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> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars > government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other missi
by Oculus 13y ago
> led NIF's critics to label the facility an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars
> government shifted NIF away from its fusion goals to focus on its other mission: simulating the conditions inside nuclear weapons
I think right there lies the problem with our world. People take up more issue with a multi-billion dollar research facility for science than one for military applications. If we spent a small fraction of the world's military spending on these big, as Google likes to put it, moonshot projects we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future vs. waiting many, many decades (if not centuries).
- pfraze 13y agoJust want to toss in, I think military applications are much easier for the layman to conceptualize. You hear science research and your gut doesn't send any strong signals.
- valarauca1 13y agoThe cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. B-2 bomber program cost 44.75 billion[1] LHC cost ~7.5 Billion Euro ~9billion USD.[2] [1] http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm http://www.fas.org/man/gao/nsiad97181.htm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider#Cost
- Oculus 13y agoThe B-2 Bomber is child's play compared to the F-35's 1 Trillion USD program [1], but the comparison to the LHC's pricetag really puts things in prespective. 1: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighter-idUSBRE82S03L20120329 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-lockheed-fighte...
- dmix 13y agoOr even better failed military projects, such as the $25+ billion spent on a spy satellite project before it was killed in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office#Future_Imagery_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
- amcnett 13y agoThe F-35 is not exactly a resounding success: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/flawed-f-35-fighter-too-big-to-kill-as-lockheed-hooks-45-states.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/flawed-f-35-fighter...
- protomyth 13y agoNo, at this point we should have built more F-22s for air-to-air. Strange how the "cheap" program is now the expensive one.
- arethuza 13y agoIt must be a resounding success - the UK is about to commit to buying some - like we committed to buying Skybolt and the F-111 (cancelling the awesome home grown TSR 2 in the process): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2
- deletes 13y agoYeah... I see no benefit in those, having a few more colliders instead would be really great. Or just start building the next version already!
- Zancarius 13y ago> Yeah... I see no benefit in those, having a few more colliders instead would be really great. That's because you're seeing it through the lens of our time. Remember, the B-2, and many other programs including the F-22, were devised during the trailing end of the Cold War (edit: that's actually a lie; the call for contracts and other such nonsense that would lead to the B-2 started in the 70s, and the F-22 program had existed in some form since the very early 80s). Whatever your conviction about whether or not such things should exist, government (and their militaries) in particular has a great deal of inertia, both in terms of expenditures and policies. So while both programs were in full swing during the collapse of the USSR, that era is primarily what laid the groundwork for such expenses. Personally, I'm a fan of both. I love the hardware used in high energy physics. And I love military hardware. If I were about 15 years younger and lived in a wetter climate, I'd go outside and splash in the mud right now. ;)
- Noughmad 13y agoThe Supercoducting Supercollider was started during the Cold War too, but that didn't stop anyone from cancelling it half-way through.
- deletes 13y agoCan I just say, that Superconducting Supercollider is the most awesome name for a device ever, and should be used for the next version.
- Zancarius 13y agoThen they should hire Ellen McLain, the voice actress who did GLaDoS, to narrate a documentary on the Super-conducting Super-collider.
- Gravityloss 13y agoHere's another article that looks at some acquisition programs just by the US Marines. Navy, Army and Air Force acquisitions are often much bigger. Scroll for the tables. http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/ace-ate-marine-corps http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/ace-ate-marine-co...
- adventured 13y agoI'd like to have a few more satellites that have the impact of a hubble. That cost ~$4b inflation adjusted.
- gnoway 13y agoDoes this adjust for inflation? Because I think if not, these numbers are even more alarming.
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago> The cost of the B-2 Bomber program has cost as much as ~5 Large Hadron Colliders. This is the kind of thing that makes me really wanna ragequit on human nature.
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoTotally agree. Just so you know, the purpose of the NIF was for military testing right from the beginning. The reason it initially got funded (shortly after the end of the cold war) was to help with stockpile stewardship (making sure our aging weapons still work via simulation, without having to do actual weapon tests). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_emerges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#NIF_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_Stewardship_and_Management_Program#Stockpile_Stewardship_and_Management_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_Stewardship_and_Manag...
- gwern 13y agoOne of my favorite novels, Carter Scholz's _Radiance_, spends much of its length all on NIF and this controversy, actually: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2002-radiance http://www.gwern.net/docs/2002-radiance
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoWow, sounds like an exciting premise!
- gwern 13y agoOh, it's not that exciting. Much of the book is on the corruption of science by funding pressures and sponsors, so it's more of a slow corrosive burn than action.
- icegreentea 13y agoDo not want to argue with the main thrust of your argument (because I agree with it), but at least part of the reason why people had an issue with the NIF as energy research, but less so as a nuclear test simulator is because the NIF as a device is pretty clearly designed to simulate nuclear detonations. If the problem is "you're wasting taxpayer money", the issue isn't the dollar amount spent, its the return on the money. As a science experiment, the return of the NIF is probably pretty crappy. As a nuclear arms tester, its almost invaluable (infinite return!!!) if you accept the dual propositions that America should obey its nuclear test treaties obligations, and that America gains significant benefits from maintaining their nuclear arsenal. The NIF was clearly built to maintain America's nuclear arms capabilities, both in providing employment to nuclear physicists, as well as maintaining the viability of the current stockpile. It was practically transparent from the beginning.
- twelvechairs 13y agothere's two ways you can take 'return on investment' - the wholistic qualitative way (if x has a tiny chance of improving the whole world then its worth it) or the narrow quantitative way (once we research it, we'l probably have to give x away basically for free and its is likely not to work out anyway and will take years so its practically valueless to our organisation on this years financial model). unfortunately the latter is used almost exclusively. even in public organisations who should be able to take the broader of public good.
- chc 13y ago"Return on investment" generally means what you get back for what you put in. Both quality and quantity matter and I think this is often recognized, but if you're getting essentially nothing, it doesn't matter what quality of nothing you get.
- twelvechairs 13y agoyeah - perhaps to better word what I said 'return on investment' for a public body should include a broad definition of 'what you get back' as in 'what the public gets back' not just 'what the agency gets back'. the latter is generally easier to quantify and easy to quantify things are easy to consider and contrast.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoNot necessarily true. A lot of great innovations have originated from military research. War necessitates innovation. Not to say that we should just funnel everything into the military, but one should not underestimate its importance in the technological landscape.
- Kroem3r 13y agoThis seems like a myth to me. Radar? Rocket engines? Turing? Stealth bomber technology? Nuclear powered aircraft carriers? ICBMs? Stuff that was happening regardless of a war and stuff that was nearly useless. Perhaps military first adopters are a net positive; like, the first buyers of a technology who will pay top dollar for working prototypes. But what on the original innovation side can you actually attribute?
- DougMerritt 13y agoLong wavelength radar pre-dated WWII, but it was barely useful and required shore-mounted towers. Short wave radar, as used on planes ever since, was developed as part of the war effort by the MIT Radiation Lab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Laboratory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Laboratory Rocket engines were known before WWII (a thousand years ago in China, and efforts like Goddard in the early 20th C), but you can't disregard the Nazi Germany invention of the V2 just because of that; it was a big deal, not just a fleshing out of prototypes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#World_War_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket#World_War_II "Development of stealth technology likely began in Germany during World War II" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_aircraft Later stealth, and nuclear carriers, and ICBMs, were a result of the cold war. I don't see how it matters whether the war is hot or cold. I'll grant you Turing (aside from crypto), not that anyone is claiming differently. The Internet directly arose from the Arpanet, which was purely a DARPA (Department of Defense) project, and there are lots of other well known examples. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet > stuff that was nearly useless. Citation needed. > But what on the original innovation side can you actually attribute? Short wavelength radar is inarguable, regardless of whether cold wars count.
- lisper 13y agoThe problem with sinking a lot of money into science is that it only pays dividends if solutions to the big problems actually exist. They may not. It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale. The only way to find out for sure is the hard (and expensive) way. By way of contrast, when it comes to military technology you're not competing with nature, only with other humans, and so a "solution" (if you'll excuse the irony) is almost certain to be found by one side or the other.
- VladRussian2 13y ago> It may in fact not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small (relative to a star) scale. the H-bomb is better-than-breakeven and much smaller than star scale. What you say may be true for Tokamak like confinement schemes whereis H-bomb is inertial confinement, and it works. And it is pretty clear that inertial confinement in several orders of magnitude smaller scale than H-bomb would work too. Look at Sandia Z-machine - an order of magnitude up, and it would get breakeven. Not that anybody really needs it :)
- lisper 13y agoOK, let me be more precise: it may not be possible to do better-than-breakeven fusion on a small scale in a way that makes the resulting energy safely harnessable for useful work.
- arethuza 13y agoJET (Joint European Torus) achieved a Q of 0.7 - with break-even being defined as a Q of 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus ITER is aiming for a Q of 5 for 480 seconds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- wcoenen 13y ago> we could probably solve some really fundamental world problems (i.e. energy, climate change) in the near future I have a feeling that if we had fusion plants providing limitless cheap power, we'd get back on an 8% yearly growth track for energy consumption, like with oil consumption before 1970. Then within a century or so, we'd be producing an amount of power equivalent to 20% of what the earth receives from the sun. It would give a whole new meaning to "global warming".
- yaur 13y agoAn old article on exactly that which I found interesting http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e... To sum it up "Free energy" buys us about 300-400 years of growth before thermodynamics kicks our ass.
- DennisP 13y agoFortunately, if we had a lot more cheap energy we could probably get to space pretty easily too. So a lot of the growth wouldn't be happening on this planet.
- yaur 13y agoCovered by the linked article to an extent and Asimov IIRC. Exponential growth requires FTL travel within a period shorter than recorded history even with free energy + space travel.
- DennisP 13y agoRight, I wasn't suggesting it could continue indefinitely, just that the limit is well beyond this planet. Solar system at least, maybe nearby stars.
- YokoZar 13y agoIt is a tiny bit unreasonable to project continuous exponential growth in human energy usage on such a ridiculously long timescale. It's like arguing that Moore's law will continue for another 200 years.
- drjesusphd 13y agoFusion is and always has been a PR excuse for NIF. Their purpose never been anything but "Stockpile Stewardship". Anyone who has been paying attention has known this for decades.
- javert 13y agoWe could also tackle those fundamental world problems if we had about 100 Bill Gateses. But we don't, because of how much the government loots. I'm not an anarchist, so I do believe there should be a government that provides military defense. I'm not a progressive, so I don't believe the government should try to loot people to try to solve other people's pet problems.