20 years away, and always will be

[mvanwink5]

(For example, look at that stupid Dark Horse Trifecta thread. If that isn't an example of rabble making guesses..)

Good grief, are you serious? That thread is for fun and is just wild speculation, explicit on the first post. It seems you missed the context entirely.

Here is from the first post

So, in grand wild speculative spirit (yet with some thought), how about picking a 2014 dark horse announcement trifecta, bets for 1st, 2nd, 3rd placement? Odds?
Off the wall thoughts...

Or maybe you aren't being serious and I missed a context somewhere?

[ladajo]

How hard is it to miss that the entire point of the thread is to embrace that we don't know shit.

Or that if anyone does know shit theey are certainly keeping it to themselves.

[asdfuogh]

Yes, well, my original point was that they try not to release information because there will be speculations which then won't match expectations. It doesn't matter if you stick a disclaimer that these speculations are "for fun and wild" because once it goes past the original kernel of posters, it becomes this monster of gossip in the lay public who have influence on funding but have no idea what they're talking about.

The public aren't supposed to know shit about this stuff because anything short of success is a failure to them. That reaction by the public then makes the private companies' investors hesitate for new funding which stalls research further. A parallel chain of consequences is that it then drives potential academic research into other areas away from this now unpopular topic.

In any case, there is an upcoming event in March, and we'll just have to wait and see then.

[ladajo]

Free Market Science.

The small research to application privates need money. So they market.

The media doesn't know what they are reporting on, so they misrepresent.

The public doesn't understand it any better than the media explains what they think it is.

End result: Fantasy

The Government efforts are caught up in this effect as well. Some also leverage it. Some do not.

I agree, and have been trying to make this point for a while as well. Lastest effort is in the NIF thread.

[mvanwink5]

Railing against a blog post and worrying that folk's speculation on it will ruin funding is ridiculous. Media reports are supposed to be conservative, knowledgeable, factual as it is intended to inform, but experienced readers know otherwise. Some VC's throw money at projects in hopes of a big winner, others are too conservative, but that is the market at work. Perhaps technology hasn't caught up until recently to make the risk benefit meet these guys metrics. That is life. and all I will say about that...

[asdfuogh]

I completely agree with you ladajo. The NIF report was definitely annoying to read after they missed their mark so many years in a row, only to allow the media to make such misunderstood statements. :/

@mvanwink5: I'm not railing against a blog post; I was agreeing with the reasons behind non-disclosure agreements (even though I think scientific research should be more transparent in principple). Forum threads and blog posts are only some easy-to-point-to signs of speculation among the public.

[CharlesKramer]

Add 5 years:

-- Nebel gone from EMC2, Bussard dead

-- The claims made for Focus Fusion were at a minimum overly optimistic (never mind the practical problems to create a reliable many-times-a-minute pulse device for repeated and practical fusion)

-- TriAlpha's actual progress is as secretive (and possibly as non-existent) as ever -- except the rumors stopped.

"Computing a Winner, Fusion a Loser In US Science Budget" See below.

I am as disappointed about this as anyone here. American stopped building its Superconducting Super Collider (which would have been bigger than CERN's large Hadron), shut Tevatron, and now Wisconsin's Synchrotron Radiation Center is shutting... Compare the price of a single B1 bomber which I think is over a billion... makes me dispair over our national priorities.

STILL.... is reduced government funding for fusion the reason it has failed? Or is the government waking up to the boondoggle of big promises and lousy results for more 60 years, during which it has spent MANY billions on fusion. Many it's priorities re: fusion compared with computing are justified. It may also have (misplaced) reduced anxiety about energy thanks to fracking.

20 years away and....

http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/03 ... nce-budget

"President Barack Obama has released a $3.901 trillion budget request to Congress, including proposals for a host of federal research agencies. Science Magazine has the breakdown, including a big win for advanced computing, a big cut for fusion, and status quo for astronomy. 'In the proposed budget, advanced computing would see its funding soar 13.2% to $541 million. BES, the biggest DOE program, would get a boost of 5.5% to $1.807 billion. BER would get a 3% bump to $628 million, and nuclear physics would enjoy a 4.3% increase to $594 million. In contrast, the fusion program would take a 17.6% cut to $416 million—$88 million less than it's getting this year. Although far from final, the numbers suggest another big dip for a program that has enjoyed a roller coaster ride in recent years. In its proposed 2013 budget, DOE called for slashing spending on domestic fusion research to help pay for the increasing U.S. contribution to the international fusion experiment, ITER, in Cadarache, France.'" The Association of American Universities has issued a letter disapproving of the amount of research funding. The Planetary Society has broken down the proposed NASA budget.

[Carl White]

Or is the government waking up to the boondoggle of big promises and lousy results for more 60 years, during which it has spent MANY billions on fusion. Many it's priorities re: fusion compared with computing are justified

At this point, I'd say the best strategy would be to cover every base fully in the hope something will pay off before the oil runs out.

[D Tibbets]

Wild speculation, my contribution....

Of the different relatively low budget efforts, I think the Polywell may make the biggest splash in 2014 . Geeneral fusion and DPF may both be restrained by technical/ engineering challenges in building test/ proof of concept models. I have no idea where Tri Alpha may be.

The Polywell research though seems poised to make clear predictions based on annoyingly unavailable WB8 results. The machine has been built, and several generations of refinements seem likely to have occurred.

The decreased funding for big project fusion (Tokamak) can be seen as a cautious shifting of national priorities- you have to support the national labs, but perhaps one or several of these smaller projects are more attractive.

I can see President Obama thumbing his nose at the Russian's and destroy their energy economy by announcing that fusion energy was here. Of course that would cause havoc world wide and might do more harm than good, at least in the short term. A cautious and secretive (despite international treaties) approach is probably more reasonable from a national defense, and economic perspective. Even if wildly successful, as Bussard pointed out, it would take decades for the technology to penetrate the markets in a dominate fashion, and transitions would be gradual. But, the markets, petroleum industry, etc. would react with acute anxiety.

Dan Tibbets

[mvanwink5]

There is only one way to see through the smoke, look for politics and look for favors for cronies. In the favors for cronies, look for "Big Green" subsidies. Polywell is not wind or solar, nor is fusion of other approaches (ITER, NIF, etc.). Face it, until fusion falls into the clutches of big .gov cronies, don't expect billions. Imagine what would happen to Green Crony Investment Inc. if Polywell or GF suddenly came out that it worked and made those Green Crony investments look like buggy whip factories? Those Green Cronies would loose a hundred billion over night, and hundreds of future billions. Cold hard facts, man.

Ob1 has many IT cronies, and Hyper big .gov needs IT, look at the NSA.

[asdfuogh]

Of the different relatively low budget efforts, I think the Polywell may make the biggest splash in 2014 . Geeneral fusion and DPF may both be restrained by technical/ engineering challenges in building test/ proof of concept models. I have no idea where Tri Alpha may be.

I disagree because of just how little professionally disclosed information there is about Polywell.

Also,

The decreased funding for big project fusion (Tokamak) can be seen as a cautious shifting of national priorities- you have to support the national labs, but perhaps one or several of these smaller projects are more attractive.

It's not a decreased funding for Tokamaks, it's a funding shift from domestic to international tokamaks. Luckily, computational plasma physics is still decently funded..

[hanelyp]

I can see President Obama thumbing his nose at the Russian's and destroy their energy economy by announcing that fusion energy was here.

That's what he SHOULD do if the research results support it. I don't think he's motivated by US interests. A smallish 100MW power generator in the hands of the public doesn't work for centralized control.

[D Tibbets]

I addressed EMC2's position (and perhaps Lockheed Skunkworks) as being the most likely to make a splash because they have built a proof of concept machine and tested it. Admittedly, it is not as applicable as a 100 MW prototype would be, but it should have demonstrated the physics, both the fusion output scaling and within limits, the input cost scaling; and given much more information about the engineering challenges involved. This applies to D-D fusion. P-B11 fusion remains much less certain, though continued work with WB8 point something may be focused more on the P-B11 possibility.. All of the others are building machines, or waiting for funding to build those machines. DPF has some promising results but they need several generations of better machines to approach what I suspect EMC2 currently has in terms of demonstrating viability. The exception is Tri Alpha. A few years ago they were mostly doing computer modeling. Have they done any significant hardware development now?

As for centralized control, and 100 MW reactors being owned by individuals- small groups, forget it. Polywell, even if successful, is not a cheap machine to build. It may be less expensive than most other approaches, but still a construction cost of over 1 doller per watt generating capacity is likely (compared to 3 to 10 dollars or more per watt for a coal to fission nuclear plant).. A 100 MW plant will cost probably 100 million dollars or more. Handling all of that heat is expensive. Even with direct conversion, dozens of megawatts of waste heat will have to be handled. The big savings comes over life cycle costs like maintainance, fuel costs, and enviornmental concerns.

Also, concerning large government control, I think I would prefer it, at least if it is the US. A P-B11 reactor might be inherently safe from a nuclear proliferation perspective, but a D-D reactor would make a lot of neutrons and this makes plutonium production much easier, with much less infrastructure compared to fission nuclear plants. Russia and France have not done well in controlling this proliferation. I think the US has done a much better job (?). Also, while a P-B11 reactor may be safe, if you know how to build it, a reverse engineered D-D reactor is probably much easier to build. I speculate that Bussard considered this , as he proposed building reactors on barges and leasing them to client countries for power and ethanol production. This would allow for greater control of the technology. Admittedly this also allows for more monopolistic games,but priorities must be observed.

Dan Tibbets

[Skipjack]

The exception is Tri Alpha. A few years ago they were mostly doing computer modeling. Have they done any significant hardware development now?

Yes, they have the C-2 device that they have been using for experiments until at least mid 2012. With this they tested things like the effect of neutral beam injection on the stability of the FRC and the improvement of confinement. I think the paper for this is still online. IIRC the lead researcher was Michl Binderbauer.
AFAIK, they have started development of the follow up prototype (IIRC called C-3) that is bigger.

[Skipjack]

On the whole proliferation thing: As history has shown, it is pretty much impossible to prevent a country from developing nuclear bomb technology, no matter what we try. With alternatives like laser enrichment, this will only become more so. I think that all those many countries that do not have nuclear bombs, do so because of choice, not because of incapability.