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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.
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.
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?
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