US Announces $46 Million In Funds To Eight Nuclear Fusion Companies (reuters.com) 111
The US Department of Energy has announced that eight American companies working on nuclear fusion energy will receive $46 million in government funding to pursue pilot plants aimed at generating power from fusion reactions. Reuters reports: The Energy Department's Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program hopes to help develop pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade. "The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to partnering with innovative researchers and companies across the country to take fusion energy past the lab and toward the grid," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a release. The awardees are: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Focused Energy Inc, Princeton Stellarators Inc, Realta Fusion Inc, Tokamak Energy Inc, Type One Energy Group, Xcimer Energy Inc, and Zap Energy Inc
The funding, which comes from the Energy Act of 2020, is for the first 18 months. Projects may last up to five years, with future funding contingent on congressional appropriations and progress from the companies in meeting milestones.
Looking to launch fusion plants that use lasers or magnets, private companies and government labs spent $500 million on their supply chains last year, according to a Fusion Industry Association (FIA) survey. They plan to spend about $7 billion by the time their first plants come online, and potentially trillions of dollars mainly on high-grade steel, concrete and superconducting wire in a mature industry, estimated to be sometime between 2035 and 2050, the survey said.
The funding, which comes from the Energy Act of 2020, is for the first 18 months. Projects may last up to five years, with future funding contingent on congressional appropriations and progress from the companies in meeting milestones.
Looking to launch fusion plants that use lasers or magnets, private companies and government labs spent $500 million on their supply chains last year, according to a Fusion Industry Association (FIA) survey. They plan to spend about $7 billion by the time their first plants come online, and potentially trillions of dollars mainly on high-grade steel, concrete and superconducting wire in a mature industry, estimated to be sometime between 2035 and 2050, the survey said.
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Fusion has been demonstrated to work since the 1930s.
And the reason why there's a huge boost of interest in commercially viablefusion these days is a confluence of the steady progress in the field combined with the advent of commercially-available-in-bulk room temperature superconducting films for RTS magnets, which let you double field strengths, which let you reduce facility scales by an order of magnitude for a given gain factor (or correspondingly increase gain for a given size). While also simplifying
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Fusion has been demonstrated to work since the 1930s.
But nothing even remotely approaching break-even fusion has.
Talking about commercially viable fusion seems kind of funny when no fusion reaction ever conducted by man has ever generated enough power to initiate a second reaction.
However, the US throws way money like this on grants for weird shit all the time. Nothing wrong with that. Never know what comes out of it.
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...However, the US throws way money like this on grants for weird shit all the time. Nothing wrong with that. Never know what comes out of it.
And yet, we know exactly what comes of this research. Greed N. Corruption getting rich fleecing the ignorant with "hope". You know what's considered "weird"? Listening to those still selling fusion as if Greed profiting off all other forms of energy would actually allow it.
And given the end result of water-is-still-wet spending in the US is $30 trillion in debt with Dumb and Dumber at the helm, I'd say there's plenty wrong with that. Perhaps you're not paying enough in taxes yet to make that clear? G
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It's 0.0015% of tax revenue.
The US has always provided stupid little fart noises worth of money to things like that.
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What matters here is the principle, not the amount.
lol. It's also literally the recipe for modern capitalist states.
Taking money from the tax payers and giving it to entrepreneurs is a recipe for corruption.
It's also a recipe for roads. dams. railroads. internets.
Have we already forgotten Solyndra?
Or... Tesla?
You do not apply your complaint consistently.
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lol. It's also literally the recipe for modern capitalist states.
What exactly is the recipe for modern capitalist state? Robbing Peter to pay Paul? Capitalism is primarily an economical system based on the institution of the private property and implies political system which protects private property. Taking private property away to give it to someone else is actually very socialistic. Your sentence sounds deep but is actually nonsensical.
Taking money from the tax payers and giving it to entrepreneurs is a recipe for corruption.
It's also a recipe for roads. dams. railroads. internets.
Actually no, it is not. There were roads in feudal times when there was no centralized countries, with governments. As for the dams, the first one, on the Niagara Falls, was private, owned by Westinghouse Corp. There are other private dams in the world. Railroads were mostly private, until recently. Union Pacific Railroads, the company that has built the first transcontinental rails on the American continent was a private company. As for the "Internets", there can be only one, to quote an ancient TV show from the previous century. The "Internets" were pioneered by DEC and IBM who have both been exploring network communication long before DARPA. DECNet had great influence over DARPA who has standardized the TCP protocol in the early 90's. DECNet has influenced the development of the "Internets" in a major way, but it had a problem, it couldn't support more than 65535 nodes and the file sharing protocol was built into networking, which made the code large, clunky and non-portable. We owe "the Internets" to the private companies like DEC and IBM. Private company rule the Internet today: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Netflix & others. Tacoma Narrows Bridge was built by the government. Market is much more efficient than the government.
Have we already forgotten Solyndra?
Or... Tesla? You do not apply your complaint consistently.
Tesla is as bad as Solyndra. I will not question the morality of robbing us taxpayers to help the richest man in the world, but subventions as such are an idiocy. There is not enough Lithium on the Earth to put it into every car. There is not enough electric energy for that and there will not be enough energy for the next 50 years, if we start building nuclear powerplants now. Nobody asked me whether I wish to contribute to Mr. Musk's wealth, but here I am, some of the money I earned goes to Elon Musk. Tesla is and always will be a luxury brand for yuppies who feel guilty because of their good life and want to "do something good for the environment". The fact that this is an expensive toy which costs $70+K and clearly shows the status of the driver is also a plus. That is why you will never see Tesla Model-T. The purpose of a Tesla is not to be good for the environment because Tesla is not good for the environment. Mining the stuff necessary to make Tesla batteries is very harmful to the environment. So is their disposal. And the electricity in those batteries is mostly produced by burning fossil fuels.
The point of the story is that government is very inefficient user of money, precisely because it's other people's money. Free market is what has lifted all states which practice free market principles out of hunger and poverty. US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and France are rich because they are free, not the other way round. Free market means that government doesn't get to pick the winners, like with Tesla. Free market is the thing that has gotten humanity into the 21st century, with iPhones, cars, airplans and...."the Internets". Governments start wars. Free market produces and enriches everybody.
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What exactly is the recipe for modern capitalist state? Robbing Peter to pay Paul? Capitalism is primarily an economical system based on the institution of the private property and implies political system which protects private property. Taking private property away to give it to someone else is actually very socialistic. Your sentence sounds deep but is actually nonsensical.
Taxation is not robbery.
You can make anything sound by by using words however you like.
So you've just set the tone of this entire discussion: You're signaled that you have no interest in arguing in good faith, and you shall be treated as such.
Actually no, it is not. There were roads in feudal times when there was no centralized countries, with governments.
No centralized countries with governments?
Ya, bullshit, lol.
Roman roads were funded by the central government, and maintenance left to the provincial governments.
So-called "road funds" were raised by levied taxes.
All main roads in all medieval governments worked
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No, taxation is not a robbery, taxation is the price of government.
Correct. Which is why calling it "Robbing Peter To Pay Paul" is a vile fucking mischaracterization.
What we are talking about here is what do we want government to do. I don't want government to act as a venture capitalist.
And that's perfectly fair. You have a right to not want the government to play a role as public works venture capitalist.
But the government does, regardless, and always has, in the ways I have demonstrated.
Maybe your vote will be the one that changes that... But probably not.
And no, I haven't gotten it wrong.
You did. Every single point.
The first hydroelectric plant also needed a dam, albeit a smaller one. Power generating turbines must be located somewhere and there must be a mechanism diverting water to turn the turbines.
No... Again, I think you don't understand how hydroelectric power plants work.
They work by turning gravita
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Now, now. What I am calling "robbing Peter to pay Paul" is taking money from me and giving it to the richest person on the planet. I am supposed to pay for the price of government, not for the price of Musk producing his yuppie toys. As for the Arpanet, here is what Wikipedia says:
Arpanet [wikipedia.org]
Pay attention to the following sentence:
Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983 after the Department of Defense made it standard for all military computer networking.[12][13]
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No. [royalsocie...ishing.org]
And what part of my comment about RTS superconductors wasn't clear? It's like a jump from lead-acid to li-ion (even moreso, actually), yet people like you saying "Lead-acid EVs are impractical, so EVs will always be impractical".
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No. [royalsocie...ishing.org]
Are you meaning to imply that cute graph shows us getting close to breakeven? lol
Your dream of magical semiconductors that require less power for refrigeration, ignoring the fact that they work in an environment that will still require massive amounts of refrigeration... is super meaningful.
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Chart stops in 2000 because there's been very little progress since. 25 years of pretty much nothing.
On the chart, the best results are still 100 times too low for commercial use.
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You do understand that there is a lag between when a facility is commissioned, when it starts operating, and when it hits its highest gain factor, right?
I mean, we could put more recent facilities on there, but they're either not operational yet or are still scaling up their operations.
And again... for the last time... what part of my comment about HTS superconductors wasn't clear?
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The lag from 2000 to 2023 is not "waiting for new reactors to come online"
It's a brick wall that was hit.
Increasing triple product doesn't get you to ignition. Only when you graph triple product next to plasma temperature do you start to get a good picture.
Increasing triple product is easy.
Tokomaks are nowhere near scientific breakeven, which means they're light years away from commercial break even.
Lowering the external refrigeration power requirement (which isn't even part of Q
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ED: That should read HTS, not RTS, of course.
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> commercially-available-in-bulk room temperature superconducting films for RTS magnets
Yeah, that doesn't exist.
Liquid nitrogen temperatures, sure. Room temperature, no.
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Yeah, that was a typo. That was supposed to be HTS. I only just now caught it. :P
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When a type is 39 characters long, that's called a seizure.
Lying to save face is a bad look. You didn't typo, you misremembered.
trillions of dollars (Score:2)
"trillions of dollars mainly on high-grade steel, concrete and superconducting wire"
I think this is a good investment on the part of the US government, but that statement caught my eye. How many fusion installations will trillions of dollars buy?
kind of a low-ball sum (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes. Start a fusion company and convince a review board of nuclear physicists that you might have a viable path to commercial fusion.
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> convince a review board of nuclear physicists
If you're private, you don't even need that part.
The Naval Research Lab wrote a lengthy report trashing TAE back in 1997 that explained in some detail why it couldn't possibly work. You can find it online.
Didn't stop TAE from getting some enormous amount of investment though. "yeah sure the navy said that, the govmint doesn't want you to know about this one secret!" Tech bros; Here, have half a billion.
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Re:Son of Solyndra (Score:4, Informative)
The loan program that Solyndra took part in ended up turning a profit like 9 years ago.
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13... [npr.org]
"Overall, the agency has loaned $34.2 billion to a variety of businesses, under a program designed to speed up development of clean-energy technology. Companies have defaulted on $780 million of that — a loss rate of 2.28 percent. The agency also has collected $810 million in interest payments, putting the program $30 million in the black."
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I hope you realize that earning $30 million after 9 years on $34.2 billion amounts to a terrible rate of return. Thats ~0.8% for the life of the investment. The Feds had to spend more borrowing that money.
Re: Son of Solyndra (Score:2)
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Bingo, turning up any money at all is over the mark, the total economic output of those dollars likely grew the economy so much it more than paid for themselves in addition to all the other upsides.
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Moving goalposts makes anything possible!
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You realize that earning profit directly on the loan isn't the ONLY thing a government granting loans to accelerate a tech sector gets, right?
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Maybe you should have explained that to jack smirking reven?
Never you mind that borrowing billions of dollars to subsidize one industry has the indirect effect of putting a drag on everyone else. TANSTAAFL.
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Only if you ignore the value of companies like Tesla, and to a lesser extent SpaceX, to the US economy.
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The purpose of the program wasn't to turn a profit, but to speed the development and deployment of solar and other green technologies. And it worked: the cost of a solar panel (a.k.a. module) has dropped something like 90% since 2005, when the Energy Policy Act that created the loan program was passed.
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Most of that cost reduction has been due to China mass-producing polysilicon on the cheap.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06... [npr.org]
Somehow I don't think that an old Obama-era energy program actually made that happen.
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As I replied to another poster above: try explaining that to jack smirking reven. He brought it up.
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I hope you realize that earning $30 million after 9 years on $34.2 billion amounts to a terrible rate of return. Thats ~0.8% for the life of the investment. The Feds had to spend more borrowing that money.
Kind of like the Qtot of .01 that fusion "breakthroughs are giving us, amirite?
When they want money from the fervent believers, they bray about Qout vs Qin. Unfortunately, Qtot is the real issue, and unless we end up with around Qtot of 1000, it isn't going to work. The fusion plant will have to produce all of the power to handle the parasitic power loads, do it continuously, and have lots of power left over to produce the commercial power.
Qtot of .01 for a small slice of time isn't going to handle i
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> Kind of like the Qtot of .01 that fusion "breakthroughs are giving us, amirite?
But those took 85 years, so its way worse.
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Relax! It's clear nobody in the Federal government loves fusion startups so much that they're willing to fork over even $1 billion, despite the merits (or lack thereof).
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Good job making an argument for more domestic petroleum extraction. Meanwhile, the DoD is going to keep spending that much per year regardless of how we get our energy or where we get it.
The whole "defense spending is subsidies for the oil companies" is a tired old saw that ignores basic reality.
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Considering how much private money is going into hot fusion, you're probably wrong.
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Tesla! Wonder if Romney
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He knew who buttered his political bread.
But his net worth and yearly income indicate he's pretty damn good at putting his money in winning investments.
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This is another costly boondoggle, throwing money away on unproven, non-working technology.
Solyndra at least had a working useful product. The problem there was lack of due diligence and lying about product/financials. Risk taking on unproven technologies is not necessarily a bad investment.
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> Solyndra at least had a working useful product.
Nah, it was a non-starter.
The idea was that you could build a low-cost modular system in what amounts to the same tubes already being used to make solar hot water systems. To do so you would have to use a PV that is not very heat sensitive, which they did. These are more expensive though, so they needed to save on the overall system cost.
To do that, they had this simplified racking system where you just dropped these racks on the roof and then put the cyli
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Solyndra at least had a working useful product.
Nah, it was a non-starter.
I don't agree. The product worked and had a niche in being installable in a wider range of environments at less cost.
Solyndra's design didn't take a huge hit from material costs. It was mostly custom production / tooling that made it expensive leaving room for cost reduction with experience and scale. Today panels are nearly irrelevant in the context of overall system cost.
Yeah fusion is starting to become seriously meeded (Score:3)
With electric cars becoming more common, corporate surveillance and big data's new hot thing AI requiring massive data centers, it's becoming urgent to find cheap power sources that don't rely on dinosaur juice and don't ruin the climate.
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With electric cars becoming more common, corporate surveillance and big data's new hot thing AI requiring massive data centers, it's becoming urgent to find cheap power sources that don't rely on dinosaur juice and don't ruin the climate.
If that is what concerns you then you should be disappointed by this announcement. They do not expect to see a working power plant until at least 2035, and perhaps not until 2050.
I'll see people scream about how we need solutions RIGHT NOW so there's no time for a nuclear fission power plant that would take 7 years to build. But an announcement about a nuclear fusion plant that might be built in 25 years and these same people get all excited on something finally being done.
There won't be any nuclear fusio
Re:Yeah fusion is starting to become seriously mee (Score:4, Informative)
Europe is building new nuclear plants, it's just that they are all disasters. Massively over budget and delayed.
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indeed solar+wind+batteries is cheaper than any other form of energy
A grid powered only by wind and solar would be many times more expensive than today's grid to operate.
Wind especially above 100m has real promise. Solar not so much. Present day ESS is only capable of short term buffering.
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We can ( and are ) doing both.
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Mostly the "right now"ers are saying we need to reduce consumption. Not build anything at all.
And many others also said we needed to act back when they were saying all this is really bad in the 1990's, or even earlier. Now many are just saying "I told you so".
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> Greed has been selling a fusion "solution" to suckers for at least three decades now
At least 5 decades.
KMS Fusion and Riggatron. Google.
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We had fission already yesterday. The same yesterday when we should have been addressing the carbon issue.
Miracle future tech is great, but if it comes after the collapse of civilization, or even after we've hit key tipping points like the permafrost methane bomb (probably less than 20 years out), it does fuck-all for anyone. Waiting on fusion isn't any better than waiting on carbon capture. There's a train coming down the tracks, toot-toot. It's time to get out of the way.
I'm sure it's easy for Joe in the
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Nobody is saying "fusion instead of solar and wind" or "do nothing until fusion is ready". This is a massive straw man that gets trotted out into every discussion about fusion, and it gets tiring.
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You can't have a reliable grid with majority weather-dependent generation. Parts of the US are just about maxed out on how much wind/solar they can install without adding more dispatchable generation capacity. That only comes from fossil fuels or fission. There's not another option. Without nuclear, you WILL see either (1) more fossil fuel plants, or (2) more blackouts.
We will probably see both, with the way people are weasling around trying to find a magic solution that's the least offensive to everyone. "
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You can't have a reliable grid with majority weather-dependent generation.
Adding EVs with V2G makes it practical.
Parts of the US are just about maxed out on how much wind/solar they can install without adding more dispatchable generation capacity.
You mean batteries? Wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than coal in the best case already, let alone nuclear.
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V2G on any kind of scale is going to take decades. You have to wait for the masses to upgrade their home's electrical infrastructure and buy an electric vehicle, one or the other doesn't work. It would also appear to work worst during peak consumption hours (daytime/early evening), when people are out and about in their cars, or just returned home and expect the car to be charging. Or during a hurricane evacuation when everyone's garage is empty. Not quite miracle tech, but unproven, and too late in any cas
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You have to wait for the masses to upgrade their home's electrical infrastructure and buy an electric vehicle, one or the other doesn't work.
You need a little hardware at (possibly behind) the meter, but it's fairly minimal, lick-and-stick kind of stuff. EVs are coming as fast as we can build batteries...
It would also appear to work worst during peak consumption hours (daytime/early evening)
During peak daytime demand (which is when it's sunny, and you have both industrial loads and air con) you can get solar. The evening peak occurs after people have gotten home. If people are charging every night, which they will be if they participate in V2G, and their battery capacity follows current trends, and they have a typical commute, they
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> You can't have a reliable grid with majority weather-dependent generation.
This is also a huge red herring. No one is proposing this.
We already have massive amounts of on-demand power from natgas. We don't have to turn them off, we simply have to turn them off *more often*. As more renewables get into the grid they'll be used less and less. Sucks for their economics, but that's been factored in already.
$46 million? Meh. (Score:3)
That's not much, considering what the private companies themselves have spent. I wonder what the US government expects for such a pittance? Other than "You took the federal money. Now here's a truckload of regulations you'll have to comply with."
If I were these companies, I'd return the checks.
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What does one have to do with the other? The companies will have to comply with all applicable regulations, regardless.
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https://www.reuters.com/techno... [reuters.com]
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Expect a whole raft of regulations that have nothing to do with the actual business.
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Intel has basically been told that by taking Federal money for their foundry services, that they can no longer control their own stock buyback schedule. Even if I personally think that stock buybacks can be a terrible idea, a poison pill like that is difficult to follow. Ceding fiduciary control to the government is awful.
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I bet this is a chunk of whatever money the DoE/Executive branch can spend on their own out of a limited pool and a larger investment would require being written into the next budget or its own bill.
because the pork goes ever on (Score:2)
$46 Million is a HUGE PILE OF MONEY!!! (Score:2)
Divided between 8 companies it's $5.75 million per each. Thirty seconds of national TV airtime averages about $350,000. Therefore it's like buying roughly eight minutes of airtime for a national TV ad campaign, which is such a minuscule amount it would be a joke. No one would bother.
So all the Slashdot Pundit are screaming their heads off about "government waste" or "I want my home molten salt thorium reactor" or "we all gonna run out of air conditioning without coal and die from a lack of cold
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Not really.
Divided between 8 companies it's $5.75 million per each. Thirty seconds of national TV airtime averages about $350,000. Therefore it's like buying roughly eight minutes of airtime for a national TV ad campaign, which is such a minuscule amount it would be a joke. No one would bother.
Your statement raises more about why anyone would be still spending $350,000 on thirty seconds of "TV" airtime. Talk about aging investments.
So all the Slashdot Pundit are screaming their heads off about "government waste" or "I want my home molten salt thorium reactor" or "we all gonna run out of air conditioning without coal and die from a lack of cold diet Coke". The sheer stupidity of these whiny reactions shows the typical Slashdot participant has a brain the size of a pea.
Uh, before you get too high up on that horse of yours, understand that if P.T. Barnum were alive today, he'd be a trillionaire selling fusion to suckers. In fact, this particular challenge is so old he probably was selling fusion to suckers.
(Imagine if we discovered the answer to all our fusion challenges tomorrow. Explain to me how and why Greed N. Corruption curre
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understand that if P.T. Barnum were alive today, he'd be a trillionaire selling fusion to suckers. In fact, this particular challenge is so old he probably was selling fusion to suckers.
There's still more money right now in selling fission to suckers, so I'd argue he'd be doing that instead...
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As for bringing up P.T. Barnum, that's so old it would have never occurred to me. Frankly I just picked TV ads out of my ass. It could have been anything, but that stat was easy to find.
If you think I'm oh a high horse, read my logon name and my sig. I'm here to amuse myself by annoying people like you, but I rare
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Our national financial disintegration is the disgrace. I want to invest in fusion too, but even more, I'd like the government to stop devastating the economy with irresponsible deficit spending. We can't have everything all at once.
Soon the air will be full of pollution (Score:2)
good and bad. (Score:2)
Only invested in 2 out of 8 (Score:3)
That is 2 out of 8, or 25% of all the companies awarded funds by the US Dept of Energy.
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Bill Gates is an investor in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Zap Energy.
That is 2 out of 8, or 25% of all the companies awarded funds by the US Dept of Energy.
Bill Gates owns like all the farmland now. How much do you think he's getting in farm subsidies? I bet it's enough to make this look like a rounding error.
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Re:What are we supposed to do until 2050? (Score:5, Insightful)
Several of these startups claim we'll have commercial reactors by 2030/2031. Which is fine. $46 million is really peanuts though, compared to what's being blown on wind/solar.
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> wind and solar are the 2 cheapest forms of electricty generation
Ever.
By far.
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Oh sure, that looks great now. Might be quite an albatross by the early 2030s though.
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We can't sit around for a decade wondering if we're going to get fusion so 'blowing' money on wind and solar is probably fine, actually.
FWIW wind and solar contributed 46.7% of energy at peak to the Australian grid yesterday so it's doing OK. I think it's be great if we continued investing on this for another 10 years and then magically we got fusion technology - we'd have a nice redundant grid with a lot of decentralisation and we can plonk fusion right on top!
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Several of these startups claim we'll have commercial reactors by 2030/2031. Which is fine. $46 million is really peanuts though, compared to what's being blown on wind/solar.
Some startups have claimed we'd have cheap commercial power a few years ago. Claims mean nothing.
And the breathless reportage of break even is sadly, a lie. Qtot is still around .01, the amount of power it takes to generate a tiny amount of power for an extremely short length of time is immense.
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The only point I'll cede to you is that Lockheed didn't hit their targets (or pulled the product back for some reason; might be strongarming by the military). Unless you think they'll have their commercial reactor ready next year, which doesn't seem likely. Strange that investors didn't seem to blink an eye on that one.
Otherwise hot fusion is moving along at a torrid pace, if the industry's backers are to be believed. MS has already signed a binding contract with Helion Energy to receive power from fusio
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The only point I'll cede to you is that Lockheed didn't hit their targets (or pulled the product back for some reason; might be strongarming by the military). Unless you think they'll have their commercial reactor ready next year, which doesn't seem likely. Strange that investors didn't seem to blink an eye on that one.
Otherwise hot fusion is moving along at a torrid pace, if the industry's backers are to be believed. MS has already signed a binding contract with Helion Energy to receive power from fusion reactors by 2028:
https://singularityhub.com/202... [singularityhub.com]
How's that for confidence? I'd hate to be Helion if they fail to deliver.
Smells a little grifty to me. We live in an age where Grifters like Ms Holmes of Theranos can make lot's of promises, grift a lot of people, get caught, and the scammed shrug their shoulders and move on to their next scam.
Considering how much power it took to generate just a bit more power for a tiny amount of time, it kind of beggars the imagination that a lot of people believe that all the impediments have been solved and it will only be 5 years until that supposed limitless power is achieved.
I mean,
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He's not going to give you a meaningful answer, I promise. If he answers at all, it will be with some blather about how nuclear is the only answer because [a whole bunch of bullshit you already wisely don't read.] He didn't answer this question when he was posting as blindseer, and he won't answer it now either.
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And what about you? What is your exact problem (with me)?
Your persecution complex.
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Get back to work what, being upset that I contradicted you in one comment? From which you concluded that I had a problem with you? I didn't know you could actually get paid for being professionally offended. Drop us a line to your recruiter, we'd all like that gig.
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