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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough to say what their odds are, other than very long. But one day, probably in my lifetime, we'll master fusion power, and it will begin a revolution that will make the industrial revolution look like a minor event. I don't think people realize that really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity. We'll enter an age of plenty like the world has never known. Limitless energy means limitless water, food, and materials. Of course it's not really limitless, but if it's even an order of magnitude cheaper than what we have now, the possibilities would be mind blowing.

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We could pretty much save the world with fission today, but we don’t because politics. I’m not confident that we’ll actually adopt fusion even when the tech is ready.

I can imagine the first reactors would be prohibitively expensive.

Naturally. You don't pump money into something like this for years without expecting to get a huge payback. That patent had a lot of military applications in it.

How could fission save the world today? It's not that cheap.

Part of the cost is relatively excessive safety margins. “Relatively excessive“ because despite the reputation fission is the safest power supply we have now, including solar because installing things on rooftops is not without risk.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

The risk is much higher because it is not only about human deaths, but also about unusable land for decades and decades.

It will be impossible to re-populate land up to six miles from the Chernobyl for the next 10,000 years, and it will probably be the same for Fukushima

Along with that, zones that can be repopulated are suffering much higher risk of cancer and misc health issues.

The safety margins are big because the risks are tremendous, not because people love to waste money.

>It will be impossible to re-populate land up to six miles from the Chernobyl

There are still humans living within the exclusion zone, still humans working at Chernobyl where three reactors continued to operate after the accident, the vast majority of gamma from the site is from an isotope with a half-life of 30 years, and the background radiation within the exclusion zone is provably less than the background radiation you find when living in high altitudes.

Chernobyl was the absolute worst case in that it had no containment whatsoever, and Fukushima was an absolute worst case for a western reactor in that it couldn't SCRAM and cool properly with multiple backup systems failing, but the implication that large tracts of land are uninhabitable for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of years is patently false.

In addition, there are no attributable deaths to either accident among the general population. Radiation doses in both cases were very low in the context of the general population surrounding these plants.

The fact is that more people died from the sudden evacuations and stress of relocating than died, or will die, from the radiation levels.

Hmm, I got the 10000 years number from this source : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/12...

But I can't seem to be able to find the original, even on Greenpeace

You might be right on this

"In addition, there are no attributable deaths to either accident among the general population. Radiation doses in both cases were very low in the context of the general population surrounding these plants."

I think you need to spend more time reading about chernobyl.

Many, many of the cleanup workers at chernobyl in the weeks and months following the disaster were normal people who were essentially gang-pressed into service and handed a shovel.

All of those people wrapping tree trunks in plastic and burying them were not all soldiers or paid, professional firefighters. These people were worked until they literally fell over and died in hospital shortly thereafter. I would characterize these people as part of the "general population".

I recommend _All that is Solid Melts Into Air_ and _Voices from Chernobyl.

I know all about the liquidators, and I sympathize, but that's why I stressed "general population" several times. It's a given that the cleanup crew isn't part of the general population.

>These people were worked until they literally fell over and died in hospital shortly thereafter.

It's more accurate to say that they were literally cooked. It's horrible, but that's what the Soviets did, and continue to neglect many who are still alive. Their sacrifices prevented the absolute worst outcome of that disaster, and they certainly deserve all recognition they can get. And for leaving the liquidators out of that comment, I apologize.

The real stories surrounding the accident and the cleanup certainly are terrifying. The control room in particular and the imagery of several individuals being totally and instantly vaporized will always stick with me.

> The risk is much higher because it is not only about human deaths, but also about unusable land for decades and decades.

By that argument, I should also be accounting for the climate change effects of carbon fuels, the mining impact of basically everything including what renewable plants are made from (IDK about most, but turns out uranium’s easier and safer to mine than coal), and the environmental damage caused by us using so much energy.

I argue the reason for tight regulation is an entirely different risk: political risk. People fear it, demand control over it, vote for politicians who implement it. It’s not like any German reactor could’ve suffered tsunami-induced damage, but tsunami-induced damage in someone else’s reactor resulted in no more German reactors. A tsunami which, for the record, killed at least 15,895 people and caused a lot of environmental damage from all the consequent chemical spills. Yet no grand public international outcry against chemicals which can be spilled by a tsunami.

Humans are interesting, what we consider to be a risk or not. :)

We don't adopt fission because it's disastrous when things go wrong, so it scares people. Plus it produces a waste problem that lasts for an incredibly long time.

Fusion doesn't suffer from those problems.

D-T fusion suffers from all of those problems.

To the same extent as fission? You're being disingenuous here with that comparison.

Fission is required for D-T fusion at this point, otherwise you don’t have any tritium. It’s the people who ignore that, and our failure to breed tritium within a fusion reactor who are disingenuous. If you don’t know even that much about the science, I’d strongly recommmemd refraining from accusing people of being less tham forthright.

It is today, but my understanding is that fission is just our best source of neutrons to breed tritium from lithium 6. Fusion should also be an excellent source of neutrons, so I don't see that as being a hard requirement. I'm not a physicist, so I may be dead wrong.

Per the article, it sounds like the fusion reactor itself could indeed be the thing producing the tritium by way of a lithium blanket. Of course, that means it'd need to have some way of generating the neutrons (the design seems to include two spots for "neutral beams", but I missed any mention of what's supplying those beams).

Not just today, we could've decades ago.

We could save the world with solar right now and it can be started immediately and is indefinitely scalable. The problems of energy supply are political not technical.

Fusion power will probably not be particularly cheap unless we really do figure out how to build very small reactors. If big Tokamaks like ITER are the way forward we need to build these very big, very expensive power plants whose costs need to be amortized over the electricity produced.

It may well start out like that, but like most technology I expect it will just keep getting cheaper and smaller with time.

Fundamental engineering limits aside, fusion progress competes with battery progress, and we put a lot more money into battery research.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't most large infrastructure projects become more expensive over time?

I mean more expensive in inflation adjusted dollars.

Once we get it going it will attract lot's of investment, global competition, and mass production. Every fusion reactor you build is essentially a money printing machine and capitalism excels at optimizing the production of things like that.

The amount of progress over time is a bell shaped curve. For a period of time after the technology becomes practical, it will get more funding & smart people involved. During that time most of the major advanced in the tech will be made. This phase may last a long time. After much of what can be done with it is discovered and optimized, the amount of progress will slow down.

Ah, yes, thank you. I was thinking about the far side of the bell curve after most of the easy gains have been made and bureaucracy sets in.

The moment that anybody demonstrates a real, working fusion reactor, a gargantuan amount of money will flood the sector.

At that point, fusion will go onto a Moore's Law curve and we will see exponential improvements for quite a few years.

Why would it be exponential? I like Kurzweil's historical exponential growth across IT (pre-dating silicon), and long-term exponential progress, technological, and longer-term biological, but I haven't seen the mechanism convincingly articulated...

Sure, more money means more improvements faster, but at best that can only amplify already-exponential progress. Unless, it leads to even more money? Or, that each improvement scales all factors? Or, that one improvement makes it easier to find subsequent improvements (a kind of positive feedback loop; accelerating returns).

Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth? Not even silicon has it any more...

> Why would it be exponential? ... Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth?

I'd say the key to the parent's premise, is they said it'd be exponential for quite a few years (rather than indefinitely). That's likely correct. The early improvements would probably leap substantially in regards to the output possible. We saw the same thing in nuclear reactor tech.

> Why would it be exponential? ... Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth?

Because fusion research is critically underfunded and always has been. Like any project, there is probably a point where we'll hit diminishing returns, but right now we're barely keeping the lights on, much less hitting diminishing returns.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

Batteries have been around for a long time. A lot of money was (and is) spent, and yet we see slow improvement (incredibly slow on a given technology, advancement usually come from new chemistry, or new physics e.g. lightsail).

Nothing resembling Moore’s law style advancement, despite a lot of money to be made.

It is likely exaggerated but the headlines claimed the big Australian battery returned the investment within a couple of months. There’s a LOT of money to be made on energy storage.

Why would fusion reactors be moorable?

> Nothing resembling Moore’s law style advancement

As you say, batteries have been around for a long time. The rapid growth/improvement part of the battery curve happened back in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

The lead-acid grid lattice design, still the...errr...gold standard when it comes to the most amount of joules stored per buck, was invented in 1881.

(modern technologies like the various lithium battery chemistries win when it come to storage for a given mass -- thus their use in things like portable devices and cars, but lead-acid still wins when it comes to storage for a given cost).

> The lead-acid grid lattice design, still the...errr...gold standard when it comes to the most amount of joules stored per buck, was invented in 1881.

Li-ion has caught up. If you have $400 to spend on batteries both li-ion [1] and comparable lead acid [2] (deep discharge, long cycle life) cost around 3 Wh/$.

[1] https://www.imrbatteries.com/samsung-29e-18650-2850mah-2-75a...

[2] https://www.powerstream.com/BBep.htm (EP100-12)

The magnetic fusion triple product* did in fact increase exponentially from 1970 to 2000, at about the same pace as Moore's Law. Then we reached the limit of the superconductors at the time, and could only move forward by building an enormous reactor which still isn't finished. Now we have better superconductors; fusion output in a tokamak reactor increases as the fourth power of magnetic field strength.

We also have lots of different designs to experiment with, and much better computers for running simulations. As the computers improve, fusion progress will speed up, if the funding is available.

* (The triple product of temperature, density, and confinement time is the critical fusion metric; for every fusion fuel there's a triple product above which you get net power.)

I'd love for that to be true but physics reality doesn't care how much money you have, not everything is possible.

Moore's law is an observation, it is not an input into some process.

It is both.

The original observation is basically a winner-take-all combined with the fact that transistors scale as the square of the minimum dimension. So, if there is linear improvement in dimension, there is exponential improvement in density.

The reason why Moore's Law continued on for so long was that companies were willing to spend exponentially increasing amounts of money to hit the next technology node because of the winner-take-all nature of the product. Anybody who got to the next node forced everybody else to the next node or wiped them out of business.

This is going to be the same thing with fusion. Linear improvements in the fundamentals translate to exponential improvements (fourth power or better) in the outputs. The first folks to fusion are going to force everyone to fusion or wipe them out of business.

I agree with you that if they can find those improvements that will all hold. But there is no guarantee for that at any give budget, though the larger the budget the bigger the chances that some improvement will be found.

The guys over at Tokamak Energy are aiming to produce a small reactor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRyUWOUk_48

Since energy is such an important factor to the life of humans, I'd say the dollar/euro price is a measure that is too narrow. The question is : is fusion necessary ? how many will die if we don't have it ? how many will be born if we have it ? Have we got a future without it ? what will be the quality of life without it ?

Increased birth rate is not necessarily a good thing for human development at this stage. Our planet cannot support an infinite number of people.

Since we are already facing unprecedented growth that won't be stopped except by famine, world war or some other calamity, it's important we find a way to stretch our limited resources further and develop technologies that will help us expand beyond earth like nuclear fusion.

Yup. But I was pointing more at the fact that the notion of "price" is not very useful here. If we're talking about mankind's future, money should be brought back to the level of "minor technical detail".

Money is what we currently have as a means of getting a consensus about what is important for mankind's future and how to allocate resources based on importance and expected payoff. It's not the best system, but it's hard to introduce alternatives.

I agree that it should be that way.

Price is important to motivate people to develop nuclear fusion technology, and to finally build commercial fusion plants when the time comes.

Nuclear fission is a superior power technology already, but we've largely stopped building new plants because of the exorbitant upstart costs compared to other technologies.

Price is a proxy for "how much resources would it take to roll this out at scale." That's important regardless of how your economy works.

Price also tells us whether the new energy source would require government support, or require less resources than building and fueling a new fossil plant, or (if extremely cheap) would prompt people to shut down even brand-new fossil plants because the new energy source is cheaper than the cost of fuel.

I think(read: am guessing, smartly) when you factor the entire cost of fossil fuels (environmental damage to harvest, subsidies, tax breaks, etc) fusion will be cheaper.

Fossil fuels have a number of intentionally "hidden" costs.

Are you aware of how CO2 is used by plants? that's a "hidden" benefit of the large-scale use of fossil fuels.

At current CO2 levels plants are starved for CO2. At 150 ppm there would be a massive extinction of land-based plant life.

Is this some kind of a joke? Global warming, full stop. Plants are not starved, they were ubiquitous until we chopped “most” of them down.

It's science.

Land-based plants evolved when CO2 levels were much higher than today. [1] In fact levels have been steadily declining from 3000 ppm 150 million years ago; the current, holocene rise is a relatively minor bump. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692178/

[2] http://caos.iisc.ernet.in/faculty/pghosh/content/Publication...

And by the way global temperature 150 million years ago was the same as today, +/- 2deg C.

Could be. But the bio-make up of the planet was different then, yes?

I don't think plants are "starved" for CO2, and increasing levels of CO2 most likely do not linearly increase productivity of plants [0].

There's also the other ramifications of increased CO2 concentration like: ocean acidification, warmer overall climate globally and increased incidences of severe weather, rising seas resulting from the warmer temperatures, and not all plants will enjoy the higher temperatures (or the droughts, hailstorms, strong winds, too much rain all at once), especially those in the tropics which already get quite warm.

>Our results suggest that future climate change will push this ecosystem away from conditions that maximize NPP, but with large year-to-year variability

[0]http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2016/08/30/1606734113...

edit: less blunt.

If you reject the fact that the vast majority of plants are currently starving for CO2, you reject science.

Here is one of many scientific papers on the subject: "Carbon dioxide starvation, the development of C4 ecosystems, and mammalian evolution" [1]

[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/353/1365/159

I don't think you are reading the studies you are sharing.

>Global expansion of C4 biomass is recorded in the diets of mammals from Asia, Africa, North America, and South America during the interval from about 8 to 5 Ma.

That's a 3 million year period, ending 5ma. You say CO2 starvation is down to 150ppm, but atmospheric CO2 levels have fluctuated between 180-200 (ice ages) to 300ppm (warm periods) for the past half million years or so.[1] Meanwhile C3 plants (those supposedly which suffered during your linked expansion of C4 biomass) are around 95% of plant biomass currently. Doesn't seem like plants on the whole are starving for CO2 at this time.

[1]https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/

> I don't think you are reading the studies you are sharing.

I'm impressed by your method of argumentation.

What I mean to say is there is more to the data than any single paper, and with a bigger picture in mind there seems to be no shortage of CO2 for 95% of plants on earth(C3 carbon fixation, evolved earlier), and for the other 5% (C4 carbon fixation, evolved more recently) they can be fine in a much greater range of CO2 concentrations.

It's pretty simple and there is ample scientific evidence and writing on the topic: at current CO2 levels, plants are starving. There is even satellite-based measurements of vegetation by NASA that demonstrate a global greening of the planet in tune with atmospheric CO2 increases over the recent decades. You are denying scientific facts.

K. Go gaslight someone else bud.

Perhaps that's true. I appreciate the insight. However it doesn't really address my point, as it was directed at another comment.

Sorry to be pessimistic, but although I agree that technological progress has the potential of dramatically improve our lives, I fear that instead we will get more capital concentration.

Put another way: social forces will balance out any positive effects of technological progress, so that in whole, humanity's well-being remain more or less constant.

Which makes me sad reading an article prioritizing all the military applications, because Lockheed Martin.

It's like a real life Iron Man movie script.

I prefer the Superman version of limitless energy.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305

If this technology becomes practical and we don't have the military applications figured out, other nations will. Sorry Citizen, you must speak German now, Changeover Day was yesterday.

Energy is already incredibly cheap. In developed countries it's something like 10-20% of household spending, which is a really nice bonus if you get most of that to spend on something else, but it's also not going to dramatically change the lifestyles of those people (who basically enjoy access to limitless food and water, with quite abundant access to other materials).

It's also set to get dramatically cheaper as solar really takes off in the coming years.

You may be lucky enough to enjoy limitless food and water, but a substantial part of the world does not and it's going to get worse before it gets better as our population approaches 10 billion in the next 30 years. A lot of that water is going to need to come from desalinization, which is basically an energy problem. Vertical farming may help us when it comes to agricultural water demand, but it's also very energy intensive. Both problems reduce to energy problems.

Hunger and access to water are largely already political problems, and like I said, energy is going to get cheaper fast in the coming years (shifting them further into the political realm).

Vertical farming is going to provide perishable produce to rich people, so it's kind of weird to end on that point given where you started.

I stand by what I said. You're looking at how we meet our needs for food and water today. I'm looking at how we'll do so for 10 billion people, with a larger percentage of them consuming more resources like us Westerner's enjoy.

Vertical farming hardly enters the picture today, and we currently pick a lot of the low hanging or unsustainable fruit where water is concerned. But we're going to have to do a lot of desalinization going forward, and we're also going to need to take a good percentage of farming indoors because we just don't have the land and water resources to do otherwise.

Vertical farming works for more than just lettuce and tomatoes - the thing is it's uneconomical so far. The technology needs to get cheaper and more widespread, and the inputs of energy, water, and fertilizers need to get cheaper. Advances in materials, building technology, and transportation would also help. Cheaper energy helps with everything.

Being able to use the same amount of energy cheaper is only half the equation. I'd be more interested in what we can do with 10x as much energy at the same price, or 100x. Could open up entirely new industries or make things that are currently infeasibly expensive novelties into commonplace materials.

One obvious win would be desalination plants to allow mass scale water production in areas with little or no fresh water but access to ocean water. Right now that's only economically feasible in limited cases, to my understanding.

Massive scale hydroponics at all latitudes, too. Why be limited to what the sun can grow, when we can grow our own sun right here on Earth?

> really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity

How does it make rent in San Francisco affordable?

How does it make enough grass-fed premium beef for everyone in the world to eat steak every night affordable?

Flying apartment buildings. Lolz

Well, if energy were cheap enough you could just dig huge, multi-level tunnels, fill them full of grow lights, and raise all the grass-fed beef you wanted.

It's the same with water -- there's plenty of water in the ocean. If energy were cheap enough, you could just distill seawater and get all the freshwater you wanted.

"Limitless" energy would mean the ability to grow crops and meat and everything with very little worry about efficiency.

> I don't think people realize that really cheap, clean energy solves pretty much every problem of scarcity.

Except the one people care about, scarcity of mates.

Less scarcity of sex robots? Only half joking.

Nuclear powered sex robots!

how's there a scarcity of mates? for each male there is a female (approx.)?

Not in China.

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