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Is this really accurate though? Afaik there are fundamental engineering and physics barriers that need to be solved to get there? How is this funding broken dow

Is this really accurate though? Afaik there are fundamental engineering and physics barriers that need to be solved to get there? How is this funding broken down, what constitutes "Fusion Funding" in the first place? In my comment I mentioned Magnets being a current barrier, in that case funding in Materials Science or EE would be more relevant and the 500M Fusion Funding number is irrelevant.

willis936 5y ago
Check out my cousin comment. The PPPL FIRE 1976 report starting around page 30 addresses these questions. Also the PPPL FIRE site (also linked) has many resources that highlight areas of research. Plasma physics is a large task in fusion energy science, but it is not the only task. FES being the motivator of those materials research ventures means money in FES goes into those areas.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  More money definitely is not going to hurt in developing fusion. I am surprised nooone has been able to get a more significant portion of the militaries funding going directly making fusion reactors workable - it seems like they could be a huge strategic advantage militarily. A submarine or spacecraft using a fusion reactor that also was able to output clean water for its occupants seems like a pretty damn nice win win. And certainly the military must also have tons of other needs for reliable, uninterruptible energy production.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The military is not funding fusion generation because current planned designs will never produce any viable power. (Actually all of inertial confinement is really military, but is about nuclear weapons research.) If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that. There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
    - willis936 5y ago
      The Navy did fund electrostatic fusion designs for a few decades. Considering any plasma physicist could have told you it was a fool's errand 60 years ago I'm not sure I would trust the military's judgment on what future energy sources warrant research. Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful. I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        HTS or stellarators don't have a damned thing to do with those power density limits of DT fusion reactors. Those limits come from power/area on the walls, and they'd still exist even with much higher magnetic fields and plasma beta.
        willis936 5y ago
        Optimized stellarators have exceeded the Greenwald limit so tokamak empirical scaling laws don't apply. If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
        pfdietz 5y ago
        Yes, you can increase power density with sufficiently neat plasma physics. But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
    - adamsmith143 5y ago
- adamsmith143 5y ago
  Well reading Government reports is not a great interest of mine, particularly ones that are nearly 50 years old, I'm just skeptical that they could accurately plot the development of the technology when here we are 50 years later with fundamental Plasma Physics and Materials Science problems that need to be solved for the tech to work. I doubt that just blanket more funding would have allowed them to be solved 30 years faster. It would be akin to AI researchers saying that if only they had more funding they could create an AGI this decade despite fundamental unknowns about how to build something like that in the first place.
  - willis936 5y ago
    I'm so confused here. You asked for a breakdown of what technologies needed to be developed (invested in) and I gave you the exact breakdown. You doubt that investment wouldn't accelerate the development of those areas? So HTS discoveries and mass production fall out of the sky? No, they take money. Given money they, demonstrably, are developed. HTS is the sexy success story because it has been critical path, but other areas of engineering research have been known and the critical path for development has not changed in 50 years. Also, PPPL's 1976 report is a report to the government and public. It was not written by bureaucrats.

willis936 5y ago

Check out my cousin comment. The PPPL FIRE 1976 report starting around page 30 addresses these questions. Also the PPPL FIRE site (also linked) has many resources that highlight areas of research. Plasma physics is a large task in fusion energy science, but it is not the only task. FES being the motivator of those materials research ventures means money in FES goes into those areas.

Melatonic 5y ago
More money definitely is not going to hurt in developing fusion. I am surprised nooone has been able to get a more significant portion of the militaries funding going directly making fusion reactors workable - it seems like they could be a huge strategic advantage militarily. A submarine or spacecraft using a fusion reactor that also was able to output clean water for its occupants seems like a pretty damn nice win win. And certainly the military must also have tons of other needs for reliable, uninterruptible energy production.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The military is not funding fusion generation because current planned designs will never produce any viable power. (Actually all of inertial confinement is really military, but is about nuclear weapons research.) If the money poured into fusion for the past N decades had gone into solar and storage, good cheap solar panels would have come out decades earlier, and we would have already built out our clean power system. But the fossil companies did not want that. There will never be a commercially competitive Tokamak fusion power plant.
  - willis936 5y ago
    The Navy did fund electrostatic fusion designs for a few decades. Considering any plasma physicist could have told you it was a fool's errand 60 years ago I'm not sure I would trust the military's judgment on what future energy sources warrant research. Also, some tips on making convincing arguments: making baseless and unfounded speculations on alternate histories with not even a whiff of empiricism is not going to convince anyone. Additionally, saying "something won't work" without articulating why it won't work isn't helpful. I've heard the power density arguments. It's a 40 year old argument that does not hold up in a world with HTS magnets and optimized stellarators.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      HTS or stellarators don't have a damned thing to do with those power density limits of DT fusion reactors. Those limits come from power/area on the walls, and they'd still exist even with much higher magnetic fields and plasma beta.
      - willis936 5y ago
        Optimized stellarators have exceeded the Greenwald limit so tokamak empirical scaling laws don't apply. If you increase the power in the same vessel is that not increasing the power density?
        pfdietz 5y ago
        Yes, you can increase power density with sufficiently neat plasma physics. But no, the fundamental limit on power density in DT fusion doesn't come from plasma physics, it comes from engineering (specifically, limits on power/area on the first wall, coupled with minimum reactor size set by the cross section of neutrons w. blanket materials). You might have a sufficiently sucky design that can't even reach that limit, but once you reach it all the improvement in plasma physics or magnetic fields you can imagine doesn't help.
  - adamsmith143 5y ago
adamsmith143 5y ago
Well reading Government reports is not a great interest of mine, particularly ones that are nearly 50 years old, I'm just skeptical that they could accurately plot the development of the technology when here we are 50 years later with fundamental Plasma Physics and Materials Science problems that need to be solved for the tech to work. I doubt that just blanket more funding would have allowed them to be solved 30 years faster. It would be akin to AI researchers saying that if only they had more funding they could create an AGI this decade despite fundamental unknowns about how to build something like that in the first place.
- willis936 5y ago
  I'm so confused here. You asked for a breakdown of what technologies needed to be developed (invested in) and I gave you the exact breakdown. You doubt that investment wouldn't accelerate the development of those areas? So HTS discoveries and mass production fall out of the sky? No, they take money. Given money they, demonstrably, are developed. HTS is the sexy success story because it has been critical path, but other areas of engineering research have been known and the critical path for development has not changed in 50 years. Also, PPPL's 1976 report is a report to the government and public. It was not written by bureaucrats.