Mystery Company Blazes a Trail In Fusion Energy

sciencehabit writes: Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California-based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers, revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs. 'They've improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,' says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Comments

This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government. It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster. We should never have diverted any tax dollars towards this to start with. Instead, set up a series of goals, contests, and rewards to drive private research.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

You mean a reward other than the trillion or so dollars a year a serious commercial fusion generator would bring?

Private entrepreneurs might eventually solve the problem, but -- it is a hard problem. The rewards for solving it, though, have never been in doubt. However, so far the problem has been a bottomless pit for investment no matter who has been making it, with literally no believable path in sight to a profit. If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.

Unless or until, of course, somebody has a real breakthrough idea or can solve one of the known "hard problems" that are blocking some of the more promising lines. Lockheed-Martin has openly claimed that they will solve the fusion problem within 5 years. They've got some very smart people working for them. Maybe they are right. Maybe not.

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[Beck_Neard]

The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.

Contests aren't the answer, but you have a point that large government-sponsored projects seem to be wasteful. But in the particular case of fusion, the government has actually allocated very little money to fusion energy research so far in relative terms, so there's no way of knowing! Laser fusion was (and is) primarily for nuclear weapons research, with energy being considered as a speculative tertiary side-effect (and a good propaganda technique for easing the public mind) rather than an actual design goal. Same goes for a lot of funded plasma research.

Re:This is a great example.

[PopeRatzo]

When the question instead became, "we're going to put things into space for $50M - how are we going to do that?" a whole new engineering methodology unfolded.

If NASA never existed, do you think there would be any private space exploration today, much less "putting something in space for $50M"? You think there would have been nuclear energy in the 20th century without a Manhattan Project?

It's easy for a company to pretend they hit a home run when they start the inning on third base.

Re:This is a great example.

[Namarrgon]

You're ignoring the decades of government-funded research that Tri-Alpha are building on. They didn't start from scratch.

Private enterprise is great at solving engineering problems, including some directed research if the payoff isn't too far off. But very few companies can sustain a $10-50 billion research effort for the really hard stuff. You need a government for that.

The other thing that governments are good for is big research & engineering jobs with little direct payoff but substantial indirect benefit to society - national infrastructure stuff. Private enterprise just doesn't see the value unless the profits go to them.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.

That's never the case. Look at the commercial space sector, for example. They're still no achieving what was achieved decades ago by government programs. The motivation for the private sector is profit, not progress. It's a mistake to conflate the two.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Hey, I love capitalism as much as anybody. But because I do love it, and indeed am on my third company as a cofounder (with two failures) I know a lot about investor mindset. It is hard as nails -- it has to be. Nobody wants to play the lottery -- they want a plausible bet, something that might be a long shot but that is affordable and has a payoff to match the risk.

That's the problem right there. Sure, maybe some kid can repurpose old TV tubes into a positive output fusion generator in his garage or -- maybe not. In fact, I'd bet a rather lot not. Nor do I think it plausible that this same kid can build a thinking robot or map the entire human genome using nothing but ordinary household chemicals and his dad's old video camera. To solve the problems you list -- AI, genetic engineering, fusion, economically feasible interplanetary or interstellar travel (might as well dream big) one needs serious resources, some real skin in the game, and even then the odds are heavily against you.

I think I could do AI -- real AI -- on a shoestring, if by a shoestring you mean a budget of maybe a million a year for four or five years, at least, if I did nothing else and had a small staff of computer geek slaves with some mad skills. And I'm not certain I know what its value would be once I finished. My robot friend (with the intelligence, however real, of perhaps a cockroach)? We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.

Fusion is tantalizing, because there is this disconnect between Back to the Future movies and our imagination and the hard reality of pushing two charged nuclei within 10 to 100 fermi of one another and holding them there long enough to tunnel the rest of the way. We think "how hard can it be" -- and then when we try, we find that this is only the first of many problems. So sure, things may be changing. For one thing, my cell phone would have been a computational munition twenty years ago, and my laptop could replace a whole supercomputing center from the 80's or even the 90's. We can actually solve some pretty darned hard magnetohydrodynamic problems computationally without having to build something to try it. For another, we have lots of data from lots of things that have been tried, and that failed. Knowing what won't work helps too. IMO there is some actual hope that some of the schemes that were tried and failed can be made to work now, by solving the really hard problems that stopped them computationally first, but even if this is true one still has to take a huge risk to build the prototype and pray that it can be scaled up into production!

Lockheed-Martin can afford it. The government can afford it. Venture capitalists? Not so much. If it is going to cost $50 million (or more!) to build the prototype after $10 or 20 million just to design it and do all of the computations, you'd have to both have a very, very serious plan with a very, very high probability of success -- a proof that it should work if you build it (and if nothing nonlinear shuts you down along the way, which is sadly a risk rather difficult to estimate). So yeah, maybe it only would take 50 to 100 million dollars, at a risk so high that even if you had it all figured out and could "prove" to investors that it would/should work, they'd want to take 90% of the final company in order to pony up that much money. So sure, if it works you have a trillion dollar payday and you have a $100 billion dollar payout from that, but they have to be thinking of the 9 -- or 90 -- times that they drop $100 million into this and end up with NOTHING.

I know personally of at least three lines of approach to the fusion problem -- one conventional, one exotic, one that (I believe) nobody's thought of and that MIGHT be doable out to a prototype for a few million dollars, chump change. But try getting even chump change out of somebody that has that kind of money for a long shot, especially without te

Re:This is a great example.

[camperdave]

You think there would have been nuclear energy in the 20th century without a Manhattan Project?

Natürlich würden wir Kernkraft haben.

Re:This is a great example.

[PopeRatzo]

Natürlich würden wir Kernkraft haben.

And that also would have been the result of a government program.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Todd Palin]

It might be real science, but real energy production is still a really long way out. They boast a tenfold improvement in the time that the reaction is contained, but the reality is there has to be another hundredfold improvement to reach the break even point. Then you have to go beyond that to get a surplus. Then you have to scale it all up to get enough energy to bother with.

Really it is just a small step on a long journey that will take many decades, unless they discover some real problems that might take longer.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Beck_Neard]

True, but progress in fusion has been so slow that improvements like this are quite welcome. Also, you have to consider that you can often get good improvements simply by scaling up your equipment.

Huge Cash Pile

[diakka]

Based on historical precedent around fusion press releases, I would venture to guess is that huge pile of cash in the "hundreds of millions" is starting to run out.

Re:Huge Cash Pile

[hey!]

Almost certainly the case on three grounds.

(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.

(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.

(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.

Re:Huge Cash Pile

[pollarda]

(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.

As a small business owner, this is so true .... The best way to raise money for your business is to convince people you don't actually need money. Go figure ....

Re:Real or Bullshit

[ArchieBunker]

As real as every other company in the past who claims to generate energy with fusion? When is 3d holographic storage coming out again?

Re:...of Government and Enterprise Working Togethe

[Required Snark]

Exactly. The Nature paper cites 47 references. The AIP article cites 56. Even with overlap, that is a lot of previous effort, most of which was government funded, And that's just he first layer. Each of those papers has a similar amount of previous research.

An army of very smart people spent a lot of time and effort to get to this point. Very little of that was paid for by private enterprise. It was almost completely government supported research. If you want to solve a big hard problem that is about the only way to do it.

Governments have the resources, stability and long term vision. For profit companies rarely have this combination. When they do, it's often a situation like the old Bell Labs days, where there was a government sponsored monopoly. The Bell system planners knew the needed something better then mechanical switches and vacuum tubes. They engaged in fundamental pure research into semiconductors starting in the 1930's, which led to the transistor in 1947.

Of course the remnants of Bell Labs are now completely out of the pure research business now. Given IBM's declining fortunes it's not clear how long they will keep up their basic research efforts. So if the government is not going to do it, no one will. In the current quarterly profit driven economy, there is no other option.

Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

We already have a fusion reactor, that pumps mega-giga-tera watts of energy and works without any serious maintenance issues. Just improve the ability to collect its output, some capacity to smooth out the fluctuations in the collection. It is a stellar idea, but I don't know when it would dawn on to the general public.