Plasma physics: The fusion upstarts
nature.com
nature.com
I was hoping Google's R<C effort would help with this but was disappointed in how that fund was managed with regard to new science. Perhaps its going to require Elon Musk to get involved :-)
[1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-inv...
At least the private investors are backing non-tokamaks fusion research, but it does seem that Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk on the subject.
It would undermine many countries dependent on production of fossil fuels. It would hurt companies who are in this trade, let alone those who create competitive energy technologies. By the same token, many countries are heavily vested in the businesses within their domain being able to complete. Finally, a safe and clean source of energy would likely become fairly cheap quickly which would boost production destabilizing the global economy.
If any one country developed such technology could they keep it to themselves?
I think the strife involved would be much less than we're having now from limited fossil supplies...and far less than we'll have a few decades now from climate change.
So the main risk would be... war in the middle east, unrest in Africa, that sort of thing?
Let's hope that never happens.
I sure hope not because they shouldn't. Fusion has the potential to solve many environmental problems and since those problems typically don't give a shit about borders keeping it to yourself would be stupid.
If I were the Saudis and the petroleum multinationals, I would be pouring money into researching industrial processes that will only be practical once fusion is invented. Then once fusion is invented, those companies would stand to make a killing.
I think it's well within the realm of possibility that the U.S. spent some number of trillions (I've heard from one to four) of dollars of taxpayer money to attempt to initiate the Biblical apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Since WWII every major military event or war has been seen by that crowd as a sign that "it is the hour of the time," 9/11 certainly included. The fact that it happened right about at the millennium added even more fuel to the fire.
Throughout history leaders have often squandered the wealth of their kingdoms on crazy religious crusades, and being either rich or politically powerful does not exclude one from believing in things that are completely bat-guano insane.
It's one of the only explanations for Iraq that really makes sense to me. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and it would have been far cheaper to develop better oil drilling technology here at home than to invade for oil. The war cost more than developing the entire Bakken play. It would also have been cheaper and ultimately more effective to deploy a missile defense shield and better border screening for hazardous materials if we were really concerned about WMDs. For a trillion dollars we could likely field Reagan's Star Wars dream complete with a staffed orbital space laser command.
If you examine history, you'll find that all too often religious motivations have been more about power than gods.
It just seems awfully expensive for that. Of course I suppose it's possible that they actually thought it would be easy and that the Iraqis would just cheer us as we rolled in.
That's why they never went in with overwhelming force but instead the lighter, cheaper force. History has of course shown that it was a dreadful decision.
I've suspected religious nuttery for a while because there was just so much of it in the Bush administration. I think a lot of more secular minded folks and religious folks who aren't fundamentalist Bible-belter types just don't get how seriously those people believe in that stuff. The end times are just around the corner. Jesus is coming back. Oh, and the Earth is 6000 years old. They really absolutely believe every bit of it. It's not just a rationalization or a smokescreen, at least not from the point of view of the true believers. (Others may certainly use it that way.)
It was likely a mixture of the two: contractors manipulating the belief systems of the fundamentalists in the Bush administration to profit from a long drawn-out war.
I've seen those claims a lot. I haven't seen references to all the leaks to support it. Do you have any?
(I have seen quite believable motivations for Saddam Hussein to lie, like keeping Iran and the Kurds short. But I have never seen leaks supporting the conspiracy theory that Bush' administration knew the WMDs was a bluff before the 2nd Iraq war.)
I find the naïveté argument hard to swallow. The U.S. has the best intelligence agencies and network in the world.
Interestingly, this exact problem is what is also cited as one of the reasons the Soviets thought the Able Archer exercise in 1983 might be a real NATO pre-emptive strike: senior spies in London and elsewhere weren't told to send their analysis back to Moscow, just their observations. Meaning they defeated the entire point of having spies in place to start with (people who lived and understood the culture being able to explain it to others).
Yes, I don't think you have to look much farther than that. The prospect of a nuclear militant Islamists is bad enough to be worth deterring, even if our current administration does not share this view.
History may yet judge the Iraq intervention as not enough rather than too much. I hope not, because the sequence of events that would take is not pleasant to contemplate. Unfortunately the very act of ignoring the possibility brings it that much closer.
That would explain an attack on Iran or Pakistan, but not on Iraq.
I think the assumption was that it would go like Nicaragua; US invasion led by rebel faction. Chalabi would be installed as puppet govenor. The planners did not expect ethnic or sectarian conflict to be unmanageable; presumably once the oil started flowing the locals would be co-opted with the money.
What they hadn't realised was that "de-Baathification" meant the removal of the entire class and system by which Iraq might be governed, and therefore the destruction of "Iraq" as a state-concept. The replacement parliament was explicitly sectarian, accelerating the split into Sunni-Iraq (now under the control of ISIS), Shia-Iraq (the nominally legitimate government, now being supported by Iran), and Kurdistan.
Before Bush was elected, there was a lot of lobbying by Chalabi, Wolfowitz and others (see Richard Bonin's fantastic Arrows of the Night) to create the (false) impression that Saddam was an unstable warmonger who was amassing WMDs and preparing another invasion.
The fear was that Saddam -- incredible as it sounds today, knowing what we now know -- was capable of taking Kuwait again and possibly even Saudi Arabia, which would have been disastrous for the US.
The evidence uncovered after the invasion shows that Saddam's Iraq had been bled dry by sanctions, and that Saddam's frustrations with forced weapons inspectors had been genuine (the chemical weapons were destroyed long ago) all along; by the late 90s, Iraq was toothless. Saddam could not have staged another war if he wanted to.
Clinton didn't oust Saddam's precisely because it wasn't necessary; Iraq provided stability in an historically unstable region. The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information. The Pentagon (I think it was) had run simulated war games, every one of which predicted an outcome very much like today.
Saddam was a dictator who massacred his own people, but his regime resulted in far fewer casualties than the invasion and subsequent chaos.
> The State Department and the CIA knew this; the neocons insisted on removing Saddam in spite of all the available information.
The CIA believed Saddam had WMD, and he certainly behaved like he did. The State Dept. isn't relevant in this context - they're not an intelligence organization. Given that he'd used chemical weapons against both the Iranians and his own people it was a pretty good bet he would use them in the future.
The US and the UK ignored the utter lack of evidence and preemptive decided he had WMDs anyway, with zero solid evidence to back those claims up; the two main "defectors" who described mobile chemical weapons labs were provided by Chalabi, and nobody did the due diligence to check if their claims were enough grounds for an invasion.
Not to mention the other purported reason for going to war, the Al Qaeda connection. As a secular state who clamped down on religious extremism, Iraqi support for Al Qaeda was nonsensical. Iraq sought to cooperate with the US against Al Qaeda, but were rebuffed.
None of this is true, and even if it were true we could not have known it to be true, particularly based on they way Saddam was acting.
Absence of evidence is not evidence.
Weapons inspectors found nothing before the invasion, and nothing afterwards. Also, the CIA had very little inside intelligence about the regime (so called defectors turned out to have false information) on which to base decisions on.
If you can't know, don't invade.
In 1994 Thermacore, under contract by the US Air Force, observed anomalous heat: http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/GernertNnascenthyd.pdf
In 1996 the CERN observed both (1) excess heat (however they theorize it is caused by local variations of its thermal characteristics) and (2) hydrogen absorption (which they concede is unexplained): http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf
In 2011 Celani observed excess heat: http://www.newenergytimes.com/v2/conferences/2012/ICCF17/pap...
There are some other groups who have reproduced it but the quality of their research vary a lot (for an overview see http://nickelpower.org/2011/12/30/replicators-as-if-december...). The problem is that it remains still hard to replicate. Zawodny (from the NASA Langley Research Center) has some theories about why, see slide 17: http://newenergytimes.com/v2/government/NASA/20110922NASA-Za...
What's up the reading comprehension today?
Without Iraq that would have been 2.5-3 mbbl/day less, or a 3.5% drop instead of a 0.3% drop.
I seem to remember from my economics class that oil demand is very inelastic. So if a 0.3% drop in supply leads to a price doubling/tripling (depending on the basis for that), what would a 3.5% drop have done ?
So while I do not pretend to know the intentions of America, I'm scared to think what would have happened without it. If oil was the target, the war was a success (for the world as a whole, America only really profited by not seeing the world go down), and lack of success would have meant total disaster. The timing was near-perfect as well.
But fact is, the only thing the Iraq war brought was a delay, or 2-3, maybe 5 years. The US shale boom is another maybe 5 year delay. Given that we're very close to the end of the second delay, we need to come up with something quick. Unless of course you'd like to see Russia take outright control of Western Europe, and have more middle eastern resource wars.
We lined the pockets of the military industrial complex. Think of it simply as taking a nice percentage out of everyone's pocket and handing it off to Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, GD, etc. As part of that transfer it was necessary to kill a good number of people on both sides.
Fusion has been severely limited by funding for a long time. Last year I read a history of the U.S. fusion program by Stephen O. Dean, one of the major figures involved. It was a sad, repeated story of scientific triumphs followed immediately by drastic budget cuts. In one case, we spent $372 million on a fusion reactor, completed it, then cancelled the program and dismantled it without running a single experiment.
Right now most of our money is going to ITER. Alternate approaches are starved. MIT's levitated dipole was cancelled, UW's FRC was reduced to computational studies, etc.
Even MIT's Alcator C-Mod, one of our leading tokamaks, keeps getting threatened with cancellation. It's got the strongest magnetic field and highest plasma pressure of any tokamak in the world, and a couple years ago made a pretty major breakthrough in tokamak physics (I-mode).
If fusion had more copious funding, then certainly a lot more physics grad students would take up the field. It's not like plasma physics is uniquely difficult.
http://www.amazon.com/Search-Ultimate-Energy-Source-Technolo...
It doesn't even have a website?! Top secret indeed!
Fusion startups have an even worse failure rate than regular startups. So far its pretty much 100%. And most fusion startups operate in a fairly secretive fashion. But, I can say from personal experience, that if you keep everything too secret, then if and when failure occurs, you may not have much you can point to and say "I did that". And that matters when you are picking up the pieces and trying to go on with your life afterwards. You may need to find a job doing something else, and the words "Stealth Mode startup" don't cut much cheese outside the Valley.
This is also true for non-fusion startups. Now, no founder thinks that they are going to fail, or else why would you start in the first place? But failure is always a possibility. Nobody wants to spend energy on backup plans. Its best to focus on getting the important job done. But a bit of publicity is often helpful for other reasons (attracting funding and customers, and importantly attracting possibly helpful criticism as well), and provides value in case of failure as well. I think the current crop of fusion startups are doing a better job of balancing publicity with secrecy than I did.
I just wanted to say something about this because I know that there are a lot more non-fusion startups reading this than fusion ones, and this lesson is appropriate to all startups. My post-fusion career would likely have been easier had I been able to point to a news article or two about what I had spent 5 years on. Outside of DFJ, pretty much nobody in the Valley knew who we were. Which means that years later now that I am working on a new startup, I have few contacts in the Valley ecosystem.
One advantage of Stealth Mode is that it spares you the embarrassment of public failure. This can seem like a big deal at the time - when you're living in your car and your girlfriend leaves you, not having some journalist harping on how stupid you were to even think you had a chance is one less thing to cry about. But years later, you'll know that you would have been able to handle it, and the public record that you were willing to swing for the bleachers may come in handy.
It's also _impossible_ to reach break-even with p-11B in _any_ reactor design based on known concepts (with one exception [1]). This result, among other no-go results regarding non-Maxwellian fusion, was a major point in Todd Rider's PhD thesis:
"Fundamental limitations on fusion systems not in equilibrium", PhD Dissertation (MIT), Todd Rider, 1995.
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/1721.1/11412/1/33227017.pdf
(When it comes to reducing neutron flux in fusion reactors, the smart money is on d-3He. Everything else has too small of a cross-section.)
[1]: Ultradense matter represents one of the few loopholes identified by Rider which might actually be achievable. However, Rider did not attempt to confirm its feasibility; it simply wasn't relevant to that particular paper, and there is a very good argument that fusion in ultradense matter is nothing like "known" physics.
In the case of focus fusion, they're banking on extreme magnetic fields in the plasmoid suppressing x-ray production. And Bussard claimed that the polywell skirted around Rider's assumptions, though I don't know the details.
Don't know about Tri-Alpha, but they have a large and fairly distinguished staff of fusion Ph.D.s so I assume they've heard of Rider too.
When I read that line it made me wonder what solar/wind energy scientists think about funding any fusion research.
And when he does, he'll get it right. Since that's what he does.
Until he turns his attention to it, though, I'm skeptical.
People have been arguing since the 1980s (if you count the original claims of the spaces shuttle, since the 1970s) that lower launch costs are possible.
But only Musk delivered.
You really think the established launch companies would have done that, as long as they earned lots of money doing business as usual? (Now their business model is dead, so they use their influence to get long time contracts with the US military just before SpaceX's rockets are verified...)
It would be interesting to see what you base your claims on?
You'll notice that he said that it was "probably" not as hard and that he "might" work on it "someday". That's because he's smart enough to pick problems that he can make progress on that others aren't making. SpaceX does something that lots of people speculated might be possible but no-one was actually working on at the right scale and actually did it.
Solar panels, solar towers, wind, and tidal have a much lower cost and lower environmental impact. But they do lack the "cool" factor, and the military applications.
Fusion has been 20-30 years out for the last 50 years.
Michael Labgerge's chart gives a more complete picture of progress in fusion research:
Perhaps you mean a nuclear power station?
"Nuke Plant" is a common idiomatic phrase for saying "Nuclear Power Plant".
Let me break it down into parts for you:
"Nuke" is the common short form for "Nuclear" in English.
"Plant" is being used in the dictionary meaning "a place where an industrial or manufacturing process takes place"
"Power" is redundant in the phrase and omitted.
In terms of usage: "Nuclear Power Plant", "Nuclear Power Station", and "Nuke Plant" are all acceptable, but frequency of usage is different. "Nuke Station" is not normally used in this meaning, but people will understand it if you use it.
"Nuclear Power Plant" is about 4 times more common in normal usage in English than "Nuclear Power Station".
"Nuke Plant" and "Nuclear Power Station" are used with about the same frequency.
"Nuke Station" is used very infrequently. You can find examples of it, but it's less than 1% of usage in current English.
Here's a list of news articles that use "Nuke Plant" so you can see usage and become familiar with how the term is used.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0....
It's also a lot safer if an accident should happen. For the fusion reaction to work you have to keep the plasma hot. So hot that if it touches the wall of your reactor fusion will stop due to cooling.
One of the reasons people are looking to get fusion going is to replace fission, gas, coal and oil based power plants. So when promoting renewable energy sources we have to look at replacing all of those with solar, wind, tidal, etc.
Today about 6-7% of the total energy need is covered by renewable sources so it would require a substantial investment to do that. The investment needed to research fusion isn't as large and promises a much better solution that has the added benefit of not requiring a certain kind of terrain or weather.
In fact scratch that: they also outright bankroll it (the coal lobby in Australia, and various unions, are anti-nuclear for what should be fairly obvious reasons).