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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."
the Obama administration, while sharing the hope that nuclear fusion will one day be harnessed as a power source, concluded that the MIT experiment was a waste of taxpayer money. It deemed MIT’s facility outdated and small, the least scientifically useful of three domestic fusion reactors. Indeed, critics of the experiment said it amounts to a $1.5 million-per-student training program that MIT wants to keep going to protect its turf and prestige.
It would be interesting to see an analysis of what the program is actually accomplishing. It's not clear, and I don't have the expertise to determine whether the program is doing anything useful.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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/
it still tastes great. I sprinkle it on everything I eat.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Wut? RadLab was about microwave radiation, for shortwave radar. They didn't do nuclear physics.
A lot of hype from a few desperate hopefuls who don't understand the tech. Nothing at all from anyone who realizes that it's expensive, impractical and doesn't solve any problems that can't be solved with better and cheaper options.
The US could have just stayed in ITER but it didn't because it thought fusion power was quixotic...
The US has stayed in ITER. It might leave ITER, but if it does so, it'll be because the project is so poorly managed.
ITER is not run by Americans so it is, de facto, poorly managed.
You're being a little too vague here. What is "this sort of thing"? Lobbying? Who is "us"? Supporters of fusion research?
It's true that the Slashdot crowd trends towards opposing lobbyists (unless they're the NRA), but there's also generally pretty strong support for science funding. It's not surprising to me that comments would largely take the attitude that this is positive.
It's common to hear someone say that "fusion power was 30 years away in the seventies, it's 30 years away now, and it will stay 30 years away"" or similar, and sadly, there is some truth to that (though perhaps it's 30 years now (estimated time for the DEMO full power-plant is 2033)). I think one of the reasons is that funding keeps decreasing, far below the optimistic projections of the 70s. The MIT fusion project made this graph to illustrate: https://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg
It's a bit like when you're downloading a file, and while the download keeps making progress, the estimated time left stays put because the download speed keeps going down. I've had that happen a few times, and it requires an exponentially falling download speed. With fusion, the situation isn't quite that bad, but when you consider the sort of funding levels people were imagining before, it isn't surprising that they thought we would have fusion power by the year 2000.
One interesting way of putting this is to say that fusion power isn't a constant amount of time away, but about 50 billion dollars of funding away. To put those 50 billion dollars in context, fossil fules have received 594 billion dollars in subsidies in the USA since 1950. So partially fusion is difficult, and partially we're not trying very hard.
As an American i take offense, yet the entire concept of lobbying for anything is idiotic...let politicians decide on what's best for their constituents, not who will give them the most money or kickbacks.
Because Republicans never funnel money into pet projects or friends. You are probably one of those idiots that think Republicans are for smaller government. The only thing the parties disagree on is where to waste our money.
> Your assumption of course is that all other factors stay the same
Exactly the opposite, I'm taking into account the changing market at every turn.
Right now commercial PV is around 8 cents and is expected to fall in 6 to 7 cents by the end of this year.
Right now wind turbines are producing power for between 4.5 and 9 cents, and it is expected the price will collapse to the 5 cent mark over time.
These numbers include factors for intermittency, transmission upgrades, and anything else you might think of.
So, thorium. In spite of multiple decades of ongoing research, we still have no working thorium reactor. In fact, that's true in spite of the fact that the reactor just down the road from me can run on it. So if we have reactors right now that can use it, and they're not, surely there is a reason for this, right?
And the reason is that the price of building the infrastructure needed to commercialize the fuel pipeline is enormous, and at current U2 prices, utterly pointless. As I'm sure you're no doubt aware, the price of the U2 fuel cycle development was paid for by WWII, which provided a large subsidy to plants in countries with military needs. That leaves only Germany as a country that had to develop a fuel cycle *without* an interest in bombs, and look how well that turned out for them.
So basically people that actually work in the power industry, especially the nuclear power industry, see that this is not a technical problem (well, it is) but a practical one. One that is *not* getting solved any time soon. Perhaps this is simply a chicken-egg problem, and anyone that cracks one side will produce a reason to attack the other. But to date that hasn't happened, and there you have it.
It's still decaying. Slowly.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Do you have inside information?
I have public information.
Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace. The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billionâ"roughly four times as much as originally estimatedâ"according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project.
That paragraph in a nutshell shows both the mismanagement and the connection between that mismanagement and a continued US contribution to ITER.