
Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists - lnguyen
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-fusion-on-brink-of-being-realised-say-mit-scientists
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clon
[https://encrypted-
tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQV2HAS...](https://encrypted-
tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQV2HASTArytCtxnJ5ML9iSeroJBGzgxNSPBB_CcVO56Ex0Lch14bXbJJE7)

I enjoy the joke about the perpetually shifting fusion acquisition time frame,
but it would be fair to add that in terms of actual funding, we have been
under the "fusion never" level. I feel like the context for the saying has
always been that the proper financing assumption holds.

~~~
clon
That said, the material sciences advances required, especially high
temperature superconducting magnets, simply were not there in the 70s. So a
moonshot project to achieve it may have been a failure at massive costs,
discouraging humanity from fusion research for a long time.

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oldcynic
First time I heard that fusion was 15 years away was around 35 years ago, in
an already old book belonging to my eldest brother. They were talking about
ZETA (late 50s).

Wake me when the first power station is being built.

~~~
tomw2005
To quote my Physics of Electrical Power Generation lecturer from a few years
ago: "Fusion is 15 years away, I think it will always be 15 years away."

~~~
ScipioAfricanus
It's a good quote, but you should know you're really quoting the zeigeist
there, as was your professor.

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ben_w
Article talks about YBCO as if it was new, but it’s almost as old as I am. If
it was the only thing holding back fusion, the reactors would’ve had software
updates for the Millennium Bug.

Perhaps this time I won’t fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…

~~~
fabian2k
YBCO is not new, but the production of it in the amounts and quality necessary
for large superconducting magnets is still difficult. You need to produce long
stretches of the material to create large magnets efficiently, and that isn't
trivial.

The old superconductors typically used in this kind of magnets have been
pushed to the limit already in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, ~23 Tesla is the
strongest existing commercial one and this seems to be a limit for that
technology. The first NMR magnets that use YBCO are expected in the next years
as far as I remember, I don't think any exist yet.

~~~
ben_w
Now that is interesting. I had thought YBCO was easy to fabricate given I saw
some amateur do it on YouTube, but I do accept they had quality control issues
— important on large scale production.

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mariuolo
I'm no expert, but 15 years seem like an awfully small timeframe to produce a
commercial reactor with a still unproven technology.

~~~
sgt101
The argument is that they can make it small - room sized, with the new
magnates. This reduces the every one of the subsidiary technical challenges to
doable, basically you don't need big machines to dig big holes, you don't need
30000m^3 of concrete here, there and everywhere, you don't need a supply chain
that involves 20000 people in 40 countries... so the co-ordination costs go
away as well.

It's pretty like the idea with data analytics or software ; if you can do an
iteration / update by yourself in 10 minutes you will be able to solve the
problem (for reasonable problems) in a few weeks for sure. If you need to
spend a month assembling the data and compiling the code before you can commit
a change you are simply not going to ever be able to make progress.

~~~
vidanay
I think the "for reasonable problems" is the question for fusion.

~~~
sgt101
I have no idea of the value of my impression of the work - I saw the MIT PI
present on this a year ago and have read up since, but well - that's it.
However, I think that they think that the main challenges are solved as per
ITER and that they are on a mission to resolve the engineering; and this is
the way to do that. They don't think that there is anything left which is a
show stopper apart from the need to trouser $50m++ to build the proof of
concept.

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rikkus
If we were to work with an assumption that fusion happens soon (<20 years) and
power is now cheap, what would we now be able to achieve that was previously
prohibitively difficult / expensive?

~~~
throwawayqdhd
If energy is basically free, how will it impact crypto prices?

~~~
alex_hitchins
Will the concept of money still mater as much if at all if all energy is free?

~~~
aoeusnth1
Let me rephrase - “will anything be scarce if electrity is free?”

The answer to that is obvious: yes. So why wouldn’t we need money?

~~~
alex_hitchins
Agreed, hence "as much". My thoughts were that the main cost of 'stuff' is the
energy used in mining or preparing it. If you have free (cheaper) electricity,
you don't need oil, metal production has it's biggest cost removed, etc.

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throwawayqdhd
What will be realized first: affordable graphene production, nuclear fusion,
or general artificial intelligence?

~~~
alex_hitchins
I'll go one step further - humans might sort their species out and stop with
all the pointless tribalism and unite for the common good.

~~~
hutzlibu
"stop with all the pointless tribalism "

I'll challenge that, because I think tribalism (living in small groups) is the
way more akin to our genes. And much from the rising mental problems of humans
today comes from living on your own in a big anonymous pool of strangers.

But those small groups could then indeed work (more) together for the common
good.

~~~
alex_hitchins
If we are looking at what's in are basic genes as a marker on what we should
be doing, I don't think we should be messing about with fusion. Or fission
come to think of it. I agree loneliness and mental health are big problems
today however don't think the answer is having an adversary to motivate
yourself.

~~~
hutzlibu
"If we are looking at what's in are basic genes as a marker on what we should
be doing, I don't think we should be messing about with fusion. "

Why?

I didn't say we should live stone age style. And using technology is very akin
to our genes, afaik. So I don't see any problems with that. What matters more
than the tools are the social interactions I believe. And there we could do
better.

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pfdietz
According to the 2014 arxiv.org paper on the ARC reactor

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf)

the concept (which would produce 190MW(e)) uses 90 tonnes of beryllium.

According to the USGS, the current total world annual production of Be is 220
tonnes, and total global resource is estimated at 100,000 tonnes.

The world uses ~20 TW of primary energy, so roughly 100,000 ARC reactors would
be needed to supply the world, using about 100x as much Be as the estimated
amount available for mining.

Unless Be supplies can be drastically increased, this concept is at best a
niche player.

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Maakuth
For comparison, Olkiluoto 3 fission plant has been under construction for 13
years already. It's currently estimated to enter energy production a bit over
one year from now.

~~~
andygates
The delays there have been the usual big project problems - big builds,
corporate drama, quality control. none of those apply to the MIT plan (they
did apply to ITER, which was one of the arguments against it, but at the time
it was the best option because the small strong magnets didn't exist).

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scottlocklin
Fusion always 15 years from being realized. Always will be.

~~~
sien
Sadly, that joke is at least 30 years old too.

There are lots of companies in the game now.

Tri Alpha Energy, General Fusion, Lockheed Martin and there are quite a few
more.

There is the Wendelstein 7X stellarator and ITER.

The increase in fusion magnetic energy has actually been faster than Moore's
law.

See this video at 18:30
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=3990s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&t=3990s)

The massive improvements in superconductive magnets are really making a huge
impact. Check out ARC and SPARC from MIT.

Humanity is going to get usable energy generated from fusion.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_Sadly, that joke is at least 30 years old too._

When I was in high school, 45 years ago, I visited prospective colleges. Some
grad students were discussing the fusion work they were doing, in a big
building, with lots of shiny hardware. They probably told me that practical
fusion was 15 years away.

 _Humanity is going to get usable energy generated from fusion._

Yeah I heard that in high school. I'm now retired and am still hearing it.
Still, stranger things have happened. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series a
few years ago!

~~~
sien
Ha.

Wonder when the first company that was targeting fusion was started.

It seems there weren't any until the 2000s sometime. Now there are lots.
People with the money to sink 10s of millions into the idea think that it's
close.

Danny Hillis will bet you that someone will do this by 2020:

[http://longbets.org/605/](http://longbets.org/605/)

They have lots of skin in the game.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Hi. Fusion company founder from 1995 here (Fiat Lux Research, funded by DFJ).
We were probably the first in the internet age, but didn't have a website
(stealth mode engaged!). We definitely weren't the first. Companies which were
earlier than us that I am aware of include Bogdan Maglich's Migma company
(1974), Paul Koloc's Prometheus 2 (1976) and Bussard's EMC2 (1985). You could
also include companies with divisions targeting fusion like General Atomics
(1974) and ITT (1964).

~~~
sien
Wow.

Thanks heaps for that. I had no idea.

What do you think of the new wave of fusion companies? Do you think they will
get somewhere?

There is a subreddit for fusion. reddit/r/fusion.

Would you be interested in answering questions, doing a sort of AMA there?

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hguhghuff
I first heard about fusion maybe 30 years ago. At the time I was told that the
cliche of fusion energy is that it's always just around the corner.

And this article seems to say, well it's.......

~~~
ZenoArrow
Ever wonder why that is?

I'd suggest the optimistic estimates are both for scientists and investors.
Optimism is used as a fuel to keep scientists going when the future is
uncertain, and any breakthrough, however small, is a chance to recharge that
fuel. On the other side, (in our society) scientific research requires
funding. It's easier to acquire funding if you suggest the research may take
20 years rather than suggesting it'll take 100 years. This also encourages
scientists to be optimistic in their predictions, as if they aren't optimistic
they risk losing their funding, which greatly reduces the chance of rapid
progress.

For those reasons, I'd suggest these long estimates (as a definition of
'long', let's say in this case anything over 5 years) are just tools that help
to get the work done, rather than being something with a high probability of
being true.

~~~
annabellish
Well, we're mostly software developers - I'm sure we all understand being an
hour away from completing a project for the past several days of development.

Scale that up, and...

~~~
ZenoArrow
Sure, but there's a difference between setting short term targets and long
term targets.

Setting short term targets is only realistic when you're doing something that
either has been done before or where it's a variation on something that has
been done before. Perhaps you underestimate the time it takes to do something
by being unaware of the underlying complexity of a task (or by telling people
what they want to hear, if they can't handle pessimistic estimates), but they
still have a reasonable chance of being completed on time.

Long term targets work differently. If you want the time taken to be as short
as possible, and you still give an estimate within a window of time which you
have little to no hope to predict, you're basically saying "I don't know".

To put it another way, I could have a reasonable guess at what I'd be doing
one week from now. On the other hand, I don't really know what I'll be doing
20 years from now. Any estimates I put within a range that is outside my
ability to predict would basically boil down to me implying I haven't got a
clue. With that said, I'd still put a timescale on an baseless estimate if it
served a purpose. It's the purpose behind pulling the number out of thin air
which is the point I was trying to highlight.

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zaarn
I hope we crack the concept of fusion soon, it would solve a lot of our
problems (atleast most of the energy related ones, ie safety, pollution,
availability of fuel)

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anotheryou
isn't it meaned to always be 50 years away?

The 10s runtime is surprisingly close to a continuum runtime btw.

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alex_duf
I'm sure it would be useful to have that technology around and I'm quite
excited by the prospect of it, especially as the volume seems to be
drastically reduced compared to ITER.

But I'm wondering how relevant fusion is to reverse climate change. It seems
like renewables and storage are already fitting the bill, at a much lower
cost.

Edit: happy to hear any arguments

~~~
DennisP
Renewables are cheap when backed up by natural gas plants, but wouldn't be
especially cheap if you built enough storage to run civilization on them.

I certainly think we should build renewables as fast as we can, because
they're available now and a long way from the market share that requires a lot
of expensive storage. But down the road, it's entirely possible that advanced
nuclear power sources, whether fusion or advanced fission like MSRs, will be
more economical than building enormous amounts of battery storage. (We do have
cheap hydro storage but that's geographically limited.)

