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Fusion is one of those areas that would benefit greatly from Public R&D. It's really sad that we've spent almost nothing on fusion research for the purposes of

Fusion is one of those areas that would benefit greatly from Public R&D. It's really sad that we've spent almost nothing on fusion research for the purposes of producing affordable electricity in the last 20 years.[1][2][3] 1. The NIF is and always has been a sideshow for the Nuclear Weapons development research that goes on there. 2. US last serious investment was the TFTR back in the 90s. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-reactor_n_6438772.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-react... 3. IMO ITER is a joke, too large scale.

oldmanjay 11y ago
You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing" Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly
- WalterSear 11y ago
  In the grand scheme of federal budgets, and how much we waste and destroy by not doing it, it's 'nothing'.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    In the grand scheme, it's not nothing at all, and treating it as such is how these "nothings" get so damned big in the first place. But again, it's super easy to spend money that isn't yours, to fix problems you don't really understand. It's just not very often useful.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      As a percentage of annual budget and or GDP it is a very small amount. And in the grand scheme of is an even smaller amount given the predicted costs of climate change.
      - Pyxl101 11y ago
        None of these reasons are specific arguments to spend money on it.
- guimarin 11y ago
  Most of the funding I've seen has gone into maintenance for existing projects, nuclear weapons research, and the ITER boondoggle. But if you have any sources of projects that have received billions of dollars that have been about power creation, I'm 100% open to changing my tune.
  - ChrisArgyle 11y ago
    Check out the US DOE budget [1]. For fusion energy alone they spent ~$400 million per year for the last several years. In addition they spent ~$1.3b on nuclear physics and high energy physics. From my experience as an undergrad lab assistant I can tell you that many of the funded physics experiments are indirectly related to fusion research because they study the byproducts of our best understood fusion reactor, the sun. [1] http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf edit: clarity
    - guimarin 11y ago
      For anyone who reads this comment and is confused about what we are talking about. On page 17, Fusion research for the NIF of ~480M is outlined. We could debate for a long time about how this is more of PR move, and not realistic. In the parent, this is where I talk about Nuclear Weapons research. For this to make power you literally need to drop millions of pellets of gold plated deuterium one after the other to create 'power', all the while firing the lasers like 100X faster than they can currently be fired. You decide if that's attainable. On page 44, the supposed ~400M a year is outlined and in the discussion notes. "The FY 2014 Budget Request funds U.S. contributions to the ITER project for long-lead procurements required in construction of the facility; the majority of these contributions will be spent on in-kind hardware sourced from U.S. industries, national laboratories, and universities" Which is basically a retelling of my comment about the ITER 'boondoggle'. There is also a gov't sentence on how they money will go to existing projects, which is really lip service to Fusion research and mostly used for Public Education (very good!) General research on the 'sun' is very far afield to say that it applies to harnessing fusion to create electricity.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jlarocco 11y ago
  If he pays taxes then it's partially his money, and he has a right to vote on how it's used and tell people his opinion. Arguing that his idea would be spending "other people's money," is a non-sequitor. Following that logic nobody should have any say in how the government spends money, because no single person is contributing the majority of funding.
- darkmighty 11y ago
  The way the climate is going, we desperately need good energy sources. If you compare historically to the space race, the manhattan project, or the spending on any major conflict you'll see that's a rounding error -- e.g. America's DoD burned through the entire cost of ITER (which is shared among 6 nations + EU) roughly every week circa 2009.
  - trhway 11y ago
    >we desperately need good energy sources. the question is "are we ready?". With nuclear energy we were on the brink of nuclear war during various periods of time, and the natural limitations of the technology help to limit the access to it. The success of fusion in non-Tokamak devices, something like inertial confinement and mixed schemas, brings the risk of a new class of weapons, something along neutron bomb (or boosted fission) without fission primary, which thus wouldn't be subject to technological limitations rooted in the fission.
    - benaiah 11y ago
      We already have enough firepower with standard nuclear warheads to destroy civilization a few times over. I doubt a bigger bomb would fundamentally change the equation at all.
      - trhway 11y ago
        Not bigger. Easier to get/build, no enrichment.
        darkmighty 11y ago
        Honestly, I doubt this is something to worry about. Fusion happens through confinement; it's inherently unstable -- the more energy production, the stronger the confinement is needed (which is provided by a self-regenerating power source in a fusion reactor). This is everything you don't want from a bomb. If the reaction starts getting too hot, your confinement breaks and then the reaction stops. Scaling up the reactor doesn't change this, and it's not like it's viable to fly a reactor with a 100MW startup power source and drop into places anyway. A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb (even with the truly massive fission energy building an H-bomb took a while!).
- dntrkv 11y ago
  Yes, it is almost nothing when you look at the estimated spending required to achieve fusion: http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png
  - techdragon 11y ago
    That's one of my favourite charts about fusion.
  - adwn 11y ago
    That graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are.
    - noobermin 11y ago
      How does this address the graph? It probably doesn't predict the current situation, but it certainly is consistent with it, that fusion funding is below the "fusion never" line, and look, we have no fusion.
      - valhalla 11y ago
        I could be wrong, but the projections are extrapolations based on obviously overly optimistic assumptions about the a) the federal government's desire to fund large, multiyear scientific projects b) the ease of creating an economically scalable fusion reactor
- ansible 11y ago
  You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing" Well, when you consider that the Iraq war cost to the USA has been at least 1 trillion (this is not just what the DoD spent), spending tens of billions on fusion research doesn't sound so bad.
scottlocklin 11y ago
NIF has nothing to do with Nukes. Zero, zilch, nadda. It doesn't even vaguely work anyway. Public funding for fusion research in the US and Europe is a waste of money; it's simply providing employment for past generations of fusion researchers, and pouring money down a hole on technologies which will never work. Tri-Alpha, on the other hand, has something new that might actually work. I went over the patents a few years ago (was going to do a blog on them; got busy); it's quite different from the approaches that get money via public funding, and unlike those approaches, it stands a chance of working.

oldmanjay 11y ago

You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing" Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly

WalterSear 11y ago
In the grand scheme of federal budgets, and how much we waste and destroy by not doing it, it's 'nothing'.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  In the grand scheme, it's not nothing at all, and treating it as such is how these "nothings" get so damned big in the first place. But again, it's super easy to spend money that isn't yours, to fix problems you don't really understand. It's just not very often useful.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    As a percentage of annual budget and or GDP it is a very small amount. And in the grand scheme of is an even smaller amount given the predicted costs of climate change.
    - Pyxl101 11y ago
      None of these reasons are specific arguments to spend money on it.
guimarin 11y ago
Most of the funding I've seen has gone into maintenance for existing projects, nuclear weapons research, and the ITER boondoggle. But if you have any sources of projects that have received billions of dollars that have been about power creation, I'm 100% open to changing my tune.
- ChrisArgyle 11y ago
  Check out the US DOE budget [1]. For fusion energy alone they spent ~$400 million per year for the last several years. In addition they spent ~$1.3b on nuclear physics and high energy physics. From my experience as an undergrad lab assistant I can tell you that many of the funded physics experiments are indirectly related to fusion research because they study the byproducts of our best understood fusion reactor, the sun. [1] http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/04/f0/Highlights.pdf edit: clarity
  - guimarin 11y ago
    For anyone who reads this comment and is confused about what we are talking about. On page 17, Fusion research for the NIF of ~480M is outlined. We could debate for a long time about how this is more of PR move, and not realistic. In the parent, this is where I talk about Nuclear Weapons research. For this to make power you literally need to drop millions of pellets of gold plated deuterium one after the other to create 'power', all the while firing the lasers like 100X faster than they can currently be fired. You decide if that's attainable. On page 44, the supposed ~400M a year is outlined and in the discussion notes. "The FY 2014 Budget Request funds U.S. contributions to the ITER project for long-lead procurements required in construction of the facility; the majority of these contributions will be spent on in-kind hardware sourced from U.S. industries, national laboratories, and universities" Which is basically a retelling of my comment about the ITER 'boondoggle'. There is also a gov't sentence on how they money will go to existing projects, which is really lip service to Fusion research and mostly used for Public Education (very good!) General research on the 'sun' is very far afield to say that it applies to harnessing fusion to create electricity.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jlarocco 11y ago
If he pays taxes then it's partially his money, and he has a right to vote on how it's used and tell people his opinion. Arguing that his idea would be spending "other people's money," is a non-sequitor. Following that logic nobody should have any say in how the government spends money, because no single person is contributing the majority of funding.
darkmighty 11y ago
The way the climate is going, we desperately need good energy sources. If you compare historically to the space race, the manhattan project, or the spending on any major conflict you'll see that's a rounding error -- e.g. America's DoD burned through the entire cost of ITER (which is shared among 6 nations + EU) roughly every week circa 2009.
- trhway 11y ago
  >we desperately need good energy sources. the question is "are we ready?". With nuclear energy we were on the brink of nuclear war during various periods of time, and the natural limitations of the technology help to limit the access to it. The success of fusion in non-Tokamak devices, something like inertial confinement and mixed schemas, brings the risk of a new class of weapons, something along neutron bomb (or boosted fission) without fission primary, which thus wouldn't be subject to technological limitations rooted in the fission.
  - benaiah 11y ago
    We already have enough firepower with standard nuclear warheads to destroy civilization a few times over. I doubt a bigger bomb would fundamentally change the equation at all.
    - trhway 11y ago
      Not bigger. Easier to get/build, no enrichment.
      - darkmighty 11y ago
        Honestly, I doubt this is something to worry about. Fusion happens through confinement; it's inherently unstable -- the more energy production, the stronger the confinement is needed (which is provided by a self-regenerating power source in a fusion reactor). This is everything you don't want from a bomb. If the reaction starts getting too hot, your confinement breaks and then the reaction stops. Scaling up the reactor doesn't change this, and it's not like it's viable to fly a reactor with a 100MW startup power source and drop into places anyway. A fusion bomb necessarily needs a transient, extreme ignition, which I believe can only be achieved with a fission bomb (even with the truly massive fission energy building an H-bomb took a while!).
dntrkv 11y ago
Yes, it is almost nothing when you look at the estimated spending required to achieve fusion: http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png
- techdragon 11y ago
  That's one of my favourite charts about fusion.
- adwn 11y ago
  That graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are.
  - noobermin 11y ago
    How does this address the graph? It probably doesn't predict the current situation, but it certainly is consistent with it, that fusion funding is below the "fusion never" line, and look, we have no fusion.
    - valhalla 11y ago
      I could be wrong, but the projections are extrapolations based on obviously overly optimistic assumptions about the a) the federal government's desire to fund large, multiyear scientific projects b) the ease of creating an economically scalable fusion reactor
ansible 11y ago
You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing" Well, when you consider that the Iraq war cost to the USA has been at least 1 trillion (this is not just what the DoD spent), spending tens of billions on fusion research doesn't sound so bad.

scottlocklin 11y ago

NIF has nothing to do with Nukes. Zero, zilch, nadda. It doesn't even vaguely work anyway. Public funding for fusion research in the US and Europe is a waste of money; it's simply providing employment for past generations of fusion researchers, and pouring money down a hole on technologies which will never work. Tri-Alpha, on the other hand, has something new that might actually work. I went over the patents a few years ago (was going to do a blog on them; got busy); it's quite different from the approaches that get money via public funding, and unlike those approaches, it stands a chance of working.