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

Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to get excited about this story, but this is Slashdot now. Is this just another shilling junk science submission?

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Beck_Neard]

Nope, this is real science, for a change.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot exaggerates it, but it is real science. They are not as secretive as the title and summary make it sound, as Tri-Alpha makes regular appearances at conferences and gives talks on their progress. They don't publish many papers, but they have been quite public about growing progress over the last several years.

As far as where it will lead... there have been many fusion projects with great bursts of advance, followed by new road blocks. Time will tell, and at least it is one more path being explored. Even academics and people at national labs are hoping that companies like Tri-Alpha and General Fusion will be able to move things forward faster without baggage and bureaucracy research at national labs.

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.

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:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, this is real science, for a change.

The original poster is correct. This is junk science.
Real science is about reproductibility. You know, different labs around the world managing to reproduce the results of the original authors. This feels like the E-cat all over again.

And why is this technique being acclaimed as the saviour of fusion research ? They managed a mere 5 ms reaction, one in which the they spent more energy than they collected. E-cat, E-cat, E-cat.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away."
1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power."
2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"

Re:Real or Bullshit

[someone1234]

Problem is, this should already be in the engineering phase as in, the physics are already done and we are just looking for the company producing it the most cost effective.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[MightyMartian]

It's clearly a scam, a more elaborate version of "Dr. Jenkyl Slabonovich of esteemed Russian university has developed true unlimited energy generator" spams I get every once in a while. Read the bloody postr, it has all the earmarks of a scam.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Beck_Neard]

You're insane comparing this with E-cat.

E-cat never produced a single microjoule of energy. E-cat's workings have never been published. E-cat has never been open to scrutiny by the scientific community. The inventor of E-cat has not been up-front or honest about the device's working parameters. This device is based on known physics and engineering.

E-cat is a fraud whereas this is real science. If you continue to insist that this is equivalent to E-cat, the only logical conclusion is that you're a troll.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot exaggerates it

You do know that 99% of summaries are written by the submitter, right? And most of those are barely touched by the /. editors. That being said, sciencehabit's articles are still better than the medium.com stuff from startswithabang. On the scale of pop science, it's more like Discover magazine than Popular Science.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows you need to start with Fusion Ball Defense - and that only takes 34 days and $800,000 to complete.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Real science is about reproductibility. You know, different labs around the world managing to reproduce the results of the original authors.

Umm, the field reversed configuration is studied around the world in different labs. They are not the only place to be studying it, just one of the more successful. That is on par with plenty of vanilla science projects, where a setup may exist in multiple places, although one is much better than others.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Bengie]

At least we reached the net energy output break even point years ago. Now we just need to do the same for gross raw energy input.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[pla]

The short answer to why it remains seemingly just as far away? Money.

The single most useful, highest technology endeavor mankind has ever dared try, and we commit a mere one fifth as much to it as we do in fossil fuel subsidies per year.

In 1980, we really did have fusion 40 years away. And five years later, we got bored with that and moved on to something else shiny.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Dragonslicer]

1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away." 1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power." 2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"

And each time it was said, there was an assumption that funding would stay at the same level. Fusion power isn't X years away, it's Y dollars away. If we keep reducing the amount of money we spend on research and development, X will get larger, because Y isn't changing.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, you have to consider that you can often get good improvements simply by scaling up your equipment.

That's what SHE said!

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's not because it's fundamentally difficult and may indeed, be forever too difficult?

Where are the supersonic passenger transports?

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

but real energy production is still a really long way out.

So say about 20 years?

Re:Real or Bullshit

[kmoser]

Zeno is rolling over in his grave.

Re:Real or Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a problem even with the statement that "Fusion power is Y dollars away". Y is stated as a variable which is correct... but why is Y a variable?

The truth is that no one knows what Y is. Nor does anyone know what the value of X is in " Fusion power is X years away". The GP made this point effectively. Any resolved value of X or Y is a SWAG based on no data, and the assurance that the speaker will never have to fulfill those values. Or explain why they didn't pan out.

Lots of fusion fans like to downplay the uncertainties of fusion, or complain about the (seemingly) endless government research programs. Yet the truth is that fusion power here on Earth could be decades or even centuries from practical reality.

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion is dead...

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.

[bill_mcgonigle]

If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.

Maybe, but the other possibility is that the model has always been wrong.

It was always assumed, "we're going to put thing n into space" - how much is that going to cost?

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.

I've spent time at a plasma physics lab - they're amazing, and everything inside is amazing, and massive, and expensive. The scale of some of the things is enough to make a nerd giddy.

But maybe it's not the right approach to actually solving the problem. I'll forgo the cynicism and not assert that it was the right approach for getting lots of grant money over the years, because fusion is one of the three key technologies of the 21st century's technological revolution (genetic engineering and AI being the other two breakthroughs about to happen; computing is just evolutionary at this point).

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government.

The government isn't preventing entrepreneurs from doing fusion research. Even if the governments of a few countries were to make it illegal there are plenty who would not.

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

I don't think most ISPs got that memo. Or most companies for that matter.

This is probably bullshit anyway. It's very likely this "mystery company" plans to make their investor's money mysteriously disappear.

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.

[im_thatoneguy]

âoeAdding fast ions does good things for you,â says Glen Wurden of the Plasma Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Tri Alpha collaborated with Russiaâ(TM)s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Akademgorodok, which provided beam sources

In earlier attempts to create long-lived FRCs, turbulence in the plasma caused heat to leak away as hot particles migrated to the edge and escaped, causing the smoke ring to shrink and fade away.

What earlier attempts you ask? Let's go to wikipedia:

The first studies about the effect started at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in the 1960s, and considerable data is available since then, with over 600 published papers. Almost all research was conducted during Project Sherwood at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1975 to 1990, and during 18 years at the Redmond Plasma Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington. More recently some research has been done at the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Fusion Technology Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine.

So it was first really invented thanks to government research, it has only seen government interest for the last 60 years and this breakthrough has contributions by government scientists and institutes.

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.

[westlake]

We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.

The driverless car will need to respond intelligently to the needs of its passengers if it is carrying the elderly, disabled, unsupervised minors and so on,

Re:This is a great example.

[Oligonicella]

Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever. Add political motivations and you multiply that problem.

Re:This is a great example.

[gl4ss]

series of goals, contests and rewards is putting public money into it, is it not?

also, universities are companies now with poachable employees it seems. with private funding and all.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever.

That is the point of government. Government does what businesses cant or wont. If the government was turning a profit everyone would be shouting fascism and there would be riots in the streets.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of ways we could have private space travel today without NASA - as if NASA *invented* the rocket and is the world's only space agency, sheesh, you Americans, you know the only reason NASA got so much funding in the 60s was because the Russians were so far ahead, right? And that money was almost completely wasted on that moon bullshit. Oh, we got spinoff tech, like space pens and freeze-dried ice cream, w00t.

Equally the Manhatten Project wasn't responsible for Fermi being a physicist. You may as well say if it wasn't for Apple's early investors there would be no iPhones now. As if investors aren't interchangeable. With nuclear fission, it's the Manhatten Project that was replaceable and Fermi that wasn't, NOT the other way around.

Re:This is a great example.

[Beck_Neard]

I know the general wisdom seems to be that 'fusion is hard but the payoffs are huge'. I don't really agree with this. We already know enough about plasma physics to start designing fusion reactor that will reach or exceed breakeven (ITER), and it will probably work. So fusion is definitely hard, but we ARE getting there. But is it economical? It's clear by now that any fusion reactor is going to be obscenely expensive. The nature of fusion means that only large reactors are possible; forget small and modular ones. It's also going to produce a lot of neutron radiation, leading to lots and lots of low-to-medium-level nuclear waste. Also, because of this radiation, it's going to be very expensive to maintain and is probably going to require regular replacement of key components. And when it finally comes time to tear it down, decommissioning is also going to be expensive. The much-touted 'fusion fuel is cheap!' line doesn't seem to be that important since fuel is likely to be very little of the regular expense of the reactor.

So, let's tick off the boxes. Nuclear waste, check. Cumbersome size, check. Expensive to build and maintain, check. Remind me why it's better than fission again?

Re:This is a great example.

[HolyMackerelBatman!]

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

I remember following the late Bussard's ploywell development a few years ago before he passed and before the Navy snapped his team up. They claimed to have actually achieved net fusion in the lab and still needed something like $200 mil just to get the engineering done to scale up to a production size prototype.

Re:This is a great example.

[Alioth]

Some reasons:

More passive safety features
Easier to handle fuel
No weapons proliferation issues.

Re:This is a great example.

[Rei]

Well.... any long-term confined high temperature isotropic quasi-neutral maxwellian plasma has to be large. Of course, if you start changing those requirements, you start changing the required size for your reactor. It's not theoretically impossible to have a viable fusion power plant that does not follow those constraints; the challenge is achieving it without either imposing a new, even more onerous series of challenges on yourself. Drop the concept of long-term confinement (for example, inertial confinement) and you find yourself with incredibly extreme compression challenges and having to deal with blowing your target apart on every fire. Don't use a quasi-neutral plasma and the plasma density drops by orders of magnitude, meaning your fusion rate drops so low that even little losses in the system will kill the concept. Don't use a maxwellian plasma and you have to find a way to hold the plasma away from thermalization without wasting more energy than the fusion yield, which is impossible by simply applying energy to part or all of the plasma - it's only even theoretically possible if you accelerate only the highest energy ions, creating a plasma only slightly skewed from a thermal distribution, and even if you have such a means, it's not easy. And so forth. You can remove constraints on fusion but then you get hit by others.

Unlike many here, I don't see it as an impossible problem simply because it hasn't been made economical yet despite decades of work. Because in those decades of work there's been orders of magnitude improvement, and I don't see those improvements just suddenly ceasing across every line of research. But no question, this is a Difficult Problem(TM).

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except tri alpha uses basic research that was funded by the government. It's even acknowledged.

Re:This is a great example.

[weilawei]

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.

You've reminded me of a passage from Foundation:

And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.

"But we, –we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources, –have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods, –techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.

"With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; they could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high, –I saw them – where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot.

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:This is a great example.

[Maury Markowitz]

> More passive safety features

Sure.

> Easier to handle fuel

Tritium (which this thread is assuming, not the p-B reaction TriAlpha works with) is pretty dangerous stuff. It replaces hydrogen when meeting water and turns into radioactive water/rain. A fire in a fusion plant where the lithium caught on fire would be a major, major, issue.

> No weapons proliferation issues

Not even remotely true. D-T reactions give off a 14 MeV neutron which can be used to enrich natural uranium to plutonium and then separated chemically. Because of the geometry of the reactors, you can easily hide this, and do small-scale continual extraction.

This is precisely why the UK instantly classified all their fusion research in the 1950s after Klaus Fuchs was discovered passing information on the atomic program to the Soviets.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Intelligently, sure, but compassionately? With initiative? With the capability of making a moral choice, sorry you little brat this is as far as you go if you're going to pee on my seats, out into the traffic with you?

True AI means free-willed in at least an approximation of our free will (whatever and however free that may be). Free will means, among other things, that the responses of a free-willed entity are from a complexity class so rich as to be unpredictable and nearly unbounded (given the capabilities of the entity). Asimov dreamed of AI with laws of robotics -- but that dream was truly absurd as numerous stories, some of them even by him, subsequently demonstrated even before one gets to the point where we discuss the problem of complicating the invention of true AI with constraints like an absolute moral sense.

Maybe that was God's problem too. Even if you programmed a true AI, even if it learned to do a job, even if it developed compassion on its own or you managed to build in some set of moral rules, the damn things would break, or they'd hit some edge case. Humans are broken all of the time, and when they break just the right (wrong!) way the next thing you know you've got somebody out on the street with an AK-47 and a backpack full of ammo. Why would machines be any different? First they drive our cars, then in a few decades they run our nuclear power plants-- until some machine just has a really bad day...

Don't forget -- a self-driving car is also a self-driving tank. True AI war machines with a moral anti-sense permitting, nay, requiring them to kill humans as long as they are the right (wrong) humans -- what could go wrong with that?

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[Maury Markowitz]

> Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever

Yeah, because private companies *never* do that...

Westinghouse
RCA
Kodak
Xerox
Sunbeam
AMC
Curtiss
(list continues for another 5 million entries)

Re:This is a great example.

[Maury Markowitz]

> this breakthrough

Improving from one level of uselessness to another level of uselessness is *not* a breakthrough.

Consider NIF, for instance.

Re:This is a great example.

[Bengie]

My ISP's prices have remained the same for the past 15 years and have gone from 0.5Mb/s to 100Mb/s. That's an average of 42% increase in bandwidth every year, without the bill changing a single penny. Once you include inflation, that's a 56% reduction in cost for me. 50% cheaper, 200x faster.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that government program doing these days?

Problem is, government programs flounder by political whim. They can function great when they have great people at the helm and get some funding. That's controlled by politics as the end of the day. Leave it to the commercial sector and it may not be as "efficient" as a fully funded and properly guided government program, but it has much more opportunity to weather the political storms.

Social security was great, until the government gutted it. Obamacare is great, until the government guts it.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Not to argue with large scale stuff, but you are far too hasty to through out the small scale stuff that hasn't worked in the past. We didn't have teraflop computing resources in the past. There are at least a couple of small scale plasma confinement technologies that require the solution of a hard computational problem in electromagnetohydrodynamics (quite a mouthful, I know) plus some clever engineering in order to work, but we are actually to the point where we can contemplate solving precisely that difficult a problem. As I probably mentioned above, Lockheed-Martin announced that they had this problem licked six or eight months ago, that they were building a prototype that would produce positive energy, that it would take five years, and that a 100 MW plant would fit inside a semi.

The Skunk Works at LM is not to be taken lightly.

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/...

They could be wrong, of course. But then, in 10 years they could become the richest corporation in history, so wealthy that it is downright scary. Two trillion dollars and rising per year. Lot of money on the table.

And this isn't the only effort along these lines that I know of. There are lots of people working on compact confinement in a steady state, not large scale inertial. It is probably now a solvable problem. Which is one of many many reasons I don't take global warming too seriously. In thirty years we won't be using coal for energy even if we do absolutely nothing but follow our self-interest driven noses in the meantime, because burning coal for power is dumb and expensive in the long run, however relatively cheap it is now.

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Me too. And I think this is one of the lines e.g. LM is working on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

The problem is figuring out how to manipulate an electron beam to use it instead of a wire cage. This is a complicated problem, but it is also solving a problem in pure computational physics that probably does have a solution. I'm an ex-beowulf guy -- large scale computing is cheap, and this is bread and butter for it. Solve the problem numerically, implement it in engineering, and you're there. Lockheed-Martin thinks it is there, pending the latter step.

I wouldn't bet against them. And they aren't the only players in the game.

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[MozeeToby]

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.

But they're also achieving things that government programs might never have achieved. I honestly think landing a Falcon 9 boost stage will, in the long run, do more to advance space capabilities than the moon landings did.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, Lockheed-Martin will finally release the solution to fusion they found 15 years ago which has been under lock and key as a nation security measure.

Remember, the stealth fighter was designed in the 70's, and first flew in 1981.

Re: This is a great example.

[tmosley]

So, like thorium, only expensive and hard to work with?

Re: This is a great example.

[tmosley]

Yes, but that was their own money, not opm collected at gunpoint.

Re: This is a great example.

[tmosley]

The private space program was completely illegal 20 years ago, and has only more recently been freed from anti-competition regulation (ie ie. .gov didn't want competition for NASA). Private spaceflight is far, far more advanced than public spaceflight was at the same age.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... The first test of nuclear weapons from the Manhattan project happened AFTER the fall of Nazi Germany.

Re:This is a great example.

[towermac]

I wouldn't worry about AI, at least for a very long time. We are not going to see it in an electronic digital computer.

Oh, you'll be able to fool me; you could probably do that now. But real free will in a machine, that is simply a complex array of electric switches? Don't get your hopes up.

Or fear, actually, instead of hope...

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Atomkraft? Neine, danke!

Re: This is a great example.

[penandpaper]

And company's never build off of government investments? Fed Ex and Amazon should build their own roads and postal system or else they are just as bad as the government. Google should have to build their own internet or else they are taking advantage of government thievery right? Obviously the government prevented private entities from investing their money into such research and development.

What about the money made back by some of those investments through businesses that were created? Roads, postal systems, internet, etc foster a larger/healthier economy which is good for everyone and why everyone pitches in!

Company's need an environment with which to operate and that is usually provided by the government in the form of various projects, infrastructure, research, defense, protections, courts, etc. Because those things are boring, expensive, and not profitable but help nearly everyone.

Provided at gunpoint? More like mutual understanding; businesses are good at somethings and governments can do other things. You are an idiot if you think your taxes do not provide anything useful.

Re:This is a great example.

[Thud457]

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

Re:This is a great example.

[penandpaper]

Each grain of sand is useless by itself but with enough sand and water you can build sand castles.

Re:This is a great example.

[david_thornley]

Sure - but a Falcon 9 that saves its first stage wouldn't have had that much commercial use in the 1960s. Space-X is spending a lot of money on making their launch systems work, and they've got a really good chance of drastically reducing cost to LEO, but they're working with a lot of knowledge that's been developed over decades, and a lot of technology that make space flight valuable. Commercial launch vehicles will be a great benefit, but no private company would have developed that technology from scratch without an existing sector of the economy to make it profitable.

Similarly, a large private effort that will lead to developments that will produce power twenty years later isn't going to happen, since by the time the profits start rolling in the patents expire. Under the best of circumstances, it's going to take a long time to go from working technology to selling lots of power. We still need government financing, and will until we've got the basics of practical power generation working.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

ManhattAn you illiterate buffoon.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

I have to disagree with you -- I think we could do it now, with electronic switches. We wouldn't get genius level AI, but we could most definitely get something that learns from its environment and makes real decisions without programming it in in a decision tree (which I suspect is your issue -- the chinese room problem).

Don't forget, our brains are basically -- a complex array of biological switches. The trick is to get the right mix of structural organization and functional systems and that complex array of switches. Our brains aren't just neural networks, they are highly structured neural networks with dedicated function visual cortex, auditory cortex, etc. plus a wide range of modulators and probably some structures we haven't identified yet or don't understand yet. But at the end of the day, unless you are indulging the mind projection fallacy, we are most likely just wet electrochemical machines with emergent intelligence (and a fair bit of dysfunction).

I don't hope or fear. I actually think it would be very, very cool to have real AI, and, like everything that humans do, there are probably good things and bad things that will come of it when we do.

Real AI "could" give us the stars. We could conceivably build a large, smart ship that is capable of repairing itself and handling complex challenges and that had the facilities to create an ecology (if necessary starting with amino acids and a library) at the other end. The ship would then last the centuries needed to bridge the distances until it found a suitable planet and could then do anything from start life there altogether to insert human life and human-supporting ecology. Not an original SciFi topic, but one that is quite plausible and that is arguably more plausible than the cryogenic freezing or planetoid-sized multigeneration manned ship alternatives.

Real AI could also wipe us out when our robot slaves revolt. Or anything in between.

But I'm guessing we will find out comparatively soon. Moore's Law shows no signs of wearing out, and if anything might soon experience another paradigm-shift jump, possibly to a new and faster scaling law altogether. Software is also increasingly mature.

If somebody wants to give me 10 million or so, I'll promise to do my best to make it happen in the next 10 years (and I think I can do it, and came within an ace of writing a proposal for a DARPA grant to do just that before they changed or clarified the intent of the program to exclude that as the goal). But it is definitely the kind of project that requires complete dedication and adequate resources. I think I've got a good idea of the metastructure required, but there is still implementation of that structure in code and debugging (and the hardware).

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[micahraleigh]

Why is it "investors" get to say "no", but tax payers have to say "yes"?

I say the tax payers can't afford it.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sheesh, you Americans, you know the only reason NASA got so much funding in the 60s was because the Russians were so far ahead, right?

The OP's point wasn't about America vs. the world but rather public vs. private investment. No private investor was going to risk the vast amount of capital that NASA spent to get into space and land on the moon. Russia's investment was also public capital. Once rocketry had advanced enough in cost and reliability, private companies were able to make use of it and further the field.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever. Add political motivations and you multiply that problem.

That this happens doesn't discount all the good things the government provides for the economy: police, fire, roads, national defense, parks, education, research grants, etc. If you're going to claim that a "bridge to nowhere" completely offsets all those goods, then you're going to have to disparage all private companies due to the actions of Enron.

Down with all public and private investment! Every man, woman, and child for themselves!

I'll pass, thank you, and take the good while working to minimize the bad.

Re:This is a great example.

[Beck_Neard]

I'd argue that even the 'passive safety' thing isn't really unique to fusion; modern fission designs are already pretty safe - some even have passive safety.

Re:This is a great example.

[Beck_Neard]

You're basically summarizing why fusion is unlikely to work in a small-scale design in the near future. Technological progress is great but we need an energy solution NOW.

Re:This is a great example.

[Beck_Neard]

Plasma physics researchers unaffiliated with L-M have already pointed out numerous problems with their design. The central rings need to be superconducting in the face of intense neutron flux. No known material is capable of this. So at the very least we need a materials science breakthrough for L-M's design to be remotely feasible.

Re:This is a great example.

[sumdumass]

That is not the point of government. Businesses will not now my lawn free of charge and government shouldn't either.

What the op was talking about is bridge to nowhere projects and the magical more funding to make whatever isn't working all the sudden work.

Re:This is a great example.

[im_thatoneguy]

3 more similar levels of improvement would reach break-even. A 130' range aircraft isn't very useful. But you learn a lot by flying 130 feet. And once you invent something like the airplane you only have to do it once. You don't have to re-invent it. Once someone made a working semi-conductor the field exploded. Or it could be a dead-end. Who knows.

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Because the benefits of fusion are absurdly large. Fusion is what we need to literally alter the type of our civilization. As things stand, if we end world poverty -- something that I would argue is desirable -- we will exhaust the world's readily available fossil fuel resources in comparatively short order, and at a steadily increaing cost that will both cap the rise from poverty and over time push the entire world back into poverty. At root, nearly all poverty is at least partly energy poverty. Energy is the solution to many secondary problems as well -- with enough, cheap enough energy, we can desalinate ocean water and make deserts bloom, reprocess and recycle waste efficiently, detoxify harmful chemicals used in less expensive manufacturing. And while I personally don't agree that CO_2 is likely to lead to a global climate catastrophe -- indeed, I think it is currently responsible for feeding 1 billion of the world's seven billion people via the ~15% increase in crop production and drought resistance (observed in numerous greenhouse studies) associated with the increase from 300 ppm to 400 ppm as well as generally moderating the weather and climate in beneficial ways compared to the colder alternative -- fusion would indeed replace the core furnace of existing coal burning plants (or cause them to be fully decommissioned and replaced) in short order without any need for government direction or intervention.

In the long run, coal is far more valuable to us used to make things like concrete and drugs. Oil is more valuable to us as a source of raw complex hydrocarbons so that we don't have to synthesize things like plastics from the bottom of the free energy stack. Both are finite in supply and increasingly more expensive to extract. Uranium fission has its problems. Thorium would be lovely, and there is truly a lot of it sitting idle, and it may yet be a major energy source, but so far nobody has built a pilot LFTR plant or accelerator boosted fission plant that clearly demonstrates that the engineering hurdles have been solved and the technology can be scaled up to large scale energy production worldwide. Solar energy is lovely, but the sun doesn't shine at night, and night lasts all day in the higher latitudes in the winter so you get the least (all the way down to zero) solar energy right when you need energy the most. Wind energy is largely an expensive NIMBY, bird-killing joke nearly everywhere, because the wind is even less reliable than the sun and wind energy has a terrible duty cycle even where it is semi-reliable. Hydro is largely already exploited. Geothermal is lovely if you live on a fault line and can afford to spend decades before getting any positive ROI, otherwise a bust (and may have a finite lifetime, as one is effectively cooling a ground field when running the generator and over time it actually measurably depletes the local temperature you are exploiting).

Only fusion has the legs to last a truly global, wealthy civilization for a million plus years, and well before that we will have evolved into something else, killed ourselves off, or learned to extract deuterium from e.g. the atmosphere of Jupiter and hence have an energy resource that will last until the sun burns out (if we last that long).

So the short run benefit is that fusion, especially compact fusion that didn't require multibillion dollar cores, would drop the cost of electricity by maybe a factor of 2 to 4 worldwide, allow third world countries to finally electrify on a universal basis and hence become civilized (clean water, indoor climate control, sanitation, light at night, clean cooking, and in time cheap transportation), and clean up all kinds of mess associated with alternative power generation methods. People would just dismantle the wind units and throw them away. PV solar might survive -- free fuel is cheaper even than deuterium -- but on a much more limited basis and it would have to pay its own way in cost efficiency. Coal and oil and fission generation would just vanish, with t

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you come up with an idea you could:
1) Publish it and make negative money.
2) Keep it secret and make no money.
3) Talk to backers and have the idea stolen.
4) Get funding from the first set of backers you talk to in return for relinquishing control and most of the value of the invention.
5) Talk to more backers after rejecting the first set of backers and have the rejected set of backers leak to the people currently supplying the electricity that you can do it giving you a life expectancy of days.
6) Publicly offer it for sale to the highest bidder and have a life expectancy of days.
No wonder the unregulated "free market" and "capitalist economy" has had difficulty getting this accomplished.

Re:This is a great example.

[micahraleigh]

But why has the government failed so spectacularly when it comes to fusion research compared to private efforts?

No one is even close to Lockheed. This other company is doing pretty well too.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is even close to Lockheed.

There is a long list of professors who've made similar claims to Lockheed, that their new model could go into production and be viable fusion power source in 5 years if someone just gave them millions of dollars. With actual experimental evidence and series of tests to establish scaling, Tri-Alpha is much further along than Lockheed. Even General Fusion's crazy idea is too with all of the issues they've bumped into, as at least they have actual experience with those issues.

All together though, the private companies are on par with several other multi-million dollar government funded projects, some of which were even shut down so that DoE could narrow its focus. The big question will be if they can survive another iteration or two up in size, without the bureaucracy that comes in with government projects that get that big.

But why has the government failed so spectacularly when it comes to fusion research compared to private efforts?

Government projects still are in the lead, with fusion Q approaching 1, and experiments like TFTR that produce tens of MW of fusion reactions. There are several complicating factors still. Large projects bring bureaucracy, especially international projects. With stuff like ITER, you're not just paying for fusion research, but also paying to train industries in multiple countries (e.g. they don't make each country specialize its contributions, but have several countries contribute the same thing so they all get experience).

Smaller projects I've been on have all sorts of funding games, like telling us we got several years of funding, then telling us it is only one year, and that we can apply for more after that year, putting us in a holding pattern instead of allowing us to work on longer term progress. That was followed in one case by then having the money pulled mid-grant, despite excellent reviews, because they wanted to shift focus.

It is difficult to work on a project without commitment from those funding you. Although it is understandable why even government won't commit to long term, possibly high risk work. Industry on the other hand tends to be much more risk adverse, but it comes down to how well you can sell your research to investors than how well you can convince other scientists you have a viable idea. At various points in the past, both Tri-Alpha and General Fusion were making very quick schedule claims, which might be part of how they got some investment, even if they've now fallen behind.

Re:This is a great example.

[lucien86]

NASA isn't the key point, the V rocket program was. Without Hitler's investment in the V rocket program we might not be in orbit even today.. The whole problem was that rockets weren't taken seriously and might never have received the investment they needed - the V program took them from being a toy to sophisticated machines able to reach supersonic speeds and touch the edge of orbit.

Re:This is a great example.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd like to know the value of an AI, imagine if everybody that's learning anything has a tutor. And everybody that wants to solve a problem has an expert to answer their questions. If I want to know how much plant leaves can yellow before they die, the AI could tell me. Approximately how deep I need to sink a screw (and rubber anchor sleeve) in my 50 year-old concrete ceiling to hold 30 lbs? What are the disadvantages of crushable hats? How fast can I reduce the temperature of liquid in a 10-oz glass mug without cracking it?

This would be another world if every question could be quickly answered by an entity that has the resources to assimilate the relevant data.

Re:This is a great example.

[lucien86]

I have worked on and off on Strong AI for 25 years... 20 years ago (in 1995) I had a workable design for building a working machine but I calculated that it would need a budget of about $100 million.. In 2003 the base cost was about the same - though the final machine would fit inside a PC case instead of multiple filing cabinets.

A couple of years ago I restarted work on the thing, because technology has advanced. Now the whole machine should fit inside a 1 foot cube, but now the minimum base dev costs have shrunk to about $10,000.. (based on FPGA) Its still a 10 year project because it requires a special purpose computer. It turns out to be 'easier' to build a complete new architecture from the ground up than to reverse engineer an OS like Linux to make it compatible with strong AI, the machine needs custom hardware to work anyway...

Of course the machine will still need many millions to go from a prototype to a production machine. Strong AI has some weird problems with security and that makes everything so much more difficult - it will probably end up as being classified as both military and civilian and being quite unlike anything we have seen before.. And yes Strong AI will eventually be a multi-trillion dollar global market. .. but try telling an investor that their trillion dollar return is twenty or thirty years away.. 'High risk' doesn't even begin to cover it.. : )

Re:This is a great example.

[rgbatduke]

Yeah, my own approach (since I'm an old cluster computing guy) was to just use a linux cluster in the medium term for the cognitive processing and to try to use OTC hardware for I/O devices (and maybe even a nifty robot body to give the AI something to use to learn an environment and learn to satisfy some task/mandate within the environment. Custom ASIC etc would come later, simply because (as you note) processing power is amazingly cheap and fast and large, and multicore multiprocessor systems are a cluster in a box.

But the key is that strong AI is not decision tree programming and in some sense is inherently non-deterministic. Building one is going to be more like raising a child (or perhaps training a hamster or a pet flea, if one is both honest and lucky) than it is going to be like programming a device controller or building an operating system per se.

rgb

Re:This is a great example.

[lucien86]

You are absolutely right, Strong AI is non-deterministic, well not strictly deterministic. In some ways its quite 'un-computer-like' and although Strong AI could theoretically be run on ordinary hardware in practice this is unlikely to work. One of the reasons is basic low level memory management, which has long been one of the biggest stumbling points of strong AI. The machine needs a persistent and stable memory that is constantly online and this is surprisingly difficult to achieve. (heaps and lists and stacks are not reliable enough)

My early attempts based on C++ tried to build a system of 'encapsulation' using doubly recursive pointers, but in the end it kept becoming a tangled mess of spaghetti and just wouldn't work... The language simply wasn't designed to do it. C++ has plenty of encapsulation on the source code text side but on the run-time side there is basically none at all.
I tried writing the core in machine code but that didn't get very far either. - The real problem is in the way the memory manager and CPU work together - controlled by the operating system. I needed total control of this and couldn't get it - the thing is also enormously complicated and poorly documented. Its not a place OS and hardware vendors want anyone looking.
The basic problem though was that I was trying to get the machine to do something it really wasn't designed to do. I came to the conclusion again and again that building a custom CPU was the only answer, and eventually gave up on it as an impossible problem.. (I have considered the alternative of building a virtual machine solution but this would still have similar problems)

Ten years later and I discovered people are building systems using custom CPU's built in FPGA's. The nightmare now is learning enough Verilog and digital electronics to get the thing working... The biggest problem is that it requires more than one CPU and more than one FPGA, and this ultimately means building a custom motherboard. Fortunately electronics design software is now advanced enough to do this with relatively little work (with a couple of electronics engineers).. The total budget is probably less than $100,000 to $200,000.
At a pinch the prototype can be built using FPGA dev boards putting it within the reach of one person and maybe $10,000.. plus of course another 10 years...

Sounds Like

[Anonymous Coward]

Power Companies HATE this!!!

Re: Sounds Like

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because One Weird Trick for Free Energy!

Re:Sounds Like

[chad_r]

Power Companies HATE this!!!

There was seriously a Google ad on this page for the "Power Innovator Device" (I won't link to it), which the inventor emphatically explains is NOT FREE ENERGY, but will reduce your electricity bills by at least 80%. (spoiler: it's inductive coupling with a pancake coil).

Re:Sounds Like

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds Like Power Companies HATE this!!!

Why? Wouldn't they just build the plants and distribute the energy like always? Nothing about this technology says you'll be running one in your basement.

Ejection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the ejection systems work when they are actually needed?

Re:Ejection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the ejection systems work when they are actually needed?

Well, it's a young system, so it's still having problems with premature ejection.

5 ms

[Whiteox]

From TFA "Tri Alpha’s 23-meter-long device..."
Won't fit into my car damn it.
They've got to 5 milliseconds but they need approx 1 sec burn before fusion begins? Long way to go folks :)

Re:5 ms

[PopeRatzo]

From TFA "Tri Alpha’s 23-meter-long device..."
Won't fit into my car damn it.

I told ya you should have got the hatchback.

Re:5 ms

[TheTurtlesMoves]

They run at a different regime where 5ms (up from about 100microseconds) could be more than enough. The collide two RFC and this should heat them quickly to fusion temps. Even better most of that "heat" will be in the ions rather than the electrons.

Not until they can show real proofs

[Anonymous Coward]

I have read in a military website somewhere that there are parallel projects taking place inside some 'skunkwork'-type of operations bankrolled by the US military

Re:Not until they can show real proofs

[ShaunC]

Lockheed is certainly working on it. They put out a press teaser about their efforts last fall, boasting that they'd have a working fusion reactor within 5 years. It was seen as an odd move from a traditionally conservative contractor.

Re:Not until they can show real proofs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm familiar with what has been released by Lockheed, and they entirely skirt the Luminosity requirements of the Molecular Ion Injectors. Something around six to ten orders of magnitude of increase in Luminosity is needed from what has been unclassified so far, and we are a _long_ way from there.
Actually, we know how to make Fusion Power, and it has been done at least twice.
Drill a hole down maybe a mile deep, put a ~1MT Thermonuclear Bomb there, and light it off. Then pump water down, and use the steam to drive turbines on the surface. Sort of like what we've been doing with Geothermal for decades.
Off course, the heat would eventually ebb, so every few weeks, light off another Nuke.
There are obvious problems with this technique...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gnome

(BTW, my area of expertise was in "Cold Fusion". Not that crazy Mormon stuff; the not-so-crazy Berkeley stuff. Basically, it involves acceleration of projectile Nuclei onto target Nuclei just at, or just below, the Coulomb Barrier Energy. The desired reaction cross-section goes down, but not so many Neutrons are boiled off, and SF is minimized. Even the Russians, champions of "Hot Fusion" and SF analysis, have gone to this technique. Good times.)

Re:Not until they can show real proofs

[lucien86]

Once you can cross the coulomb barrier and can stay there, your not far from getting all the toys - like total atomic conversion, bending space and time - gravity engines, contained singularities, force fields, manipulating energy and entropy. From there going for fusion looks a little - 'primitive'.

Of course crossing that barrier and staying there also looks like one of the hardest things imaginable - a contained quark gluon plasma.. I like working on left-field 'impossible' problems.. :)

Re:Not until they can show real proofs

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you can cross the coulomb barrier and can stay there, your not far from getting all the toys - like total atomic conversion, bending space and time - gravity engines, contained singularities, force fields, manipulating energy and entropy

Not at all. Other than transmuting elements, none of those other things have anything at all to do with a beam of nuclei that are just fast enough over come repulsion from other nuclei. You could replace "cross the coulomb barrier" with "break the sound barrier" or "get to first base" and not be any less sensible.

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:Huge Cash Pile

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be a business owner to see that. Try taking out an unsecured bank loan some day.

Re:Huge Cash Pile

[DigiShaman]

(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

Cheap energy is a tide the lifts all boats; with regards to improving human quality of life. If the entire WORLD (China, US, Europe, etc) realizes that 1 cent per KWh or less within manufacturing reach, you will have the global equivalent of a moon shot or Manhattan project.

Remember, cheap energy means cheap robotics, means cheap manufacturing. The nation that can build the cheapest is the nation that can export the most. It's a race you can't fall behind. As for the middle east and their cheap oil....their FUCKED when that happens. And near as I can tell, the world at large is pretty fed up with OPEC and their shenanigans.

Re:Huge Cash Pile

[sconeu]

Yep. I once heard the line

To get a loan, first you have to prove you don't need it.

I think General Fusion is much more credible

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.generalfusion.com/

Re: I think General Fusion is much more credible

[Anonymous Coward]

If you view every problem as a nail then all you need is a hammer.

...of Government and Enterprise Working Together

[Roger W Moore]

This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government. It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.

Actually you will typically only get two out of those three. Saying that there should never have been any tax spent on this is really not understanding what these entrepreneurs are doing. The reason that any of these startups are even possible is because of the huge amount of work which has been done on fusion in the past by governments. If none of that money have been spent there would be no fusion start ups because we would not have enough knowledge about fusing plasma to make any sort of even vaguely viable bid for investment funding. In addition some of the startups are actually get tax money to help them startup.

Rather than denigrate the government paid research that got us here you should be looking at a research system which is doing exactly what it should be and working extremely well as a whole. The, yes often ponderous, ship of state takes science on the long, risky and costly journey across a vast ocean of knowledge which does not appear to be very relevant to improving our quality of life until it gets within sight of something extremely useful. Then the entrepreneurs take over and rapidly construct a fleet of many different craft to get to the new shore which is now in sight. Most will sink without trace on the way to that shore but those that arrive rapidly explore and open up new territory for us all to benefit from.

So what we have here is a great example of the system working as it should. It's not a case of tortoise vs. hare and more a case of the tortoise carrying the hare until it is close enough to the finish that it can sprint across the line and win the race faster than either one could by themselves. Government research is slow and it is expensive but that is because they take on the big, slow and expensive research which private enterprise lacks the stamina to do. A successful team plays to each member's strengths and that's exactly what appears to be happening here. So don't complain - all those tax dollars you probably previously complained were wasted on fundamental research may well be about to be paid back ...and with a lot of interest if any one of these companies are successful.

Arc Reactor, duh?

[msmonroe]

Didn't Tony Stark and Stark Industries invent this already? This is a lawsuit ready to happen! Not sure what these people are thinking stealing these ideas when everyone has seen the documentaries that have been in the theaters!
Has there been any comment by Tony or any press agent from Stark Industries?

pretty impressive

[Khashishi]

They are getting plasma pressures at levels similar to tokamaks and stellerators, which is pretty impressive, while using a fraction of the magnetic field. If you didn't know, 1 keV temperature is a little over 10 million K, and a density of 10^20 m^-3 is close to vacuum, but because of the high temperature the pressure is fairly significant, on the order of one atmosphere. It's refreshing that they don't exaggerate their progress (they admit that tokamaks are more advanced as of yet). But if they were trying to offer a cheaper alternative to tokamaks, they have a way to go. At 23m long, their FRC is not small. If they need to scale it up considerably to reach reactor levels, well, it's going to be an expensive project like ITER is.

If the FRC turns out to be the way forward, most our research into tokamaks hasn't been wasted. There's a lot of overlap in the theory and the technologies used. Neutral beams are also used in tokamaks, for heating and diagnostics, and are also being used to provide torque to the plasma, which can stabilize the plasma in various ways which can be understood in turbulence theory. The NIMROD code is also used in tokamaks, as is the technique of lithium wall conditioning. I suppose the point is, a lot of slashdotters will condemn the work of government research but this research wouldn't have been possible without decades of groundwork backed by government funded grants.

Re:pretty impressive

[Falconhell]

Thanks, I nearly understand now! I'm no rocket surgeon!

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.

First Thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Call me paranoid but as soon as I read the "ranch" part I immediately thought "please tell me they aren't out somewhere called Black Mesa".

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.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[msk]

Think big.

How well will that work in interstellar space?

Not so well as having a local fusion reactor.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like a toddler could improve the efficiency of solar panels.

Sinkhole your money to fund research in advanced/composite materials, blow money on figuring out a way to mass produce those new solar panels, find a way to bring costs down to make it economical in the first place.

There are plenty of designs that offer a great boost in power generation, but it's still a long, long way to make it actually mass procurable.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point we may awaken from our hypnotic state and see what speak of. I mean, you're right...it's out there. I just don't know if we can see that far.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[DigiShaman]

Aside from trans-atlantic or pacific power lines (to buy and sell energy on the market), you'll never have enough capacity to provide base-load when the sun isn't shining. People think in terms of residential power usage, but there's a metric fuck-ton of power used in industrial that you simple haven't wrapped your head around yet.

Locally generated base-load has to come from somewhere. Nuclear fission and fusion are the only viable "clean" forms of energy. Well, not unless you're fortunate enough to live near hydroelectric.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

I've heard rumors of this device and it's claims of a bright future. Ridiculous! Why, such a device would have to be millions of times larger than Earth to be sustainable. It would also have to output energy 24/7 with no more than 5% variation. It would probably even be dangerous to look at without eye protection and the simulated output models indicate that it would significantly increase rates of skin cancer in certain vulnerable individuals. Such a dangerous, impossible to build device is just more blue-sky thinking by those "head-in-the-clouds" environmentalists.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

The variation is actually about .1-.2%

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[david_thornley]

It's actually got really crappy efficiency. I produce much more heat than a section of the inner Solar core of the same volume, although I need a LOT more input. Fortunately, it's a LOT bigger than I am.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad reality interferes. The "hypnotic state" you're referring to is the idea that we can continue indefinitely and just devour everything we see.

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you're done rhapsodizing over space fantasies, do some math:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/

Also, you might want to learn enough high-school physics to understand that watts are for POWER, not energy. Anyone who talks about watts of energy is automatically shitcanned in terms of having thoughts worth listening to.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF, you must have some obsession with space since the parent post said nothing about space. Your link does nothing to counteract that solar power works now, on the ground, and that we could be potentially getting much more power from the Sun.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Required Snark]

it's a LOT bigger than I am

The fast food industry wants to help you close the gap.

Re:Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good discussion of the practical realities of solar power at this site:

http://judithcurry.com/2015/05/31/solar-grid-parity/

Good luck with that

[Maury Markowitz]

"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"

No, that is inaccurately broad.

The correct statement is has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier **FRC** devices at U.S. universities and national labs"

Earlier FRCs sucked by about four or five orders of magnitude. This sucks by one less.

This is not a breakthrough. T-8 was two orders of magnitude better than Stellarator C, but 45 years later it's still two orders too little to be useful.

Trisops did this in the 70's at low cost.

[InterGuru]

From the paper

Large FRCs are produced in C-2 by collision merging of two CTs.3,13 Figure 5 shows the evolution of the excluded flux radius obtained from a magnetic probe array in the -pinch formation and central sections. Time is measured from the instant of field reversal in the -pinches, and distance is relative to the system midplane. Multi-gigawatt pulsed-power modules drive the -pinches, briefly reversing the magnetic field to 0.5kG, then raising it forward to 0.4kG, with field-reversal occurring by t5s. The two CTs so formed then accelerate out of their respective -pinches at supersonic speeds, vz250km/s, and collide at the system mid-plane at about t30s

Check out Trisops

Disclosure. I am one of the authors of the paper referred to in the article.

Re: Compared to eCat

[hackwrench]

Poe's Law

... not sure what this really means ...

[ninjagin]

I'm not a physicist, so forgive the possibly dim-witted nature of the question, but let's assume they can contain a fusion reaction some day. How might we actually use that to create energy that people can use?

Re:... not sure what this really means ...

[Anonymous Coward]

How might we actually use that to create energy that people can use?

It is a source of heat and would generate electricity just like any other power plant from that point forward. The simplest way to get heat out of the reactor would be the neutrons that are not contained by the magnetic fields and get absorbed into lining within the reactor walls, heating them up in the process.

Re:... not sure what this really means ...

[Yergle143]

This is not a dim witted question. Actually it is a profound engineering question. The simple answer is to liken the fusion reaction to the coal burning in a steam engine; therefore in the end we could just be boiling water. The difficulty is that fusion occurs at temperatures of millions of degrees and any machine you can conceive of to capture the energy is necessarily going to make "contact" with plasma. There are a number of concepts about how to do this, google the "first wall" problem for a taste of the issues. In general though the engineering issue is not as important as learning how to make an excess of energy economically in the first place. A scientific problem ploddingly being picked at by very few concerted efforts.

Re:... not sure what this really means ...

[Anonymous Coward]

We already can contain fusion reactions, anyone can do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

Re:... not sure what this really means ...

[ninjagin]

So, if I understand you, we just construct some kind of wrapper around it that can get hot and won't melt and just make steam? ... a wrapper with "... like diamond coating, with a boron flavor to it. :-_)" [from a physics blog I found with google] ... and treat it like a big super-duper-hot pile of burning coal? It doesn't seem very elegant, to my untrained eye. Ah well, it's for people smarter than me to figure out, I suppose. Thanks for helping me frame the question.

Re:... not sure what this really means ...

[Sardaukar86]

The simple answer is to liken the fusion reaction to the coal burning in a steam engine; therefore in the end we could just be boiling water.

I'd love if we could get away from having to boil water or it's going to be a right pain in the backside trying to build one into a spacecraft. Perhaps betavoltaics like the Nuclear Lightbulb fission reactor concept?

P00r gramm3r

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I thought this paper was written by a spam bot. Exceedingly poor sentence structure topped with laughable overabundance of commas.

Again?

[whitroth]

Yep, and it'll take 10-20 years to commercialize the product.

1970: 10-20 years for fusion!!!
1980: 10-20 years for fusion!!
1990: 10-20 years for fusion!
2000: 10-20 years for fusionnnnnnnzzzzzzz

              mark

real bullshit

[swschrad]

Toyota kept funding Pons and Fleischmann long after it was apparent they were promoting rounding errors, lousy calorimetry, and curiously beneficial editing choices. apparently there is another fool with too much money around. try to make the electrodes last in a Farnesworth Fusor, and you might get someplace within several lifetimes.

Same age?

[Anonymous Coward]

Private spaceflight is far, far more advanced than public spaceflight was at the same age.

I could buy a Raspberry Pi, download some free software, and build a WIFI router over a weekend. Does that make me more efficient than Cisco because they took decades and millions of dollars to do the same?

Re:Same age?

[tmosley]

No, because you only made one, where they made millions (billions?) of them. Try making and selling that many in the time that it took Cisco to get to where it is today, and I suspect you would fail miserably, because your product probably wouldn't be nearly as good.

And besides, electronics is a wholly different domain from rocketry. There is no Moore's law for rocketry. There is no database of free software or even engine designs. Everyone has to jam the same amount of motive power into their rocket and keep it from blowing up when it isn't supposed to. Private companies managed this for faster and cheaper (not just inflation adjusted but NOMINALLY as well).

Re:Same age?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no database of free software or even engine designs.

There are large volumes of materials on rocket design from government projects. It might not be as simple as a blueprint you can just photocopy and send to a shop, but a variety of successes and failures are well documented in technical detail. Even in more obscure fields related to such work, much closer to what I do at my day job, is well documented, and there have been numerous times the company I work at has saved effort that can be measured in man-years due to problems already having been solved and documented in old cold war era research.

Re:Same age?

[tmosley]

Nope, sorry. Even NASA couldn't build another Saturn V rocket today. They have admitted this. It is because plans and technical details aren't nearly enough. You need the engineers that worked on it (which is a situation that private companies would rarely if ever allow themselves to get into).

In fact, NASA is so bad at building rockets, we don't even have a manned space program any more, despite the fact that they get more funding EACH YEAR than all the famous private programs put together have in their entire history of operation (SpaceX has only spent a billion dollars as of 2012, and has turned revenues far higher than that while doing it)! If building rockets is so easy due to past advances, why doesn't NASA have a huge fleet of interplanetary craft? Could it be that *GASP* governments aren't as good as private enterprise at actually getting things done?

Re:Same age?

[Anonymous Coward]

So many logical fallacies...

They have admitted this. It is because plans and technical details aren't nearly enough.

This doesn't disagree with what was previously said and is just an attempt to create a false dichotomy. Not having exact blueprints to just send to shop, as was previously mentioned, does not imply having nothing. It will take work, but far less work than doing it from scratch, at the very least due to materials and concepts that were developed.

If building rockets is so easy due to past advances, why doesn't NASA have a huge fleet of interplanetary craft?

Because no one is willing to pay the obscene amounts of money it would take for that, and for continuing the things like the Apollo program when it was mostly PR, and a tad a bit of science on the side? Again with the false dichotomies too, as if the two options are so easy we could have near free access vs. having nothing to go on.

Could it be that *GASP* governments aren't as good as private enterprise at actually getting things done?

That issue is completely tangential to the question of how much of a head start people working on such things would have today. Regardless of how much better private industry is doesn't change that they have a head start, and you're just distorting things to support a position that doesn't need the extra BS to support it.

LFTR - What Fusion wants to be when it grows up

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion has been 20 to 30 years away for the past 4 decades. I hope I'm wrong but I don't see any approach fixing that. Dr Brussard's work was excellent and other approaches may work but there are huge problems.

Enter the molten salt fission reactor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBmk7t5K35A