Comment by wmwmwm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmwmwm | Hacker News Reader

After watching Zach Hartwig's youtube video [1] which culminates in talking through the ARC/SPARC approach to building more compact tokamaks (that don't require epic levels of global political collaboration, multi-decade planning and financing like ITER) I've been seriously considering a career change just to try and get involved! (There's a more focussed video on the Commonwealth Fusion Systems approach here [2])

As a physicist, turned developer, turned tech manager based in the UK I'm not quite sure what an opportunity looks like, and whether the right approach is to bash the plasma physics books, or wait for a more tech-orientated role to crop up.

I'm also really interested to know how these startup-esque companies are all going to handle their intellectual property now they're private enterprises - are their individual breakthroughs all going to be kept deeply secret (and vanish if/when most of them eventually fail) or are they all going to be frantically cross-licensing their discoveries so that in aggregate we don't lose out of the benefits of collaboration. According to A Piece of the Sun (by Daniel Clery) the early days of fusion research were hampered by international secrecy - things really started moving when researchers persuaded their governments to open up and let them work across borders.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

I work as an engineer on a university stellarator. I’m not close to plasma physics, which is fine since I’m good at what I do and what I do (data acquisition) is necessary. There are lots of fields that are not plasma physics that are needed to have actual experiments made and operated.

If you want to break into research: hit the books yesterday. You’ll need to be able to speak the lingo and know what machines around the world are doing. This might be difficult outside of an academic setting, but a life in academia is a tough pill to swallow. I’m not the right person to give you a list of literature, but “Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy” by Friedberg is considered the go-to book in my group.

Also, regardless of whether or not you make a big life change, I highly recommend that you read “The Future of Fusion Energy” by Parisi and Ball. It is just the right level of technical to give understanding to the problem but not so technical that someone without a plasma physics background will be lost.

In the uk you have tokamak energy that is using the same aproach than arc (and they seems to be hiring).

https://www.tokamakenergy.co.uk/

Building an ITER sized device is not that expensive, doing serious R&D is what’s so expensive. Their looking into multiple lithium blanket designs for example and just collecting a serious amount of data. An actual power plant doesn’t need that many sensors or to operate across such a wide range of conditions.

That's kinda not what people like Whyte at MIT say. They make the case that the scale of a complex device is the cause of an exponential increase in costs - both capital and operational. For example removing delicate low level radioactive magnates for servicing is easy if they weigh a kilo, a pain if they weigh 200 kilos, a big undertaking if they weigh 1000k and harder and harder and harder the larger they get.

You can see the cost increase with fission reactors - a full on big reactor like sizewell C is slated at £8bn.

If it’s radioactive enough to be a safety hazard then you need remote handling equipment either way. Further, we aren’t talking 1/200th the size, a ~1GW reactor can only be so small because the amount of heat being transferred.

That said, ITER is a very old design based on outdated limitations. But, again the goal is research not low cost power generation, a stable design is more important to them than an efficient design because the secondary equipment is so critical.

Time is more important than cost wrt fission development and global warming

Based on data we have, fusion seems unlikely to be economically viable for a long time even if it’s technically viable. Various advancements like better superconductors might change the situation, but without that there seems to be little hurry needed.

At least after talking with people in the field the reactor design seems like the least important problem.

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