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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."

15 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 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
    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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.
    8. 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).

    9. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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. . . .
  4. 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.

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

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

  6. 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.