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Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

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Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#131
post #3

Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil. What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

On top of what everybody else has said, I also don't think it's a given, even if/once we crack the technology, that anybody will actually use it to generate power. I think there's a totally plausible outcome where somebody builds a fusion reactor that produces more energy than it consumes and said reactor has essentially infinite, essentially free fuel, but the design they come up with costs $20 billion a pop to build (or whatever) with no clear path to making it cheaper, and just the cost of capital to build new plants makes those plants more expensive per unit of energy generated than coal/gas/solar/etc. even though the fuel costs nothing. At that point, even if it works, maybe the one demonstrator plant they end up building continues to tick away as a singular novelty and the rest of the world carries on building gas plants and solar.

Fission is already in not too different a place than that: fuel is nowhere near the dominant cost per unit of energy produced. I hope that ends up not being the case with fusion, but it's hard to predict at this point.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#132
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is odd that you mention this, unless your name is Karl and were at lunch last Wednesday :-), because it came up as something that companies with big cash hoards might actually be thinking about. Consider the notion that at some point a feasible fusion power plant design becomes "known". Then its a question of money to build one or two or 10. And a company like Google or Apple, with a large cash hoard could jump in…

Maybe for companies, to aim for fusion is asking too much. But what about a commercial "DARPA" ? I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is? But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well. So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal. But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-P…

Your comment made me think of Bell Labs.

From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wireless and wired communications technologies and systems. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#133
post #3

Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil. What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

>What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly.

For a start there are dozens of different approaches currently being pursued. Which do we bless with the billions of extra funding? All of them? Suppose none of them pan out?

It’s not like fusion isn’t being actively investigated and invested in. It is, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. How about we see how those projects pan out in practice and then progress from there?

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#134
post #130
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> when mainframe systems did the job just fine. Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more compute power will give them back than ?

Not that long ago (1980's?) it was said that no one really needed a personal computer, and that no one would buy one.

I programmed microcomputers in the 70s as a kid.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#135
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Stellerator, or any of its descendants, turn out to be the answer to practical fusion, it would have been contingent on vast quantities of computational power being available cheaply. It does not matter how much money you poured into your Stellerator project in 1970, you could never have built the 7-X, because there would have been no way to produce that design in the first place. Personally, I think one of th…

> Personally, I think one of the answers to "tech seems to have stalled" is that it's easy to underestimate how important cheap computational power is, even without "AI", to moving forward. For another example, as fantastic as the 1960s space projects may have been, I think they just weren't economically sustainable, so it isn't that amazing that they didn't become a self-sustaining industry right away. I think it's…

Awesome post! 1870-1970 is an era of amazing core discoveries!

At the same time, it's amazing how computing is helping every single field there. Even if the core discoveries are already made, the efficiency gains in the recent decades are tremendous:

* Classic windmills vs modern aerogenerators

* Analog transmissions vs highly multiplexed, high bandwidth digital transmissions

* First modern passenger planes vs more aerodynamic, more efficient planes

* Straight jet engines vs turbofans

* Saturn V vs Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy

* Mainframes vs modern computing devices

We live in an era of refinement, where the old discoveries are being improved in ways that enable new uses that were in the realm of science-fiction not so long ago.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#136
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for companies, to aim for fusion is asking too much. But what about a commercial "DARPA" ? I'm guessing that the innovations created by DARPA are a very good ROI in the value sense. If not, what is? But like Xerox-Parc, the fear is that extracting money from that won't go well. So one solution is creating a monopoly. But that's not ideal. But what about some sort of insurance ? How would history look if Xerox-P…

Your comment made me think of Bell Labs. From wikipedia: >Bell Laboratories was, and is, regarded by many as the premier research facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the operating system Unix, the programming languages C and C++, solar cells, the CCD, floating-gate MOSFET, and a whole host of optical, wi…

Or Xerox PARC. There have been other attempts (like Interval Research) as well.

Always the question of money and focus though. IBM has a huge research arm which is doing amazing things, but their impact on the bottom line is perhaps not as strong as Ginny (IBM CEO) would like? At Sun, when Sun Labs was a thing, there were jokes about "Where good ideas go to die." or something along those lines. Commercial interests have a really hard time seeing value in these things when they are done internally.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#137
post #133
post #3

Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil. What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

>What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion? If it were to turn out that fusion power isn’t technologically feasible within useful parameters (currently achievable technology, useful scales, economic feasibility of recovering the costs in the lifetime of a reactor, etc), we’d have squandered vast resources pointlessly. For a start there are dozens of different approaches currently being purs…

Discovering a dead end is not pointless from a science point of view. It's bad return on investment, that's for sure.

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#138
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pouring in money advances computation. Microprocessors were a direct result of the space race and space weapons systems. No other industry would have justified the trillions of dollars in investment that was required to fit advanced computers into a small space when mainframe systems did the job just fine. Missiles and spaceships required systems that could calculate trajectories and be small enough to launch into sp…

>> when mainframe systems did the job just fine. Didn't people see the value that cheaper/more compute power will give them back than ?

This can be seen as a consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox.

It is called a paradox because seeing it in action usually catches people by surprise. And this is true whether you're talking about the consumption of coal to power factories, or the consumption of electricity to power computing (and in each case the myriad of new uses that efficiency promoted).

In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle. You see that in Asimov's work, in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and so on. Basically nobody anticipated ubiquitous computing. For instance in the Foundation series you see that a computer run by the Second Foundation can predict the future course of history...and people are calculating their courses with slide rules.

As for the killer app of computing, email, I'm only aware of one pre-1970 work correctly anticipating what it would be actually like. (James H. Schmitz has a memorable scene in one of his Telzy stories where she catches up on her messages at a terminal. He doesn't say "email", but the scene is notable for unobtrusively getting it right.)

Re: Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X

#139
post #3

Experiments like Wendelstein remind me that the only thing holding back fusion power is money for research like this. Every year, we spend billions on fossil fuel exploration because the return on investment is quick - just think about all the wells going in to extract shale oil. What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

Err no, money is not "the only thing" keeping us from having fusion power. I can think of one other thing which is that it's damn hard to create stellar-core conditions inside of a small containment vessel on Earth. It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s. I'll bet if you added up all the resea…

> It's not obvious that throwing more money at the problem is going to change this. After all, fusion research has been funded in some form or another since the 1950s.

That's not very long. The first liquid-fueled rocket was in 1914, and the moon landing wasn't until 1969, and even that was only possible with very high levels of funding far beyond what's invested in fusion power today. Babbage built the Difference Engine in 1822 and conceived of the Analytic Engine in 1837, leaving skeptics dismissing the potential of computers for 150 years. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a helicopter in 1480, almost 500 years before one could actually be constructed. Gunpowder was invented probably before the year 1000 and took over 700 years after that to render pikes obsolete.

Now, it's entirely possible that there's some other limitation holding us back from fusion, just as the lack of internal combustion engines or diodes held us back from helicopters or computers. But I think we've done enough work so far that we'd be able to tell if we were running into something like that. As it stands, I think we're roughly in the place rocketry was before WWII--we have an idea of how to do it, and we don't know if it'll go to the Moon or not, but the only way to find out for sure is to try, and that's pretty expensive and might take awhile.

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