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Thread: Progress in the development of fusion power?

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    Default Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Anyone up on it?

    It always seemed to me to be the way to go--no nasty byproducts that will kill everything in sight for the next 10,000 years, plenty of cheap, clean power, the freedom from having to worry about fanatic Muslim nations sitting on the fossil fuel sources vital to our continued prosperity, etc.

    I have an uncle, now sadly near death, who was pretty heavily involved in the metallurgical side of the development of nuclear power. He always has maintained that this is the way to go--and I'm inclined to believe him.

    If I were President, I'd be devoting everything I had to it...
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Djoser
    Anyone up on it?

    It always seemed to me to be the way to go--no nasty byproducts that will kill everything in sight for the next 10,000 years, plenty of cheap, clean power, the freedom from having to worry about fanatic Muslim nations sitting on the fossil fuel sources vital to our continued prosperity, etc.

    I have an uncle, now sadly near death, who was pretty heavily involved in the metallurgical side of the development of nuclear power. He always has maintained that this is the way to go--and I'm inclined to believe him.

    If I were President, I'd be devoting everything I had to it...
    The few links here are on the old side, but the first one provides a really good non-technical introduction to fusion power

    http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/thyd/icf/IFE.html

    and the next two links are more about some of the politics involved with fusion research

    http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1209/p15s01-stss.html



    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4629239.stm

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    as the 'tin foil hat crowd' sees it, super high energy fusion research facilities which are 'designed by committee', and whose short term purpose is to provide high paying gov't funded research jobs, are extremely unlikely to make any technological breakthroughs.

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    There seems to be more excitement about hydrogen power and solar.

    And Canada does a better job of promoting independant research on it. There is a company called Shec Labs (www.shec-labs.com) that is making significant progress in developing catalyst agents which reduce the required temperature to crack water into hydrogen fuel using thermal solar power.

    They moved some of their research down to ASU's solar lab last summer.

    If successful, they could build a plant which would generate hydrogen fuel which could be used to generate electricity in a closed loop system (after the hydrogen is used, they turn it back into water and do the whole thing again). Aside from the catalyst agents which break down over time, there would be no external waste.

    I have two research scientist friends who follow this and fuel cell technology pretty closely - we have regulr discussions about various research efforts for alternative energy sources and fusion never comes up.


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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    I am to excited about the 10,000 year lasting pollution. Three mile Island, Chernobyl, Windscale - how many times do we got to drop the ball to finally say "Hey - this isn't as safe as we would like it to be."

    I mean people are trying to figure out how to tell people 10 millennia (1,000 centuries) into the future how to stay out of nuclear waste storage areas!

    It jus totally baffles me.

    Add to that, centralized power has repeatedly shown it's teeth with major blackouts.

    If we could come up with distributed power systems - that would be all the better. Do we shutter up hoover dam? Of course not - but powering our lights with 12V lamps from a solar panel/battery - probably not a bad idea. Doesn't sound like much until we think about how many people would be providing their own lighting!

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    The virtually never mentioned ecological downside of most forms of solar power is the really nasty chemical polution associated with mass producing solar cells and batteries.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
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    Veteran Member azcustomer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    ** WW - true with photovoltaic solar. Not so true with thermal solar (just mirrors)


    "Life is not about the number of breaths you take.
    It's about those moments which leave you breathless."

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    The current big project is know as ITER.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

    In mid-2003 a primary candidate site was on land at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, just east of Toronto.

    It was actually the preferred site because the fusion reactor being constructed requires Tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen). Over 80% of the world's Tritium comes from the heavy-water decontamination plant at Darlington. I'm annoyed, to say the least, that we pulled-out!

    I think the decison was based on the fact that the timeframe for a viable commercial fusion reactor is in the 35-50 year range and we couldn't justify the expenditure at this stage.

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by azcustomer
    ** WW - true with photovoltaic solar. Not so true with thermal solar (just mirrors)
    Sort of half right; thermal solar energy does avoid the polution associated with making photocells, but unless your power usage exactly tracks the thermal solar power generation (e.g., you don't need it at night or when it is cloudy and can get by on a lot less during the winter, etc), you still have to store it, and manufacturing most batteries on an enormous scale is still an ecological issue.

    To be clear, I am not saying that we shouldn't try to exploit solar energy but am just pointing out that it is not as perfect a solution from an environmental point of view as it naively appears.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by NoCoverLover
    the timeframe for a viable commercial fusion reactor is in the 35-50 year range ...
    Fusion power advocates are beginning to have major credibility problems, in the US at least, because that is *exactly* the same time frame they have been quoting for "viable commercial fusion" ever since the government first started funding research in the area in the 1950s. It was their "best guess" then and still was when the first energy crisis pumped new money into the area in the 1970s and has been mentioned in reviews of the program in essentially every decade since it began. In other words, despite a lot of money and a lot of very good work by some extremely bright and talented people, even the advocates of fusion power don't seem to think that they are any closer to success now than they thought they were more than 50 years ago!

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Banned Melonie's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    ^^ again some are beginning to question the wisdom of monstrous public funding levels to provide high paying white collar research and technical jobs which have yielded essentially zero results given 50 years worth essentially unlimited public funding. Of course, now that we have nanotechnology and molecular biotechnology to provide those publicly funded high paying white collar research and technical jobs instead ...

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    ^^ again some are beginning to question the wisdom of monstrous public funding levels to provide high paying white collar research and technical jobs which have yielded essentially zero results given 50 years worth essentially unlimited public funding. Of course, now that we have nanotechnology and molecular biotechnology to provide those publicly funded high paying white collar research and technical jobs instead ...
    Well, you could (and are, I guess) question the whole notion of govt funding of basic research with the hope of promoting the common economic (and other) good; it is a much debated political/philosophical question which we probably don't want to recycle here/now. However, if fusion research is a good example of a failure of this sort of investment of public funds, it surely isn't hard to cite great successes as well. Given the medium of this discussion, I suppose the most glaringly obvious ones are the internet and the World Wide Web (which are entirely different, though sometimes confused, things...esp from a technical point of view); both technologies were developed and initially implemented entirely with govt funding and have repayed that investment many many times over in stimulated private economic growth and activity. In fact, I am sure that you could easily put fusion research and a bunch of other stuff as well on the net/WWW tab and still come out WAY ahead.

    The point, of course, is that the way basic reseach works, you can't realisitically expect the govt (or anyone else) to only pick winners for its investments; some misses, many misses actually, are very much a part of the game.

    The hard question, re fusion and many other similar cases, is when do you give up, "cut bait" and move on.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    ^^^ in point of fact, original Arpanet technology was developed under DARPA ... with the D standing for Defense.

    "The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes." - from 'History of the Internet'

    Like the Manhattan project during WW2 or the more recent stealth fighter/bomber, projects funded through and supervised by the US military/DOD tend to have a much more 'result oriented' budgets and progress timetables than projects conducted under civilian 'academic' supervision. The reason for this, of course, is that the DOD actually wants to achieve timely results plus DOD spending is subject to 'outside' scrutiny i.e. congressional review. Thus any attempt to use the success of the Internet as an example of a successful gov't funded civilian 'academic' research project is a 'reach' at best.

    On the other hand, with civilian 'academic' projects like fusion research, merely being able to 'play with the toys' and provide white collar jobs for researchers and technicians is the only immediate goal, and there is no real accountability re actually achieving timely results or justifying expenditures of 'grant' money.
    ~
    Last edited by Melonie; 06-07-2006 at 10:45 PM.

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Deogol
    how many times do we got to drop the ball to finally say "Hey - this isn't as safe as we would like it to be."
    On that ^ I have to agree with Deogol 100%

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    The point, of course, is that the way basic reseach works, you can't realisitically expect the govt (or anyone else) to only pick winners for its investments; some misses, many misses actually, are very much a part of the game.
    at least when the DOD is involved, it matters whether or not the project is a 'winner' or a 'loser', with the 'losers' finding their funding cancelled after some reasonable effort at front end research. On the other hand, gov't grant funded civilian 'academic' projects are actually about 'playing the game', with 'winning' or 'losing' being a secondary consideration.

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    ^^^ in point of fact, original Arpanet technology was developed under DARPA ... with the D standing for Defense.

    "The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct traffic around the network via alternate routes." - from 'History of the Internet'
    Although Arpanet was DARPA funded, the idea that it was directed toward any practical defense related goal was a transparent fiction known to all involved; no one at DoD was paying the slightest attention to what was done with those (tiny, by their standards, funds). You can trust me on this one; I was there. Moreover, this was generally the case with DARPA funded projects in the 60s and 70s and beyond; basically DARPA was a mechanism for DoD to keep its connections into the science/academic community alive and active in case they ever really wanted/needed something practical from that "world". If DoD funded a research project with an actual practical goal in that epoch, they did not do it through DARPA. In fact, DARPA eventually became ARPA (thus the name Arpanet rather than Darpanet) in belated bureaucratic recognition that its projects had precious little to do with defense. Note also that ARPA eventually handed over its internet program to the NSF (National Science Foundation), a branch of the govt with the explicit mission of funding so called "curiosity driven" pure research.

    Also, you didn't discuss the WWW application of net technology, developed with (European) govt funding of particle physics research that had no practical goal whatsoever. Without the web, the net would not have had nearly so much economic impact, maybe none at all of any significance.

    Finally, if you do not care for these examples, it is easy enough to come up with many others. Just to pick one at random (pun intended), NSF funded mathematical research on the statistical properties of large "nearly prime" numbers led to the development of "public key" encription techniques that now make online financial transactions secure enough to be practical.

    Finally, I am not at all clear on why you think the govt is so interested in providing unproductive jobs and toys for "white collar researchers and technicians", not groups that are known for their political clout...or even for bothering to vote in many cases!

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Featured Member Wwanderer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    at least when the DOD is involved, it matters whether or not the project is a 'winner' or a 'loser', with the 'losers' finding their funding cancelled after some reasonable effort at front end research. On the other hand, gov't grant funded civilian 'academic' projects are actually about 'playing the game', with 'winning' or 'losing' being a secondary consideration.
    Getting back to fusion, its failure to produce practical results has actually led to it "losing"; see the DOE funding history figures for fusion research at

    http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309073456/html/87.html

    This plot only goes up to 2000, and I could not quickly find more recent numbers, but I know that they have continued to fall; I think the annual number is now under $200 million. In practical terms this has meant closure of 2 of the nation's 3 govt research centers devoted to work on fusion and cancelation and descoping of the major projects at the one remaining center (PPPL). The number of PhD level scientists working in the field in the US is now a small fraction of what it was 15-20 years ago, and the main remaining experimental work funded by the US govt is participation in a single large international collaborative project (ITER), where the US was once carrying out several major experimental projects on its own.

    To be clear, I agree with the reprioritization of DOE funds away from fusion, so I am not complaining; I am simply citing this example to show that it is not true that govt funded civilian/academic programs are not held accountable for their failures...sounds right (esp to a libertarian perspective) but simply isn't true.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Finally, I am not at all clear on why you think the govt is so interested in providing unproductive jobs and toys for "white collar researchers and technicians", not groups that are known for their political clout...or even for bothering to vote in many cases!
    Colleges and college professors devoid of politics ? Tell me another bedtime story !

    PS if you'd like some true perspective on fusion research which was deemed 'unacceptable' for public funding, do a net earch on one Mr. Philo Farnsworth.

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    Featured Member Wwanderer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    Colleges and college professors devoid of politics ? Tell me another bedtime story !
    I said devoid of political clout, not of politics itself; however, to the extent that professors are involved/effective in politics, they are far more likely to be professors of humanities or social sciences than of natural sciences or engineering (the areas that pull in major govt fundng support).

    In any case, this was only an aside; I'f be more interested in your comments on the main points: 1)whether or not you would agree that govt sponsored pure research does sometimes pay of BIG, and 2) that (magnetic confinement) fusion research has been (is being) penalized in a major way (most in the field would say that it is in the process of being shut down) due to failure to reach its stated goals.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Obviously, research of any sort sometimes pays off big. However, in general, corporate funded and administered research tends to yield the most big payoffs, followed by DOD funded and administered research, followed by civilian research funded by gov't grants. I would speculate that the degree of success is related to the different levels of scrutiny and/or schedule pressure the three scenarios operate under.

    I would also tend to agree that magnetic confinement civilian fusion research results vs costs has left a multi multi billion dollar bad taste in the mouths of a whole bunch of governments. As these governments come under increasing pressure to cover the cost of social welfare programs and retirement programs, they are looking harder and harder for budget items that are ripe for cutting in terms of cost/benefit ratio. Retirees and welfare recipients vote, whereas researchers do not (or certainly not in the same numbers). Is this a good or a bad thing ... well that involves a personal value judgement ?!?!?

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    Veteran Member azcustomer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    Obviously, research of any sort sometimes pays off big. However, in general, corporate funded and administered research tends to yield the most big payoffs, followed by DOD funded and administered research, followed by civilian research funded by gov't grants. I would speculate that the degree of success is related to the different levels of scrutiny and/or schedule pressure the three scenarios operate under.
    Sorry, I disagree.

    DOD research tends to be the most advanced and most efficient because it is dual use of "forced collusion" and "forced competition" of researchers, rather than just competing researchers. The DOD carefully manages the scope of its research grants so that no single researcher has enough influence on the critical path of progress to hold out.

    This was one of the rationales to use DARPA - establishing an electronic community of researchers which could be easily monitored and controlled. Most of our popular consumer electronics are just reused declassified DOD products (laser discs were the original storage devices for NSA eavesdropping 10 years before the public knew about them).

    Privately funded research is the least productive as corporations care more over controlling the results rather than understanding the results. There is little incentive for private research to want anyone to find the holy grail of cheap and clean energy. Established energy companies spend way more on research to impede the progress towards cheap renewable energy than finding it.

    Canada does a better job in renewable energy research because they offer many more, smaller research grants and tax subsidies to more and more competing firms for research projects and monitors the progress better than the US.


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  22. #22
    Jay Zeno
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Regarding the initial question, I don't think that fusion reactors are a practical reality anytime soon. Even once we generate a fusion reaction that generates acceptable levels of energy, we'll need to figure out radiation containment and waste disposal. At least, that's my imperfect understanding.

    Every now and then, there's a report of a breakthrough in cold fusion reaction. Let it shake out before you start to believe it.

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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Jay Zeno
    Regarding the initial question, I don't think that fusion reactors are a practical reality anytime soon. Even once we generate a fusion reaction that generates acceptable levels of energy, we'll need to figure out radiation containment and waste disposal. At least, that's my imperfect understanding.

    Every now and then, there's a report of a breakthrough in cold fusion reaction. Let it shake out before you start to believe it.

    Fusion = Black Hole. You watch man.

    They will have semi's hauling waste the size of pop cans.


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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Fusion = Black Hole. You watch man.
    I agree re the black hole ... about a trillion dollars worth of research money has gone into that black hole already LOL !\

    There is little incentive for private research to want anyone to find the holy grail of cheap and clean energy.
    I agree with this assessment as well ... although it is arguable that some element of cost / benefit ratio applies to private / corporate research spending on fusion to develop a practical fusion generator for sale to electric companies (i.e. electricity is for the most part a gov't regulated market). No electric company board of directors or stockholder vote is going to approve untold billions to purchase fusion power plants (even if they existed) when, in the end, state public service commissions are going to set electricity prices and electric company profit margins.

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    Featured Member Wwanderer's Avatar
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    Default Re: Progress in the development of fusion power?

    Quote Originally Posted by Melonie
    Obviously, research of any sort sometimes pays off big. However, in general, corporate funded and administered research tends to yield the most big payoffs, followed by DOD funded and administered research, followed by civilian research funded by gov't grants. I would speculate that the degree of success is related to the different levels of scrutiny and/or schedule pressure the three scenarios operate under.
    I at least partially agree with this perspective but think that the actual situation is considerably more complex and that the above ignores something very important - namely the very different types of research, basically the different stages in the development of new technology/products typically supported by corporations vs govt funded civilian/academic projects. Basically the reason that corporate research so often looks like it "pays off big" is not due to "scrutiny and/or schedule pressure" but simply because it tends to be focused on taking some relatively mature set of ideas/techniques/ technologies and making the improvements which make them commercially viable (i.e., make them profitable). But in many/most cases, the corporate research projects would not be possible, or even imagineable, without that pre-existing base from which they start. The frequently unrecognized contribution of civilian/academic research is to create the mature fields in which corporate research operates.

    Earlier in this thread I mentioned the encryption techniques that make online commerce and financial transactions secure enough to be practical (which, of course, has been a huge driver of economic growth in recent years). As I mentioned, the breakthrough discovery was made by mathematicians working on a esoteric problem in number theory. However, actually turning their theorems into a useful algorithm was, I believe, the work of corp funded projects that were essential (to the ideas' applications) but relatively straightforward once the mathematics was in place. So, which project would you say paid off big? It was reallly the combination of the two, right? Moreover, even the NSF funded academic project which produced the mathematical underpinnings of these encryption schemes itself depended, for its very conception, on literally centuries of previous academic study of number theory with no practical goals (or pressure or scrutiny) at all.

    And, of course, lots more examples are possible. Neither the nuclear weapons produced by military funded research nor fission nuclear power, produced in part by corp funded research, would have even been a concept without the "pure research" in physics in earlier times that again had no particular goals/pressure/scrutiny.

    -Ww
    "At this moment what more need we seek?
    As the Truth eternally reveals itself,
    This very place is the Lotus Land of Purity,
    This very body is the Body of the Buddha."
    - Zazen Wasan

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