Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough

Of course. Nobody in power wants fusion, as most of the political class have vested interests in petrochemicals. We're all going to die in the next few decades. Such is life.

dmckeon• 11 years ago

Also only eight minutes away, for the last four billion years.

Gravitic containment works.

TallGuyShort2• 11 years ago

It would only be eight minutes away if we also had warp capability.

nine_k2• 11 years ago

In short: Tri Alpha demonstrated plasma confined for 5ms. So their concept works.

Their next step is burning D-T fuel (needs 10x temperature increase). Their goal is burning H-B fuel which requires much higher temperatures, but has numerous advantages.

Update: "Tri Alpha is backed by Sam Altman, among other things." -> not at all.

sama3• 11 years ago

::shudders:: Tri Alpha is not backed by me.

Helion is though, which I think has a much better chance of producing commercial fusion power!

zamalek• 11 years ago

Regardless of who eventually nails it, it's something that Earth desperately needs yesterday.

nine_k2• 11 years ago

Sorry!

From some blog post of yours, I took the impression that you invested in it, too. On re-reading http://blog.samaltman.com/energy I see my mistake.

I'm correcting my comment.

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

::shudders:: Tri Alpha is not backed by me.

Why the shudder?

loblollyboy• 11 years ago

didn't you have a post about that? I could look it up but maybe include the post in this comment for us lazy and uninformed folks

actually here's the one i think i was thinking of

http://blog.samaltman.com/energy

link to helion in the post

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Actually they explicitly are not doing D-T fuel, staying with H-B fuel. And what they claim is that given a 10MW power source they could maintain a small ball of plasma indefinitely. So hook this up to a nuclear power plant and you have the worlds most expensive light bulb :-).

Since temperature scales with energy input, they scale up their box to produce the necessary temperatures and start collecting energy. However, as the article points out, not only is there little experience with plasmas at those temperatures, there are challenges with building things at that scale. So not a slam dunk.

That said, if we have a Fusion power plant that requires a Fission power plant to 'start' it will be a challenging thing to commercialize. Once you have a number running you could presumably 'grid start' (use excess power on the grid to start your new plant) but that would make cold start pretty hard. And if the scaling is accurate, you couldn't really turn these things on/off easily so they would have the opposite challenge of renewables which don't provide good base load support as one which can only provide baseload.

AnthonyMouse• 11 years ago

It seems all of the problems have the same solution. Store the excess power at night to use during the day. Then the stored power allows for a cold start. For the initial start the energy storage device can be filled over time from the grid.

rubidium• 11 years ago

They showed a "stable" reaction of 5 ms, which is quite good.

The video was quite nicely done. I recommend watching.

Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )

chetanahuja• 11 years ago

"Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )"

And always have been ;-)

rquantz• 11 years ago

No no, for the longest time it was 30 years.

onion2k• 11 years ago

A 23m long machine is far too big to mount on a Delorean. They'll need to fix that.

iwwr• 11 years ago

While that is somewhat in jest, there are potentials for fusion to first make it as a power source for spacecraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_rocket#Electricity_gene...

This has the advantage of not needing a power recovery system and the actual power can be external (like solar) and the fusion engine would act more like a souped-up ion engine (with correspondingly ultra-low thrust).

guimarin3• 11 years ago

Fusion is one of those areas that would benefit greatly from Public R&D. It's really sad that we've spent almost nothing on fusion research for the purposes of producing affordable electricity in the last 20 years.[1][2][3]

1. The NIF is and always has been a sideshow for the Nuclear Weapons development research that goes on there.

2. US last serious investment was the TFTR back in the 90s. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/fusion-energy-react...

3. IMO ITER is a joke, too large scale.

oldmanjay2• 11 years ago

You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing"

Presumably, the operative fact here is that it would mostly be other people's money, and no one minds spending that wildly

WalterSear• 11 years ago

In the grand scheme of federal budgets, and how much we waste and destroy by not doing it, it's 'nothing'.

guimarin3• 11 years ago

Most of the funding I've seen has gone into maintenance for existing projects, nuclear weapons research, and the ITER boondoggle. But if you have any sources of projects that have received billions of dollars that have been about power creation, I'm 100% open to changing my tune.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

If he pays taxes then it's partially his money, and he has a right to vote on how it's used and tell people his opinion.

Arguing that his idea would be spending "other people's money," is a non-sequitor. Following that logic nobody should have any say in how the government spends money, because no single person is contributing the majority of funding.

darkmighty2• 11 years ago

The way the climate is going, we desperately need good energy sources. If you compare historically to the space race, the manhattan project, or the spending on any major conflict you'll see that's a rounding error -- e.g. America's DoD burned through the entire cost of ITER (which is shared among 6 nations + EU) roughly every week circa 2009.

dntrkv2• 11 years ago

Yes, it is almost nothing when you look at the estimated spending required to achieve fusion:

http://i.imgur.com/FR0TsYF.png

ansible• 11 years ago

You have a fantastic mindset in that you can call multiple billions of dollars "almost nothing"

Well, when you consider that the Iraq war cost to the USA has been at least 1 trillion (this is not just what the DoD spent), spending tens of billions on fusion research doesn't sound so bad.

scottlocklin• 11 years ago

NIF has nothing to do with Nukes. Zero, zilch, nadda. It doesn't even vaguely work anyway.

Public funding for fusion research in the US and Europe is a waste of money; it's simply providing employment for past generations of fusion researchers, and pouring money down a hole on technologies which will never work.

Tri-Alpha, on the other hand, has something new that might actually work. I went over the patents a few years ago (was going to do a blog on them; got busy); it's quite different from the approaches that get money via public funding, and unlike those approaches, it stands a chance of working.

ogrisel2• 11 years ago

The cure for cancer and the solution to climate change announced on HN on the same day! ;)

mason240• 11 years ago

Come back tomorrow and you can experience it again!

carapace• 11 years ago

I keep wondering why this talk doesn't get more traction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8

Published on Aug 22, 2012 Google Tech Talks November 9, 2006

ABSTRACT This is not your father's fusion reactor! Forget everything you know about conventional thinking on nuclear fusion: high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste are a thing of the past. Goodbye thermonuclear fusion; hello inertial electrostatic confinement fusion (IEC), an old idea that's been made new. While the international community debates the fate of the politically-turmoiled $12 billion ITER (an experimental thermonuclear reactor), simple IEC reactors are being built as high-school science fair projects.

Dr. Robert Bussard, former Asst. Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and founder of Energy Matter Conversion Corporation (EMC2), has spent 17 years perfecting IEC, a fusion process that converts hydrogen and boron directly into electricity producing helium as the only waste product. Most of this work was funded by the Department of Defense, the details of which have been under seal... until now.

Dr. Bussard will discuss his recent results and details of this potentially world-altering technology, whose conception dates back as far as 1924, and even includes a reactor design by Philo T. Farnsworth (inventor of the scanning television).

Can a 100 MW fusion reactor be built for less than Google's annual electricity bill? Come see what's possible when you think outside the thermonuclear box and ignore the herd.

Google engEDU Speaker: Dr. Robert Bussard

pierrec• 11 years ago

Because the battle between approaches to fusion power is not so much on the grounds of how easy they are to build, but how likely they are to generate more power than they consume.

jerf• 11 years ago

Edit (whack entire previous post): See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#History , which is current up to January of this year. That includes a link to a presentation in January 2015 to Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=238...

I just found out about that video in the course of checking this comment out, so I have not watched it. No idea what's in it.

Edit edit: Digging around an ethusiast forum at http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=10 , I see there's also a paper at arxiv.org from Jun 1, 2015: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.0133

snarfy• 11 years ago

I've watched both the 'Should Google Go Nuclear?' and Microsoft Research videos on this topic.

Both are pretty good. The Google video has Bussard in it and was made not long before he died.

The Microsoft paper talks about, well a lot of things, but I recall one of the key research items was cusp confinement. The problem with using magnets to control a plasma is the plasma will reject the magnetic field as its density increases. The wiffle ball shape of the resulting plasma of the polywell allows the field lines to penetrate the plasma even at higher density.

scythe• 11 years ago

I think there's a distinction being missed. There are two "creative" fusion ideas with real potential: reciprocal magnetodynamic-electrostatic confinement (polywell) and ultradense plasma (aka pinch/focus fusion). Dr. Bussard, Convergent Scientific Inc, the Iranians, and a few small universities are responsible for most polywell research. Most commercial startups, including Tri Alpha, are pursuing ultradense plasma. It's not surprising: ultradense plasma devices are smaller, thus cheaper to experiment with, but also more speculative/dependent on poorly-understood physics, making them a better fit for the private sector. Polywells on the other hand have some decent theoretical backing and the main trouble is trying to build one large enough -- IIRC, Bussard obtained some results which, if extrapolated, imply net power in a $100M device.

cft• 11 years ago

Looks like they achieved >5ms confinement of a 10^7 degree plasma.

For meaningful energy production, they would need say ~10s confinement of 3*10^9 degree plasma (300x the current temp -same as the temperature difference between the Earth and the surface of the Sun ). It's an interesting development, but I'd call the outlook very uncertain.

danmaz74• 11 years ago

hydrogen-boron fusion, which will require ion temperatures above 3 billion degrees Celsius

3 billion degrees... that blows my mind.

junkblocker• 11 years ago

Reminds me of this BBC infographic on hottest temperatures in the universe, http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/future/bespoke/20131218-tempera... , very enlightening.

FiatLuxDave4• 11 years ago

Great infographic, but unfortunately it misses my favorite juxtaposition of temperatures:

Surface temperature of a red dwarf star (e.g. Wolf 359) 2500 C

Melting point of tungsten: 3400 C

I find the idea of making balloon-like objects out of tungsten and gas, with a density less than that of the star's photosphere, and floating them around on the surface of a star to be intriguing. It would be a great location to put a heat engine. A totally sci-fi idea, I know, but still interesting to think about.

onnoonno• 11 years ago

The concrete in the walls surrounding you contains Uranium. That alpha-decays from time to time. The system consisting of a single, former Uranium atom that just alpha-decayed, together with its alpha fragment, has a temperature in the tens of billions of Celsius/Kelvin.

(Yes, questions about the validity of defining temperature in such a system arise :)

phasetransition• 11 years ago

The summer of 1999 on the way to E&M class I rode the same bus to the physics building as Dr. Hendrik Monkhorst. He is one of the founders of Tri Alpha Energy, and I remember chatting with him about about aneutronic fusion. It was very eye opening for a 19 year old undergraduate. I remember him espousing commercialization within ten years, which now seems like prototypical professorial optimism. It is an exciting milestone to see them have successful confinement for a solid length of time.

DrNuke• 11 years ago

If only any of these passes the lab stage to start with engineering... ITER is the only fusion machine 10-20 years away from demonstration, in 2015, and it's too big to fail.

amelius2• 11 years ago

Perhaps a stupid question, but why does the plasma need to stay confined for long periods of time? If you can devise a process that performs a full power-generating cycle, then no matter how long (or short) that cycle takes, you will get net power out of it.

chm• 11 years ago

Interesting question. I don't have the answer but it could be because it's costly to get the whole thing running. Once it's up, you want to keep it up to avoid all sorts of problems/costs. And that's not considering how long it takes to generate said power from the plasma.

Might be like an MRI machine. You could quench the magnet every other month, but at what cost and benefit?

antognini• 11 years ago

I believe there are two things:

1. Ions in the plasma need to interact with each other for enough fusion reactions to occur. For this to happen, the plasma needs to be somewhat dense and the temperature needs to be very high. If the plasma escapes, the temperature and densities fall off rapidly, and the nuclear fusion rate drops quickly. (Nuclear fusion has an incredibly steep temperature dependence --- the triple alpha process, for instance, goes as T^28 or something like that).

2. When the plasma escapes, it interacts with whatever is containing it and can destroy it very quickly.

But I'm an astrophysicist, not a nuclear physicist, so I could very well be wrong. Plasma confinement is much easier in stars. Just let the gravity do the work for you. :)

mng22• 11 years ago

Quite right. The figure of merit for a fusion plasma is called the 'triple product' since it's the temperature, density and confinement time multiplied together.

The problem in general with pulsed systems is that they take a lot of energy to get them from idle to active, and the research machines have miniscule efficiency. The claim is often that "we'll scale this up and it'll be more efficient" but there are always unknown unknowns. Nature is a cruel mistress, especially in the fusion business.

amelius2• 11 years ago

1. This is, I would say, still no reason why the whole cycle can't be performed in a very short time-frame.

2. If the plasma escapes, I would say you could dump it into a large tank (like a reservoir of water), and extract energy from it.

ck2• 11 years ago

Dumb question but since they are still only working on how to contain the reaction, how exactly do you extract power from fusion?

jessaustin• 11 years ago

Same way you produce electricity from any heat source: steam turbines.

_rpd• 11 years ago

Interestingly, that isn't necessarily the case with aneutronic fusion ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion#Methods_for_...

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

Call us when they're not so secretive.

Secretive fusion company claims reactor breakthrough

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