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Comment by dfdz | Hacker News Reader

The thumbnail of the youtube video made me laugh

Smaller. Smarter. Sooner. 2018

Currently 2021 where is my fusion energy? But this time must be different, after this advance we are only a few years away from fusion energy?

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They seem to have made two claims. First, that they have a qualitatively different design that requires a significantly stronger magnetic field. Second, that they could build a magnet that produces such a field.

They are now claiming to have done the latter. Are you skeptical of the new design? Or do you think it does not represent as significant a departure from earlier designs as they claim?

The running joke has always been that “Fusion is 20 years away,” and has been, for the last 50 years.

I really want this to work. I am a bit concerned, with how “the old guard” will react, once we have successful, productive, fusion.

I foresee an astroturf NIMBY campaign against construction of fusion plants.

It wasn't a joke, it was always based on an adequate level of funding. Everything is always off in the future if it never gets funded.

Ah yes, and how much money? The answer always seems to be “More”.

Please consult this graphic from 1976 if you are actually interested in the answer.

https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

Could you clarify how to read this chart? The y axis is, funding given different plans? Or.. I got the impression that this is meant to depict a relationship between when practical fusion would be developed and how much funding it receives, but I don’t see how to get that from the chart.

Also, not sure why imgur has that image marked as adult content.

These are projections made in 1976. They can be read as different project plans made at that time for different amounts of funding. For example, "if we follow the blue plan, it would require 9 billion (2012) US dollars of funding in 1982 (etc.) and we would achieve fusion by 1990."

The 1976 projection was that, assuming funding was kept at the level of 1976 (~1 billion a year), fusion would not be achieved in the foreseeable future. It further shows that actual funding has been below that level.

In short: Yes, getting fusion off the ground sooner would have required more money. Not "always more", but more than "we project no success" levels.

Those plans would not have worked, though. They were for programs that assumed tokamaks worked better than they actually do. And by the 1980s it was realized (Lidsky; Pfirsch and Schmitter) that heat transfer limits would make any tokamak power plant unattractive.

I mean, yes, obviously if the criticism is that they're getting too little money, clearly they want more. Some technologies are fundamentally expensive to develop (the Apollo program, the Manhattan project, etc.). That doesn't mean the people saying so are automatically charlatans, especially given that they've never gotten what they've asked for -- it's not like some bomber development project where they get what they want and then keep coming back for more. The relatively paltry amounts the US has been devoting to fusion energy research are lower than any of the scenarios laid out in a 1976 DOE planning document[1] about what it would take to achieve fusion power, and lower even than just continuing at 1970s levels (a plan they labeled in that document as "fusion never").

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=KSA_AAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA234&ots...

At the moment it is very far for clear that fusion will be cost effective. The article says this about the fuel of fusion: "The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from water, and “the Earth is full of water — it’s a nearly unlimited resource. [...]"

They forgot to say that it is not the H2O that comes out of your tap. The earth is especially not full of tritium.

The plan is for them to breed their own tritium, though, so the consumables coming in the front door would just be deuterium and lithium, both of which (while less common than tap water) are not rare.

My understanding (and I am a layman) is that lithium isn't that accessibly common on Earth, and that we're doing a bang-up job of using as much of it as we can get our hands on already. Are there practical methods of extracting less accessible lithium that don't themselves have nasty side effects?

Yeah, there have been rumblings about recovering it from seawater: https://electrek.co/2021/06/04/scientists-have-cost-effectiv...

The amount of lithium required for these purposes is absolutely trivial.

The fuel for fission comes from rocks. The Earth is full of rocks!

That's actually a reasonable argument if you have breeders. The U and Th in an average continental crustal rock will give that rock 20x the energy output of burning the same mass of coal.

It's like saying the ocean is full of gold for anyone to pick up. It is. But not worth picking up with the very low concentration.

The fuel is deuterium, lithium, and a smaller amount of beryllium or lead used as a neutron multiplier to assure a net positive tritium production. Yes, tritium is needed to start the reactor, but it can be replenished with lithium tritium breeding in the blanket.

Deuterium is plentiful in tap water.

You don't need an astroturf.

Nuclear ruined it's own reputation for generations though hopeful not as long as they'll have to care for the waste we already have.

What ruined nuclear reputation is environmentalists who don't actually care for environment.

What ruined nuclear's reputation is corruption, and being the most expensive choice. (Although coal will end up overwhelmingly more costly, in the end!) Would it be so expensive without corruption? Who can say? Corruption is wired into the process.

We are purely lucky that, for structural reasons, corruption is minimal on solar and wind projects. Probably this is because what it ought to cost is readily visible from the outset. There just isn't enough fat to attract graft.

Yeah, most expensive choice, unless you count externalities of coal.

Parroting Shellenberger will never make you look like a serious participant in this discussion.

Haven't read his books, I must have gotten his ideas by osmosis. Now reading criticism of the books on his wiki page, I think his critics are not concerned with environment any further than it aids their real case if the quote below is a representative sample:

"criticizing [The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming in a Post-Environmental World] for demanding increased technological innovation rather than addressing the systemic concerns of people of color."

You don't have to read his books these days since the Astro-Turf he's fuelling with those phrases is all over social media.

I won't even go into this baseless bashing of "environmentalists". It's cheap and disgusting. Some of them have dedicated their whole life to the cause while a shitty anthropologist bashes them while being paid by the same companies which pollute the planet.

Per a comment by nielsbot, they're saying 2025. So, four years away, not 20. That's progress...

That is production of hot neutrons, not electrical power. Actual electrical power is still decades away... or would be if anybody bothered to try building it. Cost-effective electrical power from Tokamak is never.

FRC, though, maybe. But you would have to have people actually working on that.

Fusion is the Linux Desktop of energy projects.

Will fusion also occur then due to the mishandling of Windows 11?

"Fusion is always 50 years away" for a reason

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/5gi9yh/fusion_i...

With respect to that graph: tokamaks turned out to not work nearly as well as the plans embodied there assumed (and because engineering obstacles were not sufficiently publicly acknowledged at the time). If funding has not been as high as hoped, it's because stakeholders don't really exist for fusion. The utilities have never thought much of it.

There will be no need for NIMBY: fusion power is necessarily 100x+ more costly than solar + storage.

The only real open question is how long the gravy train will run before the plug is pulled. F-35 and SLS have demonstrated that with careful management, that can be longer than anyone could have believed.

The company was founded in 2018. At the time they promised to demo this magnet during the Summer of 2021. What is the issue?

The goal is to get fusion power om the grid in the 2030's and scale up in the 2040's. Stop moving the goalposts.

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