As an aspiring scientist and postdoctoral candidate, few things dishearten me more than when political agendas creep into the scientific process. Research is hard enough not having to worry about political competition. I fear the mixing of science and politics could erode the objectivity of the community.
Name me one field of human endeavor that is not impacted by the fact that groups of humans need a process to decide which things to allocate resources to. Name me one field of human endeavor which is not impacted by the fact that this process is operated by humans and therefore occasionally exhibits pettiness, favoritism, dysfunction and short-sightedness.
Name me one field of human endeavor without politics.
Name me one field of human endeavor that should be more removed from politics than the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe. "Is" does not imply "ought". We deserve better.
> the search for fundamental knowledge about the workings of the universe
But that isn't what the MIT fusion reactor is doing. We already know how fusion works; we already know what conditions we need to create to make a fusion reactor self-sustaining. What we don't yet know is how to create them here on Earth.
So the question isn't about fundamental knowledge; it's about engineering and economics. We've been trying to make tokamak fusion work for decades. The Alcator C-Mod experiment that's mentioned in these articles was put into place while I was at MIT in the mid-1980's, and people back then were saying we would have ignition, a self-sustaining controlled fusion reaction, sometime within the next decade. It's now been three decades and we still don't have ignition. Certainly the experiment has been upgraded and refined and has continued to yield useful data, but that's not the crucial question; the crucial question is, is it worth the taxpayer money that's been put into it? That money wasn't supposed to buy useful data, it was supposed to buy ignition.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that the funds for MIT's experiment should be redirected to ITER or to the other US sites mentioned in the article. The same reasoning that I just applied to the MIT experiment, could be applied to all of the fusion research that's been done since we started doing fusion research. We simply did not realize the magnitude of the engineering problem involved in achieving a controlled, self-sustaining fusion reaction without a Sun's mass worth of gravity to confine it.
In my opinion funding should rather go to Thorium and breeder fission reactors. If something has been tried for decades without a clear breakthrough, it's definitely time to try some other promising avenue.
MIT's continuance came at the expense of cuts to another project: The international fusion project, meanwhile, was funded at $200 million, $25 million less than the administration had originally requested.
But ITER is the worst possible fusion project. I mean no offence, but ITER makes nuclear reactors look cheap and small. (well, granted, the actual reactors are small, but I'm talking about the support infrastructure too)
Frankly, if ITER has the scaling laws of Tokamaks right, there won't ever be a working Tokamak smaller than a 10 story building, or producing less than about 1.5 GW. And q values can go up to maybe 10, not counting generator losses. To be honest : we don't want that.
Getting this refunded basically means that more money is going to various other fusion ideas, and that's much better than having all our eggs in one hugely expensive, massively unwieldy and "just 10 more years" project (just 10 more years for about 40 years now).
Frankly, ITER is one of those huge failed projects that just won't admit failure for mostly political reasons. We all know about lots of them. Either it will fail directly because physics somehow prevents Tokamaks from being cost effective, or it will fail because it won't succeed by the time we need it to succeed. So far, the net result of the project is that a 6 story Tokamak can't work, due to plasma instabilities. So they're building a 10 story one.
The project itself has stupendous accomplishments. It has demonstrated almost unprecedented international scientific collaboration. The amount of money freely given to fund ITER is ridiculous. The amount of companies collaborating with academics on it is in the hundreds. It has so many governments invested in it ... It has so many committees and university boards invested in it it's hard to find a decent physics department that isn't invested in it ... but all of these are political achievements. The physics side of the project is finding physics not all that cooperative.
You should think about what ITER is trying to do as a way to apply massive force to reality until it bends to our will. It's not smart at all (of course the details of doing this are very intricate. There's a difference. Smart is finding a way to beat the calculation speed of a huge datacenter with a 1990's pentium when it comes to calculating digits of pi [1]. Intricate is building a huge datacenter. Both are great accomplishments, of course).
The problem with most of the other projects are facing is that they violate "holy cows" of physics in some way. Polywell physics require a very low-pressure non-thermalized gas, which has been demonstrated but violates thermodynamics theory. It's never going to get past more than one or two physics boards. Z-pinch is one of those tricks that's just too good to be true if it works (it does work to some extent of course). Like polywells, it's a huge risk, so getting physics professors to bet their careers on it is a non-starter. Laser fusion (and other forms of inertial confinement fusion) has similar "WTF" parts that will prevent their widespread acceptance. Because most of these things have multiple projects running, in practice this is about 12 projects.
All fusion projects, with 2 exceptions (one of which is strongly suspected to be a fraud), are happening inside America, funded by either the DoD or DoE. Each of them has a much lower chance of success than ITER, I would agree with that, but if they do succeed, the payoff will be much greater. If polywells work, for example, we should be able to build a 100 megawatt or so fusion reactor the size of a 60s TV set, that could operate in a building that needn't be bigger than a big house. You know, easily small and efficient enough to install on even medium sized ships. Hell, you could probably power planes with it. None of the projects even approach the size and inefficiency of ITER (meaning 10 stories, maximum achievable q value of 10 or lower). ITER should be shelved as "not good enough" and people should go back to the cafe napkin stage.
> Also, you can't make small scale fusion power plants. If the reactor was the size of a light bulb and produced 40w of power you would still need several feet of shielding to avoid killing anyone in the area and that shielding would vary quickly become extremely radioactive. Fission is low energy in comparison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_power_stations over 5+ GW of thermal power.
Google "aneutronic fusion". Granted, ITER will never support it, but that's just another reason to try other things. ITER makes everything radioactive, but aside from that being the easiest reaction there is no good reason for doing that.
As for the size of fusion reactors, go to your nearest (big) hospital. They have a football-sized one in the radiology department. The box it's in is fridge-sized. A Farnsworth-Hirsh fusor to be exact. It will be shielded, because it's using DT fusion. If you really knew what you were doing you could get it to fuse p+B11 and it would produce electrons, but it would defeat the point for the hospital, as it's neutron radiation is exactly why they have it.
Now granted this reactor has a q value of 0.02 or so. But if there were a smart way to get it to a q of 100 or so that would almost be your lightbulb example. Get it to work on p-B11 and ...
There is no such thing as neurotic fusion. Best case neutrons carry 1% of the total released energy, but if a 100w light bulb produced 1w of unshielded 2.5MeV neutrons it would quickly give everyone in a fairly large room a lethal radiation dose.
Edit: For the morbidly curious 1w / (3 x 10 -13)j/electron = 3.3e+12 electrons. 10M from the device you have a sphere with a surface area of 1256m^2.
http://miscpartsmanuals3.tpub.com/TM-55-315/TM-55-3150021.ht... 1 rem (neutrons/cm2) from 2.5 MeV neutrons = 3* 10^6 neutrons / cm^2. 100 rem received over a short time period are likely to cause acute radiation syndrome (ARS), possibly leading to death within weeks if left untreated. So, 3 * 10^6 * 100 * 100^2 * 1256 = ~4 * 10^ 15 electrons would kill ~1/2 the people standing within 30 feet in ~10 minutes. And far less time than that to start handing out cancers left and right. And at 10 feet that's ~60 seconds. (Assuming I did not mess up...)
PS: It's far safer to spread the same dose over longer periods of time. But, if your working near a useful fusion device it needs to be heavily shielded.
They are harder to initiate than the D-T reaction, which is why they're not the ones being tried first for fusion-generated electricity; but they're perfectly good fusion reactions which have been observed in experiments.
There are fusion paths that don't result in neutrons but you don't get to limit yourself to just those path's. Consider DD fusion > 50%He + 50%T but you don't get to keep the T in a thermal DD plasma so you need to also look at DT's paths.
proton-whatever also gives you some proton-proton fusion so now you have deuterium which is not so clean. Let alone p whatever the walls of your chamber are.
Still, if your going to pretend we can do anything harder harder than DT or perhaps DD your might as well go for p+p as it's fairly 'clean' and the fuel is plentiful.
p+p is a lot harder to initiate than any of the reactions listed on the Wikipedia page I linked to. The only reason it happens in stars is that gravitational confinement makes stellar cores much, much denser than plasmas we can produce on Earth. It's not going to happen in an Earthbound reactor using proton (+ something else) fuel.
You're right that there will be some fuel particles that escape confinement and react with the chamber walls; but proper confinement makes this effect very small, much smaller than the numbers you were quoting for radiation exposure, which are based on using fuels that produce neutrons as reaction products. Neutron's can't be confined in a plasma because they're uncharged, so they immediately escape and hit the chamber walls. Protons, and other fuel particles, don't have that problem since they're charged and can be confined (if they couldn't be you wouldn't be able to make the reactor work at all).
It's not just particles directly causing reactions by hitting the walls they also cause sputtering which contaminates the plasma with whatever the wall was made out of. As to PP fusion you get some in any vary high energy plasma probably not enough to be useful for power generation but enough to make some D. Not to mention your fuel is hardly going to be pure in the first place.
Which gets back to my first point you can have low nitron fusion but if your generating useful amount of power your going to be makeing significant amounts of neutrons simply because there so deadly.
> As to PP fusion you get some in any vary high energy plasma
Do you have a reference for this? As I understand it, there aren't significant amounts of protons in our current plasma experiments to begin with, and at the densities we use in those experiments, the cross section for p-p reactions is way too small for them to appear.
> if your generating useful amount of power your going to be makeing significant amounts of neutrons
For current and foreseeable reactors, I agree; but I don't think this is a valid blanket statement about every possible type of fusion reactor that could ever be built, even when our technology has advanced well beyond where it is now.
By some I mean it happens not that it's a significant reaction. PP fusion is in no way a useful approach until you run out of everything else and still want power. Still the sun is 1/10th of ITER's goal temperature so your well in the range for PP fusion based on however much contaminates the plasma.
As to the long term potential I don't think we can rule it out in the longer term, just that when people talk about fusion without neutrons they mean low levels or don't actually know what there talking about.
And I'm asking if you have seen any actual evidence that it happens. I have not, and the information I have seen, which I mentioned, leads me to believe that it should not have happened in any fusion experiments we've done to date. That's why I asked you for a reference.
> the sun is 1/10th of ITER's goal temperature so your well in the range for PP fusion
No, the ITER is not "in the range for PP fusion", because temperature is not the only requirement. You also need sufficient density. The density in the Sun's core is many orders of magnitude larger than the density of plasma in ITER or any other Earthbound fusion experiment. That has a huge effect on the PP reaction cross section.
The rate of fusion changes as the square of density but you still get fusion at vary low density's given sufficient energy it's just less common. You might be thinking of fission?
As to PP fusion from what read. Without a large enough plasma the beta more common proton emission path >99.99% ends up costing more energy than you gain from beta-plus decay <0.01%. "The least stable is 5He, with a half-life of 7.6×10−22 seconds, although it is possible that 2He has an even shorter half-life" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_helium#Helium-2_.28...
The rate of fusion changes as the square of density but you still get fusion at vary low density's it's just less common. You might be thinking of fission?
As to PP fusion from what read. Without a large enough plasma the beta more common proton emission path >99.99% ends up costing more energy than you gain from beta-plus decay <0.01%. "The least stable is 5He, with a half-life of 7.6×10−22 seconds, although it is possible that 2He has an even shorter half-life" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_helium#Helium-2_.28...
You seem to underestimate the cost of a lot of science (not to mention that more money doesn't necessarily mean we'll get more results, maybe just the same result duplicated).
The ISS is the most expensive structure ever built, after all.
Vaccinations (medical science) and disease control / pandemic response are not as divorced from "workings of the universe" as I think you think they are...
At this point we can upgrade that from "likely" to "certain", because it has had a lot of adverse effects in terms of actually being able to vaccinate people in Pakistan.
hmmm... I think we might have talked past each other with these past two comments.
I think you're thinking that I'm saying something like "well, if we've never made it to the moon, it sounds preposterous to think we ever will." It sounds like you think developing a politics-less way of funding scientific research is a matter of working on something to produce a new system. Please let me know if that is in fact your perspective.
It is not mine. To me, the idea of not having politics be involved in science sounds as absurd as... well lets assume we're friends and imagine that you, I, and a mutual friend of ours planned to play lazor tag together. We go to pick her up and she says that she can't join us because she has food poisoning and can't come. As we are driving from her house to the lazor tag place, you say that biology shouldn't interfere with plans with your friends. Now, you just mean that it sucks that she has food poisoning and you wish that this sort of thing didn't happen occasionally. But your statement is slightly more absolute than that: biology, being fundamental to the human condition, is always involved in plans made among humans. Complex metabolic, biomechanical, and neurological processes are an inherent part of a lazor tag outing. I claim that politics is fundamental to the human condition.
I claim that much like food poisoning happens occasionally, so does pettiness and favoritism. That does not mean that it is pointless to keep one's meats either freezing or cooked. That does not make it pointless to use separate cutting boards for meat and vegetables. Healthier biology is possible to achieve and so is healthier politics. But it is still politics.
My saying "politics is always involved" may now seem pedantic, so here is why it is meaningful and important: If you adopt an attitude that attempts to simply avoid politics, you will likely avoid studying and paying attention to politics and group dynamics. On a pragmatic level, this will serve you poorly. But on a more idealistic level, this will serve your cause poorly because you will abandon the opportunity to create healthy politics. What does healthy politics look like? That is a subject for whole essays and whole lifetimes of study, but I suspect you can recognize a social system with healthy politics by its high degree of trust.
The ideal I want to attempt to achieve for the purposes of this conversation is a resource allocation process that is based on the same scientific approaches as the projects themselves.
So, if by politics you mean "the act of people mutually deciding what to do with limited resources," then yes, you cannot eliminate politics from scientific funding. But that feels like a tautology to me.
If we use the colloquial definition of politics, namely "nepotism, influence peddling, backbiting over unrelated issues, earmarking, pork barreling, gerrymandering, etc." then I do believe we can and should strive to eliminate politics from scientific funding decisions.
Thanks for your detailed reply; I hope this clarifies each of our intended meanings.
According to the article, this was an issue of MIT's reactor being a waste of money compared to the other reactors the administration backed and continued to increase funding for.
Yes, and I'm not sure that's a fair description. As far as I can tell, MIT's reactor has been producing as much useful data as the other ones; and I don't think the other US projects, or ITER, have a significantly better chance than MIT's of achieving ignition, which is supposed to be the goal that makes all this worth the taxpayer's money. See my response to nitrogen 51 upthread.
I think people here are overestimating how well we understand plasma science. I don't have a PhD in that field, but my friends who do seem to think there is still an awful lot of basic science that is just... not there yet.
This may be true if by "basic science" you mean being able to rigorously derive the behavior of a complex system like a plasma from first principles. I don't have a PhD, but I have a Master's in Nuclear Engineering, and a lot of the plasma physics I studied while getting it was full of heuristics and phenomenological laws rather than rigorous or at least semi-rigorous derivations from first principles.
However, it's not clear that we need to know all that to achieve controlled fusion, and the fusion reactors that are being pushed for global funding are not being pushed as improving our basic science about plasma physics. They are being pushed as engineering efforts that will achieve ignition. As I said in another post upthread, we know what conditions we need to achieve for ignition; we just don't know how to engineer a device to achieve them. That's what ITER and these other devices are supposed to help us figure out.
Thanks for the clarification. What I meant by "basic science" was that we were able to model plasmas well enough to predict what would happen with something akin to CFD given a real model of the apparatus. So if you can do that with heuristics and "laws", that would meet my definition of "understood".
> few things dishearten me more than when political agendas creep into the scientific process.
"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.
The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...
Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.
Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...
James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue.."
-From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".
This fear is part of why we have the absurdly opaque and inefficient grant writing process, in which funds are allocated by the government without so much as interviewing the recipients.
Absolutely this is a key factor in why scientific grants have terrible yield vs private funding.
As a former fusion scientist, I saw this coming, and left the field to make my own fortune and direct it towards what I believed the best energy research was.
There is a sunk cost effect where it must cost a billion to build another, but only a couple million to keep it running, so once you throw it out, you better be sure you'll never find it useful again because another experiment would have a capital cost of about a century of labor/maintenance cost. Something that big and cool would seem quite capable of generating enough "stuff" to be worthwhile.
I agree the reactor is useful and shouldn't simply be shut down; but the capital cost could just as easily be recovered for the taxpayers by selling the reactor to a private company that could focus on using the thing productively instead of seeking government grants.
I've gotta disagree with that. I'm all for private enterprise over government control in general, but I don't believe that there are any private enterprises capable of or willing to do the type of long-term engineering research that we'll need to get a working fusion reactor. The article I linked upthread quotes the MIT researchers as saying that we're about $80 billion in research away from a fusion reactor that can put watts on the grid. What private company in the world has ever invested that level of money on something not likely to pay off for decades?
> I don't believe that there are any private enterprises capable of or willing to do the type of long-term engineering research that we'll need to get a working fusion reactor.
Considering that there are private companies willing to invest in a project to mine asteroids, I think this is too pessimistic.
Also, you are implicitly assuming that governments are better at long time horizon projects than private companies. I've gotta disagree with that. A government's time horizon is the next election cycle. Yes, projects like MIT's fusion reactor can continue to be funded for decades, but in order to keep that funding coming, the people working on the project have to spend a significant amount of time every year or two convincing the government that the project is worth continuing to fund. We're only hearing about it now because they weren't able to do that this time around.
A private company that is willing to make a long time horizon investment is not going to have the same overhead required to keep the funding going, simply because there are fewer masters to answer to.
That's why I asked the question, which I do mean literally: What private company in the world has ever invested that level of money on something not likely to pay off for decades?
If you, or anyone, can come up with an example of a company actually doing that, not just saying they want to, then I'd definitely reconsider.
I'm guessing that you're talking about Planetary Resources with the asteroid mining thing? I didn't see much about hard numbers from them, but I'm doubtful that they will ever spend tens of billions of dollars before getting a penny in revenue.
I can believe that private companies are good at making longer-term investment in technology that directly benefits a profitable line of business that they're in. Stuff like Intel doing research towards smaller component sizes on ICs. But who's going to invest long-term in fusion power? There's no company with a revenue stream related to it that I know of. The costs will probably break a hundred billions dollars before anybody gets plants on the grid that actually generate any revenue at all. I'm just not seeing it. If it were a realistic solution, why isn't it already happening?
Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but those companies will go bust before they get any hardware off the ground. They won't want to spend $20 billion USD over a quarter of a century before making a dime in revenue. SpaceDev wanted to do that. Now they're a parts supplier.
(To be truly pessimistic...) Nor will NASA or any other governmental agency ever make use of asteroid resources. That'd be too useful. Instead they'll spend 400 years doing political stunts and in-space handshakes. In 400 years time, we'll all have uploaded ourselves into The Cloud and gone exploring simulated galaxies. The real moon will be empty, save for some smiley faces carved in it from Earth with lasers.
(To address the actual topic at hand, I think long-term research isn't getting done on either side.)
> but those companies will go bust before they get any hardware off the ground. They won't want to spend $20 billion USD over a quarter of a century before making a dime in revenue
We'll see. The companies are being funded by people who have enough personal wealth to do it without having to answer to public company shareholders or directors; so they don't have to show revenue or profit the way a publicly traded company would.
MIT's next best use of its political power would be to bring Massachusetts laws regarding innovation to parity with California's circa 1980. Specifically, adopting the "Minnesota Model" employee IP protection, making noncompete agreements unenforcable, and protecting moonlighting.
I'm not sure exactly when it was published, since their new Beta thing hides dates older than 2y ago, but it's great for showing why the MIT project, and all of the other fusion projects, deserve to get a lot more money than they're getting now.
That interview makes it pretty clear that the MIT project is not the obsolete boondoggle that the NYTimes portrays it as. They've made significant recent advances. Something I don't think they mentioned: the Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, several times stronger than ITER will have.
Aside from that, comparing it to ITER is a bit silly since ITER won't be operating for another eight years. We shouldn't just shut down research while we wait.
A note on Focus Fusion, mentioned in one of the questions: in 2012 they published a paper in Physics of Plasmas, the leading fusion journal, showing they'd reached the temperature and confinement time necessary for boron fusion. Right now they're on the front page of Indiegogo (in the "trending now" section, hit the right arrow) with a $200K campaign for the next piece of equipment they need, a beryllium electrode that they think will improve the plasma density.
> Soulskill posted more than 2 years ago | from the and-are-awesome dept.
I see that you noted this, as well. I hope Slashdot will reverse this. Some older posts are still very useful and relevant; however, knowing their context including timing is an important part of this.
Slashdot used to cater to "technical people", i.e. people who can cope with dated material that is older than e.g. "last week", and that is still specific -- some of us still remember calendars more than a year old and what was happening at specific times of those years.
I hope that is not changing. Such a change is not the kind of "social" that I want...
--
P.S. From the non-beta version of the site:
> Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @10:52AM
I had the privilege of touring and getting to see the reactor directly for an ANS student conference. Even without the politics about keeping the reactor active, the way the graduate students use the reactor seems to already be mired in bureaucracy. If I recall correctly, they have to wait on the order of a year (or more) to get one full day with the reactor to conduct their experiment.
I can only imagine how horrifying it is to have your thesis work mired in these political struggles.
I got to see it too, and got an informal tour by one of the grad students. He showed us a steel tie about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle while it was trying to launch. To hold the machine together while it operates, they need 38 of them.
It's not surprising they they have so much trouble getting time on the machine. They barely have the funding to run it. During the budget problems last year they went a whole year without running it at all.
Then again, the experiment involves controlling the hot plasma of nuclear reactions using little more than a vacuum and magnets. Nothing like some miserable bureaucracy to separate the responsible adults from the children looking for new toys. I'll take one individual's disillusionment over a nuclear accident any day of the week. Not to mention that one year in college goes by so fast that it's pretty much over before it started.
Tangential, but anyone ever been to Paradise the bar or Flour the cafe right across the street from the nuclear power plant? Cool places to go but I've always been afraid there because of the radiation exposure if there's a meltdown.
You do realise nuclear power is safer than any other base-load generation technology currently employed? Nuclear kills fewer people per kilowatt-hour electricity generated than even roof-top solar, including the deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima. [1]
I visited Flour a year or so ago and it was absolutely delicious! Lovely atmosphere as well. Totally recommend, regardless of potential nuclear meltdowns :)
I'm a big fan of MIT, and consider it a national treasure.
My question - will this type of political play create enemies? I can't imagine that the politicians who were overruled were happy, and they can make MIT pay with 1000 small cuts.
Is it truly mixing politics or rather about money? If the project is not funded, many will be unemployed. To me, that's the center of the issue. People want to keep their jobs.
How do you separate human endeavour from politics and money? They seem to be inextricably. Or rather, they are one and the same thing and we use the terms 'politics', 'money', 'human endeavour', and whatever other terms are fashionable in the social sciences this week, as a convenient way to communicate about specific aspects of the human condition.
I don't disagree with you. In fact, I agree with you. My comment is directed at the title of the article, suggesting this has something to do with government and politics. But reading a few paragraphs the whole problem to me is just people don't want to lose their jobs, which is part of reality. I think the journalist who wrote the article is trying to make the money part less, so no one gets hurt by people who are against mass public funding program.
