The Frontrunners In the Trillion-Dollar Race for Limitless Fusion Power (fastcompany.com) 107
Slashdot reader tedlistens writes that "Nuclear is booming again. And with a serious pile of private and public funding behind them—and physics (see the recent breakthrough at Livermore National Lab) — these companies say they're getting closer to fusion."
The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power." Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs.
Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion....
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025....
One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels.
Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article:
The companies were profiled in a Fast Company article titled "The frontrunners in the trillion-dollar race for limitless fusion power." Last year, investors like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos injected a record $3.4 billion into firms working on the technology, according to Pitchbook. One fusion firm, Seattle-based Helion, raised a record $500 million from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. ... The Fusion Industry Association says that at least 33 different companies were now pursuing nuclear fusion, and predicted that fusion would be connected to the energy grid sometime in the 2030s.... And you'd be forgiven for missing another milestone in July, when the Energy Dept. announced awards of between $50,000 and $500,000, to ten fusion companies working on projects with universities and national labs.
Here are a few of the awardees, who include some of the industry's leading companies, and whose projects offer a sampling of the opportunities — and hard problems — in fusion....
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building their first machine, SPARC, with a goal of producing power by 2025. "You'll push a button," CEO and cofounder Bob Mumgaard told the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit this summer, "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma. That's about 200 million degrees — you know, cooling towers will have a bunch of steam go out of them — and you let your finger off the button and it will stop, and you push the button again and it will go." With an explosion in funding from investors including Khosla, Bill Gates, George Soros, Emerson Collective and Google to name a few — they raised $1.8 billion last year alone — CFS hopes to start operating a prototype in 2025....
One morning last December, the company fired up its newest supermagnet — a 10-ton, 8-foot-tall device made of hundreds of tightly-twisted coils — and quietly pushed its magnetic field beyond a whopping 20 tesla, a record for a magnet of its size. (Most MRIs operate at a strength of about 1 tesla.) Eventually, 18 of these magnets will surround the SPARC's tokamak, which CFS says could produce as much as 11 times more energy than it consumes, and at prices cheaper than fossil fuels.
Other fusion-energy companies profiled in the article:
- Southern California-based TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron. (Since its founding in 1998 TAE has raised $1.2 billion, with $250 million in its latest round led by Google and Chevron's venture capital arm). TAE "says it plans to start delivering power to grids by 2030, followed by 'broader commercialization' during the next decade."
- General Atomics, of San Diego, California, which built eight of the magnet modules for the ground-breaking IITER facility, "including its wild Central Solenoid — the world's most powerful magnet."
- Canada-based General Fusion (backed by Jeff Bezos and building on technology originally developed by the U.S. Navy), which hopes to generate the data need to build a commercial pilot plant.
- Princeton Fusion Systems of Plainsboro, New Jersey, uses radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to generate a plasma formation in a magnetic bottle — holding the record for the longest time such a reaction has been stably held.
- UK-based Tokamak Energy has reached the 100 million Celsius threshold for commercially viable nuclear fusion, the first to do so with a spherical, privately-funded device.
- Helicity Space, based in Pasadena, California, has 10 employees and over $4 million in funding to pursue its goal of "enabling humanity's access to the solar system, with a Helicity Drive-powered flight to Mars expected to take two months, without planetary alignment."
- Magneto-Intertial Fusion Technologies, of Tustin, California.
Power In / Power Out (Score:2)
Our current plants generate heat to create steam which spin turbines/dynamos. This generates electricity (and the heat from heating things up).
Using fusion, it supposedly takes a whole bunch of energy, and we hope to get more back than we put in. Does a lot of that energy go into heat? What happens to it?
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Short answer is "fighting entropy"? But it sounds like a rather uninformed question.
Might be more amusing to ask "Where do you think it's going?"
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I really don't have much understanding of current power designs and fusion, so be gentle ;)
Our current plants generate heat to create steam which spin turbines/dynamos. This generates electricity (and the heat from heating things up).
Using fusion, it supposedly takes a whole bunch of energy, and we hope to get more back than we put in. Does a lot of that energy go into heat? What happens to it?
Fusion power is kind of the semi serious version of cold fusion.
None of this is about actually producing useable power - it's a grift to get money.
These folks are essentintally lying when they tell us that unlimited power is imminent. They speak of breakthroughs when they's actually achieve a tiny bit more efficiencies than over 20 years ago.
Here is a link to my favorite physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, who tells the truth (she is legit, not someone from the perpetual motion kook side of facebook)
Re: Power In / Power Out (Score:2, Interesting)
Nah, modern superconductors have pretty much made what she says outdated nonsense. Being able to create magnetic fields around 20-25T makes it possible to build much smaller tokamaks than we previously could to break even. Thatâ(TM)s why ITER (this giant monster prototype boondoggle weâ(TM)ve been building in France) fall into the nonsense category, but at least CFS and general fusionâ(TM)s approaches entirely reasonable. Weâ(TM)ve gone from Q factors between 1-2 (5 if youâ(TM)re
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Nah, modern superconductors have pretty much made what she says outdated nonsense.
I take it you watched the video. And have the details of what has become outdated since last October.
How about an expert like you point by point refuting what she said.
Wha I am really excited is that you know the parasitic loads - enlighten us, and show your preeminence over Dr Hossenfelder. Do you have your citations and papers to reference?
I'm all tingly that we have the authoritative source in our midst. mLooking forward to your giving us the real truth. Use the big words, I'll understand them.
Re: Power In / Power Out (Score:5, Interesting)
She's just explaining the concept of engineering break even, which I understand might be confusing for someone not well versed in engineering or physics. But it's not exactly some kind of "gotcha" that implies grift, the reality is these kinds of problems are solved by working simultaneously on various elements, then solutions integrated later. The biggest problem in fusion, by far, has been understanding the plasma physics required to sustain the reaction at a high level of output for an extended period. That's the tough nut to crack. If you can get a high energy ratio fusion reaction going then all of a sudden this becomes an engineering problem, and the higher you can get the ratio of energy into the plasma versus energy out the easier that engineering problem gets because you have more "slop" in the numbers. If these reactions were producing 10% more energy than put in I'd be skeptical of engineering breakeven being achieved, but at 1000% energy out versus in you can use some pretty wasteful solutions to solve other engineering challenges and still have plenty of net energy left.
The reason gigantic amounts of money are starting to flow into fusion research seeming very suddenly is two fold. First, our ability to simulate fusion in modeling has made huge progress in the last decade, due in no small part to advances in computer technology in general. And along similar lines the engineering aspects of converting the "raw" energy of a contained plasma into something useful has seen a giant leap forward due to advancements in materials science. Superconductors that are much cheaper and much more powerful have made it possible on paper to shrink these reactors down to the size of a small room, which is why everyone from ivy league colleges to Lockheed's skunkworks have thrown their hat into the ring designing a commercial prototype.
Your other couple complaints, like radiation and material embrittlement, are very solvable. The radionuclides produced in virtually any of the fusion reactions being investigated are short lived, and really won't be a waste problem. The answer to embrittlement problems could be as simple as routine reactor refurbishment. And on and on. No one is saying these aren't issues to be solved, but none of them are issues that are unsolvable using current technology.
The best analogy I have to what's happening right now is the race to build the first airplane in the late 1800's. By that point the basic challenges of getting something into the air were being worked out on paper, and you saw a whole host of people suddenly jump into the game of being the first to fly. And eventually the Wright Brothers did it, but it could have just as easily been one of a dozen other inventors/teams. The change from flying being something quacks talked about for hundreds of years with nothing to show for it, to airplanes being used in open war, only took a few decades.
On the whole I think you're taking the wrong message from that video you posted. It's not an indictment of fusion power, it's a caution to science writers to be more clear in their writing. It is somewhat important to understand that the big ticket experiments like ITER are not engineering demonstrations of fusion, but there are currently engineering demonstrations also being worked on side-by-side with those other "pure physics" experiments. Keeping both going in parallel will be important, as improvements in understanding plasma physics will only help us reduce the cost of production fusion reactors. But at this point, it's looking like we'll probably see commercial fusion in our lifetimes. It remains to be seen if it'll be a slam dunk, or small and ugly like the gen 1 nuclear reactors. It may ultimately not be cost competitive with other generating technologies. But I think we'll likely see actual reactors hooked into the grid in some limited fashion in the next couple decades, if for no reason other than to say we did it.
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The change from flying being something quacks talked about for hundreds of years with nothing to show for it, to airplanes being used in open war, only took a few decades.
It's not even "a few" decades--it's just one. From the Wright brothers first flight to the first confirmed air to air victory in WW1 was 10 years, 10 months. Air to ground bombing began even earlier than that.
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The change from flying being something quacks talked about for hundreds of years with nothing to show for it, to airplanes being used in open war, only took a few decades.
It's not even "a few" decades--it's just one. From the Wright brothers first flight to the first confirmed air to air victory in WW1 was 10 years, 10 months. Air to ground bombing began even earlier than that.
I'm not certain that using the example of airplane progress is the best proof of Fusion power's inevitability.
Given that the first Tokamak was put in operation in 1958 and this is 2022, in addition to the adoption of planes for warfare occurred after an actual working plane happened.
Anyhow, if we're drawing strange comparisons here, the fusion power stations will provide unlimited power for the million people living on Mars in 2050. Both are a fact, amirite?
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I'm not talking about fusion (power) specifically, as I'm on the "perpetually 20 years out" team. The part of his point that I was dogpiling on is that technological progress can be unpredictable and uneven, where you can go from "if you believe this is even possible, you're a nutjob (or, if sufficiently well-off or respected, merely eccentric)" to sophisticated applied usage in a very short time period. I believe the kids these days call this "disruptive."
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I'm not talking about fusion (power) specifically, as I'm on the "perpetually 20 years out" team. The part of his point that I was dogpiling on is that technological progress can be unpredictable and uneven, where you can go from "if you believe this is even possible, you're a nutjob (or, if sufficiently well-off or respected, merely eccentric)" to sophisticated applied usage in a very short time period. I believe the kids these days call this "disruptive."
The first Tokamak was put on line in 1959. I wouldn't hold my breath re the disruption! 8^)
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She's just explaining the concept of engineering break even, which I understand might be confusing for someone not well versed in engineering or physics. But it's not exactly some kind of "gotcha" that implies grift, the reality is these kinds of problems are solved by working simultaneously on various elements, then solutions integrated later.
As for what she is doing, yes. that's exactly what she is showing us.
Good to see this is already essentially solved. Gotta go now, my flying car is ready to pick up. Tit was in the shop because the Mr Fusion generator was putting out too much power.
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How about an expert like you point by point refuting what she said.
With courageous Apple punctuation? I'd rather he didn't.
PS: It can be turned off.
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How about an expert like you point by point refuting what she said.
With courageous Apple punctuation? I'd rather he didn't.
PS: It can be turned off.
That was a slog to get through, eh?
Maybe I've watched too many Thunderfoot YT videos, but there is a similarity in the breathless reportage Mason debunks and the breathless reportage we're getting with our standing at the very cusp of Fusion power.
As well Since my prior career was working in science based research for a long time, as soon as the input goes breathless, we become really skeptical.
It isn't that it is not possible because of the breathless reportage, it is just that breathless reportage
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Note to Slashdot staff: I know you don't want to support Unicode due to the potential for abuse, but couldn't you at least add a special case for Apple's stupid apostrophe? Just replace the damned thing with an ASCII apostrophe; it's probably one line of code.
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Nah, I like knowing who the non-diligent Apple fanbois are.
It can be turned off, but only if they're woke enough.
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It's in a Perl regular expression (probably divided into multiple points in the code) and the new owners of Slashdot haven't figured out the regular expression yet.
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If it's a few big investors, one needs to take a closer look at the financing. Tax law changes / rebates, government incentives, government loans - all these might be the real source of the (possibly freshly printed) money, not personal wealth making a legitimate bet on a technology.
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If it's a few big investors, one needs to take a closer look at the financing. Tax law changes / rebates, government incentives, government loans - all these might be the real source of the (possibly freshly printed) money, not personal wealth making a legitimate bet on a technology.
This.
I'm sure many of the investors are somewhat earnest, hoping to get in on the ground floor of the crowning achievement of humanity.
Unlimited commercial safe no radioactive products Fusion power would be just that. An end to the entire world's energy problems.
Then again, the rather large sums of money they have to put into this is not having them go to bed hungry because they can't afford food, and I'm certain their accountants have everything worked out in their favor.
And I wonder why the man
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Another lie is that there is no radiation.
It was always my understanding that fusion does create radioactivity but it is just a lot easier to deal with than fission radioactive material because the half life of the products of fusion are much shorter.
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Another lie is that there is no radiation.
It was always my understanding that fusion does create radioactivity but it is just a lot easier to deal with than fission radioactive material because the half life of the products of fusion are much shorter.
Ack - I see I wrote Protons - It is neutron impingement. Here's some info https://thebulletin.org/2017/0... [thebulletin.org] .
It isn't like we're looking at a chernobyl type issue, but the neutron flux will make the items they hit intensely radioactive.
And if we decide to encase the fusion capsule in a lithium sphere oh, just wait until one of those ignites accidentally. the flames will be such a pretty violet color, but Li reacts with almost everything. Run away.
It is most unfortunate that we are fed a line that
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No. There is no notable grift and nobody is making billions off ITER. One has to be careful about throwing around words like "lying" and to her credit, Dr. Hossenfelder has done a good job of careful wording. The scientific progress may not be communicated perfectly but the actual planning of investments in science is clearly done by policy-makers with a full understanding of where things are at.
To see this consider the aims of ITER. We can even just go to Wikipedia for this. "ITER's goals are to achieve en
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No. There is no notable grift and nobody is making billions off ITER. One has to be careful about throwing around words like "lying" and to her credit, Dr. Hossenfelder has done a good job of careful wording. But yes, the wording of way too many people connected to the ITER project has been way too vague and imprecise and Dr. Hossenfelder is right to call them out on it.
I'm fortunate enough to be semi-anonymous here, so I can word things a bit differently.
But at their very very best, they are allowing to think that this is going to be a perfect and endless source of power that will take the world into a utopia where no one ever has too little power. Perhaps such limitless power that will trigger Arthur Clarke's "heat crisis"? Joking.
We are in a remarkable new age, where critical thinking and skepticism has become a bad thing. If what I'm working on has issues, I tend
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You do realize you're going against the scientific establishment, right? And also scientific consensus.
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You do realize you're going against the scientific establishment, right? And also scientific consensus.
Ah - be that as it may, it does not make me wrong.
I very well might be wrong. And if we are all enjoying unlimited electrical power in 5 years, I'll be the first to admit it.
Just for some fun here.
Intro spacey string section music, Imaging: 3_D futuristic animations start playing. A woman with a soothing confident voice starts a narration
Imagine, if you will, a world where no one has to drill for oil, or natural gas, or any other hazardous fuel. A clean and natural world, with people living in harmony
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You may or may not be wrong, but a large number of actual scientists ... actual nuclear fusion scientists specifically, directly disagree with you.
Luckily for the rest of us, they're not deterred by your decidedly non-scientific, sky-is-falling approach to an extremely complex topic.
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You may or may not be wrong, but a large number of actual scientists ... actual nuclear fusion scientists specifically, directly disagree with you.
Luckily for the rest of us, they're not deterred by your decidedly non-scientific, sky-is-falling approach to an extremely complex topic.
Why would it be lucky for the rest of you? What does that even mean? What does luck have to do with this, and why is my skepticism make you unlucky? I would beg you to illuminate me because luck is not involved, and it's not tit for tat regardless.
Sky is falling? I have to say, that doesn't make any sense at all. I'm just stating an informed opinion, in the same manner that I don't believe that Elon Musk is going to populate a million people on Mars by 2050, or that the various schemes to provide desert
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Yes, for some today, those happy thoughts that we'll get that limitless power - seriously, limitless is another word for infinite.
What's more, you cannot even back up your argument, Just try to suppress anyone who dares to disagree.
Hah! I love it, you prove my original point.
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You must be new here! Welcome to Slashdot!
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You must be new here! Welcome to Slashdot!
Well, not too new. But hot damn, we are supposed to be at least intelligent enough to understand that criticism is part of the process.
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We need this kind of intellectual honesty every time some fool says "More nukes"!!
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Why don't I have points when I need them? We need this kind of intellectual honesty every time some fool says "More nukes"!!
It is hard to come by.
I think that it was Huxley who noted "The further a society comes from the truth, the more they hate anyone who speaks it"
He was speaking of politics, but damn - I'm me, but randos on Slashdot modding Dr Hossenfelder down and calling her insights outdated and me flamebait?
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Well we do have the Kirk Sorenson boosting the literally impossible Thorium nuclear energy cycle. Hard to find more dedicated denialism outside of the climate denialists.
I foresee a great battle, as the sons of Thorium - the immoveable object, comes into the battle of the ages - the cult of fusion, and the irresistible force. This will either save the world or destroy it in the coming war Sorry, I just came to /. after watching the Nerd of the Rings middle earth analysis on Youtube, and I'm channelling my inner J.R.R. Tolkien.. 8^)
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At this time, we are not even far enough to credibly speculate how actual energy could be taken out of a fusion reactor. Lets get reliable, long-running Deuterium-Deuterium fusion first, shall we? Maybe we will have that in 50-100 years.
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Yes, all that energy ends up as heat. A fusion power plant would then use a steam turbine system just like current fission plants to turn that heat into electric power. The conversion is never very efficient so a lot of the heat ends up being wasted (dissipated into the environment).
Re: Power In / Power Out (Score:1)
Fusion is basically the backwards process of current nuclear reactor which is shooting particles at an atom to âoesplitâ it which generates a ton of energy as a byproduct.
With fusion youâ(TM)re basically trying to excite the fuel to fuse particles into an atom, with the same release of energy of the process.
You however need a ton of energy to kickstart the process after which it basically should be able to be self-sustainable with minimum fuel and energy consumption.
The laws of nature are pre
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Yes, it goes into heat. You have to heat up a plasma to make it fuse, and run magnets to contain it. Superconducting magnets make the latter part much more efficient, but the heating mechanisms are all pretty inefficient, including things like lasers and particle accelerators. Heat also leaks out of the plasma and warms up the reaction chamber.
Fusion is not a magic wand (Score:3)
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Recently I was thinking the most likely use case for fusion is industrial. Converting methane to valuable helium with a side product of useful solid carbon. There is a lot of waste methane from fracking and the like an it would help global warming if we could use it with carbon waste. We are running out of helium. This would push the target of net energy production back and giv
Re: Fusion is not a magic wand (Score:3)
Iâ(TM)d suggest you watch https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
Commonwealth fusion systems at least think they have solved the problems with removing the blanket, because theyâ(TM)re able to easily disassemble and reassemble their magnets.
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Fusion IS a magic wand! (Score:2)
https://bigthink.com/starts-wi... [bigthink.com]
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Reactor maintenance and plant upkeep are still going to drive a large part of the cost of output electricity.
Most promising aspect of fusion in my view is the volume of enabling technologies. Becoming good enough for commercially viable energy production or even getting close enough where it becomes clearly obvious would open the floodgates of investment into fusion and enabling technologies. Relative to spending on energy production fusion research has thus far been in rounding error territory for decades.
If one assumes anything like 2030 is remotely true for commercial production this means for key technologie
Funding is not a sign of good ideas (Score:3)
In the age of "Fake it till you make it", getting Funding is not a sign of being on the road to a potentially shippable project. Look at Theranos.
If there was any reasonable hope that there might be a product in the next years, they'd get funding from outside the Silicon Valley VC bubble.
Re:Funding is not a sign of good ideas (Score:4, Informative)
Commonwealth Fusion Systems looks legit. They have a series of peer reviewed papers explaining the physics of their demo reactor and predicting its ability to generate a burning plasma. Their reactor designs were enabled by revolutionary new superconducting materials (REBCO tapes) that allow them to operate at much higher magnetic fields than previously feasible, resulting in a far smaller and easier to build reactor in addition to achieving a more stable plasma.
Home page: https://cfs.energy/ [cfs.energy]
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems [wikipedia.org]
Series of peer-reviewed physics papers on the design of their SPARC demo reactor and ability to achieve a self-sustaining plasma: https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc/publications [mit.edu]
News article on the papers: https://news.mit.edu/2020/physics-fusion-studies-0929 [mit.edu]
Talk by Dennis Whyte of MIT on the basic ideas behind the reactor design (scaling laws, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 [youtube.com]
Listening to that last talk a couple of years ago (online, of course) was the first time I actually felt optimistic about practical fusion power becoming a reality in my lifetime.
Re: Funding is not a sign of good ideas (Score:2)
Yeh, if thereâ(TM)s one company on the planet I wish I could invest in its CFS. They really genuinely seem to have an answer to all the last major questions in fusion power.
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they talk about an efficiency factor of 10 or 11, which is similar to what other experiments achieve or aim for. what they seem to omit (just like the others do) is that this only concerns the energy put into the plasma vs the energy got out of it. it doesn't account for the energy needed to get and keep the whole system running, nor the efficiency of converting the output to electricity. considering that, the total efficiency factor is probably well below 0.1, so this may be an interesting experiment but s
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The reason they target Q~10, (same as ITER) is that's about what you need for actual breakeven in a continuous operation reactor.
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Commonwealth Fusion does look like they're on to something. Ditto for General Fusion. Lockheed made some bold claims with results that were disappointing to the military, but they're still one to watch. What they choose to do with their advancements, however, is another matter.
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If there was any reasonable hope that there might be a product in the next years, they'd get funding from outside the Silicon Valley VC bubble.
And from outside the government.
It's real easy to convince some US senators to spend other people's money on a wild idea to produce energy with no CO2 emissions. If it works then they look like the hero. If it doesn't work then it's easy to spin that into some positive thing about "investment for the future", creating jobs in their district, or whatever. It's still a waste of money but these senators will find ways to make it look like it wasn't a complete waste.
If these people could make a good case for
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There is no reasonable hope of practical fusion plants in the next 50 years. May well take 100 years or 150 years until we get there. Far too much is unknown and far too many elements are missing. But apparently too many people are willing to get a little richer by giving people false hope.
Necessity. (Score:5, Insightful)
The race is less about money than it is out of necessity. Let's face it, without an incredible amount of electricity then we have no hope stopping, let alone reversing, the level of damage we've done to this planet. Having a limitless supply of electricity would enable us to fix of our pollution problems, from the atmosphere, to factory wastes, to landfills, to plastics in the ocean.
Until we have an obscene amount of energy to power massive restorative projects then we're just buying time and trying to minimize the amount of damage we keep doing.
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What's the point in "saving our species" if it means bankrupting ourselves in the process? The economics of energy production is not something we can ignore. If there's no profit in producing energy then it is a pointless effort. Profit is tracking money in versus money out but the money is just a means to track things like man-hours, materials, and energy. If there's no profit then there is a good chance that if we track down where all the losses are in the economics it really boils down to more energy
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You should be quite pleased to find that the efforts closest to a commercially-viable fusion reactor seem to be mostly privately-funded.
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If anything, having limitless power would probably cause MORE consumption which is the main driver of our pollution problems.
The primary reason there is no "zero pollution" mandate is because it's not feasible. Specifically, the more energy you use to stop pollution, the most pollution is generated. When we suddenly have an overabundance of pollution free electricity then we can have a zero pollution mandate because it's perfectly feasible. It would mean all factory waste and trash in general would have value because it could be transformed into something useful. 100% recycling would be a thing,
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It's also about politics. If oil is no longer necessary in the quantities that we currently use it, a lot of political issues will go away.
Re:Necessity. (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't take any electricity to reverse what we have done to the planet. All we have to agree on is that we need to cull the human race down to a few thousand (or better yet to zero?) and then let the planet take care of reversing our damage by itself. 8^)
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then let the planet take care of reversing our damage by itself.
Not to ruin the joke but we've already passed the point where Earth could undo what we've already done... for several millions of years. :-(
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Yes, we're still in an Ice Age (interglacial) and we can expect that the purely natural (non human-caused) temperature fluctuations between glaciation and interglacial would make things several degrees hotter than AGW is predicting.
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The particular temperatures don't actually matter, what matters is how fast they are changing. If it happen over a thousand years then the life on this planet can evolve slowly while maintaining a certain population. If that time is compressed into a decade then populations crash and the survivors get culled which leads to extinctions.
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Okay, you first!
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Having a limitless supply of electricity would enable us to fix of our pollution problems
There are always limits, as Tom Murphy pointed out a decade ago. [ucsd.edu] If we keep increasing our energy usage at ~2.3% per year, the ability of the earth to radiate away the heat will be overwhelmed in a couple of centuries, and in four or five centuries the surface of the earth will hit boiling-water temperatures.
So at some point we'll be forced to look for something other than limitless electricity if we don't want to turn into Venus.
Re: (Score:2)
We'll be dumping enormous amounts of energy pushing things into orbit, and once we have fusion online there will likely be a lot of endothermic materials synthesis going on. Plus we can recondition the atmosphere to retain less heat. It won't be the problem you think it will be.
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If we keep increasing our energy usage at ~2.3% per year, the ability of the earth to radiate away the heat will be overwhelmed in a couple of centuries
This presumes that there will be a need for that much energy to be used on Earth. If heat became an issue then it seem more likely that we would move stuff off-world. Anyway, there is little point in solving future problems when have larger problems presently.
Worth keeping things moving forward (Score:2)
We should have realistic expectations about where fusion is at currently in that it is decades, if not a century away from being the predominant energy source but it's worth keeping up funding and research. We know it can work, it's just a matter of technology and materials science catching up to making it feasible. Thousands of smaller problems to solve and then combine those solutions into a cohesive solution. It is very difficult but that's what makes it worth pursuing.
I support continued fusion rease
Re: Worth keeping things moving forward (Score:2)
If you take a look at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com] youâ(TM)ll see that weâ(TM)re extremely close to having that first commercial plant. That would put us roughly in 1950 in terms of the development of fission. That means we have maybe 20-30 years until thereâ(TM)s a huge proportion of the power supplied to the grid from fusion. And thatâ(TM)s ignoring that fusion has significant deployment advantages over fission. It doesnâ(TM)t need fuel to be refined and transported under
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We are not close. Some people like to present things as if we are though. Probably politically motivated to profit from climate change.
Re: (Score:3)
What if the estimates on when we get fusion power are wrong? We can't predict when commercially viable fusion power plants can be made any more than we could have predicted commercially viable fission power in the 1950s. You appear to be implying we don't need fission power because of how close we are with fusion. I do hope that's not where you are going.
I'll disagree with the point that fission is base load only. If you can speculate on technology development in 30 years then I can too. We have demons
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Liquid-fuel thorium reactors provide us 100,000 years worth of fuel with known reserves, will produce medica
Re: (Score:2)
An that is very much how things are. The research works, goes forward at a steady pace, but there are a lot of things to find out and a lot of engineering is to be done before we come close to a solution. And there are quite a few things in other areas that need to be discovered. For example, the Wendelstein X7 Stellerator only became possible because of advances in computers and material sciences. And now the X7 is doing plasma physics research, which is still needed to plan the next machine. The machine a
QTotal vs QPlasma (Score:5, Informative)
When I hear stuff like this: "and for the first time on earth you will make more power out than in from a fusion plasma" I immediately become suspicious, because the energy required to sustain the fusion is typically only a fraction of the power needed to run the entire plant. For example, JET had a QPlasma of 0.67, which means they produced 67% of the energy needed to sustain fusion. Sounds like they got pretty close to break-even!
From the JET wikipedia page: JET set the record for the closest approach to scientific breakeven, reaching Q = 0.67 in 1997, producing 16 MW of fusion power while injecting 24 MW of thermal power to heat the fuel.
But at the bottom of the page: JET's power requirements during the plasma pulse are around 500 MW with peak in excess of 1000 MW.
That's because they're proudly stating their QPlasma while omitting the QTotal, which appears to be the norm in the industry. And even these numbers don't consider any losses from converting the heat from the plasma into electricity.
This video explains it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] The reason ITER won't generate any electricity despite having a QPlasma of 10 is because the QTotal will be about 0.57. It's a tremendous achievement, and one that gets us close to break-even, but not enough to generate any power. And yet QPlasma is the only number ever reported.
I'm a fan of fusion energy and I hope we eventually achieve it, but anyone who only reports QPlasma and omits QTotal is trying to deceive you.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: QTotal vs QPlasma (Score:3)
Thankfully, modern superconductors will save us. Firstly, because the power needed to run and cool the magnets will be dramatically lower, secondly because the massively higher magnetic fields cause the fusion power output from a given volume of reactor to go up by the cube of the increase in field strength, which in turn means you can shrink the reactor, which means the plasma is closer to the magnets, which means the field strength is higher, which⦠yeh, positive feedback loop. Thirdly, becau
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The reason ITER won't generate any electricity despite having a QPlasma of 10 is because the QTotal will be about 0.57.
I would say the fact ITER won't be equipped with turbines and generator is a bigger reason why it won't be producing any electricity. Also producing electricity is not the point of ITER. Also you have to learn to walk before you can run.
Re: (Score:2)
The energy to run the plant is generally pretty small compared to the amount needed to maintain the plasma. What you're observing is that the energy input into the plasma is usually counted as the actual energy deposited, rather than the amount of energy required to do so.
ITER won't generate net power because it's a research reactor. It targets Q=10 in part because that's about what it would need to produce net power out if it did have a reasonable generating system attached.
There's a breakdown published on
20 Tesla? (Score:2)
And that includes Elon's parking spot!
Nuclear is booming again (Score:1)
Limitless? Words matter (Score:1)
Words like "limitless" come across as either "I don't know the meaning of common words, so don't expect me to know science" or, more charitably, "I'm using hyperbole to drum up funding and hoping nobody calls me on it."
Instead, how about "Our research looks promising. Best case is that this will supply the planet with a plentiful supply of reasonably safe, cost-effective energy and we and our investors will be rich. Even if it falls short a bit, the things we will learn along the way make it worth your in
Fusion is unremarkable (Score:3)
Just to level-set: fusion is unremarkable. Any adequately equipped university or maker lab could create a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor. [makezine.com]
The trick is creating fusion which generates a net energy output. The Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor net consumes energy. Nature has solved that by harnessing gravity, by coalescing unimaginably huge amounts of matter into singular objects which by their very mass, causing enormous temperatures and pressures, generate a fusion reaction.
Humans have not figured out how to warp gravity in such a way at their scales. So they're left with magnetic fields and lasers. Again, not to figure out how to create fusion, that is unremarkable. But how to create fusion with a net generation of energy.
Pons and Fleischmann were respected physicists, and having found a particular room-temperature, simple hack to harness fusion to generate energy was not unreasonable. It's not unreasonable today.
Anyhoo, maybe the path forward for fusion net-generating energy are these complex, (intially) energy hungry machines. But other paths shouldn't be ignored either.
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Edit: Pons and Fleischmann were chemists, not physicists. [wikipedia.org]
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chemists, not physicists
A minor distinction [xkcd.com], really.
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Pretty big when you're talking about subatomic processes.
Push a button ... (Score:2)
...and it will start.
...you let your finger off the button and it will stop.
The true technological breakthrough will be when they figure out how to run it without having some poor guy stand there with his finger on the button.
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The George Jetson will be out of a job [giphy.com].
TAE Technologies and aneutronic fusion (Score:2)
TAE Technologies, which uses a unique non-radioactive reaction between hydrogen and boron
The point is not that it is non-radioactive. They try to achieve Hydrogen-Boron fusion, which does not produce neutrons. Competitors working on Hydrogne-Hydrogen fusion (or Hydrogen-Deuterium or Tritium) have to cope with device-damaging high energy neutrons that cannot be confined by the magnetic field.
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Focus Fusion and LPP Fusion are working on that. Not sure if they should be taken too seriously.
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but not nothing
Thank you for the information, I was not aware of that point.
Reading the Wikipedia page on aneutronic fusion, I note that the solutions to handle B+H production of neutrons are much more reasonable than what we usually hear for Hydrogen fusion: water screening instead of a complex mixture of explosive Lithium, highly-toxic Berylium, and midely radioactive Tritium.
Not "limitless" and not soon (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously. What is it with the stupid stories lately? First, fusion is certainly not "limitless". You have to build, run and maintain the installations. And you have to get the fuel. Current designs are still using Tritium which is very rare indeed, because Tritium makes fusion easier. We will at the very least require reliably working Deuterium-Deuterium fusion before anything commercially viable becomes possible. But we currently are lacking materials, plasma physics, and quite a few more things to do reliable TriDe fusion. So, call it 30 to 100 years to a successful lab demo for De-De Fusion and 30 to 50 years more to the first commercial plant that is not experimental. This stuff is so fundamentally different from what the human race has done so far, it takes time.
My take is all these companies are trying a money-grab because of climate change and most of them are at least lying by misdirection.
Nothing is limitless. (Score:1)
I wish people would stop using terms like "limitless". In doing so it fosters a culture of waste. There is no such thing as "limitless", especially when it comes to energy, and nuclear fusion is no different.
Like today's fission reactors, fusion reactors are thermal energy systems requiring the use of a heat exchanger - the simplest being heating water to drive a steam turbine.
This is not exactly super efficient and means ~50% (roughly speaking - this isn't a lecture on Carnot) of the energy generated has t
Re:Nothing is limitless. (Score:5, Interesting)
That means near 60 million gigawatt-hours of energy has to be dumped into our oceans and atmosphere as waste heat each year. Or about 150,000 times more than today's global nuclear fission plant output.
That cannot happen without consequences for the environment
Total and utter bullshit. According to MIT:
A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use.
The heat given off by human activity is utterly insignificant on a global scale. Power plant cooling can impact rivers and small lakes locally, but certainly not oceans.
And not to be confused with greenhouse gas emissions, which causes more of that enormous solar radiation to be retained.
Bullshit (Score:2)
What a load of absolute bollocks. Lots of puff marketing with f-all actual results behind it.
The post basically more or less ignores ITER and where it is leading,.
Why not? (Score:1)
Progress! (Score:2)
I think it is safe to say that we have progressed from fusion power being forever 50 years away to fusion power being forever 10 years away.
Philadelphia experiment... (Score:1)
OH NO! We're all gonna end up embedded in a wall somewhere!