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Billionaires Are Chasing The Holy Grail of Energy: Fusion (bloombergquint.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Zorro shared this article from Bloomberg:
Not long before he died, tech visionary Paul Allen traveled to the south of France for a personal tour of a 35-country quest to replicate the workings of the Sun. The goal is to one day produce clean, almost limitless energy by fusing atoms together rather than splitting them apart. The Microsoft Corp. co-founder said he wanted to view the early stages of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Cadarache firsthand, to witness preparations "for the birth of a star on Earth." Allen wasn't just a bystander in the hunt for the holy grail of nuclear power. He was among a growing number of ultra-rich clean-energy advocates pouring money into startups that are rushing to produce the first commercially viable fusion reactor long before the $23 billion ITER program's mid-century forecast. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel are just three of the billionaires chasing what the late physicist Stephen Hawking called humankind's most promising technology.
Scientists have long known that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry, but development costs have been too high for all but a handful of governments and investors. Recent advances in exotic materials, 3D printing, machine learning and data processing are all changing that. "It's the SpaceX moment for fusion," said Christofer Mowry, who runs the Bezos-backed General Fusion Inc. near Vancouver, Canada. He was referring to Elon Musk's reusable-rocket maker. "If you care about climate change you have to care about the timescale and not just the ultimate solution. Governments aren't working with the urgency needed."
The company Allen supported, TAE Technologies, stood alone when it was incorporated as Tri-Alpha Energy two decades ago. Now it has at least two dozen rivals, many funded by investors with a track record of disruption. As a result, there's been an explosion of discoveries that are driving the kind of competition needed for a transformational breakthrough, according to Mowry.
The article reports one fusion company founded last year by six MIT professors is "confident they'll be able to produce a prototype of a so-called net energy reactor by 2025."
Scientists have long known that fusion has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry, but development costs have been too high for all but a handful of governments and investors. Recent advances in exotic materials, 3D printing, machine learning and data processing are all changing that. "It's the SpaceX moment for fusion," said Christofer Mowry, who runs the Bezos-backed General Fusion Inc. near Vancouver, Canada. He was referring to Elon Musk's reusable-rocket maker. "If you care about climate change you have to care about the timescale and not just the ultimate solution. Governments aren't working with the urgency needed."
The company Allen supported, TAE Technologies, stood alone when it was incorporated as Tri-Alpha Energy two decades ago. Now it has at least two dozen rivals, many funded by investors with a track record of disruption. As a result, there's been an explosion of discoveries that are driving the kind of competition needed for a transformational breakthrough, according to Mowry.
The article reports one fusion company founded last year by six MIT professors is "confident they'll be able to produce a prototype of a so-called net energy reactor by 2025."
you'll drop the dead-end Tokamaks and back these guys
http://generalfusion.com/
Their work hasn't prepared them to deal with anything as small as your balls.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I lived in a grad student dorm at the University of Texas for my first two years in law school. The first year a grad student in physics gave a talk about the viability of nuclear fusion energy production. He said that about thirty years before then people optimistically predicted that it would be dominating energy production thirty years from then, but that the science had advanced fairly dramatically, and he thought within another thirty years or so we really would see it. By the way, that was in 1981. We have been hearing this about nuclear fusion since the 1950s. But *this* time it's different!
TANSTAAFL
on for a major leap in human civilization. We did that for hundreds (thousands?) of years and progress was really, really slow. It took the government to get us to the moon. That's just because it's really, really expensive to do basic research and it takes a long time to pay off. The occasional board aristocratic (which, let's face it, is what these folks are) is about as good a system as watery tarts handing our swords.
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"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
it's fine if they want to spend money on the research. I'm all for it. I just don't want to rely on them for major breakthroughs, which with the last 40 years of nonstop tax and science funding cuts seems to be what we're doing.
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Only if you're Jamie Croft or Yasmin Pires.
Nothing against chasing this dream however I'd like a few billionaires to invest in the storage of energy that we can currently harvest - solar, wind - types of energy that we have available in abundance right now, but where the difficulty is storage.
For the last 60 years. Even after the energy balance problem is solved, the material science problem dealing with the high energy neutron (14.1 MeV for DT burn) will be interesting.
They can contact the Institute for the Study of Creimer's Sex Life.
FUSION: It's the energy of the future, now and forever!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Given the multiple dimensions of plasma state spaces that describe possible approaches to fusion: Several have been shot down by papers quickly published by a few government sponsored think-tanks. With no R&D being done. A few key parts of technologies needed to investigate these approaches are covered by ITAR. Now, have your board of directors try to raise venture capital to investigate some approach when some reports with questionable provenance will be presented to shoot down your ideas.
Find some billionaire willing to take a risk. But none of these people actually have fortunes that exist in a vacuum. Investigate the wrong technologies and your personal equity funds could be frozen by the SEC/IRS.
Two motives to consider: Existing energy companies will not be happy if someone pulls the rug out from under their business. And some of the paths that lead to fusion power also have the potential to produce a fusion bomb without the need for a fission primary.
We might be able to make use of the energy it produces
Over the last 40 years I have observed that there has been a breakout, breathless story about a "cold fusion breakthough" every 5-7 years. It is always the same.
News releases, predictions, opinions, completely math-less pictures and descriptions of the "product" and either calls for investment or confident predictions of investors. It is always going to change the world in the next 6-months to 2-years time frame.
In the past several cycles you get youtube videos. The most interesting thing about them is the variation in video production values. (Pro tip: if it has background music it is definitely a snow job.)
Then nobody is able to reproduce the results that the original team reported. Or if they even tried they point out that the energy gain that came out of the rig wasn't the result of fusion it was something else.
That's the Cold Fusion Cycle. It has been about 5 years so I guess we are due.
1. The total money spent on fusion research since 1960 is about 1% of the annual subsidy given to fossil fuels.
2. Break even was passed about a decade ago.
3. The current record for sustained fusion is 22 seconds or 2 minutes, depending on whether you believe the Chinese.
4. Mini fusion reactors which reduce the stability problem were announced a few weeks ago.
5. Renewables had just as many problems when their funding was throttled.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Congratulations on finding an (1) example of government driving technological advancement. Others would be the Internet, and (some) military weaponry.
But, you also have automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors/microprocessors, and an endless list of other areas that started with, and have been largely advanced through private funding.
sig: sauer
Are you a retard? Pharmaceuticals and semiconductors are built off a vast wealth of knowledge developed from government funded research. Modern cars are created using finite element and computational fluid dynamics models all payed for with government funding.
... Christofer Mowry, who runs the Bezos-backed General Fusion Inc. ...
Because Captain Fusion sounds like a Marvel character and Admiral Fusion sounds like a cereal.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You don't get a choice. Taxpayers consistently vote to give more power to the wealthy.
Ultimately, the only enterprise they can replace the CEO of, the only enterprise they can pressure into their agenda, is tg e enterprise they're determined to make smaller.
Power is a function of wealth and if you're not going to work collectively to have effective power through common wealth, the rich will take power through their individual wealth. You can't arm-wrestle a gorilla.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That's a fine sentiment and all. But in the US, the current administration has abdicated its responsibilities on the scientific fronts. Worse, it is deliberately fighting to regress on environmental, clean energy, and climate science; all of these being... you know... hoaxes perpetrated by China to "hurt our economy". LET'S GO ROLL SOME COAL!!!
And before you get all high and mighty, much of the rest of the world is on the regressive path too. For example: Brazil just fell to same sort of right-wing thuggery we're suffering, the Philippines did too, when it elected Duterte, the UK voted for Brexit, Le Pen came dangerously and depressingly close to winning in France, and the suggestions of likely successors of Merkel in Germany are not good.
Given the dismal state of our supposed "leadership" in the government; I'd rather sign on with, and place my trust in, Cook, Musk, Bezos, Pichai, and the like, myself versus the the regime currently occupying DC.
Imagine all the people...
it will take a lot longer than ppl think. As it is, fusion is right around the corner.
In the mean time, the CO2 is building up. We need to chase 4th gen fission here and now. If Gates really cared about AGW, he would be funding Flibe energy, and Thorcon, Both of these can not only use thorium (and we have plenty already mined), but also 'nuke waste' . In fact, we can burn up a lot of that waste.
BUT, these billionaires are doing little to nothing on this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't the situations referenced in the article suggest that you're dead wrong? ITER is the alternative and it's not happening fast *enough*. It took billionaires to move things along more quickly.
I worry more about a company controlled by someone like Allen solving the problem and then controlling the tech, and the power produced by it.
150 years ago, anyone could drill a well, and yet still we ended up with near monopolies like Standard Oil.
Sure, private enterprise and private investment are all well and good, but we need government investment and government research for the benefit of everyone. That's what our government is for, after all. Even if some people seem to have forgotten that. It's even in the US Constitution (Section 8).
Maybe this time it's really 10 years away, it we're measuring in dog years 70 years is 10 years, so we're almost there...
Anytime you smash atomic particles together (fission or fusion) you produce a ton of energy and a ton of high energy particles (radiation).
Look at the sun, it runs on fusion -- but without our atmosphere and magnetic field, our planet would be bathed in radiation and life on our planet would be much different (if it existed at all, and that's from 93m mi/150m km away). As it stands now, humans have finally decided that things like skin cancer are a major concern -- and that's the sun's fusion radiation from that distance through our atmosphere and magnetic field. If you think fusion is so 'clean' then why do you wear sun block?
So please stop spouting that fusion is 'clean energy.'
P.S. And if your definition of 'clean' means 'zero-carbon,' we already have that -- it's called fission.
That didn't end well for Otto Octavia.
Solar energy is very inefficient and the mining of the necessary rare earths for the panels and batteries produces sizeable amounts of CO2, along with deadly toxins and radioactive waste.
The atmosphere also limits how much you can get. You need something in space, but transferring the energy back would require a tight-beam microwave laser that would disrupt the atmosphere and incinerate anything that came near. What could go wrong?
Solar is only useful if you build a Dyson ring.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Eat a fat bag of cocks.
Remember the giant laser bay in Tron? The one where Flynn gets zapped into the computer? That was filmed at the SHIVA laser facility at Lawrence Livermore, a machine built to attempt to reproduce the conditions on the sun to get fusion going. It didn't work. The government built a larger laser at the National Ignition Facility. It went way over-budget and took forever to build. It also didn't work.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
That is all the billionaires are after. Fusion has been established as a field where huge amounts of cash are thrown around with little actual oversight, being clouded with cybercrud, bafflegab, and other general technical bullsh*t as cover. So of course they would like to be there to scrape off a few billions for themselves with less chance of being successfully sued than in their other endeavors.
... which operates for free, and at a safe distance. It provides way more energy than mankind requires. All we need to do is collect it, and we are getting increasingly good at that.
Governments fund universities, and quite a bit of private sector research as well. The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs is used as one of the prime examples of private technology development, but even then Shockley did a lot of work on radar for the US government during the war (as did Bell itself), some of which was actually at Columbia University.
Would it surprise you if they did it just for the patents? Then they could "tin-foil hat" : keep the proles from using it. Then the elite could keep the energy costs high, and control the supply. Or protect the current interests from "free" energy.
Perhaps that's a bit tin-foil for me, but...
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
The physics of fusion is well understood - the combination of temperature, pressure and time needed are known. Plasma fusion machines generally scale to better performance with size, so the question becomes what field configuration meets the net energy generation requirements at the lowest system cost (presumably related to size).
There are some tricks - hot ions fuse, hot electrons just radiate energy, so there are various tricks to keep the ion temperature hot relative to the electron temperature (neutral beam injection, colliding torouses, etc). In the end though it comes down to needing do a very detailed analysis of the various field configurations to understand what works best. This is somewhat limited by the extreme computational difficulty of numerically modeling plasmas.
Its *not* something where a generally smart person can look at a field configuration and decide if it is better.
Implosion fusion is also well understood - need time, pressure, temperature. This again scales better with larger (more expensive) machines. In general these machines are limited by Rayleigh- Taylor instability which causes the compression to not work as well as would naively be expected. Rayleigh taylor is pretty universal - you can see it pouring cream on coffee, or in the crab nebula. Mostly the issue is finding he least expensive driver: lasers, ion beams, etc.
Intermediate solutions, (forming plasmas, then compressing them with magnets, metal jets whatever) combines the two. These are even harder to analyze but its not impossible that one will turn out to be better. Again, this is too complex to just look at and say "that looks like a great idea".
Otherwise muonic fusion is painfully close to working, but still looks impossible. Cold fusion is exceedingly unlikely to work.
I'm happy to see renewed interest in fusion, but it doesn't feel to me like a problem that needs clever ideas - I think its too well understood for that (though I'm happy to be proven wrong).
If we had free, unlimited power. I can imagine we might be able to stop building terrible power plants.
We might be able to build carbon capturing devices. I'm not sure, I'm not a science man.
With the 'magic' of fusion, we might be able to turn the tide, I think, but we're otherwise entirely doomed.
Also, it's been coming in 50 years, for easily 50 years.
We already know how to harness power from fusion. The technique is called "solar panel".
I'm seeing the Democrats in America giving Iran support for their civil nuclear power program. They aren't working on fusion, they want fission, and the Democrats want them to have it.
Why would a nation so rich in energy need nuclear fission? They have lots of sun, and wind, and hydro. Why support a nuclear power program in Iran? If Iran can have nuclear power then why not Americans? If the American Democrats were consistent then they'd be supporting nuclear power everywhere, not just in Iran. And everywhere would include the USA.
When Iran does get this nuclear power then what will they do with the waste? We have our own waste problems here but the Democrats are opposing the construction of facilities to process and contain the waste. I assume Iran will need such facilities as well. Can't all nations have facilities to dispose of radioactive waste?
Fusion is a nice idea, and I'm not going to tell private individuals how to spend their money. It sure would be nice if the government spent some of the money I send them to solve this nuclear waste problem. There's only two ways to dispose of the waste, bury it or consume it in neutron bombardment. Both solutions require facilities to process the waste. Democrats won't fund it here but they will in Iran.
This makes me wonder what the Democrats plan to do with all this plutonium we are supposed to dispose of by treaty? Do they plan to sell it to Iran? That seems to be the plan if Iran can have these facilities but we can't.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
An orbital ring with tethers to the ground for the power cables would manage orbital solar. Or you could build solar on the ground, with batteries, for 1% of the cost with the same capacity. We know how to make stuff without releasing polution, it's just a cost problem.
An orbital ring with tethers to the ground for the power cables would manage orbital solar.
Might be doable in another 1,000 years, maybe (probably) more.
Do you have any idea how much mass it would take to build a ring...even a small one...around the Earth at geosynchronous orbit altitude so the ring is relatively stationary enough for tethers/elevators?
Do you propose we break up the Moon for the materials or boost a middling-sized Earth-continent's-worth of mass into orbit?
I am still working on the first stages and looking for funding (billionaires welcome), but here you have a sample ad giving a good idea about it:
Billionaire, are you looking for something relevant to do with your life? Do you have the feeling that something is missing? Are you tired of non-billionaire people only caring about your money? Do you want to be much more than just stinky (;)) rich? Are you looking for that world-changing endeavor providing the endless stream of blind admiration about which you have always dream?
Join BLFSD (Billionaires Looking For Something to Do)! You can give a profound meaning to your life for a reasonable entrance fee! Just 1 of your billions! (Full property of a big enough island might be accepted. Ask about our discounts for groups of 3 or more billionaires. Additional fees might apply). Our team will surely find that big idea on which you can put your money and hopes! Don't miss this opportunity and call us now!
LOL, LOL, etc.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
my guess is that we already have fusion.
it's just taking so long because the people invested cannot agree on the "milking cow" strategy.
it's abit like what happend with wireless phones:
do we add a display on the first generation? should we add better battery types before or after we add the camera?
should we increase the display 100% before adding the front facing camera or after adding wifi? etc.
fusion has mostly probably been thought out already, now it's just about agreeing about the "iteration plane from 1G the size of football field all the way to private airplanes/drones powered by pizza box sized fusion in generation 6 or so ..."
how best to sell and market the tiny improvements from generation to generation for maximum profit : )
Make that: ... (about five, IIRC).
It also substantially improved the reliability and maintainability. (For starters, you can shut down the magnet, warm it up, open it up, disconnecting the windings, replace the reaction chamber liner, put it back together, cool them down, and resrart it. You don't have to replace the winding after one use.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Note how quickly CFL bulbs were eclipsed by LEDs. Perhaps those who spent all that money developing them and the production facilities to make them in quantity were behind the incandescent bulb bans. They knew that LEDs were fast approaching and desperately needed to recoup their investment before it became worthless. So too will solar and wind power once fusion comes online which would explain the insane push to legislate their adoption.
Vast amounts of cheap energy are essential for advanced civilization. Solar and wind aren't going cut it for first-world nations.
It was part of the ICF program, that tried to duplicate the conditions for fusion on the sun.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
First thing that comes to mind when I hear "Fusion"....Elisabeth Shue
Solar energy is very inefficient
So what? The only numbers that matter are watts/dollar and Wh/environmental impact. Solar wins on both levels.
and the mining of the necessary rare earths for the panels and batteries produces sizeable amounts of CO2,
Only small quantities of rare earths are used, and the quantities are falling over time as the technology advances. Some panels already use no rare earths.
along with deadly toxins and radioactive waste.
Manufacturing anything of any complexity does that. Building nuclear plants produces large quantities of CO2 and toxins and operating them produces radioactive waste. Solar panels produce less of all of that stuff, and they produce none in operation. In current days, panels are required to break down gracefully if landfilled, e.g. not doing substantial leaching.
The atmosphere also limits how much you can get. You need something in space, but transferring the energy back would require a tight-beam microwave laser that would disrupt the atmosphere and incinerate anything that came near. What could go wrong?
Well, for one thing, your understanding of the issues involved could go grossly out of whack. Transferring the energy back would not require a tight-beam "microwave laser", which BTW is called a "MASER". There's no such thing as a "microwave laser", because microwave means a specific frequency range which is outside the range commonly known as "light" (IR through UV.) You would use an unfocused antenna array to power a broad rectenna array located here on the planet. A single satellite would literally be incapable of cooking anything.
Solar is only useful if you build a Dyson ring.
This is not only provably but obviously false. People are making quite good use of solar right now in contexts both celestial and terrestrial, at scales both micro and macro, and at economic levels both lofty and lowly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Solar energy is very inefficient and the mining of the necessary rare earths for the panels and batteries produces sizeable amounts of CO2, along with deadly toxins and radioactive waste.
No rare earths in solar panels, or in any battery technology considered for grid scale. No radioactive waste being produced. No "deadly toxins" that cannot be destroyed (and in fact generally are eliminated in modern plants". And no, it is not CO2 negative, even if dirty energy is used to manufacture.
Fusion power plants however use a lot of rate exotic materials, and their very high capital cost means lots of CO2 before they start operating. Odd that you don;t think that counts against them.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Old joke:
How do you make a million dollars, quickly and easily?
Start with one billion dollars, then invest that in fusion research!
Slashdot comment in 2010: ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks.
From 2009: Mismanagement? Quote:
"The ITER project was sold on the basis of a much earlier delivery and much lower cost than predicted today. Now the number of years of work till the first full test is estimated to be the entire length of the scientist's careers. That's very convenient for the scientists, and very inconvenient for the taxpayers who pay every franc and mark."
Maybe a bit of a reminder is needed here. This isn't really about physics rather than engineering. The physics of fusion is well known. So we're not really talking the physics, we're talking about the engineering needed to contain the energy and make it useful.
Creating a fusion bomb was reasonably easy in comparison since it wasn't about containment but release. The Sun is just a major bomb continuously going off..its "contained" by the universe and gravity. To make it useful on earth we'd rather not have an uncontrolled fusion reaction going off on the earth.
Hopefully with enough private money and new technologies, material sciences etc. We'll solve the problems.
I've been working for a few years on a totally new fusion reactor design. I can't find anyone that is interested in even helping me simulate it better... it feels like I'm invisible.
I keep thinking about how much it could mean on the off chance it actually works... what are the odds? 1 percent? Even a 1 percent chance deserves a look right?
Instead, nothing. Nobody cares and I've lost a lot of faith in humanity.