9 ms·

Plasma physics: The fusion upstarts

107 points by alphanumeric0 12y ago

slacka 12y ago
It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean, safe, energy independence. At least the private investors are backing non-tokamaks fusion research, but it does seem that Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk on the subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg
- jotm 12y ago
  Well, war is a proven way to make lots of money. Nuclear fusion is an uncertainty in the small minds of those who seek wealth and power only for themselves.
  - api 12y ago
    War is a proven way to empty the national treasury into the pockets of contractors. That's good if you're a contractor but it's a net loss for the rest of us.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  I wonder how much strife would come about should we develop such technology. It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. It would hurt companies who are in this trade, let alone those who create competitive energy technologies. By the same token, many countries are heavily vested in the businesses within their domain being able to complete. Finally, a safe and clean source of energy would likely become fairly cheap quickly which would boost production destabilizing the global economy. If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves?
  - DennisP 12y ago
    I doubt any country could keep it to themselves. Even if we tried and avoided espionage, once it's proven to work economically every major country would ramp up research. (But espionage would happen pretty quickly. We didn't even manage to keep the H-bomb secret for long.) I think the strife involved would be much less than we're having now from limited fossil supplies...and far less than we'll have a few decades now from climate change.
  - simonebrunozzi 12y ago
    It would not be the first time that this happens in history. :)
  - justin66 12y ago
    > It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. So the main risk would be... war in the middle east, unrest in Africa, that sort of thing? Let's hope that never happens.
  - WhoBeI 12y ago
    > If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves? I sure hope not because they shouldn't. Fusion has the potential to solve many environmental problems and since those problems typically don't give a shit about borders keeping it to yourself would be stupid.
  - stcredzero 12y ago
    It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. If I were the Saudis and the petroleum multinationals, I would be pouring money into researching industrial processes that will only be practical once fusion is invented. Then once fusion is invented, those companies would stand to make a killing.
- api 12y ago
  I think there are factors other than oil at work. Given the extreme fundamentalist religiosity of the Bush administration, I've suspected for quite some time that Iraq was driven by religious imperatives at the top with 9/11 and possibly oil used as rationalizations. I think it's well within the realm of possibility that the U.S. spent some number of trillions (I've heard from one to four) of dollars of taxpayer money to attempt to initiate the Biblical apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Since WWII every major military event or war has been seen by that crowd as a sign that "it is the hour of the time," 9/11 certainly included. The fact that it happened right about at the millennium added even more fuel to the fire. Throughout history leaders have often squandered the wealth of their kingdoms on crazy religious crusades, and being either rich or politically powerful does not exclude one from believing in things that are completely bat-guano insane. It's one of the only explanations for Iraq that really makes sense to me. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it would have been far cheaper to develop better oil drilling technology here at home than to invade for oil. The war cost more than developing the entire Bakken play. It would also have been cheaper and ultimately more effective to deploy a missile defense shield and better border screening for hazardous materials if we were really concerned about WMDs. For a trillion dollars we could likely field Reagan's Star Wars dream complete with a staffed orbital space laser command.
  - josho 12y ago
    I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I'll spare the details, but the premise is essentially all driven by economics and power. An Iraq aligned with the US means more to US corporations and power over the next few decades than the cost of the war. If you examine history, you'll find that all too often religious motivations have been more about power than gods.
    - api 12y ago
      Hmm... so you think it's just pure realpolitik and long-term geostrategic stuff. It just seems awfully expensive for that. Of course I suppose it's possible that they actually thought it would be easy and that the Iraqis would just cheer us as we rolled in.
- gd1 12y ago
  Does that not lead you to question your assumption that the war was "for oil in Iraq"?
  - lobster_johnson 12y ago
    There is a lot of evidence that it was to secure the US' access to oil. Before Bush was elected, there was a lot of lobbying by Chalabi, Wolfowitz and others (see Richard Bonin's fantastic Arrows of the Night) to create the (false) impression that Saddam was an unstable warmonger who was amassing WMDs and preparing another invasion. The fear was that Saddam -- incredible as it sounds today, knowing what we now know -- was capable of taking Kuwait again and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which would have been disastrous for the US.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      There is plenty of (true) evidence to support the impression Saddam was an unstable warmonger.
      - lisper 12y ago
        Unlike the stable non-warmongers who have replaced him.
      - brianbreslin 12y ago
        Haven't we proven ourselves (us) to be warmongers too? :-(
      - lobster_johnson 12y ago
        Was. And warmonger he may have been, but a stable one. The evidence uncovered after the invasion shows that Saddam's Iraq had been bled dry by sanctions, and that Saddam's frustrations with forced weapons inspectors had been genuine (the chemical weapons were destroyed long ago) all along; by the late 90s, Iraq was toothless. Saddam could not have staged another war if he wanted to. Clinton didn't oust Saddam's precisely because it wasn't necessary; Iraq provided stability in an historically unstable region. The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information. The Pentagon (I think it was) had run simulated war games, every one of which predicted an outcome very much like today. Saddam was a dictator who massacred his own people, but his regime resulted in far fewer casualties than the invasion and subsequent chaos.
- mrb 12y ago
  Personally I really wish more scientists looked into Nickel-Hydrogen fusion: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 The phenomenon observed is so far unexplained... (Unfortunately the field is tarnished by one scientist who has a bad reputation who does research in this domain.)
  - tinco 12y ago
    Was the phenomenon ever independently reproduced?
    - sanswork 12y ago
      No, but people for some reason still believe him after he has spent the past few years making up excuse after excuse for why it couldn't be tested independently.
    - mrb 12y ago
      Yes (note: most people who have replicated it distinguish it from "cold fusion" - obviously this is controversial.) In 1994 Thermacore, under contract by the US Air Force, observed anomalous heat: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf In 1996 the CERN observed both (1) excess heat (however they theorize it is caused by local variations of its thermal characteristics) and (2) hydrogen absorption (which they concede is unexplained): http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf In 2011 Celani observed excess heat: http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/papers/Celani-Cu-Ni-Mn-AlloyWires-Paper-ICCF17-pp.pdf http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/pap... There are some other groups who have reproduced it but the quality of their research vary a lot (for an overview see http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december-30-2011 http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december...). The problem is that it remains still hard to replicate. Zawodny (from the NASA Langley Research Center) has some theories about why, see slide 17: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Zawodny-GRC-LENR-Workshop.pdf http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Za...
    - verroq 12y ago
- rfugger 12y ago
  The war made defense contractors rich, and drove up the price of oil, which continues to this day to make oil companies rich. The Bush administration had strong ties to defense contractors and the oil industry. Dots = connected.
  - waps 12y ago
    Total world oil production has been decreasing since 2005, despite all the good news you hear. With the Iraqi production, the curve is going down but is nearly flat. That lead to oil prices of $100/barrel not going down. It hasn't gone up due to wars in the middle east, sadly. I realize people keep bringing that up, but it's not true. A few spikes, yes, the actual rise, no. Without Iraq that would have been 2.5-3 mbbl/day less, or a 3.5% drop instead of a 0.3% drop. I seem to remember from my economics class that oil demand is very inelastic. So if a 0.3% drop in supply leads to a price doubling/tripling (depending on the basis for that), what would a 3.5% drop have done ? So while I do not pretend to know the intentions of America, I'm scared to think what would have happened without it. If oil was the target, the war was a success (for the world as a whole, America only really profited by not seeing the world go down), and lack of success would have meant total disaster. The timing was near-perfect as well. But fact is, the only thing the Iraq war brought was a delay, or 2-3, maybe 5 years. The US shale boom is another maybe 5 year delay. Given that we're very close to the end of the second delay, we need to come up with something quick. Unless of course you'd like to see Russia take outright control of Western Europe, and have more middle eastern resource wars.
    - api 12y ago
      I blame conservatives for this too. They laughed for 50 years at all the hippies and eggheads who talked about the need for alternative energy. One of Reagan's first acts was to take the solar panels off the White House.
      - tsotha 12y ago
        Conservatives are just less interested in empty symbolic gestures.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  > US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq We lined the pockets of the military industrial complex. Think of it simply as taking a nice percentage out of everyone's pocket and handing it off to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, GD, etc. As part of that transfer it was necessary to kill a good number of people on both sides.
- orbifold 12y ago
  Unfortunately fusion research is not something you can throw unlimited funds at and it would immediately be a reality. There are still hard unsolved problems and the amount people actually capable of solving them is limited and would not change significantly, if their work were better compensated. Something like Wendelstein 7-X took a decade of planning and building because they had to invent the manufacturing tools and construction methods as they went along, not because they had not enough money to finance the project.
  - DennisP 12y ago
    Stellerators like the 7-X are the most complicated reactors to build of any design we have. Fusion has been severely limited by funding for a long time. Last year I read a history of the U.S. fusion program by Stephen O. Dean, one of the major figures involved. It was a sad, repeated story of scientific triumphs followed immediately by drastic budget cuts. In one case, we spent $372 million on a fusion reactor, completed it, then cancelled the program and dismantled it without running a single experiment. Right now most of our money is going to ITER. Alternate approaches are starved. MIT's levitated dipole was cancelled, UW's FRC was reduced to computational studies, etc. Even MIT's Alcator C-Mod, one of our leading tokamaks, keeps getting threatened with cancellation. It's got the strongest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any tokamak in the world, and a couple years ago made a pretty major breakthrough in tokamak physics (I-mode). If fusion had more copious funding, then certainly a lot more physics grad students would take up the field. It's not like plasma physics is uniquely difficult. http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technology/dp/1461460360 http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technolo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Back in 2011 there was a Popular Science blurb on General Fusion and Jeff Bezos' investment in them. I looked through papers and news reports about them and was reminded of the comment in the movie "National Treasure" by Jon Voight discussing this potentially mythical treasure, "... another clue, and then another clue after that, its nothing but clues!" So much of the 'upstart' fusion research is just that, pure research trying to learn enough so that you can begin to answer questions like "Exactly how would we get energy out of this in useful way?" The numbers are small, $10M here, $15M there, $3-4M over there. But there is so much risk stacked on top of risk that the only funds available are literally funds that the owner expects about as much return as they would get by making a bonfire out of them, with the exception the bonfire would keep them warm for one night. I was hoping Google's R<C effort would help with this but was disappointed in how that fund was managed with regard to new science. Perhaps its going to require Elon Musk to get involved :-) [1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-invests-195-million-nuclear-fusion-technology?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=4&con=jeff-bezos-invests-195-million-in-general-fusions-nuclear-technology http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-inv...
- WhoBeI 12y ago
  They did find the treasure in the end though. :)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
debt 12y ago
"Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a website." It doesn't even have a website?! Top secret indeed!
- scottlocklin 12y ago
  The patents are public record, and very informative. I may do a blog on it at some point.
- phazmatis 12y ago
  Wow, that's a new type of hipster startup cred. "We're post-web". All joking aside, I'm guessing startups like this play in a space where people (gov. contractors) aren't really impressed by a website.
- FiatLuxDave 12y ago
  As a former fusion startup founder, I'd like to say a word about "Stealth Mode". Fusion startups have an even worse failure rate than regular startups. So far its pretty much 100%. And most fusion startups operate in a fairly secretive fashion. But, I can say from personal experience, that if you keep everything too secret, then if and when failure occurs, you may not have much you can point to and say "I did that". And that matters when you are picking up the pieces and trying to go on with your life afterwards. You may need to find a job doing something else, and the words "Stealth Mode startup" don't cut much cheese outside the Valley. This is also true for non-fusion startups. Now, no founder thinks that they are going to fail, or else why would you start in the first place? But failure is always a possibility. Nobody wants to spend energy on backup plans. Its best to focus on getting the important job done. But a bit of publicity is often helpful for other reasons (attracting funding and customers, and importantly attracting possibly helpful criticism as well), and provides value in case of failure as well. I think the current crop of fusion startups are doing a better job of balancing publicity with secrecy than I did. I just wanted to say something about this because I know that there are a lot more non-fusion startups reading this than fusion ones, and this lesson is appropriate to all startups. My post-fusion career would likely have been easier had I been able to point to a news article or two about what I had spent 5 years on. Outside of DFJ, pretty much nobody in the Valley knew who we were. Which means that years later now that I am working on a new startup, I have few contacts in the Valley ecosystem. One advantage of Stealth Mode is that it spares you the embarrassment of public failure. This can seem like a big deal at the time - when you're living in your car and your girlfriend leaves you, not having some journalist harping on how stupid you were to even think you had a chance is one less thing to cry about. But years later, you'll know that you would have been able to handle it, and the public record that you were willing to swing for the bleachers may come in handy.
scythe 12y ago
> Igniting this p–11B fuel would require temperatures of about a billion kelvin, It's also _impossible_ to reach break-even with p-11B in _any_ reactor design based on known concepts (with one exception [1]). This result, among other no-go results regarding non-Maxwellian fusion, was a major point in Todd Rider's PhD thesis: "Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium", PhD Dissertation (MIT), Todd Rider, 1995. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf (When it comes to reducing neutron flux in fusion reactors, the smart money is on d-3He. Everything else has too small of a cross-section.) [1]: Ultradense matter represents one of the few loopholes identified by Rider which might actually be achievable. However, Rider did not attempt to confirm its feasibility; it simply wasn't relevant to that particular paper, and there is a very good argument that fusion in ultradense matter is nothing like "known" physics.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Everybody in the field is well aware of Rider. He's not necessarily the last word on the subject. In the case of focus fusion, they're banking on extreme magnetic fields in the plasmoid suppressing x-ray production. And Bussard claimed that the polywell skirted around Rider's assumptions, though I don't know the details. Don't know about Tri-Alpha, but they have a large and fairly distinguished staff of fusion Ph.D.s so I assume they've heard of Rider too.
aerovistae 12y ago
It's funny because Elon Musk said once "I think fusion is probably not as hard as everyone thinks; I might work on that someday." And when he does, he'll get it right. Since that's what he does. Until he turns his attention to it, though, I'm skeptical.
- aerovistae 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM
- ufmace 12y ago
  It doesn't seem to match up well with the things that he's done so far. Both SpaceX and Tesla are pretty much doing the same old things in a new way, and are meant to be profitable early on and maintain that profitability while also pushing ahead the state of the art. Fusion seems to be a different animal in that way - a lot of money is going to have to be thrown into various seemingly bottomless pits before somebody figures out how to do it.
- schwap 12y ago
  I think the apotheosis of Elon Musk is getting out of hand a wee bit. Scientific advances have kind of been happening for centuries without him.
  - aerovistae 12y ago
    Yep, what he's done has been pretty unremarkable. Woulda happened anyway, in more or less the same timeline. In fact I don't even get why he's famous.
    - BugBrother 12y ago
      Was that irony? People have been arguing since the 1980s (if you count the original claims of the spaces shuttle, since the 1970s) that lower launch costs are possible. But only Musk delivered. You really think the established launch companies would have done that, as long as they earned lots of money doing business as usual? (Now their business model is dead, so they use their influence to get long time contracts with the US military just before SpaceX's rockets are verified...) It would be interesting to see what you base your claims on?
jobu 12y ago
“The big experiments have been funded for decades, so there's little chance they won't meet their milestones,” says John Slough, a plasma physicist at the University of Washington. “If they start funding these alternatives, all the uncertainties come back.” When I read that line it made me wonder what solar/wind energy scientists think about funding any fusion research.
- orbifold 12y ago
  Unlike fusion, neither solar nor wind energy scientists have any really hard problems to solve. Engineering problems sure, bot not scientific problems. Fusion research is about creating a stable ministar on earth, since normally stars are self-gravitating and in vacuum, this turns out to be a rather hard problem. The basic principle behind solar power is understood since 1905 and wind mills have been used since forever.
curtis 12y ago
Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion wasn't mentioned in the article, but it's also pretty interesting -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusio.... It's a hybrid approach using both inertial and magnetic confinement.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
BatFastard 12y ago
Personally I find all of the money we have put into Uranium fission and Fusion as a tremendous waste of money. It appears we have no way of decommissioning the plants, or disposing of the waste, of course there is the risk of further accidents. If we have to use nuclear decay, at least go with Thorium. Solar panels, solar towers, wind, and tidal have a much lower cost and lower environmental impact. But they do lack the "cool" factor, and the military applications. Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years.
- prestadige 12y ago
  >Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years. Michael Labgerge's chart gives a more complete picture of progress in fusion research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9kC1yRnLQ#t=4m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9kC1yRnLQ#t=4m40s
- bane 12y ago
  They also lack the base load characteristics of nuke plants.
  - stephen_g 12y ago
    What's a nuke plant? As far as I am aware, there is no such thing. Perhaps you mean a nuclear power station?
    - bane 12y ago
      I don't know why the downvotes. You must not be a native English Speaker. Let me help. "Nuke Plant" is a common idiomatic phrase for saying "Nuclear Power Plant". Let me break it down into parts for you: "Nuke" is the common short form for "Nuclear" in English. "Plant" is being used in the dictionary meaning "a place where an industrial or manufacturing process takes place" "Power" is redundant in the phrase and omitted. In terms of usage: "Nuclear Power Plant", "Nuclear Power Station", and "Nuke Plant" are all acceptable, but frequency of usage is different. "Nuke Station" is not normally used in this meaning, but people will understand it if you use it. "Nuclear Power Plant" is about 4 times more common in normal usage in English than "Nuclear Power Station". "Nuke Plant" and "Nuclear Power Station" are used with about the same frequency. "Nuke Station" is used very infrequently. You can find examples of it, but it's less than 1% of usage in current English. Here's a list of news articles that use "Nuke Plant" so you can see usage and become familiar with how the term is used. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=%22nuke+plant%22&oq=%22nuke+plant%22&gs_l=news-cc.3...0.0.0.478.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0....

107 points by alphanumeric0 12y ago

It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean, safe, energy independence. At least the private investors are backing non-tokamaks fusion research, but it does seem that Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk on the subject. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg

jotm 12y ago
Well, war is a proven way to make lots of money. Nuclear fusion is an uncertainty in the small minds of those who seek wealth and power only for themselves.
- api 12y ago
  War is a proven way to empty the national treasury into the pockets of contractors. That's good if you're a contractor but it's a net loss for the rest of us.
Shivetya 12y ago
I wonder how much strife would come about should we develop such technology. It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. It would hurt companies who are in this trade, let alone those who create competitive energy technologies. By the same token, many countries are heavily vested in the businesses within their domain being able to complete. Finally, a safe and clean source of energy would likely become fairly cheap quickly which would boost production destabilizing the global economy. If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves?
- DennisP 12y ago
  I doubt any country could keep it to themselves. Even if we tried and avoided espionage, once it's proven to work economically every major country would ramp up research. (But espionage would happen pretty quickly. We didn't even manage to keep the H-bomb secret for long.) I think the strife involved would be much less than we're having now from limited fossil supplies...and far less than we'll have a few decades now from climate change.
- simonebrunozzi 12y ago
  It would not be the first time that this happens in history. :)
- justin66 12y ago
  > It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. So the main risk would be... war in the middle east, unrest in Africa, that sort of thing? Let's hope that never happens.
- WhoBeI 12y ago
  > If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves? I sure hope not because they shouldn't. Fusion has the potential to solve many environmental problems and since those problems typically don't give a shit about borders keeping it to yourself would be stupid.
- stcredzero 12y ago
  It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. If I were the Saudis and the petroleum multinationals, I would be pouring money into researching industrial processes that will only be practical once fusion is invented. Then once fusion is invented, those companies would stand to make a killing.
api 12y ago
I think there are factors other than oil at work. Given the extreme fundamentalist religiosity of the Bush administration, I've suspected for quite some time that Iraq was driven by religious imperatives at the top with 9/11 and possibly oil used as rationalizations. I think it's well within the realm of possibility that the U.S. spent some number of trillions (I've heard from one to four) of dollars of taxpayer money to attempt to initiate the Biblical apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Since WWII every major military event or war has been seen by that crowd as a sign that "it is the hour of the time," 9/11 certainly included. The fact that it happened right about at the millennium added even more fuel to the fire. Throughout history leaders have often squandered the wealth of their kingdoms on crazy religious crusades, and being either rich or politically powerful does not exclude one from believing in things that are completely bat-guano insane. It's one of the only explanations for Iraq that really makes sense to me. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it would have been far cheaper to develop better oil drilling technology here at home than to invade for oil. The war cost more than developing the entire Bakken play. It would also have been cheaper and ultimately more effective to deploy a missile defense shield and better border screening for hazardous materials if we were really concerned about WMDs. For a trillion dollars we could likely field Reagan's Star Wars dream complete with a staffed orbital space laser command.
- josho 12y ago
  I just finished reading Confessions of an Economic Hitman, I'll spare the details, but the premise is essentially all driven by economics and power. An Iraq aligned with the US means more to US corporations and power over the next few decades than the cost of the war. If you examine history, you'll find that all too often religious motivations have been more about power than gods.
  - api 12y ago
    Hmm... so you think it's just pure realpolitik and long-term geostrategic stuff. It just seems awfully expensive for that. Of course I suppose it's possible that they actually thought it would be easy and that the Iraqis would just cheer us as we rolled in.
gd1 12y ago
Does that not lead you to question your assumption that the war was "for oil in Iraq"?
- lobster_johnson 12y ago
  There is a lot of evidence that it was to secure the US' access to oil. Before Bush was elected, there was a lot of lobbying by Chalabi, Wolfowitz and others (see Richard Bonin's fantastic Arrows of the Night) to create the (false) impression that Saddam was an unstable warmonger who was amassing WMDs and preparing another invasion. The fear was that Saddam -- incredible as it sounds today, knowing what we now know -- was capable of taking Kuwait again and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which would have been disastrous for the US.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    There is plenty of (true) evidence to support the impression Saddam was an unstable warmonger.
    - lisper 12y ago
      Unlike the stable non-warmongers who have replaced him.
    - brianbreslin 12y ago
      Haven't we proven ourselves (us) to be warmongers too? :-(
    - lobster_johnson 12y ago
      Was. And warmonger he may have been, but a stable one. The evidence uncovered after the invasion shows that Saddam's Iraq had been bled dry by sanctions, and that Saddam's frustrations with forced weapons inspectors had been genuine (the chemical weapons were destroyed long ago) all along; by the late 90s, Iraq was toothless. Saddam could not have staged another war if he wanted to. Clinton didn't oust Saddam's precisely because it wasn't necessary; Iraq provided stability in an historically unstable region. The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information. The Pentagon (I think it was) had run simulated war games, every one of which predicted an outcome very much like today. Saddam was a dictator who massacred his own people, but his regime resulted in far fewer casualties than the invasion and subsequent chaos.
mrb 12y ago
Personally I really wish more scientists looked into Nickel-Hydrogen fusion: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61 The phenomenon observed is so far unexplained... (Unfortunately the field is tarnished by one scientist who has a bad reputation who does research in this domain.)
- tinco 12y ago
  Was the phenomenon ever independently reproduced?
  - sanswork 12y ago
    No, but people for some reason still believe him after he has spent the past few years making up excuse after excuse for why it couldn't be tested independently.
  - mrb 12y ago
    Yes (note: most people who have replicated it distinguish it from "cold fusion" - obviously this is controversial.) In 1994 Thermacore, under contract by the US Air Force, observed anomalous heat: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf In 1996 the CERN observed both (1) excess heat (however they theorize it is caused by local variations of its thermal characteristics) and (2) hydrogen absorption (which they concede is unexplained): http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf In 2011 Celani observed excess heat: http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/papers/Celani-Cu-Ni-Mn-AlloyWires-Paper-ICCF17-pp.pdf http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/pap... There are some other groups who have reproduced it but the quality of their research vary a lot (for an overview see http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december-30-2011 http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december...). The problem is that it remains still hard to replicate. Zawodny (from the NASA Langley Research Center) has some theories about why, see slide 17: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Zawodny-GRC-LENR-Workshop.pdf http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Za...
  - verroq 12y ago
rfugger 12y ago
The war made defense contractors rich, and drove up the price of oil, which continues to this day to make oil companies rich. The Bush administration had strong ties to defense contractors and the oil industry. Dots = connected.
- waps 12y ago
  Total world oil production has been decreasing since 2005, despite all the good news you hear. With the Iraqi production, the curve is going down but is nearly flat. That lead to oil prices of $100/barrel not going down. It hasn't gone up due to wars in the middle east, sadly. I realize people keep bringing that up, but it's not true. A few spikes, yes, the actual rise, no. Without Iraq that would have been 2.5-3 mbbl/day less, or a 3.5% drop instead of a 0.3% drop. I seem to remember from my economics class that oil demand is very inelastic. So if a 0.3% drop in supply leads to a price doubling/tripling (depending on the basis for that), what would a 3.5% drop have done ? So while I do not pretend to know the intentions of America, I'm scared to think what would have happened without it. If oil was the target, the war was a success (for the world as a whole, America only really profited by not seeing the world go down), and lack of success would have meant total disaster. The timing was near-perfect as well. But fact is, the only thing the Iraq war brought was a delay, or 2-3, maybe 5 years. The US shale boom is another maybe 5 year delay. Given that we're very close to the end of the second delay, we need to come up with something quick. Unless of course you'd like to see Russia take outright control of Western Europe, and have more middle eastern resource wars.
  - api 12y ago
    I blame conservatives for this too. They laughed for 50 years at all the hippies and eggheads who talked about the need for alternative energy. One of Reagan's first acts was to take the solar panels off the White House.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      Conservatives are just less interested in empty symbolic gestures.
rdtsc 12y ago
> US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq We lined the pockets of the military industrial complex. Think of it simply as taking a nice percentage out of everyone's pocket and handing it off to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, GD, etc. As part of that transfer it was necessary to kill a good number of people on both sides.
orbifold 12y ago
Unfortunately fusion research is not something you can throw unlimited funds at and it would immediately be a reality. There are still hard unsolved problems and the amount people actually capable of solving them is limited and would not change significantly, if their work were better compensated. Something like Wendelstein 7-X took a decade of planning and building because they had to invent the manufacturing tools and construction methods as they went along, not because they had not enough money to finance the project.
- DennisP 12y ago
  Stellerators like the 7-X are the most complicated reactors to build of any design we have. Fusion has been severely limited by funding for a long time. Last year I read a history of the U.S. fusion program by Stephen O. Dean, one of the major figures involved. It was a sad, repeated story of scientific triumphs followed immediately by drastic budget cuts. In one case, we spent $372 million on a fusion reactor, completed it, then cancelled the program and dismantled it without running a single experiment. Right now most of our money is going to ITER. Alternate approaches are starved. MIT's levitated dipole was cancelled, UW's FRC was reduced to computational studies, etc. Even MIT's Alcator C-Mod, one of our leading tokamaks, keeps getting threatened with cancellation. It's got the strongest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any tokamak in the world, and a couple years ago made a pretty major breakthrough in tokamak physics (I-mode). If fusion had more copious funding, then certainly a lot more physics grad students would take up the field. It's not like plasma physics is uniquely difficult. http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technology/dp/1461460360 http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technolo... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Fusion_Test_Facility

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Back in 2011 there was a Popular Science blurb on General Fusion and Jeff Bezos' investment in them. I looked through papers and news reports about them and was reminded of the comment in the movie "National Treasure" by Jon Voight discussing this potentially mythical treasure, "... another clue, and then another clue after that, its nothing but clues!" So much of the 'upstart' fusion research is just that, pure research trying to learn enough so that you can begin to answer questions like "Exactly how would we get energy out of this in useful way?" The numbers are small, $10M here, $15M there, $3-4M over there. But there is so much risk stacked on top of risk that the only funds available are literally funds that the owner expects about as much return as they would get by making a bonfire out of them, with the exception the bonfire would keep them warm for one night. I was hoping Google's R<C effort would help with this but was disappointed in how that fund was managed with regard to new science. Perhaps its going to require Elon Musk to get involved :-) [1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-invests-195-million-nuclear-fusion-technology?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=4&con=jeff-bezos-invests-195-million-in-general-fusions-nuclear-technology http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-inv...

WhoBeI 12y ago
They did find the treasure in the end though. :)
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debt 12y ago

"Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a website." It doesn't even have a website?! Top secret indeed!

scottlocklin 12y ago
The patents are public record, and very informative. I may do a blog on it at some point.
phazmatis 12y ago
Wow, that's a new type of hipster startup cred. "We're post-web". All joking aside, I'm guessing startups like this play in a space where people (gov. contractors) aren't really impressed by a website.
FiatLuxDave 12y ago
As a former fusion startup founder, I'd like to say a word about "Stealth Mode". Fusion startups have an even worse failure rate than regular startups. So far its pretty much 100%. And most fusion startups operate in a fairly secretive fashion. But, I can say from personal experience, that if you keep everything too secret, then if and when failure occurs, you may not have much you can point to and say "I did that". And that matters when you are picking up the pieces and trying to go on with your life afterwards. You may need to find a job doing something else, and the words "Stealth Mode startup" don't cut much cheese outside the Valley. This is also true for non-fusion startups. Now, no founder thinks that they are going to fail, or else why would you start in the first place? But failure is always a possibility. Nobody wants to spend energy on backup plans. Its best to focus on getting the important job done. But a bit of publicity is often helpful for other reasons (attracting funding and customers, and importantly attracting possibly helpful criticism as well), and provides value in case of failure as well. I think the current crop of fusion startups are doing a better job of balancing publicity with secrecy than I did. I just wanted to say something about this because I know that there are a lot more non-fusion startups reading this than fusion ones, and this lesson is appropriate to all startups. My post-fusion career would likely have been easier had I been able to point to a news article or two about what I had spent 5 years on. Outside of DFJ, pretty much nobody in the Valley knew who we were. Which means that years later now that I am working on a new startup, I have few contacts in the Valley ecosystem. One advantage of Stealth Mode is that it spares you the embarrassment of public failure. This can seem like a big deal at the time - when you're living in your car and your girlfriend leaves you, not having some journalist harping on how stupid you were to even think you had a chance is one less thing to cry about. But years later, you'll know that you would have been able to handle it, and the public record that you were willing to swing for the bleachers may come in handy.

scythe 12y ago

> Igniting this p–11B fuel would require temperatures of about a billion kelvin, It's also _impossible_ to reach break-even with p-11B in _any_ reactor design based on known concepts (with one exception [1]). This result, among other no-go results regarding non-Maxwellian fusion, was a major point in Todd Rider's PhD thesis: "Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium", PhD Dissertation (MIT), Todd Rider, 1995. http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf (When it comes to reducing neutron flux in fusion reactors, the smart money is on d-3He. Everything else has too small of a cross-section.) [1]: Ultradense matter represents one of the few loopholes identified by Rider which might actually be achievable. However, Rider did not attempt to confirm its feasibility; it simply wasn't relevant to that particular paper, and there is a very good argument that fusion in ultradense matter is nothing like "known" physics.

DennisP 12y ago
Everybody in the field is well aware of Rider. He's not necessarily the last word on the subject. In the case of focus fusion, they're banking on extreme magnetic fields in the plasmoid suppressing x-ray production. And Bussard claimed that the polywell skirted around Rider's assumptions, though I don't know the details. Don't know about Tri-Alpha, but they have a large and fairly distinguished staff of fusion Ph.D.s so I assume they've heard of Rider too.

aerovistae 12y ago

It's funny because Elon Musk said once "I think fusion is probably not as hard as everyone thinks; I might work on that someday." And when he does, he'll get it right. Since that's what he does. Until he turns his attention to it, though, I'm skeptical.

aerovistae 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM
ufmace 12y ago
It doesn't seem to match up well with the things that he's done so far. Both SpaceX and Tesla are pretty much doing the same old things in a new way, and are meant to be profitable early on and maintain that profitability while also pushing ahead the state of the art. Fusion seems to be a different animal in that way - a lot of money is going to have to be thrown into various seemingly bottomless pits before somebody figures out how to do it.
schwap 12y ago
I think the apotheosis of Elon Musk is getting out of hand a wee bit. Scientific advances have kind of been happening for centuries without him.
- aerovistae 12y ago
  Yep, what he's done has been pretty unremarkable. Woulda happened anyway, in more or less the same timeline. In fact I don't even get why he's famous.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    Was that irony? People have been arguing since the 1980s (if you count the original claims of the spaces shuttle, since the 1970s) that lower launch costs are possible. But only Musk delivered. You really think the established launch companies would have done that, as long as they earned lots of money doing business as usual? (Now their business model is dead, so they use their influence to get long time contracts with the US military just before SpaceX's rockets are verified...) It would be interesting to see what you base your claims on?

jobu 12y ago

“The big experiments have been funded for decades, so there's little chance they won't meet their milestones,” says John Slough, a plasma physicist at the University of Washington. “If they start funding these alternatives, all the uncertainties come back.” When I read that line it made me wonder what solar/wind energy scientists think about funding any fusion research.

orbifold 12y ago
Unlike fusion, neither solar nor wind energy scientists have any really hard problems to solve. Engineering problems sure, bot not scientific problems. Fusion research is about creating a stable ministar on earth, since normally stars are self-gravitating and in vacuum, this turns out to be a rather hard problem. The basic principle behind solar power is understood since 1905 and wind mills have been used since forever.

curtis 12y ago

Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion wasn't mentioned in the article, but it's also pretty interesting -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusio.... It's a hybrid approach using both inertial and magnetic confinement.

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BatFastard 12y ago

Personally I find all of the money we have put into Uranium fission and Fusion as a tremendous waste of money. It appears we have no way of decommissioning the plants, or disposing of the waste, of course there is the risk of further accidents. If we have to use nuclear decay, at least go with Thorium. Solar panels, solar towers, wind, and tidal have a much lower cost and lower environmental impact. But they do lack the "cool" factor, and the military applications. Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years.

prestadige 12y ago
>Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years. Michael Labgerge's chart gives a more complete picture of progress in fusion research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9kC1yRnLQ#t=4m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9kC1yRnLQ#t=4m40s
bane 12y ago
They also lack the base load characteristics of nuke plants.
- stephen_g 12y ago
  What's a nuke plant? As far as I am aware, there is no such thing. Perhaps you mean a nuclear power station?
  - bane 12y ago
    I don't know why the downvotes. You must not be a native English Speaker. Let me help. "Nuke Plant" is a common idiomatic phrase for saying "Nuclear Power Plant". Let me break it down into parts for you: "Nuke" is the common short form for "Nuclear" in English. "Plant" is being used in the dictionary meaning "a place where an industrial or manufacturing process takes place" "Power" is redundant in the phrase and omitted. In terms of usage: "Nuclear Power Plant", "Nuclear Power Station", and "Nuke Plant" are all acceptable, but frequency of usage is different. "Nuke Station" is not normally used in this meaning, but people will understand it if you use it. "Nuclear Power Plant" is about 4 times more common in normal usage in English than "Nuclear Power Station". "Nuke Plant" and "Nuclear Power Station" are used with about the same frequency. "Nuke Station" is used very infrequently. You can find examples of it, but it's less than 1% of usage in current English. Here's a list of news articles that use "Nuke Plant" so you can see usage and become familiar with how the term is used. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=%22nuke+plant%22&oq=%22nuke+plant%22&gs_l=news-cc.3...0.0.0.478.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0....