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Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fu

by ttul 8y ago

Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil. What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

hyperbovine 8y ago
Err no, money is not "the only thing" keeping us from having fusion power. I can think of one other thing which is that it's damn hard to create stellar-core conditions inside of a small containment vessel on Earth. It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. I'll bet if you added up all the research dollars that have been expended on fusion, it would come to quite a tidy sum indeed. Despite this, we still have little to show for it.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Fusion research is chronically underfunded. We actually have made surprising progress despite basically not funding research at all.
- cygx 8y ago
  Just for the record, you don't re-create stellar-core conditions with earth-bound fusion devices: We don't have the means, and the yield would suck. Now, it is true that there's still fundamental research to be done until energy production via nuclear fusion becomes a reality, but we're reasonably confident that we could make the conventional approaches work. However, that research is Big Science, and there's no political will to fund it properly (the graph that people like to cite is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi... ). ITER suffered from this as well, and W7-X basically only exists because German reunification happened, and the German government was looking for a big science project - any project - they could leverage to funnel money into East Germany. The plans for W7-X just happened to be ready at the right time.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >>> However, that research is Big Science, Not all of it. The big science approach is a function of "pure" fusion research done from the assumption that containment/ignition only comes from magnetic fields and particle collisions. Some are approaching it from different directions, even using physical forces to trigger ignition (ie slamming the hydrogen with a big hammer). This isn't crazy stuff, just a more practical approach from people who see the problems from a different perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-genius/ https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-geniu... "At the centre will be a sphere, three metres in diameter, inside which molten lead swirls at high speed creating a vacuum, or vortex, in the middle. Arrayed around it will be 200 to 300 pistons, each the size of a cannon. Firing in perfect harmony, they will create an acoustic wave that collapses the vortex at the very moment a plasma injector shoots hydrogen isotopes, the nuclear fuel, into it. If General Fusion has its physics right, the heat and pressure will ignite a fusion reaction that spins off countless neutrons which will heat the lead even more. Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant."
    - cygx 8y ago
      Hence my qualifier 'conventional approaches'. I wish those working on alternative approaches the best of luck, and some of the experiments look like a lot of fun (they get to blow things up - I've seen videos where plastering was raining from the ceiling of the control room ;)).
      - sandworm101 8y ago
        I'd say that the "conventional" approach for triggering fusion is physical. We've been triggering fusion in nuclear weapons for many years and the physicalities of it are very well understood. What general fusion is doing is essentially a non-destructive nuclear secondary. Triggering fusion with magnets, without moving parts, is imho the unconventional way of getting to fusion. It is only conventional in comparison to fusion research. The practical users of fusion (the armed forces) don't use magnets.
- madaxe_again 8y ago
  The total since research started is somewhere between $25bn and $50bn. In the US alone, oil subsidies are >$400bn a year. Here’s an article - about the same amount, annualised, is spent on Halloween costumes for pets. http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/have_we_spent_too_much http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav...
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    Not to mention the total expenditure on fusion weapons.
- bseidensticker 8y ago
  We are spending a relatively pitiful amount of money on fusion power research. The US has spent $29B TOTAL in 2010 dollars from the 1950s through 2010. (I couldn't easily find global numbers, but I can't imagine it's more than an order of magnitude higher) Some other numbers for comparison: NASA's current ANNUAL budget is $19B. [1] The BP oil spill cost $40B. [2] "A 2016 IMF study estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP." [3] The US alone spent $600B on fossil fuel subsidies in 2015. [3] >It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-being-spent-on-research-for-fusion-reactor-compared-with-space-related-projects-by-developed-countries https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-being-spent-on-resea... [2] http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/have_we_spent_too_much http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
  - mrep 8y ago
    >>It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. >This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly. How much money do you propose we throw at it then because even fission isn't profitable these days and that is something we know how to do. While I agree that it is worth something to pursue, wind/solar + batteries + smart grid are a way better investment these days since we cannot even produce a fusion reactor that is net positive in energy let alone economical.
- short_sells_poo 8y ago
  If fusion research funding got 1'000 dollars a year, we wouldn't have 1'000'000 dollars worth of research after 1000 years. Just as there are diminishing returns after throwing so much money at a problem, throwing too little means that progress will halt and we get stuck in a local minimum because we need a bigger cash infusion to get over the hump.
- Jach 8y ago
  In 1976 a plan for how much funding over how much time was made to get fusion ready. This graph shows the possible paths, as well as the actual level of funding, and is a great explanation for why fusion seems to always be x decades away: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...
  - hyperbovine 8y ago
    This graph precisely illustrates my point. Let's conservatively posit that a workable fusion reactor is worth $2 trillion; the world spends many multiples of this on energy each year. The cost of acquiring fusion, according to its advocates, is equal to the integral of any one of the curves on this graph, which looks to be on the order of ~$100b. This is well within the range of investment attainable by private sources, just look at pharma. In other words, if fusion advocates are to be believed, the market is failing to the tune of few trillion dollars, roughly the GDP of the United Kingdom, and has been for decades. Now, markets are not necessarily efficient, but is this a believable scenario? I claim no.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. That's not very long. The first liquid-fueled rocket was in 1914, and the moon landing wasn't until 1969, and even that was only possible with very high levels of funding far beyond what's invested in fusion power today. Babbage built the Difference Engine in 1822 and conceived of the Analytic Engine in 1837, leaving skeptics dismissing the potential of computers for 150 years. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a helicopter in 1480, almost 500 years before one could actually be constructed. Gunpowder was invented probably before the year 1000 and took over 700 years after that to render pikes obsolete. Now, it's entirely possible that there's some other limitation holding us back from fusion, just as the lack of internal combustion engines or diodes held us back from helicopters or computers. But I think we've done enough work so far that we'd be able to tell if we were running into something like that. As it stands, I think we're roughly in the place rocketry was before WWII--we have an idea of how to do it, and we don't know if it'll go to the Moon or not, but the only way to find out for sure is to try, and that's pretty expensive and might take awhile.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    We do know there are inherent problems with fusion, particularly DT fusion. In fact, we've known for 35 years or more. Even if the plasma physics issues are magically solved, fusion has grave engineering obstacles. http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%20Fusion.pdf http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%... https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2131864/content https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2... It's interesting examining the recent efforts, public and private, in light of these venerable critiques.
- sd88sa 8y ago
  I'm a physicist by training working as a software engineer at one of the large tech companies. I have multiple physics friends doing the same. We'd gladly be working on fusion (or other physics stuff) but our present jobs pay much better. More money, and better pay for hard science careers, actually would make a difference.
travisoneill1 8y ago
Private money is coming in now: http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309 http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-nov... https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
- DennisP 8y ago
  Also Helion, TAE (formerly Tri Alpha), First Light Fusion, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion, and others. TAE is the biggest, with over $500M invested so far.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    I have to shake my head at TAE, since their approach was brutally critiqued 20 years ago. It turns out being given $500M doesn't let you evade the laws of physics. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_on_the_Colliding_Beam_Fusion_Reactor_Proposed_by_Rostoker_Binderbauer_and_Monkhorst_for_Use_with_the_p-11B_Fusion_Reaction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_...
    - DennisP 8y ago
      I'm not a fusion scientist so I can't really judge, but in general I'm not sure it makes sense to say "it turns out" unless you know that experiments have proven it correct. From some quick googling it appears that TAE people responded to the critique and other people thought they made some valid points; see page 4 in this paper: http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf Things seem to be going pretty well for TAE, at least as far as plasma confinement goes. Whether they can get net power from boron is another question, of course. I definitely see them as a dark horse compared to the tokamak companies.
      - pfdietz 8y ago
        TAE has recently begun pivoting, for example trying to use their technology for cancer treatment(!). Their name change was part of this. Generally a company doesn't do something like that unless they are forced to. TAE's response was not at all strong, IMO. And that was not the only critique. Plasma confinement is not the issue for TAE. The problem is even with perfect confinement, their non-Maxwellian scheme doesn't work.
empath75 8y ago
If they had a clear path to fusion and money were the only thing in the way, money would flow into it from every direction. The problem is that nobody knows how to build a functioning reactor yet or if it's even possible to build a functioning reactor. It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out.
- cygx 8y ago
  It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out. Possible, but unlikely (imo). It's just that private business doesn't really do large-scale multi-decade pure research efforts with far-off ROI, and governments have chosen to spend money elsewhere. Hence, progress is steady, but slow.
  - ttul 8y ago
    Yes. It’s a classic market failure. We see examples of this type of thing throughout history. For instance, without the Manhattan Program, civil nuclear power would not have developed, because the enormous investment in risky technology development would not have flowed from the private sector.
    - idontpost 8y ago
      > For instance, without the Manhattan Program, civil nuclear power would not have developed, because the enormous investment in risky technology development would not have flowed from the private sector. I don't buy this. Generating electricity from fission is stupid simple once you figure out that piling a bunch of uranium produces heat (literally what Fermi did in Chicago in '42). The safety features to keep the whole thing regulated, not melting, and to avoid poisoning everyone around it obviously aren't simple, but the process of creating and capturing energy as electricity is. By contrast, the process of capturing the energy and converting it is a huge part of the challenge with fusion.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I am glad that private business is not getting into this. I would hate it if fusion got protected by a bunch of patents. Fusion power has the potential to be a serious game changer and everybody should have access to it.
lifeformed 8y ago
A company like Apple has a quarter trillion in cash laying around, they could jump start fusion and control near-limitless energy in several decades. I wish there was more of a visionary drive among institutions for intellectual curiosity and pushing the boundaries of humankind. And yes, I know why they don't... shareholders business plans risk blah blah blah. Reality is just so BORING. Maybe one day we'll find a way to make life's ultimate pursuit something more interesting than an optimization function on some integer in a bank server.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  It is odd that you mention this, unless your name is Karl and were at lunch last Wednesday :-), because it came up as something that companies with big cash hoards might actually be thinking about. Consider the notion that at some point a feasible fusion power plant design becomes "known". Then its a question of money to build one or two or 10. And a company like Google or Apple, with a large cash hoard could jump in, build some plants, power their infrastructure on their own plants and sell excess power to the grid, we even gave a name to the company "Google Power and Packet" :-). The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it. This idea, that the future will have sudden insights that will take tremendous capital to exploit to create unassailable leadership positions, is not one I had considered. Fusion power, space opportunities, Etc, might be areas where things suddenly create an entirely new need.
  - bassman9000 8y ago
    The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it They already are, in the cheapest, riskless way possible: those massive cash stashes are sustaining, or even boosting, their valuations. When a company grows too big, it's in its best interest, as in investors best interest, not to spend a few billions on an initiative that could lead nowhere.
    - abundant 8y ago
olau 8y ago
It sounds like you think fusion would be a great alternative source of energy since you're comparing it to fossil fuel exploration. However, this is not necessarily true. It not only has to work, it also has to be economical and not have significant drawbacks. I think that's very much up in the air. Compare it to fission - we know how to build those power plants, but it's just so damn hard that it's too expensive, compared to alternatives like photovoltaics and wind turbines. And those are getting cheaper and cheaper at an incredible rate at the moment. So it's a moving target. And yes, solar and wind rely on intermittent sources of energy, so you need to combine them with some kind of dispatchable source/storage to match the demand curve, but you have that too with a fission plant because of the high capital cost, and I don't see why it wouldn't be true for fusion too, unless somebody comes up with a way of building a really cheap fusion plant.
- wuliwong 8y ago
  I agree. I hear the comments about a lack of funding but to me it isn't necessarily a lack of vision from politicians and businessmen. I have a Ph.D. in physics and even worked for 6 months full-time in the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab as an undergraduate and I still hav mixed feelings about fusion power, particular vs other non-fossil fuel options.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Among other things, there's a perception of fusion as this clean, infinite energy source. I haven't followed fusion carefully for a good many years but back when I was studying material science, radiation embrittlement of fusion reactor shielding was an area of active research. It wasn't clear that you didn't end up with just as much radioactive waste from fusion as you did with fission. Don't know what the current thinking on that is but it was one practical challenge in the past.
    - dodobirdlord 8y ago
      Sure, we might, but the "issue" of management of macro-scale solid radioactive waste has never been anything but nonsense. It is a completely manufactured "problem." Mix it with concrete and cast it into large bricks so that it's hard to lose and infeasible to steal, vacuum seal it in plastic wrap as a precaution against outgassing, drive it to the seaside in lead lined semi trucks and toss it off the continental shelf.
jerf 8y ago
If the Stellerator, or any of its descendants, turn out to be the answer to practical fusion, it would have been contingent on vast quantities of computational power being available cheaply. It does not matter how much money you poured into your Stellerator project in 1970, you could never have built the 7-X, because there would have been no way to produce that design in the first place. Personally, I think one of the answers to "tech seems to have stalled" is that it's easy to underestimate how important cheap computational power is, even without "AI", to moving forward. For another example, as fantastic as the 1960s space projects may have been, I think they just weren't economically sustainable, so it isn't that amazing that they didn't become a self-sustaining industry right away. I think it's easy to look at SpaceX and say "Gee, there's nothing that we couldn't have done there fifty years ago", but again, I suspect you miss just how much of the Falcon rocket is a result of extensive cheap computation abilities. Even if you could use modern computers to produce a design that could have worked fifty years ago, there's still not necessarily a practical path to that design using only tech from fifty years ago. (And of course the Falcon is full of stuff that couldn't exist fifty years ago.) Modern tokamak designs are of course run through all kinds of computations nowadays too (because everything is), but the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Uhh... are you aware that the 7-X design was computed in the late 80s? It was just an enormous challenge to build this thing. Things like building and validating the field coils required a lot of effort and some novel approaches that they had to come up with along the way.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    > 7-X design was computed in the late 80s? Source for that? Looking at the German Wikipedia entry, the HELIAS method was invented in the late 80s. I don't see anything about the 7-X design actually having been computed back then. In fact, even the 2002 experiment Wendelstein 7-AS wasn't fully optimised. Also, Tokamaks were invented in the 1950s. JET started operating in 1983. ITER was proposed in 1987. Given even just a little bit of path-dependency, there really wasn't any realistic overlap.
DesiLurker 8y ago
Dont forget about the advances in superconductor tech happened over last few decades. Especially with High tesla superconductors possible due to new materials like REBCO tapes have been a great enabler. so much so that the ITER is design locked to use the older tech and cannot easily upgrade to the latest materials. Prof dennis whyte of MIT ARC project actually had a slide explaining the impact of max magnet strength on the containment design and overall cost of the project. My key takeaway from this is that market/capitalism are really good at finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem using the currently available tech, however, its not so much for cases where you need the enabler tech also to be invented. IMHO this is where govt needs to step up and bring all the necessary pieces in the realm of possibility. after this private business can pick it up and optimize. on a different note, its really amazing that they can maintain superconductors at -100 F just a few inches from a plasma at 100M F.
scottlocklin 8y ago
We have invested billions into fusion. And we get results like this, which are ... basically useless.
apendleton 8y ago
On top of what everybody else has said, I also don't think it's a given, even if/once we crack the technology, that anybody will actually use it to generate power. I think there's a totally plausible outcome where somebody builds a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes and said reactor has essentially infinite, essentially free fuel, but the design they come up with costs $20 billion a pop to build (or whatever) with no clear path to making it cheaper, and just the cost of capital to build new plants makes those plants more expensive per unit of energy generated than coal/gas/solar/etc. even though the fuel costs nothing. At that point, even if it works, maybe the one demonstrator plant they end up building continues to tick away as a singular novelty and the rest of the world carries on building gas plants and solar. Fission is already in not too different a place than that: fuel is nowhere near the dominant cost per unit of energy produced. I hope that ends up not being the case with fusion, but it's hard to predict at this point.
- drjesusphd 8y ago
  Even coal power plants cost several billion. I don't think an order of magnitude reduction in cost is foolish to count on. The issue is the design of extremely specialized components, not necessarily the raw materials (except when they're novel superconducting magnets designed for that purpose). I think schedule delays are what is making ITER so expensive.
simonh 8y ago
>What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly. For a start there are dozens of different approaches currently being pursued. Which do we bless with the billions of extra funding? All of them? Suppose none of them pan out? It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there?
- vvillena 8y ago
  Discovering a dead end is not pointless from a science point of view. It's bad return on investment, that's for sure.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly. Not necessarily, because discovering a large blocker would give us an idea of what to invest in next. The economic impact of fusion power is great enough that even if there's a 10-25% probability of it working out, the expected value implied by that probability would justify significantly higher levels of funding than fusion currently receives. > It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there? ITER, the largest multinational fusion project, is projected to have a total cost of over 20 billion euros, which is about 22 billion USD. 22 billion USD is less than NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation, for the single years of 1963 through 1970 or 1990 through 1993. And NASA's work is built on top of the rocketry work of Nazi Germany, which cost about 40 billion inflation-adjusted dollars even with, to be euphemistic, artificially low labor costs. For another point of comparison, the Persian Gulf War, which was primarily motivated by the attempt to secure part of the global supply of petroleum, cost $61 billion. The Iraq War cost at least an order of magnitude more, but (a) many of that was due to cost overruns and (b) that war was partially motivated by issues other than securing part of the world's petroleum supply. In terms of improving long term human living conditions and enabling future economic growth, developing fusion power would provide tremendous benefits.
zamalek 8y ago
> What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? The big problem is that fusion has reached its end-game in military applications: we have the h-bomb. Sure, there's the hypothetical fusion submarines and carriers, but what do those really provide beyond their fission equivalent? If we could find some novel thing that fusion power solves for the military, then fusion would be solved.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  Fusion in ships is a ridiculous idea. Fission has much better power density, and volume in ships is limited.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Fully agree but the same could be applied to solar and energy storage as well.
Recurecur 8y ago
> What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? We should invest much more heavily into fission, and keep deuterium/tritium fission investment at around the current levels. Why? Because deuterium/tritium fission like the stellerators and tokomaks use produces a lot of (energetic) neutrons, along with heating the plasma. That is very bad for two reasons. First, essentially unrecoverable energy is wasted by the neutrons. Second, the neutron exposure causes the reactor to become radioactive. So, the promise of "clean" fusion energy with no radioactive waste is not realized. Aneutronic fusion is possible, but requires higher energy and different fuel. This is not yet being widely researched, but some interesting work is being done at LPP Fusion: https://lppfusion.com/ https://lppfusion.com/ That is an effort I'd like to see funded much more fully. At any rate, next-generation fission reactors are just as safe as deuterium/tritium fusion, are well understood, and many designs produce less and shorter-lived waste than the dinosaur PWR designs. It is beyond silly to not fully leverage clean, cheap fuel with a million times the energy density of fossil fuel while we work out the kinks with fusion. There is a necessity for reliable grid power alongside unreliable "renewables", and fission is the only viable CO2 free approach for the foreseeable future.

by ttul 8y ago

hyperbovine 8y ago

Err no, money is not "the only thing" keeping us from having fusion power. I can think of one other thing which is that it's damn hard to create stellar-core conditions inside of a small containment vessel on Earth. It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. I'll bet if you added up all the research dollars that have been expended on fusion, it would come to quite a tidy sum indeed. Despite this, we still have little to show for it.

adrianN 8y ago
Fusion research is chronically underfunded. We actually have made surprising progress despite basically not funding research at all.
cygx 8y ago
Just for the record, you don't re-create stellar-core conditions with earth-bound fusion devices: We don't have the means, and the yield would suck. Now, it is true that there's still fundamental research to be done until energy production via nuclear fusion becomes a reality, but we're reasonably confident that we could make the conventional approaches work. However, that research is Big Science, and there's no political will to fund it properly (the graph that people like to cite is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi... ). ITER suffered from this as well, and W7-X basically only exists because German reunification happened, and the German government was looking for a big science project - any project - they could leverage to funnel money into East Germany. The plans for W7-X just happened to be ready at the right time.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  >>> However, that research is Big Science, Not all of it. The big science approach is a function of "pure" fusion research done from the assumption that containment/ignition only comes from magnetic fields and particle collisions. Some are approaching it from different directions, even using physical forces to trigger ignition (ie slamming the hydrogen with a big hammer). This isn't crazy stuff, just a more practical approach from people who see the problems from a different perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-genius/ https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-geniu... "At the centre will be a sphere, three metres in diameter, inside which molten lead swirls at high speed creating a vacuum, or vortex, in the middle. Arrayed around it will be 200 to 300 pistons, each the size of a cannon. Firing in perfect harmony, they will create an acoustic wave that collapses the vortex at the very moment a plasma injector shoots hydrogen isotopes, the nuclear fuel, into it. If General Fusion has its physics right, the heat and pressure will ignite a fusion reaction that spins off countless neutrons which will heat the lead even more. Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant."
  - cygx 8y ago
    Hence my qualifier 'conventional approaches'. I wish those working on alternative approaches the best of luck, and some of the experiments look like a lot of fun (they get to blow things up - I've seen videos where plastering was raining from the ceiling of the control room ;)).
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      I'd say that the "conventional" approach for triggering fusion is physical. We've been triggering fusion in nuclear weapons for many years and the physicalities of it are very well understood. What general fusion is doing is essentially a non-destructive nuclear secondary. Triggering fusion with magnets, without moving parts, is imho the unconventional way of getting to fusion. It is only conventional in comparison to fusion research. The practical users of fusion (the armed forces) don't use magnets.
madaxe_again 8y ago
The total since research started is somewhere between $25bn and $50bn. In the US alone, oil subsidies are >$400bn a year. Here’s an article - about the same amount, annualised, is spent on Halloween costumes for pets. http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/have_we_spent_too_much http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav...
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  Not to mention the total expenditure on fusion weapons.
bseidensticker 8y ago
We are spending a relatively pitiful amount of money on fusion power research. The US has spent $29B TOTAL in 2010 dollars from the 1950s through 2010. (I couldn't easily find global numbers, but I can't imagine it's more than an order of magnitude higher) Some other numbers for comparison: NASA's current ANNUAL budget is $19B. [1] The BP oil spill cost $40B. [2] "A 2016 IMF study estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP." [3] The US alone spent $600B on fossil fuel subsidies in 2015. [3] >It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly. [1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-being-spent-on-research-for-fusion-reactor-compared-with-space-related-projects-by-developed-countries https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-being-spent-on-resea... [2] http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/have_we_spent_too_much http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
- mrep 8y ago
  >>It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. >This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly. How much money do you propose we throw at it then because even fission isn't profitable these days and that is something we know how to do. While I agree that it is worth something to pursue, wind/solar + batteries + smart grid are a way better investment these days since we cannot even produce a fusion reactor that is net positive in energy let alone economical.
short_sells_poo 8y ago
If fusion research funding got 1'000 dollars a year, we wouldn't have 1'000'000 dollars worth of research after 1000 years. Just as there are diminishing returns after throwing so much money at a problem, throwing too little means that progress will halt and we get stuck in a local minimum because we need a bigger cash infusion to get over the hump.
Jach 8y ago
In 1976 a plan for how much funding over how much time was made to get fusion ready. This graph shows the possible paths, as well as the actual level of funding, and is a great explanation for why fusion seems to always be x decades away: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  This graph precisely illustrates my point. Let's conservatively posit that a workable fusion reactor is worth $2 trillion; the world spends many multiples of this on energy each year. The cost of acquiring fusion, according to its advocates, is equal to the integral of any one of the curves on this graph, which looks to be on the order of ~$100b. This is well within the range of investment attainable by private sources, just look at pharma. In other words, if fusion advocates are to be believed, the market is failing to the tune of few trillion dollars, roughly the GDP of the United Kingdom, and has been for decades. Now, markets are not necessarily efficient, but is this a believable scenario? I claim no.
philwelch 8y ago
> It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. That's not very long. The first liquid-fueled rocket was in 1914, and the moon landing wasn't until 1969, and even that was only possible with very high levels of funding far beyond what's invested in fusion power today. Babbage built the Difference Engine in 1822 and conceived of the Analytic Engine in 1837, leaving skeptics dismissing the potential of computers for 150 years. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a helicopter in 1480, almost 500 years before one could actually be constructed. Gunpowder was invented probably before the year 1000 and took over 700 years after that to render pikes obsolete. Now, it's entirely possible that there's some other limitation holding us back from fusion, just as the lack of internal combustion engines or diodes held us back from helicopters or computers. But I think we've done enough work so far that we'd be able to tell if we were running into something like that. As it stands, I think we're roughly in the place rocketry was before WWII--we have an idea of how to do it, and we don't know if it'll go to the Moon or not, but the only way to find out for sure is to try, and that's pretty expensive and might take awhile.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  We do know there are inherent problems with fusion, particularly DT fusion. In fact, we've known for 35 years or more. Even if the plasma physics issues are magically solved, fusion has grave engineering obstacles. http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%20Fusion.pdf http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%... https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2131864/content https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2... It's interesting examining the recent efforts, public and private, in light of these venerable critiques.
sd88sa 8y ago
I'm a physicist by training working as a software engineer at one of the large tech companies. I have multiple physics friends doing the same. We'd gladly be working on fusion (or other physics stuff) but our present jobs pay much better. More money, and better pay for hard science careers, actually would make a difference.

travisoneill1 8y ago

Private money is coming in now: http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309 http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-nov... https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...

DennisP 8y ago
Also Helion, TAE (formerly Tri Alpha), First Light Fusion, Tokamak Energy, General Fusion, and others. TAE is the biggest, with over $500M invested so far.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  I have to shake my head at TAE, since their approach was brutally critiqued 20 years ago. It turns out being given $500M doesn't let you evade the laws of physics. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_on_the_Colliding_Beam_Fusion_Reactor_Proposed_by_Rostoker_Binderbauer_and_Monkhorst_for_Use_with_the_p-11B_Fusion_Reaction https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_...
  - DennisP 8y ago
    I'm not a fusion scientist so I can't really judge, but in general I'm not sure it makes sense to say "it turns out" unless you know that experiments have proven it correct. From some quick googling it appears that TAE people responded to the critique and other people thought they made some valid points; see page 4 in this paper: http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf Things seem to be going pretty well for TAE, at least as far as plasma confinement goes. Whether they can get net power from boron is another question, of course. I definitely see them as a dark horse compared to the tokamak companies.
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      TAE has recently begun pivoting, for example trying to use their technology for cancer treatment(!). Their name change was part of this. Generally a company doesn't do something like that unless they are forced to. TAE's response was not at all strong, IMO. And that was not the only critique. Plasma confinement is not the issue for TAE. The problem is even with perfect confinement, their non-Maxwellian scheme doesn't work.

empath75 8y ago

If they had a clear path to fusion and money were the only thing in the way, money would flow into it from every direction. The problem is that nobody knows how to build a functioning reactor yet or if it's even possible to build a functioning reactor. It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out.

cygx 8y ago
It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out. Possible, but unlikely (imo). It's just that private business doesn't really do large-scale multi-decade pure research efforts with far-off ROI, and governments have chosen to spend money elsewhere. Hence, progress is steady, but slow.
- ttul 8y ago
  Yes. It’s a classic market failure. We see examples of this type of thing throughout history. For instance, without the Manhattan Program, civil nuclear power would not have developed, because the enormous investment in risky technology development would not have flowed from the private sector.
  - idontpost 8y ago
    > For instance, without the Manhattan Program, civil nuclear power would not have developed, because the enormous investment in risky technology development would not have flowed from the private sector. I don't buy this. Generating electricity from fission is stupid simple once you figure out that piling a bunch of uranium produces heat (literally what Fermi did in Chicago in '42). The safety features to keep the whole thing regulated, not melting, and to avoid poisoning everyone around it obviously aren't simple, but the process of creating and capturing energy as electricity is. By contrast, the process of capturing the energy and converting it is a huge part of the challenge with fusion.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I am glad that private business is not getting into this. I would hate it if fusion got protected by a bunch of patents. Fusion power has the potential to be a serious game changer and everybody should have access to it.

lifeformed 8y ago

A company like Apple has a quarter trillion in cash laying around, they could jump start fusion and control near-limitless energy in several decades. I wish there was more of a visionary drive among institutions for intellectual curiosity and pushing the boundaries of humankind. And yes, I know why they don't... shareholders business plans risk blah blah blah. Reality is just so BORING. Maybe one day we'll find a way to make life's ultimate pursuit something more interesting than an optimization function on some integer in a bank server.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
It is odd that you mention this, unless your name is Karl and were at lunch last Wednesday :-), because it came up as something that companies with big cash hoards might actually be thinking about. Consider the notion that at some point a feasible fusion power plant design becomes "known". Then its a question of money to build one or two or 10. And a company like Google or Apple, with a large cash hoard could jump in, build some plants, power their infrastructure on their own plants and sell excess power to the grid, we even gave a name to the company "Google Power and Packet" :-). The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it. This idea, that the future will have sudden insights that will take tremendous capital to exploit to create unassailable leadership positions, is not one I had considered. Fusion power, space opportunities, Etc, might be areas where things suddenly create an entirely new need.
- bassman9000 8y ago
  The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it They already are, in the cheapest, riskless way possible: those massive cash stashes are sustaining, or even boosting, their valuations. When a company grows too big, it's in its best interest, as in investors best interest, not to spend a few billions on an initiative that could lead nowhere.
  - abundant 8y ago

olau 8y ago

It sounds like you think fusion would be a great alternative source of energy since you're comparing it to fossil fuel exploration. However, this is not necessarily true. It not only has to work, it also has to be economical and not have significant drawbacks. I think that's very much up in the air. Compare it to fission - we know how to build those power plants, but it's just so damn hard that it's too expensive, compared to alternatives like photovoltaics and wind turbines. And those are getting cheaper and cheaper at an incredible rate at the moment. So it's a moving target. And yes, solar and wind rely on intermittent sources of energy, so you need to combine them with some kind of dispatchable source/storage to match the demand curve, but you have that too with a fission plant because of the high capital cost, and I don't see why it wouldn't be true for fusion too, unless somebody comes up with a way of building a really cheap fusion plant.

wuliwong 8y ago
I agree. I hear the comments about a lack of funding but to me it isn't necessarily a lack of vision from politicians and businessmen. I have a Ph.D. in physics and even worked for 6 months full-time in the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab as an undergraduate and I still hav mixed feelings about fusion power, particular vs other non-fossil fuel options.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Among other things, there's a perception of fusion as this clean, infinite energy source. I haven't followed fusion carefully for a good many years but back when I was studying material science, radiation embrittlement of fusion reactor shielding was an area of active research. It wasn't clear that you didn't end up with just as much radioactive waste from fusion as you did with fission. Don't know what the current thinking on that is but it was one practical challenge in the past.
  - dodobirdlord 8y ago
    Sure, we might, but the "issue" of management of macro-scale solid radioactive waste has never been anything but nonsense. It is a completely manufactured "problem." Mix it with concrete and cast it into large bricks so that it's hard to lose and infeasible to steal, vacuum seal it in plastic wrap as a precaution against outgassing, drive it to the seaside in lead lined semi trucks and toss it off the continental shelf.

jerf 8y ago

If the Stellerator, or any of its descendants, turn out to be the answer to practical fusion, it would have been contingent on vast quantities of computational power being available cheaply. It does not matter how much money you poured into your Stellerator project in 1970, you could never have built the 7-X, because there would have been no way to produce that design in the first place. Personally, I think one of the answers to "tech seems to have stalled" is that it's easy to underestimate how important cheap computational power is, even without "AI", to moving forward. For another example, as fantastic as the 1960s space projects may have been, I think they just weren't economically sustainable, so it isn't that amazing that they didn't become a self-sustaining industry right away. I think it's easy to look at SpaceX and say "Gee, there's nothing that we couldn't have done there fifty years ago", but again, I suspect you miss just how much of the Falcon rocket is a result of extensive cheap computation abilities. Even if you could use modern computers to produce a design that could have worked fifty years ago, there's still not necessarily a practical path to that design using only tech from fifty years ago. (And of course the Falcon is full of stuff that couldn't exist fifty years ago.) Modern tokamak designs are of course run through all kinds of computations nowadays too (because everything is), but the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.

gmueckl 8y ago
Uhh... are you aware that the 7-X design was computed in the late 80s? It was just an enormous challenge to build this thing. Things like building and validating the field coils required a lot of effort and some novel approaches that they had to come up with along the way.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  > 7-X design was computed in the late 80s? Source for that? Looking at the German Wikipedia entry, the HELIAS method was invented in the late 80s. I don't see anything about the 7-X design actually having been computed back then. In fact, even the 2002 experiment Wendelstein 7-AS wasn't fully optimised. Also, Tokamaks were invented in the 1950s. JET started operating in 1983. ITER was proposed in 1987. Given even just a little bit of path-dependency, there really wasn't any realistic overlap.

DesiLurker 8y ago

Dont forget about the advances in superconductor tech happened over last few decades. Especially with High tesla superconductors possible due to new materials like REBCO tapes have been a great enabler. so much so that the ITER is design locked to use the older tech and cannot easily upgrade to the latest materials. Prof dennis whyte of MIT ARC project actually had a slide explaining the impact of max magnet strength on the containment design and overall cost of the project. My key takeaway from this is that market/capitalism are really good at finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem using the currently available tech, however, its not so much for cases where you need the enabler tech also to be invented. IMHO this is where govt needs to step up and bring all the necessary pieces in the realm of possibility. after this private business can pick it up and optimize. on a different note, its really amazing that they can maintain superconductors at -100 F just a few inches from a plasma at 100M F.

scottlocklin 8y ago

We have invested billions into fusion. And we get results like this, which are ... basically useless.

apendleton 8y ago

On top of what everybody else has said, I also don't think it's a given, even if/once we crack the technology, that anybody will actually use it to generate power. I think there's a totally plausible outcome where somebody builds a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes and said reactor has essentially infinite, essentially free fuel, but the design they come up with costs $20 billion a pop to build (or whatever) with no clear path to making it cheaper, and just the cost of capital to build new plants makes those plants more expensive per unit of energy generated than coal/gas/solar/etc. even though the fuel costs nothing. At that point, even if it works, maybe the one demonstrator plant they end up building continues to tick away as a singular novelty and the rest of the world carries on building gas plants and solar. Fission is already in not too different a place than that: fuel is nowhere near the dominant cost per unit of energy produced. I hope that ends up not being the case with fusion, but it's hard to predict at this point.

drjesusphd 8y ago
Even coal power plants cost several billion. I don't think an order of magnitude reduction in cost is foolish to count on. The issue is the design of extremely specialized components, not necessarily the raw materials (except when they're novel superconducting magnets designed for that purpose). I think schedule delays are what is making ITER so expensive.

simonh 8y ago

>What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly. For a start there are dozens of different approaches currently being pursued. Which do we bless with the billions of extra funding? All of them? Suppose none of them pan out? It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there?

vvillena 8y ago
Discovering a dead end is not pointless from a science point of view. It's bad return on investment, that's for sure.
philwelch 8y ago
> If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly. Not necessarily, because discovering a large blocker would give us an idea of what to invest in next. The economic impact of fusion power is great enough that even if there's a 10-25% probability of it working out, the expected value implied by that probability would justify significantly higher levels of funding than fusion currently receives. > It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there? ITER, the largest multinational fusion project, is projected to have a total cost of over 20 billion euros, which is about 22 billion USD. 22 billion USD is less than NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation, for the single years of 1963 through 1970 or 1990 through 1993. And NASA's work is built on top of the rocketry work of Nazi Germany, which cost about 40 billion inflation-adjusted dollars even with, to be euphemistic, artificially low labor costs. For another point of comparison, the Persian Gulf War, which was primarily motivated by the attempt to secure part of the global supply of petroleum, cost $61 billion. The Iraq War cost at least an order of magnitude more, but (a) many of that was due to cost overruns and (b) that war was partially motivated by issues other than securing part of the world's petroleum supply. In terms of improving long term human living conditions and enabling future economic growth, developing fusion power would provide tremendous benefits.

zamalek 8y ago

> What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? The big problem is that fusion has reached its end-game in military applications: we have the h-bomb. Sure, there's the hypothetical fusion submarines and carriers, but what do those really provide beyond their fission equivalent? If we could find some novel thing that fusion power solves for the military, then fusion would be solved.

pfdietz 8y ago
Fusion in ships is a ridiculous idea. Fission has much better power density, and volume in ships is limited.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Fully agree but the same could be applied to solar and energy storage as well.

Recurecur 8y ago

> What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? We should invest much more heavily into fission, and keep deuterium/tritium fission investment at around the current levels. Why? Because deuterium/tritium fission like the stellerators and tokomaks use produces a lot of (energetic) neutrons, along with heating the plasma. That is very bad for two reasons. First, essentially unrecoverable energy is wasted by the neutrons. Second, the neutron exposure causes the reactor to become radioactive. So, the promise of "clean" fusion energy with no radioactive waste is not realized. Aneutronic fusion is possible, but requires higher energy and different fuel. This is not yet being widely researched, but some interesting work is being done at LPP Fusion: https://lppfusion.com/ https://lppfusion.com/ That is an effort I'd like to see funded much more fully. At any rate, next-generation fission reactors are just as safe as deuterium/tritium fusion, are well understood, and many designs produce less and shorter-lived waste than the dinosaur PWR designs. It is beyond silly to not fully leverage clean, cheap fuel with a million times the energy density of fossil fuel while we work out the kinks with fusion. There is a necessity for reliable grid power alongside unreliable "renewables", and fission is the only viable CO2 free approach for the foreseeable future.