I giggled at this, but a serious question for those in the know: is computer simulation a significant factor in the development of fusion experiments, and can it be distributed (a la SETI@Home, Folding@Home, et al)?
Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this. Where has all that money gone from the drawn down of the wars? Where is the investments going in alternative energy?
Well that last is easy, groups who contribute politically, hence solar and wind. They receive far too much in ways of support whereas hard science projects like this with incredible payoffs are pushed off because they don't payback in political contributions.
There are a myriad of ways to finance such an ambitious project through clean energy taxes but unfortunately they suffer the changing whims and needs of politicians. Yeah certain industries would go by the way side with this type of power available but many of them have big money invested in energy creation and distribution many would simply shift some columns in their spreadsheets and still balance out.
Considering the deficits the US runs, just in a day or two of deficit spending is more than what this facility budgets for this research.
It seems to me that the more plausible explanation is something like "Solar and wind power are proven to work, whereas fusion research is still trying to find something that even looks like it might work." Even after this "milestone," fusion still requires more energy from us than it gives back.
Basically, the funding is going toward practical technologies, in the sense that you can actually put them into practice today and reap rewards.
Exactly. If one were to give a hundred billion to fusion research, how much faster would we get results? Would we be funding needs that are critical to help the science into its next phase, or just be funding the N next-best ideas that previously were set aside?
For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues. We're in this for the long haul, if we get fusion in twice the time for half the money, we'll still have fusion.
If we have fusion in 30 years instead of 60 years, we have colonization of the solar system happening in our lifetimes. We'd have the economic rationale for removing all military engagement in the middle east. We have 30*380 billion on petro cost savings here in the U.S: http://www.fuelfreedom.org/the-real-foreign-oil-problem/oil-... God knows how much CO2 we remove from the atmosphere. 100 billion sounds cheap to me.
It comes down to energy. Fusion would dramatically decrease energy costs, which would in turn drive costs of almost everything else down and allow us to do things that had been only a dream before such as fusion propulsion. So run your cost/benefit analysis again with that in mind.
This is even before we get into ecology - most modern energy sources are highly pollutant (oil/coal). How much better off will planetary ecology will be if fusion comes online 10 years earlier?
Excellent points. I certainly know that with much more funding, there could be much more efficient research, though I wonder where the limit is. How many more world-class physicists are there to put on this problem? Are the other theories really "next-best" ideas, or are they simply unexplored avenues, or perhaps more appealing with recent technology advances, but we've already committed to the current paths.
There's a second factor, which is that certain specific fusion designs are heavily over-funded, in a way that doesn't necessarily reflect their practicality. A case in point: NIF isn't even supposed to be the basis for a reactor design. ITER is, but it's still a fair way off and even assuming it lights it'll be 2 more generations before possible industrial application.
The problem is that these approaches can't work without enormous budgets, and while they produce lots and lots of very interesting science, they hoover up talent and funding resources that might be better spent exploring other avenues.
In situations of depressed aggregate demand, it really doesn't matter what you spend the money on -- you could even bury it in the ground like gold and "pay" people to dig it up. Whatever you fund is essentially a free lunch.
You don't want to wait months though, which is why "shovel-ready" matters and this sort of research loses out to other sorts of projects. That said, less guns and more fusion would be nice.
Well, I get the impression billions spent on fusion research doesn't really employ that many more people, it just spends more on expensive resources. Maybe that has a knock-on effect, but using the money on more labour-intensive work (skilled or otherwise) is still probably a better use. Such as, building and installing a heck of a lot of cheap solar panels.
Exactly. Say you go to a fusion laboratory that employs the top ten fusion scientists in the world, with a current budget of a few hundred million dollars, and you say to them "I've got 2 billion here in additional funding for you. You need to spend it in the next few months because I'm trying to stimulate an economy right here."
Does that hire you forty more world class fusion scientists? Are there forty more world class fusion scientists?
Are those scientists going to go "Fantastic! We'll just order up three more of these experimental fusion reactor rigs, here are the plans, we'll start hiring engineers and buying up electronic components from the local silicon fab down the road driving all that money into economic productivity for you!" - unlikely. They already have one experimental fusion reactor. Three more the same aren't going to get them anywhere any faster. They won't know what the next one should look like until they've finished getting results out of this one.
Maybe they just spend it all on repainting the lab, buying new office furniture, getting in catered lunches - you might see a marginal improvement in fusion research productivity, and certainly there's a local economic stimulus which was the idea there, but you're not getting the valuable long term capital value of, say, using the money to rebuild a few bridges.
Even if it turns out your ten fusion scientists have a ready proposal to build the next generation experimental fusion reactor, plans are drawn up and costed, and all they need is you to hand over that check for two billion, if they then go ahead and order the parts from China, subcontract a bunch of German engineering firms to build the cooling systems, and get the heavy steelwork welded together in Korea, your stimulus effect just disappeared overseas.
Of course, if that experimental fusion reactor turns out to be THE ONE that creates viable economic fusion power, maybe that's worth the 2 billion. But that's not stimulus spending, that's gambling on an investment.
I can answer to one of your question, there is forty more world class fusion scientists (especially young one with new ideas). They usually are kicked out of research because of no money and send into the job market into financial and other jobs.
So this could help everyone if these more qualified people could stay in research and not take a spot in a job that can be filled by a less skilled person.
Also, high-level research projects push the state-of-the-art in the private sector. When CERN order up a new type of magnet, that contract goes to a company who does magnet winding who in turn usually revamp their entire process as part of the collaboration to achieve the desired field strength, homogeneity and size.
Suddenly, there's now a company which can do that - and is eager to sell the service on since they now have the capability. Not only do subsequent magnets get cheaper, but things which weren't feasible due to their smaller scale but precise requirements suddenly become possible.
> Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission.
That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??
NIF's nuclear weapons research was in support of maintaining the current arsenal of nuclear weapons. Most notably, it helps solve the question of how to ensure current stockpiles are reliable without actually detonating a nuke (since that's a huge no-no). It also kept a generation of nuclear physicists and engineers in employment, and also providing a method by which to test future weapons designs.
So really, the answer is, it doesn't matter how many nukes we have right now, NIF was created (in part) to ensure that the capability to blow up the world could be maintained.
As depressing as it is, it's pretty much how it goes with nearly all defense technology spin offs. Why the hell did we spend all that time working on rockets that purposefully crashed back onto the Earth (on top of people!) instead of doing something like getting communications satellites up, or getting to the moon.
When thinking about nukes, always remember, the bigger and scarier they are, the less likely to be used, and the less likely are we to engage in land wars where we gut each other with bayonets.
They would never have gotten funding for it. No way in hell.
Plus, war made sure that they put getting working reactors first. Not interesting science. A critique in fusion research is that nice, flexible and very accurate/complex apparatus is given preference over quick-iteration and fast experimentation. War made sure that the researchers went straight for the goal (and there is the fact that the Germans and the Americans both knew that there was probably a way to tickle the uranium reactors to result in Hiroshima. This caused the Germans to be careful, although even their experiments would today be considered absurdly dangerous. But the early American experiments were bat-shit insane). So thought hard about every step, and constantly fucked up (someone left 2kg uranium in a bath of water + cadmium by mistake, then walked out for the night : the first meltdown. They didn't figure out what had happened until years later. Someone inserted a steel rod into a barely sub-critical reactor submerged in water. No-one left the building alive (due to the water exploding as steam violently enough to bring the roof down, not due to a nuclear explosion). None of this would not have happened in peace time.
Make fusion, not war.