What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?
Personally, I think one of the answers to "tech seems to have stalled" is that it's easy to underestimate how important cheap computational power is, even without "AI", to moving forward. For another example, as fantastic as the 1960s space projects may have been, I think they just weren't economically sustainable, so it isn't that amazing that they didn't become a self-sustaining industry right away. I think it's easy to look at SpaceX and say "Gee, there's nothing that we couldn't have done there fifty years ago", but again, I suspect you miss just how much of the Falcon rocket is a result of extensive cheap computation abilities. Even if you could use modern computers to produce a design that could have worked fifty years ago, there's still not necessarily a practical path to that design using only tech from fifty years ago. (And of course the Falcon is full of stuff that couldn't exist fifty years ago.)
Modern tokamak designs are of course run through all kinds of computations nowadays too (because everything is), but the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.
It was just an enormous challenge to build this thing. Things like building and validating the field coils required a lot of effort and some novel approaches that they had to come up with along the way.
Source for that?
Looking at the German Wikipedia entry, the HELIAS method was invented in the late 80s. I don't see anything about the 7-X design actually having been computed back then. In fact, even the 2002 experiment Wendelstein 7-AS wasn't fully optimised.
Also, Tokamaks were invented in the 1950s. JET started operating in 1983. ITER was proposed in 1987. Given even just a little bit of path-dependency, there really wasn't any realistic overlap.
I do research at W7-X, so I can confirm that to the best of my knowledge, the design was computed a long time ago. Building the actual device took a while.
http://epsppd.epfl.ch/Sofia/pdf/P4_192.pdf
Alas, it "just" seems to talk about extending the coil design for a reactor, not the rest. I am guessing most of that would be similar as for other fusion reactors, see for example MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy:
Though I don't really understand the significance of the "pebbles" in this system.
Would you happen to know what kind of compute power was required? Was it run on a colleague's PC or workstation or did it require supercomputer time?
By the way, the unusual shapes of the coils can be understood intuitively from this picture: https://imgur.com/a/Bq3ABfQ. A plasma needs to be confined with a magnetic field in order to be heated to extreme temperatures, and a toroidal field (produced by the currents in the red coils) is unstable due to particle orbit drifts. You need to add a twist to the field for it to be stable (using the green coils). But if you unroll the surface of the torus, you can approximate the currents in both green and red coils using the discrete blue coils, and they're easier to build.
[1] https://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.860481 [2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0029-5515/27/5/018...
This paper published in 92 mentions that the 7-X was being designex at that time. I remember having seen images of the proposed field coil configuration in 91 or 92. So I might have bern off by a few years. But the plans must have bern complete for the project start in 1994.
> the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power.
does not square with Wikipedia:
> Stellarator ... The first Model A started operation in 1953 ...
Fusion would be similar.
Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more compute power will give them back than ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgO4HtWIJjQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape
It is called a paradox because seeing it in action usually catches people by surprise. And this is true whether you're talking about the consumption of coal to power factories, or the consumption of electricity to power computing (and in each case the myriad of new uses that efficiency promoted).
In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle. You see that in Asimov's work, in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and so on. Basically nobody anticipated ubiquitous computing. For instance in the Foundation series you see that a computer run by the Second Foundation can predict the future course of history...and people are calculating their courses with slide rules.
As for the killer app of computing, email, I'm only aware of one pre-1970 work correctly anticipating what it would be actually like. (James H. Schmitz has a memorable scene in one of his Telzy stories where she catches up on her messages at a terminal. He doesn't say "email", but the scene is notable for unobtrusively getting it right.)
Now compare with Franchise, Jokester, All the Troubles of the World, The Last Question and many more stories that feature as a plot device a very powerful centralized computer named Multivac. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac for a more complete list.)
How the same mind could have come up with the idea of androids with positron brains following the three laws of robotics, and yet missed pocket calculators baffles me.
In many ways we're doing that exact thing. The computer at my desk is powerful but somewhat useless; the grand oracle in the form of Google et. al. does the real heavy lifting of giving me useful information. Whether it's a single computer or a bunch of separate ones acting as a whole is pretty immaterial in that sense.
For example, in 1964, the ATLAS computer went fully online in Manchester, England. It was the most powerful computer in the world, took up a floor of a university, and the word “supercomputer” was invented to describe it.
The requirements for the Apollo Guidance Computer were to make something with those approximate specs, but take up only 24×12.5×6.5 inches (61×32×17 cm), use 55 watts of power and be ready to fly in 1967. It was a crazy, impossible task.
I’m convinced the AGC was the biggest computing advance after the move general purpose computers.
"Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more electric power will give them back than ?"
I think it's also possible that technological process happens in fits and starts instead of at a continuous or even a continuously changing rate. Often there's an individual discovery that leads to a spurt of innovation that consists mostly of applying that singular discovery to different problems.
For example:
* The late 19th and early 20th century saw very fast innovation in vaccines and antibiotics, because the discovery of effective vaccines and antibiotics was general enough to solve entire classes of problems all at once. It seems like a lot of innovations all at once when you manage to find extremely effective treatments against polio, smallpox, measles, syphilis, chlamydia, typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, etc., etc., etc., but really that was just from a couple of extremely general inventions playing themselves out.
* Steam engines led to large-scale mechanization while electrical power led to small-scale mechanization in two relatively fast and concentrated chunks. In both cases, the invention of a general technique for powering machines led to lots and lots and lots of machines.
* Marconi's wireless telegraph was invented in 1896, leading to different varieties of radio, television, and radar.
* Airplanes might be another example. I don't want to dismiss the huge difference between a Wright Flyer and a Boeing 737, but "make the airplane out of aluminum" and "have a tube that the crew and passengers can be inside of" are both pretty obvious improvements once you've figured out large-scale manufacturing and the Bayer process, both of which we had ahead of time. I guess jet engines were another breakthrough, although we kind of had them already and they're basically just rockets except they consume oxidizer from the air instead of carrying their own.
* Rockets. There were less than three decades between the V-2 and the moon because it turns out "building a big rocket" is the hard part. OK, there are a lot of other hard parts to landing on the moon, but they're hard in the way that they're achievable by any sufficiently well-funded and motivated group of people with rockets, but nearly impossible without rockets. As you point out, Falcon 9 is significantly more advanced in certain ways than Saturn V, but the low-hanging fruit was reaped by Werner von Braun.
* Computers: just like the Saturn V is basically a very, very, very large V-2 and so is the Falcon 9, we're basically using very, very, very large (logically large; physically small) versions of the computers we had in the 1970's. The fundamental discoveries in computing are all basically done; the rest is just playing itself out. The reason it seemed to take longer to play itself out is because computers are a self-compounding invention: you can use computers to design computers, and you can use better computers to design better computers. Also, having computers makes a lot of other things easier, so you get a lot of innovation from that, too.
Fusion, promisingly enough, also seems to be one of those technologies that will just unlock a bunch of really, really powerful innovations, seemingly all at once, because of how many problems we could solve by just throwing lots and lots and lots of energy at them. (Some discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pmgr6FtYcY . Also, the excellent book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" develops rough upper bounds on the amount of sustainable energy that the UK could produce and the amount of energy the UK consumes, ultimately leading to the bar graph Figure 18.1 here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml. Later discussion of nuclear fusion places the same bar graph, to scale, next to the sustainable level of fusion power production on Figure 24.17 here: https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_173.shtml.)
At the same time, it's amazing how computing is helping every single field there. Even if the core discoveries are already made, the efficiency gains in the recent decades are tremendous:
* Classic windmills vs modern aerogenerators
* Analog transmissions vs highly multiplexed, high bandwidth digital transmissions
* First modern passenger planes vs more aerodynamic, more efficient planes
* Straight jet engines vs turbofans
* Saturn V vs Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy
* Mainframes vs modern computing devices
We live in an era of refinement, where the old discoveries are being improved in ways that enable new uses that were in the realm of science-fiction not so long ago.
You should do a Netflix series, Phil!
Plus: GPS, Combustion Engine, The Web / Networking, Plastics/Chem revolution, and maybe soon AI?
Edit: found Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
It wasn't the computational revolution that made SpaceX possible, the basic technology is more or less the same as it was in the 60s. The Merlin engine has it's roots in the '90s NASA Fastrac design, evolved for performance and reusability.
SpaceX's success relates to things like market incentives, lean business practices, a fail early and iterate quickly attitude as opposed to "too big to fail" public projects, and so on.
I refer to Friction Stir Welding, the wonderful technique that welds aluminum alloys by plastic deformation below their actual melting points.
The landing algorithms for the F9 first stage make use of advances in optimization algorithms that weren't available 40 years ago as well (as well as exploiting faster processors).
The conversation came up because I was trying to fathom why a company would sit on billions of dollars when they could make more billions with it. This idea, that the future will have sudden insights that will take tremendous capital to exploit to create unassailable leadership positions, is not one I had considered. Fusion power, space opportunities, Etc, might be areas where things suddenly create an entirely new need.
They already are, in the cheapest, riskless way possible: those massive cash stashes are sustaining, or even boosting, their valuations.
When a company grows too big, it's in its best interest, as in investors best interest, not to spend a few billions on an initiative that could lead nowhere.
Wouldn't that be too late? Or, put it this way: it is already a problem of capital. If you have enough, you can explore all technology tree branches till finding the one that leads you to it, even in parallel.
If there were a global carbon tax, it would give fusion an advantage against fossil fuels, but that would also be to the advantage of fission and renewables. In the absence of a global carbon tax, is fusion going to be cheap enough to displace fossil fueled power? We've had the technology for emissions-free electricity for decades, but it's difficult to profitably compete with fossil-based generators enjoying unpriced externalities.
Consider SpaceX, its a growing business that took what, 10 billion in capital? That is below the 'material' threshold for some of these companies holding 100 to 300 billion dollars in cash equivalents.
But like everything Apple these days, they are just slow. Their Datacenter expansion already started late, and now with all the set back they are also much further behind. Similar to their Solar Energy which depends and linked to their DataCenter Expansion. And instead of spending money on their CDN ( Which they finally get around to doing so ), built their World Wide WiFi Network, ( iPhone users can enjoy free WiFi access like in Apple Store, but in far more places ), they decided to spend BILLIONS in making TV series and Drama.
But what about a commercial "DARPA" ?
I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is?
But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well.
So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal.
But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-Parc was guarranteed to at-least break even?
From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.
And for a company that's not a startup, Lockheed Martin has a fusion project.
Companies get a quarter trillion in cash by doing something really well that others aren't doing. Nuclear fusion powered perpetual motion machines certainly fit the bill...
It does. You jest, but competition is fierce and little things matter; also, sometimes making even a small improvement require a technological breakthrough.
Now, it is true that there's still fundamental research to be done until energy production via nuclear fusion becomes a reality, but we're reasonably confident that we could make the conventional approaches work.
However, that research is Big Science, and there's no political will to fund it properly (the graph that people like to cite is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi... ). ITER suffered from this as well, and W7-X basically only exists because German reunification happened, and the German government was looking for a big science project - any project - they could leverage to funnel money into East Germany. The plans for W7-X just happened to be ready at the right time.
Not all of it. The big science approach is a function of "pure" fusion research done from the assumption that containment/ignition only comes from magnetic fields and particle collisions. Some are approaching it from different directions, even using physical forces to trigger ignition (ie slamming the hydrogen with a big hammer). This isn't crazy stuff, just a more practical approach from people who see the problems from a different perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion
https://www.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/crazy-geniu...
"At the centre will be a sphere, three metres in diameter, inside which molten lead swirls at high speed creating a vacuum, or vortex, in the middle. Arrayed around it will be 200 to 300 pistons, each the size of a cannon. Firing in perfect harmony, they will create an acoustic wave that collapses the vortex at the very moment a plasma injector shoots hydrogen isotopes, the nuclear fuel, into it. If General Fusion has its physics right, the heat and pressure will ignite a fusion reaction that spins off countless neutrons which will heat the lead even more. Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant."
Confinement in the spheromak was also unacceptable; fast electrons were lost too easily from the edge, causing too much cooling.
Instead, the new scheme compresses more slowly, and compresses a spherical tokamak plasma. This scheme will have a solid post running down the center of the plasma, and the metal will implode from the sides at lower speed. The burn will take about 1 millisecond.
I am skeptical of this approach, since the center post will be exposed to extreme conditions (average neutron fluence two order of magnitude higher than in conventional fusion reactor designs) without a thick layer of liquid metal to shield it. The non-acoustic compression scheme also means the reactor vessel will have to withstand extreme pressure.
That's the first time I've heard that. Brilliant!
At least, that's the story I've been told by one of the current top W7-X people over a glass of beer, though the main topic at the time was that the movers and shakers behind such big projects might not see them to completion due to retirement or even death.
Some of the progress in recent years is from the development of ideas that can be tried at much smaller scales, like the ST40:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjzok6h2-xA
This is something that spherical tokamak research has been hammering away at for years:
See Inertial Confinement Fusion, The NIF, High-Energy-Density Physics, etc.
In the US alone, oil subsidies are >$400bn a year.
Here’s an article - about the same amount, annualised, is spent on Halloween costumes for pets.
http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav...
Some other numbers for comparison:
NASA's current ANNUAL budget is $19B. [1] The BP oil spill cost $40B. [2] "A 2016 IMF study estimated that global fossil fuel subsidies were $5.3 trillion in 2015, which represents 6.5% of global GDP." [3] The US alone spent $600B on fossil fuel subsidies in 2015. [3]
>It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this.
This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-being-spent-on-resea...
[2] http://www.fusionenergyleague.org/index.php/blog/article/hav...
>This is true, but we haven't funded it enough. The potential upside is insane. We aren't funding research accordingly.
How much money do you propose we throw at it then because even fission isn't profitable these days and that is something we know how to do. While I agree that it is worth something to pursue, wind/solar + batteries + smart grid are a way better investment these days since we cannot even produce a fusion reactor that is net positive in energy let alone economical.
That's not very long. The first liquid-fueled rocket was in 1914, and the moon landing wasn't until 1969, and even that was only possible with very high levels of funding far beyond what's invested in fusion power today. Babbage built the Difference Engine in 1822 and conceived of the Analytic Engine in 1837, leaving skeptics dismissing the potential of computers for 150 years. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a helicopter in 1480, almost 500 years before one could actually be constructed. Gunpowder was invented probably before the year 1000 and took over 700 years after that to render pikes obsolete.
Now, it's entirely possible that there's some other limitation holding us back from fusion, just as the lack of internal combustion engines or diodes held us back from helicopters or computers. But I think we've done enough work so far that we'd be able to tell if we were running into something like that. As it stands, I think we're roughly in the place rocketry was before WWII--we have an idea of how to do it, and we don't know if it'll go to the Moon or not, but the only way to find out for sure is to try, and that's pretty expensive and might take awhile.
http://www.askmar.com/Robert%20Bussard/The%20Trouble%20With%...
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2131865/component/file_2...
It's interesting examining the recent efforts, public and private, in light of these venerable critiques.
We'd gladly be working on fusion (or other physics stuff) but our present jobs pay much better.
More money, and better pay for hard science careers, actually would make a difference.
However, this is not necessarily true. It not only has to work, it also has to be economical and not have significant drawbacks.
I think that's very much up in the air. Compare it to fission - we know how to build those power plants, but it's just so damn hard that it's too expensive, compared to alternatives like photovoltaics and wind turbines.
And those are getting cheaper and cheaper at an incredible rate at the moment. So it's a moving target.
And yes, solar and wind rely on intermittent sources of energy, so you need to combine them with some kind of dispatchable source/storage to match the demand curve, but you have that too with a fission plant because of the high capital cost, and I don't see why it wouldn't be true for fusion too, unless somebody comes up with a way of building a really cheap fusion plant.
It is actually pretty hard to come up with a solution that's going to be safe for 1000 of years.
I might be wrong but I think all countries so far has opted for the solution of putting the stuff somewhere they can keep an eye on it, and possibly get it up again in case somebody figures out a use for it.
Fission is already in not too different a place than that: fuel is nowhere near the dominant cost per unit of energy produced. I hope that ends up not being the case with fusion, but it's hard to predict at this point.
The issue is the design of extremely specialized components, not necessarily the raw materials (except when they're novel superconducting magnets designed for that purpose).
I think schedule delays are what is making ITER so expensive.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235032059_Comments_...
http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf
Things seem to be going pretty well for TAE, at least as far as plasma confinement goes. Whether they can get net power from boron is another question, of course. I definitely see them as a dark horse compared to the tokamak companies.
TAE's response was not at all strong, IMO. And that was not the only critique.
Plasma confinement is not the issue for TAE. The problem is even with perfect confinement, their non-Maxwellian scheme doesn't work.
The problem is that nobody knows how to build a functioning reactor yet or if it's even possible to build a functioning reactor. It's very possible that we could throw trillions of dollars at this and still not figure it out.
Possible, but unlikely (imo). It's just that private business doesn't really do large-scale multi-decade pure research efforts with far-off ROI, and governments have chosen to spend money elsewhere. Hence, progress is steady, but slow.
I don't buy this. Generating electricity from fission is stupid simple once you figure out that piling a bunch of uranium produces heat (literally what Fermi did in Chicago in '42).
The safety features to keep the whole thing regulated, not melting, and to avoid poisoning everyone around it obviously aren't simple, but the process of creating and capturing energy as electricity is.
By contrast, the process of capturing the energy and converting it is a huge part of the challenge with fusion.
Fusion power has the potential to be a serious game changer and everybody should have access to it.
The big problem is that fusion has reached its end-game in military applications: we have the h-bomb. Sure, there's the hypothetical fusion submarines and carriers, but what do those really provide beyond their fission equivalent?
If we could find some novel thing that fusion power solves for the military, then fusion would be solved.
We should invest much more heavily into fission, and keep deuterium/tritium fission investment at around the current levels.
Why? Because deuterium/tritium fission like the stellerators and tokomaks use produces a lot of (energetic) neutrons, along with heating the plasma. That is very bad for two reasons. First, essentially unrecoverable energy is wasted by the neutrons. Second, the neutron exposure causes the reactor to become radioactive. So, the promise of "clean" fusion energy with no radioactive waste is not realized.
Aneutronic fusion is possible, but requires higher energy and different fuel. This is not yet being widely researched, but some interesting work is being done at LPP Fusion: https://lppfusion.com/
That is an effort I'd like to see funded much more fully.
At any rate, next-generation fission reactors are just as safe as deuterium/tritium fusion, are well understood, and many designs produce less and shorter-lived waste than the dinosaur PWR designs. It is beyond silly to not fully leverage clean, cheap fuel with a million times the energy density of fossil fuel while we work out the kinks with fusion. There is a necessity for reliable grid power alongside unreliable "renewables", and fission is the only viable CO2 free approach for the foreseeable future.
My key takeaway from this is that market/capitalism are really good at finding the optimal solution to an engineering problem using the currently available tech, however, its not so much for cases where you need the enabler tech also to be invented. IMHO this is where govt needs to step up and bring all the necessary pieces in the realm of possibility. after this private business can pick it up and optimize.
on a different note, its really amazing that they can maintain superconductors at -100 F just a few inches from a plasma at 100M F.
If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly.
For a start there are dozens of different approaches currently being pursued. Which do we bless with the billions of extra funding? All of them? Suppose none of them pan out?
It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there?
Not necessarily, because discovering a large blocker would give us an idea of what to invest in next.
The economic impact of fusion power is great enough that even if there's a 10-25% probability of it working out, the expected value implied by that probability would justify significantly higher levels of funding than fusion currently receives.
> It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there?
ITER, the largest multinational fusion project, is projected to have a total cost of over 20 billion euros, which is about 22 billion USD. 22 billion USD is less than NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation, for the single years of 1963 through 1970 or 1990 through 1993. And NASA's work is built on top of the rocketry work of Nazi Germany, which cost about 40 billion inflation-adjusted dollars even with, to be euphemistic, artificially low labor costs.
For another point of comparison, the Persian Gulf War, which was primarily motivated by the attempt to secure part of the global supply of petroleum, cost $61 billion. The Iraq War cost at least an order of magnitude more, but (a) many of that was due to cost overruns and (b) that war was partially motivated by issues other than securing part of the world's petroleum supply.
In terms of improving long term human living conditions and enabling future economic growth, developing fusion power would provide tremendous benefits.