Mystery Company Blazes a Trail In Fusion Energy 144
sciencehabit writes: Of the handful of startup companies trying to achieve fusion energy via nontraditional methods, Tri Alpha Energy Inc. has always been the enigma. Publishing little and with no website, but apparently sitting on a cash pile in the hundreds of millions, the Foothill Ranch, California-based company has been the subject of intense curiosity and speculation. But last month Tri Alpha lifted the veil slightly with two papers, revealing that its device, dubbed the colliding beam fusion reactor, has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs. 'They've improved things greatly and are moving in a direction that is quite promising,' says plasma physicist John Santarius of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean a reward other than the trillion or so dollars a year a serious commercial fusion generator would bring?
Private entrepreneurs might eventually solve the problem, but -- it is a hard problem. The rewards for solving it, though, have never been in doubt. However, so far the problem has been a bottomless pit for investment no matter who has been making it, with literally no believable path in sight to a profit. If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.
Unless or until, of course, somebody has a real breakthrough idea or can solve one of the known "hard problems" that are blocking some of the more promising lines. Lockheed-Martin has openly claimed that they will solve the fusion problem within 5 years. They've got some very smart people working for them. Maybe they are right. Maybe not.
rgb
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If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.
Maybe, but the other possibility is that the model has always been wrong.
It was always assumed, "we're going to put thing n into space" - how much is that going to cost?
When the question instead became, "we're going to put things into space for $50M - how are we going to do that?" a whole new engineering methodology unfolded.
I've spent time at a plasma physics lab - they're amazing
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
If NASA never existed, do you think there would be any private space exploration today, much less "putting something in space for $50M"? You think there would have been nuclear energy in the 20th century without a Manhattan Project?
It's easy for a company to pretend they hit a home run when they start the inning on third base.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
You think there would have been nuclear energy in the 20th century without a Manhattan Project?
Natürlich würden wir Kernkraft haben.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
And that also would have been the result of a government program.
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NASA isn't the key point, the V rocket program was. Without Hitler's investment in the V rocket program we might not be in orbit even today.. The whole problem was that rockets weren't taken seriously and might never have received the investment they needed - the V program took them from being a toy to sophisticated machines able to reach supersonic speeds and touch the edge of orbit.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, I love capitalism as much as anybody. But because I do love it, and indeed am on my third company as a cofounder (with two failures) I know a lot about investor mindset. It is hard as nails -- it has to be. Nobody wants to play the lottery -- they want a plausible bet, something that might be a long shot but that is affordable and has a payoff to match the risk.
That's the problem right there. Sure, maybe some kid can repurpose old TV tubes into a positive output fusion generator in his garage or -- maybe not. In fact, I'd bet a rather lot not. Nor do I think it plausible that this same kid can build a thinking robot or map the entire human genome using nothing but ordinary household chemicals and his dad's old video camera. To solve the problems you list -- AI, genetic engineering, fusion, economically feasible interplanetary or interstellar travel (might as well dream big) one needs serious resources, some real skin in the game, and even then the odds are heavily against you.
I think I could do AI -- real AI -- on a shoestring, if by a shoestring you mean a budget of maybe a million a year for four or five years, at least, if I did nothing else and had a small staff of computer geek slaves with some mad skills. And I'm not certain I know what its value would be once I finished. My robot friend (with the intelligence, however real, of perhaps a cockroach)? We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.
Fusion is tantalizing, because there is this disconnect between Back to the Future movies and our imagination and the hard reality of pushing two charged nuclei within 10 to 100 fermi of one another and holding them there long enough to tunnel the rest of the way. We think "how hard can it be" -- and then when we try, we find that this is only the first of many problems. So sure, things may be changing. For one thing, my cell phone would have been a computational munition twenty years ago, and my laptop could replace a whole supercomputing center from the 80's or even the 90's. We can actually solve some pretty darned hard magnetohydrodynamic problems computationally without having to build something to try it. For another, we have lots of data from lots of things that have been tried, and that failed. Knowing what won't work helps too. IMO there is some actual hope that some of the schemes that were tried and failed can be made to work now, by solving the really hard problems that stopped them computationally first, but even if this is true one still has to take a huge risk to build the prototype and pray that it can be scaled up into production!
Lockheed-Martin can afford it. The government can afford it. Venture capitalists? Not so much. If it is going to cost $50 million (or more!) to build the prototype after $10 or 20 million just to design it and do all of the computations, you'd have to both have a very, very serious plan with a very, very high probability of success -- a proof that it should work if you build it (and if nothing nonlinear shuts you down along the way, which is sadly a risk rather difficult to estimate). So yeah, maybe it only would take 50 to 100 million dollars, at a risk so high that even if you had it all figured out and could "prove" to investors that it would/should work, they'd want to take 90% of the final company in order to pony up that much money. So sure, if it works you have a trillion dollar payday and you have a $100 billion dollar payout from that, but they have to be thinking of the 9 -- or 90 -- times that they drop $100 million into this and end up with NOTHING.
I know personally of at least three lines of approach to the fusion problem -- one conventional, one exotic, one that (I believe) nobody's thought of and that MIGHT be doable out to a prototype for a few million dollars, chump change. But try getting even chump change out of somebody that has that kind of money for a long shot, especially without te
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We really want smart-ish but programmable and directed -- cars that can drive themselves, not cars that can be our friends.
The driverless car will need to respond intelligently to the needs of its passengers if it is carrying the elderly, disabled, unsupervised minors and so on,
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Intelligently, sure, but compassionately? With initiative? With the capability of making a moral choice, sorry you little brat this is as far as you go if you're going to pee on my seats, out into the traffic with you?
True AI means free-willed in at least an approximation of our free will (whatever and however free that may be). Free will means, among other things, that the responses of a free-willed entity are from a complexity class so rich as to be unpredictable and nearly unbounded (given the capabil
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I wouldn't worry about AI, at least for a very long time. We are not going to see it in an electronic digital computer.
Oh, you'll be able to fool me; you could probably do that now. But real free will in a machine, that is simply a complex array of electric switches? Don't get your hopes up.
Or fear, actually, instead of hope...
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"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
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I have to disagree with you -- I think we could do it now, with electronic switches. We wouldn't get genius level AI, but we could most definitely get something that learns from its environment and makes real decisions without programming it in in a decision tree (which I suspect is your issue -- the chinese room problem).
Don't forget, our brains are basically -- a complex array of biological switches. The trick is to get the right mix of structural organization and functional systems and that complex arr
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If it is going to cost $50 million (or more!) to build the prototype after $10 or 20 million just to design it and do all of the computations, you'd have to both have a very, very serious plan with a very, very high probability of success
I remember following the late Bussard's ploywell development a few years ago before he passed and before the Navy snapped his team up. They claimed to have actually achieved net fusion in the lab and still needed something like $200 mil just to get the engineering done to scale up to a production size prototype.
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Me too. And I think this is one of the lines e.g. LM is working on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
The problem is figuring out how to manipulate an electron beam to use it instead of a wire cage. This is a complicated problem, but it is also solving a problem in pure computational physics that probably does have a solution. I'm an ex-beowulf guy -- large scale computing is cheap, and this is bread and butter for it. Solve the problem numerically, implement it in engineering, and you're there. Lockheed
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I have worked on and off on Strong AI for 25 years... 20 years ago (in 1995) I had a workable design for building a working machine but I calculated that it would need a budget of about $100 million.. In 2003 the base cost was about the same - though the final machine would fit inside a PC case instead of multiple filing cabinets.
A couple of years ago I restarted work on the thing, because technology has advanced. Now the whole machine should fit inside a 1 foot cube, but now the minimum base dev costs have
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Yeah, my own approach (since I'm an old cluster computing guy) was to just use a linux cluster in the medium term for the cognitive processing and to try to use OTC hardware for I/O devices (and maybe even a nifty robot body to give the AI something to use to learn an environment and learn to satisfy some task/mandate within the environment. Custom ASIC etc would come later, simply because (as you note) processing power is amazingly cheap and fast and large, and multicore multiprocessor systems are a clus
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You are absolutely right, Strong AI is non-deterministic, well not strictly deterministic. In some ways its quite 'un-computer-like' and although Strong AI could theoretically be run on ordinary hardware in practice this is unlikely to work. One of the reasons is basic low level memory management, which has long been one of the biggest stumbling points of strong AI. The machine needs a persistent and stable memory that is constantly online and this is surprisingly difficult to achieve. (heaps and lists and
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Because the benefits of fusion are absurdly large. Fusion is what we need to literally alter the type of our civilization. As things stand, if we end world poverty -- something that I would argue is desirable -- we will exhaust the world's readily available fossil fuel resources in comparatively short order, and at a steadily increaing cost that will both cap the rise from poverty and over time push the entire world back into poverty. At root, nearly all poverty is at least partly energy poverty. Energy
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No one is even close to Lockheed. This other company is doing pretty well too.
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When the question instead became, "we're going to put things into space for $50M - how are we going to do that?" a whole new engineering methodology unfolded.
You've reminded me of a passage from Foundation:
And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion.
"But we, –we, our little Foundation, our single world almost without metallic resources, –have had to work with brute economy. Our generators have had to be the size of our thumb, because it was all the metal we could afford. We had to develop new techniques and new methods, –techniques and methods the Empire can't follow because they have degenerated past the stage where they can make any really vital scientific advance.
"With all their nuclear shields, large enough to protect a ship, a city, an entire world; they could never build one to protect a single man. To supply light and heat to a city, they have motors six stories high, –I saw them – where ours could fit into this room. And when I told one of their nuclear specialists that a lead container the size of a walnut contained a nuclear generator, he almost choked with indignation on the spot.
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I know the general wisdom seems to be that 'fusion is hard but the payoffs are huge'. I don't really agree with this. We already know enough about plasma physics to start designing fusion reactor that will reach or exceed breakeven (ITER), and it will probably work. So fusion is definitely hard, but we ARE getting there. But is it economical? It's clear by now that any fusion reactor is going to be obscenely expensive. The nature of fusion means that only large reactors are possible; forget small and modula
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Some reasons:
More passive safety features
Easier to handle fuel
No weapons proliferation issues.
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> More passive safety features
Sure.
> Easier to handle fuel
Tritium (which this thread is assuming, not the p-B reaction TriAlpha works with) is pretty dangerous stuff. It replaces hydrogen when meeting water and turns into radioactive water/rain. A fire in a fusion plant where the lithium caught on fire would be a major, major, issue.
> No weapons proliferation issues
Not even remotely true. D-T reactions give off a 14 MeV neutron which can be used to enrich natural uranium to plutonium and then separ
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I'd argue that even the 'passive safety' thing isn't really unique to fusion; modern fission designs are already pretty safe - some even have passive safety.
Re: This is a great example. (Score:2)
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Well.... any long-term confined high temperature isotropic quasi-neutral maxwellian plasma has to be large. Of course, if you start changing those requirements, you start changing the required size for your reactor. It's not theoretically impossible to have a viable fusion power plant that does not follow those constraints; the challenge is achieving it without either imposing a new, even more onerous series of challenges on yourself. Drop the concept of long-term confinement (for example, inertial confinem
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You're basically summarizing why fusion is unlikely to work in a small-scale design in the near future. Technological progress is great but we need an energy solution NOW.
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Not to argue with large scale stuff, but you are far too hasty to through out the small scale stuff that hasn't worked in the past. We didn't have teraflop computing resources in the past. There are at least a couple of small scale plasma confinement technologies that require the solution of a hard computational problem in electromagnetohydrodynamics (quite a mouthful, I know) plus some clever engineering in order to work, but we are actually to the point where we can contemplate solving precisely that di
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Plasma physics researchers unaffiliated with L-M have already pointed out numerous problems with their design. The central rings need to be superconducting in the face of intense neutron flux. No known material is capable of this. So at the very least we need a materials science breakthrough for L-M's design to be remotely feasible.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:4, Insightful)
The effect of 'contests' and 'rewards' is often a bunch of people coming up with an expensive one-off stunt that does exactly what is required for the prize money and nothing more, and does not really advance the state of the art. The various turing test contests are an example, as well as the Ansari X prize.
Contests aren't the answer, but you have a point that large government-sponsored projects seem to be wasteful. But in the particular case of fusion, the government has actually allocated very little money to fusion energy research so far in relative terms, so there's no way of knowing! Laser fusion was (and is) primarily for nuclear weapons research, with energy being considered as a speculative tertiary side-effect (and a good propaganda technique for easing the public mind) rather than an actual design goal. Same goes for a lot of funded plasma research.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're ignoring the decades of government-funded research that Tri-Alpha are building on. They didn't start from scratch.
Private enterprise is great at solving engineering problems, including some directed research if the payoff isn't too far off. But very few companies can sustain a $10-50 billion research effort for the really hard stuff. You need a government for that.
The other thing that governments are good for is big research & engineering jobs with little direct payoff but substantial indirect benefit to society - national infrastructure stuff. Private enterprise just doesn't see the value unless the profits go to them.
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Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever. Add political motivations and you multiply that problem.
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> Yet another thing governments are good for is pouring money down a sink hole for basically forever
Yeah, because private companies *never* do that...
Westinghouse
RCA
Kodak
Xerox
Sunbeam
AMC
Curtiss
(list continues for another 5 million entries)
Re: This is a great example. (Score:2)
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And company's never build off of government investments? Fed Ex and Amazon should build their own roads and postal system or else they are just as bad as the government. Google should have to build their own internet or else they are taking advantage of government thievery right? Obviously the government prevented private entities from investing their money into such research and development.
What about the money made back by some of those investments through businesses that were created? Roads, postal syste
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That is not the point of government. Businesses will not now my lawn free of charge and government shouldn't either.
What the op was talking about is bridge to nowhere projects and the magical more funding to make whatever isn't working all the sudden work.
...of Government and Enterprise Working Together (Score:3)
This is exactly why you let private entrepreneurs do things rather than the government. It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.
Actually you will typically only get two out of those three. Saying that there should never have been any tax spent on this is really not understanding what these entrepreneurs are doing. The reason that any of these startups are even possible is because of the huge amount of work which has been done on fusion in the past by governments. If none of that money have been spent there would be no fusion start ups because we would not have enough knowledge about fusing plasma to make any sort of even vaguely vi
Re:...of Government and Enterprise Working Togethe (Score:5, Insightful)
An army of very smart people spent a lot of time and effort to get to this point. Very little of that was paid for by private enterprise. It was almost completely government supported research. If you want to solve a big hard problem that is about the only way to do it.
Governments have the resources, stability and long term vision. For profit companies rarely have this combination. When they do, it's often a situation like the old Bell Labs days, where there was a government sponsored monopoly. The Bell system planners knew the needed something better then mechanical switches and vacuum tubes. They engaged in fundamental pure research into semiconductors starting in the 1930's, [wikipedia.org] which led to the transistor in 1947.
Of course the remnants of Bell Labs are now completely out of the pure research business now. Given IBM's declining fortunes it's not clear how long they will keep up their basic research efforts. So if the government is not going to do it, no one will. In the current quarterly profit driven economy, there is no other option.
Re:This is a great example. (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll get done better, cheaper, and faster.
That's never the case. Look at the commercial space sector, for example. They're still no achieving what was achieved decades ago by government programs. The motivation for the private sector is profit, not progress. It's a mistake to conflate the two.
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They're still no achieving what was achieved decades ago by government programs. The motivation for the private sector is profit, not progress. It's a mistake to conflate the two.
But they're also achieving things that government programs might never have achieved. I honestly think landing a Falcon 9 boost stage will, in the long run, do more to advance space capabilities than the moon landings did.
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Sure - but a Falcon 9 that saves its first stage wouldn't have had that much commercial use in the 1960s. Space-X is spending a lot of money on making their launch systems work, and they've got a really good chance of drastically reducing cost to LEO, but they're working with a lot of knowledge that's been developed over decades, and a lot of technology that make space flight valuable. Commercial launch vehicles will be a great benefit, but no private company would have developed that technology from scr
Re: This is a great example. (Score:2)
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And besides, electronics is a wholly different domain from rocketry. There is no Moore's law for rocketry. There is no database of free software or even engine designs. Everyone has to jam the same amount of motive power into their rocket
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In fact, NASA is so bad at building rockets, we don't even have a manned space program any more, despite the fact that they get more funding EACH YEAR than all the famous private programs put together have in t
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âoeAdding fast ions does good things for you,â says Glen Wurden of the Plasma Physics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Tri Alpha collaborated with Russiaâ(TM)s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Akademgorodok, which provided beam sources
In earlier attempts to create long-lived FRCs, turbulence in the plasma caused heat to leak away as hot particles migrated to the edge and escaped, causing the smoke ring to shrink and fade away.
What earlier attempts you ask? Let's go to wikipedia:
The first studies about the effect started at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in the 1960s, and considerable data is available since then, with over 600 published papers. Almost all research was conducted during Project Sherwood at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1975 to 1990, and during 18 years at the Redmond Plasma Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington. More recently some research has been done at the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Fusion Technology Institute of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Irvine.
So it was first really invented thanks to government research, it has only seen government interest for the last 60 years and this breakthrough has contributions by government scientists and institutes.
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> this breakthrough
Improving from one level of uselessness to another level of uselessness is *not* a breakthrough.
Consider NIF, for instance.
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Each grain of sand is useless by itself but with enough sand and water you can build sand castles.
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3 more similar levels of improvement would reach break-even. A 130' range aircraft isn't very useful. But you learn a lot by flying 130 feet. And once you invent something like the airplane you only have to do it once. You don't have to re-invent it. Once someone made a working semi-conductor the field exploded. Or it could be a dead-end. Who knows.
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series of goals, contests and rewards is putting public money into it, is it not?
also, universities are companies now with poachable employees it seems. with private funding and all.
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Sounds Like (Score:1)
Power Companies HATE this!!!
Re: Sounds Like (Score:1)
That's because One Weird Trick for Free Energy!
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Power Companies HATE this!!!
There was seriously a Google ad on this page for the "Power Innovator Device" (I won't link to it), which the inventor emphatically explains is NOT FREE ENERGY, but will reduce your electricity bills by at least 80%. (spoiler: it's inductive coupling with a pancake coil).
5 ms (Score:1)
From TFA "Tri Alpha’s 23-meter-long device..." :)
Won't fit into my car damn it.
They've got to 5 milliseconds but they need approx 1 sec burn before fusion begins? Long way to go folks
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I told ya you should have got the hatchback.
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Huge Cash Pile (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on historical precedent around fusion press releases, I would venture to guess is that huge pile of cash in the "hundreds of millions" is starting to run out.
Re:Huge Cash Pile (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost certainly the case on three grounds.
(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.
(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.
(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.
Re:Huge Cash Pile (Score:4, Insightful)
(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.
As a small business owner, this is so true .... The best way to raise money for your business is to convince people you don't actually need money. Go figure ....
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You don't have to be a business owner to see that. Try taking out an unsecured bank loan some day.
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Yep. I once heard the line
To get a loan, first you have to prove you don't need it.
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Arc Reactor, duh? (Score:1)
Has there been any comment by Tony or any press agent from Stark Industries?
pretty impressive (Score:5, Informative)
They are getting plasma pressures at levels similar to tokamaks and stellerators, which is pretty impressive, while using a fraction of the magnetic field. If you didn't know, 1 keV temperature is a little over 10 million K, and a density of 10^20 m^-3 is close to vacuum, but because of the high temperature the pressure is fairly significant, on the order of one atmosphere. It's refreshing that they don't exaggerate their progress (they admit that tokamaks are more advanced as of yet). But if they were trying to offer a cheaper alternative to tokamaks, they have a way to go. At 23m long, their FRC is not small. If they need to scale it up considerably to reach reactor levels, well, it's going to be an expensive project like ITER is.
If the FRC turns out to be the way forward, most our research into tokamaks hasn't been wasted. There's a lot of overlap in the theory and the technologies used. Neutral beams are also used in tokamaks, for heating and diagnostics, and are also being used to provide torque to the plasma, which can stabilize the plasma in various ways which can be understood in turbulence theory. The NIMROD code is also used in tokamaks, as is the technique of lithium wall conditioning. I suppose the point is, a lot of slashdotters will condemn the work of government research but this research wouldn't have been possible without decades of groundwork backed by government funded grants.
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Thanks, I nearly understand now! I'm no rocket surgeon!
Fusion? done thing. Why reinvent the wheel? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Think big.
How well will that work in interstellar space?
Not so well as having a local fusion reactor.
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I've heard rumors of this device and it's claims of a bright future. Ridiculous! Why, such a device would have to be millions of times larger than Earth to be sustainable. It would also have to output energy 24/7 with no more than 5% variation. It would probably even be dangerous to look at without eye protection and the simulated output models indicate that it would significantly increase rates of skin cancer in certain vulnerable individuals. Such a dangerous, impossible to build device is just more blue-
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It's actually got really crappy efficiency. I produce much more heat than a section of the inner Solar core of the same volume, although I need a LOT more input. Fortunately, it's a LOT bigger than I am.
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it's a LOT bigger than I am
The fast food industry wants to help you close the gap.
Good luck with that (Score:3)
"has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier devices at U.S. universities and national labs"
No, that is inaccurately broad.
The correct statement is has shown a 10-fold improvement in its ability to contain the hot particles needed for fusion over earlier **FRC** devices at U.S. universities and national labs"
Earlier FRCs sucked by about four or five orders of magnitude. This sucks by one less.
This is not a breakthrough. T-8 was two orders of magnitude better than Stellarator C, but 45 years later it's still two orders too little to be useful.
Trisops did this in the 70's at low cost. (Score:4, Informative)
From the paper
Check out Trisops [wikipedia.org]
Disclosure. I am one of the authors of the paper referred to in the article.
... not sure what this really means ... (Score:2)
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This is not a dim witted question. Actually it is a profound engineering question. The simple answer is to liken the fusion reaction to the coal burning in a steam engine; therefore in the end we could just be boiling water. The difficulty is that fusion occurs at temperatures of millions of degrees and any machine you can conceive of to capture the energy is necessarily going to make "contact" with plasma. There are a number of concepts about how to do this, google the "first wall" problem for a taste of t
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The simple answer is to liken the fusion reaction to the coal burning in a steam engine; therefore in the end we could just be boiling water.
I'd love if we could get away from having to boil water or it's going to be a right pain in the backside trying to build one into a spacecraft. Perhaps betavoltaics like the Nuclear Lightbulb fission reactor concept?
Again? (Score:2)
Yep, and it'll take 10-20 years to commercialize the product.
1970: 10-20 years for fusion!!!
1980: 10-20 years for fusion!!
1990: 10-20 years for fusion!
2000: 10-20 years for fusionnnnnnnzzzzzzz
mark
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Nope, this is real science, for a change.
Re:Real or Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
It might be real science, but real energy production is still a really long way out. They boast a tenfold improvement in the time that the reaction is contained, but the reality is there has to be another hundredfold improvement to reach the break even point. Then you have to go beyond that to get a surplus. Then you have to scale it all up to get enough energy to bother with.
Really it is just a small step on a long journey that will take many decades, unless they discover some real problems that might take longer.
Re:Real or Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but progress in fusion has been so slow that improvements like this are quite welcome. Also, you have to consider that you can often get good improvements simply by scaling up your equipment.
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That's what SHE said!
real bullshit (Score:2)
Toyota kept funding Pons and Fleischmann long after it was apparent they were promoting rounding errors, lousy calorimetry, and curiously beneficial editing choices. apparently there is another fool with too much money around. try to make the electrodes last in a Farnesworth Fusor, and you might get someplace within several lifetimes.
Re:Real or Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
As real as every other company in the past who claims to generate energy with fusion? When is 3d holographic storage coming out again?
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Problem is, this should already be in the engineering phase as in, the physics are already done and we are just looking for the company producing it the most cost effective.
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Lockheed is certainly working on it. They put out a press teaser about their efforts last fall, boasting that they'd have a working fusion reactor within 5 years. It was seen as an odd move from a traditionally conservative contractor.
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Once you can cross the coulomb barrier and can stay there, your not far from getting all the toys - like total atomic conversion, bending space and time - gravity engines, contained singularities, force fields, manipulating energy and entropy. From there going for fusion looks a little - 'primitive'.
Of course crossing that barrier and staying there also looks like one of the hardest things imaginable - a contained quark gluon plasma.. I like working on left-field 'impossible' problems.. :)
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You're insane comparing this with E-cat.
E-cat never produced a single microjoule of energy. E-cat's workings have never been published. E-cat has never been open to scrutiny by the scientific community. The inventor of E-cat has not been up-front or honest about the device's working parameters. This device is based on known physics and engineering.
E-cat is a fraud whereas this is real science. If you continue to insist that this is equivalent to E-cat, the only logical conclusion is that you're a troll.
Re: Compared to eCat (Score:1)
Re:Real or Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot exaggerates it, but it is real science. They are not as secretive as the title and summary make it sound, as Tri-Alpha makes regular appearances at conferences and gives talks on their progress. They don't publish many papers, but they have been quite public about growing progress over the last several years.
As far as where it will lead... there have been many fusion projects with great bursts of advance, followed by new road blocks. Time will tell, and at least it is one more path being explored. Even academics and people at national labs are hoping that companies like Tri-Alpha and General Fusion will be able to move things forward faster without baggage and bureaucracy research at national labs.
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1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away."
1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power."
2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"
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The single most useful, highest technology endeavor mankind has ever dared try, and we commit a mere one fifth as much to it as we do in fossil fuel subsidies per year.
In 1980, we really did have fusion 40 years away. And five years later, we got bored with that and moved on to something else shiny.
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1960s: "Cheap fusion power is only 40 years away." 1980s: "In 40 years we'll have cheap fusion power." 2015: "We're getting closer, at the rate we're making progress we'll have fusion power within 40 years"
And each time it was said, there was an assumption that funding would stay at the same level. Fusion power isn't X years away, it's Y dollars away. If we keep reducing the amount of money we spend on research and development, X will get larger, because Y isn't changing.
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It's clearly a scam, a more elaborate version of "Dr. Jenkyl Slabonovich of esteemed Russian university has developed true unlimited energy generator" spams I get every once in a while. Read the bloody postr, it has all the earmarks of a scam.