there is completely different regulatory landscape and thus price to enter the game. Any fission work would involve radioactive elements from the start. Licensing and approval on all the levels from federal to local require investments and political power on the scale well beyond ...
An even if you manage to develop and prototype the fission reactor, the deployment is still and even more subject to that approval problems.
The nuclear fusion work, as long a it is deuterium based (tritium can be bread during the process) and no dual-purpose equipment is attempted to be bought (like very large power lasers or extremely short-impulse discharge devices) can be conducted in your garage ... well until you start getting real neutron flux (or gamma flux before it if you're going fusor way) - either you and your neighbors get serious health damage/killed or you start installing protection from the flux - that would involve money and questions on why would you need so much of boron concrete :)
The fission startups out there (most notably TerraPower) do all of their work in silico, and that's representative of fission reactor design in general. Fission reactors aren't prototyped, they're simulated exhaustively, approved, and then built.
You're right, though, that securing the materials for a fusion prototype is less legally fraught.
The author's assertion that this project will be impacted by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand the technology. Fusion != Fission, and in this case there isn't even any radioactive material in the equation. If anything, the Japanese disaster will put more focus on fusion research and development.
The author's assertion that this project will be impacted
by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand
the technology.
Fukushima incident will impact any project (at least in PR sense) that has "nuclear" in it, no matter how different process is.
Germany's actions (hey massive cunami caused problems in some reactors in Japan, let's shut down ours!) is a good example that rationality has little to do in such cases :(
It must be a truism of hacker news that public relations appears to be the biggest impediment to what is likely the biggest scientific breakthrough of the next 10-20 years.
The first team to reach net power out (and there are many teams around the world working on different paths to this at the moment) will have no trouble explaining it to people in a way that will differentiate it from dirty nuclear power. Getting to net power out will be, by far, the more challenging part.
Actually, I think the National Ignition Facility will have no trouble in getting net power out, very soon. The real challenge is getting a significant amount of power out at some non-insane cost, since the NIF in its present form costs billions of dollars and can only do one fusion shot every couple of weeks.
The NIF's plan for a commercial inertial confinement fusion reactor looks like the NIF, except that shots occur ten times a second. At the moment they have no way of firing the lasers that often, or of extracting all the energy thus produced.
Is NIF getting close to breakeven in terms of laser input energy, energy generating the lasers, or thermal energy to power a turbine to power the lasers? Because, useful power generation requires ~30-100x breakeven in terms of laser energy and last time I checked they where several orders of magnitude from that standpoint.
Fusion has been "the biggest scientific breakthrough of the next 10-20 years" since I before I was a teenager 35 years ago. Like AI, it has become an "I'll believe it when I see it" technology.
The difference between what's going on with fusion today and what was going on when you were a teenager is pretty huge, actually. When you were a teenager there wasn't a gigantic international consortium (ITER) dedicated to making fusion happen in our lifetimes. The US government effort was limited to fringe experimentation; in contract, today, the NIF and France's Laser Megajoule are both aiming for net power out in the next few years. And, perhaps more importantly, unlike in the 80s there are now private startups looking to commercialize fusion processes -- that wasn't even being seriously considered 10 years ago.
Just because there isn't net power out today doesn't mean that an enormous amount of progress hasn't been made.
This touches upon another important point: fusion has never received the amount of funding it should have received in order to make true on their claim. It would have been available right now if only countries would have freed up reasonable amounts of funds. The JET project in the UK was extremely succesful and it is completely incomprehensible that it wasn't followed up upon swiftly and strongly. I believe lobbying by those invested in traditional sources of energy has everything to do with that.
Germany did not shut down the reactors because of Tsunamis. There are none in Germany.
Germany did shut down the more problematic reactors for a security check. The question is whether the reactors survive a scenario, where multiple systems are failing (like in Japan). This can be caused by operator errors, terrorist attacks, earth quakes (yes, germany has earth quakes), etc.
Compare that with the US, which has several reactors which are much more dangerous than most German ones, has some in very dangerous earth quake zones, etc. The US did mostly nothing.
* The US government did nothing because they've already considered and inspected for these contingencies, knowing that the reactors are in earthquake zones.
* The German government is displaying their incompetence because it took a huge disaster somewhere else for them to decide to look at these issues, rather than being more proactive about it.
You're assuming that because the US did nothing that it's reactors are vulnerable and the government must be turning a blind eye to it. You've provided no evidence to back this claim.
Several US reactors share a lot of the design of the Japanese and are built and designed by GE. That Lone would make me nervous.
The accident in Japan provided knew knowledge: it showed multiple scenarios which were thought to be extremely unlikely or which were not thought about at all.
Fusion != Fission, and in this case there isn't even any radioactive material in the equation
Fusion reactors spew neutrons which can create a variety of radioactive isotopes. Most of these are very short-lived, fortunately -- but they do exist, and reactor designs need to take these into account.
(Also, some reactor designs use tritium as fuel, which is of course radioactive to begin with.)
Related anecdote: I visited the National Ignition Facility [1] last year, where everything was pretty much up and running but they still hadn't finished putting in all the shielding that needs to surround the target chamber before they start actually doing fusion shots. We were assured that if they had done a fusion shot before installing the shielding then everyone in the (extremely large) building would have been dead due to (if I recall correctly) neutron absorption.
Side note: the National Ignition Facility is freaking awesome.
C-14 is not much contained in old fossil fuels due to radioactive decay. The literature also discusses the Suess effect, which shows that coal power plant reduced the effect of C-14.
True but the other difference is that fission reactors have to be kept cool. With fusion reactors, the challenge is getting it hot enough. There's never a concern about loss of cooling, meltdown, all that mess.
Also of course, several projects are attempting boron fusion, which doesn't produce neutrons other than from a small portion of side reactions.
Right, I agree that fusion reactors are inherently much safer than fission reactors -- I just wanted to make the point that they're still not completely harmless.
That's not exactly true. There's enough neutron flux in a hypothetical fusion reactor (assuming D-T) for neutron activation of structural materials to be a real concern. There are actually some hybrid fission-fusion designs which use a fusion reactor running at a loss as a neutron source for a subcritical assembly of fission fuel.
You're right that the fission products and high-mass-number alpha emitters have left the picture, though.
What's with that photo? The shaven head, leather armchair, and expression, juxtaposed with the story about nuclear reactors, make it look like he's channeling a supervillain. Paging Hank Scorpio.
Probably not the next decade. I've seen fusion researchers referred to as "the cathedral builders of our time"—their work will take decades, and they might not see success within the span of their careers, or even lifetimes.
But yes, controlled, sustained, repeatable fusion reactions could be a black swan on the order of the internal combustion engine for the 21st century.
Fusion isn't so hard. What's hard is getting a reaction big enough for "breakeven", which means getting more energy out than you put in. From there, it's even harder to capture that energy in a useable form and then use that energy to continue the reaction. So, fusion isn't so hard. Useful fusion is hard.
Tapping fusion power will solve the world's energy issues, and that is a good thing.
Is it though? Exponential growth always has to end in disaster sooner or later.
Global energy use in 2008 was estimated at 474 exajoules. At a 8% yearly growth rate in consumption, it would take only 120 years to increase that to 5 million exajoules, thereby producing more waste heat than the energy which the earth receives from the sun. It's likely that we would be in serious trouble long before that.
(If the 8% growth rate seems high, I took it from the growth rate in oil consumption before the first oil shock in the 1970s. This seemed like a reasonable model for growth in a world with limitless energy supply.)
It's actually not reasonable; since the 70s there have been significant pushes toward efficiency on a variety of fronts which make pre-1970s energy consumption statistics inapplicable.
But nothing's ever "limitless," though -- energy would still cost something (even though it could be 1/100th of what it is today). Transmission and storage of energy would still have costs and that's where the drive for efficiency would come from.
If they (General Fusion) can make their idea work... wow. Kudos to Bezos and the other investors for backing them.
Also did you notice the author chose to use a Bezos photo taken by Steve Jurveston (Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson)? It's a small world indeed!
Here's the triad which must seem attractive to billionaires:
High Risk -- High Capital Cost -- High Impact.
By risk I refer to financial risk. By impact I refer to the changes the new thing would wreak and the concomitant profits that would follow.
Fusion fits the bill nicely. With a few billion bucks I reckon I would happily sling a million here and there for a low probability of obtaining still further billions.
Still cool, though.
As a title nitpick, using the N-word to cover both fission and fusion glosses over how utterly different the two things are.