6 ms·

Let that sink in for a moment, there are 17 companies doing research on a hugely important topic with only 2.4billion in funding(disclosed). Magic leap alone ha

• colechristensen 5y ago
  I mean, depends on how you slice it and what you count, but ITER had an initial budget of 6 billion and updated total cost estimates between 20 and 40 billion dollars or euros. That one fusion project is probably the most expensive human effort since the ISS and its successor is already being planned. Yes there’s a lot of dumb venture capital going around, but there’s also a lot of money going towards trying things beyond searching for the next unicorn tech fad.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    I would bet $10,000 that the technology behind the first commercial fusion reactor does not come from ITER.
    • dd444fgdfg 5y ago
      i don't disagree. but there are valuable side effects. like engineering technology learned. a place and economy for physicists to "work". The web came from CERN, think of all the things we got from the moonshot. we get a lot from big science projects if not the end goal.
    • spaetzleesser 5y ago
      I think it will definitely contribute. For example SpaceX also could learn from expensive mistakes like the Space Shuttle . I think it will be the same with ITER.
      • WalterBright 5y ago
        Yes. Don't put wings, flaps, rudder, and landing gear on a rocket.
        • dogsgobork 5y ago
          Except SpaceX's Starship design does include moveable wings/flaps.
          • WalterBright 5y ago
            I'd call them fins, which are used to orient the rocket, not provide lift.
            • djenendik 5y ago
              So a rudder?
              • WalterBright 5y ago
                Look at the size of the rudder on the space shuttle vs the size of the fins.
      • pfdietz 5y ago
        The lesson that was (or at least should have been) learned from the Space Shuttle was to not develop things that are obviously from the start bad ideas (as one of von Braun's Germans lamented "they reinvented the wheel, and made it square.") This lesson also applies to ITER.
    • wolverine876 5y ago
      What basis do you have for saying that it won't? Offering a fake bet isn't evidence or reason.
      • Fordec 5y ago
        Probably because Wendelstein 7-X is making progress at a far faster rate than the ITER model has the current goal, without accounting for delays, for a 2050+ delivery time for the PROTO reactor.
        • LegitShady 5y ago
          >for a 2050+ delivery time for the PROTO reactor when a scientist tells you 2050+ it means they don't know and everything is being made up as they go along. It means 'outside the realm of any realistic estimate, but close enough to feel tempting so you don't immediately remove funding'.
        • wolverine876 5y ago
          Imagine you have a software need that two contractors are working on. One says it will take 2 years. The other says 2 months, and says they are writing code faster.
          • Fordec 5y ago
            Except they aren't "writing code faster" but started 8 years later and the industry now has these things like source control, GPUs and cloud computing and a new project is moving far faster with the new tools than the competing, existing project stuck in development hell that is still running in a server down the hall entirely composed Itanium 2 processors of and written in PHP 4. One project started in 2007 planning activation in 2025 and planning reactions in 2035. The other started in 2015, activated 2017 and steady state reactions have been delayed from the original Sept 2021 plan to 2022. It's not even close the results so far.
        • spaetzleesser 5y ago
          Wendelstein is only a plasma experiment not a full reactor.
    • whazor 5y ago
      Didn't ITER offer a lot of research positions and resulted in many papers and books on fusion? Think about all the PhD students that studied there. Sounds like ITER is foundational both in knowledge and in talent for commercial fusion reactors. I know that the technical university I was in had mathematicians working on models useful for ITER.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        Physicists having been maintained on a payroll will be the only material outcome of ITER, in the end, along with a likelihood of hundreds of tons of radioactive slag to dispose of. (If canceled before they light it up, it could be productively scrapped at a fractional penny on the dollar. Once it's hot, it becomes an indefinitely expensive liability.) There are few other places just now to train up plasma fluid physicists. The main beneficiaries, though, are the contractors. This is a gravy train that just doesn't quit. The reasons so much money easily goes to it have far more to do with corporate welfare for otherwise mainly-military contractors, and maintaining a population of hot-neutron physicists ready to draw on for weapons work, than any conceivable expectation of competitive power generation. But the main product of the Tokamak-adjacent projects is lies. They cultivate the confusion between "Q>1" meaning more kinetic energy of neutrons emitted than microwave photons injected and magnets energized, vs "Q>1" meaning electrical power to the grid exceeding grid power injected. There are at least two orders of magnitude between the two Qs. Achieving the former leaves you very, very far from the latter. ITER itself makes no pretense of ever producing so much as one watt-hour of grid power. Thus, any system resembling ITER (particularly ITER itself) is a technological dead end. A fusion power plant that relies on hot neutrons would necessarily cost many, many times as much to build and operate as a comparable fission plant. Big fission is already not competitive (perhaps mainly from deeply entrenched official corruption, but so what?) and gets less so every day. We have yet to see whether small-scale fission can work, economically. It has failed before. The Helion and TAE systems would be "aneutronic", generating power electromagnetically, without a side trip through neutrons, heat, and a turbine. They have a chance to be useful, because they would be cheap to operate, even at a small enough scale to leave little scope for official corruption. TAE is taking the harder road, chasing hydrogen/boron fusion, which reactants are both extremely abundant. Helion is chasing hydrogen-2/helium-3, which is more plausibly achievable, but helium-3 is very scarce, so they would need to synthesize it themselves by also fusing hydrogen-2. The Princeton FRC reactor project, not mentioned in TFA, is working on a shoestring NASA budget, hoping to loft a 2 MW space-probe propulsion test in 2035. That might work, and they would not need much helium-3 for that. They could probably get something done much earlier if ITER were not pissing away all the money, but moving money from public to private purses (as with NASA's SLS and DoD's F-35) is ITER's true purpose.
    • piva00 5y ago
      What about all the physics and engineering knowledge that required empirical and practical experiments to test hypothesis? The technology itself might not be from ITER but the development of the knowledge for it will definitely have been impacted by ITER. Don't really understand your point.
    • Yizahi 5y ago
      It most probably will come only from ITER/DEMO or similar scale project. Yes, it is drowning in the bureaucracy, politics etc. and in generic market this would be a ripe case for disruption and doing "move fast, break stuff" approach. But the fusion problem is so fundamentally hard that it is simply not possible at all in this case. Core problems like stability, preventing whole assembly becoming radioactive, actual conversion to the electricity are so impossibly hard that startup approach won't handle it, even if they had trucks with free cash queuing outside.
  • ohiovr 5y ago
    We need a heck of a happy accident to find the answer.
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  Investing in the wrong fusion approach will almost certainly just burn money instead of hydrogen. ITER is a shining example of how to do this maximally wrong. It is a path only to ongoing expenditure, not useful energy. There are some smaller startups doing interesting things such as using superconducting coils with much higher field strengths. They might be able to leapfrog ITER. If any of them can demonstrate net positive energy, then and only then the human race should throw tens of billions at that.
  • wahern 5y ago
    > ITER is a shining example of how to do this maximally wrong. ITER is an example of what happens when you dither and drag things out for decades. If member states had made a major commitment to not only fund ITER, but to have it built within 5-10 years and actually done so, it would have been money well spent. If you wait long enough all designs for anything will become outdated. An operational ITER would have provided, and still can provide, crucial experience and data. But the cost-benefit ratio is now much poorer for the delays. This is the lesson of SpaceX--not a lesson about financial frugality or simplicity of engineering. SpaceX has spent far more money than will be spent on ITER, and its designs are not known for their elegance. The world is awash in both cash and talent. The lesson is about process and pace and iteration--all that cash and talent is wasted if you don't apply it. Optimize for time. Emphasize process over product, as the former makes for the latter, not the other way around. When you have confidence something is worthwhile, as with ITER at the outset, don't hold back.
    • spaetzleesser 5y ago
      I just don't think ITER is really that expensive compared to other stuff like defense, oil subsidies, returning to the moon and so on.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      You can't really compare ITER and SpaceX. SpaceX has worked on a breakthrough in engineering, one that had seen research in decades past as well (the DC-X rocket achieved vertical landing from a few kilometers in the 1990s before the project was shut down; they would have almost certainly reached orbit if they were allowed to continue a few more years). On the other hand, ITER is breaking entirely new ground on the engineering side, and it even requires fundamental research. It is not even known if what ITER is setting out to do is fundamentally possible given realistic engineering constraints instead of idealized models.
• bigbaguette 5y ago
  Just for the comparison, the French submarines Australia didn't want in the end were 65 billions
• willis936 5y ago
  Applying generalizations to a unique problem is a recipe to make the wrong conclusions.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  > Let that sink in for a moment, there are 17 companies doing research on a hugely important topic with only 2.4billion in funding(disclosed). Magic leap alone has burned more money than that. Theranos has burned almost a billion. > Caring about every penny you spend is definitely not how you want to run a company doing groundbreaking work, but there's definitely a middle ground. Private business allocates funds toward profit. Apparently, investors don't see much potential return on additional funding compared to, e.g., electric cars, phones, online retail, etc. An investment's value can be calculated, in one sense, as risk x potential profit. Given the latter is very high, investors arguably must perceive the former as very poor, though possibly they perceive that the companies don't need more funding at their current stages (i.e., it's marginal return on additional funding that matters for investors, not total return on all funding). The people of a country, through government, can allocate funds toward work based on importance and regardless of profit. Such work, such as basic science, is where the market fails. (Probably much of the basic science behind fusion was already funded this way.) Per the OP, we've allocated $22 billion toward ITER. So fusion is pretty well funded.
  • trophycase 5y ago
    Or they can just let someone else pay to invent it and take the innovation the last mile.
  • snek_case 5y ago
    In my experience, the amount of money invested reflects the collective belief that a given technology is going to succeed and be profitable. Investors will act like fusion research is not worth investing in all the way until someone actually achieves self-sustaining fusion for the first time. Then, funding will rush in and investors will walk over each other like it's black Friday to throw their money at fusion startups, which will start popping up like mushrooms. It will be just like deep learning. There wasn't really much investment in neural network research and hardware until the field started having some big breakthroughs, at which point cash started flooding in and the community got extremely excited. I think we'll see fusion breakthroughs in the next decade or two, and it's going to be interesting.
• knodi123 5y ago
  I'm asking a genuine question, out of ignorance, but - aren't the tech behind Theranos and Magic Leap the kind of thing you can easily patent and protect - whereas if someone discovers how to make practical fusion, they get a nobel prize and now the world knows how to do it? Fusion is undoubtedly critical to our future, but I think I can see why the investors don't think it's a profit machine in the same way as a new commercial gadget.
  • bawolff 5y ago
    If something is patented it means you have to disclose how to do it. I dont see why you couldn't patent a fusion reactor. You can patent the underlying science, but the physical realization is patentable. If you manage to pull it off, you are probably super rich. However the risk of failing is much higher, and the time horizons are much longer than a silicon valley startup.
• simonh 5y ago
  Fusion energy is a very high risk and very long term investment. Meanwhile plenty of billions are being spent by governments and academic institutions (ok, arguably the same thing) around the world on fusion research. In almost every thread here on fusion someone eventually says something along the lines of "what we need for fusion is a Manhattan project", but ITER by itself is costing more than that in inflation adjusted terms. Fusion has soaked up massive investment and continues to do so.
• dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents (and particularly not nationalistic tinged ones). This one wasn't quite as egregious as the other flamewar tangent in this thread (now collapsed) but it's still a change of subject into something less interesting, more generic, and more inflammatory—and that's what the site guidelines ask everyone to try to avoid here. It makes discussion more tedious, more repetitive, and usually nastier. There's lots of interesting material in the OP and clearly that's what a thread like this should be engaging with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Why don't you just put that mentioning any country in a less than 100% positive way in a comment is against the rules? There's more and better discussion under the "flame war" threads than the entire rest of the comment section.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]