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I think your take on this is accurate, but it’s a little deeper than a welfare program. The government needs to maintain a population of cleared scientists who
by leephillips 5y ago
I think your take on this is accurate, but it’s a little deeper than a welfare program. The government needs to maintain a population of cleared scientists who know how to calculate things like fusion yields, simulated with classified codes. These fake fusion energy programs contribute to that; some of the most capable scientists don’t want to work on weapons, so they can kid themselves that they are working on “energy”.
There is no reasonably foreseeable future with fusion as part of the electricity grid. Even if we got fantastically lucky and were able to build a practical (magnetic or inertial) reactor in 50 years, by that time improvements in energy storage and transmission technologies will have allowed renewable energy to dominate, and no government would be crazy enough to permit it to be built.
http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ http://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-e...
- eloff 5y ago> no government would be crazy enough to permit it to be built Why? Nuclear fusion doesn't have the meltdown risk or waste problems of fission.
- leephillips 5y agoThere is no meltdown risk with modern fission reactor designs. But there is the waste problem. If you follow the links my Op-Ed, you’ll find articles describing the radioactive waste and proliferation risks that will accompany any fusion reactor. Not as great as fission, but far from zero. And there is the problem of production and transportation of tritium, a very nasty substance. A commercial fusion reactor would be fantastically expensive and complex, and require a huge infrastructure to support it.
- blablabla123 5y ago"Does Fusion produce radioactive nuclear waste the same way fission does? Nuclear fission power plants have the disadvantage of generating unstable nuclei; some of these are radioactive for millions of years. Fusion on the other hand does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. Can fusion reactors be used to produce weapons? No." https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs https://www.iaea.org/topics/energy/fusion/faqs
- leephillips 5y agoRight, as other commenters have pointed out, this is low-level radioactive waste. It, along with tritium, is great for dirty bombs and catnip to terrorists. A dirty bomb is a weapon. They are talking about “atom bombs”.
- kortilla 5y ago> is great for dirty bombs and catnip to terrorists. This is another variant of “think of the children”. How many terrorists have built these dirty bombs?
- leephillips 5y agoI saw it in at least two movies. They haven’t been able to yet, because we don’t have any fusion reactors out there.
- nitrogen 5y agoIs the risk any worse than a terrorist making a bomb that spreads a bunch of non-radioactive heavy metals, or any other toxic substance? What about when compared to the general damage caused by mining and burning coal?
- leephillips 5y agoNot necessarily, if I take “any other” literally. Tritium’s low molecular weight means that a bomb can disperse it over a large area. It has a half-life of 12.5 years and its beta radiation is known to be carcinogenic from animal studies. An inhaled, microscopic bit of tritium will be irradiating your lung tissue for many years, although the actual effects of this are not known. However, it is very strictly controlled, and you need all kinds of special licences and certifications to use it in your laboratory, for these reasons. So the lure for the terrorist is just that: it’s good for terror, because of the psychological effect. “What about when compared to the general damage caused by mining and burning coal?” If the choice were between coal and fusion, for me there would be no contest. We would have to put everything into developing fusion power. Fortunately, there are alternatives that are better than either and are already working.
- chongli 5y agoFusion still has to deal with waste, just not high-level waste. Through the process of neutron activation all of the parts exposed to neutrons eventually become radioactive enough to be treated as low-level waste. In a reactor large enough to produce energy for the grid these parts could be very large (and expensive) to deal with (not to mention replace).
- bbojan 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
- EarlKing 5y ago...is even further from breakeven than deuterium+tritium fusion.
- tux3 5y agoYes, though the article consists almost entirely of reasons why aneutronic fusion is really hard ("the conditions required to harness aneutronic fusion are much more extreme than those required for deuterium-tritium fusion being investigated in ITER"). Note that the "Candidate fuels" section is not part of "Technical Challenges", but it might as well be. Helium-3, by far the easiest, is vanishingly rare. Deuterium would not really be aneutronic. Then further down is a list of worse and worse headaches. The leading scenario for acquiring the most convenient fuel candidate is "mining it on the moon". (The alternative scenario being to scale up production of tritium by existing heavy-water reactors from the nuclear weapons program, which decays into helium-3... and defeats the point of researching extremely complex, clean, aneutronic fusion reactors) I want to like aneutronic fusion, but it takes an objective that is several breakthroughs away and plays the game on nightmare mode.
- pfdietz 5y agoAnything beyond D-3He or D-D is likely impossible. And any fuel with deuterium will still make enough neutrons to render the reactor inaccessible to hands-on maintenance. So there will still be a waste problem (as well as a huge reliability and maintenance problem). The reactor might not AS MUCH radioactivity, but much of the cost of dealing with it will scale with the mass of the contaminated material, not its activity. And fusion reactors will be very large. The cost of dealing with the activated material might end up higher than the cost of dealing with spent fission reactor fuel.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe problem of fission isn't meltdown risk or waste (or fuel availability), the problem of fission is capital cost. The capital cost of a fusion power plant is likely to be much higher than that of a fission power plant of equal capacity.
- Tossrock 5y agoI'll take that bet - say, $500 in 2021 dollars, that a fusion power plant is selling energy to the grid? I'll even make it easier and halve the time you suggested to 25 years, so we can settle the bet in 2046.
- jetbooster 5y agohttps://longbets.org https://longbets.org ?
- Tossrock 5y agoThat would be my favored platform!
- billiam 5y agoI like what Tim Bray's doing with his time. https://longbets.org/863/ https://longbets.org/863/
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoI'd bet a bitcoin against him.
- leephillips 5y agoI’m interested, but the bet needs another condition, to exclude toy demonstration projects. The reactor will have to generate at least 100MW (far less than existing coal plants) and be in operation for an integrated time of at least 90 days over the course of any one year on or before 2046. Accept?
- Tossrock 5y ago100MW seems like a substantial moving of the goalposts, given your earlier statement that "there is no reasonably foreseeable future with fusion as part of the electricity grid" and that I've already cut the timetable by 25 years :) That said, I'll still accept - I'm emailing you at your profile address for the details!
- AlanSE 5y agoThis is deeply fascinating to read. But what about projects like Iter? There's a lot going on in fusion that has no alternative government justification. Surely those provide little to no value for weapons programs. If fusion for grid-scale energy is really accepted to be non-viable (and if we're honest... it is) then that has some pretty far-reaching consequences. I don't think that fusion is categorically non-viable, but the approaches of the currently funded megaprojects all seem to be. More creative and compact approaches could still have potential. Of course, there's always PACER, which illustrates our cognitive dissonance.
- leephillips 5y agoThere are plenty of true believers working in fusion energy. Enough to support big projects like ITER. But consider this analogous situation. I was working in a government physics lab when Star Wars (excuse me—SDI) was still a program that you could get money from for all kinds of projects. Nobody—I mean nobody—actually doing research believed in the program. That we would actually build a Star Wars defense shield to make Ronald Reagan proud. But they happily sent off grant proposals and were glad to accept money to work on various things. You can spin lots of pet projects so it sounds like they are all about missile defense. But the algorithms I worked on, during my brief involvement, would have been more useful for game design.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoOut of curiosity, are you familiar with Project Excalibur at all? I’m curious how the simultaneous-targeting of dozens of reentry vehicles from a single fission-explosion-powered sea-urchin multi-laser was supposed to work. Going by leaked and declassified material I’ve seen the concept was too far developed for it to have been laughed-out of the room, so what’s the story? …or any other juicy bits you got for us?
- leephillips 5y agoDoesn’t ring a bell, but I’m not an expert in Star Wars stuff. I don’t know if this qualifies as juicy, but let me just point out, as a general strategy, that if your boss puts you on a project that you don‘t want to work on, and you are in a position to ensure that the project will lose its funding by failing to meet its milestones...well, you can‘t work on a project that doesn’t exist.
- blablabla123 5y ago> These fake fusion energy programs contribute to that; some of the most capable scientists don’t want to work on weapons, so they can kid themselves that they are working on “energy”. This sounds quite anti-progressive and anti-scientific, I have trouble understanding where this sentiment comes from. If Fusion reactors could be realized, this would solve all energy problems. As you mention, renewables done right doesn't stop at production but also includes global deployment of Smart Grids and Energy storage capabilities. It's nuclear energy done in a reasonable way. Apart from that, it's really not clear if production fusion reactors will ever be possible so it's clearly a research topic. Perhaps better availability of computing power (to engineer the confining magnetic fields) and better abilities to orchestrate such complex projects will also help if you look at the challenges of the ITER project.
- leephillips 5y ago“This sounds quite anti-progressive and anti-scientific, I have trouble understanding where this sentiment comes from.” It can’t be, it was first published in the Progressive. It comes from my scientific knowledge of the field and is my factual description of what I personally observed, working on-and-off in both magnetic and inertial fusion for many years. My motivation is not anti-scientific but in defense of real science that is not getting done because of the billions wasted on fake energy projects.
- jollybean 5y agoI read your article here [1] and I've found it a bit problematic. You don't give a real foundation impetus to 'stop' fusion research other than the perception not making enough progress in general terms, and that the money could be used on renewables. It's a problematic argument because 'a few billion' is a very, very small amount of investment for an energy potentially which could yield significant results, even decades away. It maybe a 80 year-long project, even then, it would be worth it. Renewables are not suffering from money otherwise allocated to Fusion. I think if you gave some very specific arguments as to why some investment will not work - even as an experimental vehicle - that would lend more credibility to your argument, but then you'd also have to have that view corroborated in some way aka 'this experiment does not materially advance science, and they know it, here is the evidence or logic'. [1] https://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-energy-180313/ https://progressive.org/op-eds/let-cut-our-losses-on-fusion-...
- Ericson2314 5y agoOn the contrary, it will be so much energy it will be like a new agrarian revolution. No society outside the be able to resist it.
- lallysingh 5y agoWould they be useful in space?
- pfdietz 5y agoNo DT reactor will be useful in space. The size of the reactor will dwarf that of a fission reactor of equal output.
- wffurr 5y agoIs NIF even a "fake fusion energy program"? TFA specifically mentions their goal of simulating fusion detonations in nuclear weapons.
- leephillips 5y agoYeah, but they regularly send out press releases gushing about the energy application. This helps with Congressional funding. Here is the head of the NNSA, the funding agency for the NIF, quoted in the fine article: “It also offers potential new avenues of research into alternative energy sources that could aid economic development and help fight climate change” That’s some finely tuned BS right there.
- skissane 5y ago> and no government would be crazy enough to permit it to be built I can imagine China building one simply for the national prestige. "China built the world's first commercial nuclear fusion power station". The Chinese government wants to prove itself the equal of other major world powers (especially the US) and being the first country to have commercial nuclear fusion would be a good way of sending that message. Even if it is more expensive and less safe than renewable energy. And then the US government would build one to "counter the nuclear fusion gap with China" and "ensure American supremacy in nuclear fusion technology". That said, this isn't going to be technically feasible for a few more decades (at least), and we don't know what the geopolitical situation will be like by then. Maybe China-US competition will still be as strong, even stronger, then as now. Maybe it will be in the past and the world will have moved on to something else. Who knows.
- bob33212 5y agoI agree, except in 50 years the productivity of the world will be so high that building this, even if it costs 500B in today's dollars, someone will pay.
- lambdasquirrel 5y agoNow that you said it, a holhraum does bear a resemblance to a Teller-Ulam device.
- dleslie 5y ago> some of the most capable scientists don’t want to work on weapons, so they can kid themselves that they are working on “energy”. This should be highlighted. Anecdotally, I have a friend who worked at Macdonald-Detweiller on algorithms for handling the controlled descent of autonomously-guided aircraft when lacking propulsion and relying solely on gliding. She was horrified when I told her she was working on smart bomb guidance systems.
- neolog 5y agoWow, what did she think it was for?
- contingencies 5y agoClearly, delivering cuddles and cookies to the destitute. In a sense, we programmers who work on ML are just as guilty. It seems to be used primarily for for surveillance and reliably scalable automation of centralised control of industry and society.
- maccam94 5y agoNot OP, but it could also be used in engine-out situations on drones or de-orbiting satellites.
- kbelder 5y agoShe'll probably be suitably shocked again for the next guy that comes along and explains what she's really doing to her.
- noobermin 5y agoWould be nice to note the thing you linked to was written by yourself, for full disclosure.
- leephillips 5y agoYeah. that was a big secret.
- derac 5y agoWhat about SPARC and ARC?
- pfdietz 5y agoBuilding enough ARC reactors to supply the world primary energy demand require beryllium 100x more than the estimated global resource of that element. A single ARC reactor uses 40% of the current world annual production of Be.
- throwawayboise 5y ago> Even if we got fantastically lucky and were able to build a practical (magnetic or inertial) reactor in 50 years, by that time improvements in energy storage and transmission technologies will have allowed renewable energy to dominate, and no government would be crazy enough to permit it to be built. Not so sure about that. Vast solar and wind farms are eyesores and are not environmentally benign.
- leephillips 5y agoYou're right. they’re not. But no form of electricity production at the scale we need it, and the even more massive scale in the future, is environmentally benign. The challenge is to find the best way to leave chemical combustion behind, and fast. Notice the new interest in the old devil, nuclear fission, among various green groups.
- pfdietz 5y agoThat's mostly interest among astroturfers, not actual green groups. There was a bit of interest among some genuine greens about a decade ago, but that evaporated as solar and wind continued to decline in cost and the nuclear renaissance flamed out.
- smolder 5y agoI think they're aesthetically pleasing, personally. Both solar and wind farms.
- hoseja 5y ago"Renewable" maximalists are such bores.
- nswest23 5y ago> mean that renewables will soon be able to supply all of our energy needs pure propaganda. Otherwise why all the panic about global warming. If true we'll have no problem hitting all the targets to avoid the a global warming catastrophe.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago> Otherwise why all the panic about global warming Because it doesn't just need to be feasible, it also has to be actually implemented. That costs a lot, and comes with a shit ton of friction. The fossil economy is a massive beast to try to turn around, and it would be so even if aliens landed and gave us the schematics to a perfectly working dream fusion reactor right now. That's why there is a "panic".