
Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a milestone, but faces lack of funding [audio] - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-22/the-nuclear-tech-breakthrough-that-could-make-oil-obsolete
======
hwillis
This is a low-impact segment. I skipped around a lot but it's incredibly light
on information. Like 20% is spent on explaining what fusion is, which is just
wasted air. The only substance is a super-light overview of ITER. No mention
of the couple dozen fusion startups.

>Nuclear fusion is on the brink of a major milestone

ITER is supposed to ignite in 2025 if it stays on schedule. The project is in
continual jeopardy from people pulling out. Fusion is _bleak_ despite large
variety in research[1]. This whole thing could be reduced to a 30 second
endorsement soundbyte. Instead it's a longform that gives no actual idea of
the state of fusion.

[1]: [http://fusion4freedom.us/intensive-analysis-lockheed-
martins...](http://fusion4freedom.us/intensive-analysis-lockheed-martins-
fusion-effort/)

~~~
jessriedel
Really appreciate a summary like this, even when brief. I wish people would
take a cue from academia and post more abstracts/tldr's.

The 80k Hours podcast does a fantastic job at this, providing a full
transcript, a summary of the key points, and a time-indexed table of contents.

[https://80000hours.org/2017/08/podcast-we-are-not-worried-
en...](https://80000hours.org/2017/08/podcast-we-are-not-worried-enough-about-
the-next-pandemic/)

~~~
msla
> I wish people would take a cue from academia and post more abstracts/tldr's.

Then they get downvoted by people who think "TL;DR READ IT" is a masterful
blow against everything wrong with Kids Today.

To be more serious, there's enough people who apparently regard summaries as
lazy that it's hard to predict whether they'll be welcome in any given forum.
Caring or not caring about downvotes aside, posting stuff that's unwelcome
isn't very sociable.

~~~
tj-teej
It is lazy, but only if the summaries are replacing actually reading the
content.

Also a summary is only as good as it is accurate. If the piece being
summarized has sufficient nuance it can't be summarized well, or is at a
higher risk of being summarized incorrectly.

There's a joke here somewhere about judging a book by its cover.

~~~
jessriedel
Different articles are worthwhile to different people. Abstracts help people
find content they are interested in, reduces incentives for clickbait and
burying the lede, and focus discussion on the main points. Of course bad
summaries can be bad for the discussion, but that's what downvotes and
criticism is for. The same is true for normal comments.

------
vortico
There's no such thing as a single "breakthrough" in fusion, and it bugs me
whenever news outlets claim it's "just around the corner" or "it just requires
a genius to figure it out". Fusion is achieved by many incremental
improvements on the design of the facility, the macroscopic structure of the
fuel, and its material makeup.

There are two ways humans can have self-sustaining fusion. See my crappy log-
log plot: [http://i.imgur.com/ZfCueCe.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZfCueCe.png)

Inertial confinement fusion starts at the red point and goes straight up
without heating up the plasma much. After it stagnates for ~2-5ns, the high-
pressure plasma equilibrates so its temperature rises, putting it in the
fusion range. The higher the pressure, the higher the final temperature, and
ideally you want to get as deep into the fusion range as possible to more
efficiently burn the fuel. The state of art neutron energy yield per laser
capacitor yield is around 100%, but we need at least 5000% to make up the
inefficiency of charging capacitors, amplifying lasers, converting neutron
kinetic energy into steam, generating electricity via turbines, and still have
some left over to supply a power grid.

Magnetic confinement fusion starts at the red point and goes to the right over
a few milliseconds. The pressure is always about 1 atmosphere, so you have to
get really hot. Tokamaks can hold this position for a few seconds, which is
needed for efficient fusion to account for the slow burning because of low
pressures. I'm not sure exactly what the engineering challenges of magnetic
confinement are, but I can say that storing anything that hot for a while is
very damaging to the tokamak, while at the same time you must have strong and
precise magnets placed around it.

There's really no other way of getting into that "fusion" area of the plot. If
you try to draw a diagonal line, you wouldn't be able to keep pressurizing
because high temperature makes plasma difficult to compress. You have to
choose one of the above two general methods, and the design space is pretty
well explored, so there's not going to be a large breakthrough that
researchers have completely missed at this point. Fusion will be achieved by a
sequence of 1% improvements month by month, so law makers and tax payers must
understand this when they allocate X dollars and are disappointed that their
grant only gave a 10% improvement on previous methods.

~~~
gozur88
>There's no such thing as a single "breakthrough" in fusion...

What you're describing is incremental development. Whether or not there's an
actual "breakthrough" out there is unknowable by the very nature of the word.
There may be another way we can do fusion that nobody's thought of yet.

------
kkwteh
This talk by Zach Hartwig from IAP 2017 "MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy" is
fantastic. Hartwig is an assistant professor in the Nuclear Science &
Engineering department at MIT. He presents a straightforward overview of the
basic science involved as well as the most promising technologies today.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk)

~~~
bsder
Probably the only tech video I have watched completely in the last 12 months
(I hate video--it's such a slow way to transmit information).

While it clearly is a bit of marketing for his own baby (tokamak with modern
superconducting magnets), it has a lot of good technical points.

The big one being that tokamak is the _only_ fusion technology anywhere near
being commercially feasible--by several orders of magnitude.

------
nickik
We don't need new innovation. Nuclear fission is already here, we don't even
need fusion to make oil, coal and gas obsolte.

We could mass produce Liquid Molten Salt Reactors or many other reactors with
current technology, current manufacturing processes and replace all carbon we
use now and fulfil the growing demand.

I simply dont understand why people continue to hope for fusion when they
refuse fission.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Weapons-grade byproducts, radiation leaks, Homer Simpson, Chernobyl,
Fukushima...list goes on.

People have all sorts of deep seated fears about fission. They don't have to
be accurate to be afraid.

Knowledgeable people are aware that more people have died falling off of roofs
trying to install solar panels than have ever died from a nuclear power plant.

The problem is insufficient propaganda from the nuclear fission industry. The
tech works fine, but people don't believe it.

~~~
throw2016
Are you comparing solar installation accidents to the Chernobyl and Fukushima
disasters?

~~~
GVIrish
Why not? The point is not that a Fukushima or Chernobyl should be considered
to have the same impact as falling off roofs, clearly that's not true.

The point is that the risk of death with nuclear plants isn't nearly as high
as people feel it is, even when factoring in the high-profile accidents that
have occurred. Right now, a lot of people have an irrationally over-inflated
perception of the risk posed by nuclear power.

~~~
throw2016
This is reductive. It's not reasonable to simply ignore the devastating
fallout of nuclear accidents beyond human causalities.

This doesn't engage with the real world consequences of nuclear accidents that
are devastating to life and the environment, long lasting and extremely
expensive and complex to cleanup.

~~~
nickik
On any measure you look at nuclear is superior.

It kills less people, it uses less land, it uses less resources, it uses less
mining and so on.

Areas of nuclear fallout and in protection zones are actually reclaimed by
nature and animals don't give a shit about living there.

Environmentalist should love nuclear. There is that movement called 'eco-
modernist' who subscribe to that.

> nuclear accidents that are devastating to life

Hardly. Most of the people that were evacuated were not in danger, devastating
to their live was government action because of fear mongering.

Far more people died of the evacuation then of the radiation.

People are again living in cities near Chernobyl and their cancer rates are
not unusual.

------
bhhaskin
Oil isn't going anywhere any time soon. We might not use it for energy
production, but it is a key ingredient in pretty much any modern technology.
From plastics to asphalt. Until we can find away to synthesis or substitute
it, it will be around for the foreseeable future.

~~~
the8472
Synthesizing it from organic waste is possible today. It is mostly a question
of efficiency.

~~~
astrodust
With really inexpensive electricity it would be trivial to manufacture
synthetic hydrocarbons, or even reprocess existing stock into new forms.

The biggest barrier today is that it's more energy efficient to dig up new oil
than to make it.

------
zimablue
I think the point of oil is more that it's portable than that it's great for
burning in power plants, we already have renewables, coal and gas and only
burn oil to fill any remaining deficit.

Electric cars will kill oil more than fusion would, I think.

~~~
ageofwant
I suspect that if viable fusion power plants become a reality today we will be
burning synthesized hydrocarbon fuel for centuries to come. There is vast
hydrocarbon fuel infrastructure in place already. If it costs a few cents to
synthesise oil from air because you have hyper abundant fusion energy on hand
then it would be silly to throw away the infrastructure we have.

------
jhallenworld
I've been watching Isaac Arthur's interesting youtube channel recently. He
points out that fusion is really nice, but is not actually necessary since we
have the sun. If you think "dyson swarm" big, you can capture all of the
energy you could ever need from the sun, and without the need for any
particularly advanced technology.

[https://futurism.com/could-humanity-ever-really-build-a-
dyso...](https://futurism.com/could-humanity-ever-really-build-a-dyson-
sphere/)

So what can you do with abundant energy? One thing is to make "active"
structures like launch loops. This would allow you to make buildings larger
than would be possible with normal materials (but your building collapses if
there is a power failure).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_structure)

~~~
gozur88
You can't build "dyson swarm big" without a whole lot of cheap energy, though.
It's a chicken and egg problem.

------
paulrpotts
Nuclear fusion has been "on the brink of a milestone" for my entire lifetime.
I think I can be forgiven a certain skepticism. Reading about ITER's troubles
in detail over the years, I've come to believe that there is a mechanism where
fusion can self-assemble, stabilize, and produce a continuous, reliable usable
feed of energy at scale, only occasionally resulting in catastrophic failure.
It's called a "star." Attempting to stabilize and contain the process and
exploit the process at a smaller scale honestly does not seem feasible to me
at this point.

------
inestyne
There's portability+density issue with renewable or even free electric. You
cant run planes, trains, ships, heavy industry, heavy haulers, etc om battery.
And thats where the lions share of fossil is burnt.

~~~
mavhc
Trains are easy to run on electricity. Heavy industry? Surely that's mostly
static.

Transport is 26% of world energy usage, oil is 31% of world energy source.

[https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=23832](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=23832)
says that 12% of energy use for transport is air, 12% ships. So probably 75%
of transport energy usage could be replaced by electricity. So about 75% of
oil usage could be replaced easily.

------
jacknews
I'm not really qualified to assess this piece, which suggests the brass ring
isn't what it seems in any case:

[http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-
they%E2%80%9...](http://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-
they%E2%80%99re-cracked-be10699)

------
strictnein
I look forward to my fusion powered self driving car that uses a quantum
computer to run a fully realized AI.

------
jlebrech
nuclear fusion is always 10 years away.

~~~
roceasta
Fusion progress chart:

[http://imgur.com/BN0pz](http://imgur.com/BN0pz)

~~~
obeone
Extrapolating this graph (whose last data point is approximately 1998), we
should expect a commercial reactor very soon--perhaps in about 2005.

~~~
astrodust
Looks like there were some setbacks, but these things happen.

------
throwawayaway12
Are they talking about inertially confined fusion or magnetically confined
fusion (OR something else)? Cant listen to the podcast at the moment.

------
johnchristopher
Nuclear tech breakthrough or not, oil as fuel is sooner than later going to be
obsolete.

------
MBCook
Can we mark this [podcast] or something like that? It's not an article that
can be read.

~~~
dang
Yes. We use [audio] for that by analogy with [video]. Added.

------
giardini
Its always the same story: "We're on the brink of X, but we need more money."
where X is:

\- a cure for cancer (one of the oldest and still working), a testable string
theory, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, flying cars, a cure for AIDS, for
addiction, for cellulite, or for that fungus that's been festering in your
crotch for 10 years now, [insert your favorite here], ..., etc.

Never, never, never will you hear:

"We've got enough money, please don't send more!"

or

"We have the solution, it has been validated by an independent group and it
works! You can get it today!"

Which reminds me of an old joke:

Bob: "Hey, didja hear? They finally found a cure for marital infidelity!"

Fred: "You don't say? What is it?"

Bob: "Nudity!"

~~~
Retric
A hell of a lot more people survive cancer now than 50 years ago.

Make the same list 100 years ago or 100 years from now and it's a different
list... Because progress happens, some things are just more complex than SV
style innovation and this weeks next big thing.

~~~
giardini
What do you mean by "survive"?

My experience is that no one survives a confirmed diagnosis of cancer. By
"survive" _I_ mean that their life is unaffected and they die of something
else and that their death is not sped by cancer.

Oh, there's the occasional "miracle" out there, but no one's paying attention
to potential false positive diagnoses (i.e., person was diagnosed with cancer,
is treated, later turns out to not be cancer at all, he's a "miracle", thank
you Jesus, thank you Lord!)

~~~
Retric
Your redefining the term. If someone survives a car crash they may have
suffered massive trauma they are just not dead.

The odds of being alive 20 years after a cancer diagnosis are not nearly as
bad is you might think. Around 2x as many people are diagnosed with cancer
every year as die from it.

~~~
giardini
I'm asking you how you define "survive" and you haven't answered. Sounds like
you're using the usual "5-year survival" of cancer research which means that,
5 years later, the person still has a heartbeat.

