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Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

bbc.com

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Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#31

Post by abhi3 »

dang wrote: post #8
abhi3 wrote: post #5

TLDR 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, mag…

We've banned your account because we asked you not to post these. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

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.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#32

Post by dang »

daveguy wrote: post #27
dang wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've banned your account because we asked you not to post these. If you don't want it to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com.

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.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#33

Post by Angostura »

dang wrote: post #32
daveguy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

> it comes from long experience and reflection about what makes for good HN conversations.

In your long experience, how is this detrimental to good HN conversations?

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#34

Post by icehawk219 »

paulydavis wrote: post #21
darawk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#35

Post by dang »

Angostura wrote: post #33
dang wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is…

> it comes from long experience and reflection about what makes for good HN conversations. In your long experience, how is this detrimental to good HN conversations?

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 in the comments.

I wrote about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538480 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538499.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#36

Post by mattgrice »

daviddumenil wrote: post #16
nxzero wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Electricity already makes up around half or less of the cost of desalination. Even free electricity would at best halve the cost.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#37

Post by refurb »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #30
ridgeguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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%.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#38

Post by gizmo686 »

mattgrice wrote: post #36
daviddumenil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Electricity already makes up around half or less of the cost of desalination. Even free electricity would at best halve the cost.

Assuming current designs. There may be less energy efficient designs that are, ignoring the cost of energy, cheaper to builder and operate.

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#39

Post by tachim »

YZF wrote: post #24

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 har…

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?

Re: Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies

#40

Post by DennisP »

refurb wrote: post #37
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

True, and waste heat is a far smaller contribution to warming than greenhouse gases.

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.)

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