There are a handful of private companies working on new/not well researched approaches to cracking fusion using private capital while Government projects like National Ignition Labs and ITER suck most of the public funding to work on mainstream methods.
There are two companies of note,
1) General Fusion (funded in part by Bezos) working on something called magnetised target fusion
Here's how it works: first, magnetic fields are used to confine a superheated plasma of volatile deuterium and tritium isotopes. This plasma is then injected into a sphere, where it's briefly contained in a vortex of liquid metal. Next, pistons converging towards the centre of the sphere simultaneously strike an anvil at the end of their cylinder, sending a shock wave into the plasma. This burst of energy causes the plasma to compress and the deuterium-tritium fuel to ignite – producing, in theory, a tremendous burst of energy.
2)Tri Alpha (Paul Allen) using a reactor tech called called a “field-reversed configuration.” This type of device has more in common with Iter's tokamak-style reactor than General Fusion’s machine: it uses magnetic confinement and heat, rather than compression, to induce fusion, and it produces energy continuously, instead of in bursts.
The advantage of a field-reversed configuration over a tokamak is that its engineering is much simpler. But from a physics perspective, the technology is far less well-developed.
Conclusion is that both these companies are following long shot techs and it's challenging for them to raise capital since they'll take a long long time to give VC an exit, if ever. But if they work, then their investors hit jackpot.
-- To be clear, this is NOT about debating the matter, it's about transparency and helping the community understand how things work. To be more clear, I've posted and seen others post TLDR and unclear if these shouldn't be posted on HN, or if there's something else going on.
[1] When dang took over HN, the topic of transparency was covered, and though I may have misunderstood, more transparency was promised.
I would like to say that 1) I think TL;DR summaries are a good thing (especially the detailed and accurate ones this user has posted). And 2) it would be an excellent way to promote an apply HN that does exactly that.
I think you just banned someone who is a positive contributor to HN.
Certainly opinions can reasonably differ on this, but it's my job to make these calls and in this case it comes from long experience and reflection about what makes for good HN conversations.
But there are two issues beyond what you're saying. First, when we ask someone not to do something and they keep doing it, we're within our rights to ban them. It's not something we always do, but we sometimes do. Second, the issue is sometimes swung by additional data that isn't public. If we don't make it public, that's often out of courtesy to the user.
There are a bunch of reasons. Here are two: In real conversation, people don't recite summaries at one another as if into a parliamentary record—everyone would tune out long before they finished. Second, the purpose of such summaries is to save people having to read the article, which is exactly the wrong way to go if we want to have thoughtful discourse.
Well, I'm going to disagree and hope you stop doing that.
Better, I'll even tell you why: I use summaries to decide to read the original article or not. Your argument seems to stand on the idea that a short title is enough to decide if an article is worth my time to read. It often is not. The first thing when I see a title that looks interesting is to read the first few top comments to see if other HN reader have found it interesting and get more information about the content.
The extreme version of your position would be that we don't need titles either: HN reader should just trust that top links are intersting since they made it to the top and the title line would just give them incorrect information to discuss, everyone should just read every article that appears in the top 30.
This is obviously ridiculous.
You think titles are enough. I don't, and otehr obviously also disagree.
> "...to see if other HN reader have found it interesting"
A summary doesn't tell you that though. The comment ceases to be a comment and instead functions as a sort of mechanical interpretation. As technical people concerned with taxonomy, we can't have "summary comments", that's just crazy talk!
Not only that, but what of the ethical dilemma of posting a "TL;DR" for something that isn't your own writing? That's self-appointed editorial control when nobody agreed to that.
That said, I like summaries, but only when a genuine opinion comes with them. The summary service I see mentioned sounds interesting for sure, definitely a good idea. Although it's not quite clear to me how I would access that.
I don't know if anyone can see this (even with showdead) but i just want to say that I didn't so this to promote the applyhn or anything (there was no link or even a passing reference). The original piece is 3,500 words and takes 20 minutes to read. I just thought a TLDR would help a lot of people. I have mailed dang to clear that.
I think it's debatable, do you prefer our energy future being at the hands of lobbyists? Because that's what's happening today in the US and Europe as far as I can tell.
EV were always dubbed too complex and impossible in Europe until tesla came around and made it happen.
I follow the general skepticism about money and control of mankind's future (space resources, energy, water, etc) but also have to keep faith in a certain humanity.
Has anyone since reasonable explanation of what the future would look like with fusion?
To me, there will never be enough energy, this effort is about control, not power; even if there was (relatively speaking) an unlimited source of energy, the bounds of it's use would quickly be found, and as such, would not be "universally" available.
While I think that is true in general, and we will eventually saturate whatever fusion may provide - it will take a good while to do that. And in the mean time, we'll have a near perfect source of energy, that's cheap, plentiful and clean.
Fusion is truly a pretty revolutionary thing if we can make it work.
Why is it cheaper than now? I mean coal is really cheap. You still have to pay people to operate these reactors. It is not like we have a scarcity of coal. I get clean I do not get cheap. Yes the fuel will be water but these things must have large overhead to maintain and run and build.
For things like coal and oil the cost is in acquisition, transportation, and storage of the fuel and the infrastructure that goes with that.
You can't just go out and find coal lying around. You need to hallow out or level an entire mountain to get it. That requires a lot of people and equipment. And you need to transport large quantities of it around to where it's needed which requires special infrastructure dedicated to that task. The same goes for oil/natural gas.
At the center of our society/culture is the human being's desire to dominate others. We use capitalism/money as a means to achieve that. Money/power always has a systemic property to create monopolies and reinforce them.
That being said, technological advance usually benefits more than just the owners of capital. But the balance usually is tipped in their favor.
In short: There's enough food for everybody on this planet, but we currently prefer to have more of it for ourselves and let others starve.
If we don't like this system, then we need to move away from capitalism (as we know it) and put different values than domination/power/money at the center of our culture.
My first thought was that an electricity cost at maybe 20% of what it is now would be result in a good economic uplift but not a seismic change.
But the interesting cases are those where much cheaper electricity unlocks new opportunities. Imagine the coast of sub-Saharan Africa transformed by the agriculture enabled by cheap desalinated water.
Is it really just a 5x reduction in power cost that would allow "cheap" desalination? Would it require a 50x reduction in cost? I wonder if cheap desalination and cheap desalination are on the same order of magnitude. Do you know the current cost of desalination? Is there any sort of accurate estimate of how cheap power would be? (I guess not since everything is a prototype and nothing has been able to produce excess power from fuel).
I think the first world would look much like it does now, except that fusion would replace most current nuclear, coal, and oil-fired plants - the technologies that supply base load. Natural gas plants will continue in service as fast response peaking plants.
Renewable energy sources will continue to replace older generation technologies so long as they continue to get cheaper and grid modernization keeps pace with the special requirements of renewables wrt variability.
All that depends on whatever fusion tech proves to be both technically feasible and cost competitive. If that doesn't happen, or is really delayed, then grid storage technology may win out as a cost-effective energy "source".
If storage becomes cheap and effective I'd expect to see renewables + storage expand to serve base load. Also, we'd see faster electrification of areas that currently can't afford classic distribution grids. This might accelerate significant changes in the developing world.
But whatever the generation technology, energy won't be "unlimited". There will always be cost limits.
There are also fundamental thermodynamic limits that you hit at some point. All production and usage of electricity produces waste heat, it's unavoidable (see Carnot). Even neglecting global warming, you can't keep 20th century energy growth going for much more than another century or two before waste heat alone causes catastrophic climate change.
you can't keep 20th century energy growth going for much more than another century or two before waste heat alone causes catastrophic climate change.
That seems unlikely to me, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I would imagine that all of the waste heat produced through the world's economy is several orders of magnitude lower than the sun. Like less than 0.0001%.
Whether this is physically or economically realistic is another matter. I tend to think that long before waste heat is an actual problem, we'll either transition to a stable state or move the growth off planet. (Conveniently, fusion is also great for rockets.)
Well, that assumes we don't move manufacturing processes off planet. Which is more realistic when nigh-unlimited energy (fusion) is available. With that, you can do cool things like launch loops or even a space fountain.
Waste heat could possibly replace natural gas for heating. Eventually that won't be enough, but I'm sure by the time it becomes a problem we'll figure something out.
It's really pathetic how HN has degenerated from an actual community of builders / startup founders / creators to reddit-style vitriol and populist complaints about the 1%.
Every comment right now is complaining about billionaires and the problems with of capitalism. Not even about the technology, much less being happy about this being funded.
Genuine question -- is there a community somewhere which is actually full of not-shitty people? I would like an invite.
Have you considered that there may be many qualified people who want to work on innovative projects like fusion power, but are prevented from doing so because the necessary capital is locked up with the hyper-wealthy? Only by having inside connections and luck can you hope to acquire capital for your projects, but even then you work for years only to concentrate even more capital in the hands of your lender, making the problem worse. This is a legitimate problem holding back innovation.
I checked your post history, of about 9 top-level comments on the first page (not including this one) I see seven normative posts and two technical ones.
I have some friends at General Fusion and I've been following them relatively closely from the beginning. I had an opportunity to invest some in the beginning and decided not to - mostly because the problems they're trying to solve seemed so hard.
They've pivoted a little bit on their approach since then. In the beginning it was all about focussed pressure waves. Now they're starting with plasma. Fusion is really hard (well, at least for power generation, perhaps the "level a city" kind is easier). I think it's harder than self driving cars (for example) or landing rockets on barges (as another example). There are many fundamental problems in different areas that have to be solved and not all these areas are well understood.
I'm pleasantly surprised they are still going strong and that they were able to raise money to continue their progress. Obviously if they are successful the business opportunity of all power generation in the world is a pretty big one...
Fusion is easy. Lots of fusion (but not quite city leveling kind) is hard.
As far as I can tell most of the difficulty arises in the plasma physics part instead of the actual fusion bit (the latter being fairly well understood now for quite a long time now).
That's where 90% of the work has to go get fusion power and also the reason the early estimates for when fusion power would be available were so optimistic.
It wasn't clear back then how difficult and unforgiving plasmas can be (and making the plasma extremely hot, applying strong magnetic fields and running high currents through it doesn't make it easier to work with - quite the opposite).
Sure. I believe there's some fusion happening around us all the time. It's a statistical event. But to get a useful amount of fusion is different.
Yes, plasma is very difficult. You need to get it hot enough and in the right shape and in the right position at the right time. But even when you do that there are still many hard problems to solve. One of them is irradiation embrittlement. Capturing all the energy efficiently and converting it efficiently into power is also difficult (steam turbines I guess). The efficiencies of the input side are also a problem (the energy intake of creating the plasma, managing it, "fusing" it). All these inefficiencies eat into your energy budget making it harder to get significantly more energy out than you put in... Anyways, I'm not a physicist, but every little problem I hear about related to this process seems to be of monumental proportions and there are many of those...
Evan in thermonuclear bombs, most of the benefit in fusion does not from the energy released by the fusion itself, but rather from the neutrons released that trigger fission surrounding U-238 (the non-bomb isotope of uranium).
How does the design process for these reactors work? How much design is done in simulation vs experimentally and how high-fidelity are the simulations?
This is not my field (just an enthusiast) but consider that a typical fusion plasma has a density of 10^20 particles per cubic meter. Even if your plasma is 1 cubic centimeter, that's still 10^14 particles! Thus a full-on EM simulation, where every charged particle interacts with every charged particle, is not practical. A full-scale simulation is still unrealistic even if you typically cheat by breaking the problem up into cells and ignoring the Coulomb interaction beyond cell boundaries.
Fusion machine design is a combination of hard-won experimental knowledge and theoretical guesswork. I'm skeptical of the current wave of fusion startups simply because they don't have the weight of the decades of experimental work that have gone into tokamak research. But hey, they might make a breakthough, who knows.
Serious question for those with actual knowledge of Controlled Fusion Economics:
Does the smaller size of this reactor design mitigate the challenges that the Tokamaks face with material radioactivity? With the level of neutron bombardment those pistons undergo what material can they be made of to assure an economically viable operational lifetime?
I remember this being one of the bigger challenges for all of injector and heating equipment in Tokamak designs. After a point the devices are composed of different radioactive isotopes and have to be replaced/disposed of, making the economics... challenging.
Is it possible for this project to be successful without a Materials breakthrough? I don't think the Physics challenges are insurmountable with enough time, but finding new materials can be a rabbit hole.
I know Michel Laberge, he's from my home town of Bowen Island, BC. I went to school with his son, and my earliest memory of his mad scientist work was when his son brought in a mechanical hand controlled by a glove for his grade 6 science project. I think I was experimenting with lemons as a power source...
Of course we didn't learn until much later that he had rented the old gas station in the middle of town to conduct experiments with nuclear energy.
I still believe General Fusion's approach to be the most practical of the solutions I've seen. I'm continually following their progress, and am hoping for great news to come from them. I would love to be able to tell this as the story of how we accomplished nuclear fusion.
52 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThere are a handful of private companies working on new/not well researched approaches to cracking fusion using private capital while Government projects like National Ignition Labs and ITER suck most of the public funding to work on mainstream methods.
There are two companies of note,
1) General Fusion (funded in part by Bezos) working on something called magnetised target fusion
Here's how it works: first, magnetic fields are used to confine a superheated plasma of volatile deuterium and tritium isotopes. This plasma is then injected into a sphere, where it's briefly contained in a vortex of liquid metal. Next, pistons converging towards the centre of the sphere simultaneously strike an anvil at the end of their cylinder, sending a shock wave into the plasma. This burst of energy causes the plasma to compress and the deuterium-tritium fuel to ignite – producing, in theory, a tremendous burst of energy.
2)Tri Alpha (Paul Allen) using a reactor tech called called a “field-reversed configuration.” This type of device has more in common with Iter's tokamak-style reactor than General Fusion’s machine: it uses magnetic confinement and heat, rather than compression, to induce fusion, and it produces energy continuously, instead of in bursts. The advantage of a field-reversed configuration over a tokamak is that its engineering is much simpler. But from a physics perspective, the technology is far less well-developed.
Conclusion is that both these companies are following long shot techs and it's challenging for them to raise capital since they'll take a long long time to give VC an exit, if ever. But if they work, then their investors hit jackpot.
________
EDIT: So, much for any calms of transparency[1]:
(1) It's not clear why the user was ban.
(2) Mod requested to deal with the issue offline.
-- To be clear, this is NOT about debating the matter, it's about transparency and helping the community understand how things work. To be more clear, I've posted and seen others post TLDR and unclear if these shouldn't be posted on HN, or if there's something else going on.
[1] When dang took over HN, the topic of transparency was covered, and though I may have misunderstood, more transparency was promised.
When we ban someone and they email us, we simply ask them to promise not to do it again, and if they do, we unban them and welcome them back.
Edit: abhi3 emailed and is now unbanned.
and if you showdead:yes you'll see 'these' types are 'TLDR' summaries
a previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11537818
also, dang even gave him an out if just requests it.. all seems very reasonable
IIRC before dang people used to be shadowbanned. Again IIRC pointing out that someone has been banned now is a huge step towards transparency.
I think you just banned someone who is a positive contributor to HN.
But there are two issues beyond what you're saying. First, when we ask someone not to do something and they keep doing it, we're within our rights to ban them. It's not something we always do, but we sometimes do. Second, the issue is sometimes swung by additional data that isn't public. If we don't make it public, that's often out of courtesy to the user.
In your long experience, how is this detrimental to good HN conversations?
I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538480 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538499.
Better, I'll even tell you why: I use summaries to decide to read the original article or not. Your argument seems to stand on the idea that a short title is enough to decide if an article is worth my time to read. It often is not. The first thing when I see a title that looks interesting is to read the first few top comments to see if other HN reader have found it interesting and get more information about the content.
The extreme version of your position would be that we don't need titles either: HN reader should just trust that top links are intersting since they made it to the top and the title line would just give them incorrect information to discuss, everyone should just read every article that appears in the top 30.
This is obviously ridiculous.
You think titles are enough. I don't, and otehr obviously also disagree.
A summary doesn't tell you that though. The comment ceases to be a comment and instead functions as a sort of mechanical interpretation. As technical people concerned with taxonomy, we can't have "summary comments", that's just crazy talk!
Not only that, but what of the ethical dilemma of posting a "TL;DR" for something that isn't your own writing? That's self-appointed editorial control when nobody agreed to that.
That said, I like summaries, but only when a genuine opinion comes with them. The summary service I see mentioned sounds interesting for sure, definitely a good idea. Although it's not quite clear to me how I would access that.
EV were always dubbed too complex and impossible in Europe until tesla came around and made it happen.
I follow the general skepticism about money and control of mankind's future (space resources, energy, water, etc) but also have to keep faith in a certain humanity.
To me, there will never be enough energy, this effort is about control, not power; even if there was (relatively speaking) an unlimited source of energy, the bounds of it's use would quickly be found, and as such, would not be "universally" available.
Fusion is truly a pretty revolutionary thing if we can make it work.
You can't just go out and find coal lying around. You need to hallow out or level an entire mountain to get it. That requires a lot of people and equipment. And you need to transport large quantities of it around to where it's needed which requires special infrastructure dedicated to that task. The same goes for oil/natural gas.
At the center of our society/culture is the human being's desire to dominate others. We use capitalism/money as a means to achieve that. Money/power always has a systemic property to create monopolies and reinforce them.
That being said, technological advance usually benefits more than just the owners of capital. But the balance usually is tipped in their favor.
In short: There's enough food for everybody on this planet, but we currently prefer to have more of it for ourselves and let others starve.
If we don't like this system, then we need to move away from capitalism (as we know it) and put different values than domination/power/money at the center of our culture.
But the interesting cases are those where much cheaper electricity unlocks new opportunities. Imagine the coast of sub-Saharan Africa transformed by the agriculture enabled by cheap desalinated water.
Renewable energy sources will continue to replace older generation technologies so long as they continue to get cheaper and grid modernization keeps pace with the special requirements of renewables wrt variability.
All that depends on whatever fusion tech proves to be both technically feasible and cost competitive. If that doesn't happen, or is really delayed, then grid storage technology may win out as a cost-effective energy "source".
If storage becomes cheap and effective I'd expect to see renewables + storage expand to serve base load. Also, we'd see faster electrification of areas that currently can't afford classic distribution grids. This might accelerate significant changes in the developing world.
But whatever the generation technology, energy won't be "unlimited". There will always be cost limits.
That seems unlikely to me, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I would imagine that all of the waste heat produced through the world's economy is several orders of magnitude lower than the sun. Like less than 0.0001%.
But exponential growth gets impressive after a while. At 2.3% growth per year, we boil the oceans in about 400 years: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
Whether this is physically or economically realistic is another matter. I tend to think that long before waste heat is an actual problem, we'll either transition to a stable state or move the growth off planet. (Conveniently, fusion is also great for rockets.)
Every comment right now is complaining about billionaires and the problems with of capitalism. Not even about the technology, much less being happy about this being funded.
Genuine question -- is there a community somewhere which is actually full of not-shitty people? I would like an invite.
They've pivoted a little bit on their approach since then. In the beginning it was all about focussed pressure waves. Now they're starting with plasma. Fusion is really hard (well, at least for power generation, perhaps the "level a city" kind is easier). I think it's harder than self driving cars (for example) or landing rockets on barges (as another example). There are many fundamental problems in different areas that have to be solved and not all these areas are well understood.
I'm pleasantly surprised they are still going strong and that they were able to raise money to continue their progress. Obviously if they are successful the business opportunity of all power generation in the world is a pretty big one...
As far as I can tell most of the difficulty arises in the plasma physics part instead of the actual fusion bit (the latter being fairly well understood now for quite a long time now). That's where 90% of the work has to go get fusion power and also the reason the early estimates for when fusion power would be available were so optimistic. It wasn't clear back then how difficult and unforgiving plasmas can be (and making the plasma extremely hot, applying strong magnetic fields and running high currents through it doesn't make it easier to work with - quite the opposite).
Yes, plasma is very difficult. You need to get it hot enough and in the right shape and in the right position at the right time. But even when you do that there are still many hard problems to solve. One of them is irradiation embrittlement. Capturing all the energy efficiently and converting it efficiently into power is also difficult (steam turbines I guess). The efficiencies of the input side are also a problem (the energy intake of creating the plasma, managing it, "fusing" it). All these inefficiencies eat into your energy budget making it harder to get significantly more energy out than you put in... Anyways, I'm not a physicist, but every little problem I hear about related to this process seems to be of monumental proportions and there are many of those...
Fusion machine design is a combination of hard-won experimental knowledge and theoretical guesswork. I'm skeptical of the current wave of fusion startups simply because they don't have the weight of the decades of experimental work that have gone into tokamak research. But hey, they might make a breakthough, who knows.
I just hope that Christy Clark doesn't sabotage GF with her goal of turning mining, LNG, fracking and real estate into BC's economic engines.
Does the smaller size of this reactor design mitigate the challenges that the Tokamaks face with material radioactivity? With the level of neutron bombardment those pistons undergo what material can they be made of to assure an economically viable operational lifetime?
I remember this being one of the bigger challenges for all of injector and heating equipment in Tokamak designs. After a point the devices are composed of different radioactive isotopes and have to be replaced/disposed of, making the economics... challenging.
Is it possible for this project to be successful without a Materials breakthrough? I don't think the Physics challenges are insurmountable with enough time, but finding new materials can be a rabbit hole.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion
Of course we didn't learn until much later that he had rented the old gas station in the middle of town to conduct experiments with nuclear energy.
I still believe General Fusion's approach to be the most practical of the solutions I've seen. I'm continually following their progress, and am hoping for great news to come from them. I would love to be able to tell this as the story of how we accomplished nuclear fusion.