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There have been a series of breakthrough in helicity injection techniques and the understanding of spheromak physics in the last decade. Some believe that econo

There have been a series of breakthrough in helicity injection techniques and the understanding of spheromak physics in the last decade. Some believe that economical fusion power plants are possible with today's technology[1] and need a ~$30 million to prove out a scale model reactor before building a full scale one on the order of $2-3 billion of a 1-2 Gigawatt power plant. This is an order of magnitude less cost that the ITER project, which is spending a lot of money on cement and magnets on a probably doomed technology path of commercial fusion. These same breakthroughs are also likely to be able to produce a fusion engine for spacecraft. This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. No inefficient fusion to electricity to rocket engine cycle is necessary. I am not a fusion scientist, but my father is. For more info and technical references, drop me an email (see profile). [1]https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor-concept-could-be-cheaper-than-coal/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/08/uw-fusion-reactor...

philwelch 8y ago
> This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. Jesus. For reference, chemical rockets tend to have ISP in the low-to-mid hundreds, and ion thrusters are in the thousands—not ten thousands, but single thousands. A 100,000 ISP rocket is like a car that can drive from Bangkok to Vladivostok to Lisbon, then back to Istanbul and down to Johannesburg without refueling or recharging. It’s like a phone battery that lasts years rather than days. And it’s all powered by the most plentiful elements in the universe. I’m pretty sure you could generate electricity by flying this rocket around in a circle tethered to an electric turbine if you wanted to. I mean, all of your electricity would probably be in space, because a high ISP usually implies that the rocket doesn’t work as well on the earth’s surface (not as a physical law, just as a limitation of our technology), but of all the monumentally impressive things you can build from a fusion reactor, a 100k ISP rocket has got to be up there. As for ITER, I’m not necessarily bearish on it, but if there’s a credible chance of an alternative design that can be proven for anything <$1 billion...I hate to say it, but any person, venture capital fund, or government with more than $10 billion to their name would be hard pressed to find any better use for it. Even if the damn thing is 95% likely to fail, that’s a 5% chance you literally end up having a stake in the single most valuable technology in the single most valuable sector of the economy—one that will provide untold benefits to mankind. 30 million dollars, really? Like—does Y Combinator know about this? Never mind the “benefits to mankind”—if a single business can be first to market with an economical fusion power plant, that will become the single most valuable business in human history. There’s like five tech companies that are up there in the ranks of “most valuable business in the world”, and they’re approximately the same value as any of about ten oil and gas conglomerates, and those lists usually don’t even count state-owned companies that are even more valuable. (“All the oil in Saudi Arabia”—that’s wealth.) Fusion power would immediately be more valuable than every single oil and gas company in the world put together. Even if nobody bought fusion plants, you could just build the damn things yourself, use them to synthesize hydrocarbons from the damn atmosphere, and undercut the market while simultaneously fixing climate change by making fossil fuel usage a closed loop with no new net CO2 introduced into the atmosphere and an economical method for extracting the excess we already have.
- njarboe 8y ago
  For reference the temperature of fusion plasmas are in the 100 million degrees C range. So very high ISPs are not that crazy. There are many other problems to solve in building a usable fusion rocket, but high ISP comes for free. One thing you should realize about a fusion reactor is that the easiest (which is still really difficult to do) reactions for fusion release a lot of their power in neutrons. These can not be harnessed directly to produce electricity, unlike moving electrons or ions theoretically could be. They can be used to boil water, just like a coal plant, and use steam to run a generator to make electricity. This part of the power plant is expensive. And the fusion reactor is expensive. You don't just get a Mr. Fusion on your car roof outputting Gigawatts of power. As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid. Also, who knows if people will be just as afraid of nuclear fusion plants and nuclear fission. If that is the case they will not be economical to build. Maybe a name change is in order? Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :)
  - philwelch 8y ago
    > One thing you should realize about a fusion reactor is that the easiest (which is still really difficult to do) reactions for fusion release a lot of their power in neutrons. These can not be harnessed directly to produce electricity, unlike moving electrons or ions theoretically could be. They can be used to boil water, just like a coal plant, and use steam to run a generator to make electricity. This part of the power plant is expensive. And the fusion reactor is expensive. You don't just get a Mr. Fusion on your car roof outputting Gigawatts of power. I would kind of expect a completely new technology to be expensive to begin with. > As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid. I'm not sure how that follows--this might not be a great comparison, but the cost of building the first two atomic bombs was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of building the most recent two atomic bombs. Even if it costs $20-50 billion dollars per fusion power plant, it still might work out if each plant can produce enough economy of scale. > Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :) Yeah, that makes sense. There has to be some reason that a $30 million plan to build a proof-of-concept viable fusion reactor hasn't been funded yet.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
I'm not a fusion scientist either :) But I was fortunate to sit next to one in a bar in Princeton NJ a couple years ago. The gist of that conversation was in sync with what you said. Long to short, it's close. Money could help accelerate the research into the necessary details.
- pfdietz 8y ago
  They are close to achieving breakeven, maybe (for certain values of "close"). Congratulations, that puts them where fission was in 1942. But a workable, practical fusion powerplant? Not close at all.
NoblePublius 8y ago
If the only thing the world needed to make fusion work was less than half of the Juicero Series A, we would have had fusion a long time ago
- icebraining 8y ago
  They're saying it (might) be the only thing the world needs now, after all the advances it has made up to today, not that it takes $30M to develop it all from scratch. There is a point at which a single step is enough to win a marathon; that doesn't mean it would have been enough when the race started.

philwelch 8y ago

> This is actually an easier problem to solve than electricity generation as the deuterium can be used as fuel and as a propellant ejected straight out of the plasma core at variable ISP up to around 100,000. Jesus. For reference, chemical rockets tend to have ISP in the low-to-mid hundreds, and ion thrusters are in the thousands—not ten thousands, but single thousands. A 100,000 ISP rocket is like a car that can drive from Bangkok to Vladivostok to Lisbon, then back to Istanbul and down to Johannesburg without refueling or recharging. It’s like a phone battery that lasts years rather than days. And it’s all powered by the most plentiful elements in the universe. I’m pretty sure you could generate electricity by flying this rocket around in a circle tethered to an electric turbine if you wanted to. I mean, all of your electricity would probably be in space, because a high ISP usually implies that the rocket doesn’t work as well on the earth’s surface (not as a physical law, just as a limitation of our technology), but of all the monumentally impressive things you can build from a fusion reactor, a 100k ISP rocket has got to be up there. As for ITER, I’m not necessarily bearish on it, but if there’s a credible chance of an alternative design that can be proven for anything <$1 billion...I hate to say it, but any person, venture capital fund, or government with more than $10 billion to their name would be hard pressed to find any better use for it. Even if the damn thing is 95% likely to fail, that’s a 5% chance you literally end up having a stake in the single most valuable technology in the single most valuable sector of the economy—one that will provide untold benefits to mankind. 30 million dollars, really? Like—does Y Combinator know about this? Never mind the “benefits to mankind”—if a single business can be first to market with an economical fusion power plant, that will become the single most valuable business in human history. There’s like five tech companies that are up there in the ranks of “most valuable business in the world”, and they’re approximately the same value as any of about ten oil and gas conglomerates, and those lists usually don’t even count state-owned companies that are even more valuable. (“All the oil in Saudi Arabia”—that’s wealth.) Fusion power would immediately be more valuable than every single oil and gas company in the world put together. Even if nobody bought fusion plants, you could just build the damn things yourself, use them to synthesize hydrocarbons from the damn atmosphere, and undercut the market while simultaneously fixing climate change by making fossil fuel usage a closed loop with no new net CO2 introduced into the atmosphere and an economical method for extracting the excess we already have.

njarboe 8y ago
For reference the temperature of fusion plasmas are in the 100 million degrees C range. So very high ISPs are not that crazy. There are many other problems to solve in building a usable fusion rocket, but high ISP comes for free. One thing you should realize about a fusion reactor is that the easiest (which is still really difficult to do) reactions for fusion release a lot of their power in neutrons. These can not be harnessed directly to produce electricity, unlike moving electrons or ions theoretically could be. They can be used to boil water, just like a coal plant, and use steam to run a generator to make electricity. This part of the power plant is expensive. And the fusion reactor is expensive. You don't just get a Mr. Fusion on your car roof outputting Gigawatts of power. As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid. Also, who knows if people will be just as afraid of nuclear fusion plants and nuclear fission. If that is the case they will not be economical to build. Maybe a name change is in order? Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :)
- philwelch 8y ago
  > One thing you should realize about a fusion reactor is that the easiest (which is still really difficult to do) reactions for fusion release a lot of their power in neutrons. These can not be harnessed directly to produce electricity, unlike moving electrons or ions theoretically could be. They can be used to boil water, just like a coal plant, and use steam to run a generator to make electricity. This part of the power plant is expensive. And the fusion reactor is expensive. You don't just get a Mr. Fusion on your car roof outputting Gigawatts of power. I would kind of expect a completely new technology to be expensive to begin with. > As to it being a great investment, an electric power generation method is only going to be a great one if it is much cheaper than current methods. This is why ITER is such a boondoggle with its $10-$20 billion dollar price tag. It is very unlikely to be the path to putting fusion power onto the grid. I'm not sure how that follows--this might not be a great comparison, but the cost of building the first two atomic bombs was orders of magnitude higher than the cost of building the most recent two atomic bombs. Even if it costs $20-50 billion dollars per fusion power plant, it still might work out if each plant can produce enough economy of scale. > Relativistic magnetohydrodynamics is a hard subject matter. Investors with $30 million dollars to speculate on such a project are not going to know enough to distinguish a possible project from unlikely ones. Physicists who can know enough to see that some plan might work are unlikely to have the funds to invest. I saw Sam Altman had a fusion book on one of his lists at one point and Elon Musk might know a physicist he would trust, but getting those people to take a look is not easy. I'd be happy to make introductions though. :) Yeah, that makes sense. There has to be some reason that a $30 million plan to build a proof-of-concept viable fusion reactor hasn't been funded yet.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

I'm not a fusion scientist either :) But I was fortunate to sit next to one in a bar in Princeton NJ a couple years ago. The gist of that conversation was in sync with what you said. Long to short, it's close. Money could help accelerate the research into the necessary details.

pfdietz 8y ago
They are close to achieving breakeven, maybe (for certain values of "close"). Congratulations, that puts them where fission was in 1942. But a workable, practical fusion powerplant? Not close at all.

NoblePublius 8y ago

If the only thing the world needed to make fusion work was less than half of the Juicero Series A, we would have had fusion a long time ago

icebraining 8y ago
They're saying it (might) be the only thing the world needs now, after all the advances it has made up to today, not that it takes $30M to develop it all from scratch. There is a point at which a single step is enough to win a marathon; that doesn't mean it would have been enough when the race started.