Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/541286/finally-fusion-takes-small-steps-toward-reality/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality[/font]

[font size=4]The focus of research on fusion power has moved from big government programs to startups with novel designs.[/font]

By Richard Martin on September 14, 2015

[font size=3]After three decades of expensive government-funded research that has failed to produce tangible breakthroughs, nuclear fusion has gone from a promising source of effectively limitless power to something more like a punch line.

…

Now the urgency has risen, and these companies are testing new ideas and new approaches—and attracting the investment to do so. General Fusion recently landed $27 million in new funding from a group of investors led by the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia.

“Right now what’s happening is a rethinking,” says Burton Richter, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976 and is an advisor to Tri Alpha. Budget cuts in the 1990s forced the shutdown of alternative approaches outside of ITER and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility. Companies like Tri Alpha offer a path to fusion paved not with taxpayer dollars but with private-sector money—which ultimately is the only way to actually get something built.

Jonathan Menard, a plasma physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, directs the National Spherical Torus Experiment, which is pursuing a tokamak shaped like a beach ball instead of a doughnut. Menard, whose own program recently completed a $94 million upgrade of its experimental machine, has closely followed developments with the Tri Alpha and ARC efforts and believes that these innovations should be pursued further.

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[daleanime]

1. Bookmarked

[phantom power]

2. The new fusion innovators stand on the shoulders of that "failed govt research"

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Some do, others do not

For example, I am not aware (correct me if I’m wrong) of governement research which pursued something like General Fusion’s rather audacious approach to fusion.
http://www.ted.com/talks/michel_laberge_how_synchronized_hammer_strikes_could_generate_nuclear_fusion

[FBaggins]

4. Really all of them

Think of Edison's "I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!"

Edison had to learn from his own mistakes. Had some government-funded research provided those results instead, Edison would have succeeded more rapidly due to those shoulders.

[OakCliffDem]

5. They better get a move on

Lockheed Martin will start their fusion reactor in 2017.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112736443

[Yo_Mama]

6. Building the first prototype, in theory, which will be too small to generate net power.

So far, ALL of this is just woo.

I hope with the rest, but Lockheed's claims are not founded on anything but theory. If they get even close to breakeven, they expect to get huge infusions of government money to continue work. All else is just bait for investors.

[Nihil]

7. Misleading headline: Fusion has only *ever* taken small steps towards reality.

I used to hope that fusion would provide the solution to so many of
our problems but it is still "hopefully, in the future", same as it was
when I started reading about it in New Scientist (many decades ago).

Now, I realise that it would just be pouring fuel on the flames of
over-consumption & gross waste and the only remaining benefit of
(some approaches to) fusion would be the safe & efficient re-use
of material that is currently classified as "waste".

The problem is not with the science, it is with the mindset of the
tool-monkeys who abuse & distort it in their greed.