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The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)
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- api 2y agoThis field is so underfunded, but progress is still being made. Check out Commonwealth Fusion and their progress with insanely powerful compact energy efficient magnets. They recently clocked a stable 20T magnetic field.
- cycomanic 2y agoCalling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially unlimited free energy is wrong. The extremely high capital costs would likely mean that fusion is unlikely to ever match solar or wind in energy production costs. I'm not opposed to fusion/plasma research, we have much insights into nonlinear dynamics and chaotic behaviour due to this research, I disagree with the notion that this is a field that achieves incredible outcomes with small budgets, that's far from reality.
- nabla9 2y agoLet's read again what you just wrote and think: "ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD" That's not the most costly costly project, not even close (prices in current dollars and total costs) Apollo project: $257 billion ISS: $150 billion. STS: $196 billion. Fusion energy has been constantly underfunded.
- pfdietz 2y agoNone of those projects was worth the cost.
- selfmodruntime 2y agothe ISS was definitely worth the cost.
- pfdietz 2y agoReally? What result did ISS deliver that justifies its construction? It's an exercise in orbital flagpole sitting.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoWhat's the point of being alive without building monuments?
- pfdietz 2y agoI find that justification not only not convincing, but utterly repulsive. Governments shouldn't be in the business of praising themselves.
- api 2y agoIt’s an engineering test platform for long duration space flight. Along with the development of reusable rockets we are now almost to the point of being ready to actually go somewhere and do more than just plant a flagpole. Apollo was ridiculously ahead of its time and was not sustainable. The entire stack was disposable and it’s pure luck that we never lost a crew. We needed a project like the ISS to do the real work to figure out how to live in space and build long lasting space hardware. The biggest shortcoming of the project is that we never tried centrifugal gravity. There were plans for a module but it never got there.
- pfdietz 2y ago
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- api 2y agoThe new Vogtle reactor in Georgia (the US state) cost about $17B. A single offshore oil platform can cost upwards of $1B and we build hundreds of these. When weighed against the potential payoff fusion is very underfunded. If we make it work we basically have infinite clean energy until the heat death of the universe, not to mention a source of energy that could jet us around the solar system and beyond at speeds far beyond what anything we currently have can achieve. The cost of ITER is not crazy for the energy industry in general. Huge energy projects are very expensive. We spend multiples of that on oil drilling every year.
- baq 2y agoApple is buying back $110B of stock. They could build an Apple iFusion Reactor instead and still buy back $50B.
- willis936 2y agoArguably for much less than that. The current fusion startups are targeting burning plasma and altogether they've raised a tenth as much as ITER's (speculated) 6.5 Bn USD. Granted, very few companies are targeting burning plasma with their current level of funding.
- jiggawatts 2y agoITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”. For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue construction for decades more. Meanwhile, SC magnetic tape technology has moved on, making the entire enterprise a dead-end waste of time and money. They got bogged down in the paperwork and bureaucracy of the “rest of the facility” with no hope of making actual working reactor. There are many instances of this issue in industry, and in my experience large government bureaucracies are pathologically incapable of planning ahead for where the puck will be instead of where the puck was. I like to imagine what would happen if a rich industrialist like Bezos or Musk approached the problem: First, spend a few billion on superconductor tape research and then start building many small reactors that are minimal test beds while in parallel improving the magnets. Only “go big” once the reactor can produce net power. See also: NASA spending billions per launch on the SLS with a couple of test launches per decade while SpaceX spends millions per Starship and plans half a dozen test launches this year!
- XorNot 2y agoSo how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going? That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems". Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.
- willis936 2y agoThey never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.
- pfdietz 2y agoI wonder if some of these whacky military things are actually honeypots for espionage. That's been my assumption for the Navy work on Polywell.
- xcv123 2y agoThat's a ~12 year construction project. 5.4 Billion USD per year is nothing these days. Only 0.006% of annual GDP for a project that has the potential to transform our civilization.
- mdprock 2y agofusion research is underfounded while ITER is overfounded. I worked with it and it is clear that 1) it is too big of a step from the previous nuclear fusion reactor. 2) french regulatory agency is being way too strict 3) the procurement mechanism with in kind contribution has been a total failure.
- pfdietz 2y ago4) even if it "succeeded" it would be a dead end.
- mdprock 2y agonot true. if it works it will demonstrate a huge number of technologies that any type of fusion reactor will face. it is just not efficient in pursuing these
- pfdietz 2y agoAnything exposed to neutrons is not going to be "demonstrated" in the sense of shown to work in an environment of a working production DT reactor. The integrated neutron flux over the lifetime of ITER, assuming it works at all, is just a few percent what would be needed. This will not be sufficient to show the devices or materials are adequate or to conduct necessary reliability growth. There is the larger issue of whether anything like ITER, with solid surfaces exposed to DT neutron flux, could ever be successful. ITER itself is very far out of the running as a prototype for a competitive source of heat, with volumetric power density of the reactor 400x lower than existing PWRs. A substantial part of that problem is limits on power/area through the exposed surfaces.
- mdprock 2y agosome material in iter are not relevant for future reactors, true. But some yes and will face a fluence that is n order of magnitudes higher than what has been tested in jet, the most powerful tokamak so far. so it's a "half-way" demonstration. in any case materials are not everything, iter will test remote handling, breeding, long pulses, etc etc. we can argue that tokamak are not the right path but at the moment is the most advanced so it is worth pursuing it.
- CalRobert 2y agoIf you're the type to read comments before the article itself, do yourself a favour and click over if only for the fantastic, sci-fi level design of this device. Incredibly cool-looking.
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- jcims 2y agoGave me Contact vibes. Love it!
- GordonS 2y agoWow. It almost looks alien - insanely cool, and thanks for the push, it's quite an interesting article.
- exochrono 2y agoI love the juxtaposition in one of the first pictures of this super advanced contraption being rolled into place using plywood and logs. It totally looks like it could be a still from the a movie where medieval humans discover some sort of crazy alien artifact and drag it back home to put in the middle of their town as a trophy.
- relaxing 2y agoThese Big Science projects give me Akira vibes.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThese are good stories to keep in mind when your/our much smaller passion projects get killed by management. Life moves on.
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- willis936 2y agoI worked at a fusion lab at UW Madison for a few years. There is a statue of these mirror magnets (with a poetically broken water display). The way MFTF funding cut as soon as it was complete was a generational shock to fusion researchers. The taste still hasn't left peoples' mouths.
- jethkl 2y agoThe engineering hall statue! Thank you for posting your comment. I thought it was an abstract sculpture trying look "engineery". But it's a realistic representation of a cultural wound, and it is a warning. https://engineering.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Kids-by-fountain-Presentation-169-1024x576.png https://engineering.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Kids...
- actionfromafar 2y ago“No deed of honor is commemorated here”
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- nullc 2y agoFour thousand years from now, P-Cygnian explorers arrive to find a desolate Earth-- the evidence of mankind is spread far and wide but no humans remain. Archeologists are convinced that this planet was home to yet another civilization that killed itself fighting for access to energy ... or at least they were convinced, until they found The Artifact. Every known civilization inevitably discovers the same design for fusion power or dies before it makes it that far: apparently it's the only one that works. And there it is on earth, in statue form, at the bottom of an excavation pit recognizable to any student of physics. What happened here?
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- SaberTail 2y ago> Only in December of 2022 did scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announce that they had achieved the first recorded fusion reaction with a net energy gain We've been achieving fusion reactions with net energy gain since the 1950s, when hydrogen bombs were developed. And, on top of that, the achievement they're talking about was more energy out than light energy put in from lasers. The NIF lasers are not anywhere close to 100% efficient at converting energy to light, and so it was not actually net energy positive. NIF is not going to lead to fusion power. That's not the point. Fusion bombs are primarily an engineering problem. There's lots of plasma physics going on that is very difficult to simulate with a computer, and you need real world data to inform the simulations to make sure they're working properly. That's what NIF is for. Instead of having to blow up a nuclear bomb, and violating test ban treaties, NIF can produce that data. And with the PR shine of tying it to fusion energy.
- daedrdev 2y agoWe already have enough nukes to glass the world several times over.
- jvanderbot 2y agoI don't understand your comment at all. It doesn't seem to me that GP was suggesting more bombs, just suggesting more testing and letting bomb makers use all their available tools and funding on it.
- pfdietz 2y agoThis is not true.
- dekhn 2y agoThat may have been true in the past but the major nuclear arsenals are much smaller, and the yields much lower, with the intent of incapacitating an enemy, not destroying the entire world.
- Terr_ 2y agoI doubt you meant that literally, but just to illustrate the gap, let's consider what it would require for just one glassing. World land area is ~149,000,000 km². Acknowledged nuclear warheads are ~13,000. So the average single warhead would somehow need to "glass"--however, thoroughly or deeply you choose to define that--over 11,000 km². For context, that's about one US state of Connecticut or the nation of Qatar. ... So you might say I'm a "glass is nowhere even close to half-full" kinda guy.
- keepamovin 2y agoThis is such a tragedy. So ridiculous it just wreaks of corruption. Energy industry threatened by new tech. To not even turn it on? And collect the data? Like the Darkstar Mach 10 test day shutdown scene by the “Drone Ranger” in Top Gun: Maverick Oh well perhaps if the magnet mirrors still exist they can be repurposed by the Guggenheim for an installation. Beautiful sculpture!! Hehe :)
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- doubloon 2y ago"we must bring the deficit under control," that's funny because Reaganomics was the beginning of the "deficits dont matter" wing of the Republican party.
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- pstuart 2y agoaka The Two Santas.
- api 2y agoIt was also the start of politically weaponized Keynesianism. When Republicans are in power they spend massively to stoke the economy while using deficit hawk rhetoric. When they lose power they blame the ensuing deficits on Democrats. Works incredibly well because people don’t look beneath the headlines.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoThe two Santas theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Claus_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Wanniski#The_Two_Santa_Cl...
- willis936 2y agoNot to be confused with the Futurama episode named after this theory, written by Bob Odenkirk, and that definitely lives rent free in my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Santas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Santas
- scapp 2y ago*Bill Odenkirk. Bob is his brother
- FiatLuxDave 2y agoBeautiful pictures, but I felt that the post was lacking in mention of Post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_F._Post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_F._Post
- pfdietz 2y agoThe father of actress Markie Post from "Night Court".
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- fnordpiglet 2y ago“This is frustrating, and perhaps not the best use of our national talent and resources, but we must bring the deficit under control,” so said all accountants when in charge of anything.
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- airstrike 2y agolooks straight out of Control (the game) <They/We must persist/fight back until net power/control is achieved>
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- Linda231 2y ago[dead]
- pfdietz 2y agoIf I understand correctly (and I'm not sure I am), what killed MFTF was they pushed ahead too fast. They didn't find all the instabilities before they started building it. Since then, the instability that killed it (DCLC) has been understood and they've found a way to design the system to avoid it. So mirrors are being worked on still, they just don't look like MFTF. https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror21.pdf https://plasma.physics.swarthmore.edu/brownpapers/WHAMmirror... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374070078_Physics_basis_for_the_Wisconsin_HTS_Axisymmetric_Mirror_WHAM https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374070078_Physics_b... https://realtafusion.com/ https://realtafusion.com/
- willis936 2y agoWouldn't that have come to light within the first few campaigns? It's difficult to justify spending the capital on an experiment that is never run, regardless of how wise it was to make compared to other experiments.
- Zardoz84 2y agoI was always asking what happened with the magnetic mirror experiments about fusion. I only know about, what was in a book that I read when I was young. I think that was the "The fusion quest"