I think Nuclear Fusion is the single most exciting up-and-coming technology. I can't believe we're not throwing a hundred billion dollars at it.
Make fusion, not war.
Make fusion, not war.
If only we capture 1% of the social graph we can make freemium Fusion the next killer energy product!
Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because they don't payback in political contributions.
There are a myriad of ways to finance such an ambitious project through clean energy taxes but unfortunately they suffer the changing whims and needs of politicians. Yeah certain industries would go by the way side with this type of power available but many of them have big money invested in energy creation and distribution many would simply shift some columns in their spreadsheets and still balance out.
Considering the deficits the US runs, just in a day or two of deficit spending is more than what this facility budgets for this research.
Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice today and reap rewards.
For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues. We're in this for the long haul, if we get fusion in twice the time for half the money, we'll still have fusion.
This only works if fusion can make petroleum cease to be a strategic resource.
This is even before we get into ecology - most modern energy sources are highly pollutant (oil/coal). How much better off will planetary ecology will be if fusion comes online 10 years earlier?
The problem is that these approaches can't work without enormous budgets, and while they produce lots and lots of very interesting science, they hoover up talent and funding resources that might be better spent exploring other avenues.
> Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this.
Perhaps some kind of "Manhattan Project".... oh.
You don't want to wait months though, which is why "shovel-ready" matters and this sort of research loses out to other sorts of projects. That said, less guns and more fusion would be nice.
Does that hire you forty more world class fusion scientists? Are there forty more world class fusion scientists?
Are those scientists going to go "Fantastic! We'll just order up three more of these experimental fusion reactor rigs, here are the plans, we'll start hiring engineers and buying up electronic components from the local silicon fab down the road driving all that money into economic productivity for you!" - unlikely. They already have one experimental fusion reactor. Three more the same aren't going to get them anywhere any faster. They won't know what the next one should look like until they've finished getting results out of this one.
Maybe they just spend it all on repainting the lab, buying new office furniture, getting in catered lunches - you might see a marginal improvement in fusion research productivity, and certainly there's a local economic stimulus which was the idea there, but you're not getting the valuable long term capital value of, say, using the money to rebuild a few bridges.
Even if it turns out your ten fusion scientists have a ready proposal to build the next generation experimental fusion reactor, plans are drawn up and costed, and all they need is you to hand over that check for two billion, if they then go ahead and order the parts from China, subcontract a bunch of German engineering firms to build the cooling systems, and get the heavy steelwork welded together in Korea, your stimulus effect just disappeared overseas.
Of course, if that experimental fusion reactor turns out to be THE ONE that creates viable economic fusion power, maybe that's worth the 2 billion. But that's not stimulus spending, that's gambling on an investment.
So this could help everyone if these more qualified people could stay in research and not take a spot in a job that can be filled by a less skilled person.
Suddenly, there's now a company which can do that - and is eager to sell the service on since they now have the capability. Not only do subsequent magnets get cheaper, but things which weren't feasible due to their smaller scale but precise requirements suddenly become possible.
This is fun.
[1] This is tongue in cheek.
That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??
So really, the answer is, it doesn't matter how many nukes we have right now, NIF was created (in part) to ensure that the capability to blow up the world could be maintained.
As depressing as it is, it's pretty much how it goes with nearly all defense technology spin offs. Why the hell did we spend all that time working on rockets that purposefully crashed back onto the Earth (on top of people!) instead of doing something like getting communications satellites up, or getting to the moon.
1) we never would have had nuclear power in the first place. (or it would have taken decades more)
2) It would even have taken a lot longer to develop oil energy and widespread cars (allied research on oil)
3) We wouldn't know about co2 separation (since the nazi state was cut-off -mostly- from oil, they researched liquefaction and nuclear power)
Nobody ever gives cruel losers credit, I guess. Heh. But the nazis certainly did a lot of useful research.
Plus, war made sure that they put getting working reactors first. Not interesting science. A critique in fusion research is that nice, flexible and very accurate/complex apparatus is given preference over quick-iteration and fast experimentation. War made sure that the researchers went straight for the goal (and there is the fact that the Germans and the Americans both knew that there was probably a way to tickle the uranium reactors to result in Hiroshima. This caused the Germans to be careful, although even their experiments would today be considered absurdly dangerous. But the early American experiments were bat-shit insane). So thought hard about every step, and constantly fucked up (someone left 2kg uranium in a bath of water + cadmium by mistake, then walked out for the night : the first meltdown. They didn't figure out what had happened until years later. Someone inserted a steel rod into a barely sub-critical reactor submerged in water. No-one left the building alive (due to the water exploding as steam violently enough to bring the roof down, not due to a nuclear explosion). None of this would not have happened in peace time.