8 ms·

Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, I hope t

Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, I hope that the ongoing/coming energy crisis will help all nuclear fusion technologies tokamak/stellarator become real. We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants and a few decades away from solving our energy problems for every, but I hope we get there sooner than later.

cl0ckt0wer 4y ago
"our need will be the real creator" - Plato
- SapporoChris 4y ago
  "Necessity is the mother of invention" Proverb of unknown origins. Earliest reference Aesop's fable. I've been quoting the proverb for a long time. Thank you for the quote, I feel it says basically the same thing but I appreciate the different wording and that it is attributed to Plato.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    "Laziness is the mother of invention." - Forgot where I heard that. It may have been a comedian.
moogly 4y ago
> We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants I admire your optimism. I'd say half a century, if things go well, but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  I think that 50 years is a reasonable timeframe to give fusion the possibility of delivering results. But I agree with you, it's pretty much impossible that anything will come out of fusion in the coming 10-15 years, despite the publicity we keep hearing lately.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    We've already given it more than 50 years.
    - kingkawn 4y ago
      Yes, but making long predictions allows them to pretend they are in pursuit of something
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      Solving hard engineering problems is expensive. You have to put lots of money into it. Say, 30% of the funds invested by VCs in jitney cabs and collectable JPEGs.
      - 7thaccount 4y ago
        It is so sad how much money and talent goes into getting people to click on more ads.
    - Gud 4y ago
      It took humans hundreds(thousands?) of years to learn how to fly. 50 years is not really that long.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      But apart from the part that's useful for nuclear weapons research, we've barely given it any funding. The idea of "we could have useful fusion reactors in 30 years" always came with the sentence "if we get the funding to do it". There's this [1] famous graph comparing US research spending into Fusion, compared to 1976 predictions how long it would take with different budgets. According to that, the US funded fusion below the "not enough to ever get it done" budget. With that in mind, we have come remarkably far. 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
      - pfdietz 4y ago
- okasaki 4y ago
  The UK government plans to have a fusion power plant on the grid by 2040 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1022540/towards-fusion-energy-uk-government-fusion-strategy.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    They can also plan to bring world peace and end world hunger by this winter. Doesn't mean it will happen.
    - okasaki 4y ago
      Well, they definitely aren't planning that.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    In other news, the UK government revealed it is wholly disconnected from reality.
    - okasaki 4y ago
      Yeah ok, or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Taking British ministerial announcements at face value has not worked out well for many, over recent decades.
- Maken 4y ago
  It feels like fusion energy is perpetually 50 years away.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Minimal investment means minimal progress. ITER was basically a Regan/Gorbachev project from 1985 that’s still not built yet. It’s JET’s the current largest device was completed in 1983. Real progress has been made, but the major projects have been extremely conservative by necessity. Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
    - mjhay 4y ago
      And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.
      - XorNot 4y ago
        ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study. HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device. If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability. "But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible Not on Earth. But put a good enough fusion reactor on a rocket, and you can reach neighboring stars in 3 or 4 decades instead of the 15 one would expect for fission. (Of course, nobody is even sure reactors can get that good, but it does look possible.)
  - mjhay 4y ago
    Fission fragment rockets could actually compete with fusion here. The reaction mass is the fission fragments themselves, which could get a specific impulse of around 10^6 s. The technology to do this is within relatively easy reach, at least by interstellar rocket standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Neat links! I think nuclear propulsion is going to be the biggest beneficiary of higher mass-to-orbit-for-a-reasonable-price advances. There are a huge number of propulsion technologies that are physically possible but too heavy and/or dangerous for near-Earth use. Cheaper lift (to bootstrap) + more ongoing destinations and transit work (to drive) + outside of Earth orbit (to alleviate safety concerns) = rapid progress
    - Retric 4y ago
      Designs like that quickly start using a significant fraction of available fuel on earth if you want to do more than send a single tiny probe on a flyby. The proposed fuel is even worse as AM242 has a half life of 141 years making it hard to collect in bulk.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    That is highly tangential to the issue of economic viability, and the energy crisis.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Economic viability only exists relative to an application. And there is absolutely zero chance of fusion solving our current energy crisis, the odds for fission are already low enough. There is no point on speculating on that.
- FBISurveillance 4y ago
  Still sooner than Linux on Desktop if you'd ask me!
  - tkubacki 4y ago
    Yet 1-2% of population is using Linux as of today and 0% is using fusion energy as of today. Witty but false.
ajross 4y ago
> ongoing/coming energy crisis This has been IMHO inappropriately hyped. We have an expected gas shortfall in Europe due to the mess made by one rogue actor (though Putin hasn't shut the pipes off yet, The existing price shocks are all speculative!). Petroleum production is fine. Gas production outside of Europe is fine. Existing interests in those industries have been exploiting the resulting price shocks (which are not the same thing as a crisis) to try to drive public policy decisions in their direction. We've been here before in the 1970's when rogue actors tried to exploit their production capacity for political gain. It sucked, but we didn't get fusion out of it then either. Frankly it's not even the first time we've had a supply shortfall. People tend to forget this, but we ran out of oil in the late 90's too! Turns out, there was lots more oil available at higher price points.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Nordstream 1 is off.
  - xg15 4y ago
    The Turkish and Ukrainian pipelines aren't (yet) though: https://berthub.eu/gazmon/ https://berthub.eu/gazmon/
est31 4y ago
> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve About mRNA vaccines I agree with you, because they indeed have been a niche thing before covid, but then they were the first available vaccines while the alternatives were still being researched when the first mRNA vaccines got their emergency approval. But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? It doesn't seem to be used anywhere in therapeutics, no?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? I imagine it's on the comment because it was used to create many of the non mRNA vaccines. But I don't think it got popularized. It was already widely popular.
PicassoCTs 4y ago
lettergram 4y ago
> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, … I don’t think it’s actually evolved all that much. They just deployed something that wasn’t really tested. I recall learning about theoretical mRNA vaccines back in 2014-2019 (granted they were killing the hosts and stuff). As someone who’s studied bioengineering (university, reading papers and some projects) I’d really like to see 10-15 years of usage before we consider anything with the tech. I for one home we don’t do the same thing with fusion. There is an amazing amount of risk as technology has expanded, we have to be far more cautious.
- freshpots 4y ago
  Once again you're so far out of your lane and think you're smarter than those actually working on it.
dabber21 4y ago
In an interview about this project with the recent changes, they said its investment in future energy production in 2050
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Fusion is about as relevant to energy production as deep sea submarines are to commuter transport. There's no way to get heat out of one and turn it into electricity in a way that is practical enough for power generation even if the core technologies were here today rather than 30 years after we need to fix things. We have the solution, it's removing the most egregious wastes of energy and using the sun to power the rest. It's the same solution that we've always had available, we just have to do the intelligent thing rather than the thing which gives more power to the powerful.

cl0ckt0wer 4y ago

"our need will be the real creator" - Plato

SapporoChris 4y ago
"Necessity is the mother of invention" Proverb of unknown origins. Earliest reference Aesop's fable. I've been quoting the proverb for a long time. Thank you for the quote, I feel it says basically the same thing but I appreciate the different wording and that it is attributed to Plato.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  "Laziness is the mother of invention." - Forgot where I heard that. It may have been a comedian.

moogly 4y ago

> We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants I admire your optimism. I'd say half a century, if things go well, but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago
I think that 50 years is a reasonable timeframe to give fusion the possibility of delivering results. But I agree with you, it's pretty much impossible that anything will come out of fusion in the coming 10-15 years, despite the publicity we keep hearing lately.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  We've already given it more than 50 years.
  - kingkawn 4y ago
    Yes, but making long predictions allows them to pretend they are in pursuit of something
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    Solving hard engineering problems is expensive. You have to put lots of money into it. Say, 30% of the funds invested by VCs in jitney cabs and collectable JPEGs.
    - 7thaccount 4y ago
      It is so sad how much money and talent goes into getting people to click on more ads.
  - Gud 4y ago
    It took humans hundreds(thousands?) of years to learn how to fly. 50 years is not really that long.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    But apart from the part that's useful for nuclear weapons research, we've barely given it any funding. The idea of "we could have useful fusion reactors in 30 years" always came with the sentence "if we get the funding to do it". There's this [1] famous graph comparing US research spending into Fusion, compared to 1976 predictions how long it would take with different budgets. According to that, the US funded fusion below the "not enough to ever get it done" budget. With that in mind, we have come remarkably far. 1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
    - pfdietz 4y ago
okasaki 4y ago
The UK government plans to have a fusion power plant on the grid by 2040 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1022540/towards-fusion-energy-uk-government-fusion-strategy.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  They can also plan to bring world peace and end world hunger by this winter. Doesn't mean it will happen.
  - okasaki 4y ago
    Well, they definitely aren't planning that.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  In other news, the UK government revealed it is wholly disconnected from reality.
  - okasaki 4y ago
    Yeah ok, or maybe you don't know what you're talking about.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Taking British ministerial announcements at face value has not worked out well for many, over recent decades.
Maken 4y ago
It feels like fusion energy is perpetually 50 years away.
- Retric 4y ago
  Minimal investment means minimal progress. ITER was basically a Regan/Gorbachev project from 1985 that’s still not built yet. It’s JET’s the current largest device was completed in 1983. Real progress has been made, but the major projects have been extremely conservative by necessity. Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
  - mjhay 4y ago
    And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.
    - XorNot 4y ago
      ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study. HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device. If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability. "But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible Not on Earth. But put a good enough fusion reactor on a rocket, and you can reach neighboring stars in 3 or 4 decades instead of the 15 one would expect for fission. (Of course, nobody is even sure reactors can get that good, but it does look possible.)
- mjhay 4y ago
  Fission fragment rockets could actually compete with fusion here. The reaction mass is the fission fragments themselves, which could get a specific impulse of around 10^6 s. The technology to do this is within relatively easy reach, at least by interstellar rocket standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Neat links! I think nuclear propulsion is going to be the biggest beneficiary of higher mass-to-orbit-for-a-reasonable-price advances. There are a huge number of propulsion technologies that are physically possible but too heavy and/or dangerous for near-Earth use. Cheaper lift (to bootstrap) + more ongoing destinations and transit work (to drive) + outside of Earth orbit (to alleviate safety concerns) = rapid progress
  - Retric 4y ago
    Designs like that quickly start using a significant fraction of available fuel on earth if you want to do more than send a single tiny probe on a flyby. The proposed fuel is even worse as AM242 has a half life of 141 years making it hard to collect in bulk.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  That is highly tangential to the issue of economic viability, and the energy crisis.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Economic viability only exists relative to an application. And there is absolutely zero chance of fusion solving our current energy crisis, the odds for fission are already low enough. There is no point on speculating on that.
FBISurveillance 4y ago
Still sooner than Linux on Desktop if you'd ask me!
- tkubacki 4y ago
  Yet 1-2% of population is using Linux as of today and 0% is using fusion energy as of today. Witty but false.

ajross 4y ago

> ongoing/coming energy crisis This has been IMHO inappropriately hyped. We have an expected gas shortfall in Europe due to the mess made by one rogue actor (though Putin hasn't shut the pipes off yet, The existing price shocks are all speculative!). Petroleum production is fine. Gas production outside of Europe is fine. Existing interests in those industries have been exploiting the resulting price shocks (which are not the same thing as a crisis) to try to drive public policy decisions in their direction. We've been here before in the 1970's when rogue actors tried to exploit their production capacity for political gain. It sucked, but we didn't get fusion out of it then either. Frankly it's not even the first time we've had a supply shortfall. People tend to forget this, but we ran out of oil in the late 90's too! Turns out, there was lots more oil available at higher price points.

actionfromafar 4y ago
Nordstream 1 is off.
- xg15 4y ago
  The Turkish and Ukrainian pipelines aren't (yet) though: https://berthub.eu/gazmon/ https://berthub.eu/gazmon/

est31 4y ago

> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve About mRNA vaccines I agree with you, because they indeed have been a niche thing before covid, but then they were the first available vaccines while the alternatives were still being researched when the first mRNA vaccines got their emergency approval. But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? It doesn't seem to be used anywhere in therapeutics, no?

marcosdumay 4y ago
> But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? I imagine it's on the comment because it was used to create many of the non mRNA vaccines. But I don't think it got popularized. It was already widely popular.

PicassoCTs 4y ago

lettergram 4y ago

> Just like COVID helped the mRNA/CRISPR technology evolve and come faster and closer to us, with the potential for many more usages in various diseases, … I don’t think it’s actually evolved all that much. They just deployed something that wasn’t really tested. I recall learning about theoretical mRNA vaccines back in 2014-2019 (granted they were killing the hosts and stuff). As someone who’s studied bioengineering (university, reading papers and some projects) I’d really like to see 10-15 years of usage before we consider anything with the tech. I for one home we don’t do the same thing with fusion. There is an amazing amount of risk as technology has expanded, we have to be far more cautious.

freshpots 4y ago
Once again you're so far out of your lane and think you're smarter than those actually working on it.

dabber21 4y ago

In an interview about this project with the recent changes, they said its investment in future energy production in 2050

Schroedingersat 4y ago

Fusion is about as relevant to energy production as deep sea submarines are to commuter transport. There's no way to get heat out of one and turn it into electricity in a way that is practical enough for power generation even if the core technologies were here today rather than 30 years after we need to fix things. We have the solution, it's removing the most egregious wastes of energy and using the sun to power the rest. It's the same solution that we've always had available, we just have to do the intelligent thing rather than the thing which gives more power to the powerful.