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I feel like we need a SpaceX for Fusion, someone willing to fund and build a whole bunch of SPARC reactor prototypes of various sizes quickly, with the understa

I feel like we need a SpaceX for Fusion, someone willing to fund and build a whole bunch of SPARC reactor prototypes of various sizes quickly, with the understanding they may or may not work. The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. Seems to me the primary problems are manufacturing and scaling components like REBCO. Someone like Musk would look at this and go "ok, first thing, let's build our own REBCO factory, and even mine the materials if necessary ourselves to get cost efficiency". They're still approaching this as "big science" project, where they don't want to fail, and they're gonna subsist on grants and as much off the shelf providers as they can. Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs. The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.

boogies 6y ago
> we need to build and fail a lot more inb4 FUD from people who think nuclear power failures have been lethal more than once
cma 6y ago
"Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fusion energy for any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding."
obilgic 6y ago
I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.
- foota 6y ago
  They developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)
  - mulmen 6y ago
    They weren't the first to build a new engine or an engine of that type or land upright. They just combined previous achievements in a better way. Their technology is incredible but it is all incremental improvements combined with a sustainable business model.
    - yholio 6y ago
      Their major accomplishments were economic, not technological. Their crown jewel Raptor, applies full-flow staged combustion principles that were known and demonstrated on soviet test stands since the 60s. Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
      - mulmen 6y ago
        My understanding is that the physics are actually pretty well understood but it's just a matter of executing on them. Fusion is possible but we just need someone to actually... do it. Which AFAIK is the point of ITER.
        donor20 6y ago
        ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success. Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
        mulmen 6y ago
        I don't think ITER was ever intended to be a commercial success and it doesn't have to be. It's literally named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
        6y ago
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  I think reusable rocket was definitely "may or may not work".
  - yholio 6y ago
    Reusable rockets were at "They most likely would work, but it's pointless since governments are willing to spend billions on rockets; in fact, lowering price to space would be very bad for our business". Compared to space tech, fusion science is at the stage of 1929 sci-fi drama "Woman in the moon".
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      For context: 1926 was the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1929 it was not yet clear that this was the technology that would take us into space. That sounds about right for fusion. It is probable that we have built a primitive version of what will eventually sustain a net-positive fusion reaction, but it may only be obviously a milestone in hindsight.
    - chasd00 6y ago
      spacex was laughed out of the room by industry and press when they announced trying to land the first stage. then they did it. reusable rockets were uniformly assumed to be a fool's errand.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        This is a complete fantasy, people were working on reusable vehicles for decades. SpaceShuttle was already partially reusable and operational, just like falcon 9 is, just was not economical. SpaceX doesn't have a fully reusable vehicle yet, and there was a program to develop a fully reusable replacement for Space Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar If Elon was laughed out of somewhere, thats to do with Elon's credibility at the time.
  - foolfoolz 6y ago
    then space shuttle was designed to be reusable. spacex had 20-30 years of data to build off
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale This has become a popular line of contrarian bunk as of late. I am an aerospace engineer. I am also a Tesla valuation sceptic. The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary. In materials, numerical methods, logistics and technology, they have pioneered. Common knowledge in 2001 was reusable launch could not compete with expendable vehicles. SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. Ignoring that is to reduce the problem to a simplistically technical level that detaches entirely from reality.
  - tenpies 6y ago
    > SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. How can we say anything about SpaceX's efficiency with cash if there are no public statements available and even investors have trouble getting any financial data at all?
    - ericd 6y ago
      We know how much they've raised, how much they charge for launches, and how many launches they've done.
      - donor20 6y ago
        And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach.
        Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach. I was going to say to look exactly at its endless money pit counter-part: SLS from ULA. Nothing will ever compare to that monstrosity that will never work: $7.2 Billion and growing [0]. Also, not an Engineer, but went to interview at both Tesla and SpaceX and SpaceX's internal facilities are jaw-dropping. People love to go on about Tesla's Fremont factory, which is awesome, but I've been to Fremont and Boca Chica. And Boca is by far more impressive; I lived and worked in Emilia Romanga in Italy, and also lived in the town nearest to Stuttgart in Germany so I've have seen my share of amazing engineer and logistical/distribution feats. I saw them starting to stack what was to become SN3 (RIP) in real time in the hangar as I saw SN2 vertical on the launchpad which that still remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my Life. I was basically leaning up against one of the Raptor Engine prototypes they have pretty much just around. I've also got a few glimpses of the Hawthorne factory from (the outside) when I was charging the Model 3, lots of cool stuff comes out there (namely Falcon 9 and Merlin and Raptor engines) they have so much cool stuff just lying on the side of the building which I took pictures of but was asked to delete by security, which I complied. 0: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Many comments have claimed this, but I disagree. Plasma confinement as science has largely been solved now. Like the Rocket Equation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and other aspects of Aerospace, we know the parameters of how to do it, and it is simply a matter of searching the space, reducing the parameters, via engineering iteration. We also knew that landing rockets was possible, and closed-cycle combustion engines were possible, the physics said so, and even had prototypes that could do it, but with SpaceX, it is not the science that's the issue, or even one-off engineering feats, but practical, economical, scalable production. With Fusion, we've already achieved confinement times and burns that show we can make it work. But making it work in a prototype reactor is a far cry from making it work in a commercial reactor which needs to be run everyday and maintained. ITER's been going for 13 years now, and I don't think they're solving any of the problems that SPARC will solve. Yes, tokamak prototypes have provided the insight to help nail down the plasma physics, but small scale fusion prototypes have helped to do, with much faster turnaround time than $20+ billion mega projects. What SPARC is saying is that small is beautiful. That because of scaling of the B-field to the fourth power, if you focus on stronger magnets, you can dramatically reduce both the size and the cost to build your fusion reactors. That is, if you double the strength of your B-field, you shrink the size of the machine needed by a factor of 4. So clearly, instead of focusing on ITER, you should focus on the economics and scaling of REBCO manufacturing, and increases in magnetic field you can eeek out because they pay huge dividends. In other words, we are not longer at the Von Braun stage of rockets, or even the Apollo stage, we're at the SpaceX stage of dramatically reducing manufacturing costs and increasing use. Likewise, I think Fusion is poised to move past the Von Braun stage of "is this possible" to "can we build a real reactor?" As long as people can let go of huge super-projects, and we can get funding for a bunch of innovative startups in the space to try various techniques and designs for engineering small, cheap, and rapidly. Likewise, for Thorium reactors, we already know Molten Salt Reactors work, we already know the Thorium cycle works, and we even know a commercial plant works, as Germany ran one at one point. There are oodles of startups now vying to build small scale thorium reactors. The role the government could play here is, like with NASA, the DOE, could provide capital to reduce risk, and get some of the more promising ventures off the ground. Most importantly, they need to be allowed to fail.
  - 6y ago
loeg 6y ago
> Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs. > The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER. We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do, and we have working reactor designs already. I don't mean that we shouldn't spend some money on fusion research, just that it isn't reasonable to spend 100% GDP on it (or some significant fraction thereof).
- rurounijones 6y ago
  > We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do I wish it were the case, but I think we have seen that it is politically impossible.
  - tjpnz 6y ago
    How so?
  - loeg 6y ago
    Do you think the politics of fusion would be any better? The politics opposing fission aren't grounded in science; do you think the politics around fusion would be?
    - raziel2701 6y ago
      Yeah the politics would definitely be better because it's deuterium/tritium for fusion as opposed to uranium, which has a lot a cultural and historical baggage and it's on the news in a bad way all the time. So yes it would be better. Now would it be better enough to get out of the same political/cultural hole that fission is in? I don't know, but it at least has a better chance.
      - XorNot 6y ago
        Also not having to source and mine uranium is actually a huge advantage. We have more lithium then ever, and deuterium can be extracted literally any large body of water.
phkahler 6y ago
>> The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow... I'm starting to think real progress on fusion is suppressed because there might be a risk lurking there.
- andi999 6y ago
  As far as I understand there is a nuclear waste problem, since neutrons are generated which activate the hull significantly. Neutron cannot be deflected. But I dont believe this is the show stopper why progress is slow. To me it feels more like people know ther e is a technical insurmountable problem ahead (like how to efficiently enough transform the energy to electricity; actually really wondering how this should be scalable) and people involved do not want to reach that point.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Isn't the energy converted to electricity by heating water and generating steam then doing any number of well understood things like spinning turbines?
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Getting the heat from neutrons randomly flying out of the reactor to water is a hard problem. The current thought is to cool the reactor with liquid lithium, which itself will be undergoing fission and releasing helium during the process. The liquid lithium and helium would then be pumped through water cooled heat exchanger and some sort of filtering process to remove the helium. Also, all of the plumbing and materials have to withstand radiation 100 times that found in fission reactors. I’m not saying it is impossible, but they won’t be working on it until ITERs successor sometime in the 2050s
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        Is there a reason graphite won't work? It's conductive, stable and extracts thermal energy from neutrons fairly reliably in fusion reactors.
aaronblohowiak 6y ago
Why do you think a 5 year timeline is too long for the challenge? AFAIK most people think that is way too ambitious. Spacex took 6 years to get into orbit (and were not the first by decades) and you think they could show energy gain fusion in 5?
mulmen 6y ago
The question is if we would have any innovation in fusion without ITER. It is a research installation meant to prove fusion is viable for generating energy. It's basically designed to be surpassed by later designs. But it's also like an Apollo program for fusion installations. It doesn't have to be economical, it just has to work.
sanxiyn 6y ago
> The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. It's almost sure to work assuming the magnet works. Given that they are still developing the magnet and haven't finalized the design yet, it seems crazy ambitious to me to get to SPARC in 5 years.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  And ARC "work" in the sense of a reactor having the weight of a couple of WW2 destroyers.
  - jabl 6y ago
    Well, ARC is supposed to produce an order of magnitude more power than a WW2 destroyer power plant produced, so I'm not sure why that comparison is relevant. The first application of fusion reactors will presumably not be naval ships. Anyway, assuming your 4000 ton figure is correct, that works out to 125 kW/ton. For comparison, a quick googling suggests a wind power plant is around 3 kW/ton, excluding the rather massive foundation of the tower.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      That weight figure (7190 tonnes, not 4000) for ARC is just for the reactor. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf (page 30) The net output of ARC in that design is 190 MW(e), which comes to 26 kW(e)/tonne. It doesn't include anything outside the reactor, which would likely increase the weight by at least an order of magnitude. It doesn't include (for example) the cryo plant, tritium processing, heat exchangers, turbines, cooling system, the BUILDING, and facilities for installation and disposal of vacuum vessels.
      - jabl 6y ago
        > That weight figure (7190 tonnes, not 4000) for ARC is just for the reactor. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf (page 30) Thanks. As I hadn't seen that paper, I used the Fletcher class destroyer, which was the most numerous class the US built, and it was slightly on the larger side at about 2000 tons; common destroyers were around 1500 tons IIRC. I also assumed, wrongly it seems, that 500 MW was the electrical power. Anyways, if we're really interested in material requirements for various power plant types, one can check e.g. the DOE quadrennial energy review 2015, Table 10.4 on page 390. One can see that fission does pretty well, about an order of magnitude better than wind (and solar being somewhat worse than wind). I would guess fusion wouldn't do as well as fission, but it shouldn't be a huge difference either considering that except the reactor itself it should be pretty similar.
mng2 6y ago
>it's almost sure to work Famous last words... >we need to build and fail a lot more You know, that actually describes the early years of fusion research. People thought it would be easier than it has turned out to be. There are lots of gremlins... I will also note that SPARC is a tokamak, the same as ITER. It's decades of steady tokamak research that has gotten us to this point.
peteretep 6y ago
Bezos has already effectively ceded “space guy” to Musk, might as well put in the cash to be “fusion guy”. Good way to make sure you’re in the history books for all time
- airstrike 6y ago
  His wealth has also increased tremendously since he tried to be the "space guy" so it makes sense for him to aim even higher now. Now we just need someone to reverse-psychology this into him
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Bezos has already effectively ceded “space guy” to Musk, might as well put in the cash to be “fusion guy”. Good way to make sure you’re in the history books for all time I think the advantage of that is if he did and fusion energy was a large portion of energy that powers the Super Charger Network it would amuse him enough to consider putting his considerable wealth to that end. He really is like a real life Lex Luthor, and when the only way he can one-up his rivals would be to make them dependent on them at rate Royalties +15% (because he has dominant market share and be because he quite honestly 'just could') would be very befitting after having being out-done in the Space Industry. And the reality is that since Solar city is probably the only real Musk Corp he can actually displace, that's where he'd probably get the most bang-for-his-buck and kick-start the 'battle of futuristic futures' by the 2 richest people on Earth that we were supposed to have already. Bezos also made lots of platitudes about how he wants to help make the entire Earth a Nature preserve: so in case you're reading this (or iithe Saudi's who have rootaccess to his new hacked his phone...) why the hell not, Jeff?
  - PedroBatista 6y ago
    Don’t know about Lex Luthor but certainly jacked Mini-Me
- mlindner 6y ago
  Bezos can't cede something he never had... Bezos has had a hobby project no bigger than what SpaceshipOne did in 2004 and has poured billions into it for practically no results. Elon was launching rockets into Space before Bezos was doing anything at all.
Detrus 6y ago
Lockheed Martin's approach does what you're talking about. Small, fast to iterate design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
jiggawatts 6y ago
You're spot on, this is exactly the problem. To use a physics analogy, gargantuan megaprojects like ITER develop their own selfgravitation that sucks in money and innovation, crushing engineers pitilessly under the weight of the bureaucracy. To further abuse analogies, megaprojects suffer from something akin to the tyranny of the rocket equation: Because they're huge and expensive, they have to be broken up and doled out to disparate teams (countries even!), subcontractors, etc... Because there are many organisations involved, the friction of the interactions between force managers to plan ahead. Because planning ahead is required, only existing, established technologies can be used. QED: It is not possible to do "innovation" with megaprojects, their mega size inherently prevents any possibility of true innovation occurring! The bigger they are, the less innovative they are. I cannot emphasise this enough: Elements of the ITER project have been planned 30 years ahead! That's insanity. That's using 1990s technology in the 2020s! There is no possible path through ITER and then DEMO to achieve commercial power generation before 2050. None. There is not even a hope of such a thing. Most critically, ITER used a legacy superconducting wire in their designs, which has a lower maximum magnetic field strength compared to more modern types. Because of the highly nonlinear scaling (quartic?) with increasing field strength, this is the fundamental limit to achieving break-even fusion, but they were forced to start planning without it. They should have done what Tesla did: Focus on the batteries as the primary thing, everything else is secondary. ITER should have focused on the superconducting wires above all else for at least the first two decades of the project, before even thinking of actually opening a CAD program to design a Tokamak!
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  The corrolary to your message is “don’t build mega-projects” which doesn’t make sense to me. And no, Tesla didn’t start by selling batteries: they started by selling expensive cars which didn’t need the batteries at the same scale as mass-produced car; which kind of destroys the meaning of whole of your initial message.
  - kiba 6y ago
    I don't think that's necessary the case. Instead, you approach the megaproject as a series of prototypes, spending large sum of money in the hope of quick advancement and iteration cycle.
willis936 6y ago
It’s funny you mention SPARC because MIT is treating it as a business opportunity. Their REBCO coil winding work is both private and proprietary. This is very much not how the fusion community (and physics at large) do things. The openness of fusion research was a component in ending the Cold War. Researchers building machines right now want HTS coils. MIT is making sure they’re the ones to supply them. Who makes money in a gold rush? The pickaxe company.
- jabl 6y ago
  Well yes, but... if they crack the nut of how to make an economical fusion reactor work, I'd be happy to pay them to be the monopoly supplier of REBCO tape until the patent runs out. And to be honest, if they demonstrate the reactor to work, I'm sure others will figure out ways to produce REBCO without violating the patent, or would outright give the patent the finger.
  - willis936 6y ago
    I hate to bring up a spoiler effect because it has been a toxic sour point between competing MCF designs in the past, but MIT is actively pulling funds away from attractive coil winding techniques that are public and subject to peer review. I’m rather close to this issue because I’m aware of grants being given to MIT to make prototypes. MIT is in the US and have a big reputation. The current grants are modest, but they are opening a path for MIT to be paid to develop a technology they will sell. This is all fine. Where it stops being fine is when the developed coil winding technology is proprietary. I’m not exactly sure how this doesn’t violate DoE grant contract rules. Here is the competition, btw. Paz-Soldan’s technique seems sound and should be funded for prototype coils. I’m not saying MIT shouldn’t be given grants to do this work. I just wish that they wouldn’t use public funds to develop proprietary technology. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.02154.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.02154.pdf
gtsnexp 6y ago
Would you mind adding links to the Nature papers you have mentioned?
nine_k 6y ago
The problem is that fusion is not rocket science. It's way harder. By the time SpaceX was founded, we've been shooting comnercial rockets into space for half a century, and had flown humans to the moon multiple times. Some application of modern technologies allowed to do the next logical step, a cheaply reusable first stage (expensive reusable space systems existed for decades, like the space shuttle). Fusion is nothing like that. We can reliably blow fusion-based nuclear bombs. That's mostly it. We don't have a reliable reactor that would run any close to breaking even (a fusor does not count). We have no experience burning the plasma for more than a few hours, before losing it to internal instabilities. Certainly we have nothing similar to commercial energy generation furled by fusion. A plethora of approaches exist because no common design is known to reliably work. This is not a moment for a SpaceX. This is not a moment for an Apollo effort. I'm not even sure it's a moment for a Manhattan project type of effort. We still seem to know too little to spearhead an engineering effort. I'd be glad to receive a qualified refutation of my points.
- donor20 6y ago
  I disagree in a small way. Telsa / SpaceX / Elon - focused on ground up physics principals. They said things like, how can we make a better battery pack and will the math then work for a good EV car. They showed to their satisfaction that the answer was yes, and built from there to a degree. Their battery / powertrain work has been consistently good before any of the huge capital efforts, and the path forward was pretty well defined. Same with their rocket engines. They iterate and qualify pretty quickly. ITER and these folks are spending billions on what is actually ancient tech with really no realistic (I don't think) path to sustainable commercial power even theoretically in any reasonable time horizon. This is the Space Launch System approach, gear up and go on old tech. We do need someone in a lab (Tesla / SpaceX style) iterating, and then proving out key physics / components. The problem with ITER, you CANNOT stop funding it, it's just gobbling up all the money because the number of jobs now tied to this - it's a jobs machine basically. At spaceX it doesn't feel like their are a lot of sacred cows. These maga projects are pure sacred cow it feels like sometime. It's private / personal capital driven.
  - coliveira 6y ago
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
Tokamak Energy has made 3 fusion devices in 11 years. It's not super fast, but certainly faster than the megaprojects. They are planning on their current design hitting 100 million degrees.
- twic 6y ago
  Indeed, Tokamak Energy's whole strategy hinges on fast iteration [1]: "The basic approach being taken by Tokamak Energy is simple—to combine the two aforementioned technologies to unlock the potential of fusion power in more compact devices, and to do whatever development, testing and iteration are necessary on smaller machines in order to reduce construction timescales and to progress faster." As of January 2020, Tokamak Energy had raised a total of £117 milllion (~$156 million). I read that SpaceX has raised $5.4 billion [3]. That's the limiting factor. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6365856/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6365856/ [2] https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak-energy-raises-67m-from-new-and-existing-investors/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak-energy-raises-67m-fr... [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-technologies https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te...
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ohyes 6y ago
surely a fusion reactor failing will have no consequences.
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intricatedetail 6y ago
In most countries there is no policing of corruption and in some countries it is essentially legal and described as lobbying. I think the resistance to these new technologies comes from the situation where decision makers are paid adequately to never put such ideas forward. Fusion could turn many countries economies upside down so they have an incentive to steer away anyone at any cost.
niffydroid 6y ago
This does make sense. If you look at some post world war 2 projects like Dounreay managed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, things can happen. But with how advanced things are now, can a single government entity manage projects which will require skills from many other countries?
rwmj 6y ago
There are "SpaceX For Fusion" projects around. Several have been mentioned already in replies, but one I don't see mentioned is https://generalfusion.com/ https://generalfusion.com/ (not claiming that this is a valid approach).

boogies 6y ago

> we need to build and fail a lot more inb4 FUD from people who think nuclear power failures have been lethal more than once

cma 6y ago

"Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fusion energy for any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding."

obilgic 6y ago

I don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.

foota 6y ago
They developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)
- mulmen 6y ago
  They weren't the first to build a new engine or an engine of that type or land upright. They just combined previous achievements in a better way. Their technology is incredible but it is all incremental improvements combined with a sustainable business model.
  - yholio 6y ago
    Their major accomplishments were economic, not technological. Their crown jewel Raptor, applies full-flow staged combustion principles that were known and demonstrated on soviet test stands since the 60s. Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      My understanding is that the physics are actually pretty well understood but it's just a matter of executing on them. Fusion is possible but we just need someone to actually... do it. Which AFAIK is the point of ITER.
      - donor20 6y ago
        ITER will NOT in any reasonable time frame actually do it, and will not be a commercial success. Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
        mulmen 6y ago
        I don't think ITER was ever intended to be a commercial success and it doesn't have to be. It's literally named the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
        6y ago
sanxiyn 6y ago
I think reusable rocket was definitely "may or may not work".
- yholio 6y ago
  Reusable rockets were at "They most likely would work, but it's pointless since governments are willing to spend billions on rockets; in fact, lowering price to space would be very bad for our business". Compared to space tech, fusion science is at the stage of 1929 sci-fi drama "Woman in the moon".
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    For context: 1926 was the first liquid fueled rocket. In 1929 it was not yet clear that this was the technology that would take us into space. That sounds about right for fusion. It is probable that we have built a primitive version of what will eventually sustain a net-positive fusion reaction, but it may only be obviously a milestone in hindsight.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    spacex was laughed out of the room by industry and press when they announced trying to land the first stage. then they did it. reusable rockets were uniformly assumed to be a fool's errand.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      This is a complete fantasy, people were working on reusable vehicles for decades. SpaceShuttle was already partially reusable and operational, just like falcon 9 is, just was not economical. SpaceX doesn't have a fully reusable vehicle yet, and there was a program to develop a fully reusable replacement for Space Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar If Elon was laughed out of somewhere, thats to do with Elon's credibility at the time.
- foolfoolz 6y ago
  then space shuttle was designed to be reusable. spacex had 20-30 years of data to build off
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale This has become a popular line of contrarian bunk as of late. I am an aerospace engineer. I am also a Tesla valuation sceptic. The work SpaceX has done is revolutionary. In materials, numerical methods, logistics and technology, they have pioneered. Common knowledge in 2001 was reusable launch could not compete with expendable vehicles. SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. Ignoring that is to reduce the problem to a simplistically technical level that detaches entirely from reality.
- tenpies 6y ago
  > SpaceX overturned that paradigm with a fraction of the competition’s cash. How can we say anything about SpaceX's efficiency with cash if there are no public statements available and even investors have trouble getting any financial data at all?
  - ericd 6y ago
    We know how much they've raised, how much they charge for launches, and how many launches they've done.
    - donor20 6y ago
      And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > And we know the VAST amounts of cash devoured by SLS and the traditional folks who critiqued SpaceX approach. I was going to say to look exactly at its endless money pit counter-part: SLS from ULA. Nothing will ever compare to that monstrosity that will never work: $7.2 Billion and growing [0]. Also, not an Engineer, but went to interview at both Tesla and SpaceX and SpaceX's internal facilities are jaw-dropping. People love to go on about Tesla's Fremont factory, which is awesome, but I've been to Fremont and Boca Chica. And Boca is by far more impressive; I lived and worked in Emilia Romanga in Italy, and also lived in the town nearest to Stuttgart in Germany so I've have seen my share of amazing engineer and logistical/distribution feats. I saw them starting to stack what was to become SN3 (RIP) in real time in the hangar as I saw SN2 vertical on the launchpad which that still remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen in my Life. I was basically leaning up against one of the Raptor Engine prototypes they have pretty much just around. I've also got a few glimpses of the Hawthorne factory from (the outside) when I was charging the Model 3, lots of cool stuff comes out there (namely Falcon 9 and Merlin and Raptor engines) they have so much cool stuff just lying on the side of the building which I took pictures of but was asked to delete by security, which I complied. 0: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-012.pdf
cromwellian 6y ago
Many comments have claimed this, but I disagree. Plasma confinement as science has largely been solved now. Like the Rocket Equation, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and other aspects of Aerospace, we know the parameters of how to do it, and it is simply a matter of searching the space, reducing the parameters, via engineering iteration. We also knew that landing rockets was possible, and closed-cycle combustion engines were possible, the physics said so, and even had prototypes that could do it, but with SpaceX, it is not the science that's the issue, or even one-off engineering feats, but practical, economical, scalable production. With Fusion, we've already achieved confinement times and burns that show we can make it work. But making it work in a prototype reactor is a far cry from making it work in a commercial reactor which needs to be run everyday and maintained. ITER's been going for 13 years now, and I don't think they're solving any of the problems that SPARC will solve. Yes, tokamak prototypes have provided the insight to help nail down the plasma physics, but small scale fusion prototypes have helped to do, with much faster turnaround time than $20+ billion mega projects. What SPARC is saying is that small is beautiful. That because of scaling of the B-field to the fourth power, if you focus on stronger magnets, you can dramatically reduce both the size and the cost to build your fusion reactors. That is, if you double the strength of your B-field, you shrink the size of the machine needed by a factor of 4. So clearly, instead of focusing on ITER, you should focus on the economics and scaling of REBCO manufacturing, and increases in magnetic field you can eeek out because they pay huge dividends. In other words, we are not longer at the Von Braun stage of rockets, or even the Apollo stage, we're at the SpaceX stage of dramatically reducing manufacturing costs and increasing use. Likewise, I think Fusion is poised to move past the Von Braun stage of "is this possible" to "can we build a real reactor?" As long as people can let go of huge super-projects, and we can get funding for a bunch of innovative startups in the space to try various techniques and designs for engineering small, cheap, and rapidly. Likewise, for Thorium reactors, we already know Molten Salt Reactors work, we already know the Thorium cycle works, and we even know a commercial plant works, as Germany ran one at one point. There are oodles of startups now vying to build small scale thorium reactors. The role the government could play here is, like with NASA, the DOE, could provide capital to reduce risk, and get some of the more promising ventures off the ground. Most importantly, they need to be allowed to fail.
- 6y ago

loeg 6y ago

> Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs. > The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER. We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do, and we have working reactor designs already. I don't mean that we shouldn't spend some money on fusion research, just that it isn't reasonable to spend 100% GDP on it (or some significant fraction thereof).

rurounijones 6y ago
> We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do I wish it were the case, but I think we have seen that it is politically impossible.
- tjpnz 6y ago
  How so?
- loeg 6y ago
  Do you think the politics of fusion would be any better? The politics opposing fission aren't grounded in science; do you think the politics around fusion would be?
  - raziel2701 6y ago
    Yeah the politics would definitely be better because it's deuterium/tritium for fusion as opposed to uranium, which has a lot a cultural and historical baggage and it's on the news in a bad way all the time. So yes it would be better. Now would it be better enough to get out of the same political/cultural hole that fission is in? I don't know, but it at least has a better chance.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      Also not having to source and mine uranium is actually a huge advantage. We have more lithium then ever, and deuterium can be extracted literally any large body of water.

phkahler 6y ago

>> The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow... I'm starting to think real progress on fusion is suppressed because there might be a risk lurking there.

andi999 6y ago
As far as I understand there is a nuclear waste problem, since neutrons are generated which activate the hull significantly. Neutron cannot be deflected. But I dont believe this is the show stopper why progress is slow. To me it feels more like people know ther e is a technical insurmountable problem ahead (like how to efficiently enough transform the energy to electricity; actually really wondering how this should be scalable) and people involved do not want to reach that point.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Isn't the energy converted to electricity by heating water and generating steam then doing any number of well understood things like spinning turbines?
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Getting the heat from neutrons randomly flying out of the reactor to water is a hard problem. The current thought is to cool the reactor with liquid lithium, which itself will be undergoing fission and releasing helium during the process. The liquid lithium and helium would then be pumped through water cooled heat exchanger and some sort of filtering process to remove the helium. Also, all of the plumbing and materials have to withstand radiation 100 times that found in fission reactors. I’m not saying it is impossible, but they won’t be working on it until ITERs successor sometime in the 2050s
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      Is there a reason graphite won't work? It's conductive, stable and extracts thermal energy from neutrons fairly reliably in fusion reactors.

aaronblohowiak 6y ago

Why do you think a 5 year timeline is too long for the challenge? AFAIK most people think that is way too ambitious. Spacex took 6 years to get into orbit (and were not the first by decades) and you think they could show energy gain fusion in 5?

mulmen 6y ago

The question is if we would have any innovation in fusion without ITER. It is a research installation meant to prove fusion is viable for generating energy. It's basically designed to be surpassed by later designs. But it's also like an Apollo program for fusion installations. It doesn't have to be economical, it just has to work.

sanxiyn 6y ago

> The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. It's almost sure to work assuming the magnet works. Given that they are still developing the magnet and haven't finalized the design yet, it seems crazy ambitious to me to get to SPARC in 5 years.

pfdietz 6y ago
And ARC "work" in the sense of a reactor having the weight of a couple of WW2 destroyers.
- jabl 6y ago
  Well, ARC is supposed to produce an order of magnitude more power than a WW2 destroyer power plant produced, so I'm not sure why that comparison is relevant. The first application of fusion reactors will presumably not be naval ships. Anyway, assuming your 4000 ton figure is correct, that works out to 125 kW/ton. For comparison, a quick googling suggests a wind power plant is around 3 kW/ton, excluding the rather massive foundation of the tower.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    That weight figure (7190 tonnes, not 4000) for ARC is just for the reactor. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf (page 30) The net output of ARC in that design is 190 MW(e), which comes to 26 kW(e)/tonne. It doesn't include anything outside the reactor, which would likely increase the weight by at least an order of magnitude. It doesn't include (for example) the cryo plant, tritium processing, heat exchangers, turbines, cooling system, the BUILDING, and facilities for installation and disposal of vacuum vessels.
    - jabl 6y ago
      > That weight figure (7190 tonnes, not 4000) for ARC is just for the reactor. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf (page 30) Thanks. As I hadn't seen that paper, I used the Fletcher class destroyer, which was the most numerous class the US built, and it was slightly on the larger side at about 2000 tons; common destroyers were around 1500 tons IIRC. I also assumed, wrongly it seems, that 500 MW was the electrical power. Anyways, if we're really interested in material requirements for various power plant types, one can check e.g. the DOE quadrennial energy review 2015, Table 10.4 on page 390. One can see that fission does pretty well, about an order of magnitude better than wind (and solar being somewhat worse than wind). I would guess fusion wouldn't do as well as fission, but it shouldn't be a huge difference either considering that except the reactor itself it should be pretty similar.

mng2 6y ago

>it's almost sure to work Famous last words... >we need to build and fail a lot more You know, that actually describes the early years of fusion research. People thought it would be easier than it has turned out to be. There are lots of gremlins... I will also note that SPARC is a tokamak, the same as ITER. It's decades of steady tokamak research that has gotten us to this point.

peteretep 6y ago

Bezos has already effectively ceded “space guy” to Musk, might as well put in the cash to be “fusion guy”. Good way to make sure you’re in the history books for all time

airstrike 6y ago
His wealth has also increased tremendously since he tried to be the "space guy" so it makes sense for him to aim even higher now. Now we just need someone to reverse-psychology this into him
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> Bezos has already effectively ceded “space guy” to Musk, might as well put in the cash to be “fusion guy”. Good way to make sure you’re in the history books for all time I think the advantage of that is if he did and fusion energy was a large portion of energy that powers the Super Charger Network it would amuse him enough to consider putting his considerable wealth to that end. He really is like a real life Lex Luthor, and when the only way he can one-up his rivals would be to make them dependent on them at rate Royalties +15% (because he has dominant market share and be because he quite honestly 'just could') would be very befitting after having being out-done in the Space Industry. And the reality is that since Solar city is probably the only real Musk Corp he can actually displace, that's where he'd probably get the most bang-for-his-buck and kick-start the 'battle of futuristic futures' by the 2 richest people on Earth that we were supposed to have already. Bezos also made lots of platitudes about how he wants to help make the entire Earth a Nature preserve: so in case you're reading this (or iithe Saudi's who have rootaccess to his new hacked his phone...) why the hell not, Jeff?
- PedroBatista 6y ago
  Don’t know about Lex Luthor but certainly jacked Mini-Me
mlindner 6y ago
Bezos can't cede something he never had... Bezos has had a hobby project no bigger than what SpaceshipOne did in 2004 and has poured billions into it for practically no results. Elon was launching rockets into Space before Bezos was doing anything at all.

Detrus 6y ago

Lockheed Martin's approach does what you're talking about. Small, fast to iterate design. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlYClniDFkM https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.html https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...

jiggawatts 6y ago

You're spot on, this is exactly the problem. To use a physics analogy, gargantuan megaprojects like ITER develop their own selfgravitation that sucks in money and innovation, crushing engineers pitilessly under the weight of the bureaucracy. To further abuse analogies, megaprojects suffer from something akin to the tyranny of the rocket equation: Because they're huge and expensive, they have to be broken up and doled out to disparate teams (countries even!), subcontractors, etc... Because there are many organisations involved, the friction of the interactions between force managers to plan ahead. Because planning ahead is required, only existing, established technologies can be used. QED: It is not possible to do "innovation" with megaprojects, their mega size inherently prevents any possibility of true innovation occurring! The bigger they are, the less innovative they are. I cannot emphasise this enough: Elements of the ITER project have been planned 30 years ahead! That's insanity. That's using 1990s technology in the 2020s! There is no possible path through ITER and then DEMO to achieve commercial power generation before 2050. None. There is not even a hope of such a thing. Most critically, ITER used a legacy superconducting wire in their designs, which has a lower maximum magnetic field strength compared to more modern types. Because of the highly nonlinear scaling (quartic?) with increasing field strength, this is the fundamental limit to achieving break-even fusion, but they were forced to start planning without it. They should have done what Tesla did: Focus on the batteries as the primary thing, everything else is secondary. ITER should have focused on the superconducting wires above all else for at least the first two decades of the project, before even thinking of actually opening a CAD program to design a Tokamak!

heavenlyblue 6y ago
The corrolary to your message is “don’t build mega-projects” which doesn’t make sense to me. And no, Tesla didn’t start by selling batteries: they started by selling expensive cars which didn’t need the batteries at the same scale as mass-produced car; which kind of destroys the meaning of whole of your initial message.
- kiba 6y ago
  I don't think that's necessary the case. Instead, you approach the megaproject as a series of prototypes, spending large sum of money in the hope of quick advancement and iteration cycle.

willis936 6y ago

It’s funny you mention SPARC because MIT is treating it as a business opportunity. Their REBCO coil winding work is both private and proprietary. This is very much not how the fusion community (and physics at large) do things. The openness of fusion research was a component in ending the Cold War. Researchers building machines right now want HTS coils. MIT is making sure they’re the ones to supply them. Who makes money in a gold rush? The pickaxe company.

jabl 6y ago
Well yes, but... if they crack the nut of how to make an economical fusion reactor work, I'd be happy to pay them to be the monopoly supplier of REBCO tape until the patent runs out. And to be honest, if they demonstrate the reactor to work, I'm sure others will figure out ways to produce REBCO without violating the patent, or would outright give the patent the finger.
- willis936 6y ago
  I hate to bring up a spoiler effect because it has been a toxic sour point between competing MCF designs in the past, but MIT is actively pulling funds away from attractive coil winding techniques that are public and subject to peer review. I’m rather close to this issue because I’m aware of grants being given to MIT to make prototypes. MIT is in the US and have a big reputation. The current grants are modest, but they are opening a path for MIT to be paid to develop a technology they will sell. This is all fine. Where it stops being fine is when the developed coil winding technology is proprietary. I’m not exactly sure how this doesn’t violate DoE grant contract rules. Here is the competition, btw. Paz-Soldan’s technique seems sound and should be funded for prototype coils. I’m not saying MIT shouldn’t be given grants to do this work. I just wish that they wouldn’t use public funds to develop proprietary technology. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.02154.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.02154.pdf

gtsnexp 6y ago

Would you mind adding links to the Nature papers you have mentioned?

nine_k 6y ago

The problem is that fusion is not rocket science. It's way harder. By the time SpaceX was founded, we've been shooting comnercial rockets into space for half a century, and had flown humans to the moon multiple times. Some application of modern technologies allowed to do the next logical step, a cheaply reusable first stage (expensive reusable space systems existed for decades, like the space shuttle). Fusion is nothing like that. We can reliably blow fusion-based nuclear bombs. That's mostly it. We don't have a reliable reactor that would run any close to breaking even (a fusor does not count). We have no experience burning the plasma for more than a few hours, before losing it to internal instabilities. Certainly we have nothing similar to commercial energy generation furled by fusion. A plethora of approaches exist because no common design is known to reliably work. This is not a moment for a SpaceX. This is not a moment for an Apollo effort. I'm not even sure it's a moment for a Manhattan project type of effort. We still seem to know too little to spearhead an engineering effort. I'd be glad to receive a qualified refutation of my points.

donor20 6y ago
I disagree in a small way. Telsa / SpaceX / Elon - focused on ground up physics principals. They said things like, how can we make a better battery pack and will the math then work for a good EV car. They showed to their satisfaction that the answer was yes, and built from there to a degree. Their battery / powertrain work has been consistently good before any of the huge capital efforts, and the path forward was pretty well defined. Same with their rocket engines. They iterate and qualify pretty quickly. ITER and these folks are spending billions on what is actually ancient tech with really no realistic (I don't think) path to sustainable commercial power even theoretically in any reasonable time horizon. This is the Space Launch System approach, gear up and go on old tech. We do need someone in a lab (Tesla / SpaceX style) iterating, and then proving out key physics / components. The problem with ITER, you CANNOT stop funding it, it's just gobbling up all the money because the number of jobs now tied to this - it's a jobs machine basically. At spaceX it doesn't feel like their are a lot of sacred cows. These maga projects are pure sacred cow it feels like sometime. It's private / personal capital driven.
- coliveira 6y ago

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

Tokamak Energy has made 3 fusion devices in 11 years. It's not super fast, but certainly faster than the megaprojects. They are planning on their current design hitting 100 million degrees.

twic 6y ago
Indeed, Tokamak Energy's whole strategy hinges on fast iteration [1]: "The basic approach being taken by Tokamak Energy is simple—to combine the two aforementioned technologies to unlock the potential of fusion power in more compact devices, and to do whatever development, testing and iteration are necessary on smaller machines in order to reduce construction timescales and to progress faster." As of January 2020, Tokamak Energy had raised a total of £117 milllion (~$156 million). I read that SpaceX has raised $5.4 billion [3]. That's the limiting factor. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6365856/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6365856/ [2] https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak-energy-raises-67m-from-new-and-existing-investors/ https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/tokamak-energy-raises-67m-fr... [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-technologies https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te...

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ohyes 6y ago

surely a fusion reactor failing will have no consequences.

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intricatedetail 6y ago

In most countries there is no policing of corruption and in some countries it is essentially legal and described as lobbying. I think the resistance to these new technologies comes from the situation where decision makers are paid adequately to never put such ideas forward. Fusion could turn many countries economies upside down so they have an incentive to steer away anyone at any cost.

niffydroid 6y ago

This does make sense. If you look at some post world war 2 projects like Dounreay managed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, things can happen. But with how advanced things are now, can a single government entity manage projects which will require skills from many other countries?

rwmj 6y ago

There are "SpaceX For Fusion" projects around. Several have been mentioned already in replies, but one I don't see mentioned is https://generalfusion.com/ https://generalfusion.com/ (not claiming that this is a valid approach).