Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies
bbc.com
bbc.com
They've pivoted a little bit on their approach since then. In the beginning it was all about focussed pressure waves. Now they're starting with plasma. Fusion is really hard (well, at least for power generation, perhaps the "level a city" kind is easier). I think it's harder than self driving cars (for example) or landing rockets on barges (as another example). There are many fundamental problems in different areas that have to be solved and not all these areas are well understood.
I'm pleasantly surprised they are still going strong and that they were able to raise money to continue their progress. Obviously if they are successful the business opportunity of all power generation in the world is a pretty big one...
As far as I can tell most of the difficulty arises in the plasma physics part instead of the actual fusion bit (the latter being fairly well understood now for quite a long time now). That's where 90% of the work has to go get fusion power and also the reason the early estimates for when fusion power would be available were so optimistic. It wasn't clear back then how difficult and unforgiving plasmas can be (and making the plasma extremely hot, applying strong magnetic fields and running high currents through it doesn't make it easier to work with - quite the opposite).
Yes, plasma is very difficult. You need to get it hot enough and in the right shape and in the right position at the right time. But even when you do that there are still many hard problems to solve. One of them is irradiation embrittlement. Capturing all the energy efficiently and converting it efficiently into power is also difficult (steam turbines I guess). The efficiencies of the input side are also a problem (the energy intake of creating the plasma, managing it, "fusing" it). All these inefficiencies eat into your energy budget making it harder to get significantly more energy out than you put in... Anyways, I'm not a physicist, but every little problem I hear about related to this process seems to be of monumental proportions and there are many of those...
Fusion machine design is a combination of hard-won experimental knowledge and theoretical guesswork. I'm skeptical of the current wave of fusion startups simply because they don't have the weight of the decades of experimental work that have gone into tokamak research. But hey, they might make a breakthough, who knows.
To me, there will never be enough energy, this effort is about control, not power; even if there was (relatively speaking) an unlimited source of energy, the bounds of it's use would quickly be found, and as such, would not be "universally" available.
Fusion is truly a pretty revolutionary thing if we can make it work.
You can't just go out and find coal lying around. You need to hallow out or level an entire mountain to get it. That requires a lot of people and equipment. And you need to transport large quantities of it around to where it's needed which requires special infrastructure dedicated to that task. The same goes for oil/natural gas.
At the center of our society/culture is the human being's desire to dominate others. We use capitalism/money as a means to achieve that. Money/power always has a systemic property to create monopolies and reinforce them.
That being said, technological advance usually benefits more than just the owners of capital. But the balance usually is tipped in their favor.
In short: There's enough food for everybody on this planet, but we currently prefer to have more of it for ourselves and let others starve.
If we don't like this system, then we need to move away from capitalism (as we know it) and put different values than domination/power/money at the center of our culture.
But the interesting cases are those where much cheaper electricity unlocks new opportunities. Imagine the coast of sub-Saharan Africa transformed by the agriculture enabled by cheap desalinated water.
Renewable energy sources will continue to replace older generation technologies so long as they continue to get cheaper and grid modernization keeps pace with the special requirements of renewables wrt variability.
All that depends on whatever fusion tech proves to be both technically feasible and cost competitive. If that doesn't happen, or is really delayed, then grid storage technology may win out as a cost-effective energy "source".
If storage becomes cheap and effective I'd expect to see renewables + storage expand to serve base load. Also, we'd see faster electrification of areas that currently can't afford classic distribution grids. This might accelerate significant changes in the developing world.
But whatever the generation technology, energy won't be "unlimited". There will always be cost limits.
That seems unlikely to me, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I would imagine that all of the waste heat produced through the world's economy is several orders of magnitude lower than the sun. Like less than 0.0001%.
But exponential growth gets impressive after a while. At 2.3% growth per year, we boil the oceans in about 400 years: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
Whether this is physically or economically realistic is another matter. I tend to think that long before waste heat is an actual problem, we'll either transition to a stable state or move the growth off planet. (Conveniently, fusion is also great for rockets.)
Does the smaller size of this reactor design mitigate the challenges that the Tokamaks face with material radioactivity? With the level of neutron bombardment those pistons undergo what material can they be made of to assure an economically viable operational lifetime?
I remember this being one of the bigger challenges for all of injector and heating equipment in Tokamak designs. After a point the devices are composed of different radioactive isotopes and have to be replaced/disposed of, making the economics... challenging.
Is it possible for this project to be successful without a Materials breakthrough? I don't think the Physics challenges are insurmountable with enough time, but finding new materials can be a rabbit hole.
I just hope that Christy Clark doesn't sabotage GF with her goal of turning mining, LNG, fracking and real estate into BC's economic engines.
Of course we didn't learn until much later that he had rented the old gas station in the middle of town to conduct experiments with nuclear energy.
I still believe General Fusion's approach to be the most practical of the solutions I've seen. I'm continually following their progress, and am hoping for great news to come from them. I would love to be able to tell this as the story of how we accomplished nuclear fusion.
EV were always dubbed too complex and impossible in Europe until tesla came around and made it happen.
I follow the general skepticism about money and control of mankind's future (space resources, energy, water, etc) but also have to keep faith in a certain humanity.
Every comment right now is complaining about billionaires and the problems with of capitalism. Not even about the technology, much less being happy about this being funded.
Genuine question -- is there a community somewhere which is actually full of not-shitty people? I would like an invite.