By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: News from the frontiers of science, where the future is being built and the predictions of doomsters will be defeated. Also, see the last section: why has fusion always been 30 years away? And naming the people responsible for this failure.
“We think we have the science, speed and scale to put carbon-free fusion power on the grid in 15 years.”
— Robert Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (PhD in Nuclear Physics, MIT). Source: The Guardian, March 2018.
One of the great oddities of our time is the widespread belief that our CO2 emissions will destroy the Earth in the 21st century. The thin foundation for these stories is the IPCC’s worst-case scenario, RCP8.5 (often misrepresented as a “business as usual scenario”). In this we burn off most of the Earth’s available oil – then turn to an alternative. In RCP8.5 the fuel of the future is the fuel of the 19th century – coal. The result would be catastrophic. It’s also unlikely, and widespread belief it is probability is stunning achievement of modern propaganda.
In the real world, the technology of energy generation and use advances rapidly. Although nuclear power is dying as an industry (destroyed by incompetence), solar tech is taking a growing share of the electric generation market. Steady improvements suggest that it has a big future (although less than dreamers believe).
To see how quickly tech can advance, a decade ago electric cars were considered a technology for the distant future. A 2009 report by the National Academies of Science said that even plug-in hybrids “are unlikely to have much impact before 2030.” We have already leaped over that stage, with many of the world’s major car companies now offering all-electric cars (~1% of the market) – and the others rolling them out in the next five years. The report did not even mention them.
The private sector sees profits in fusion power
The US government fusion program was funded since 1976 at levels far below that required to deliver results at at some indefinite date (“far out in time”; see the last section below). But decades of work have brought fusion to an important milestone. The growing interest of private investors – especially professional venture capitalists – marks the start of a new phase in the development of fusion power. These are smart business people expecting results soon, and putting money on the table. This is an update of a list that I have shown before.
- LPPFusion – Created in 1994 with funding from NASA, incorporated in 2002, based in NJ. Their website. Funding: first round in 2008 raised $1.2 Million from The Abell Foundation and Individual Investors, with five more offerings completed since then (including some crowdfunding).
- TAE Technologies – Founded 1998, based in California. Their website. Rumored to have raised $150 million; Crunchbase shows 6 rounds since 2002 from 3 VC firms. See Wikipedia. Partnered in 2017 with Google.
- General Fusion – Founded 2002, based in Canada, 50 scientists. Their website. Funding: $90 million, in 8 rounds from venture capitalist, government, and energy companies. See Wikipedia.
- Proton Scientific – Founded 2005, based in Illinois. Their website. Funding: unknown.
- Woodruff Scientific, Inc. – Founded 2005, based in Seattle. Their website. Contract research in fusion, working for both public and private firms.
- Global Energy Corporation – Founded 2006, based in Virginia. Their website. Research on hybrid fission-fusion tech. NASA has funded some of their work. See this list of relevant patents, papers, and other work.
- Tokamak Energy – Founded 2009, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: $13 million in one round from venture funds. They hit a major milestone in June.
- First Light Fusion – Spun out from Oxford in 2011, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: $32 million, in 3 rounds from 2 VC firms.
- Helion Energy – Founded 2013, based in Washington. Their website. Funding: $5 million seed capital from DoE, plus $12 million in 2 rounds from 2 VC firms. See Wikipedia.
- Applied Fusion Systems – Founded 2014, based in Britain. Their website. Funding: unknown, tapping individual investors.
- CTFusion – Spun off from U Washington in 2015, based in Seattle. Their website. Funding: unknown, most or all from the US government.
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems – Spun Off from MIT in 2017, based in Massachusetts. Their website. Funding: $50 million investment from ENI (a global energy corp).
- Hyperjet Fusion – Founded in 2017, merged with HyperV Technologies Corp in 2017, based in Virginia. Their website. Funding: $28 million from the US government plus an unknown sum from Strong Atomics (a VC).
One mega-corp is investing in fusion: Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works began building a compact fusion system in 2010. See their website and the Wikipedia entry. From their October 2014 press release …
“{Lockheed} is working on a new compact fusion reactor (CFR) that can be developed and deployed in as little as ten years. …The smaller size will allow us to design, build and test the CFR in less than a year. After completing several of these design-build-test cycles, the team anticipates being able to produce a prototype in five years.”
Most of these companies issue exciting press releases and videos about breakthroughs and timetables. Most are falling behind on their initial promises. The sums spent are small, as such things go. But most new evolves slowly at first. We can only guess at what they might accomplish in the next decade.
This is one facet of a large story, one of the biggest of our era: a new industrial revolution has begun!
Great things come from small beginnings. See Niagara Falls in 1904, with little factories tapping some of its power.
Here is the “Z Machine” of Sandia National Laboratory. It could provide fusion energy for the future. See Science, Nov 2016.
For More Information
Another often-told story about natural resources is about the replacement of whale oil by petroleum. The reality was much more complex, with no obvious lessons for us. See an analysis by Bill Kovarik, Professor of Communication at Radford University; also see the discussion in the comments.
Why has fusion always been 30 years away?
There have been countless articles like this by Nathaniel Scharping in Discover March 2016, asking “Why Nuclear Fusion Is Always 30 Years Away.” Sometimes other numbers are given, such as “Forever 20 years away: will we ever have a working nuclear fusion reactor?” in the November 2014 New Statesman. Oddly, these seldom quote people in 20 or 30 years ago making such predictions.
But there is a deeper reason why fusion scientists disappointed us: we did not give them the money they said they needed to deliver in 20 or 30 years. See this graph (click to enlarge) from the peak enthusiasm days of fusion. It is from page 12 of “Fusion Power by Magnetic Confinement: Program Plan“, a report by the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (1976), updated to show 2012 dollars. We did not even provide the funding required to deliver future at some indefinite date (“far out in time”). We got what we paid for.
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Since when are technological breakthroughs linked solely to federal funding? That’s nonsense.
Nuclear Fission is not dying.
Its actually doing very nicely, just not in the West, where its been [deliberately] strangled by over regulation.
If Brexit ever happens, it is likely that the UK might well adopt a more sane approach to regulation.
And build out some reactors: Its stated that around 50GWe would be needed at least to support ‘electric cars’
If we had very cheap energy then other than where minerals were on the surface such as most coal in Australia, the energy could be used to extract all we needed from the sea.
MJER
Will todays young Grens be prepared to give up all of their electronics toys to go back to the 1800 period, I don’t think so.
MJE
“A 2009 report by the National Academies of Science said that even plug-in hybrids ‘are unlikely to have much impact before 2030.’”
That seems basically correct to me. Larry Kummer seems to think that 1% of the market constitutes “much impact.” I don’t think that anything less that 10% of the vehicles on the road could be described as “much impact” and remember that % of the market is not the same as % of the vehicles on the road.
You say that human-caused climate change isn’t happening and never will, but today, a container cargo ship sailed through the North Pole for the first time in history because all the ice has melted. So what does that tell you.
Other things:
Great Barrier Reef is dead
Islands in the Pacific sinking into the sea
Sudden rise in heat deaths this summer and last
Every year, hottest year on record, six years in a row
Crazy increase in storm intensity
The Great Florida Fish Kill (still occurring)
Gulf Fungal Blooms
Earth’s average temperature is hotter than it was 50 years ago.
Permafrost sublimation
Do you think all of this is just suddenly going to stop one day? By itself?
You should stop listening to Green & Climate Propoganda.
That Cargo ship was an Ice Breaking Strengthened Container Vessel and had support from actual Ice Breakers.
The Barrier Reef is NOT dead.
Islands in the Pacific are NOT sinking into the sea, the only ones that show lower land levels are due to excessive drinking water withdrawal.
The Sudden rise in heat deaths did not reach the level of the sudden rise in Cold Deaths and never will.
Every Year hotter due to Adjusted data.
No increase in Storm Intensity, nor in quantity.
Earths average temperature hooter than 50 years ago, but not 80 or 1000 years ago.
Permafrost sublimation has always been going on since the last Ice Age, so nothing new.
Also
Polar Bears are not dying out, but increasing.
Snow has not disapppeared.
Greenland has massively increased it’s Snow and Ice.
There are less wild fires.
There are less Tornadoes
There has been no Acceleration in Sea Rise Level increases.
Need I go on?
The short answer is YES.
The longer answer is, you are uninformed or at least misinformed.
We are in an interglacial. It is warmer than the previous ice age. During this interglacial, there have been other warm periods that were warmer than we are today specifically, the Minoan warm period, the Roman warm period and the Medieval warm period.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/07/31/a-warm-period-by-any-other-name-the-climatic-optimum/
The Arctic sea ice is lower than average by 2 sd, but seems to be stabilizing, still there is evidence of an ice free Arctic in the past. See the Sea Ice Page on this site.
Great barrier reef isn’t in a death spiral, it dies and regenerates repeatedly throughout it’s history. A Google search will give you several articles to read.
Hottest year ever claims are within 100ths of a degree, which is beyond the accuracy of the measurements and if you research how those are calculated the entire nortyand south pole temps are extrapolated from a single reading to represent 1000’s of sq miles.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/19/noaa-data-demonstrates-that-2016-was-not-the-hottest-year-ever-in-the-usa/
Keep reading with an open mind, and you may conclude that many of your concerns aren’t as dire as you think they are now.
Best of luck
Matt
“all the ice has melted” There’s actually more sea ice in the arctic right now than there was in 2007.
Bill Nye won’t tell you that, neither will Mike Mann, Katherine Hayhoe, CNN, BBC, etc. etc.
They’re lying to you.
“But there is a deeper reason why fusion scientists disappointed us: we did not give them the money they said they needed to deliver in 20 or 30 years. “
No, there isn’t enough money to deliver fusion energy on any timescale. I first visited a fusion experiment in 1970, and later worked there. It has become clear to me that fusion can work as soon as a big enough tokamak can be built. How big is that? Probably it’s way bigger than any country can afford.
ITER may achieve theoretical break even but how does that scale up into a real power plant? Oh, and how will the radioactive waste be handled? Oh yes there will be waste.
So what is the motivation for this just out of reach dream, really? Won’t melt down? Molten Salt doesn’t have that problem either. Unlimited fuel? There are fission based routes to nearly unlimited fuels and burning the waste to boot.
Clearly there is a LOT of interesting technology to be developed for fusion. The low hanging fruit has mostly been tried since 1970. Maybe a few million dollars going here and there into skunkworks fusion projects could discover something new. Most of them look like things that were tried years ago.
So if non-polluting energy is so important why not take a Manhattan project ‘all of the above’ approach and commit just as much effort into fission technology?
We failed because you didn’t give us enough money. Well there’s a universal excuse for robbery. Or socialism.
A stupid article all around.
“Although nuclear power is dying as an industry (destroyed by incompetence), ”
Apparently this writer’s knowledge of nuclear power came from the Sierra Club.
While nuclear power in this country is not thriving, due mostly to the inability of
the U.S. to build large steel structures anymore, and a decades long span when no reactors were
built, nuclear power plants are springing up all over the world, built mostly by Chinese and Russian companies. The numbers : currently 58GW of nuclear capacity being constructed, 155 GW more planned, and 372 GW proposed.
But anyone familiar with the technology knows that molten salt nuclear reactors (some uranium fueled, some Thorium fueled) are the patently obvious future : easily constructed in factories, errected quickly on sites which require mimimal preparation and no need for a cooling body of water, inherently safe and able to provide power either cheaper or nearly as cheap as any other technology. This is a no brainer Two countries China and India are rushing to develop these reactors,as are a half dozen or more companies in this country and elsewhere. Several different designs, all of which should prove viable, some cheaper than others and able to be prototyped sooner. This is NOT a new, unknown technology – molten salt reactors have been operating for decades. The new designs use advanced material and smarter moderators to make the technology practical and able to use low grade uranium. Like right now.
Totally agree. In the 1970s I was building instruments for fusion research. My customers were energy related (e.g inertial confinement experiments) and defense related (e.g. Sandia Laboratories and NRL).
Back then we thought that commercial fusion power was 40 years away. Forty five years later it may be more than forty years away.
In the 1990s Charlie Bowman built an accelerator driven reactor that we tested at TUNL (Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory) but we failed to secure $20 million to take the project to the next stage so it migrated from Duke to Virginia Tech (GEMSTAR project).
That got me interested in molten salt reactors which have great potential to improve on the already excellent safety characteristics of fission reactors while dramatically reducing capital costs and improving thermodynamic efficiency. Braxton cycle anyone?
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/lenr-lithium-size-matters/#comment-67841
Why are these type of articles like “if we just had more money we could…..?”
If it is viable and profitable, then Capital will arrive. If it is not, then government will waste money on it.
What the US needs is a nuclear version of the TVA where the government builds the reactors on government land or military bases, which are government land, and then has the facilities operated by civilian contractors: GOCO. The government agency, Dept. of Energy?, would then wholesale the power to the grid operators for distribution. The government claims it is a national security program and tells the greenies to move to California….
That could happen. TVA is looking at a potential small modular reactor at its Clinch River site in some sort of partnership with ORNL. Ineel is also looking at possibilities.
Problem is that the NRC only knows how to license light water, LEU conventional reactors.
ORNL has some experience with molten salt, MSRE, and ineel has experience with liquid metal. Unfortunately that doesn’t include any active staff members.
“breakthroughs achieved”. Dream on.
When I was at DARPA, I visited General Atomics, and was given a tour of the Tokamak facility they operate. It’s the only one in the world, right now, and is being used by people all over the world to obtain data for use in fusion reactor design. They have advanced the state of the art in plasma control to the point where the Tokamak runs for arbitrarily long periods of time at within shouting distance of engineering breakeven. The most significant aspect of this is that they only run deuterium. As the Chief Scientist (who gave me the tour) noted, they aren’t licensed to use deuterium/tritium. Given the very large difference in cross section between the two, I have little doubt that the GA’s Tokamak would achieve engineering breakeven effortlessly.
Re the GA tokamak: running a D-T plasma without massive neutron shielding and the required double wall plumbing for the tritium would create a literal hot mess. TFTR did have tritium piping and got in a few D-T shots in before they had to walk away and let it cool off.
I didn’t see Energy Matter Conversion Corporation on the list. Last experiment they succeeded in achieving a wiffleball plasma confinement in their small Polywell fusion machine. That is to say, they injected a plasma into the center of six magnetic solenoids in a box configuration, and then energized the solenoids. The plasma diamagnetically repelled the six convex magnetic fields sealing off the magnetic cusps. It’s what is know as high Beta confinement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Even if the whole global warming . . . climate change . . . climate disruption (each of which has more nebulous metrics) dissipates and its adherents admit defeat, the very same people will come up with a new excuse (some new big threat caused by humans) for why we need to cede more power and more money to others.
This never was a real science effort. It’s always been political—just a means, an excuse, to form a globalist unified world government—that would ultimately collapse and cause as much harm as has been done in other countries.
Not expecting fusion anytime soon.
+ many +’s