
Plasma physics: The fusion upstarts - alphanumeric0
http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstarts-1.15592
======
ChuckMcM
Back in 2011 there was a Popular Science blurb on General Fusion and Jeff
Bezos' investment in them. I looked through papers and news reports about them
and was reminded of the comment in the movie "National Treasure" by Jon Voight
discussing this potentially mythical treasure, "... another clue, and then
another clue after that, its nothing but clues!" So much of the 'upstart'
fusion research is just that, pure research trying to learn enough so that you
can begin to answer questions like "Exactly how would we get energy out of
this in useful way?" The numbers are small, $10M here, $15M there, $3-4M over
there. But there is so much risk stacked on top of risk that the only funds
available are literally funds that the owner expects about as much return as
they would get by making a bonfire out of them, with the exception the bonfire
would keep them warm for one night.

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...](http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-05/jeff-bezos-
invests-195-million-nuclear-fusion-
technology?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=4&con=jeff-bezos-invests-195-million-in-
general-fusions-nuclear-technology)

~~~
WhoBeI
They did find the treasure in the end though. :)

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slacka
It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in
Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean,
safe, energy independence.

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.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-
VxJWpg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg)

~~~
Shivetya
I wonder how much strife would come about should we develop such technology.

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?

~~~
DennisP
I doubt any country could keep it to themselves. Even if we tried and avoided
espionage, once it's proven to work economically every major country would
ramp up research. (But espionage would happen pretty quickly. We didn't even
manage to keep the H-bomb secret for long.)

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.

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curtis
Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion wasn't mentioned in the article, but it's
also pretty interesting --
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusion).
It's a hybrid approach using both inertial and magnetic confinement.

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debt
"Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a
website."

It _doesn 't even have a website_?! Top secret indeed!

~~~
FiatLuxDave
As a former fusion startup founder, I'd like to say a word about "Stealth
Mode".

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.

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scythe
> Igniting this p–11B fuel would require temperatures of about a billion
> kelvin,

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](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.

~~~
DennisP
Everybody in the field is well aware of Rider. He's not necessarily the last
word on the subject.

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.

------
jobu
_“The big experiments have been funded for decades, so there 's little chance
they won't meet their milestones,” says John Slough, a plasma physicist at the
University of Washington. “If they start funding these alternatives, all the
uncertainties come back.”_

When I read that line it made me wonder what solar/wind energy scientists
think about funding any fusion research.

~~~
orbifold
Unlike fusion, neither solar nor wind energy scientists have any really hard
problems to solve. Engineering problems sure, bot not scientific problems.
Fusion research is about creating a stable ministar on earth, since normally
stars are self-gravitating and in vacuum, this turns out to be a rather hard
problem. The basic principle behind solar power is understood since 1905 and
wind mills have been used since forever.

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aerovistae
It's funny because Elon Musk said once "I think fusion is probably not as hard
as everyone thinks; I might work on that someday."

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.

~~~
schwap
I think the apotheosis of Elon Musk is getting out of hand a wee bit.
Scientific advances have kind of been happening for centuries without him.

~~~
aerovistae
Yep, what he's done has been pretty unremarkable. Woulda happened anyway, in
more or less the same timeline. In fact I don't even get why he's famous.

~~~
BugBrother
Was that irony?

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?

~~~
aerovistae
Yes, I was being entirely sarcastic, in response to the comment above my own.
I recognize that Musk has done and continues to do the impossible on a daily
basis.

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BatFastard
Personally I find all of the money we have put into Uranium fission and Fusion
as a tremendous waste of money. It appears we have no way of decommissioning
the plants, or disposing of the waste, of course there is the risk of further
accidents. If we have to use nuclear decay, at least go with Thorium.

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.

~~~
bane
They also lack the base load characteristics of nuke plants.

~~~
stephen_g
What's a nuke plant? As far as I am aware, there is no such thing.

Perhaps you mean a nuclear power station?

~~~
bane
I don't know why the downvotes. You must not be a native English Speaker. Let
me help.

"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...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=%22nuke+plant%22&oq=%22nuke+plant%22&gs_l=news-
cc.3...0.0.0.478.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0...1ac).

~~~
stephen_g
Interesting. I have only really seen the term 'nuke' as either referring to
nuclear weapons or as a colloquial term for microwaving food.

