Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

growthbusiness.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 686 posts

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#101

Post by tremon »

sacrosancty wrote: post #38
Digital28 wrote: post #2

This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

Fusion isn't a silver bullet even if it works. If it costs more than solar+battery then it's worthless.

No, this is way too shortsighted. Fusion allows us to use other energy sources than our own sun, which means it's essential for viable space missions, and we won't need to compete with the rest of nature (including agriculture!) for our energy needs.

Hydroponics with fusion technology allows us to produce food without relying on the sun at all. I'd say that alone is worth the investment.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#102

Post by bilsbie »

gruturo wrote: post #82
ksaxena wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, with that logic, coal is also indirect fusion

Yeah. And Wind, Gas, Hydro, etc. Basically everything except fission, tidal and a portion of geothermal. Admittedly it's not a terribly useful classification.

Fission is just solar from different star.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#103

Post by no_wizard »

Digital28 wrote: post #2

This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

I’d love to see a Manhattan project for nuclear fusion research. Just pour money into it until we crack it. I think out of all the energy alternatives it’s the most game changing.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#104

Post by borissk »

When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear.

Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work day and night and secure the funding).

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#105

Post by stormbrew »

toveja wrote: post #40
paul80808 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The past of fusion has been grim, but the future looks (probably) bright. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-f...

I wouldn't say the (recent) past was grim, but rather that the technology to build an _affordable_ commercial device had not yet been developed yet. We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available. In the meantime, all of the experimental devices (JET, AUG, EAST, DIII-D, etc.,) have been gathering evidence on how to operate I…

> We designed and built ITER at such a large size and cost (€20 billion) since high temperature superconducting magnets were not yet available.

This is one of those numbers that only seem big without context. Medium-sized cities spend more than this on interchanges and highway development over shorter timespans than any of the various multi-decade price tags that get thrown around for ITER.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#106

Post by twawaaay »

Digital28 wrote: post #93
rainsford wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see viable nuclear fusion power, but the lack of more investment at the moment doesn't really seem unreasonable. As you said, there are a number of other green alternatives, including traditional nuclear fission power, that have proven they can be real alternatives to fossil fuels and that would benefit from continued investment. Unless I've missed something, nuclear fusion meanwhile has yet to demonstrat…

It's an equal level of insanity that technologies like thorium breeder reactors haven't been getting whole number percentages of first world budgets, especially considering how extremely high of a priority climate change has become and how costly the alternatives (e.g., disaster mitigation) are getting.

Budgets are decided by elected officials and elected officials are steered by their polling numbers.

Out of all sources of energy only atomic energy is something that we can practically scale at the moment to cover almost all our needs (air travel and maritime shipping being notable exceptions). We just need to think a bit harder how to ensure this is done responsibly and safely. Not saying it is an easy problem, but I think the issue is too little resources are devoted to solving it. I would say this probably isn't harder than sending a man to the Moon. It is just something that should be possible to fix practically with existing technology and just good design.

The cost of humanity that can't decide on what needs to be done is that we are still reliant on fossil fuels and are distracting ourselves with half measures that have a lot of problems that in hindsight were pretty obvious. Like solar energy -- only works when the sun is up, is difficult to scale and we still haven't figured out how to store energy for when it is needed.

Our children will curse us.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#107

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Digital28 wrote: post #2

This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

On one hand, you had "traditional" companies (oil, coal, gas,...) lobbying against it, and on the other hand, you had the "green" organizations lobbying (and protesting) against it.

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#108

Post by TaylorAlexander »

Digital28 wrote: post #2

This is great news. That said, what the literal fuck -- we've previously been investing 1/850,000th of global GDP in one of 4-5 truly promising energy technologies while the world burns before our eyes?

I hate to say it, but this is the result of fossil fuel interests running the largest [1] economy in the world. We will literally spend 1 trillion dollars a year on war in the middle east and associated commitments but couldn't bother to spend a few billion on fusion research. Absurd.

[1] until recently

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#109

Post by sva_ »

Something I wondered about fusion is, where does all that 'excess energy' go?

I mean don't understand me wrong, it is obvious that is a much better form of energy release than all the other forms of energy production we have; but let us consider we manage to gain energy from fusion, the electricity released still releases heat, so how does it dissipate, if we have near-infitite energy, and anyone can spend as much as they want?

Re: More invested in nuclear fusion in last 12 months than past decade

#110

Post by anothernewdude »

borissk wrote: post #104

When all these starups fail to deliver anything of value in a few years, the investors will disappear. Commercial fusion power is such a huge challenge IMHO there are only two ways we can get there currently: ITER/DEMO (if it doesn't get overcome by bureaucracy and the members don't loose interest in funding it) or Elon Musk (who is probably the only person who can attract the top talent needed, motivate it to work d…

Musk doesn't attract talent - the wealth does that, Elon himself is a negative.
Post reply on HN