If you wanted a legacy, you could hardly do better than being the Zefram Cochrane of energy. You don't even have to stop being an asshole!
[1] The Scheherazade for a current example of interest, but there are thousands more examples.
This is the weirdest thing to me. How do billionaires think a big boat is cooler than building nuclear fusion? If I was a billionaire, I'd build space ships and underground tunnels and nuclear micro reactors
Chicks dig the long ball.
"Gamma ray tanning beds: illegal in 220 countries!"
Being first to fusion would mean your name would be above even Einstein in history.
Integrating the curves is maybe $100 billion. And below a certain level of funding nothing can really be done (you can't build any reactor on $10 and a box of surplus paperclips the IRS donated from pity). The fact we actual got anywhere using the handful of "it's a start" research reactors like JET, which dates to 1984, that could get built is a testament to the scientists and engineers, not a indictment of the field.
Basically, if as much was spent on it as we spent on blowing up poor countries for no real reason (at least $2,000 billion, just for Afghanistan), we'd likely be onto the second or third generation. Or we'd have concluded decades ago that it really can't be done to a five-sigma certainty.
The cynic in me says there's a renewed push for it recently because China has 3 research reactors, the next one (CFETR) is designed to outperform ITER (which China is contributing to) and support research for DEMO (which is to say, it is or is very close to being designed for experimental power generation), and the US feels in danger of being beaten to it.
$500 worth of steroids may let me bench press 200lbs, but it doesn’t follow that with $50,000 I could lift my house.
Booking out a hotel for hundreds of aides, attachés and visitors is very difficult outside the largest cities. Securing it can be impossible. Particularly on short notice. A yacht solves those problems.
(I’d still pick the reactor.)
> Physicists trapped in indentured servitude aboard Elon Musk's converted droneship research station "Just Fucking Get It Done" as it sails the post-apocalytic seas.
> Just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, they dock at Peter Thiel's island bio-research facility and they have to take matters into their own nitrile-gloved hands before it's too late...
He also has a startup, LTA (Lighter Than Air), aiming to build blimps for humanitarian purposes.[2] According to this article he also wants to the blimp to be "luxuriously appointed" so it can be used as an air yacht.[3] LTA is based at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, and I know I've seen blimps take off and land there every once in a while. When I see one I always wonder if it's Sergey's blimp.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-...
[2] https://www.ltaresearch.com/
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-airship-c...
Fun fact, this was part of the setup for Tenet.
You'd think a billionaire would have gotten one of those by now. Like China with the Liaoning... though, even the Liaoning isn't nuclear.
Actually, that's pretty amazing. The Americans have several nuclear carriers. The Soviets/Russians had/have several. And the French have one: the Charles de Gaulle. That's it. Nobody else has any. Not even China. Not even Britain (which does have nuclear submarines).
That's pretty amazing.
It really puts into perspective how powerful the United States is.
Granted, there's an argument that these are becoming floating targets, what with ASBMs, and as hypersonics come online. But still. They're pretty impressive things.
And even the Russians seem less capable than expected.
Which leaves basically just the US. Still.
Complacency would be a huge mistake -- and China is projected to start working on nuclear carriers pretty soon -- but, nevertheless, maybe reports of America's dethronement are premature.
Though that was long ago, I'm unaware of changes regarding that.
So no cruising to your bunker in NZ on your supernukular toy when the SHTF :-)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Ci...
https://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/editorial-features/...
If not for visions of space-faring billionaires, I could easily foresee sea-based billionaires with a small armada of support vessels to provide for them:
Old tankers could potentially be repurposed as massive hydroponic farms, or even fish farms. Why trust the local's mercury-and-parasite ridden fauna, when you can instead pull some fresh Tilapia 2 (genome will be slightly modified to prevent breeding with 'natties', probably will have different-colored skin) out of The Pond's hold?
A cruise ship would probably be the best host vessel for your employees, since it already has a lot of the features you'd need (sleeping, eating, refit some of the entertainment spaces into workspaces), and a smart move would have been to buy one during the Covid crash the operators had early on. Force your employees to register as residents in your port town of choice for optimal tax shelter status, and minimal legislative oversight.
Nuclear submarines could be used as top-secret skunkworks, since they could dive down in order to guarantee some amount of isolation from corporate spies. Once you have your roster for a project, you'd dive down a mile or so, and give the teams metrics to see who earns the most sunlight during the bimonthly surfacings. Lines up nicely with 2 week sprints, right?
But here's something I can't figure out: What would the flagship be? How many people would it need to support? Would it be one of the biggest of the armada (like the capital vessel), or would it be an incredibly-well-appointed cruiser?
Even the biggest yachts can't host even close to these numbers of people. E.g. the gigantic Azzam superyacht, at a cost of $600M, and 180m in length, can host only 36 guests according to news reports.
I doubt when Buff Jezos goes to visit Gill Bates on his super yacht he shows up only with a couple suitcases.
Then I discovered that the $700 million superyacht Scheherazade can accommodate "40 guests in 22 cabins". I suppose you could fill the hallways with bunk beds as well for your "hundreds of aids, attaches, and visitors".
I don't think accommodating 40 guests is difficult "outside of the largest cities".
“ It's worth acknowledging that while owners will ultimately spend a huge amount for the privilege of having their very own superyacht, they're able to recoup some of these costs by chartering them out. Connor estimates that around 12 weeks of charter represents the annual operating cost of most yachts, which means owners can break even if they hire their boats out for the same length of time they use them during the year.”
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/hidden-costs-of-owning-a-supe...
I guess you get some back if you sell it, and you probably never actually laid out for it as such rather than though some mad financial chicanery because simply paying for stuff is decidedly plebian.
Your buddy sets up a special company just to build it and stiffs all his employees and suppliers. Then the quid pro quo gets you another 30% or so back.
Renting it out for another 12mo/year earns the remainder back in a decade or two.
You can also 'donate' the use of your yacht to have a big party (also known as a charity ball) from time to time if you feel you are paying too much tax. Make sure the 'charity' is one owned by one of your buddies and is primarily used for lobbying or undermining competitors.
I gotta ask, have you ever filed taxes? Cause that’s not how any of this works.
1) You don’t buy something for $100+ million out-of-pocket. It’s easy to borrow money when you have money. The purchase would be financed at very close to market interest rates, and the repayments factored into the running costs.
2) The vessel would then be run as a business and chartered out for conventions, luxury cruises etc. Any profits would go to the owner.
3) The owner would then use the vessel as needed, maybe even paying like any other customer (albeit out of the profits generated by the boat itself, I’d imagine.)
4) Any remaining profits could be used to pay off capital, but probably aren’t. Instead, they’d be used to fund new ventures.
[1] https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/moonlight-ii/
[2] https://www.fraseryachts.com/en/yacht-for-charter/moonlight-...
that's a big "if"
I'm surprised no authority has raided one just after an investment banker party cruise, looked for the forgotten baggies and seized the vessel for "drug smuggling".
If you're a state level actor, you've got state level security concerns. I doubt, for instance, the American or Russian consulate gets rented out for parties where they turn over the whole kit to some other organization.
Yes, there is "your" staff on-site to protect much of the yacht / facility, but that doesn't stop a determined actor who's got a week of somewhat unsupervised access from infesting the whole ship with bugs bombs and poisons.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/24/superyachts-...
In particular they backed "Commonwealth Fusion Systems".
Use 20MW of energy to add 10MW into plasma, get 20MW of fusion, convert 30MW of heat into 10MW of electricity and they have reached their stated goal without actually achieving anything useful. And that’s assuming steady state operation rather than a fraction of a second pulse that briefly reaches their goals.
It’s exactly the same thing as a startup selling dollars for pennies and saying yea we’re going to make it up in volume.
Tokamak scaling is very well established. The output scales with the square of plasma volume, and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Stronger magnetic fields also make the plasma more stable. JET already demonstrated a five-second plasma, which they only had to shut down because they have copper coils that would melt if operated longer than that.
Because of all this, many independent fusion researchers think SPARC will succeed in getting 10X gain in 2025. After that, the larger ARC should easily reach commercial levels.
Of all the commercial fusion companies, CFS is the most conservative one. Tokamak Energy is a close second, with a very similar approach. The other fusion startups are attempting approaches that have more physics risk, though many of them would have fewer engineering and economic difficulties if the physics does work out.
First you need fuel, global Tritium supplies are tiny and DD fusion is much harder.
Next stability is an open question, no Tokamak has ever operated near maximum capacity for even 1 hour.
Add to that serious material science questions, etc etc and even Q>100 alone just doesn’t actually mean much.
Now let’s just assume all of that is solved, you still need to actually ensure your design is economically viable. Simply producing energy from fusion alone isn’t enough which means you need to cheaply solve not only all the above but do so cheaply.
He3 barely exists on Earth. However, pure deuterium fusion is easier than He3 fusion, and its waste is half He3, half tritium.
Even if it could be recovered, all the 3He on the entire moon might power the world for maybe 100 years.
That strengthens the point I was trying to get at, which was that there's no reason to go to the moon for He3 when, if we can get net power from He3, we can just make it in a D-D reactor and gain energy in the process.
For D-3He fusion to be useful, we have to hope that it will be economically viable to synthesize 3He, in the meantime. Arguably, we ought to be making and stockpiling tritium now so there will be enough 3He when we need it; but that might be too optimistic.
They actually have a fairly practical-looking design though. ARC will use FLiBe for tritium breeding and coolant. That will surround an inner reactor wall that's 3D-printed and replaced annually. MIT already demonstrated joints in the superconducting tape, allowing the reactor to be opened up to replace the core.
Economic viability is an open question for all tokamaks. Some of the other designs would have a better chance of achieving low costs if things work out, but there's a much bigger question mark on the plasma physics.
But D-T reactors would mainly breed tritium from lithium. The CFS reactor, for example, will immerse the reactor in a pool of FLiBe salt, which also functions as coolant. Each beryllium atom hit with a neutron emits two neutrons, and when neutrons hit lithium atoms they breed tritium. General Fusion does something similar with lead in place of beryllium.
It’s really not clear which would end up cheaper in the long run.
As to containment, the lack of high pressure steam makes much thinner walls completely viable. You still need shielding around the vessel, but not a completely redundant system capable of containing highly energetic steam explosions.
In terms of risks, sabotage at a nuclear reactor can be vastly more expensive than just the cost of equipment. Modern reactors are reasonably safe, but not if people where actually trying to break them. Especially when you consider what someone could do with access to the fuel. It’s not weapons grade, but dirty bombs are horrific.
The building housing an ARC will be very large. The reactor itself is 20 meters tall, and the entire top half of it has to be lifted off and moved aside when changing out the vacuum vessel. All that lifting and moving will have to be done remotely because of radiation from the activated vacuum vessel, which then will need yet another shielded area where it can be broken down for disposal and the debris from that cleaned up or at least contained.
Safety system don’t just need to handle normal operations. The energy in a fusion reactors magnetic fields is very well known, a fission reactor steam explosion or potentially hydrogen explosions can bet vastly more violent.
Using Fukushima as a baseline. ~1,000 kg of hydrogen * 142 MJ/kg is a lot of energy and that was vented outside the primary containment vessel before detonating.
Granted this is not an inherent requirement for fission, but good luck convincing regulators it’s unnecessary.
IOW, we're never going to break even. You and I are paying now, and would in any case never get any of the revenue, if in fact any could be had.
But we are supporting the careers and research of plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their students, and a few of them might do other, actually useful, and anyway wholly unpredictable things, later. With a good measure of luck, none of those things will build up to any world-spanning catastrophes the way the steam engine did.
p-B or D-He3 fusion, if achieved, would have application in the outer solar system even if not competitive here.
Lower risks should mean fewer NIMBY issues, which means wider adoption. Nuclear advocates miss that if fission played a larger role in energy generation it would also see more major incidents. Which then risks a backlash etc.
I think both Tokamak and CFS have roughly the same strategy of using bigger magnetic fields. Given the scalings here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.043... + JET working well it's a lot less risk than whatever most others are doing. Make a JET sized tokamak but have 5x the magnetic field strength gives a 625x gain in power, ideally.
SPARK is undoubtedly a more efficient design but it’s not a solution for any of the major outstanding problems.
Note that both companies are aiming to build a tokamak using high-temperature superconducting coils, which will facilitate energy gain in a small, high-field tokamak. CFS has built the coils, but no tokamak yet. Tokamak Energy has built a tokamak, but it doesn't use HTS coils yet, it uses standard/super-inefficient copper ones (they're developing the HTS coils as a separate project and expect to marry them in a future prototype). This prototype has the same "make it up on volume" problem, it's just lossy in a different way.
Both have made important advances that demonstrate critical components that will be necessary to do the full thing, but different ones, and neither of them has demonstrated everything. If anything, CFS's piece is arguably more important, because other copper-magnet high-field tokamaks have been built before (e.g., Alcator C-Mod at MIT, essentially the predecessor to CFS's prototype), but nobody has built a full-sized HTS coil before.
It’s possible they could succeed long term, but I don’t think it’s particularly likely.