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The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

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Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#61

Post by jiggawatts »

cycomanic wrote: post #46
api wrote: post #3

This field is so underfunded, but progress is still being made. Check out Commonwealth Fusion and their progress with insanely powerful compact energy efficient magnets. They recently clocked a stable 20T magnetic field.

Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…

ITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”.

For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue construction for decades more. Meanwhile, SC magnetic tape technology has moved on, making the entire enterprise a dead-end waste of time and money. They got bogged down in the paperwork and bureaucracy of the “rest of the facility” with no hope of making actual working reactor.

There are many instances of this issue in industry, and in my experience large government bureaucracies are pathologically incapable of planning ahead for where the puck will be instead of where the puck was.

I like to imagine what would happen if a rich industrialist like Bezos or Musk approached the problem: First, spend a few billion on superconductor tape research and then start building many small reactors that are minimal test beds while in parallel improving the magnets. Only “go big” once the reactor can produce net power.

See also: NASA spending billions per launch on the SLS with a couple of test launches per decade while SpaceX spends millions per Starship and plans half a dozen test launches this year!

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#62

Post by pfdietz »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #56
pfdietz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What result did ISS deliver that justifies its construction? It's an exercise in orbital flagpole sitting.

What's the point of being alive without building monuments?

I find that justification not only not convincing, but utterly repulsive. Governments shouldn't be in the business of praising themselves.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#63

Post by pfdietz »

api wrote: post #58
pfdietz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What result did ISS deliver that justifies its construction? It's an exercise in orbital flagpole sitting.

It’s an engineering test platform for long duration space flight. Along with the development of reusable rockets we are now almost to the point of being ready to actually go somewhere and do more than just plant a flagpole. Apollo was ridiculously ahead of its time and was not sustainable. The entire stack was disposable and it’s pure luck that we never lost a crew. We needed a project like the ISS to do the real wor…

That's great, except (1) the thermal environment is all wrong, (2) ditto for the radiation environment, (3) that just pushes back the need for justification to long distance spaceflight. Justifications for space activities that amount to "enables other space activities" are an example of what's called a "self-licking ice cream cone".

There were plenty of non-self-referential justifications for ISS (like growing protein crystals, or space manufacturing) that never really went anywhere.

Ironically, maybe the best justification was it shows large space structures can be assembled from small units, so large launch vehicles aren't needed. NASA has of course totally ignored this lesson with SLS.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

pfdietz wrote: post #52
nabla9 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's read again what you just wrote and think: "ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD" That's not the most costly costly project, not even close (prices in current dollars and total costs) Apollo project: $257 billion ISS: $150 billion. STS: $196 billion. Fusion energy has been constantly underfunded.

None of those projects was worth the cost.

"Estimates of the return on investment in the space program range from $7 for every $1 spent on the Apollo Program to $40 for every $1 spent on space development today."

I guess you take issue with estimates like this?

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#65

Post by pfdietz »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #64
pfdietz wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those projects was worth the cost.

"Estimates of the return on investment in the space program range from $7 for every $1 spent on the Apollo Program to $40 for every $1 spent on space development today." I guess you take issue with estimates like this?

Yes, because they are basically exercises in bullshit. You might think they went and catalogued in detail what the benefits were, but they're actually just based on macroeconomic assumptions about what the return on R&D is.

I mean, think: for spinoff arguments to work, you need to have some notion of how technology would have progressed without NASA. How could one possibly figure out that contrafactual?

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#66

Post by xcv123 »

cycomanic wrote: post #46
api wrote: post #3

This field is so underfunded, but progress is still being made. Check out Commonwealth Fusion and their progress with insanely powerful compact energy efficient magnets. They recently clocked a stable 20T magnetic field.

Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…

That's a ~12 year construction project. 5.4 Billion USD per year is nothing these days. Only 0.006% of annual GDP for a project that has the potential to transform our civilization.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#67

Post by XorNot »

jiggawatts wrote: post #61
cycomanic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…

ITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”. For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue const…

So how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going?

That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems".

Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#68

Post by XorNot »

rqtwteye wrote: post #49
doubloon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we do not maintain expertise in nuclear weapons then we will end up like Ukraine.

We already know everything that’s to know about nuclear weapons if used for defense and deterrence. A pure fusion bomb would be relatively clean so it would be much more tempting to use as a regular weapon. What if Putin had such bombs right now?

Nuclear weapons aren't a deterrent because of radiation. They're a deterrent because they enable an ICBM to destroy a city.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#69

Post by willis936 »

XorNot wrote: post #67
jiggawatts wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”. For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue const…

So how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going? That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems". Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.

They never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#70

Post by jtriangle »

SaberTail wrote: post #29
jtriangle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your answer to the question, is nuclear war inevitable? If it is, making weapons that are as clean as possible is a reasonable goal. If you get some knowledge that's applicable elsewhere, that's a nice bonus. If you don't think it's inevitable, you can likely justify making them cleaner because it will likely have applications elsewhere by the logic of fusion weapons being the only place we've been able…

The difficulty with "clean fusion bombs" is that bomb makers can always increase the yield of a fusion bomb by making it dirty. Fusion releases neutrons, and these neutrons have enough energy to fission the common 238 isotope of uranium, which releases roughly 100 times more energy than than the neutron started with.

Yes, but if you're getting the desired yield from fusion alone, you don't need to.

Remember, most of the world is focused on relatively small nuclear arms, not world ending polymegaton devices

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