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MIT Used Lobbying, Influence To Restore Nuclear Fusion Dream
An anonymous reader writes in with the story of how MIT's fusion energy experiment is alive and well even though its federal funding was axed. "'In the end, it is about picking a winner and a parochial effort to direct money to MIT,' said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based watchdog group. 'It's certainly a case of lawmakers bucking the president and putting their thumb on the scale for a particular project.' MIT enlisted the support of a wealthy Democratic donor from Concord and the help of an influential Washington think-tank co-founded by John Kerry. These efforts were backed by lobbyists, including a former congressman from Massachusetts, with connections to the right lawmakers on the right committees. The cast also included an alliance of universities, industry and national labs, all invested in the fusion dream. 'It's ground-breaking research that could lead an energy revolution,' [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. 'This was not about politics. This was about good science.' The revival of MIT's project, whatever its merits, clearly demonstrated what the combination of old-fashioned Washington horse-trading and new-fangled power — both nuclear and political — can do."
I read a report 2 years ago that said the R&D funding in America has fallen, while at the same time R&D fundings in Korea, Japan, Singapore and in China have gone up
The report also stated that the number of patents awarded to America has plateaued while patents awarded to other countries, especially those from East Asia, have skyrocketed
Most importantly the report stated that of the patents awarded to American companies, more and more are not directly resulted from technological advancement, but rather, based on "usage" and/or "methodology", such as the patent as described in following article -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/11/scheduling_paradigm/
The program is doing useful research.
What useful research is it doing? This is the topic I'm really interested in.
1) dollar-for-dollar the MIT reactor produced more papers
Eh, I'm too aware of the quality of academic papers to really care about raw numbers. Let's hear about the details of their important discoveries (or more interestingly, what research they are working on now that could give us important results in the future).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> Your argument appears to be "we haven't solve the technical and practical challenges yet, so we never will."
What?!? I said the *exact opposite* of that.
I said that even if they get it working, there's no reason to build it.
Here, let me put this in crayon for you. Right now I can go and buy a turbine from GE, hook that up to a food dryer system from some hippy store, and use it to dry out peanut butter and feed them into the turbine. I *guarantee* you this will actually work, and produce net energy. What, you don't believe me? Fine, read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car
Better yet, it's carbon neutral, because the CO2 you release by burning it is sucked back into the next tree. Now of course the power coming out would cost ten times what you'd get by burning bunker oil, and bunker oil produces power at ten times the rate of a wind turbine, but *it will work*, for sure. Fusion? Meh, maybe by 2050. Maybe not. And of course, fusion will likely cost even more.
So what problem does a fusion reactor solve that a peanut turbine doesn't? None. So why isn't anyone racing to built peanut turbines? Because they cost too much. And fusion costs more than that.
And THAT is my argument.
"Now wait" you say... what if advancement X causes the price of fusion to fall? Well sure, but what if advancement Y causes the price of peanut turbines to fall? And when you look at all the research in the world, there's a lot more going into making cheaper peanuts than fusion.
I am being a bit facetious here, but not that much. I've been looking at this problem for three decades now, and it's not getting any better. Quite the opposite, fusion is getting more and more expensive. Its just not going to happen. You need to spend your energy on something that will actually happen, even if it's not as good in theory.