U.S. physicists rally around plan to build fusion power plant

>There has never, at any time, been any reasonable expectation of getting practical, commercial power from magnetic-confinement hot-neutron fusion.

Not true. The existence of privately-funded fusion efforts implies that some people think there is a reasonable expectation, and are willing to put money behind it. This costing study suggests that $2-6/W could be achievable for some fusion concepts[0]. Using some rough calculations, that would translate to $20-60/(MW*hr), which is competitive.

>Any practical fusion plant would have to absolutely huge -- an order of magnitude bigger than the biggest fission plant.

Not necessarily. Fission power plans with low power density have been operated, and may even be desirable from a safety standpoint. The current crop of small modular reactors for fission seems to target power densities in the range of 1-10MW/m^3, rather than the 50-100 MW/m^3 of PWR reactors. This suggests that reduced power density may pay off in terms of reducing the costs associated with risk mitigation (highly redundant systems, large containment structures, etc). Fusion reactors could probably get to the 1-10MW/m^3 range.

> "Break-even" is nowhere near enough to get practical power out

Yes, there's a distinction between 'scientific breakeven' of gain > 1, and 'engineering breakeven' of gain > 10 (ish) which is necessary to have net power output. But we gotta crawl before we can run. It's an important milestone along the way.

>Tokamak fusion research is, first, foremost, and always, a jobs program to maintain a population of high-neutron-flux physicists

Not really -- the high-energy-density plasma physics research (which is not tokamak-related at all) is more relevant in terms of producing people with the skills to work on weapons.

> They need enough billions poured into the project to make it politically self-sustaining, where no amount of failure can ever threaten its funding, because so much has already been sunk that it would be too embarrassing to admit failure.

I'll admit that I see aspects of this, particularly with the failure of NSTX-U & politcally-motivated decision to repair it. However, what I mostly see with the DOE has been trying to get the most of the 'sunk costs' by slowly ramping down the program (ie, not investing in new devices to replace old ones that are shuttered). I suspect that Synakowski's reasoning was: "if a breakthrough happens somewhere around the world, it's worth having a skeleton program in the US that can be ramped up to take advantage of it at that time." Now that Van Dam has taken over, I think we may be seeing more optimism & willingness to invest, particularly if that means partnering with industry (which is trending in Washington).

[0]https://woodruffscientific.com/pdf/ARPAE_Costing_Report_2017...

As far as we know, it's not possible to miniaturize fusion. The mass of the shielding alone for a hypothetical miniature DT fusion reactor would prevent it from being used in anything smaller than a large ship. 'Advanced fuels' with reduced neutron radiation are orders of magnitude below DT in power density for given reactor performance levels, so miniaturizing them is even more in the realm of science fiction.

People love to post comments like this on every thread where nuclear comes up, but it really distorts the reality of the situation.

Investment in nuclear has essentially evaporated. This is because fission plants take billions of dollars and around a decade to stand up. If you go through the numbers the ROI looks pretty ugly. Meanwhile you can look at the trend over time in levelized energy costs and storage costs, and can see that we're very near the thresholds for simply doing it all with renewables plus storage. All together this makes it clear to any investor doing the most basic of diligence that fission is a risky bet. Even if you waved a magic wand and eliminated any form of political opposition, that doesn't change this less than favorable cost picture.

>2040s? 20+ years from now!?! Too fuckin slow!!

I'm impatient too, but perspective is important here. Even the leading private efforts don't have plans to put power on the grid for at least 10 years. Also, before this report, there wasn't an official plan of any sort for the US federal fusion program to get to a pilot plant -- so this is progress. (FWIW, I participated in the early community input stages of this report.)

>For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.

Musk has a good nose for what's possible to commercialize in a medium-term (5-10 year) time horizon on a few $bn budget. I have reason to believe he's considered fusion (he has a background in physics after all). Instead, he's made a play in batteries & solar.

Now, if someone had ~$1-5bn to gamble, it might be possible to leapfrog the existing crop of private efforts by ~5 years. Just pick one concept and build the engineering-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 20) without the intermediate scientific-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 1). It would be significantly riskier, but it would save time if it worked.

I've had several mentors and advisors and am doing everything I can to be inclusive without giving away equity. There was a legal entity created, and I have applied for several grants. Each time, I have put together a team or had lined up collaborators who could help if the grant had been awarded.

I'm working with suppliers, and discussing the concept openly with everyone who is interested.

Most of the time however, I am working alone.

Should I pay someone to sit around and twiddle their thumbs for semantic reasons?

I believe a royal "WE" is appropriate, but I could be wrong.