Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Still cool, though.
As a title nitpick, using the N-word to cover both fission and fusion glosses over how utterly different the two things are.
An even if you manage to develop and prototype the fission reactor, the deployment is still and even more subject to that approval problems.
The nuclear fusion work, as long a it is deuterium based (tritium can be bread during the process) and no dual-purpose equipment is attempted to be bought (like very large power lasers or extremely short-impulse discharge devices) can be conducted in your garage ... well until you start getting real neutron flux (or gamma flux before it if you're going fusor way) - either you and your neighbors get serious health damage/killed or you start installing protection from the flux - that would involve money and questions on why would you need so much of boron concrete :)
You're right, though, that securing the materials for a fusion prototype is less legally fraught.
/facepalm
Fusion reactors spew neutrons which can create a variety of radioactive isotopes. Most of these are very short-lived, fortunately -- but they do exist, and reactor designs need to take these into account.
(Also, some reactor designs use tritium as fuel, which is of course radioactive to begin with.)
Also of course, several projects are attempting boron fusion, which doesn't produce neutrons other than from a small portion of side reactions.
Side note: the National Ignition Facility is freaking awesome.
C-14 is not much contained in old fossil fuels due to radioactive decay. The literature also discusses the Suess effect, which shows that coal power plant reduced the effect of C-14.
You're right that the fission products and high-mass-number alpha emitters have left the picture, though.
The author's assertion that this project will be impacted
by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand
the technology.
The first team to reach net power out (and there are many teams around the world working on different paths to this at the moment) will have no trouble explaining it to people in a way that will differentiate it from dirty nuclear power. Getting to net power out will be, by far, the more challenging part.
The NIF's plan for a commercial inertial confinement fusion reactor looks like the NIF, except that shots occur ten times a second. At the moment they have no way of firing the lasers that often, or of extracting all the energy thus produced.
Just because there isn't net power out today doesn't mean that an enormous amount of progress hasn't been made.
Germany did shut down the more problematic reactors for a security check. The question is whether the reactors survive a scenario, where multiple systems are failing (like in Japan). This can be caused by operator errors, terrorist attacks, earth quakes (yes, germany has earth quakes), etc.
Compare that with the US, which has several reactors which are much more dangerous than most German ones, has some in very dangerous earth quake zones, etc. The US did mostly nothing.
I know which government I prefer.
* The US government did nothing because they've already considered and inspected for these contingencies, knowing that the reactors are in earthquake zones.
* The German government is displaying their incompetence because it took a huge disaster somewhere else for them to decide to look at these issues, rather than being more proactive about it.
You're assuming that because the US did nothing that it's reactors are vulnerable and the government must be turning a blind eye to it. You've provided no evidence to back this claim.
The accident in Japan provided knew knowledge: it showed multiple scenarios which were thought to be extremely unlikely or which were not thought about at all.
The collective opinion of Joe is what constitutes public opinion, and public opinion is (as I understand it) one of the biggest obstacles.
That would be massive news, I mean of the century, no?
But yes, controlled, sustained, repeatable fusion reactions could be a black swan on the order of the internal combustion engine for the 21st century.
Is it though? Exponential growth always has to end in disaster sooner or later.
Global energy use in 2008 was estimated at 474 exajoules. At a 8% yearly growth rate in consumption, it would take only 120 years to increase that to 5 million exajoules, thereby producing more waste heat than the energy which the earth receives from the sun. It's likely that we would be in serious trouble long before that.
(If the 8% growth rate seems high, I took it from the growth rate in oil consumption before the first oil shock in the 1970s. This seemed like a reasonable model for growth in a world with limitless energy supply.)
If they (General Fusion) can make their idea work... wow. Kudos to Bezos and the other investors for backing them.
Also did you notice the author chose to use a Bezos photo taken by Steve Jurveston (Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson)? It's a small world indeed!
High Risk -- High Capital Cost -- High Impact.
By risk I refer to financial risk. By impact I refer to the changes the new thing would wreak and the concomitant profits that would follow.
Fusion fits the bill nicely. With a few billion bucks I reckon I would happily sling a million here and there for a low probability of obtaining still further billions.