There’s an interesting question at the end of the post about the progress of ITER versus polywell:
Why hasn’t Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?
I suspect it’s not “green” enough. And by that, I don’t mean that it has too high a carbon footprint — it obviously has none. No, the problem is that it doesn’t force us to tighten up the hair shirts, and force us to live the politically correct lifestyles that our betters demand of us.
If Polywell were to work, why would we ever need the Feds to be anything other than what it was in (say) 1900?
Mel Brooks alluded to the best explanation… the Feds have to protect their phony-baloney jobs.
Well … Polywell is a very exciting idea and I hope someone funds it, but if it’s so likely that it’s going to work, why would government need to fund it? Surely private industry could come up with $100M for an energy source like this.
Private industry is hesitant because they think the government will fund it.
Or private industry is leery of investing in anything with the word “nuclear” attached because they’ve been burned before by government regulation?
Why invest in something that’s likely to be shut down by obnoxious protesters who fall for every scare story they hear?
I, for one, remain unconvinced of the merits of electrostatic confinement (even if for electons only). In fact, the things I learned about inertial confinement are rather horrible too, and that’s a way more workable idea. I used to call Bussard “a crackpot” for the cult-like following, but actually he only grossly underestimated what it takes to produce the power.
First off. Thanks!
Second off. The experimenters report no show stoppers for Polywell so far and even with their budget limitations (millions a year) expect to know if a full scale reactor is feasible in 18 to 24 months. Compare that to ITER which is in the same knowledge boat is costing around a billion a year and will probably have no clue for 15 years (under the old schedule) and more like 30 years under the new one.
Let me add that 4 or 5 countries are making the SC magnets for ITER. That is nuts.
I can’t say I’m impressed with what I know of polywell so far. It’s a neat trick, but so far I see no serious solution to the problem of getting a reasonable density of fusion events going on. It’s not hard to get a few fusion events happening, but that doesn’t solve the practical problems.
And by “a few” I mean any number with 12 or fewer zeros on the end. We are talking about atomic-scale events, after all. One fusion event releases energy measured in picojoules. Unless you can get 10^12 or more such events happening every second, you have a tabletop curiosity, not a serious power source.
Maybe the Obamanauts should throw money into this hopper, but I rather suspect not. They don’t need a lot of money, and the possible outcome (economical fusion) is not something the value of which only far-thinking or super smart people can appreciate. I’m pretty confident that if their proposals have merit they can find the cash from private sources, or from the normal DoD, DoE and NSF grant process.
if their proposals have merit
Doesn’t the risk/reward itself and the tangible path forward provide that merit even for a very low probability of success?
IIRC the US Navy is financing Polywell to the tune of $2 million USD. Which granted, is not a lot of money, but allows for proving the models before embarking on more expensive projects.
I can understand the hesitations of some folks regarding Dr. Bussard’s latest work, taking into account the Riggatron mess a couple of decades before. That was probably also the reason why they are pursuing government funding for this project. Most private investors don’t have the balls to spend $100 million on something like this.
Contrary to what some people think, tokamaks have already achieved conditions for break even fusion with Q >= 1.0. The Japanese JT-60 reactor is an example. They have not however achieved steady state operations under the harsh, neutron heavy, conditions of D-T fusion. That is what ITER is meant to achieve. IMO it is problematic that contemporary tokamaks are so low density. Nuclear fission reactors are already known to be expensive in no small part because of large construction expensives, and tokamaks seem to be no better in that regard. Probably even worse.
Mike and Mark:
Who’s going to want to fund it? Polywell has the potential to be an extremely destabilising technology, and more so the smaller the units turn out to be. The fossil fuel companies definitely don’t want it. The existing electricity utilities don’t want it, because Polywell holds out the hope (for everyone else) and the fear (for those companies) that some of the larger users, at least, might become independent of the grid. The government doesn’t want it for the same reason as the power companies don’t. The watermelon Greens don’t want it because it’s not hair-shirt enough – and to be fair, because it might actually accelerate the depletion of other resources.
The Navy does want it, because it makes logistics immensely simpler; at the very least, it makes the whole oiler fleet redundant if the units are small enough for small ships.
Strangely enough, the US Navy is the only organisation putting any money into this at all – which rather supports my argument.
No, the problem is that it doesn’t force us to tighten up the hair shirts, and force us to live the politically correct lifestyles that our betters demand of us.
And yet Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking up fast-neutron reactors (click my name).
If environmentalists only wanted us all to suffer they’d favor burning coal until the atmosphere had 600 ppm of CO2, and there was no ice left on the surface of the planet; that would be suffering. Instead, they seem to want to avoid such a fate.
I agree with Fletcher and others that fusion is the potentially the most disruptive technology in the early 21st century. We developed automobiles, radio/tv, fission nuclear electrical power, and computers/internet during the 20th century because of the freedom entrepreneurs and their consumers had for these inventions. Unfortunately, our freedoms are greatly restricted now – look at the stupidity of not drilling in ANWAR, a swampland only good for bugs. The Elite absolutely hate the masses affording expensive things like RV’s, airplanes, big boats, and nice villas in the countryside, all possible when energy costs are significantly reduced.
The background of Pollywell is interesting. In the late 1950’s, using basically vacuum tube technology, Philo Farnsworth showed the non-thermonuclear fusion reaction. Farnsworth, the major inventor of television, asked Albert Einstein if he was on the right track, and Einstein “agreed.” Bussard switched from electrostatic confinement to magnetic confinement, and as M. Simon says, there are no show stoppers now. I don’t understand Pete Zaitcev’s comment in this regard.
In addition to the small size, Pollywell really shines in the direct conversion to electricity from the fusion reaction – no intermediate heat to steam (Carnot) as with present coal/fission. And after increasing the focus energy by ten, Pollywell becomes really practical with Boron-Hydrogen fusion, which doesn’t give off neutrons. As Godzilla points out, D-D and D-T fusions have neutrons, so where is the major fusion advantage vs. fission? We could be doing advanced fission (pebble bed, etc.) reactors now for much less cost than the other grand fusion reactors, which also have radioactive components at decommission. So it isn’t a cost issue, it’s strictly politics.
If environmentalists only wanted us all to suffer
The point is not about us suffering. It’s about living our lives the way they want us to. If they were really interested in carbon because of global warming, they’d be pushing nukes.
The National Ignition Facility quietly goes online. Laser Inertial Fusion
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.12fab6f6c00a65e15e6fb5e305aacbb7.41&show_article=1
If they were really interested in carbon because of global warming, they’d be pushing nukes.
And, as pointed out above, they (namely the new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu), are doing just that.
Oh, I see. That must be why they closed down Yucca Mountain.
Doesn’t the risk/reward itself and the tangible path forward provide that merit even for a very low probability of success?
The figure of merit you’re looking for, ken, is “expected payoff,” and it’s the probability of success multiplied by the magnitude of the payoff, i.e. a $1 lottery ticket that pays $10,000 is worth the cost, if the odds of winning are greater than 1 in 10,000, because 1/10000 * 10000 = $1, the expected payoff ($1) is equal to the cost.
NSF et al. fund all kind of stuff where the probability of payoff is miniscule. Program officers are used to making that kind of rough calculation, or rather, correlating that calculation made by other scientists in the field, since the way you get an NSF grant is having other scientists in your field review your proposal in glowing terms. The real issue with grant funding is the competition: what other proposals are in front of the committee, and what do their cost/benefit ratios look like?
You can’t decide to throw money at polywell fusion as if the money would otherwise lie around in a Scrooge McDuck vault somewhere, or as if it comes from the magic money tree, and all you need to do is pick it. If it goes into polywell, it comes out of something else. But what? That’s the question. Maybe it comes out of funding the Phase I trials of a cancer vaccine that would surprise everyone by working 100% against all solid tumors. Maybe it would come out of the satellite that first detects the strange signals the intelligent life-forms on Alpha Centauri have been sending us. Maybe it would come out of some other fusion concept, which has not even had the publicity of polywell, that would pan out much better.
I’m not saying any of these things are true, but I am saying you can’t just look at the potential benefit and ignore the costs, most importantly what the economists call “opportunity costs” — the costs you incur by not spending the money somewhere else. These are, alas, sort of “Invisible Man” costs, to borrow Amity Shlaes pointed metaphor. They’re costs we don’t notice, because what we give up is something we never had in the first place.
Also don’t forget the correlation between the speed of scientific advance and the amount of money flung at it is weak. Generally, the limiting “nutrient” for science in the US is not money, it’s bright ideas. Throwing money at a particular basic area of research tends not to speed up the science very much, because it doesn’t make the clever ideas and breakthroughs happen any faster. There are exceptions, of course, and I wouldn’t presume to speak for engineering development, which is perhaps a different thing entirely.
So it may well be that the money polywell has right now, although not what its adherents want (it never is anyway), is enough to let the idea mature, if it’s going to. It may need more money, but it’s not obvious to me yet.
Who’s going to want to fund it? Polywell has the potential to be an extremely destabilising technology,
Fletch, this might have made some sense in the 15th century, when sturdy guilds controlled technology up to the eyeballs. But it hasn’t made any sense since then. Competition for glory and wealth is simply too intense, too widespread. Sure, the suits at Exxon might not be happy about a game-changing energy source. But they’ve also got their eye on what those sharp chiseling bastards at BP and Chevron are up, too, too, and even worse than coping with a game-changing technology is being the last to get into it, and having all the juicy patents and insider expertise go to one of your competitor.
You’re thinking a company like Exxon is in the business of oil. Not true. They’re in the business of making money, and at present they do it in oil. But if they can make as much or more money by going completely into polywell fusion, they’ll do it in a heartbeat. As an example, take IBM, which got its start making typewriters — anyone see one of those around lately? — then made cardpunches and then big iron mainframe computers and then minis and micros, and now more or less survives by selling computing services somewhat divorced from hardware (they do still sell big iron, however, and profitably).
To be sure, there are firms that cling to their buggy-whip manufacturing expertise, can’t imagine making anything else, and will do their best to thwart the emergence of any newfangled horseless carriage business. But these are the Chryslers and PanAm’s of the business world, those weaklings destined to survive only as case studies in business schools. Let us not exaggerate their influence. At least, not compared to government, which has far more power, zero competition, and about the same disinterest in disruptive technologies.
I’d be less dismissive of Polywell if the boosters had ever published a paper in the peer reviewed literature demonstrating the errors of the previous work (which was published in that literature) showing that class of concepts can’t work even in theory, on any “advanced fuel”.
The whole thing smacks of wishful thinking.
Oh, I see. That must be why they closed down Yucca Mountain.
Yucca Mountain was another unnecessary government boondoggle — and I say that as someone who supports the expansion of commercial nuclear energy. The only reason to ever bury spent nuclear fuel was to prevent it from being vaporized by hydrogen bombs in a full scale nuclear war. Absent that, storing the spent fuel in armored casks at the surface is cheaper, safer, and altogether more practical.
Yucca Mountain was another unnecessary government boondoggle — and I say that as someone who supports the expansion of commercial nuclear energy.
While I agree, that’s not why they shut it down. They shut it down as a back-door way to hinder expansion of the nuclear industry.
While I agree, that’s not why they shut it down. They shut it down as a back-door way to hinder expansion of the nuclear industry.
But it doesn’t do that. If anything, removing Yucca Mountain and making dry cask storage the sanctioned solution for long term waste disposal will help nuclear power.
If they want to hinder the expansion of the nuclear industry, the direct way is to simply pull back on loan guarantees. Nuclear power will live or die based on capital cost and cost of financing, not the adequately-solved (and relatively inexpensive) problem of waste disposal. Have they pulled back on that?