Are we going to wait until the sea level rises 20 feet and then say, geez, compared to the costs this imposed, fusion would have been easy?
Interesting point of reference: the Manhattan project cost around around $25 billion in today's dollars. The US government spent at least $6 trillion on the coronavirus response, which could buy 200 Manhattan Projects. Coronavirus will kill around a million people this year at most; air pollution kills around five million per year (and sea level rises could kill a lot more).
1. Chapter 8, "Invention", p198 in my paperback edition.
25 billion USD buys a lot of necessary stuff, but one Feynman doing his best to crack a secret of nature is priceless.
And as opposed to the current advertisement websites with auxiliary functions, I believe they had a more physics centered role
Then one B-29 had an emergency landing in Sovjet and the soviets reversed engineered it into the TU-4. Tu-94 which is still flying is a newer scaled up version of this.
It's amazing how much of the innovation the U.S did in the 1940s ended up in others hands(the bomb, B-29). The world would probably be very different if it hadn't happened.
Jets and Rockets were built by the Germans first.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160201-the-wwii-flying-...
It's common knowledge that the US spends much more per capita on Healthcare, however the commonly offered explanation for this is that the private healthcare system in the US is less efficient than the public systems in Europe. But the graph in the provided link shows that US costs are split evenly between private spending and public spending.
This is confusing because the private system in the US covers twice as many people as the public system. Per the US Census Bureau: "in 2018, private health insurance coverage continued to be more prevalent than public coverage, covering 67.3 percent of the population and 34.4 percent of the population, respectively."[0] If the provided data are correct, this would indicate that US private spending is nearly twice as efficient as public spending.
What am I missing?
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-26...
This was the original article I saw when it was $700B: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/how-the-u...
More recent one, I thought it was $950B but this puts it at $760-935B. The potential savings are lower but still in the low hundreds of billions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2752664
I originally started thinking about "how do we understand large numbers" when I saw the article as I think I had roughly the same emotional reaction as I would have done if the number was $70B. Most "big number" comparisons go to things like "dollar bills up to the moon" or "swimming pool full of X" which only gets across "this is a big number". I found comparing it to other enormous projects was hard even as if you take out the US contribution to the LHC you don't move the needle, so you need to then cover all countries costs, then the full project budget for all years and you're still left with almost the entire figure left.
The situation is quite different with nuclear fusion.
Why are we letting a silly thing like scarcity, supply, and demand dictate whether we self-destruct?
People would be able to plan on the price increasing every year and make sound economic decisions on whether they wanted to move closer to work, etc.
Unfortunately, it became apparent about the same time that the US is almost incapable of doing something in an organized fashion. People would scream about the price of gas going up and it would be rolled back. Or there'd be subsidies that would negate the tax increases.
I'd say that killing coal would have a large effect. It would also put entire town populations out of work — a really hard problem, read about how UK tackled it in 1970s and 1980s, it was painful and ugly.
In fact, it would even be cheaper than the healthcare costs of pollution from coal plants, which amounts to $187 billion in the U.S.[3] And in Appalachia, healthcare costs from coal production are $75B annually, so we'd come out ahead there too, which would be a double benefit for the miners since they'd be both richer and healthier.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coal-miner-salary-SRCH_KO...
[3] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/coal-costs-us-half-trillion-ann...
But it still won't be built, because Solar PV and wind are roughly two-thirds the cost and falling. (Including the cost of backup power supplies for periods of low sun or low wind.)
(Not to mention having much shorter construction times until first revenue, lower delay risk, lower investment risk, and lower operation and maintenance costs.)
Nuclear had its chance in the 1990s. Today, we have cheaper and better options.
Personally, I think, for United States it does make perfect sense to redirect, say, half of the military budget onto solving real homeland security issues: climate change, sustainability, ecology, pandemics. There might be enough budget there to address climate change [1].
It'd be a risk to spend less on military, but considering that the United States has nuclear weapons and allies, is it a risk really?
I think nukes is the future but nukes belong in space; just build some fission on high orbit to perfect fusion, and bring the meat down over microwave or as bulk hydrocarbons or whatever that works.
Solar system has unlimited free meal supplies of raw materials on first-come-first-serve basis. It’s been said that extraterrestrially constructed spacecraft can be launched for free merely by gently pushing it out of dockyard, or at most shooting out of a maglev train, for at least half a century.
So build some gigantic fission satellites in space!
It can be both when the consent is manufactured! :)
Edit- link to article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
It’s far too late to stop it with prevention, though there is still value in trying to cut CO2 when possible to blunt it a bit.
You can see this by comparing it to fission.
Fission fuels is not expensive on a kWh base, so cheaper fuel is not really a big advantage.
Fusion plants produce radioactive waste too (perhaps less?), so you don't save yourself from that headache. Which isn't actually that big of a problem either, even if the costs are probably underestimated for fission plants.
Now, the real killer for fission is the cost of the plants. They are just so incredibly complex and expensive that they are not competitive.
Will a fusion plant be cheaper? Probably not. It will most likely, with current tech, be much more expensive. So it won't be able to compete with fission. And fission can't compete (in most parts of the world) with renewables, that are still falling exponentially in price.
So fusion may still be interesting from a scientific stand point, and perhaps things will change in the far future.
An argument I often see is that renewables need storage, and that's true. But so does a fission or a fusion plant, unless you overbuild and accept a bad capacity factor. Some amount of overbuild combined with storage looks like the most economical solution currently - the specifics depend very much on where you are in the world.
You can't have a runaway reaction, because you need energy input to the magnet field to get more energy out. Instead of creating the right environment to get a chain reaction started if your control rods end up in the wrong place. Drop the magnet field and it all collapses.
Even if you lose control of it with the magnet field on the quantity is limited, tokamaks can only sustain bursts before going unstable. Wendelstein like designs would also be limited by the quantity contained.
If everything goes completely wrong you simply end up with a dirty bomb from the neutron bombarded core material and an initial burst of radiation. Sure not amazing but not a meltdown releasing vast quantities of heavy radioactive decay materials which can leach into the environment. Remember, fission is messy, it's not a chemical reaction where A+B = C. You get a spread of materials and energies, as seen by the Z number here. [0]
Essentially, you can at any point do an unsafe abort which might damage something or if everything aligns it's no more than a dirty bomb, but you will never lose control. Your Swiss cheese model needs to have far fewer and simpler layers compared to fission, vastly bringing at least those costs down.
I'm still betting on renewables for the near future, but my guess is at least harnessing fusion will have a place for projects with extremely specific goals in the 50-100 year timescale.
[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Th...
Fusion will also require highly reliable equipement, just like fission. Not because of safety, but because the fusion reactor will be complicated and very difficult to repair. The reactor itself, even the magnets, will be irradiated and activated beyond the point where hands on maintenance could be performed.
While the fusion reaction itself isn't very dangerous, the magnetic coils in a fusion reactor can potentially quench, causing them to explode, which because of their position will throw radioactive debris from the irradiated reactor vessel all over the place, as well as your tritium breeding blanket which will be highly flammable, toxic, and a bit radioactive. Worse, you can't make the magnets passively-safe.
Then there are the standard issues like tritium release. And you have nuclear proliferation concerns as a fusion reactor is great at making plutonium by just doping the tritium breeding blanket with some natural uranium. In fact, the first "fusion" reactors will probably do this anyways as they need to produce more tritium to get more reactors online and because this dramatically increases power output - so you get all the fun of dealing with fission products too.
I would be willing to bet complying with the safety standards for fusion will in fact be more expensive than for fission. Yes the general population doesn't have the same irrational fear of fusion that it has of fission, but once people start seriously proposing to put these in people's backyards that will likely change.
I am not qualified to assess whether that hope is well-founded, but there are real differences in the approach.
It's not that clear how much economy of scale is there with a modular design and if it's enough to displace the diseconomy of making smaller plants. But the one thing that gets cheaper with a small size is safety mechanisms, and those are a big thing.
Anyway, I let Wellerstein reply to this:
"""The Manhattan Project was an unusual, somewhat dubious enterprise that had massive, world-affecting consequences. Ignoring that not only misunderstands the Manhattan Project, it misunderstands what happens when you pour essentially unlimited resources into a given field — which actually is the primary goal of those who use this metaphor.
The problem is, the Manhattan Project “worked,” if by “worked” you mean, “produced atomic bombs for use in the Pacific theatre during World War II.” It almost didn’t work — there are plenty of reasons to believe that the war would have been over fairly soon with or without the bombs (the main historical question is not whether it would soon end, but on what terms and at what costs)."""
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...
This is just one of many lacklustre attempts at justifying a hideous war crime. From Eisenhower:
"I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."
America was more keen, but the logistics of actually invading the USSR would make any war essentially unwinnable.
Maybe if the nukes didn't exist, the USSR would have annexed western Berlin, but I don't really know how they would have managed more than that, even if they had wanted to.
I also don't think nuclear weapons would have prevented a war if the USSR was more aggressive or more close to the USA in military power.
*So called because intra-state conflict outside of NATO doesn't count.
You can't tell people to live a lower-quality life and expect to win elections, and you'll have the combined lobbyists of a lot of different interests against you.
It's actually more tractable to invent fusion than to try and win that battle long-term -- at least it's theoretically possible to make fusion work. And heck, if we could put some $ in pockets while doing it, that's something that could pass!
Developing fusion, carbon recapture schemes, we need to be thinking in terms of boondoggles that get the job done.
Fixing market failures increases economic wellbeing.
Well, yeah, the US spent the last 50 years (e.g. "WTF Happened In 1971?"[0]) widening the income gap and doing everything possible to keep their "undesirable" ethnic groups as poor as possible. When the bottom falls out, the only people left standing will be the people who would have been able to use the nice water fountain back when America was "Great", and anyone suffering will get individual blame for their lack of individual bootstraps.
e: In case I was unclear, I think this is a bad thing :)
[0]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/, but I would ask "WTF Happened in 1968?" instead.