Fusion and Magic | Hacker News Reader

Fusion and Magic

laphamsquarterly.org

46 pointscurmudgeon2221 comments

Great stuff, but it's important to realize that even with all the amazing work being done, fusion will almost certainly not be available fast enough to save us from climate change. It's a phenomenal longer-term prospect, but in the next couple of decades we need to look to other technologies (fission being the obvious point of discussion) and building political will to take meaningful action.

While I certainly agree fission is great, I think fusion is a great thing to work on if you are concerned about climate change. Specifically, it's the type of thing that would likely enable cheap carbon removal.

How is a complicated fusion reactor going to be cheaper than solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries?

I think fusion reactors are only going to make sense farther out in the solar system, like Mars, Ceres, and beyond.

Solar and Wind have recently hit economies of scale that they are already outperforming many past fission plants in year-over-year growth, power output, etc. Solar is fun because it's the cheapest "fusion" system possible, just using some of the waste fusion from the big ball in the sky. It is a sort of "fusion magic".

There's a lot of hope that solar and wind installations outpace a lot of other energy investments and do offer us a road towards "saving us" from climate change. (Though how dirty we generate power is still only one part of the climate change problem, we still need a lot more solutions to carbon capture the dirt we've already emitted.)

For anyone interested in the current state of the art of plasma physics and fusion technology I strongly recommend the book "The Future of Fusion Energy" by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball.[1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion-Energy-Jason-Parisi/dp/...

Lockheed's Skunk Works is still plugging away on fusion, on their own money.[1] They don't talk about it much. But they're hiring for that project, so it continues.

[1] https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion.htm...

Human nature does not change, not even at gun-point. This is what technology is, to change the world around us, so our brittle little society does not break down and we within it. Technology is the anti-thesis to ideology that believes one can fundamentally alter human nature. But due to our exponential insatiable nature, all technology in the end would become exponentially powerful. Handing out WMD-Gadgets to glorified monkeys at the end of the curve. No flying cars due to 9/11.

Philosophy aside, i was always fascinated by the ability to produce plasma with lasers - if need be in midair.

I added that to a game i develop, were the basic containment field for fusion is "augmented" on the fly, by printing plasma-circuitry into the outer layers and running currents through that. Its just scifi, in reality the interior of a reactor is to chaotic and unstable for such things, but its fun to imagine. Like printing a coil shaped laser lightning rod.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/fet-open-laser...

This is very beautiful written. I haven't finished it yet but i already made a mental note to check it more by the author just for the prose alone.

I couldn't stand it. No structure, just more words until it was done.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that all the UAP/UFO incidents were just advanced US craft, powered by some form of fusion.

Fusion requires very strong superconductors. Those can be made from plastic, according to some old patents. The critical temperature of this material far exceeds the decomposition point of the plastic, 1000 degrees K.

If you put all the pieces together, you should be able to pull off Boron 11 fusion in a manner similar to the Polywell, and extract most of the energy directly as high voltage DC.

You could then use that high voltage DC to power a field effect lifter.

That's my guess at the how fusion could be magic. Extrapolated from spending way too much time surfing the web.

One day I want my own personal Megawatt box powered by this technology. It should be about the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet with a small display for setting the output parameters, and a set of 480, 220, 110, 12 volt, and USB-C outputs.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that all the UAP/UFO incidents were just advanced US craft, powered by some form of fusion.

Triangular aircraft zipping around U.S. Navy vessels may have been things like this.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPGDAZyQ44k

I couldn't do that, I'd lose it in the sky, even if I was flying it.

Whoever's flying that thing is very good. They seem to be using an ordinary Futaba R/C plane controller. The tiny aircraft pulls out of power dives and goes to straight and level at low altitude, screaming past the observers at over 450 MPH several times without any problems.

That little delta-winged thing with a German/Austrian jet engine has better performance than some reported UFOs. Here's the engine.[1] That's a 2017 model. Costs US$3,390.

[1] https://www.ultimate-jets.net/collections/behotec-turbines/p...

> Those can be made from plastic, according to some old patents

Citation needed

> If you put all the pieces together, you should be able to pull off Boron 11 fusion in a manner similar to the Polywell

Citation needed

> and extract most of the energy directly as high voltage DC.

Citation needed

> You could then use that high voltage DC to power a field effect lifter.

Citation needed

> One day I want my own personal Megawatt box powered by this technology. It should be about the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet with a small display for setting the output parameters, and a set of 480, 220, 110, 12 volt, and USB-C outputs.

Imagine just handing everyone a Megawatt of energy, to do with as they please. We'd be living in a very different world.

However, for any of the above to be believable, there have to be some reputable sources to look at, no? Why is no one working on this and why isn't there more news of this, when this can just be done by 'putting all the pieces together'?

I am just as enthusiastic as the next guy about progress, but these extraordinary statements require extraordinary evidence IMO

Plastic superconductor -

  https://patents.google.com/patent/US5777292A/en
  https://patents.google.com/patent/US6804105B2/en?inventor=Kevin+P.+Shambrook

Polywell - Fuses Boron 11

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

Extract energy directly

  https://www.helionenergy.com/our-technology/

There are MANY working on fusion, see page 26 of this:

  https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2102/ML21026A315.pdf

Field Effect Lifter - Dedicated Lifters Homepage (2006)

  http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/liftbldr.htm

It was late night, and I didn't feel like pulling all the links together for a some speculation.

Those patents aren’t for superconductors. They claim “a material with a conductivity in excess of 10^6 S/cm.” That’s not too far off from copper at around 6*10^5 S/cm. Pretty good for a polymer if it works I imagine, but not superconducting.

Just because someone names their company “ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTORS,” doesn’t mean they’ve made a fundamental physics breakthrough.

The actual polaron chains that do the conducting have far, far more conductivity, the challenge is growing them in bulk.

After 1/2 hour of digging, I found a page that mentions conductivity on the order of 10^11 S/cm.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070704235516/http://www.ultrac...

You still need a real keyboard and monitor to be productive (Steve mostly increased consumption) and the best solar panel and battery will always be the tree (the best fusion reactor is the sun).

All the inventions that enabled the final medium; the 3D MMO, where invented in the 70's (personal computer and TCP) and 90's (HTTP and OpenGL).

Refinements to both have now peaked, the Jetson Nano (10W) as client with OpenGL ES 3 that has VAO and the Atom 8-core (25W) as server with 1Gb/s fiber home hosting.

Enjoy this while it lasts, and please; make something open that others can use to make something!

Also stop chasing infinite growth, instead settle on the peak.

Finally; own what you do!

There will never be so much as a single erg of commercially competitive power generated by Tokamak fusion. The only way to understand the current state of government-backed fusion research is purely as a way to keep hot-neutron physicists and contractors employed between weapons projects.

Other approaches may be useful for, e.g., spacecraft propulsion, but Tokamak is burning up the budget. It will need to be jettisoned before we can get much progress on the others.

But right now, every cent that diverted into fusion from building out solar, wind, and storage for them pushes us closer to imminent worldwide disaster.

> as a way to keep hot-neutron physicists and contractors employed between weapons projects.

This far more true of ICF than MCF (i.e. tokamak) approaches.

With the excellent results from MAST, it seems the spherical tokamak approach could allow for a much smaller tokamak to built than previously thought - given the size of the tokamak is strongly related to the capital costs (which are the biggest economic hurdle by far) this is great news for economic fusion power.

With the plans for STEP (UK), the US Pilot Plant (in design, seems it will follow similar route to STEP) and the CFETR (China) and the planned experiments at ITER - I suspect economic fusion will be outright proven by 2040 and perhaps even delivering commercial power to the grid by 2050.

Fusion doesn't have the same fundamental physical limits that solar and wind do. That said, I think this sort of zero-sum approach to science is what is going to lead us to imminent worldwide disaster.

In the Manhattan Project they pursued both the Fat Man and Little Boy designs simultaneously despite the cost - this needs to be our approach with the energy crisis, we can't afford to try and pick winners, the cost of failing to do so is far higher than the cost of funding multiple avenues.

We already know the outcome of Tokamak fusion research: certainly nothing for, at minimum, decades. Even if it could be made to work, it would take decades more to build out reactors, at conservatively a $100-billion apiece. We certainly won't be building dozens of $100-billion reactors until after the first one works long enough to prove itself.

All this time, solar, wind and storage costs will continue on down. Fusion will certainly never be cheaper than fission, which today costs more just to operate than building out new solar. So power from fusion reactors would always be the most expensive alternative. There can never be an economically rational choice to build a terrestrial Tokamak fusion plant.

Meanwhile, we already know the far and away cheapest sources of electric power ever: solar and wind. They start producing immediately. The $100 billion for the first fusion plant, someday, would buy a great deal of solar and wind today, and more all the time, displacing carbon sources immediately. Thus, every cent diverted from those to fusion brings the disaster ever closer.

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