I enjoy the joke about the perpetually shifting fusion acquisition time frame, but it would be fair to add that in terms of actual funding, we have been under the "fusion never" level. I feel like the context for the saying has always been that the proper financing assumption holds.
That said, the material sciences advances required, especially high temperature superconducting magnets, simply were not there in the 70s. So a moonshot project to achieve it may have been a failure at massive costs, discouraging humanity from fusion research for a long time.
First time I heard that fusion was 15 years away was around 35 years ago, in an already old book belonging to my eldest brother. They were talking about ZETA (late 50s).
Wake me when the first power station is being built.
Article talks about YBCO as if it was new, but it’s almost as old as I am. If it was the only thing holding back fusion, the reactors would’ve had software updates for the Millennium Bug.
Perhaps this time I won’t fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…
They've found a way to wind it into tapes which make fabricating magnates relatively easy - they have demonstrated world record magnetic capability with these. Fusion is one of the applications but the thing I liked about the research is that there are intermediate technology goals that they are aiming to hit which should fund everything - notably compact medical scanners.
YBCO is not new, but the production of it in the amounts and quality necessary for large superconducting magnets is still difficult. You need to produce long stretches of the material to create large magnets efficiently, and that isn't trivial.
The old superconductors typically used in this kind of magnets have been pushed to the limit already in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, ~23 Tesla is the strongest existing commercial one and this seems to be a limit for that technology. The first NMR magnets that use YBCO are expected in the next years as far as I remember, I don't think any exist yet.
Now that is interesting. I had thought YBCO was easy to fabricate given I saw some amateur do it on YouTube, but I do accept they had quality control issues — important on large scale production.
The way I’m reading the article they’re talking about a new superconductor where YBCO is one of the materials used. English isn’t my first language though so I could be off base here.
The argument is that they can make it small - room sized, with the new magnates. This reduces the every one of the subsidiary technical challenges to doable, basically you don't need big machines to dig big holes, you don't need 30000m^3 of concrete here, there and everywhere, you don't need a supply chain that involves 20000 people in 40 countries... so the co-ordination costs go away as well.
It's pretty like the idea with data analytics or software ; if you can do an iteration / update by yourself in 10 minutes you will be able to solve the problem (for reasonable problems) in a few weeks for sure. If you need to spend a month assembling the data and compiling the code before you can commit a change you are simply not going to ever be able to make progress.
I figure they could probably build a reactor that produces power - the MIT design looks like it would work if built. Making it profitable without government subsidy is a whole different thing though which I doubt will happen in 15 years.
If I were a politician I'd vote for subsidising the thing by say buying the electricity at 30c/kWh to advance human understanding, so I think it could be built. I think MIT estimated $5bn + to build a 200MW generator which is not a huge amount in government terms.
If we were to work with an assumption that fusion happens soon (<20 years) and power is now cheap, what would we now be able to achieve that was previously prohibitively difficult / expensive?
To name a couple, you enable mass desalination and cracking of water. Solve humanity's access to clean water, enable replacement of fossil fuels for vehicles, solve anthropogenic climate change. Just those two are huge.
I believe the proof-of-work calculations automatically become more difficult as more computing power is dedicated to solving them. The net result is that the amount of energy consumed will probably increase inversely proportionally to any reduction in power prices.
We can make graphene very cheaply and easily now, the issue is making large continuous high quality sheets of it. Same for carbon nanotubes.
GAI and fusion are different issues in that we have clear elementary understand of fusion (and a large chunk of the technology worked out). We have little to no understanding of cognition and much of the technology that we use for AI now may (or may not) prove to be irrelevant to GAI.
I'll challenge that, because I think tribalism (living in small groups) is the way more akin to our genes. And much from the rising mental problems of humans today comes from living on your own in a big anonymous pool of strangers.
But those small groups could then indeed work (more) together for the common good.
Or, human might sorth their species out and away from the list of Earth species, effectively rendering question of nuclear fusion, graphene production, AI, and social constructs irrelevant.
the concept (which would produce 190MW(e)) uses 90 tonnes of beryllium.
According to the USGS, the current total world annual production of Be is 220 tonnes, and total global resource is estimated at 100,000 tonnes.
The world uses ~20 TW of primary energy, so roughly 100,000 ARC reactors would be needed to supply the world, using about 100x as much Be as the estimated amount available for mining.
Unless Be supplies can be drastically increased, this concept is at best a niche player.
For comparison, Olkiluoto 3 fission plant has been under construction for 13 years already. It's currently estimated to enter energy production a bit over one year from now.
The delays there have been the usual big project problems - big builds, corporate drama, quality control. none of those apply to the MIT plan (they did apply to ITER, which was one of the arguments against it, but at the time it was the best option because the small strong magnets didn't exist).
Readit News
I enjoy the joke about the perpetually shifting fusion acquisition time frame, but it would be fair to add that in terms of actual funding, we have been under the "fusion never" level. I feel like the context for the saying has always been that the proper financing assumption holds.
Wake me when the first power station is being built.
Perhaps this time I won’t fall for the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect…
The old superconductors typically used in this kind of magnets have been pushed to the limit already in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, ~23 Tesla is the strongest existing commercial one and this seems to be a limit for that technology. The first NMR magnets that use YBCO are expected in the next years as far as I remember, I don't think any exist yet.
It's pretty like the idea with data analytics or software ; if you can do an iteration / update by yourself in 10 minutes you will be able to solve the problem (for reasonable problems) in a few weeks for sure. If you need to spend a month assembling the data and compiling the code before you can commit a change you are simply not going to ever be able to make progress.
There are a lot of problems to deal with eg see "Fusion reactors: Not what they’re cracked up to be" https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they%E2%80%... There's also a Reddit discussion of that saying the problems aren't quite so bad https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/67rqqg/fusion_react...
If I were a politician I'd vote for subsidising the thing by say buying the electricity at 30c/kWh to advance human understanding, so I think it could be built. I think MIT estimated $5bn + to build a 200MW generator which is not a huge amount in government terms.
Coupled with emerging energy storage it seems like cheap energy is due to come long before fusion
Basically the price (demand) for hardware goes up and should equilibriate when it reaches the previous cost of energy.
GAI and fusion are different issues in that we have clear elementary understand of fusion (and a large chunk of the technology worked out). We have little to no understanding of cognition and much of the technology that we use for AI now may (or may not) prove to be irrelevant to GAI.
I'll challenge that, because I think tribalism (living in small groups) is the way more akin to our genes. And much from the rising mental problems of humans today comes from living on your own in a big anonymous pool of strangers.
But those small groups could then indeed work (more) together for the common good.
Dead Comment
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.3540.pdf
the concept (which would produce 190MW(e)) uses 90 tonnes of beryllium.
According to the USGS, the current total world annual production of Be is 220 tonnes, and total global resource is estimated at 100,000 tonnes.
The world uses ~20 TW of primary energy, so roughly 100,000 ARC reactors would be needed to supply the world, using about 100x as much Be as the estimated amount available for mining.
Unless Be supplies can be drastically increased, this concept is at best a niche player.
Dead Comment