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The skepticism is not about fusion power, it's about cold fusion specifically, as well role of proprietary IP and patents in scientific research. Tokamak[1] (a

The skepticism is not about fusion power, it's about cold fusion specifically, as well role of proprietary IP and patents in scientific research. Tokamak[1] (and other magnetic confinement) reactors seem much more promising and have seen slow but non-zero improvements for decades[2]. Some reactors like JT-60 have come close to being energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Large ongoing projects like like ITER[4] have the potential to break past limits and provide invaluable data. There are also advances in plasma physics which improve our ability to run computer simulations[5] of Tokamaks and suggest new hypotheses for how they can be improved[6]. If Google were serious about fusion, they would invest in this kind of mainstream research. Unfortunately, that's too big for them to own end-to-end; the most they could do would be to participate in the international process. But that wouldn't result in proprietary, patent-able technology, so they instead they put resources behind fringe science that they can control. This is reminiscent of the Lockheed-Martin CFR[7], which also chose an approach which was extremely unlikely to result in a scientific breakthrough but which did yield a few patents for Lockheed-Martin. Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling justifies a certain degree of cynicism. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60 [4]: https://www.iter.org/ https://www.iter.org/ [5]: http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/topics/plasma-fusion-theory-simulation http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/topics/plasma-fusion-theory... [6]: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-stabilizes-fusion-plasmas.html https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-stabilizes-fusion-p... [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion_Reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...

akiselev 7y ago
> Some reactors JT-60 have been energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Nitpick: I don't believe the JT-60 has actually gone energy positive. They achieved a point where they would be power positive if they had been able to use a 1:1 ratio of D-T fuel instead of their D-D fuel but handling D-T fuel is very complicated and the JT-60 facility doesn't have those capabilities.
- olooney 7y ago
  Noted; I've edited the above comment to read, "have come close to being energy positive." Thank you.
darawk 7y ago
So, you must think one of two things, then: 1. Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success. 2. It'd be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion, but Google made some money off of it. Is that right?
- danShumway 7y ago
  It would be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion and Google controlled the entire stack, yes. This is because in the long, long term, allowing a company to dictate how a technology this important is used could hamper our ability to build on it or improve it. Over a long enough timescale, it would be better if we delayed getting cold fusion so that we could get the same technology later in a less encumbered form. If cold fusion is possible, and Google stops working on it, we can still get it through other means. Other people can pick up Google's slack. If Google manages to crack it, and as a result is able to put legally enforceable restrictions on how it's used, then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there.
  - natechols 7y ago
    Those legally enforceable restrictions last for less than two decades; it's already been 30 years since the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      It's also assuming they would do something untoward with the monopoly, rather than just building a thousand new power plants and then making ten trillion dollars by being the lowest cost provider of zero carbon power generation for twenty years.
      - dTal 7y ago
        I don't know how the math works out exactly, but it seems not unlikely that the optimal rollout for curbing carbon emissions as rapidly as possible is not the same as the optimal rollout for maximizing value to shareholders.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jonas21 7y ago
You could argue that this is exactly the type of research that should be funded by private industry: high-risk, high-reward, and unlikely to get government funding.
- larkost 7y ago
  High-risk is something that private industry rarely to never does (except on vanity projects). All of the venture capital in Silicon Valley is really chasing medium-risk, not high-risk. Beyond big tickets like fusion, I would direct you to things like initial drug investigations (almost all done in University labs with government grants), or rocket development (almost all done under government grants). In all of these cases the initial development of things that are unlikely to work out are done on public funds, and once it looks like it is just down to the details (still a big undertaking) then private funding steps in. The pattern here is almost always: socialize costs/risks, privatize gains.
ehsankia 7y ago
> If Google were serious about fusion, they would invest in this kind of mainstream research. They do. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18201220/nuclear-fusion-energy-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-tae-google https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18201220/nuclear-fusion-e... https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/news/a27484/google-fusion-energy-company-improve-plasma-reactor-ai/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/news/a27... Just because they also look into other alternatives doesn't mean they are ignoring the more mainstream research. They are approaching it from every angle, because as pointed out, any discovery here can help in other places too. > Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling Google, for as big as it is and as many patents as it owns, has never once used its patent portfolio offensively, so assuming that they want to patent-troll is extremely unfair.
- olooney 7y ago
  These two projects look great, and are exactly the kind of projects where I can see Google making an impact. I think it is extremely likely that we will struggle to build working reactors until we have an "AutoCAD for magnetic containment" which is able to accurately simulate real world plasma physics, after which I expect that a working design will be discovered within a few years, and then constructed within a decade or two. This follows from the simple observation that the build-test cycle for real world reactors is something like a decade, and for simulated reactors something like 1 day - a 36500X decrease in iteration time is a game changer. Such a program is very non-trivial and no one today knows how to write one.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    And that's exactly the kind of stuff Google is trying to accelerate. One tangential but highly relevant example is their work on predicting molecular properties [0]. They were basically able to use neural networks to speed up the simulator by 300,000x, taking something that would take hours to less than a second. As you mention, this entirely changes the way you work and iterate. Here's a video of Jeff Dean talking more about it [1]. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-molecules-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-m... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP8CGyDbxBY&t=16m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP8CGyDbxBY&t=16m43s
grkvlt 7y ago
I'd believe Lockheed Martin's CFR claims more if they didn't say things like this: > Energy created through fusion is 3-4 times more powerful than the energy released by fission.[0] Which is just confus(ed/ing) on a fundamental level... More Powerful energy? So each Joule from fusion is actually 3-4 times better than each Joule from fission, in some way? I really can't work out what they are trying to say here. 0. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
- mikeash 7y ago
  I think they’re saying that a single fusion event produces 3-4x more energy than a single fission event.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Do you mean a single _fusion_ event?
    - mikeash 7y ago
      Yes, thanks. Brain no function beer well without.
  - grkvlt 7y ago
    But even that is pretty vague, since a single Uranium atom fission event releases about 200 MeV of energy, whereas most of the Hydrogen/Deuterium/Tritium/Helium/etc. fusion pathways release around 10% of this per fusion event: D + T -> He fusion gives 17 MeV, 4 p -> He gives 27 MeV, D + D -> He is 12 MeV and so on. Now, the energy released per nucleon greater for fusion, but I'm not convinced that's a useful or intuitive metric?
    - mikeash 7y ago
      How about energy per kilogram?

akiselev 7y ago

> Some reactors JT-60 have been energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Nitpick: I don't believe the JT-60 has actually gone energy positive. They achieved a point where they would be power positive if they had been able to use a 1:1 ratio of D-T fuel instead of their D-D fuel but handling D-T fuel is very complicated and the JT-60 facility doesn't have those capabilities.

olooney 7y ago
Noted; I've edited the above comment to read, "have come close to being energy positive." Thank you.

darawk 7y ago

So, you must think one of two things, then: 1. Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success. 2. It'd be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion, but Google made some money off of it. Is that right?

danShumway 7y ago
It would be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion and Google controlled the entire stack, yes. This is because in the long, long term, allowing a company to dictate how a technology this important is used could hamper our ability to build on it or improve it. Over a long enough timescale, it would be better if we delayed getting cold fusion so that we could get the same technology later in a less encumbered form. If cold fusion is possible, and Google stops working on it, we can still get it through other means. Other people can pick up Google's slack. If Google manages to crack it, and as a result is able to put legally enforceable restrictions on how it's used, then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there.
- natechols 7y ago
  Those legally enforceable restrictions last for less than two decades; it's already been 30 years since the Pons and Fleischmann fiasco.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    It's also assuming they would do something untoward with the monopoly, rather than just building a thousand new power plants and then making ten trillion dollars by being the lowest cost provider of zero carbon power generation for twenty years.
    - dTal 7y ago
      I don't know how the math works out exactly, but it seems not unlikely that the optimal rollout for curbing carbon emissions as rapidly as possible is not the same as the optimal rollout for maximizing value to shareholders.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jonas21 7y ago

You could argue that this is exactly the type of research that should be funded by private industry: high-risk, high-reward, and unlikely to get government funding.

larkost 7y ago
High-risk is something that private industry rarely to never does (except on vanity projects). All of the venture capital in Silicon Valley is really chasing medium-risk, not high-risk. Beyond big tickets like fusion, I would direct you to things like initial drug investigations (almost all done in University labs with government grants), or rocket development (almost all done under government grants). In all of these cases the initial development of things that are unlikely to work out are done on public funds, and once it looks like it is just down to the details (still a big undertaking) then private funding steps in. The pattern here is almost always: socialize costs/risks, privatize gains.

ehsankia 7y ago

> If Google were serious about fusion, they would invest in this kind of mainstream research. They do. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18201220/nuclear-fusion-energy-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-tae-google https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18201220/nuclear-fusion-e... https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/news/a27484/google-fusion-energy-company-improve-plasma-reactor-ai/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/news/a27... Just because they also look into other alternatives doesn't mean they are ignoring the more mainstream research. They are approaching it from every angle, because as pointed out, any discovery here can help in other places too. > Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling Google, for as big as it is and as many patents as it owns, has never once used its patent portfolio offensively, so assuming that they want to patent-troll is extremely unfair.

olooney 7y ago
These two projects look great, and are exactly the kind of projects where I can see Google making an impact. I think it is extremely likely that we will struggle to build working reactors until we have an "AutoCAD for magnetic containment" which is able to accurately simulate real world plasma physics, after which I expect that a working design will be discovered within a few years, and then constructed within a decade or two. This follows from the simple observation that the build-test cycle for real world reactors is something like a decade, and for simulated reactors something like 1 day - a 36500X decrease in iteration time is a game changer. Such a program is very non-trivial and no one today knows how to write one.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  And that's exactly the kind of stuff Google is trying to accelerate. One tangential but highly relevant example is their work on predicting molecular properties [0]. They were basically able to use neural networks to speed up the simulator by 300,000x, taking something that would take hours to less than a second. As you mention, this entirely changes the way you work and iterate. Here's a video of Jeff Dean talking more about it [1]. [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-molecules-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-m... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP8CGyDbxBY&t=16m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP8CGyDbxBY&t=16m43s

grkvlt 7y ago

I'd believe Lockheed Martin's CFR claims more if they didn't say things like this: > Energy created through fusion is 3-4 times more powerful than the energy released by fission.[0] Which is just confus(ed/ing) on a fundamental level... More Powerful energy? So each Joule from fusion is actually 3-4 times better than each Joule from fission, in some way? I really can't work out what they are trying to say here. 0. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...

mikeash 7y ago
I think they’re saying that a single fusion event produces 3-4x more energy than a single fission event.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Do you mean a single _fusion_ event?
  - mikeash 7y ago
    Yes, thanks. Brain no function beer well without.
- grkvlt 7y ago
  But even that is pretty vague, since a single Uranium atom fission event releases about 200 MeV of energy, whereas most of the Hydrogen/Deuterium/Tritium/Helium/etc. fusion pathways release around 10% of this per fusion event: D + T -> He fusion gives 17 MeV, 4 p -> He gives 27 MeV, D + D -> He is 12 MeV and so on. Now, the energy released per nucleon greater for fusion, but I'm not convinced that's a useful or intuitive metric?
  - mikeash 7y ago
    How about energy per kilogram?