6 ms·
The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
by hackernewds 4y ago
The funding does seem miniscule given we spend 100x more on funding military excursions in the name of energy security
- azinman2 4y agoIs the bottleneck for fusion money though?
- rowanG077 4y agomoney is always the bottleneck in some sense. There are diminishing returns but in general more money will make it happen faster.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYou might be right — we threw enough money and put humans on the Moon. The Manhattan Project was well funded and produced results as well.
- ErrantX 4y agoThey also had a strong ideological element too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dmix 4y agoThe talent + purpose (which drew the talent) was what defined Manhattan. The money came easy when all of the greatest minds in the country were pointing a giant flashing light in one obvious direction. This is big news but fusion will largely be a product of the people it attracts. The people can do the job attracting money and other talent if it's justified. I've seen the Canadian gov try to throw money at trying to build a local tech scene and it all went to hucksters, old school finance suits with megacorp resumes, and administrators. While all the tech talent just kept going to SF where the capital was going into high risk ventures... not expensive buildings, events, 'entrepreneur/small business programs', and propping up old school D-round investors. Money is easily wasted even when the pursuit sounds noble and valuable on the surface.
- hcknwscommenter 4y agoI believe the Manhattan project (where we basically built an entire new city, and entire new manufacturing process from scratch: mining operations, refineries, enrichment, milling, etc.) cost less in constant dollars than the stealth fighter.
- maria2 4y agoThis is like saying thread count is always the bottle neck in computation. More money allows more parallelism as you can pay for more people and more equipment for more research. As in computing, there are diminishing marginal returns and surely a version of Amdahl's Law for human endeavors.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xattt 4y ago> thread count is always the bottle neck in computation The softer the bed linen, the more rested the computer scientists will be and the more likely they are to come up with novel solutions that lead to faster computing.
- BuckRogers 4y agoI would have to agree. The "in general" though is carrying an enormous amount of weight in that statement. I think what other commentors may be getting at is that in many cases the simple analogy of asking how 9 women can have a baby in 1 month is instructive here. You could throw trillions at that problem, a need to have a baby in 1 month. Sometimes there are hard limits that money has a hard time addressing. A case could be made that with enough money put towards advanced technology, like gene therapy to force a fetus to maturity in 1 month vs 9, it could be done with horrendous side effects. So to your point money does solve all problems, but I think diminishing returns is putting it very lightly.
- fullshark 4y agoThe laws of physics also a limiting factor
- z3phyr 4y agoMore money attracts more eyes, hands, grey matter which they would otherwise focus on something with more money. But it is a long process.
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoyes. fusion funding has been sliding downwards for decades which is a large reason why it takes so long to do anything. It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything. 1. Shortage of funding 2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding 3. extremely low risk tolerance 4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high 5. projects are over engineered to reduce chance of failure 6. projects are over budget and over schedule 7. projects only make minor incremental progress 8. lack of fast/exciting progress drives decrease in funding 9. GOTO 1
- zaroth 4y agoI can't agree that funding is "largely the reason" why NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a top 3 reason. NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics. NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an order of magnitude more money for each launch than it should. (almost two?)
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoI agree however that culture was caused by a lack of funding. You can't be swift and lean when you are given very limited, budgeted funding. You can't take risks or you risk putting people out of a job and killing the program. That leads to an overly conservative culture that restricts any risk taking and over-engineers everything to the point failure is effectively impossible. This slow movement, overly conservative, design by committee approach helps limit risk but it absolutely balloons costs in the long run and horrifically delays progress. Of course if they were a company they'd eventually run out of money but that's not really an option for gov orgs so when the overly conservative, limited run designs end up encountering production issues, the projects explode in cost with nearly no upper limit. TLDR: The political climate is a direct consequence of the lack of budget and continued restriction of that budget only worsens the problem.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoThere are like 20 designs of various fusion reactors on the drawing board that need to be built and tested. Scientists also don't work for free. They arent mushrooms that grow by themselves
- nerpderp82 4y agoOne of the things that I think I noticed from the press conference, is that funding is going to be the bare minimum to meet some goal for a design they select. This seems like a gross mistake. If we are going to avert a climate catastrophe we will need TW of power to "unburn" the carbon we put into the environment (ocean and atmosphere). Instead of barely hitting this target, we should over deliver since we are running out of wall-clock time. Every project that meets a bar for feasibility, organizational/operational capabilities (if they dont have it, either fix it, or transfer design to capable team) should be given funding (50-100M). We should be dropping BILLIONS on this, if we can drop 50B+ on semiconductors we can do the same for fusion.
- LarryMullins 4y agoDump trillions of dollars into fusion energy today and it will still be decades before the first fusion power plant is connected to the grid. You'd be better off funding the construction of fission power plants. Those are very expensive and take years to build, but they're still a hell of a lot cheaper and faster than funding fusion to the degree you're suggesting.
- moloch-hai 4y agoEach dollar diverted to chase nuke wills-o'-th'-wisp brings climate catastrophe nearer. Money is fungible. Dropping $billions on this means not dropping those $billions on something that works already, works fantastically well, and would work even better with more money. We already know how to prevent (more) climate catastrophe. We just need to do more of it.
- salawat 4y agoSo drop it on fission. There. Settled.
- rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y agoI think a major bottleneck for fusion research from the lay public (including myself) is lack of interest. Fission reactors work really well and have been around for 50+ years. If we are going to go nuclear instead of renewable, we need to address the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is: why not just fission?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- azinman2 4y agoFukushima most recently
- rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y agoAnd somehow harnessing the power of the literal sun will have a better safety rate? It's all speculation at this point because fusion doesn't exist yet... but it does seem like a huge undertaking to get superior safety over fission.
- azinman2 4y agoIt’s not speculation because so much is known about the physics and elements involved. With fusion you want lighter particles which tend to be less radioactive, rather than heavy uranium etc particles for fission. See https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/safety-in-fusion https://www.iaea.org/bulletin/safety-in-fusion for more details
- rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago”Regulatory bodies have vast experience in the realm of safety and security for fission. We are working with them to ensure that all applicable knowledge is transferred to fusion." Let me put the question another way: suppose we get fusion that's equally as safe as fission like IAEA is saying here. Why would we switch to it if we were unwilling to switch to fission?