants soon, it looks like this is not the company that will deliver them.
For me to be anything but skeptical of this claim.
I want to believe... but seriously how many of us here are proficient enough in the physics and engineering to really have a clue.
All we can do is believe... and as much as I want to believe... i also don't want to be taken for a fool. I hope its real... but suspect its bullshit.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The article states that operations are to begin at ITER in 2027. This is actually the date where ITER will be operated using a Tritium and Deuterium plasma, as opposed to a Deuterium only plasma. Nearly all tokamak experiments currently undertaken are using Deuterium-only plasmas to investigate how the devices operate. Adding Tritium to the mix means that a Tokamak can reach fusion temperatures, but it requires extremely delicate handling. A Tritium plasma is safe, but it's important to keep track of all of it (and that includes losses to the vacuum vessel of the tokamak, we really don't want any going missing!).
Plasma experiments are set to begin in ITER much earlier, with a `first plasma' date in November of 2020 using a Deuterium plasma. It should not be understated what we can gain from experiments using a Deuterium-only (which means no fusion) plasma. ITER will be used in this manner for several years, while we gain better understanding of plasma physics on these scales. When we have a good feel for the machine, then we will start to produce fusion with a `DT' (Deuterium-Tritium) plasma.
I'm very busy right now and have only had a cursory glance at the article, but I'm reading things such as `Moreover, because the end product of the reaction is moving charged particles, those can be converted into electricity directly', and thinking that at least the writers do not have a detailed knowledge of plasma physics. Tokamak power plants would use the energy of the 14MeV neutron produced by the DT fusion reaction to heat water to steam and generate it directly. `Moving charged particles' is just a plasma, just like in a flurorescent light bulb. You can make a current out of it, but not electricity.
Let's put $200.000+ risk on "backers" alone, in the hope that they reach a milestone that will increase the value to their investors many-fold.
Worst case it doesn't work out and we've got a bit of pocket change.
I really want to believe, but... I'm sure they could find an investor for $200.000+, assuming they'd be willing to part with a major stake in the company.
So this leads me to believe they're just not committed enough to this over their own financial gain.
Sometimes I wonder - I, or perhaps humanity as a whole, we have so much anxiety about the destruction and depletion of our natural resources, the extinction of species, the CO2 in the atmosphere, the conservation of our environment. Some of us try so hard to be environmentally conscious by recycling waste, reusing appliances, conserving water and energy.
Then maybe 100 years from now the killer asteroid will struck Earth and obliterate everything, or the supervolcano under Yosemite will blow up. And the universe will point the finger at us and say "ha ha!"
That would be a real bummer.
But I suppose this is like saying, why take care of myself? Why take a shower in the morning, have a balanced died, quit smoking, if maybe tomorrow I'll be dead?
As long as we have a chance at survival, we have to protect our heritage, which means the natural environment that spawned and hosts us.
Who knows, maybe in 100 years, instead of being obliterated, we will take this heritage with us to the stars.
The same lack of proficiency in physics and engineering that prevents most of us from really having a clue -- a genuine clue and not just a plausible clue -- that the poster was referring to is the same lack of proficiency that prevents most of us from being able to judge Wikipedia articles.
I've seen too many problems on wikipedia about things I do know that I cannot trust it for things I do not know.
I am sorry, that sounds like a suspiciously "pie in the sky" project to me.
First of all, nuclear fusion is insanely difficult. OK, maybe not *that* difficult, more like: "Easiest way to get fusion is to get 1.99x10^30 Kg of hydrogen in one place" difficult.
Now, coming out of nowhere, we have people saying: "Give us US$ 1,000,000 and we will give you portable, safe fusion within 6 years!". Sure, people, what makes you think you can do better than, say ITER? New approach, yadda yadda yadda, sure, I have heard that one before. Whatever the "new approach" was, it did not work the first time, it probably won't work now. Insanely difficult problem, overconfidence of the new kid on the block, and all that
Second, the old "Fusion power is clean!" saw. No, it is not. Fusion generates insane temperature and neutron radiation. What makes you think you can put everything in a small container? What happens to all that energy dissipation? To the container and its surroundings? If you RTFA, these people are saying thay can generate up to 5MW in a containment chamber "small enough to fit in a garage"! Excuse me? No dangerous radiation, perfect containment in a completely secure, small package? Hmmm... The Engineering does not seem strong in this one.
Third argument against: EROEI. Sure, you can get fusion going in a very small spot. We know this, it has been done before, using several different technologies (See Z-Machine at Sandia National Lab, for instance). BUT... (a) how much power do you have to pump into these capacitors to even *create* fusion in the first place? (b) creating fusion can be done... but what about *sustaining* a fusion reaction? In other words, if it takes you 20MW of power to sustain 5MW of power generation, where is your EROEI? Oooops... There is none.
Final nail in the coffin: "We were financed by NASA-JPL". So what? NASA funds thousands of projects per year. JPL, probably hundreds. And don't get me started on the NSF or DARPA, (or whatever local equigvalent exist in your country), OK?They certainly fund some pretty weird things, just on the off-chance that XYZ wild theory could prove interesting. Or, even better, that XYZ wild theory will be conclusively disproved. That, in itself, does not mean anything. It certainly does not mean your project is headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists: just that your weird project received a bit of money from whatever popular government entity you could contact.
As a matter of fact, if your project was so smart and so innovative, *and* headed by cool-headed, super-smart, seasoned engineers and scientists, you probably would not have to ask for money on IndieGogo or other: smart money would flow, by the millions, into your coffers, again just on the off-chance that super-duper weird idea could prove to be the real, "fusion in a box" thing that could change the world. Seriously. And don't give me that conspiracy crap that big oil does not want you to be independent yadda yadda yadda: there is so much money floating around right now, looking for ROI, and so many (rich) people ready to tweak the nose of Govt (See: The Intercept) that a serious project like this would get funded 10 times over. WhatsApp sold for *billions* of dollars for Pete sake! What makes you think portable fusion reactors could not get funded? Get Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg on the phone!
All in all, this does not sound very serious. More like the romantic fantasy of the genius guy in a garage changing the world one micro-fusion reactor at a time. Sorry.
Fund this? Sure, why not. But I'll pass this one, thank you very much.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
if there is any realisitc chance for this to happen, then a for profit serious investor would jump on it. anybody who crowdfunds this is an idiot.
There are some pretty dubious energy projects on indiegogo.
https://www.indiegogo.com/expl...
Also:
"The Department of Energy decided forty years ago to put all its fusion money on one device, the tokamak, and is not funding anything else"
What about NIF? or is that DoD?
If you believe that the smartest people on Earth are working on a 17 billion euro machine like ITER, when they could be building cheap focus fusion machines for 1000x cheaper, then I have some shares in the Tower Bridge to sell you...
I want an n/200,000 share of all patents, publications, and corporate assets produced in the next 10 years in return for my n contribution. And you can keep the ferro-fluid and the shout-out.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When we need crowdfunding, kickstarting, and bake sales to advance meaningful discoveries in theoretical scientific research, but shit like the F35 fighter plane can quietly blow through 5 billion dollars without producing a single useable aircraft outside of testing. Even sadder is knowing its projected cost is over one trillion dollars along 50 total years of development, and the only comment was in 2011 from the senate armed services committee which basically amounted to a high five.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion describes the pros and cons of using different fuels for radiation free fusion. By using Hydrogen-Boron you can avoid the neutron radiation problem. But in exchange you have to have a temperature 10 times what we've failed to produce for a long enough time to get energy back from the more common fuels. The article also mentions that a lot of the energy released would be photons, which are harder to convert into electricity.
Hydrogen-Boron and radiation free would be nice and so raises the profile of this work and perhaps makes it more crowd funding friendly. But without more explanation makes me even more suspicious that they are saying all the too good to be true parts and skipped mentioning all the reasons it's not likely to work. On the other hand it would be nice if boards of competent scientists could invest some real money in slightly crazy ideas that were allowed to fail without politicians going nutso that when you tried 10 things with a chance of success of 10% only one worked.
Honestly, it's tech we probably aren't going to see, even by 2027.
I'd rather we funneled energy research money into something we could implement wide-scale by then. Like LFTR.
Once we've got plentiful energy, THEN we can go chasing after fusion.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This was tried as the Trisops Project 35 years ago but lost funding because all of the fusion energy project's focus was on the Tokamak.
Disclosure: I was an author on the paper and of the referenced Wikipedia article;
This article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... covers the pros and cons of Hydrogen-Boron reaction. You do avoid the nasty neutron radiation issues but at a cost of needing 10 times the kind of temperature we have spent decades trying to achieve. While the posting says much of the energy is easy to convert to electricity a lot of it escapes as photons. The fact that the article in the posting doesn't cite the issues suggests that it's not a balanced article and is the kind you'd expect for fundraising from naive people (aka us). I do agree with some of the comments above that it's a shame that boards of scientists who know the issues don't have funds to distribute to crazy ideas like this with potential huge payoffs, without politicians complaining that when scientists take a risk they mostly fail.
I expect to see them on Shark Tank.
I also love that they changed the name from the British Dragon's Den to Shark Tank, because - what - too satanic sounding for middle America?
Focus Fusion: The Fastest Route to Cheap, Clean Energy
The company's Chief Scientist is listed as Eric Lerner, a name I thought I recognised. Turns out he's a noted plasma cosmology crank.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I just don't see how making promises like this is good for anyone. Clearly they are just looking for funding; no scientist or researcher in their right mind would promise something they can't already do by a specific date unless they were lying (or guessing, call it what you want) in order to get funding. This is the kind of crap that makes simpler people no longer "believe in science."
After reading this story and this older story (which has 5 backers and a nice 390 Euro beer kitty) I can't help thinking I want in on this action.
Do I need to invent a ridiculous company idea or is it enough to just ask for donations for my holiday fund?
It's too late. The catastrophic effects of burning fossil fuel on world climate have been known since the 1970s. Peak oil could have been a nice opportunity to switch to other energy sources. What's the answer instead? They press gigantic amounts of poison into the ground to extract more fossil fuel.
Cheap and Clean energy will save nature.
You can make the price of oil as high as you want, there will still be people using it and polluting.
...vaporware.
h@hh@hh@...@.&.... "You shall not pass!"
Bottled Coca-Cola sales were still behind those made at the soda fountains, but the lucrative potential of the home and take-away market was obvious. The only hurdle was the lingering image of unsanitary bottles that still put many people off. For Woodruff, cleaning up the bottlers was a priority, and, the company legend goes, he witnessed the problem firsthand shortly after becoming president when he visited a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Inside he found piles of broken glass, dust-covered machinery, and pools of spilled Coca-Cola syrup swarming with flies. Furious, he told the bottler that if the plant wasn't clean by the next day they would no longer be a Coca-Cola bottling plant. âoeBut Mr. Woodruff,â pleaded the bottler, âoeit donâ(TM)t do no good to clean up. The next day itâ(TM)ll look like this again.â Woodruff removed his cigar from his mouth and growled: âoeYou wipe your ass, donâ(TM)t you?â
Everyone who supports it gets a free Mr Fusion when it's done! Just kidding, but that would be cool though. You know, I have a feeling that those ITER morons are just a bulky, overly expensive disaster run by an idiot and it's a gigantic money pit. They're like Solyndra. It should work in theory but it's too expensive and run by morons. I also don't believe LPP Fusion though. It sounds like they have an idea that MIGHT work and they're phrasing it like it's a done deal and they just need the cash to build it.
... to destroy the rest of the nature beyond all hope.
Just off the top of my head, cheap energy would allow:
This would be a wonderful joke to play on ITER. All those bureaucrats would be so ticked to have to actually go back to science. What I love about FirstFusion is that not only does promise to be a small reactor, but that in all likelihood when it starts to work properly that people will figure out all kinds of improvements to make it smaller and more efficient.
People think about how this will change the world; but I suspect that it would result in all kinds of interesting and new things well beyond the usual More Energy, Cheap Energy effects. One would be the reminder that technology can change our lives. That being a scientist is cool, and funding science is smart.
We won't get to the stars if the watermelons have their way. We'll all be living in mud huts in squalor until the extinction event happens. Whatever species achieves sentience next should have plenty to work with though.
On the contrary, cheap energy is DESTROYING the nature. It is destroying the nature now, when we use oil (by reducing natural habitats of virtual everything + by oil spils) and it will destroy the nature, when we will move to fusion (by reducing natural habitats of virtual everything, only, as this technology is - oh! - "so clean").
Too much power corrupts people. Absolute power corrupts them absolutely. This goes for gaining power by cheap energy, too.
In a few years, they will rename the device to "Mr. Fusion".
If one of the perks of funding is not, at the very least, a 5MW container-sized fusion reactor to stick in my backyard, where's the incentive?
Seesh!
The charged particles thing is one of the great benefits of p-B fusion, in addition to the lack of neutron or gamma radiation along the primary reaction path . You fuse a common hydrogen-1 nucleus (aka a proton) with a common Boron-11 nucleus to get a Carbon-12 nucleus that's unstable due to too much excess impact energy. The C-12 then immediately fissions into three helium-4 nuclei with the nuclear energy converted to the kinetic energy of their (fairly consistent) speeds.
You then have charged particles moving at extremely high speed and there's a number of ways those can be converted to electricity directly - most of which, in essence, boil down to firing them backwards into a small particle accelerator, which will generate as much energy slowing them down as it would have taken to get them up to speed. Minus efficiency losses of course, but those are potentially far less than even the best-case theoretical heat engine.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
D-T fusion is among the easiest reactions to create, so that tends to be what the initial "proof of concept" aim is for, but realistically in the long term we need to either design reactors that breed their own Tritium, possibly by including Lithium in the plasma or shielding, or rely completely on more common materials
That's one of the reasons p-B fusion is often considered the holy grail - it's got something like a 100x smaller reaction cross section, so is typically a much more difficult reaction to generate, but it uses the most common isotopes of hydrogen and boron and produces virtually no neutron or gamma radiation along the primary reaction path. Plus as an added bonus without neutron or gamma radiation all the nuclear energy gets converted to the kinetic energy of the three helium nuclei that the unstable (because of excess reaction energy) carbon-12 nucleus immediately fissions into. And energy can be recovered from fast-moving charged particles far more simply and efficiently than via a heat engine driven by gamma-heated reactor coolant.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What sane investor would put money into fusion research that hasn't even accomplished fusion yet, much less achieved the net energy gain that's proven to be the stumbling block of all other publicly visible research? Meanwhile if 0.4% of the US population sends them just $1 they'll have the $1.2M in funding they believe they'll need to first buy these beryllium electrodes (the current $200K) and then work out the engineering challenges to achieve net energy gain, which they presumably think will be relatively easy with their approach. At that point, assuming it works, they'll have something to make them stand out from the crowd and perhaps attract investors to build their first $50M commercial prototype.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You do know achieving fusion is actually really easy, right? Any science student can build a Farnsworth Fusor for Whatever the "new approach" was, it did not work the first time, it probably won't work now
What part of "new approach" don't you understand? There was no first time. At best there were preliminary experiments showing promising results - these folks for example need some expensive beryllium electrodes so that they can increase the plasma density enough to trigger fusion, for the first time with this approach.
As for radiation: you clearly have no idea what you're talking about - there's many different aneutronic fusion reactions that don't emit neutron radiation along the primary reaction path. p-B fusion has the added benefit of also emitting negligible gamma radiation, with virtually all energy being released as kinetic energy of the three helium-4 nuclei produced, which are also potentially extremely easy to convert into electricity without involving any inefficient heat engines. The existence of side reactions means it won't be *completely* neutron free, but you don't need much shielding if only 0.3% of your energy is being released as fast neutrons.
As for the money - there's LOTS of promising small-scale fusion research, but very, very little government funding, virtually all of which goes to ITER, and investors aren't going to put money into something with no expected payout for decades. (and realistically that's what we're probably looking at here - even if they get energy-positive by 2020 they still need to build a business around the technology)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Flexible Funding makes it very suspicious as they can just pocket all the money people donate even if they don't reach their funding goal. This is probably a scam and will never go anywhere.
"US$50 million to produce the working 5 MW prototype"
$50,000,000 / 5,000,000 W = $10/W.
Anything over about $5 will not get built. Period. Consider Levy County and Darlington B. And unlike this system, they actually worked.
There are some groups who already have working cold fusion that works in the lab and is repeatable. The trick now is to turn the devices into commercial devices (at a profit) and not get smashed out of business by the current entrenched market forces in the energy industry.
I've seen videos of the devices actually working.
Yes, I could be wrong, or have been mislead, but that's the info I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Yet their address is in Middlesex a hour away.
When are people going to wake up to the fact that the ITER is only funded because the idiots spent billions on it, and have no choice now but to make it actually work. The russians started experimenting with Tokomaks in the 1970s and the US having to stick it to the commies rushed in with money to compete. 40 years later with no end in sight, we're still here trying to make a broken idea work. ITER is one of the actual cases of the government spending stupid amounts of money on a project with no proven success. The same amount of funding spread across the other fusion projects would quite likely have resulted in a usable reactor by now. Hell the Polywell guys reckoned 100 million would have built a power plant using their reactor design. A smaller figure would prove net power according to Robert Bussard.
(the supervolcano is under Yellowstone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_Caldera)
As I read the comments it is clear to me that many people have written very lengthy critiques of this without actually doing any research into it...
They have in fact been published in plasma physics peer reviewed journals for record 1.8 BILLION degrees C (hotter than the sun!)
It's very possible to create fusion reactions that produce no harmful radioactivity by using Hydrogen-Boron fuel source. That is one of the major points of how they're approach is different and is not of scientific debate. It's called aneutronic fusion. Look it up.
Their approach creates an ion beam, rather than neutrons, which can be directly converted into electricity. This would result in a HUGE efficiency gain compared to conventional steam generation used by other approaches. Again, this is well established physics. Look up 'plasmoid'.
The only part of their science that is debatable is their predicted gains in plasma density by the quantum magnetic field effect and the only way to prove this prediction right or wrong is to carry out the experiment with the beryllium electrode they are trying to raise money for on Indiegogo.
They do have private investors already and have been receiving funding from private investors since they lost funding from NASA due to a policy change regarding fusion research. They state that they currently receive about .5 million dollars in funding a year and this will not cover the cost to have the one of a kind beryllium electrode needed to test scientific feasibility.
You can spout numbers all you want, but the only way to prove that this doesn't work is to run the experiment.
If they are right, there is no doubt this technology would change the world.