
Betting on fusion - dkirtley
http://fortune.com/2015/09/28/jeff-bezos-peter-thiel-fusion/
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Tossrock
I'm kind of astonished to hear someone paid money for the e-cat. I'd always
thought of Rossi as a crank. Hopefully I was wrong and we get a revolutionary
new energy source, but I'm still not convinced.

General Fusion is still awesome though, and it's great to see they're making
progress. I wish I were a rich VC because I would have bet on them 6 years
ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8np70/fusion_dream...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8np70/fusion_dreams_delayed_international_partners_are/c09vb49)

~~~
ChuckMcM
That is because he is a crank. Anyone who actually has a working device would
simply sell electricity at below market rates to earn the money to continue
the development. And any system which cannot generate enough energy to pay for
its cost of operation and generate at least some profit, is not a working
system.

That said, since there is a whole of confusion about just what is going on
around LENR type systems, it feels a lot like Sarnoff and Tesla arguing about
Radio to me.

~~~
marcosdumay
Rossi is a crank, not arguing about that.

But have you ever calculated how expensive is to get any amount of heat-
generated electricity into the grid? Even if one had a completely free source
of heat, any generator that is not at least on the tens of MW isn't
economicaly viable. And for tens of MW, one needs tens of millions of dollars.

~~~
aminorex
Rossi has sold 1MW heat plants.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Actually he has a plant "under test", he is self reporting it here:
[http://www.e-catworld.com/rossis-1mw-plant-performance-
updat...](http://www.e-catworld.com/rossis-1mw-plant-performance-updates/)

But with the caveat: _This is of course not verified scientific data, but it’s
about as good as we are going to get until the test is concluded and data
published, and it might help paint something of a picture of how things are
going with the plant._

Any plant that generates 1MW net power can earn $54,000 a month in revenue. A
bit more than 1/2 million dollars a year. If it costs less than that per year
to run, then he just has to wait for it to generate enough cash to build a
second one, and then a third one. At which point he will become exponentially
rich without anyone's help.

Except that isn't the way its working out. I wish him the best of luck but he
seems to have this century's version of the Moeller Air Car.

~~~
DougMerritt
Wow, blast from the past.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar)

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drjesusphd
> Scientists are learning much from all this tinkering, but experts say these
> big projects—if they work—are at best decades away from commercialization.

I don't understand what the rush is. Are we really that shortsighted that we
can't wait a few decades or even centuries for the ultimate energy cure-all?
We continue to enthusiastically support a space program, even though we know
the practical payoff is a long way away. Why can't we have the same attitude
about fusion? Traditional nuclear and associated advanced concepts can carry
us in the medium term, albeit with some proliferation risk.

It's a shame that the smaller projects got cut from government funding, and
I'm glad venture capitalists are stepping in and contributing. But it seems
that they are outright dismissing of mainstream academic scientists, and
believe that nothing useful can be learned from the scientific community. This
seems hubristic, and will just lead to wasted resources and good will.

Plasma physicists have tried many things over the decades and have gotten good
at pointing out failure modes. There is no good reason why there can't be more
collaboration between academia and industry in this space.

If it's secret, it's not science.

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graycat
At least they are trying to do some real _innovation_ \-- powerful, valuable,
important, useful, difficult to duplicate or equal, lots of intellectual
property and trade secrets, etc.

Much better than yet another social, local, mobile, sharing, membership,
_app_.

Terrific! Go for it, guys.

Uh, guys, original research in applied physics is not the only good direction
for especially powerful innovations.

There is also _information technology_ from original research in applied
mathematics (theorem and proof kind) for, yes, powerful, valuable, important,
useful, difficult to duplicate or equal, lots of intellectual property and
trade secrets, etc.

