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Comment by petschge | Hacker News Reader

The simple answer is that the surface only goes up a factor of 4 if you increase the radius by a factor of 2, but the volume goes up by a factor of 8. So the ratio of (energy containing) volume to surface (where energy get's lost) if getting better with increasing size.

There is of course much more complicated answers, all the way up to full-device simulations using gyrokinetic codes like Gene or Gkeyll that take millions of core hours and predict that ITER will work (and that predict performance of existing devices correctly).

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This is the main issue and I don't want to make it any more complicated. But I do want to explain something because people hear arguments between fusion scientists. Within the field no one really doubts that ITER is going to work (there's a few, of course, but the majority don't doubt). The thing they are arguing over is if it is needed. The big reason for ITER is not to generate power but to demonstrate that sustainable fusion is achievable. The idea is that if there is a demonstration people will stop shying away from it and investing would skyrocket (a government would have to be dumb not to substantially invest in PROVEN fusion devices). The counter argument is that there is enough funding and that they will beat ITER to the punch with small scale reactors (much closer to the path for devices that would provide actual energy to our grid). My take is "don't put all your eggs in one basket."

Without giving a strong opinion either way on whether this particular project is a good investment or not :

Science, as an institution imo undervalues good marketing and good PR. For profit enterprises are under no illusion that they can succeed without good marketing and public perception.

If large expensive projects like this are needed to increase public awareness and support for basic scientific research then I am all for them. Society is willing to spend billions on projects that give no tangible return and are all perceptions (for example, sports stadiums) so if some of that instead is spent promoting Science that’s a good thing.

Any actual discoveries in fundamental science that come out would be a bonus too, but getting people excited about research is an end unto itself.

I think a problem with ITER for PR isn't the cost. It's time. I learned about it and got excited more than a decade ago. It'll still take years of time for it to be finished.

I'm not really sure how to express this, but the huge amount of time just diminishes the impact of it for me.

One could also argue that it would be developed faster if they had more money. It wouldn't be a linear relationship, but there is a definite relationship between the two. But fundamentally I agree. It is hard to stay excited about something to come for decades.

I have similar feelings about the James Webb Space Telescope too.

Think of it like the construction of a legendary cathedral. The prolonged commitment required is part of its impressiveness.

With a legendary cathedral, the layperson can walk up to it at any time and easily perceive its ever-waxing size and majesty.

This is something a fusion reactor doesn't have (I guess they could do tours or something maybe?).

They do have a YouTube channel showing construction.

There are people whose imagination ITER exceeds.

This is why I'm particularly upset about SSC's[0] failure to be built. There are many advantages to housing the smartest scientists in the world within the borders of your country, and those benefits aren't limited to scientific output. After all, a big part of these multi-national projects is the culture war.

And let's be real, which is worth more? A super collider that runs for decades or the F35 (which cost more, but we'll pretend they are the same and that America would be the only one funding a multi-national facility)?

Fun (perspective) fact: any of the top 30 billionaires in the world could personally pay for one of these colliders.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

My software startup was a huge beneficiary of the SSC cancellation, it freed up a nuclear physicist to write graphics software for us, which became one of our biggest products.

I’m in favor of pursuing basic research, but there is always a cost. When you take a group of your smartest people and focus them on non-economic activities, the economy loses something.

That's incredibly short-sited. I'm glad for you that your startup was able to make money, but do you really think that the long-term economic value created is higher by making yet another piece of graphics software than from fundamental research?

I would argue this entirely the other way; whenever the smartest people are sucked away from foundational work to make money "up the stack", it makes us all the poorer.

Pie in the sky when you die....

https://www.comparably.com/companies/cern/salaries

Says the man living in a world plagued by short termism, where companies forsake their future to improve their quarterly report, where we have condemned generations to suffer climate change just so that we could have 15% cheaper electricity and enjoy oversized cars.

This going further down this path only lead to misery

Given that interest rates in developed countries are generally lower than in all of history, and mind-boggling amounts of surplus capital are being deployed by companies like Amazon, Softbank, Tesla, etc., it seems to me that the world is less "plagued by short termism" than any time in the last 13 billion years.

I'm not debating your assessment in an absolute sense, or the direction that resources are deployed, I'm just saying relatively speaking, the world has been approaching an asymptote, so how far does it have to go to be enough? At what point does some disaster that we weren't expecting happen that proves we went too far in being future oriented? Like, I dunno, an actual plague?

Edit: I meant this to express something more than just another "well actually" comment - I think COVID-19 really raises existential questions about whether people in the wealthy countries have gone too far in a future orientation, as if everything was certain and we and our civilization were all immortal. It may not make a bit of difference for some, but I observe it's changing a lot of people's outlooks. Something that has stuck in my mind is how plastic bags were banned in my area just before the pandemic hit, and whether or not there was an actual repeal, everyone has brought them back. Is this something to lament, to cheer, or just to observe and contemplate? If everything is bad, is anything?

I am struggling to make any sence of your post.

COVID demonstrates lack of being prepared and future orientated, we did not have PPE stockpiles and did not takw actions that would contain the virus to save the economy now. The more future oriented you are, the safer you are.

You're talking about predicting the future correctly and making the right tradeoffs. Being future oriented means trading off short term goals for long term ones; preparing for the future says nothing about whether we are prepared in hindsight.

You can use "future oriented" to mean being prescient or omniscient, but I think that's a useless way to define the word, because it's not a thing that exists.

The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy, and I assume we would agree it was a huge mistake, right?

WeWork was a tremendously future oriented company, that wanted to be everything to everyone, but it wasn't, and won't be, the next Amazon.

It would be bad for society for similar projects to suck up all the resources in preference to short term needs.

"it is difficult to make predictions, particularly about the future" - Mark Twain

> The US invasion of Iraq was a drastic pivot of the US towards a more future oriented foreign policy

Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented? Thinking it was "mission accomplished" in 2003? Having no exit strategy? Creating a power vaccum, which was eventually filled by Islamic State? Aquiring oil, in a world which is trying to divest from it, and which is being damaged by its use?

>Which aspects of the invasion of Iraq were future oriented?

The planning of it, which, you know, happened before "mission accomplished" and all the things that went wrong. It has been widely reported and asserted that the planning started considerably before 9/11, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...

> Formation 1997

That's 6 years before the invasion, so slightly longer than a single election cycle, and significantly shorter than the duration of the war itself. I wouldn't exactly call that 'future oriented', especially since 3 of those years were spent under the Clinton administration; Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled the trigger pretty quickly once in power.

It's also incredibly short-term compared to its contemporaries, like Russia's "Foundations of Geopolitics" or China's "Peaceful Rise".

I don't see the term "future oriented" as having any firm meaning in a vacuum, as a somehow absolute judgment; it's meaningful in a relative sense and that's how I used it.

After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before; both advocating for the invasion and addressing "root causes" in different ways are different forms of that. Either was more focused on the future than maintaining sanctions and occasional airstrikes.

> After 9/11, most Americans became more future oriented than immediately before

I really can't tell if you're trolling at this point.

Declaring war against an intangible form of political violence, as a knee-jerk reaction to a specific incident, which ends up perpetuating that form of violence, is a classic example of short-term thinking.

We have plans to invade everywhere, buildings full of plans.

“Future” oriented thinking would be Phase IV Occupation plans. That filing cabinet was empty (by design) and “It’s the UNs problem now” is not very future-oriented strategery.

Cool your boots...

The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion... The comment you to which you are responding even asserted that basic research does have value - and does not assert that the trade offs go one way or another.

The implication of the comment as I read it was that we should at least critically think about those trade offs rather than just writing a blank check to whatever basic science scientists are requesting to pursue.

Your comment, in contrast, claims that the tradeoff always is worth it - that 'whenever' money is not diverted to basic research, then we are all poorer. You have no evidence for this claim.

In fact - no one really understands much about how best to evaluate this tradeoff. A helpful contribution to the discourse would provide us with tools to think about how to evaluate it, rather than just the endless tribalistic drum beating for one side or the other.

Funny, the comment from the start-uper, to me, sounds like a implicit explanation that basic/fundamental research is OK as long as it has less priority than economy (in the sense of money making money).

> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion...

It also happens to be wrong.

If more projects that require nuclear physicists get funded, more people can become nuclear physicists. We're nowhere near the point that we're going to run out of potential nuclear physicists who could be trained if there was more demand for them.

At some kind of abstract level there are a finite number of people in the world so anybody who does something can't be doing something else, but there are more than enough people for whom the "something else" is either unemployment or some net-annihilating occupation like divorce attorneys or advertising that we shouldn't have to worry about people spending their time doing something actually beneficial.

>> The claim was that there is a trade off - which is a pretty common sense assertion...

>> It also happens to be wrong.

Wow. The startup guy gave an actual example of the tradeoff. Am I correct that you see that not as a tradeoff but as a loss?

Sure, because the trade off wasn't real. There is a whole market full of people who could've done that work, it didn't have to the exact person who did it who happened to be one of the ones who would have gone to the other project, and the market expands when there is more demand because supply comes to meet it.

So the trade off wasn't between physics and software. We could've had both of those at the "cost" of fewer divorce lawyers or lower unemployment, neither of which are actually costs.

There is a theoretical point where having people do physics is less productive than having them do anything else they might've done, but we're nowhere near it. We still have people working in advertising only to cancel out the work of other people working in advertising.

Gee I sure wish I could have found one of those easily available graphic software geniuses, it would have saved us the $30,000 we spent getting ours a work visa.

Resource allocation is still a hard problem. We might be better as a society if we reallocate all the physicists to HR until that is solved.

Nobody said you get to pay below market rate. See how many appear if you offer a salary above it.

Or, that particular person could have been sucked up in to a huge bureaucracy and produced nearly nothing their entire career.

Hard to say.

I think you're over simplifying things with the example. There's 2 major factors that I see.

1) It is unknown what economic impact that the SSC would have had. It could produced more value or less than that which you and similar industries contributed to from the benefit of these scientists. A search shows that without accounting for the impact of the fundamental science, CERN's revenues exceed the costs by ~3bn euros[0] (report seems to also ignore ambiguous contributions like spin-offs). So the companies that benefited from the closure would have to at have near this revenue.

2) Scientific projects are fundamentally long term economic investments. These scientific projects have returns on investment of larger than 20 years and sometimes upwards of 100. These are impossible ROIs for companies, but great for civilizations.

These factors are huge and we're not even talking about the local economy boom because and influx of smart people which typically leads to higher quality schools in the area and tech startups that grow because subcontracting, consulting, and spin-offs. We're also ignoring the cultural impact as labs serve as a form of cultural exportation, which is important in the global game played between countries (the economic value of which is difficult to quantify), and this is what you are directly responding to.

It is fairly difficult to answer these questions, so I think your answer is too simplified.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004016251...

Regarding CERN, it's probably too obvious but I can't help but mention Tim Berners-Lee's work.

A nuclear physicist working on graphics software sounds like underemployment to me.

I agree.

"The economy" seems to favour the current generation of Einsteins working on optimizing ad impressions for Google, spreading fake news for Facebook and sucking unimaginable amounts of money into Bezos' pocket, the consequences be damned.

We could use a lot less of this, and a lot more Einsteins in research laboratories and universities.

At least some of the products in tech are actual products, I'm more sad and frustrated by a generation of Einsteins working in finance...

10-ish years ago I would have agreed with you. Right now, we are at a point where most tech giants are not making the world any better IMHO.

Do you think that a nuclear physicist writing graphics software rather than doing nuclear physics was a net win for society in the long term?

Well, depends on the nuclear physicist and on the graphics software

Maybe this person had better career successes in the SW field than in the Physics field

yes

Lets we free up all these physisics and engineers working on long-term projects that may or may not succed and send them to trade stocks on wallstreet. Who needs real progress

> the economy loses something

like…graphics software?

I think the trade-off is more than worth it to better understand the nature of our universe.

You seem to imply that basic research has no long-term economic benefit, or maybe that the long-term benefit does not outweigh the short term cost. That seems like a pretty difficult implication to defend.

No implication was given, just that things have costs.

Its pretty presumptuous to assume your startup has economic value, and the SSC didn't.

Plenty of completely economically worthless tech startups.

Well, ours was profitable and sold for $95M, kind of a definition of economic value.

That startup was already sold?

Now you have economic value it's time to have other kind of values. And with that amount of money you definitely can.

(of course, this is the comment of someone who painfully gathers 3000 bucks a month, that is who has 0 firepower except a few donations here and there, a few signature, etc. Not everybody is blessed with "the good idea").

I mean, that nuclear physicist also wasn't farming.

What you mention about billionaires paying for it piques me especially. For someone like Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg or any number of other ultra rich individuals, the PR value of simply stating that they will themselves pay for such a collider up to the cost of its proposed budget (maybe so long as some organization or government promises to cover any cost overruns, or overruns beyond a certain percentage) would be enormous.

Not to mention that they would be paying for an immense and unambiguously good scientific gift to posterity that would be free of all the complications, interest conflicts, mismanagements and so forth that come with building a mega-charity like the Gates Foundation (the conspiracy theories around that alone have been absurd, despite all its excellent health programs for the developing world).

It's always hard for a person to say what they'd really do if they were in other shoes, but if I had the sort of fortune that a Bezos or Zuckerberg has and especially with the relative youth of these guys, it wouldn't be hard to convince myself to make such an investment.

The Large Hadron Collider cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion dollars. Bezos alone saw his net worth grow by a multiple of that in 2020 alone. This huge cost would barely dent anything else they're doing or funding and in no way dent their personal quality of life.

I'm not at all arguing that they owe something like this to the world, or trying to paint any kind of anti 1% resentment, just pointing out that paying for this doesn't even seem like such a bad idea for people like them and their image for posterity (something always important to most billionaires).

The top four or five billionaires in the world could even cover most of ITER's much larger budget without permanently or seriously denting their fortunes.

The discussion of billionaires building "CERNs" came out of a discussion I was having with a friend as a way to quantify how rich these people are in terms more understandable. Graphics like pixel wealth[0] just show scale, but doesn't put things in perspective. But a Forbes analysis estimates the cost of finding the Higgs at around $14bn (rounding up)[1]. I also tried using Super Computers, but at around $300m a piece the number was too small (e.g. Elon is 100 Auroras and Bezos is 1000, ball parks). Number of CERNs became a much more approachable metric but also has the fault that these take over a decade to build (meaning the # of CERNs is likely an underestimate).

I do agree that this would be a great PR move. Especially as we've seen Bezos grow his wealth by $65bn in the last 4 months[2] or Elon by $44bn (more than doubling) in the same time frame[3]. But the practicability is also a little naive considering that these numbers do not equate to liquid cash that they have available. Though someone like Gates has much higher liquidity than Bezos or Elon.

But it is interesting. Maybe if my metric catches on someone will build one (or another mega science project) :D

[0] https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/?list=billionaires...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-musk/?list=billionaires#...

Regarding mkorostoff's 1 pixel wealth page. Taking wealth from the richest is very difficult. You'll have to find a way to make them agree with it. If you forcibly take money from people then you're just an angry mob. The only thing that would appear fair is higher taxes and maybe a wealth tax [0] but a 100 billion dollars buys you a lot of lobbying power. The worst case scenario is that the rich just hide their wealth.

[0] One could even make a concession and let the wealthy choose among a list of approved charities/projects to spend the taxed money on.

> You'll have to find a way to make them agree with it. If you forcibly take money from people then you're just an angry mob.

Not really. They use the "mob"'s roads and banks to make their business work and store their wealth. They use the "mob's" courts and police to protect themselves and their property. We live in a society, if your worry is that they are too powerful for them to participate in that society (e.g. because their power would let them hide their wealth away), then that just makes the ridiculousness of their wealth all the more apparent.

Wow. You think that the Gates Foundation has complications and conflicts of interest, and you think that a mega-science project would be free of those?

I mean, first of all, mega-science is just as prone to grift and mismanagement as any other type of mega-project, and far more so than vaccine programs or malaria treatment. And just imagine, what would the absurd conspiracy theory nuts say about a supercollider?

Of course, hey, wait a second, Gates and/or the Gates Foundation already do this (e.g. TeraPower, e.g. CFS), so your whole line of reasoning that it'd have considerable PR benefit is proven false. Fortunately the Gates Foundation isn't very motivated by PR.

You're right that something like a super collider could produce its own major opportunities for graft and corruption, but because it's a single project with a single construction to production timeline and a much more specific budget proposal, it doesn't quite compare to the endlessly fluid, highly organic and always adaptive nature of many long running billionaire foundations.

So no, I didn't quite prove the idea of its PR value false. Conspiracy nuts will always find a reason to consider anything made by some people or groups as suspect or outright nefarious, no matter how straightforward it is. but foundations oriented towards education, medical research and healthcare for the developing world are easily much more prone to that kind of narrative manipulation than a fixed, specific and extremely complex scientific device that will be used for a more limited range of possible things over a certain period of time.

The same applies to the differences in opportunities for graft and corruption between the two: Dishonest contractors and consultants could find ways to milk a privately funded super collider project during its construction and even during administration, but the scope of their opportunities would be fairly limited beyond a certain point, especially if the (presumably not stupid) billionaire funding it is keeping an eye on details.

Imagine on the other hand how many opportunities something like the Gates Foundation could offer for bad financial administration down the decades after its creator and main benefactor dies of old age or etc. Most of the collider's budget as covered by a billionaire in my scenario above will be a single sunk cost spent during a very limited period of time. The endowment of a giant foundation with flexible goals can on the other hand be managed (or mismanaged) ambiguously for decades.

The two things are not the same either administratively or philosophically.

> (the conspiracy theories around that alone have been absurd, despite all its excellent health programs for the developing world)

I mean, super science mega charity is going to have worse conspiracy theories. It's going to be the Gates foundation stuff mixed with the LHC stuff.

Like he's opening a portal to hell to mine energy from or something. No wait that's DOOM.

I can actually argue for the F35. F35 and Carrier groups ensures open oceans and secure maritime trade for all. 90% of global trade is over the sea and is worth Trillions of dollars.

There were times when countries would actively block maritime routes and steal cargo. A well integrated global economy, with open and secure maritime trade is beneficial for everyone and particularly the USA.

That would be done by frigates, destroyers and corvettes. Carrier groups are needed to dominate conflict theaters and other countries by projecting power.

Totally agree on open trade.

And as far as the F-35 is concerned, I think it was an attempt to be the end-all NATO, and global, fighter craft. Didn't work out that good, so far at least.

> Science, as an institution imo undervalues good marketing and good PR. For profit enterprises are under no illusion that they can succeed without good marketing and public perception.

Not to mention, this could be an attraction. Sell tickets for guided tours. I would gladly give money to have a guide walk me through that. Granted, at $100 a ticket, and 10,000 people a year, it'll take 20,000 years to recoup the investment.

Therefore, they need to make ITER romantic to have millions of people flock to rekindle an affection as powerful as the sun, and fuse humans as ITER fuses atoms.

You need to create a ritual. A couple would go, each holding a cup of water in their hand. They would then pour the water into the system as individual cups, and ITER would fuse atoms forever.

Now you can have millions of couples instead of two people like me.

Apparently, there are 80 million people per year who visit the frigging mall in Dubai. Many also visit the Eiffel tower, which was built for an exposition by the way.

Man, you’re just giving out ideas like this for free?

They also have to change the name. ITER --> GLITTER, to go with the fusion --> sun --> star theme.

Not all that GLITTERs is gold.

They could have a theme park with lots of different reactor designs!

Well, I did visit ITER back in 2014, it was really nice, we went on a tour, saw the facilities, attended a presentation, saw models of the reactors, etc. It was all for free (but the train ticket). We were a small (6) group of students who asked if a visit would be possible, and we were pleasantly surprised by the answer. There was at least one other family with us, so it's not just students.

Making money isn't really the goal for ITER, though. PR and education is. The tour left us with a pleasant feeling about ITER, but we weren't the ones to convince. I didn't see that kind of tour advertised in any brochure.

Might be better if, when trying to promote your passion, you don’t bash others.

I’d argue getting people excited about sport, and society as a whole playing more of it, is an unbounded good.

I even know some research scientists who play sport recreationally, and follow professional-level sport.

Plenty of room and resources for both!

I absolutely agree with you. Sports are good.

But it's an arbitrary good, because it's determined culturally. The rules of soccer could be changed at any time, and it would probably be just as exciting. Soccer is fun because we all agree it's fun, and no other intrinsic reason.

There's no reason we can't get excited about a monument to science the same way. If we have to spend billions just to get excited about science (without producing actual research), we should do it, just as we spend billions on sports just for fun and not because it produces any physical goods.

>>> small scale reactors

I believe this is the DoE position. Leverage AI/ML to design smaller magnetic confinement. With the goal toward commercialized products and partnerships.

JET was on track to breakeven. And I think most of the researchers involved believe they would have gotten there if the funding hadn't been cut. I think what they want is simply long term commitments. The sort of thing that is risky in fiscal budgets that can change year to year ;)

Final Report of the Committee on a Strategic Plan for U.S.Burning Plasma Research (2018)

http://brookhaventech.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Burning...

You don't need AI, just use stronger magnets[1]. ITER was conceived before high temperature superconducting magnets were discovered, so it has more trouble maintaining plasma stability.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=39m0s

MIT-affiliated company building a reactor using these magnets: https://cfs.energy/technology

These reactor concepts are still very large for their power output, compared to fission reactors.

I’d compare it to the human genome project. Look where we are now with full genome sequencing for the cost of a laptop.

I had a conversation with nomeone who worked on ITER who was of the name opinion, and my follow-up question to him was: "how much money would I need to raise to get us over the line". His answer was calm and sincere: "I think, something like 3 trillion US dollars".

That's prohibitively expensive for private markets. No one will take that bet. It needs to be proven to be possible first.

> investing would skyrocket (a government would have to be dumb not to substantially invest in PROVEN fusion devices).

Even if it is proven to work that's no proof that it's economically sustainable. The enormous complexity and required scale are huge barriers to adoption.

Most of the advantages of fusion reactors are already enjoyed by fission reactors, and it's not like the fusion reactors are going to have that much of an easier time managing public perception. "They're building a H-Bomb in your back yard!"

Worse, since fusion reactors aren't useful for making bombs government investment is basically guaranteed to be tepid. It's only advantage is saving the environment, which doesn't get votes, and environmental groups will likely be lukewarm on the plants just like they are with fission. Sure it doesn't release CO2, but /nuclear waste/ is a huge boogeyman, even when you're talking about low level incidentals like irradiated gloves and bits of piping.

> Even if it is proven to work that's no proof that it's economically sustainable.

If it is proven to work, then it removes one of the key unknowns: Does it work?

If it can produce more power than it consumes, then it's ahead of the smaller demonstration reactors that have already been built and demonstrated.

> The enormous complexity and required scale are huge barriers to adoption.

Hence they're building this one.

> Most of the advantages of fusion reactors are already enjoyed by fission reactors,

Say what? What do you think the advantages of fusion reactors are, and same question for fission reactors?

> and it's not like the fusion reactors are going to have that much of an easier time managing public perception. "They're building a H-Bomb in your back yard!"

'This reactor can be built far enough away that even if it explodes - and it can't - you won't notice. You won't notice it going off, and you won't notice cancer and birth defects, vast tracts of land cordoned off, water sources rendered toxic, etc for the next few hundred years. And we don't have to bury the waste product somewhere for a millennia or more.'

Sounds like a much easier sell.

> Worse, since fusion reactors aren't useful for making bombs government investment is basically guaranteed to be tepid.

How many power stations are owned by governments around the western world today?

It feels like most of the interesting things happening in high tech now are all privately funded. If / when this works, and there's money in it, government lack of interest due to inability to make bombs from it (and that all sounds dubious to me) is irrelevant.

Good answer. It's referred to as the Lawson criterion for those wishing a deeper dive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion

Regarding simulations, plasma physics can in a very real sense be viewed as the predominant driver for supercomputing research and funding. Ratio of fusion budget allocations to total global energy demand remains woefully pitiful. On order of something like 30B / 100T or 0.03%.

Indeed, we know that a fusion reactor will work if scaled up to about 1.4 x 10^27 cubic meters...

> Gkeyll contains ab-initio and novel implementations of a number of algorithms, and perhaps is unique in using a JIT compiled typeless dynamic language for its implementation.

LuaJIT. Neat. I assumed this stuff was still all in FORTRAN.

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