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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."
So which of the three methods outlined in this 1976 clairvoyant report, from the which this magic graph was lifted, is the method that will provide us with practical fusion energy: is it the theta pinch, the mirror machine or the tokamak? Did you ever look at the actual report?
As it happens there is well funded effort to build a tokamak, which should demonstrate break-even in about 20 years. It is called ITER, and is mentioned in the summary. Unlimited funding would reduce the schedule but is unlikely to cut it in half no matter how much money was provided, since lots of experimentation will be needed to work out the technical issues. The roughly 226 tokamaks that have been built (yes, a lot of work has been done, and amazingly the U.S. government is not the only source of funding for research in the world) have provided a lot of experience to work with but more work needs to be done as it scales up.
The other two concepts in the document are dead as viable approaches at present.
The report envisions that a total of $65 billion (current dollars) would be needed (pretty much regardless of funding schedule) to produce a demonstration fusion reactor, the actual US expenditure since that time has been about $30 billion, but of course a large chunk of that (about $10 billion) went into the dead-end NIF which failed.
ITER expects to build that demonstration fusion reactor for a total cost of about $20 billion, and has a solid technical case to support it.
But the report writers, making a pitch for extravagant funding, really had no idea what funding or schedule made sense because they were guessing about technical feasibility of any of the concepts.
It is time to give this chart a decent rest.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
The core funding, materials sourcing and engineering of ITER is Europe-based hence the decision to place it in Cadarache, an established nuclear fission research hub (not far from Nice on the Mediterranean coast) which already has a lot of useful engineering facilities and skilled workforce present. Locating ITER in Japan and earthquake-proofing the facilities would have involved much more cost as well as exascerbating the movement of personnel. As a contributor nation Japan provides only 9% of the material and staffing inputs to the project meaning the EU which provides 45% would have to ship large components, researchers, engineers etc. half-way around the world back and forth. Not a goer but since the US had a hate on for France after the Iraq invasion the actual choice of site was delayed while the US worked its way through its temper tantrum.
"The US provides about 9% of the funding for ITER, nowhere near half."
The person you replied to didn't claim the US provided half the funding, but that their removal of their funding caused half the project to shut down. Having a project lose almost 10% of their promised funding can shut down more than 10% of it. In some cases it can shut down 100% of it