Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
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.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
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.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
As real as every other company in the past who claims to generate energy with fusion? When is 3d holographic storage coming out again?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
...and with a lot of interest if any one of these companies are successful.
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
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.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
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.
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
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
You think there would have been nuclear energy in the 20th century without a Manhattan Project?
Natürlich würden wir Kernkraft haben.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
Why is Snark Required?
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).
"Who the **** put an emergency exit in the interrogation room?!" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
And that also would have been the result of a government program.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"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.
From the paper
Check out Trisops
Disclosure. I am one of the authors of the paper referred to in the article.
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.
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes