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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."
The explanation is simple.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
ITER isn't a demonstration fusion power reactor, it's a fusion testbed built to power-reactor scale in terms of dimensions and energies. It's expected to show energy returns of 10 to 1 (so-called Q factor) sustained for hundreds or thousands of seconds. Whether it succeeds or not in an unknown, in part that's why it's being built. One school of thought says going big simplifies things and makes sustainable plasma fusion easier, another more pessimistic school says going big reveals more problems. The "E" in ITER stands for "Experimental" after all.
If ITER shows tokamak fusion is practical then comes DEMO, a fusion reactor that will produce electrical power. Once the bugs are shaken out of that hardware then comes PROTO, the first-generation commercial fusion generating plant. That's the current road-plan, whether it survives reality is another matter.
ITER's "first light" should be in 2025 or so if all goes well. It probably won't though.
The US provides about 9% of the funding for ITER, nowhere near half. That funding is subject to political infighting -- for example the US wanted the ITER prototype to be built in Japan, the rest of the consortium other than the US and Japan wanted it built in Cadarache in France. When the invasion of Iraq kicked off and France refused to support Bush's Excellent Arabian Adventure the US government shut down funding contributions to ITER and bailed from the consortium but rejoined later. Currently the US is in arrears with its payments to the ITER project.
From Physics Today: "Since rejoining ITER in 2003, the US has never come close to providing annual contribution levels commensurate with its 9% ownership share. Through FY 2017, it has contributed a total of $1.1 billion. ITER spokesperson Laban Coblentz says the US made no cash contribution to support operations at the French site in FY 2016 or 2017, and the unpaid balance for the two years stands at $65 million. In addition, the US in-kind contribution in 2017 fell short by about $50 million. Five member nations - China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia - have the same ownership share as the US, and Coblentz says those countries are pulling their weight. As the host, the European Union is paying nearly half of ITER's cost."
America's political instability with its whipsaw changes in government makes it a liability in long-term international scientific collaborations for this reason.
I used to work in fusion, the engineering problems that need to be overcome before we have a working commercial reactor are tremendous. Also I tend to believe with some older critics that a tokamak will never be commercially viable:
http://www.askmar.com/Robert%2...
Computer modeling has been a tremendous help, but we do not have the capability to simulate a working tokamak reactor yet. We don't even have a complete understanding of plasma physics, for example modeling disruptions and ELMs in reactors can't yet be done to the best of my knowledge. Simulation generally needs very complex monte carlo models that simulate chemistry and nuclear interactions, magnetohydrodynamics (electric-magnetic "fluids"), etc.
Better magnets help shrink the size and may help reach new operational modes more easily, but this field is unbelievably slow. The current state of the art is Nb3Sn, and the material was discovered over 50 years ago. To get good magnets made from HT superconductors you're looking at a few more decades. This is one issue with the MIT arc design, the magnets required can't quite be made yet by the looks of it. Also the cables are tremendously expensive, Nb3Sn roughly $1k/m
Better materials help, but the radiation coming from a nuclear fusion reactor cannot be simulated offline to help develop new materials. Think an order of magnitude more nuetron flux than fission, but also proton bombardment and helium bubbles forming. Using a spallation neutron source may get the neutron flux, but not the proton flux etc. Best way is to try out new materials in the reactor...
We're nearing 100 years of trying to make fusion work, it's just the most difficult problem humanity has ever tried to solve. The first real attempt at building a fusion reactor was in 1938 by Kantrowitz. I am excited by these new companies in the US and UK that are going back the the drawing board and throwing out the tokamak, but I still don't see it happening in my lifetime.
"Billionaires don't actually have enough money to meet the projection, but assuming their money is two or three times better than anyone else's money, fusion should happen in ten years or it's bunk."
There is a way in which a billionaire's money can be better than other money, in that if all the money is coming from a single individual, that usually translates into the major decisions being made by a single individual. Those decisions may be good or they may be bad, but at least you won't have half of the money/influence fighting against the other half and the project going nowhere as a result. And if the individual's decisions are mostly good, that means a lot of progress can be made in a relatively short period of time (see Tesla, SpaceX, Waymo, etc)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.