| Submit your comments on this article |
| Science |
| Obumbles underfunded fusion research - but fusion (NOT solar) is the future |
| 2017-03-02 |
| Scientific American - March 2017 issue - By Fred Guterl edited for brevity John Holdren has heard the old joke a million times: fusion energy is 30 years away - and always will be. Despite the broken promises, Holdren, who early in his career worked as a physicist on fusion power, believes passionately that fusion research has been worth the billions spent over the past few decades - and that the work should continue. In December, Scientific American talked with Holdren, outgoing director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, to discuss the Obama administration's HOLDREN: I started working on fusion in 1966. I did my master's thesis at MIT in plasma physics, and at that time people thought we'd have fusion by 1980. It was only 14 years away. By 1980 it was 20 years away. By 2000 it was 35 years away. But if you look at the pace of progress in fusion over most of that period, it's been faster than Moore's law in terms of the performance of the devices--and it would be nice to have a cleaner, safer, less proliferation-prone version of nuclear energy than fission. My position is not that we know fusion will emerge as an attractive energy source by 2050 or 2075 but that it's worth putting some money on the bet because we don't have all that many essentially inexhaustible energy options. There are the renewables. There are efficient breeder reactors, which have many rather unattractive characteristics in terms of requiring what amounts to a plutonium economy--at least with current technology--and trafficking in large quantities of weapon-usable materials. The other thing that's kind of an interesting side note is if we ever are going to go to the stars, the only propulsion that's going to get us there is fusion. The reason we should stick with ITER [a fusion project based in France] is that it is the only current hope for producing a burning plasma, and until we can understand and master the physics of a burning plasma--a plasma that is generating enough fusion energy to sustain its temperature and density--we will not know whether fusion can ever be managed as a practical energy source, either for terrestrial power generation or for space propulsion. I'm fine with taking a hard look at fusion every five years and deciding whether it's still worth a candle, but for the time being I think it is. Note: other entrepreneurs and scientists think small businesses that are nimble can advance fusion a lot better than ITER run by a committee of nations. Michael Laberge of General Fusion (Vancouver) thinks the Moore's Law for fusion pretty much halted with ITER because that's what happens with a committee. Just look at the UN. He thinks the little guys can develop smaller fusion projects quicker. A few are in with MIT. Jeff Bezos (amazon) invested in General Fusion and Peter Thiel (paypal, legend, centipede) invested in Helion Energy. I'd like to buy shares in Helion if I could. |
| Posted by:anon1 |
| #15 I think you overstate for effect, grom. I can think of a few exceptions. And some problems are so hard that you need a team, and not just in experiments. |
| Posted by: james 2017-03-02 21:04 |
| #14 Fusion has already been done, to wit: |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2017-03-02 18:15 |
| #13 Fusion sounds too much like Fission and actual clean power means people can make bad choices instead instead of cutting back on consumption and returning to a medieval level where they can be controlled. Spending money on green industries owned by the political connected and talking how we are doing something is much more politically satisfying. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2017-03-02 16:52 |
| #12 Re: #3 A good example of this is when a committee got together to design a horse, they ended up way over budget and resulted in the end product being a camel. So when I read about the Lockheed Fusion Reactor, my first thought is that it will never see the light of day. Lockheed being Lockheed, it's purely a money suck designed to bring bonuses to the board and upper management, nothing more. |
| Posted by: Seeking cure for ignorance 2017-03-02 15:54 |
| #11 wow everyone this is the one i tried to post yesterday and it disappeared - but like magic here it is!! When articles are posted after 2 p.m. ET we prefer to move them to the next day unless they are unfolding terror attacks, anon1. This is not one of those. If you want to add it to an on-going discussion, better to paste it into a comment than post as a separate article. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-03-02 10:29 |
| #10 thorium fission is also 'just a decade or two away' situation so is small modular uranium fission only a finite amount of research $$ and a finite amount of research scientists |
| Posted by: lord garth 2017-03-02 08:58 |
| #9 What happened to the Lockheed Fusion Reactor? Short answer - work still proceeding well. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2017-03-02 08:17 |
| #8 Ooops. I guess I'm so mad, my hands are shaking. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-03-02 08:11 |
| #7 basically all research is sort of stalled about 1990-ish And when you say all, it's not just fusion - it's everything from animal behavior to origins of the universe - because, conform or die. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-03-02 08:10 |
| #6 basically all research is sort of stalled about 1990-ish And when you say all, it's not just fusion - it's everything from animal behavior to origins of the universe - because, conform or die. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-03-02 08:10 |
| #5 grom you're so right!! ps: MIT have a good program for an ARC, or a mini tokomak, which they can do a lot easier than ITER because they use superconductive magnets that work at high temperatures This talk by Zach Hartwig goes through all the different Fusion permutations and then explains why none are close except for ITER and stellerator and mini-tokomacs this is the great talk here, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk basically all research is sort of stalled about 1990-ish |
| Posted by: anon1 2017-03-02 07:50 |
| #4 wow everyone this is the one i tried to post yesterday and it disappeared - but like magic here it is!! |
| Posted by: anon1 2017-03-02 07:47 |
| #3 News flash. Scientific (and technological) advances are not made by smoothly functioning teams of well adjusted people who are superb communicators and all around likable and were straight-A students. It's made by socially inept --- or straight out antisocial --- supremely egocentric loners, who prefer to spend time inside their heads pursuing their idiosyncratic interests and not giving a f*ck about what other people define as important. Nowadays people like this play computer games --- or, at best, write them. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2017-03-02 05:17 |
| #2 Don't forget Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor Memory lapse will likely result in contract cost overruns. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-03-02 04:08 |
| #1 Don't forget Lockheed Martin Compact Fusion Reactor |
| Posted by: Chuck 2017-03-02 03:22 |