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Billionaires Are Chasing The Holy Grail of Energy: Fusion (bloombergquint.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the man-made-stars dept.

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."

32 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. This has been going on for quite a while... by mkoenecke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by KiloByte · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The explanation is simple.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    2. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful


      I lived in a grad student dorm at the University of Texas for my first two years in law school.
      .
      .
      .
      We have been hearing this about nuclear fusion since the 1950s. But *this* time it's different!

      And this is exactly why we need more science and engineers in government, and less lawyers. You lawyers think real things like Fusion energy that actually can, and eventually will revolutionize the world are just lies and pipe dreams, and a giant boondoggle made up by the Physicists. It isn't.

      The reality is that if you say its 30 years away, what that _really_ means is that it's possible, it seems within reach during a human lifetime, but there's enough unknowns and difficulties that I can't really give you a good estimate about how long it might take.

      This is a HARD problem. People were screwing around with electricity in a scientific way since 1600. Things got a bit more serious in the 1800s with the publication of Maxwell's equations. It took until the early 20th Century and inventions by Tesla and others to fully bring about our modern electric era. I don't think anyone would want to go back and tell James Clerk Maxwell or William Gilbert that what they did wasn't worthy of study since they didn't know when practical value might be made of it.

      But I'm sure there were people like yourself who laughed at the people toying with this little "electricity thing" 200 years ago. 200 years later, we've changed who we're laughing at.

    3. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by jd · · Score: 2

      First, funding keeps getting cut. If you halve spending, you double the time. That's what delayed renewables.

      You happen to remember which year the Salter Duck came out? Or when Einstein calculated the photoelectric effect? In the case of the Salter Duck, do you remember the scandal when it was revealed the nuclear industry had paid civil servants to falsify documents over energy costs by renewables? Or the funding cuts to renewables that followed?

      Give fusion the same money as is given to fossil fuel and scrap the ban on cooperation between Europe and America. As long as the game is rigged, the clock hasn't started.

      Second, we passed break even and sustained fusion is now running into either tens of seconds or minutes. But better than the 1980s.

      --
      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)
    4. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by crunchygranola · · Score: 4, Informative

      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
    5. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by jd · · Score: 2

      Total funding for fusion is $313 million per year. International cooperation is banned by the U.S.

      Total subsidies for fossil fuel are $5 trillion a year.

      If people want to complain about disproportionate funding, why is the taxpayer giving five trillion dollars to private business?

      If people want to complain about a lack of progress, get those numbers swapped round and see what happens.

      --
      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)
    6. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by nojayuk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    8. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    9. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by mukinrestak · · Score: 2, Informative

      "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

    10. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by quanminoan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    11. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "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.
    12. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by currently_awake · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Current designs of fusion reactors require expensive parts, meaning expensive power when it's eventually made to work. Solar power is cheap and readily available now, meaning it's what people will invest in. By the time they get fusion working there will be no compelling reason to use it (on Earth).

    13. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Need a better university system to make sure staff are hired on merit with skills?
      Where and how do you acquire the skills regarding fusion, if not starting as an unskilled grad student in the not working fusion research reactors?

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    14. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by jd · · Score: 2

      You'll find a lot of the technology can't be exported from America due to ITAR regulations. Doesn't matter if the U.S. is paying into ITER now, you can't retroactively install projects into a fusion facility and the workload is locked in. That was the US' doing, political whinging and mincing around in revenge for France refusing to commit illegal acts.

      Once a project is abandoned, that's it, there is no catch-up. At least, not at same cost. It would require practically rebuilding ITER and the U.S. didn't provide funds for that. Fusion research isn't like making a baking soda volcano, you can't miss bits off and come back later. You do it right or you do it over at twice the cost.

      --
      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)
    15. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by crunchygranola · · Score: 2

      Break-even was passed about a decade ago.

      The mini reactor that came out of MIT recently is the one to look at.

      No fusion system of any kind has reached breakeven yet, which is Q=1 (power being released by the fusion reactions is equal to the required heating power). This is what the term "breakeven" means, unless qualifications are added to make it mean something else (to define lower bars to clear, generally, as at NIF), And classic breakeven, Q=1, is what ITER will do. Currently the highest Q value was JET (Joint European Torus) with 0.67.

      You should have "looked it up" yourself, if you had you would have found you mis-remembered. No such thing happened. I think you are remembering something real, but you misinterpreted it. In papers on the plasma geometry of the MIT Alcator C-Mod (the MIT mini reactor to which you are referring) there are references to an esoteric plasma geometry parameter call the "inverse rotational transform profile (q)" or the "central safety factor q0" which indeed has values greater than 1, but this lower case q has nothing to do with Q, breakeven.

      This is not to run down the MIT Alcator C-Mod, which is what you must be referring to - it holds the world record for volume averaged plasma pressure (2.05 bar). But ITER will hit 2.6 bar, over a much larger volume (830 cubic meters as opposed to one cubic meter in Alcator C-Mod).

      But other tokamaks (like JET, above) have set other records: Tore Supra tokamak in France holds the record for the longest plasma duration time (6 minutes and 30 seconds), the Japanese JT-60 achieved the highest value of the fusion triple product. All of these are pushing forward some of the requirements of a successful demo power plant. ITER is the attempt to bring all of these together in one system.

      All of this research has advanced the state of the art of tokamaks, moving toward reaching true breakeven.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
    16. Re:This has been going on for quite a while... by AHuxley · · Score: 2

      Most advance nations facing a new area of science usually find the very best people they have, give them jobs and money.
      Advance nations quickly work out if they can support a project over years of decades.
      The "budget" part for science when not at war usually sets some real world limits on expert staffing and the amount of new equipment.
      So take the science "budget" and consider how much can go towards one new project.
      Find the very best people and see if they get any results over years, a few decades within that amount of science spending.

      Why would any advanced nation staff any long term project with below average staff for decades and still expect results?

      Advance nations with the best skills have an ability to look after projects over decades and see if their spending is getting real world results.

      Tax payers money is not unlimited in most nations. Getting another nation or nations to keep on investing is not unlimited if no results are found.
      Private investment would also like to see some results in the short to long term for their money.
      That all needs the very best staff in advanced nations who can show they can manage "science" and who have decades of getting results for such investments.
      By governments looking after tax payers money every year. By investors expecting a return at some later date on their investment.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    17. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by crunchygranola · · Score: 2

      Also I tend to believe with some older critics that a tokamak will never be commercially viable:

      I support the ITER project but I absolutely believe (because of the estimates made by ITER proponents) that it will never be commercially viable. We won't get grid power from fusion in this century. But proving that we cab use fusion to produce energy, even if at a high cost, is still a worthwhile project. Not every part of the solar system has lots of solar power and wind.

      --
      Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
    18. Re: This has been going on for quite a while... by stealth_finger · · Score: 2

      If people want to complain about disproportionate funding, why is the taxpayer giving five trillion dollars to private business?

      Because the taxpayer doesn't actually decide where the money goes and the fossil industry have much better lobbyists

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
  2. I don't think billionaires are who we should rely by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  3. Oh, I should probably add by rsilvergun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  4. Good but by andyh · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re: Good but by jd · · Score: 2

      They did. Vanadium batteries (Tesla) and hydrogen storage (everyone else).

      --
      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)
    2. Re:Good but by blindseer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So what you're saying is that we need to make the solar to fuel conversion more efficient?

      Sure, let's go with that. How long will it take to make that technology work as compared to, and I'm just giving this as an example, building some nuclear power plants to replace some natural gas power plants. We'd be burning less natural gas, and the gas we save would not have to be synthesized by some not yet proven viable technology. We'd still be burning some natural gas, but then we'd also be burning natural gas while waiting for this solar to fuel conversion technology to develop.

      I keep hearing that nuclear power is worthless because it would take 10 years to complete a nuclear power plant if we started today. That's bullshit but I will concede that point for this discussion. I'll ask again, how long will it take for this solar to fuel technology to come? How long until we will see the energy storage systems of any type to get deployed and allow us to use wind and solar to replace coal? I keep hearing that it could take 10 to 20 years.

      So, we can wait for wind and solar but not wait for nuclear? What a pile of bullshit. What happens if this technology doesn't come? Where is the plan B in this? Do we then allow nuclear power plants to get built? Or, can we wait another 10 to 20 years while we keep burning coal and natural gas?

      We will need fuel synthesis infrastructure whether we deploy more nuclear or not. The difference is we can pray at the altars of wind and solar in the hope they will save us, or we can include nuclear power in on the deal just in case the gods don't smile upon us.

      --
      I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
  5. The old tag line as follows: by CFD339 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  6. The Cold Fusion Cycle by AlanObject · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. General Fusion by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... 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. . . .
  8. fusion is great, but,,, by WindBourne · · Score: 2

    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.
  9. We already have a huge fusion reactor... by ffkom · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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.

  10. Problem already solved by manu0601 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We already know how to harness power from fusion. The technique is called "solar panel".

  11. Re:If nuclear fission power is good for Iran? by currently_awake · · Score: 2

    The Democrats are not supporting nuclear in Iran, they are supporting supervision so they don't make bombs. Trump wants to kill the supervision so he can claim they have the bomb and start a war.

  12. Re: Things to consider by jd · · Score: 2

    Wikipedia is unreliable. I use silly things like research papers.

    --
    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)