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More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

692 points by bilsbie 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stefantalpalaru 4y ago
Digital28 4y ago
This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.
  - champtar 4y ago
    And if you combine both hands you get Greenpeace energy
- paul80808 4y ago
  Exactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
  - toveja 4y ago
    I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      > We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.
      - toveja 4y ago
        I agree. The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war. The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.
    - dtagames 4y ago
      Doesn't IETR consume more power than it produces? Fusion (like solutions for aging fission plants and their waste products) always seems just around the corner -- yet never arrives.
      - orzig 4y ago
        For me, it was eye opening to inside its progression in terms of dollars, not years. It’s barely had the chance to get started.
    - samhain 4y ago
      Have you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.
      - willis936 4y ago
        3x smaller major radius. 42x smaller plasma volume.
  - nilsbunger 4y ago
    This was an awesome overview of current state of fusion attempts!
- barkingcat 4y ago
  the profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    source?
  - stuartd 4y ago
    Still doesn’t stop the world burning, though
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
    - stuartd 4y ago
      If meals cost 5$ all over the planet then there would be mass starvation
      - adrian_b 4y ago
        Yes, indeed. Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat. However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.
    - the-smug-one 4y ago
      Five bucks? 1kg of beans in Sweden is like 3 bucks.
    - koverda 4y ago
      beans, $700 / metric ton [1] rice, $500 / metric ton [2] a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person. 700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m Total $149.1m/day I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about. 1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-supplier-crop-long_62039743604.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.675963e1lxG5Wh https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s... 2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Grain-Fragrant-Rice_60640299922.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.569f51b9BpLJv0 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Not at all. There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.
    - eftychis 4y ago
      Also we are talking about totally different load over time characteristics. And we don't want time plus weather to dictate our industrial and shipping power needs. Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
    - Digital28 4y ago
      Don't forget that we're perpetually one temper tantrum away from nuclear winter now, which would cripple all solar infrastructure for years. I'm actually a little surprised the DoD hasn't deeply invested in fusion for this reason alone.
    - adventured 4y ago
      Along with small and or very high population density nations. India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        > They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. ...space vs population situation. Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine. All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.
- rainsford 4y ago
  I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment. Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
  - Digital28 4y ago
    It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
    - twawaaay 4y ago
      Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers. Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design. The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed. Our children will curse us.
- otikik 4y ago
  Compare that to what we have invested in crypto globally and weep.
  - Noughmad 4y ago
    Compare it to what we have invested in killing each other, and despair.
- joe_name 4y ago
  It's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).
  - ac29 4y ago
    > no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though. The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Yes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.
    - lispm 4y ago
      > follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW) If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... 750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess). The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.
- more_corn 4y ago
  What if I told you commercially viable fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40 years? What if I told you it always will be? Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.
  - orzig 4y ago
    I think the people who said “10 years away “we’re assuming it would get actual serious investment. I would argue that this is year 1
    - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
      Indeed, fusion has never been a certain number of years away, it's only ever been number of billions of dollars away, as projected here [1]. Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png [2]: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy-gain.html https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy...
- api 4y ago
  The world burning is the basis of the economy for dozens of petrostates and some of the world’s largest corporations.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd. [1] until recently
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  I can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.
  - formerkrogemp 4y ago
    Perhaps this was referring to humanity's use of fossil fuels?
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      no, fossil fuels aren't a new form of energy. The implication would be that a new form of energy would just be used with all the other forms of energy, it may also have been a new cheap form of energy in the quote, implying that we would take a cheap form of energy and overuse it so that the world burned faster.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    I don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink? Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission. It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction. I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable). Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.
eatonphil 4y ago
The article doesn't seem to mention why exactly but I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) visible climate change (extreme heat, wildfires, drought, etc.) so people want better energy sources and 2) the mayhem Russia started seeing as it is one of the bigger energy providers. Or has there been anything else?
- bawolff 4y ago
  Better high temp super conductor lowering barrier to entry maybe? (im pretty ignorant of this field)
- ISL 4y ago
  The really big deal in the last decade has been better magnets -- many of the "novel" approaches attracting recent funding are probably doomed to fail, but the MIT-associated consortia that simply aspire to building better tokamaks with modern magnets look encouraging.
- Filligree 4y ago
  Some breakthroughs in plasma modelling, too. https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-successfully-controls-plasma-in-nuclear-fusion-experiment https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-succ...
  - drtgh 4y ago
    Interesting. By that link, it seems they was able to stabilizing 'droplets' where two plasmas co-existed simultaneously inside Tokamak. I wonder if they thought if it would be possible to accelerate such plasma droplets in opposite directions for to take Helion's aproach [1] if needed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180
- ianburrell 4y ago
  REBCO high-temperature superconductors have potentially changed the game. They can support stronger fields which means smaller devices for same confinement. Commercial production seems to only started in the last decade. MIT's research, spun out as CFS, may be prompting other startups.
greenthrow 4y ago
I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.
- wetpaws 4y ago
  So was solar and nuclear.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- twarge 4y ago
  Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > have been no breakthroughs Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this. With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
    - hobscoop 4y ago
      Yes. We're currently living through a golden age of stellarator design powered by new algorithms and optimization techniques.
    - joak 4y ago
      And what about Helion Energy tech? Pulsed collision of plasmoids (FRC), with direct energy conversion. Deuterium helium3 aneutronic fusion, no neutrons. They've received $500M (lead by Sam Altman) to demo net electricity by 2024.
magila 4y ago
Where is this $1.9 billion over the last decade figure coming from? ITER alone has surely burned through more than double that. Edit: Sounds like it might only be counting investment in private companies.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.
  - danaris 4y ago
    That's part of the problem with fairly basic research like what we're putting into fusion. Without making the investment, doing the science and engineering to actually study these things and learn how they work and how we can do them better, we won't know how or whether they can be made cheaper, miniaturized, etc. This isn't the same kind of problem that most of us are used to dealing with in our daily lives—where the fundamental components, and the fundamental science, that make it all up are well-understood and fairly mature, and what we have to do is come up with creative ways to apply it. This is the kind of "we don't know if any specific avenue of research will ever pay back a positive monetary ROI, but pursuing them is important anyway" science that we need to be doing with or without fusion as a specific goal, because over time, it will produce years or decades of silence, punctuated by small, incremental improvements in our understanding of the universe...and then an amazing breakthrough like practical, commercially-viable fusion power. But only if we are willing to patiently fund it through those years or decades of boring stuff.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors. Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output. Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They're planning a net power attempt in 2025 and a lot of independent fusion researchers think they'll succeed. CFS is a spinoff from MIT, whose Alcator C-Mod had more powerful magnets than any other tokamak in the world.
deleted 4y ago
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rbanffy 4y ago
I’m glad, but I hope we still invest in Plan-B’s because we are literally betting our civilisation on moving away from carbon.
timmg 4y ago
I wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in crypto startups in the past few years. (I don't mean the value of crypto or the amount of money that was traded into it -- just the amount VCs invested into crypto startups.) I don't know if that means people that allocate capital think crypto has a better chance of changing the world than nuclear fusion -- or if it's something else. But it is strange to compare the funding of each.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  The total of crypto VC investments for 2021 was reported at $33B.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  Not that it has a better chance of changing the world, just that it has a better chance of making them some money back in a reasonable time.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  There are probably a lot more founders with crypto ideas than founders with fusion ideas.
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    That would be an argument for having more investment into fusion.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      Why? If you get 25 crypto startups for every fusion startups, you're necessarily going to see more funding in the crypto sector.
- kortilla 4y ago
  >or if it's something else It’s something else. Many people want their money invested in something with a good risk adjusted returns. Only a tiny subset of investors invest significant portions of their capital into significantly lower expected value outcomes because they like the field.
mbgerring 4y ago
One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  It seems more reasonable to me to try to figure out what would be a reasonable amount of money to spend on these projects independently, instead of tying the amount of clean energy deployment to the amount clean energy research for no apparent benefit
- kortilla 4y ago
  Maybe we should fraud these people trying to invest in a better solution with worse ones!
- willis936 4y ago
  We've spent far more on solar than fusion. Why divert the nth dollar rather than diversify? https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Examination%20of%20Federal%20Financial%20Assistance%20in%20the%20Renewable%20Energy%20Mark..._1.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Exami...
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    The problem with that argument is that it could also be used to justify diverting some money to invest in perpetual motion machines. The likelihood of the technology paying off has to enter into it somehow.
mkl95 4y ago
Good news. But let's not forget that fission is the present and near future of nuclear energy. And it just works.
toveja 4y ago
To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados. [0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg
- LegitShady 4y ago
  Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
  - toveja 4y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?
    - krallja 4y ago
      > it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later A forum.
    - willis936 4y ago
      I personally like reddit for public discussions. r/fusion used to be a ghost town with crackpots a few years. These days there are occasional good discussions and the crackpots are chased off.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    > People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. this is a feature not a bug. the real problem is lack of user ownership over data, not lack of searchability.
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    It's a chat room. The conversations are disposable, it is part of the medium. Having a record of discussion is not really what interests me about instant messaging.
alexnewman 4y ago
Finally. I wonder if what's going on in ukraine has helped investment.
TT-392 4y ago
Maybe it is only 19 years in the future this time
thriftwy 4y ago
I believe that there might be a way to have a compact and efficient fusion reactor which we just don't know yet (and a time traveller would be able to "hold my beer" us into it) For example, there's this plasma-producing microwave + cut grape trick, what if you use something like this to supply really hot deuterium plasma?
- jleahy 4y ago
  Then you get super hot deuterium plasma, which is unconfined and so won't fuse.
  - thriftwy 4y ago
    Maybe you can generate it in one place and confine it in the other? Not dissimilar to how ICEs work. Produce plasma and then burn (fuse) it in pulses.
- willis936 4y ago
  That's actually exactly what existing MCF machines do. The gyrotron (ECRH, same as a microwave's magnetron) resonant frequency is tuned to the confinement field strength of the plasma so it absorbs the energy. On top of that there's a vacuum so air doesn't pull all the heat away and a magnetic bottle so the plasma doesn't touch the wall. Fusion is very far away from happening spontaneously on Earth.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
It’s happening!
rjmunro 4y ago
> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.
- chris_va 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba ... was slightly larger than that. Anyway, 59MJ isn't terrible if you can run it at 60Hz. Of course, I agree that the reality is a bit far away.
- toveja 4y ago
  59 megajoules of sustained energy ^over the course of a few seconds^. Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER. JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet. Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and around 15-20 MA plasma current.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Note that these are 59MJ of energy released by the fusion reaction. No attempt was made to actually catch them. And even if they had been captured, they would not have been able to power the magnets + cooling systems used to confine the plasma. We are very very far away from actually producing even 1W of usable fusion power.
    - toveja 4y ago
      You are correct that at JET there is no tech installed to absorb the neutrons, nor will there ever be in JET, since (as pointed out above) it is a _research_ device. Current fusion devices are not nor were they ever designed to generate electricity for a grid. This is why we build ITER, and DEMO thereafter. Generating 'usable fusion power' is limited to building reactor scale experiments, which to date, has not been done (ITER will be the first).
bloodyplonker22 4y ago
It means we are closer to success when we see a lot more VC funding of nuclear fusion versus government (taxpayer) funding. VCs don't have the timeline or ability to lose money without much consequence or blame like the government does.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  It could also mean there are lots more rich people who want to spend money on a gamble to "save the world" and don't care to do sufficient due diligence to dig below the fancy slide decks they get spoon fed in the board room every quarter.
  - lven 4y ago
    You're better off donating money to fusion companies directly than paying taxes to the government. Wish musk had donated his taxesto companies last year instead.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  If VC's are so great, they could have invested in fusion 20 years ago and presumably they'd have it solved by now. Why didn't they? They didn't because they don't have the guts to create entire new branch of science. Once the government has built research laboratiries, trained physicists and engineers, built prototypes, waited untill those engineers come up with viables plans, then the VC are ready to swoop in and take all the credit. Thats fine if Venture capital can't make 60 year investments. Whats not cool, is everyone else buying the narrative that we don't need government funding for fundamental research, that VCs will solve all problems in the world as long as we let them run wild and don't tax them
dreamcompiler 4y ago
There's a huge amount of hype in fusion these days. Companies are getting big investments just by saying "we're over unity." None of their investors will recoup any money. Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes. What will likely happen during our lifetimes is we develop large-scale electricity storage mechanisms. Together with decentralized microgrids, storage will enable most of the world's electricity to be generated by renewables. The sun is a giant fusion engine, and it's the only fusion engine that will be practical for us during at least the next 50 years.
- acchow 4y ago
  Private Investments usually need returns within a 10-15 year time scale. Once practical fusion gets to that point, we should expect money to come pouring in which will help make it a reality. We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars
  - Terr_ 4y ago
    My pet theory is that it's no coincidence the self-driving-car investment craze started the same time the baby-boom generation started to enter "grandpa can't drive himself anymore" territory. In other words, I suspect it's not fueled by a technology trend, but by trying to capture a potential customer trend.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cypress66 4y ago
      It seems like a stretch. Self driving car investments mostly coincide with AI getting to a good enough level that it seem feasible.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I think investments are happening because recent progress in this space is indicating that this might in fact happen in the next decade or so. The cliche that fusion reactors are perpetually 30 years away, might have actually been correct up to about 20 years ago. There are no guarantees here of course, but there are now quite a few companies acting like they are going to get their first test plants up and running in the next ten or so years. From there to commercialization is of course still a long and risky path. But it's very different once you can prove that the process works and more energy comes out then goes in. As you say, fusion reactors will have to compete with absolutely dirt cheap solar, wind, and storage. As well as with future fission plants that may or may not become cheaper than the current state of the art (which is super expensive). Just getting things working is not going to be good enough. It will need to work cheaply.
borissk 4y ago
When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear. Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work day and night and secure the funding).
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    Yes, clearly that's why SpaceX was successful in an industry where the adage was "How do you become a millionaire in aviation? Start with a billion!".
    - game-of-throws 4y ago
      Has SpaceX disclosed whether they're profitable or still burning investor money?
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        They obviously aren't profitable right now since they're working on two megaprojects simultaneously, but the Falcon 9 program is obviously profitable and clearly successful given their flight rate and economics.
    - Kukumber 4y ago
      SpaceX is not successful as an industry It is a government funded project at this point
      - dotnet00 4y ago
sva_ 4y ago
Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go? I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as they want?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- orzig 4y ago
  It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    In the beginning, of course. Nevertheless, the heating of the Earth puts a limit on the total usable nuclear power on Earth, both fission and fusion, it cannot be "infinite", but it must remain forever a small fraction of the power of the incoming Solar radiation, otherwise it would cause an excessive heating of the Earth by itself.
    - willis936 4y ago
      Ever getting close to this point is what is considered a "good problem". We are always teetering on the edge of oblivion. Being so wildly successful that our industrial heat rivals that of the incident energy of the sun would be incredible. No problems humans have ever faced would be in living memory (including mortality). This is a science fiction future that does not need planning from the minds of today. It would also have many solutions related to adjusting albedo.
- hobscoop 4y ago
  It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW. If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.
hit8run 4y ago
jason0597 4y ago
I am genuinely surprised that there is so much interest in the comments here and excitement about fusion energy powering the future. Yet I see surprisingly few numbers or physics being discussed. Kind of disappointed for a forum that is supposedly technically-minded and able to speak mathematics. There was this great MIT paper [1] published a while back that's still to be rebuked, talking about the serious technical challenges. Furthermore, there's Maury Markowitz's blogs that have been around for more than a decade showcasing why economically future can never work competitively on the grid [2]. Fusion is great science, it may eventually return a net positive in energy, but it has so many problems that make it impossible to use commercially. [1]: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou... [2]: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/ https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...
- lven 4y ago
  One morea article worth reading about the con-fusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion
acidburnNSA 4y ago
But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind. For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter. Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money). Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too. Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.
- deltasevennine 4y ago
  The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be. I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA. At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!
alex_young 4y ago
Why don’t we just leave the fusion where it works best, i.e. the sun? Put the same amount of spending into building a robotic solar collection factory on the moon and beam the power where we need it. No crazy particles to deal with and zero nuclear weapons byproducts.
- jefftk 4y ago
  A beam of power many times stronger than the Sun sounds like a pretty terrifying weapon
  - topher515 4y ago
    This is actually one of the classic "disasters" in Sim City 2000[1]. The "Microwave Powerplant" works by bouncing a concentrated beam of sunlight to earth. It provides plentiful, pollution free power... The only downside is sometimes the satellite beam misses, melting everything surrounding it. [1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster) https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)
  - alex_young 4y ago
    The microwave beam would be pretty wide by the time it reached the surface. The power levels wouldn’t make an effective weapon but would take up a sizable footprint for the collectors.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      If it isn't many times stronger than sunlight, just build more solar panels. If it is many times stronger than sunlight, that's pretty dangerous!
      - alex_young 4y ago
        MW power transmission is about 85% efficient at the receiving end. Solar is much lower than that.
manholio 4y ago
You could say the same thing about Bitcoin. Fusion is in the VC hype cycle but there are no new developments that suggest it can become cheaper and more predictable than fission, which itself is dying, primarily because of financial uncertainties and risks. On the contrary, physics suggest that performance scales with size, so even the extraordinary expensive ITER project is way too small to achieve engineering break even, let alone financial break-even. You will only hear about scientific break-even, which is a useless milestone because, yes, you get more energy than you put it, but you put electric energy and get fast neutron energy, only you need an order of magnitude more of that to get back the electricity you put in. Understanding different types of break-even would be an obligatory primer to anyone navigating hyped fusion claims: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-and-breakeven-explained/ https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-a...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Fusion reactors (after they're big enough to have ignited) have diseconomy of scale, due to the square-cube law. Cost scales (at least) as reactor volume, while power is limited by power/area through the surface of the reactor vessel.
  - manholio 4y ago
    But are we hitting that power density ceiling yet? It doesn't seem so, we're not even in the "big enough to have ignited" range, only scraping at the door of "big enough for scientific break-even", but have already blown any reasonable chance for such designs to be cost effective even if they were to be mass produced. Massive superconducting magnets generating megatons of force, building-sized vacuum chambers that are almost guaranteed to leak some amount tritium, which only adds to the unavoidable regulatory burden imposed by the fast neutron environment, activated structure and every day production of weapon-grade material etc. etc., even if the current technology magically works tomorrow, it's still an economic dead-end. The present fusion crop is megascience at its worst, draining public funds for something that can't possibly ever work and producing very little substantial science in the way. We need to take a step back and reassess. At least Helion is trying a new path, even if they are likely to end up in a similar dead-end.
Kukumber 4y ago
They should have invested in education 20 years ago Vulture capitalist always show up during the last mile after government (us, the people) paid for kickstarting everything What's sad is China already ahead despite all of that https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun-smashes-1000-second-fusion-world-record-16rlFJZzHqM/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun... https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-designing-worlds-1st-power-plant/ https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-design...
charlieyu1 4y ago
The only true form of green energy other than geothermal. fission, solar, wind, waterfall energy all have their own negative environmental impacts
- joak 4y ago
  Geothermal, and all thermal power energy, have a big issue: thermal pollution. You need a lot of water for the cooling phase of the thermodynamic cycle that transform heat into electricity. That's why during drought episodes fission plants have to be stopped. There is however a non-thermal path to fusion energy, aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. In this scheme, the fusion reaction produces no neutrons and the kinetic energy of ions is directly converted to electricity.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Given how much zero carbon warm water we need, it's easy to see zero carbon thermal pollution as a feature rather than a bug. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations/4_Safa_Economics-District-Heating-Light.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...
    - BMc2020 4y ago
      If I were to ask you the answer to two plus 2, what would it be?
boringg 4y ago
Hmm I suspect that this isn't accurate but if it is, also relevant is that in the last 12 months we were at the top of the crazy money market so people were handing out cash and desperate for something with a seeming return to it. Seems like a click-baity title to me.
Calmanimal 4y ago
lven 4y ago
Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've written a post about this here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion. I cover fusion's issues compared to fission. In particular: far worse neutron and gamma damage, 10x more demanding heat transfer, parasitic power draws, 50-100x larger radiological waste volume, higher financial and nuclear accident risk compared to new new micro reactors, higher cost by any metric, similar or worse proliferation characteristics, etc. My aim was to add a dissenting perspective on the practicality of near-term fusion energy systems.
jupp0r 4y ago
There is a gigantic stable fusion reaction from which we just need to convert energy into electricity - our sun. Bring out the dyson sphere.
jeandejean 4y ago
For a technology that has the promise of clean energy for humanity, I am shocked it's receiving that small amount of funding, while we have been distributing literally trillions globally during the pandemic...
dogcomplex 4y ago
A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constructed with still strongly net economic/energy positive) - this does not need to be built around any population centers. At a cost of 1.5% efficiency loss per 1000 km, UHV power lines can direct it from a single write-off location anywhere on earth. That single location can likely be scaled to supply well beyond the total current global energy production. https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/ https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  Lmao, that sounds like something straight out of Futurama. The Wikipedia article you liked says it “economically unviable”, but fails to provide a source
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  What about earth quakes? (I didn’t click the links)
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Another no container idea (this one is crazy): just blow them in the ocean, that will evaporate some water and speed up evaporation of some more. Harvest energy with existing hydroelectric setuos once it passes the weather cycle.
  - willis936 4y ago
    There are much less ecologically disastrous and less illegal cloud-seeding techniques. They're still very illegal though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding
pixiemaster 4y ago
I love the concept of fusion from a scientific point. I’d love to see even more money put into this. But for real world deployment, we can have decentralized systems that have an ROI of 6yrs (Solar) and 10 yrs (Wind), - i think that’s the thing we should be doubling down on NOW. [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145C...]
blippage 4y ago
Scientists have been futzing around with fusion energy since I was a schoolboy in the 70's, and undoubtedly before. Maybe they'll be a breakthrough, but I think the odds are heavily against them. Fission, OTOH, seems an interesting bet. The problem with old-style reactors is that there's basically no ESD (Emergency Shutdown) that you can perform. Those radioactive rods are going keep radiating heat no matter what. Newer styles seem a much saner approach, were two different materials must be in contact for a reaction to occur. In an emergency you just let one of them drain out, thereby stopping the reaction. Coal is an abundant source of fuel with a proven track record. The big problem is with pollution. But there's no rule that says you have to puke out the waste into the atmosphere. It can be processed. After all, oil is pretty shitty when it comes up out of the ground, and needs a lot of processing. This is a costly exercise, of course, but one that we willingly undertake. The question now is one of economics: will the cost of waste processing mean that coal burning is feasible? It's a question that nobody seems interested in asking. We just seem to have the default assumption that coal energy was shitty in the past and must be shitty in the present. "Eww, coal".
rep_movsd 4y ago
We already have clean energy - its called Fission, all we need is to start doing it at scale
Gud 4y ago
Such a controversial topic these days. I got one am happy billions are being poured into fusion. Yes, massive investments in fission, solar and wind are required. But one by one the technical obstacles are being overcome for fusion. I say give fusion a chance
alexalx666 4y ago
Deady epidemic - let’s work from home! Russians attack Europe - let’s invest in nuclear! What is the next disaster that will make another common sense thing happen ?
greyhair 4y ago
So much more funding now. That will getting it working twenty years from now, just like it has been 'working twenty years from now' for the last fifty years.

692 points by bilsbie 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stefantalpalaru 4y ago

Digital28 4y ago

This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.
- champtar 4y ago
  And if you combine both hands you get Greenpeace energy
paul80808 4y ago
Exactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-future-of-fusion https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...
- toveja 4y ago
  I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate ITER when it is turned on, and not necessarily focused on achieving breakeven.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    > We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.
    - toveja 4y ago
      I agree. The hefty price tag seems smaller when considering the development and design of ITER began during the cold war. The literal size is definitely big even without context, which is why it has the nickname: gigantomak :D.
  - dtagames 4y ago
    Doesn't IETR consume more power than it produces? Fusion (like solutions for aging fission plants and their waste products) always seems just around the corner -- yet never arrives.
    - orzig 4y ago
      For me, it was eye opening to inside its progression in terms of dollars, not years. It’s barely had the chance to get started.
  - samhain 4y ago
    Have you heard of MITs SPARC reactor? It’s way more interesting than ITER. It is 3x smaller, with Q greater than 10 (compared to ITERs ~10). It’s also slated to be finished -before- ITER.
    - willis936 4y ago
      3x smaller major radius. 42x smaller plasma volume.
- nilsbunger 4y ago
  This was an awesome overview of current state of fusion attempts!
barkingcat 4y ago
the profits in 1 year from silicon valley can solve world hunger by buying every single man woman child 3 meals a day, every day.
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  source?
- stuartd 4y ago
  Still doesn’t stop the world burning, though
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  700 million people live in poverty 3 meals per day, 5$ per meal for 365 days is 3,832,500,000,000$
  - stuartd 4y ago
    If meals cost 5$ all over the planet then there would be mass starvation
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      Yes, indeed. Even in the European Union, it is possible to pay around $5 for all the meals of a day, including not only adequate quantities of vegetables and fruits, but also a moderate amount of chicken meat. However, for that, you must be cost-conscious, because from the same shops you could buy an equivalent quantity of food, but at a price even 10 times greater, when you choose to buy processed foods, even those as cheap as bread, instead of buying only raw ingredients.
  - the-smug-one 4y ago
    Five bucks? 1kg of beans in Sweden is like 3 bucks.
  - koverda 4y ago
    beans, $700 / metric ton [1] rice, $500 / metric ton [2] a meal of 65g dry rice and 55g dry beans per person. 700m * 3 = 2.1b meals per day 115,500 tons beans = $80.9m 136,500 tons rice = $68.3m Total $149.1m/day I'm sure at these quantities you can get much better prices of rice and beans, even just browsing on alibaba. I'd guess we can probably get that down under $100m from alibaba. Probably even lower at the quantities we're talking about. 1 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-supplier-crop-long_62039743604.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.675963e1lxG5Wh https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/red-bean-wholesales-s... 2 - https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Grain-Fragrant-Rice_60640299922.html?spm=a2700.7724857.0.0.569f51b9BpLJv0 https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Jasmine-Rice-Long-Gra...
sacrosancty 4y ago
Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.
- Teever 4y ago
  Not at all. There will always be places where solar+battery isn't viable. Northern Canada and Alaska come to mind.
  - eftychis 4y ago
    Also we are talking about totally different load over time characteristics. And we don't want time plus weather to dictate our industrial and shipping power needs. Solar is great but not simply alone. (Latitude is less of an issue as (proper) power systems are interconnected markets that sell/buy excess load.)
  - Digital28 4y ago
    Don't forget that we're perpetually one temper tantrum away from nuclear winter now, which would cripple all solar infrastructure for years. I'm actually a little surprised the DoD hasn't deeply invested in fusion for this reason alone.
  - adventured 4y ago
    Along with small and or very high population density nations. India is going to end up with perhaps two billion people and will have extraordinary population density/spacing problems. They're going to desperately need huge numbers of nuclear fission power plants or fusion plants to provide for that. They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Vietnam, Israel, Belgium, Netherlands (among others) are in the same space vs population situation. And given the population explosion across parts of the Middle East and Africa, it's a certainty nations in those regions will have the same problem as well.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > They will not have the space for epic scale solar farms. ...space vs population situation. Your math is totally wrong, space was never an issie for solar. It tales 100x less space for a coutry to cover it's power needs with solar, than it does for a country to grow it's own food and feed it's own people. So every country thats not a city-state, like Vatikan, is fine. All the challaneges of Solar are around intermittency, cost and ofcourse it's less viable in northern lattitudes. But none of them are around space.
rainsford 4y ago
I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment. Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrate realistic commercial power generation, even as a proof of concept or a complete path to get to that point. In other words, more research is definitely worthwhile, but it also seems possible it will be a dead end at least in the near term. It's hard to argue prioritizing that over other things that have been generating real commercial power for decades. I'm all in favor of an all-of-the-above approach, but prioritization almost always has to be the reality.
- Digital28 4y ago
  It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers. Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design. The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed. Our children will curse us.
otikik 4y ago
Compare that to what we have invested in crypto globally and weep.
- Noughmad 4y ago
  Compare it to what we have invested in killing each other, and despair.
joe_name 4y ago
It's only top 5 most promising if you're heavily weighting based on theoretical upside. We should always be taking moonshots but for climate change and global warming we need to be taking active steps yesterday, and for that fusion shouldn't even be on the list. Fission + some renewables is all we need anyway for almost everything, and carbon capture/removal can take care of stuff that will likely need to rely on fossil fuels moving forward, like aircraft. It's not a matter of way, just will.
tsimionescu 4y ago
If you look more into it, it's not clear at all that fusion is actually a promising source of power. None of the currently contemplated technologies have any realistic chance of producing power anywhere near competitively in cost, even ignoring the huge research costs left to get there (no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes).
- ac29 4y ago
  > no currently planned fusion experiment has any hope of producing more power than it consumes ITER [1] is expected to produce more thermal energy than it consumes and is currently under construction. No electricity though. The follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Plant
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Yes, I should have said electrical power. ITER isn't even attempting to produce any. DEMO is a concept, not a planned facility; the plans will be drawn up based on the results of ITER, hopefully by 2030. Note that DEMO won't even be a particular plant, several countries participating in ITER are hoping to go on to construct DEMO plants.
  - lispm 4y ago
    > follow up plant, DEMO [2], should produce electricity (750MW) If it will ever be built and then go online. Which is highly unlikely given the slow progress of ITER and its very difficult problems - some it even does not try to solve. Like getting enough Tritium: https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run... 750MW (again using thermal energy, which is probably not the future of electricity production) from such an expensive & complex device? Probably you would need pools of several fusion power plants, since it is unlikely that one fusion power plant will run for a longer periods of time. Maybe a pool of six would provide two running (just a wild guess). The technical problems will be huge and the costs gigantic. I can't imagine how this will be competitive when in production (with outputs in tens of Gigawatts, to make any impact) in 2060 or later.
more_corn 4y ago
What if I told you commercially viable fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40 years? What if I told you it always will be? Investment in something that might not pay off is wise if it does, and foolish if it doesn’t.
- orzig 4y ago
  I think the people who said “10 years away “we’re assuming it would get actual serious investment. I would argue that this is year 1
  - adhesive_wombat 4y ago
    Indeed, fusion has never been a certain number of years away, it's only ever been number of billions of dollars away, as projected here [1]. Though, luckily, it looks like that was a little over-pessimistic: it's not like the field has been sitting on its thumbs despite having, in terms relative to the potential, negligible funding: [2]. [1]: https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png [2]: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy-gain.html https://phys.org/news/2021-11-unveiling-steady-fusion-energy...
api 4y ago
The world burning is the basis of the economy for dozens of petrostates and some of the world’s largest corporations.
no_wizard 4y ago
I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd. [1] until recently
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
I can't remember who said it but I remember reading a quote one time to the effect that the man who invented a new form of energy for the world without also inventing a new heat sink would be history's greatest monster. Not sure I agree, but does give one pause if prone to pessimism as I am.
- formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Perhaps this was referring to humanity's use of fossil fuels?
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    no, fossil fuels aren't a new form of energy. The implication would be that a new form of energy would just be used with all the other forms of energy, it may also have been a new cheap form of energy in the quote, implying that we would take a cheap form of energy and overuse it so that the world burned faster.
- kadoban 4y ago
  I don't get it. Why would a new form of energy need a new heat sink? Wouldn't any energy we can realistically generate be a drop in the bucket compared to what the Sun throws at us every second? And even if not, what would a heat sink do about it? I think I'm missing something.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
It is doubtful that fusion will even be cheaper than old-crappy-PWR-fission. It is very very very doubtful it will beat wind/solar as they continue to drop in cost, at least not for probably... 40 years. We're looking at 10-20 years to a viable commercial design and construction. I place fusion like next-gen fission: worthy of continued investment in research and maybe some subsidized consumer plants (if/when fusion becomes viable). Even with viable fusion, there will likely be degradation/radioactivity of the power generation cores from fast neutrons and other problems.

eatonphil 4y ago

The article doesn't seem to mention why exactly but I'm guessing it's some combination of 1) visible climate change (extreme heat, wildfires, drought, etc.) so people want better energy sources and 2) the mayhem Russia started seeing as it is one of the bigger energy providers. Or has there been anything else?

bawolff 4y ago
Better high temp super conductor lowering barrier to entry maybe? (im pretty ignorant of this field)
ISL 4y ago
The really big deal in the last decade has been better magnets -- many of the "novel" approaches attracting recent funding are probably doomed to fail, but the MIT-associated consortia that simply aspire to building better tokamaks with modern magnets look encouraging.
Filligree 4y ago
Some breakthroughs in plasma modelling, too. https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-successfully-controls-plasma-in-nuclear-fusion-experiment https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-breakthrough-as-ai-succ...
- drtgh 4y ago
  Interesting. By that link, it seems they was able to stabilizing 'droplets' where two plasmas co-existed simultaneously inside Tokamak. I wonder if they thought if it would be possible to accelerate such plasma droplets in opposite directions for to take Helion's aproach [1] if needed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29119180
ianburrell 4y ago
REBCO high-temperature superconductors have potentially changed the game. They can support stronger fields which means smaller devices for same confinement. Commercial production seems to only started in the last decade. MIT's research, spun out as CFS, may be prompting other startups.

greenthrow 4y ago

I don't believe the hype. From what I can see fusion still isn't anywhere near being a viable source of energy, other than in the form or solar power.

wetpaws 4y ago
So was solar and nuclear.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
twarge 4y ago
Agree. There have been no breakthroughs. The projects getting funding are just different enough to be not immediately disprovable and continue to spectacularly overpromise without solving any of the real problems. Chamber embrittlement? Nuclear waste? (activation of the apparatus by the 12 MeV fusion netrons is a lot worse than the 100 keV fission neutron.)
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > have been no breakthroughs Magnet miniaturisation and CADs like the stellarator [1] refute this. With respect to waste and embrittlement, those are simpler consumables and waste products than fossil fuels and atmospheric emissions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
  - hobscoop 4y ago
    Yes. We're currently living through a golden age of stellarator design powered by new algorithms and optimization techniques.
  - joak 4y ago
    And what about Helion Energy tech? Pulsed collision of plasmoids (FRC), with direct energy conversion. Deuterium helium3 aneutronic fusion, no neutrons. They've received $500M (lead by Sam Altman) to demo net electricity by 2024.

magila 4y ago

Where is this $1.9 billion over the last decade figure coming from? ITER alone has surely burned through more than double that. Edit: Sounds like it might only be counting investment in private companies.

Apocryphon 4y ago

Crazy to imagine what would’ve happened if in the past it had been more than sub-fusion never. http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...

shadowofneptune 4y ago
I've known about this chart for a long while, but recently I've become skeptical of it. What says that fusion would be a success even if that level of funding was reached? The most mature fusion reactor being built, ITER, is gigantic and it's not clear how it could be made cheaper or miniturized.
- danaris 4y ago
  That's part of the problem with fairly basic research like what we're putting into fusion. Without making the investment, doing the science and engineering to actually study these things and learn how they work and how we can do them better, we won't know how or whether they can be made cheaper, miniaturized, etc. This isn't the same kind of problem that most of us are used to dealing with in our daily lives—where the fundamental components, and the fundamental science, that make it all up are well-understood and fairly mature, and what we have to do is come up with creative ways to apply it. This is the kind of "we don't know if any specific avenue of research will ever pay back a positive monetary ROI, but pursuing them is important anyway" science that we need to be doing with or without fusion as a specific goal, because over time, it will produce years or decades of silence, punctuated by small, incremental improvements in our understanding of the universe...and then an amazing breakthrough like practical, commercially-viable fusion power. But only if we are willing to patiently fund it through those years or decades of boring stuff.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Actually it's quite clear: use REBCO superconductors. Tokamak output scales with the square of reactor volume and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output. Modern REBCO superconductors can support much stronger magnetic fields than ITER will manage. That's why CFS is building a reactor using REBCO which is much smaller than ITER, but should have the same performance. It'll be half the size of JET, which was built in a year. They're planning a net power attempt in 2025 and a lot of independent fusion researchers think they'll succeed. CFS is a spinoff from MIT, whose Alcator C-Mod had more powerful magnets than any other tokamak in the world.

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rbanffy 4y ago

I’m glad, but I hope we still invest in Plan-B’s because we are literally betting our civilisation on moving away from carbon.

timmg 4y ago

I wonder how this compares to the amount of money invested in crypto startups in the past few years. (I don't mean the value of crypto or the amount of money that was traded into it -- just the amount VCs invested into crypto startups.) I don't know if that means people that allocate capital think crypto has a better chance of changing the world than nuclear fusion -- or if it's something else. But it is strange to compare the funding of each.

ricardobeat 4y ago
The total of crypto VC investments for 2021 was reported at $33B.
rjmunro 4y ago
Not that it has a better chance of changing the world, just that it has a better chance of making them some money back in a reasonable time.
missedthecue 4y ago
There are probably a lot more founders with crypto ideas than founders with fusion ideas.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  That would be an argument for having more investment into fusion.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    Why? If you get 25 crypto startups for every fusion startups, you're necessarily going to see more funding in the crypto sector.
kortilla 4y ago
>or if it's something else It’s something else. Many people want their money invested in something with a good risk adjusted returns. Only a tiny subset of investors invest significant portions of their capital into significantly lower expected value outcomes because they like the field.

mbgerring 4y ago

One novel approach to clean energy deployment would be to spend some of this money to deploy enough solar, wind and batteries to provide the enormous amounts of energy needed for all these sub-breakeven fusion experiments. Then, whether we get a viable fusion reactor or not, we all win.

ChadNauseam 4y ago
It seems more reasonable to me to try to figure out what would be a reasonable amount of money to spend on these projects independently, instead of tying the amount of clean energy deployment to the amount clean energy research for no apparent benefit
kortilla 4y ago
Maybe we should fraud these people trying to invest in a better solution with worse ones!
willis936 4y ago
We've spent far more on solar than fusion. Why divert the nth dollar rather than diversify? https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Examination%20of%20Federal%20Financial%20Assistance%20in%20the%20Renewable%20Energy%20Mark..._1.pdf https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2018/11/f57/Exami...
- pfdietz 4y ago
  The problem with that argument is that it could also be used to justify diverting some money to invest in perpetual motion machines. The likelihood of the technology paying off has to enter into it somehow.

mkl95 4y ago

Good news. But let's not forget that fission is the present and near future of nuclear energy. And it just works.

toveja 4y ago

To those interested in discussion outside of HN, there is a discord community [0] with professional, academic, and hobby fusion afficionados. [0] https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg https://discord.gg/Rcum9zkBtg

LegitShady 4y ago
Discord is a black hole in the internet. People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. It's convenient but it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later. It's a shame it's used for such interesting discussion.
- toveja 4y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. What would be your suggestion/alternatives?
  - krallja 4y ago
    > it's worse than a forum for creating knowledge people can search through later A forum.
  - willis936 4y ago
    I personally like reddit for public discussions. r/fusion used to be a ghost town with crackpots a few years. These days there are occasional good discussions and the crackpots are chased off.
- _dain_ 4y ago
  > People have discussions you can't search for and isn't indexed on Google etc. this is a feature not a bug. the real problem is lack of user ownership over data, not lack of searchability.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  It's a chat room. The conversations are disposable, it is part of the medium. Having a record of discussion is not really what interests me about instant messaging.

alexnewman 4y ago

Finally. I wonder if what's going on in ukraine has helped investment.

TT-392 4y ago

Maybe it is only 19 years in the future this time

thriftwy 4y ago

I believe that there might be a way to have a compact and efficient fusion reactor which we just don't know yet (and a time traveller would be able to "hold my beer" us into it) For example, there's this plasma-producing microwave + cut grape trick, what if you use something like this to supply really hot deuterium plasma?

jleahy 4y ago
Then you get super hot deuterium plasma, which is unconfined and so won't fuse.
- thriftwy 4y ago
  Maybe you can generate it in one place and confine it in the other? Not dissimilar to how ICEs work. Produce plasma and then burn (fuse) it in pulses.
willis936 4y ago
That's actually exactly what existing MCF machines do. The gyrotron (ECRH, same as a microwave's magnetron) resonant frequency is tuned to the confinement field strength of the plasma so it absorbs the energy. On top of that there's a vacuum so air doesn't pull all the heat away and a magnetic bottle so the plasma doesn't touch the wall. Fusion is very far away from happening spontaneously on Earth.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

It’s happening!

rjmunro 4y ago

> There was also a breakthrough in late 2021, when researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxford managed to release a record-breaking 59 megajoules of fusion 59 megajoules in useful units is 16kWh, less than 2 days use of my house. That's the biggest fusion reaction ever.

chris_va 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba ... was slightly larger than that. Anyway, 59MJ isn't terrible if you can run it at 60Hz. Of course, I agree that the reality is a bit far away.
toveja 4y ago
59 megajoules of sustained energy ^over the course of a few seconds^. Ideally this energy output would be sustained for days within ITER. JET is not designed to do this, as it has a copper magnet system, which means if you try to sustain such a plasma (confined with around 5 T magnet and around 2 MA plasma current) for longer than a few seconds, you would melt the magnet. Edit: ITER would operate at 5-10 T, and around 15-20 MA plasma current.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Note that these are 59MJ of energy released by the fusion reaction. No attempt was made to actually catch them. And even if they had been captured, they would not have been able to power the magnets + cooling systems used to confine the plasma. We are very very far away from actually producing even 1W of usable fusion power.
  - toveja 4y ago
    You are correct that at JET there is no tech installed to absorb the neutrons, nor will there ever be in JET, since (as pointed out above) it is a _research_ device. Current fusion devices are not nor were they ever designed to generate electricity for a grid. This is why we build ITER, and DEMO thereafter. Generating 'usable fusion power' is limited to building reactor scale experiments, which to date, has not been done (ITER will be the first).

bloodyplonker22 4y ago

It means we are closer to success when we see a lot more VC funding of nuclear fusion versus government (taxpayer) funding. VCs don't have the timeline or ability to lose money without much consequence or blame like the government does.

acidburnNSA 4y ago
It could also mean there are lots more rich people who want to spend money on a gamble to "save the world" and don't care to do sufficient due diligence to dig below the fancy slide decks they get spoon fed in the board room every quarter.
- lven 4y ago
  You're better off donating money to fusion companies directly than paying taxes to the government. Wish musk had donated his taxesto companies last year instead.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
If VC's are so great, they could have invested in fusion 20 years ago and presumably they'd have it solved by now. Why didn't they? They didn't because they don't have the guts to create entire new branch of science. Once the government has built research laboratiries, trained physicists and engineers, built prototypes, waited untill those engineers come up with viables plans, then the VC are ready to swoop in and take all the credit. Thats fine if Venture capital can't make 60 year investments. Whats not cool, is everyone else buying the narrative that we don't need government funding for fundamental research, that VCs will solve all problems in the world as long as we let them run wild and don't tax them

dreamcompiler 4y ago

There's a huge amount of hype in fusion these days. Companies are getting big investments just by saying "we're over unity." None of their investors will recoup any money. Getting above unity is important but it's still a very long way from systemic over unity of the entire lifecycle of the process that turns fusion into electricity on the grid. And that simply won't happen in my lifetime or most of your lifetimes. What will likely happen during our lifetimes is we develop large-scale electricity storage mechanisms. Together with decentralized microgrids, storage will enable most of the world's electricity to be generated by renewables. The sun is a giant fusion engine, and it's the only fusion engine that will be practical for us during at least the next 50 years.

acchow 4y ago
Private Investments usually need returns within a 10-15 year time scale. Once practical fusion gets to that point, we should expect money to come pouring in which will help make it a reality. We’re seeing something similar happening in self driving cars
- Terr_ 4y ago
  My pet theory is that it's no coincidence the self-driving-car investment craze started the same time the baby-boom generation started to enter "grandpa can't drive himself anymore" territory. In other words, I suspect it's not fueled by a technology trend, but by trying to capture a potential customer trend.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cypress66 4y ago
    It seems like a stretch. Self driving car investments mostly coincide with AI getting to a good enough level that it seem feasible.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think investments are happening because recent progress in this space is indicating that this might in fact happen in the next decade or so. The cliche that fusion reactors are perpetually 30 years away, might have actually been correct up to about 20 years ago. There are no guarantees here of course, but there are now quite a few companies acting like they are going to get their first test plants up and running in the next ten or so years. From there to commercialization is of course still a long and risky path. But it's very different once you can prove that the process works and more energy comes out then goes in. As you say, fusion reactors will have to compete with absolutely dirt cheap solar, wind, and storage. As well as with future fission plants that may or may not become cheaper than the current state of the art (which is super expensive). Just getting things working is not going to be good enough. It will need to work cheaply.

borissk 4y ago

When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear. Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work day and night and secure the funding).

anothernewdude 4y ago
Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Yes, clearly that's why SpaceX was successful in an industry where the adage was "How do you become a millionaire in aviation? Start with a billion!".
  - game-of-throws 4y ago
    Has SpaceX disclosed whether they're profitable or still burning investor money?
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      They obviously aren't profitable right now since they're working on two megaprojects simultaneously, but the Falcon 9 program is obviously profitable and clearly successful given their flight rate and economics.
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    SpaceX is not successful as an industry It is a government funded project at this point
    - dotnet00 4y ago

sva_ 4y ago

Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go? I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as they want?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
orzig 4y ago
It is a valid question, but to put it in perspective, the sun bathes us in dramatically more kWh than we need to annually power the world every few minutes. So fusion would be a drop in the bucket at a global scale.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  In the beginning, of course. Nevertheless, the heating of the Earth puts a limit on the total usable nuclear power on Earth, both fission and fusion, it cannot be "infinite", but it must remain forever a small fraction of the power of the incoming Solar radiation, otherwise it would cause an excessive heating of the Earth by itself.
  - willis936 4y ago
    Ever getting close to this point is what is considered a "good problem". We are always teetering on the edge of oblivion. Being so wildly successful that our industrial heat rivals that of the incident energy of the sun would be incredible. No problems humans have ever faced would be in living memory (including mortality). This is a science fiction future that does not need planning from the minds of today. It would also have many solutions related to adjusting albedo.
hobscoop 4y ago
It'll ultimately be dissipated by infrared radiation into space. Earth receives something like 173,000 terawatts of radiation from the sun; this is equal to the amount radiated out as infrared, except for the "radiative forcing" which is the amount by which the world is heating. Radiative forcing is currently something like 1000 TW. All of human civilization is powered by something like 20 TW. If we want to stop global heating we need to use a fraction of those 20 TW to "turn the ship" of size 1000 TW.

hit8run 4y ago

jason0597 4y ago

I am genuinely surprised that there is so much interest in the comments here and excitement about fusion energy powering the future. Yet I see surprisingly few numbers or physics being discussed. Kind of disappointed for a forum that is supposedly technically-minded and able to speak mathematics. There was this great MIT paper [1] published a while back that's still to be rebuked, talking about the serious technical challenges. Furthermore, there's Maury Markowitz's blogs that have been around for more than a decade showcasing why economically future can never work competitively on the grid [2]. Fusion is great science, it may eventually return a net positive in energy, but it has so many problems that make it impossible to use commercially. [1]: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou... [2]: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/ https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-wi...

lven 4y ago
One morea article worth reading about the con-fusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion

acidburnNSA 4y ago

But where are the fusion neutrons? (See Voodoo Fusion [1]) [1] https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf https://vixra.org/pdf/1812.0382v1.pdf I'm a professional fission guy. I started out in fusion and switched to advanced fission. These days I don't see why we don't just build lots more regular old LWR fission reactors. Imagining that somehow fusion is going to a) work, b) be cheap (fuel cost is only 5% of total nuclear fission cost so who cares), and c) not have the same stigma as fission is kind of weird in my mind. For example, there are leaks of tiny amounts of tritium at some fission plants and people lose their minds. Fusion reactors will have many orders of mag more tritium. Will people not lose their minds just the same? Tritium is notoriously hard to contain since it's so small. It can permeate through metal like a hot knife through butter. Also, lots of people worry about fission and nuclear weapons proliferation. So does fusion get around this? Not really. In fact it's worse. Did you know that the two materials you need to make thermonuclear weapons are tritium and plutonium? Tritium breeding is required by almost all practical fusion power plants (the other reactions are 100s to 1000s of times harder, I don't care what x random fusion CEO says, they're in it for the sweet billionaire side project money). Plutonium is made by irradiating natural uranium from the dirt with neutrons. Practical fusion reactors have lots of neutrons. Really high energy ones too. Anyway let's just do fission you guys. It's way easier. It has been working fine since the 1950s. It's zero carbon. Waste problem is solved (see Onkalo, and reprocessing). It net saves millions of lives by displacing air pollution. It runs 24/7 on a tiny land and material footprint. We have enough uranium and thorium to run the whole world for 4 billion (with a b) years using breeder reactors (demonstrated in 1952 in Idaho). Get the Koreans over here to build some ARP1400s or the Chinese to build some Hualong Ones until we figure out how to project manage again and then call it good.

deltasevennine 4y ago
The main reason is because fission isn't cool anymore. Been there, done that.... Fusion is still super cool with all the big devices they're building.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  You're probably right that fission isn't considered cool anymore. I guess my heartburn is in that it most definitely should be. I guess most people don't appreciate the relatively tiny fission plant workhorses producing >50% of all zero-carbon electricity in the USA. At least we have nuclear tiktok influencers nowadays!

alex_young 4y ago

Why don’t we just leave the fusion where it works best, i.e. the sun? Put the same amount of spending into building a robotic solar collection factory on the moon and beam the power where we need it. No crazy particles to deal with and zero nuclear weapons byproducts.

jefftk 4y ago
A beam of power many times stronger than the Sun sounds like a pretty terrifying weapon
- topher515 4y ago
  This is actually one of the classic "disasters" in Sim City 2000[1]. The "Microwave Powerplant" works by bouncing a concentrated beam of sunlight to earth. It provides plentiful, pollution free power... The only downside is sometimes the satellite beam misses, melting everything surrounding it. [1] https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster) https://simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Microwave_(disaster)
- alex_young 4y ago
  The microwave beam would be pretty wide by the time it reached the surface. The power levels wouldn’t make an effective weapon but would take up a sizable footprint for the collectors.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    If it isn't many times stronger than sunlight, just build more solar panels. If it is many times stronger than sunlight, that's pretty dangerous!
    - alex_young 4y ago
      MW power transmission is about 85% efficient at the receiving end. Solar is much lower than that.

manholio 4y ago

You could say the same thing about Bitcoin. Fusion is in the VC hype cycle but there are no new developments that suggest it can become cheaper and more predictable than fission, which itself is dying, primarily because of financial uncertainties and risks. On the contrary, physics suggest that performance scales with size, so even the extraordinary expensive ITER project is way too small to achieve engineering break even, let alone financial break-even. You will only hear about scientific break-even, which is a useless milestone because, yes, you get more energy than you put it, but you put electric energy and get fast neutron energy, only you need an order of magnitude more of that to get back the electricity you put in. Understanding different types of break-even would be an obligatory primer to anyone navigating hyped fusion claims: https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-and-breakeven-explained/ https://news.newenergytimes.net/2022/04/08/fusion-q-values-a...

pfdietz 4y ago
Fusion reactors (after they're big enough to have ignited) have diseconomy of scale, due to the square-cube law. Cost scales (at least) as reactor volume, while power is limited by power/area through the surface of the reactor vessel.
- manholio 4y ago
  But are we hitting that power density ceiling yet? It doesn't seem so, we're not even in the "big enough to have ignited" range, only scraping at the door of "big enough for scientific break-even", but have already blown any reasonable chance for such designs to be cost effective even if they were to be mass produced. Massive superconducting magnets generating megatons of force, building-sized vacuum chambers that are almost guaranteed to leak some amount tritium, which only adds to the unavoidable regulatory burden imposed by the fast neutron environment, activated structure and every day production of weapon-grade material etc. etc., even if the current technology magically works tomorrow, it's still an economic dead-end. The present fusion crop is megascience at its worst, draining public funds for something that can't possibly ever work and producing very little substantial science in the way. We need to take a step back and reassess. At least Helion is trying a new path, even if they are likely to end up in a similar dead-end.

Kukumber 4y ago

They should have invested in education 20 years ago Vulture capitalist always show up during the last mile after government (us, the people) paid for kickstarting everything What's sad is China already ahead despite all of that https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun-smashes-1000-second-fusion-world-record-16rlFJZzHqM/index.html https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-12-31/China-s-artificial-sun... https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-designing-worlds-1st-power-plant/ https://eurasiantimes.com/artificial-sun-china-claims-design...

charlieyu1 4y ago

The only true form of green energy other than geothermal. fission, solar, wind, waterfall energy all have their own negative environmental impacts

joak 4y ago
Geothermal, and all thermal power energy, have a big issue: thermal pollution. You need a lot of water for the cooling phase of the thermodynamic cycle that transform heat into electricity. That's why during drought episodes fission plants have to be stopped. There is however a non-thermal path to fusion energy, aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion. In this scheme, the fusion reaction produces no neutrons and the kinetic energy of ions is directly converted to electricity.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Given how much zero carbon warm water we need, it's easy to see zero carbon thermal pollution as a feature rather than a bug. https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations/4_Safa_Economics-District-Heating-Light.pdf https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/workshops/nucogen/presentations...
  - BMc2020 4y ago
    If I were to ask you the answer to two plus 2, what would it be?

boringg 4y ago

Hmm I suspect that this isn't accurate but if it is, also relevant is that in the last 12 months we were at the top of the crazy money market so people were handing out cash and desperate for something with a seeming return to it. Seems like a click-baity title to me.

Calmanimal 4y ago

lven 4y ago

Fusion is generally touted by many as an energy "Holy Grail." Indeed, it appears to have similar qualities, being both perpetually elusive and miraculous, able to solve all mankind's problems. Media reporting tends to discuss the benefits of fusion with misleading and false statements and no discussion of fusion’s negative attributes. The financial and practical perspective of fusion based power is missing. I've written a post about this here: https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion https://lvenneri.com/blog/ConFusion. I cover fusion's issues compared to fission. In particular: far worse neutron and gamma damage, 10x more demanding heat transfer, parasitic power draws, 50-100x larger radiological waste volume, higher financial and nuclear accident risk compared to new new micro reactors, higher cost by any metric, similar or worse proliferation characteristics, etc. My aim was to add a dissenting perspective on the practicality of near-term fusion energy systems.

jupp0r 4y ago

There is a gigantic stable fusion reaction from which we just need to convert energy into electricity - our sun. Bring out the dyson sphere.

jeandejean 4y ago

For a technology that has the promise of clean energy for humanity, I am shocked it's receiving that small amount of funding, while we have been distributing literally trillions globally during the pandemic...

dogcomplex 4y ago

A friendly reminder that the idea posed by a pioneer of nuclear energy of just dumping big bombs in a hole and harvesting the heat energy with steam/plasma has never been invalidated and remains the most efficiently-simple solution immediately viable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER If containment is your concern (though underground blast effects are decently understood, and blast chambers could be constructed with still strongly net economic/energy positive) - this does not need to be built around any population centers. At a cost of 1.5% efficiency loss per 1000 km, UHV power lines can direct it from a single write-off location anywhere on earth. That single location can likely be scaled to supply well beyond the total current global energy production. https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/ https://en.geidco.org.cn/aboutgei/uhv/

brtkdotse 4y ago
Lmao, that sounds like something straight out of Futurama. The Wikipedia article you liked says it “economically unviable”, but fails to provide a source
therealdrag0 4y ago
What about earth quakes? (I didn’t click the links)
lostmsu 4y ago
Another no container idea (this one is crazy): just blow them in the ocean, that will evaporate some water and speed up evaporation of some more. Harvest energy with existing hydroelectric setuos once it passes the weather cycle.
- willis936 4y ago
  There are much less ecologically disastrous and less illegal cloud-seeding techniques. They're still very illegal though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding

pixiemaster 4y ago

I love the concept of fusion from a scientific point. I’d love to see even more money put into this. But for real world deployment, we can have decentralized systems that have an ROI of 6yrs (Solar) and 10 yrs (Wind), - i think that’s the thing we should be doubling down on NOW. [https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145C...]

blippage 4y ago

Scientists have been futzing around with fusion energy since I was a schoolboy in the 70's, and undoubtedly before. Maybe they'll be a breakthrough, but I think the odds are heavily against them. Fission, OTOH, seems an interesting bet. The problem with old-style reactors is that there's basically no ESD (Emergency Shutdown) that you can perform. Those radioactive rods are going keep radiating heat no matter what. Newer styles seem a much saner approach, were two different materials must be in contact for a reaction to occur. In an emergency you just let one of them drain out, thereby stopping the reaction. Coal is an abundant source of fuel with a proven track record. The big problem is with pollution. But there's no rule that says you have to puke out the waste into the atmosphere. It can be processed. After all, oil is pretty shitty when it comes up out of the ground, and needs a lot of processing. This is a costly exercise, of course, but one that we willingly undertake. The question now is one of economics: will the cost of waste processing mean that coal burning is feasible? It's a question that nobody seems interested in asking. We just seem to have the default assumption that coal energy was shitty in the past and must be shitty in the present. "Eww, coal".

rep_movsd 4y ago

We already have clean energy - its called Fission, all we need is to start doing it at scale

Gud 4y ago

Such a controversial topic these days. I got one am happy billions are being poured into fusion. Yes, massive investments in fission, solar and wind are required. But one by one the technical obstacles are being overcome for fusion. I say give fusion a chance

alexalx666 4y ago

Deady epidemic - let’s work from home! Russians attack Europe - let’s invest in nuclear! What is the next disaster that will make another common sense thing happen ?

greyhair 4y ago

So much more funding now. That will getting it working twenty years from now, just like it has been 'working twenty years from now' for the last fifty years.