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Power Earth Science

Billionaires Are Chasing The Holy Grail of Energy: Fusion (bloombergquint.com) 185

Posted by EditorDavid 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."
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Billionaires Are Chasing The Holy Grail of Energy: Fusion

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  • This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mkoenecke ( 249261 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @01:49PM (#57586486) Homepage
    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!

    • Re:This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:07PM (#57586566)

      The explanation is simple [wikimedia.org].

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by novakyu ( 636495 )

        So, what you are saying is, if we don't see practical fusion after about 10 years of "maximum effective effort" level funding from these guys (billionaires literally have money to fund these projected levels, falling short by a factor of 2 or 3, but that's easily accounted for by minimizing waste and fraud, especially in something like scientific research—fail early and often; try something else that might work better), we will know that this projection was bunk.

        Something to look forward to.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          That right there is the problem. "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."

          • Re:This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:41PM (#57587346) Homepage

            "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)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              Absolutely true. It ups the variance considerably. Don't forget about the downside though (see for example story today about crazy bitcoin dude buying up Nevada desert to build paradise). So not a great benchmark to base feasibility on.

          • but assuming their money is two or three times better than anyone else's money

            A cursory look at history - along with some common sense and a dose of logic - would suggest that, all over things being equal, those spending their own money would be far more likely to do so effectively than would bureaucrats spending that of others.

            • Correction: all other things being equal...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

              I guess you're probably American? The US was founded by a bunch of rugged individualists with a strong distrust of government. That distrust seems to have persisted. Reality is a bit more complicated. To start with, funding decisions for scientific projects generally aren't made by bureaucrats. They're made by scientists. Tech billionaire projects? Well, it's not like tech billionaires don't have a well deserved reputation for thinking their success in one field translates to expertise in other fields, do

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AHuxley ( 892839 )
          The reports mentioned showed what money put in resulted in. Decades later and all the money spent. Do we have a result yet?
          Need more money again? Need to locate labs in more advanced and better nations with better quality workers?
          Find more money again.
          Need a better university system to make sure staff are hired on merit with skills?
          Need really great staff and a lot more money this time in a nation that is innovative and advanced.
          Find the money. A lot of it. Move the project to an advanced nati

          • 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?

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by AHuxley ( 892839 )
              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 with

      • Re:This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:5, Informative)

        by crunchygranola ( 1954152 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:45PM (#57586686)

        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 [pppl.gov]?

        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.

        • Break-even was passed about a decade ago.

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

          • 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

        • Also, the U.S. pulled out of ITER, resulting in half the project being abandoned. Tends to slow things up. The U.S. banned fusion cooperation with Europe and is unlikely he working much with China either.

          • Re: This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @03:41PM (#57586924)

            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.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by Bob-Bob Hardyoyo ( 4240135 )

              "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

        • That report is positively ancient, and no one should look at particular approaches believed most promising 42 years ago. But it made a particular promise about research speed vs funding, and this promise turned out true. So the report is still valid to refute complaints that "fusion is always 30 years in the future".

        • Re:This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by nojayuk ( 567177 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @03:26PM (#57586860)

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Small nitpick. The basic physics says big is better. I saw a graph once that plotted various fusion experiments against the theoretical size vs. efficiency line, and it looked like the theory is pretty close so far. There's always the possibility that there might be serious hidden problems at larger scale though.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by nojayuk ( 567177 )

              Initial fusion research using magnetic mirror containment and "pinch" was promising until instability appeared and the mirrors started to leak at higher temperatures and densities, hence the move to tokamaks and stellarators (which seem to be making a comeback recently). Scaling up ITER might not work. That's what makes it fun, Nobel Prizes all around!

              The scientific community has a lot more understanding of plasma physics and engineering, modelling and computation, control systems, instrumentation etc. toda

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward


      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

      • But I think that the development of electric devices is the point. It took 200 years to go from chemicals in jars to PCs. On that basis fusion is realistically a century or more away, not 30 years.

        From a non-physics point of view the social and economic disruption are more important than the science. Cheap fusion power will disrupt the whole international economy. Expensive fusion power will have little effect at all. At this point while people would like to think fusion power will eventually be cheap we re

    • 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 scr

      • First, funding keeps getting cut. If you halve spending, you double the time.

        Not true, because if you delay you can benefit from other advances, such as faster computers, better magnets, high temperature superconductors, stronger composite materials, etc.

        That's what delayed renewables.

        Most money spent on renewables went toward subsidies for installations, not research. Some people believe this was counter-productive since the subsidies made deficient systems appear to be economically viable, thus reducing the incentive to build products that actually made sense.

        • Re: This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by quanminoan ( 812306 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @05:41PM (#57587344)

          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... [askmar.com]

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jd ( 1658 )

            Fusion work started in the mid 1950s. We've a bit to go before 100 years.

            Yes, I agree with most of what you wrote, though MIT's recent announcement is very interesting. I'd be interested in your opinions on that.

            You're not going to model fusion precisely until the millennium prize on fluid dynamics is won. That may take a while. The question is how accurate we actually need it.

            Had ITER been fully funded, with no projects cut, would you agree we'd be closer?

            What do you make of China's 101.2 seconds of sustai

          • 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.

    • Remember the giant laser bay in Tron? The one where Flynn gets zapped into the computer? That was filmed at the SHIVA laser facility at Lawrence Livermore, a machine built to attempt to reproduce the conditions on the sun to get fusion going. It didn't work. The government built a larger laser at the National Ignition Facility. It went way over-budget and took forever to build. It also didn't work.

    • Re:This has been going on for quite a while... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @07:47PM (#57587764)
      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).
    • People like to say in the fusion business - fusion is always 30 years into the future until one day it isn't.

  • I don't think billionaires are who we should rely (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @01:50PM (#57586492)
    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.
    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ichthus ( 72442 )

      It took the government to get us to the moon.

      Congratulations on finding an (1) example of government driving technological advancement. Others would be the Internet, and (some) military weaponry.

      But, you also have automobiles, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors/microprocessors, and an endless list of other areas that started with, and have been largely advanced through private funding.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Governments fund universities, and quite a bit of private sector research as well. The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs is used as one of the prime examples of private technology development, but even then Shockley did a lot of work on radar for the US government during the war (as did Bell itself), some of which was actually at Columbia University.

    • You don't get a choice. Taxpayers consistently vote to give more power to the wealthy.

      Ultimately, the only enterprise they can replace the CEO of, the only enterprise they can pressure into their agenda, is tg e enterprise they're determined to make smaller.

      Power is a function of wealth and if you're not going to work collectively to have effective power through common wealth, the rich will take power through their individual wealth. You can't arm-wrestle a gorilla.

    • Don't the situations referenced in the article suggest that you're dead wrong? ITER is the alternative and it's not happening fast *enough*. It took billionaires to move things along more quickly.

  • 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.

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

    • These billionaires are investing in energy storage systems. They are looking on ways to efficiently release and collect the energy stored in the matter in the universe.

      Fuel is storage.

      Anything that uses fuel for energy is inherently an energy storage system. We store energy in the fuel, and we release it when we choose. Natural gas is an energy storage system. Coal is an energy storage system. Same goes for petroleum, nuclear fission, and hydroelectric dams. (Although water stored at a height isn't "f

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        So what you're saying is that we need to make the solar to fuel conversion more efficient? That coal took 10's-100's of millions of years of solar to store what we're burning, likewise with natural gas though the time scale is perhaps shorter.
        Use solar and wind to make methane might be the simplest. Hydrogen sounds nice but is hard to deal with.

        • Re:Good but (Score:4, Insightful)

          by blindseer ( 891256 ) <blindseer@noSPAm.earthlink.net> on Sunday November 04, 2018 @12:19AM (#57588394)

          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.

  • FUSION: It's the energy of the future, now and forever!

  • We might be able to make use of the energy it produces

  • The Cold Fusion Cycle (Score:3)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:21PM (#57586600)

    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.

  • 1. The total money spent on fusion research since 1960 is about 1% of the annual subsidy given to fossil fuels.

    2. Break even was passed about a decade ago.

    3. The current record for sustained fusion is 22 seconds or 2 minutes, depending on whether you believe the Chinese.

    4. Mini fusion reactors which reduce the stability problem were announced a few weeks ago.

    5. Renewables had just as many problems when their funding was throttled.

    • hahaha, "break even was passed about a decade ago".

      No it wasn't.

      Fusion at a net loss is done all the time in particle accelerators, for hours and days on end.

      you're delusional, there is no notable progress towards a self sustaining fusion reaction. are you believing some marketing spew?

      No, renewables don't have billions poured into them with nothing to show, unlike fusion.

      we already have a nice fusion reactor in the sky and know how to turn its energy into electricity.

      • $393 million a year is spend on fusion. Not exactly billions.

        October 2013, fusion scientists in Europe reached break-even. Ok, not quite a decade. 2014, the U.S. exceeds break-even.

        South Korea reached 70 seconds sustained fusion in December of 2016. 2017, China reached 101.2 seconds.

        Looks like progress to me. Fusion isn't where you thought it was. It moved on, even if you didn't. That happens. Recognize the fact and move forwards to today. No use dwelling on the past.

        Renewables aren't competing with fusion.

        • October 2013, fusion scientists in Europe reached break-even.

          You better go fix wikipedia, then. The article over there says that as of 2017 "the record for Q is held by the JET tokamak in the UK, at Q = (16 MW)/(24 MW) â 0.67".

          Of course over there they expect you to produce silly things like "citations", which we obviously don't require here.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by jd ( 1658 )

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

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

              Well that's wonderful! While you're fixing wikipedia you better also go sort out those idiots at ITER, who say the same thing:

              "Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 16 MW of fusion power, for 24 MW of power used to heat the plasma (a Q ratio of 0.67)"

              https://www.iter.org/sci/Beyon... [iter.org]

              It's almost as if wikipedia actually is pretty reliable, and cites credible sources! But that must be an illusion, right? Clearly

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jd ( 1658 )

            I also spend a lot of time correcting Wikipedia. Like the Hitchhiker's Guide, it is definitively wrong.

    • 2. Break even was passed about a decade ago.
      Not on this planet.

      Where do yo come from?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jd ( 1658 )

        Check the science press, not the conspiracy theory press. You might learn something.

        • I only read science press.

          And no: there was no break even in fusion with magnetic confinement so far. And I'm pretty certain that electric field based designs had no break even either.

          But feel free to show us a citation.

  • General Fusion (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:30PM (#57586628)

    ... 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.

    • Personally, I'm looking forward to the version every civilian can buy, Mr. Fusion.
      • What we will have is Consolidated Fusion. Yes, just as Consolidated Edison is known as ConEd, we'll have ConFusion.

  • fusion is great, but,,, (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @02:37PM (#57586650) Journal
    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.

    • We can have fusion in 10-20 years, if we spent adequate money on it and scrap the bans on cooperation.

      We've technology enough to build highly reliable self-sealing piping, which means a next generation reactor using sodium wood be perfectly safe.

      Most of the problem with fission is waste. We can reprocess waste to some degree. But nothing prevents us from storing waste in the reactor. Since you have more very long-lived isotopes than short-lived or stable ones, see if you can get them to do something interes

  • We already have a huge fusion reactor... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @04:38PM (#57587158)
    ... 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.
  • Would it surprise you if they did it just for the patents? Then they could "tin-foil hat" : keep the proles from using it. Then the elite could keep the energy costs high, and control the supply. Or protect the current interests from "free" energy.
    Perhaps that's a bit tin-foil for me, but...

  • The physics of fusion is well understood - the combination of temperature, pressure and time needed are known. Plasma fusion machines generally scale to better performance with size, so the question becomes what field configuration meets the net energy generation requirements at the lowest system cost (presumably related to size).

    There are some tricks - hot ions fuse, hot electrons just radiate energy, so there are various tricks to keep the ion temperature hot relative to the electron temperature (neutral

    • Otherwise muonic fusion is painfully close to working, but still looks impossible. Cold fusion is exceedingly unlikely to work.
      Muonic fusion is cold fusion.

      • Usually when people talk about "cold fusion" they are talking about fusion in room temperature solid state materials. Muonic fusion can happen in room temperature hydrogen so technically it is "cold" fusion, but doesn't really fit the typical model. In any case it looks like there is no way to get out enough energy to make up for what was needed to create the muons in the first place (they stick to the helium atoms) so there is not clear path toward practicality.

        Unlike standard "cold fusion" the physics o

  • If we had free, unlimited power. I can imagine we might be able to stop building terrible power plants.
    We might be able to build carbon capturing devices. I'm not sure, I'm not a science man.

    With the 'magic' of fusion, we might be able to turn the tide, I think, but we're otherwise entirely doomed.

    Also, it's been coming in 50 years, for easily 50 years.

    • All problems facing humans can be divided into 2 catagories: 1-Politics, 2-cost. Eliminating all fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables is doable for stationary use right now (Appolo level project=10 years), if we want it. Using renewables for mobile use still needs some work. We don't need free power to eliminate air pollution, we need clean power that's not more expensive than what we're using and the political will to build it.

  • Problem already solved (Score:5, Insightful)

    by manu0601 ( 2221348 ) on Saturday November 03, 2018 @07:07PM (#57587632)
    We already know how to harness power from fusion. The technique is called "solar panel".

  • 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 eve

    • 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.

      • The Democrats are not supporting nuclear in Iran, they are supporting supervision so they don't make bombs.

        What are they supervising? That's right, a civilian nuclear power program. So, you admit that the Democrats will allow Iran to have a nuclear power program. What does the Democratic Party say on nuclear power in the USA? Oddly nothing. I checked:
        https://democrats.org/wp-conte... [democrats.org]

        Trump wants to kill the supervision so he can claim they have the bomb and start a war.

        That's irrelevant to the discussion. Iran has been quite successful in killing the supervision on their own, if they won't play by the rules then they need to be punished for it.

        Trump wants to see nuclear power grow in the USA

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Note how quickly CFL bulbs were eclipsed by LEDs. Perhaps those who spent all that money developing them and the production facilities to make them in quantity were behind the incandescent bulb bans. They knew that LEDs were fast approaching and desperately needed to recoup their investment before it became worthless. So too will solar and wind power once fusion comes online which would explain the insane push to legislate their adoption.
    Vast amounts of cheap energy are essential for advanced civilizatio

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