Startup company says it is one step closer to creating nuclear fusion | Hacker News Reader

Startup company says it is one step closer to creating nuclear fusion

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60 pointsyodabodega38 comments

Lerner has been beating this drum for years, and presented at many conferences. And yet no one has invested. I'd love to know why. Either there's a catch to the technology that he's not disclosing (and the smart money doesn't have a motivation to disclose), or he's asking for unreasonable business terms.

The only thing I know for sure is there's no lack of capital available for good fusion research. Not if the money raised by Tri-Alpha, General Fusion, and others is an indicator.

My dad was a navy nuke and said that the cost v safety v portability of fission was far superior to that of fusion. That was back in the 90s, so I wonder if it's still relevant, but a quick search [1] seemed to confirm the general idea.

[1] diffen.com/difference/Nuclear_Fission_vs_Nuclear_Fusion

Considering we don't have any way of currently producing an energy positive fusion reactor that can sustain a reaction, he's not wrong... but it is comparing a proven technology to one that, despite the hype, is still in its infancy. Fusion has a lot of benefits should we ever engineer a reactor successfully.

Yeah I'd be baffled if someone compared the cost and portability of classical vs quantum computers.

There isn't a single fusion power plant that puts out more energy than it pulls in, other than the Sun. It's kinda hard to compare cost, safety, and portability of something that doesn't exist to something that does.

I think you should listen to him.

Fusion is still vapourware. For it to ever be viable outside a few niches, it will have to beat fission in price, because it will probably share many characteristics with fission plants (high capital costs, low cost of fuel, radioactive waste, huge plants).

Fusion somehow ended up being branded as the future of energy. But the prospects aren't looking good so far. Fission plants are probably already too expensive to have much of a future.

The project featured in the article, if successful, will produce no radioactive waste, fits inside a garage, and will likely be cheap overall. Unlike the well-funded laser and tokamak designs which get most media coverage and still don't work well and are unbelievably expensive.

In discussions of new nuclear technology, it's always a good idea to keep in mind the famous Paper Reactors Real Reactors document written by the architect of the worlds most successful nuclear power program.

http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf

Fusion has a huge political benefit in not being the same thing as fission. Fission isn't perfect, but it's way better than you'd think if you only looked at what we invest in. If it can be spun as a separate thing from Chernobyl/Three Mile Island/Fukushima then it might fare closer to what it should from a purely objective standpoint.

I learned during an energy project at elementary school (begin '90) a hypothetical nuclear fusion reactor would be a prime target for military action more so than fission. Tho I forgot the exact details on why, I suppose the reactor is easier damaged, whereas a fission reactor is much more difficult to cause a fallout with. Can anyone confirm that's true or false?

It's the other way around:

If a fission reactor is insuffciently cooled (due do the cooling system getting destroyed by attack or natural causes, cf the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster), the reaction will continue, the core can melt and breach containment.

If a (plasma-based) fusion reactor gets damaged, the plasma will dissipate and the reaction will stop.

Portability is a concern that is particular to the Navy, and I don't think anyone has suggested they switch...

Simple: people in the know realize that this technique still needs a bunch of development.

This is a good talk about the various variables you need to demonstrate in fusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

I understand the the issue is the unreasonable business terms.

His team has been consistently ahead of the competition on key metrics for a long time despite less funding.

>And yet no one has invested. I'd love to know why.

investing means some ROI. There is no way to have any ROI here (to illustrate - try to imagine how you can get any ROI by investing back at the time in Einstein developing GR). They aren't going to build a lot of power plants themselves and for selling their tech - there should be some "secret sauce", and the current fusion development is at the stage when results of one team can easily be replicated by any other team (given sufficient access to money). I.e. current investing in fusion is more like scientific/humanitarian grants (and big thanks to those guys like Allen for pushing our civilization forward) than VC for profit.

For example, once a team develops high-performance sensors and software to efficiently manage say that plasma ball at the end of a DPF shot so that there would be a real power gain, that would be an item suitable for investing by VC.

Sounds like a question of what kind of patent deals the investors could expect.

Sorry, but your theory doesn't work because plenty of other fusion projects are attracting VC. There is something wrong with Lerner specifically, not fusion generally, that's stopping people from putting money in.

Elon Musk addressed the idea of creating nuclear fusion on earth by saying something along the lines of, "why would we do that, there's a huge nuclear fusion generator in the sky that we can use to generate all the power we need"

Thats what I‘d say if I was selling energy storage.

Or owned a solar company.

On the other hand, it’s exactly what I wouldn’t say if I was building an interplanetary colony ship.

Not if I thought it had any realistic chance of success, anyway.

The Sun shines on Mars too. Solar energy is a practical source of energy as far out as the asteroid belt. Nuclear energy isn't needed to accomplish anything that Musk wants to accomplish in life.

Nuclear propulsion would make colonisation much more practical, much safer, and return trips much cheaper.

Maybe. I understand the physics says there's an ISP benefit. Standard rocket engines are well-understood though, work well, allow for retro-propulsion, and you can synthesize methane easily on Mars.

In the long term when the space transport infrastructure is as well developed as the terrestrial one, I can see the benefit of having different systems for different purposes, so you get the specialized benefits. But I'm not sure we are there yet.

To use an analogy from history, we aren't at the Golden Spike moment yet where California was sufficiently settled to warrant a continental rail road connecting the East and West Coasts. We're still in the exploration and settlement stage, and while trains may be more energy efficient, what we need is a Conestoga Wagon that can be operated and maintained by the settlers themselves while they live off the land and develop the first homesteads.

In the absence of a working fusion reactor, everything is necessarily speculative. That said, going from chemical to nuclear propulsion is estimated to reduce round-trip times from ~600 days (you have to wait at Mars for the orbits to realign), to 30 days.

This is roughly the difference between an 1881 steamliner from London to Syndey, and a 747.

NASA is working on it, but until there's a working engine available for private rockets it seems premature.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/201...

Ordinarily I would agree. However, this is Musk, and both SpaceX and Tesla have made progress beyond what most commentors have thought reasonable when the first press releases went out.

I’d guess a 10%-30% chance SpaceX is already Skunkworks-ing some form of atomic rocket, either fusion or fission.

Edit: and yes, that estimate is despite the public comments.

Well you and I are just speculating, so who knows. But I sort of doubt it. People would have noticed if SpaceX was hiring nuclear engineers. I think they have enough R&D on their plate getting to full reusability.

He's got a point though [1]. The price of solar has gone down massively as well. We can use it to charge batteries. Farmers here are renting solar cells on their territory, getting free energy and selling the overabundant for money. If we invest in green companies who use solar energy, we end up stimulating that industry instead of giving the grey energy providers our dime.

Tesla's at the upper end of the market, but just today I saw on HN an article that GM is selling an EV in China for ~5k USD. In the mid-90s it was GM who, after an experiment, neglected the idea of an EV. See e.g. the documentary Who Killed The Electric Car? [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Potential

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

Makes sense.

How to judge the merits of different fusion concepts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

So the journey of a thousand miles has finally begun for them?

If I have learned anything about fusion articles in the tech news, it is that fusion research is always really expensive and everyone is always tantalizingly close to a breakthrough whenever they need more funding.

So now we're 49 years away instead of the proverbial 50 years we've always been at?

Nah, it's one step closer, not a full year closer yet.

That proverbial 50 years away is like the horizon, it moves with you.

I think its possible that a lot of people are waiting to see what ITER brings to the table.

Didn't read the article yet, but this is relevant to the discussion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

Url changed from https://futurism.com/a-startup-claims-to-have-found-a-soluti..., which points to this.

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