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This 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. Surel
by AlanSE 5y ago
This 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.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago> you can‘t work on a project that doesn’t exist. You've lost me :S
- Dav3xor 5y agoIt's still around, they just changed the name. And it's still a boondoggle.
- whatshisface 5y agoDon't get too fascinated by the takes you hear about on Hacker News, as many of these comments are written by software engineers as they are by deeply embedded domain experts.
- shusaku 5y agoA lot of the posters on hacker news have just mastered the cynical take. It’s an ego booster for people who can’t handle that there are other people out there accomplishing things.
- wallacoloo 5y agoA HN user’s cynical take on other HN users’ cynical takes. Masterful.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe cynical take is a product of talking to engineers, not scientists. The tragedy of engineering is that in any market niche, generally only one technology can win. The others are driven to extinction. It's like ecology's "one niche, one species" rule. As Freeman Dyson pointed out, this is not like science, where multiple complementary theories may coexist. We build chips from silicon, not GaAs or superconducting niobium or any of the other possible technologies that were considered over the decades. An engineer, if he's old enough, will have seen many technologies come up then fail and die. There are more ways to solve problems than there are sufficiently distinct problems, so this is inevitable. When fusion competes with fission, and wind, and solar, and geothermal, and..., it's a fight to the death. The notion that fusion is inevitable is a stacking of the mental deck to just assume fusion will win this competition.
- Retric 5y agoFusion isn’t just about grid power. In terms of covering the needs for food, shelter, etc the Hubble telescope, cassini probe, large hadron collider etc are useless. However, there’s plenty of economic capacity to push limits simply to explore what’s possible and what’s out there. Fusion is likely the energy source of the future and that’s ok. It’s ok to dream of far future deep space colonization, and take just one tiny step closer to that dream.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoMass, sustainable renewables with large energy-storage systems do kinda make fusion unnecessary though. Places with existing gas and oil, and maybe even coal, power stations aren’t going to tear them down when fusion becomes do-able or even economically viable. Not just due to the sunk-cost fallacy but because they don’t want 10,000+ newly unemployed workers who honestly probably won’t retrain for fusion. And more reasons like that.
- elcritch 5y agoWho knows, fusion could be key to accessing the next order-of-magnitude level for society. Perhaps it'll be key to large scale carbon sequestration to stabilize future climate change effects. If we had cheap Fusion tomorrow we could replace much of fossil fuels with synth fuels with neutral CO2 cycle. We get to reuse existing infrastructure but without massive co2.
- pfdietz 5y agoIt could, but IMO it's a very low odds bet. There are fundamental physical reasons why fusion reactors will struggle to compete. Fusion is a technology that IMO persists on cultural momentum, a meme technology that is part of the future because that's a story that we've been told since the 1950s. I think the most likely end will be that controlled fusion will go into a similar niche as dirigibles and vacuum tubes as a retrofuturistic anachronism. It will be recognized as something that used to be part of the future, but no longer is.