Nuclear Fusion Updated project reviews

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Here is a rundown of the various nuclear fusion projects. Overall there many interesting projects with decent funding. Most are being more careful about making specific timeline promises. Molten Salt fission could deliver on most of the nuclear fusion clean energy and low-cost energy claims with what appears to be lower technical risks and no scientific uncertainties.

General Fusion

General Fusion is raising hundreds of millions for 70% scale demo system to be completed around 2023. The next system after the 70% scale system will be a full commercial system. They have a pulsed system without the need for plasma containment. General Fusion feels if they can prove out end to end power generation that scaling to higher energy return will not be a hurdle.

Simulation will be used to validate the economics and design specifics to move to a 100% system.

The Demo system will cost several hundred million dollars. General fusion is fundraising now. Several existing funders (Jeff Bezos, Canadian and Malaysian government) are likely participants in the next round. However, the fundraising cannot have actual disclosure until it is completed. As of late 2016, General Fusion had received over $100 million in funding from a global syndicate of investors and the Canadian Government’s Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) fund.

All of the individual components have been matured enough to enable integration into a prototype pilot plant.

Over the five years of the demo plant there will be design, construction and a nominal 18 months of testing.

The plasma injector component built so far is a 2-meter plasma injector. It will be a 3-meter injector for the pilot plant.

Helion Energy

Helion Energy’s fifth-generation plasma machine, nicknamed Venti (as in a Starbucks coffee cup size), went into operation last year. Venti aims to compress a plasma target to 20 Tesla and to fusion temperatures.

The sixth-generation machine (Trenta?) is already being designed. The seventh-generation machine hopes to hit net energy gain.

Previously there had been hopes that the sixth machine would hit net energy gain. Helion Energy is pulsed energy and does not depend upon long-term containment of plasma.

LPP Fusion

LPP Fusion has raised nearly $1 million via crowdinvestment. They have enough money for 2018 experiments and some of 2019. They are trying to prove out a dense plasma focus fusion experiment for net energy gain. There is no confinement problem in their design. They have to work out controlling contimination of a nuclear fusion spark plug like design. They have a lot of scientific risk.

TAE Technologies

California-based TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy) has had over $500 million in venture capital to date. They are working on their fifth machine. They hope the next machine will hit break even energy.

• C-2U plasma sustainment compelling foundation for “long enough” (Gen 5 reactor targets 30 milliseconds up from 10 milliseconds)
• 3 year C-2W project underway – towards “hot enough” (Gen 5 targets 10x the power)
• Begin to work on to commercialization plan w/ utilities and industrial partners


MIT Commonwealth Fusion

Trying to make a compact Tokomak with more powerful superconducting magnets. They want a commercial tokomak by 2033.

MIT has spunout a tokomak fusion project into Commonwealth Fusion systems. They want to apply modular designs to high-temperature superconductors. They want to get to stronger magnets that will shrink the size and cost of the potential nuclear fusion reactor. Improved magnets would improve any nuclear fusion design that involves confinement of plasma. There is less science risk to this MIT approach but more technological risk. They are trying to accelerate the commercial use of high-temperature superconducting magnets and trying to contain their costs. Cost for superconducting magnets for past fusion projects have been $20 per watt but other applications have seen costs of $1.4 to $1.8 per watt.

Lockheed Compact Fusion

Lockheed is still working on the Compact reactor but they are doing computer simulations and testing to validate certain components and aspects of the design. The initial design claims of ten years to a 20-ton reactor that can be moved by truck have be wrong by 100 times. They now hope they can get to 2000 ton fusion reactor that works.

97 thoughts on “Nuclear Fusion Updated project reviews”

  1. Luckily, there are ways to achieve these large temperatures in the lab environment without having to use any material. The trick is to use magnetic fields to hold ionized hydrogen plasma together, without having to touch any container walls. If you want you can read that article here: http://thinkandsay.net/nuclear-fusion/

  2. Luckily there are ways to achieve these large temperatures in the lab environment without having to use any material. The trick is to use magnetic fields to hold ionized hydrogen plasma together without having to touch any container walls.If you want you can read that article here:http://thinkandsay.net/nuclear-fusion/

  3. Nay-sayers always look smart until the final breakthrough arrives. Then they are still smart because everyone forgets about them and they did no work.

  4. Nay-sayers always look smart until the final breakthrough arrives. Then they are still smart because everyone forgets about them and they did no work.

  5. No it tends to cause too much interference. And I paid for the premium implant for streaming HD cranium direct, so I try to steer clear of insane people schizer. But thanks for asking jello. PS: What flavor are you?

  6. No it tends to cause too much interference. And I paid for the premium implant for streaming HD cranium direct so I try to steer clear of insane people schizer. But thanks for asking jello. PS: What flavor are you?

  9. Tell me about it… Those freaking AI Swarm guys! Right?! The very phrase perpetual motion is a concept imagined by Cromagnon minds to maintain commodities prices in fossil fuel markets. Schmucks right? Pictures? Mister man wants to see pictures? Oh I got pictures Mr. Man. You wanna see some pictures here’s a great link: https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures Nobody wants an aerospace engineer to do anything aerospacey just automobili. “Just improve my gasoline burning internal combustion engine driven not quite a flying thing Thingy on wheels.” Some of us are purists, what can I say? Regarding your excerpt from page 37 of your “Screwing The Little Guy Guidance” pamphlet on social media disinformation: ” The crazy guys find that the suppression is so seamlessly effective that nobody else will ever talk or write about it.” Hmmm… Me thinks he doth protest too much and to precisely… Go to http://vaperpower.com and read it I dare you. Go to http://timothyjsipp.com and read it I dare you. Go to http://eitherreel.com/projecttio and read it I dare you. Either way, I’m a freelance influencer and always for hire, but never for sale. Cheers, ;-)>

  10. Tell me about it… Those freaking AI Swarm guys! Right?! The very phrase perpetual motion is a concept imagined by Cromagnon minds to maintain commodities prices in fossil fuel markets. Schmucks right? Pictures? Mister man wants to see pictures? Oh I got pictures Mr. Man. You wanna see some pictures here’s a great link: https://www.google.com/search?q=picturesNobody wants an aerospace engineer to do anything aerospacey just automobili. Just improve my gasoline burning internal combustion engine driven not quite a flying thing Thingy on wheels.”” Some of us are purists”””” what can I say?Regarding your excerpt from page 37 of your “”””Screwing The Little Guy Guidance”””” pamphlet on social media disinformation: “””” The crazy guys find that the suppression is so seamlessly effective that nobody else will ever talk or write about it.”””” Hmmm… Me thinks he doth protest too much and to precisely…Go to http://vaperpower.com and read it I dare you.Go to http://timothyjsipp.com and read it I dare you.Go to http://eitherreel.com/projecttio and read it I dare you.Either way”” I’m a freelance influencer and always for hire but never for sale.Cheers””;-)>”””

  11. Hey Hooves And Horns Thanks for taking the time to do your homework before you went all hatchet-man on my “apparent pyschodynamics” and level of “self-realization” and employability. The Einstein Endowed Chair for Immense Underachievers at the USPTO was currently occupied so I satisfied myself with a mastery in apprenticeship instead. Then I began to write. Grab your tinfoil hat cuz baby you going on a crazy train tonight. That’s right, I keep it tight. http://eitherreel.com http://timothyjsipp.com http://soulutionsllc.com Let’s just say, Billy, that I know a guy who once stared at a goat a little too long. Wink wink nudge nudge say no more… I’m a Professional Problem Solver. How may I assist you? http://soulutionsllc.com “I’m gonna go ahead and take “Unemployed Screenwriter for a Thousand, Alex.” Would you believe a highly trained, top secret, super intelligent hybrid analyst slash operator code named Tio, assigned to the IATF unit Task Force TIO out of Albuquerque, NM with a top secret mandate to do stuff and things? God bless the makers of “Get Smart” Actually my bovine brother, I was COIN at S&S for NNSA at SNL & LANL TAD’d from DIA & CIA along time ago in a galaxy far far away. LOL. };-D> Don’t be afraid of the future, for if it’s true, than it’s also your past, for it has always been your destiny. Or something sagacious or nefarious, not mutually exclusive. OK enjoy your hamster wheel. Tio out. ;-)>

  12. Hey Hooves And HornsThanks for taking the time to do your homework before you went all hatchet-man on my apparent pyschodynamics”” and level of “”””self-realization”””” and employability. The Einstein Endowed Chair for Immense Underachievers at the USPTO was currently occupied so I satisfied myself with a mastery in apprenticeship instead. Then I began to write. Grab your tinfoil hat cuz baby you going on a crazy train tonight. That’s right”” I keep it tight. http://eitherreel.com http://timothyjsipp.com http://soulutionsllc.comLet's just say Billy”” that I know a guy who once stared at a goat a little too long. Wink wink nudge nudge say no more… I’m a Professional Problem Solver. How may I assist you?http://soulutionsllc.com“”””I’m gonna go ahead and take “”””Unemployed Screenwriter for a Thousand”””” Alex.””””Would you believe a highly trained”” top secret super intelligent hybrid analyst slash operator code named Tio assigned to the IATF unit Task Force TIO out of Albuquerque”” NM with a top secret mandate to do stuff and things?God bless the makers of “”””Get Smart””””Actually my bovine brother”” I was COIN at S&S for NNSA at SNL & LANL TAD’d from DIA & CIA along time ago in a galaxy far far away. LOL. };-D>Don’t be afraid of the future for if it’s true than it’s also your past for it has always been your destiny. Or something sagacious or nefarious”” not mutually exclusive.OK enjoy your hamster wheel.Tio out. ;-)>”””

  13. Hey there Doctorpat. Uh, ok where to begin? I used the word “Stimulates” not “stipulates” to describe the momentum transfer between the cold ionized plasma, a gas, and a solid piece of iii-v semiconductor mounted in a specialized harness that translates mechanical input into electrical impulses, I believe they’re calling them “transducers” and one they could be used to record the human voice and then we’ll have “Talkies” at the cinema. Yes, Solomon tells us in the Proverbs that “Where words are many, sin is not absent.” So I’ll be brief: I didn’t invent solid state electronic fusion, God did, it’s known as the piezoelectric effect, I didn’t invent FLASH, I invented a work-around that simulated FLASH function for corporate and academic online education needs and pushed the curve of evolution (ooh how poetic, bet he’s a weird fantasy romantic LARP type) and provide a lot of people with a lot of new understandings for free, since they stole it. Shame on me for not patenting first while innovating and trying to pay rent; and as for SIRI, I did invent that bitch, but I called her ARIA and gave her away at a DARPA SCORM conference in Memphis in 2005; frictionless bearings have been around since the 1960s, I just have a new take on them with regards to electric vehicles including electric aircraft, same for the brakes and a dozen other things that no one will steal from me, cuz I am AWESOME SAUCE! LOL. Suck it monkeys. ;-)>

  14. Hey there Doctorpat. Uh ok where to begin? I used the word Stimulates”” not “”””stipulates”””” to describe the momentum transfer between the cold ionized plasma”” a gas and a solid piece of iii-v semiconductor mounted in a specialized harness that translates mechanical input into electrical impulses”” I believe they’re calling them “”””transducers”””” and one they could be used to record the human voice and then we’ll have “”””Talkies”””” at the cinema. Yes”””” Solomon tells us in the Proverbs that “”””Where words are many”””” sin is not absent.”””” So I’ll be brief: I didn’t invent solid state electronic fusion”” God did it’s known as the piezoelectric effect I didn’t invent FLASH I invented a work-around that simulated FLASH function for corporate and academic online education needs and pushed the curve of evolution (ooh how poetic bet he’s a weird fantasy romantic LARP type) and provide a lot of people with a lot of new understandings for free since they stole it. Shame on me for not patenting first while innovating and trying to pay rent; and as for SIRI I did invent that bitch but I called her ARIA and gave her away at a DARPA SCORM conference in Memphis in 2005; frictionless bearings have been around since the 1960s I just have a new take on them with regards to electric vehicles including electric aircraft same for the brakes and a dozen other things that no one will steal from me”” cuz I am AWESOME SAUCE! LOL. Suck it monkeys. ;-)>”””

  15. Hey Goatboy, baaaaaaaack up a minute. Good boy. Now sit. Roll over. Good boy. I wrote 3 sigfigs not 4. And in case your unit conversion don’t work, I ended in kW, so my 3 sigfig number ends in kilowatts. Know anywhere a guy, or a girl, can buy something kilowatt accurate? Schmuck! For a disinformation specialist working with Paradigm Management for NNSA SS & PS for MIchael Grimler out of SNL you’re just not that good, Oh and the link was scrubbed. So here it is again: http://vaperpower.com/paene-mihi-intellectum-theoria-motus-malesuada-magnam-stuff-and-things/

  16. Hey Goatboy baaaaaaaack up a minute. Good boy. Now sit. Roll over. Good boy. I wrote 3 sigfigs not 4. And in case your unit conversion don’t work I ended in kW so my 3 sigfig number ends in kilowatts. Know anywhere a guy or a girl can buy something kilowatt accurate? Schmuck! For a disinformation specialist working with Paradigm Management for NNSA SS & PS for MIchael Grimler out of SNL you’re just not that good Oh and the link was scrubbed. So here it is again: http://vaperpower.com/paene-mihi-intellectum-theoria-motus-malesuada-magnam-stuff-and-things/

  19. Nay-sayers always look smart until the final breakthrough arrives. Then they are still smart because everyone forgets about them and they did no work.

  21. No it tends to cause too much interference. And I paid for the premium implant for streaming HD cranium direct, so I try to steer clear of insane people schizer. But thanks for asking jello. PS: What flavor are you?

  23. Tell me about it… Those freaking AI Swarm guys! Right?!

    The very phrase perpetual motion is a concept imagined by Cromagnon minds to maintain commodities prices in fossil fuel markets. Schmucks right? Pictures? Mister man wants to see pictures? Oh I got pictures Mr. Man. You wanna see some pictures here’s a great link: https://www.google.com/search?q=pictures

    Nobody wants an aerospace engineer to do anything aerospacey just automobili. “Just improve my gasoline burning internal combustion engine driven not quite a flying thing Thingy on wheels.” Some of us are purists, what can I say?

    Regarding your excerpt from page 37 of your “Screwing The Little Guy Guidance” pamphlet on social media disinformation: ” The crazy guys find that the suppression is so seamlessly effective that nobody else will ever talk or write about it.” Hmmm… Me thinks he doth protest too much and to precisely…

    Go to http://vaperpower.com and read it I dare you.

    Go to http://timothyjsipp.com and read it I dare you.

    Go to http://eitherreel.com/projecttio and read it I dare you.

    Either way, I’m a freelance influencer and always for hire, but never for sale.

    Cheers,

    ;-)>

  24. Hey Hooves And Horns
    Thanks for taking the time to do your homework before you went all hatchet-man on my “apparent pyschodynamics” and level of “self-realization” and employability.

    The Einstein Endowed Chair for Immense Underachievers at the USPTO was currently occupied so I satisfied myself with a mastery in apprenticeship instead. Then I began to write. Grab your tinfoil hat cuz baby you going on a crazy train tonight. That’s right, I keep it tight. http://eitherreel.com http://timothyjsipp.com http://soulutionsllc.com

    Let’s just say, Billy, that I know a guy who once stared at a goat a little too long. Wink wink nudge nudge say no more… I’m a Professional Problem Solver. How may I assist you?

    http://soulutionsllc.com

    “I’m gonna go ahead and take “Unemployed Screenwriter for a Thousand, Alex.”

    Would you believe a highly trained, top secret, super intelligent hybrid analyst slash operator code named Tio, assigned to the IATF unit Task Force TIO out of Albuquerque, NM with a top secret mandate to do stuff and things?

    God bless the makers of “Get Smart”

    Actually my bovine brother, I was COIN at S&S for NNSA at SNL & LANL TAD’d from DIA & CIA along time ago in a galaxy far far away. LOL. };-D>

    Don’t be afraid of the future, for if it’s true, than it’s also your past, for it has always been your destiny. Or something sagacious or nefarious, not mutually exclusive.

    OK enjoy your hamster wheel.

    Tio out. ;-)>

  25. Hey there Doctorpat. Uh, ok where to begin? I used the word “Stimulates” not “stipulates” to describe the momentum transfer between the cold ionized plasma, a gas, and a solid piece of iii-v semiconductor mounted in a specialized harness that translates mechanical input into electrical impulses, I believe they’re calling them “transducers” and one they could be used to record the human voice and then we’ll have “Talkies” at the cinema.
    Yes, Solomon tells us in the Proverbs that “Where words are many, sin is not absent.” So I’ll be brief: I didn’t invent solid state electronic fusion, God did, it’s known as the piezoelectric effect, I didn’t invent FLASH, I invented a work-around that simulated FLASH function for corporate and academic online education needs and pushed the curve of evolution (ooh how poetic, bet he’s a weird fantasy romantic LARP type) and provide a lot of people with a lot of new understandings for free, since they stole it. Shame on me for not patenting first while innovating and trying to pay rent; and as for SIRI, I did invent that bitch, but I called her ARIA and gave her away at a DARPA SCORM conference in Memphis in 2005; frictionless bearings have been around since the 1960s, I just have a new take on them with regards to electric vehicles including electric aircraft, same for the brakes and a dozen other things that no one will steal from me, cuz I am AWESOME SAUCE! LOL. Suck it monkeys. ;-)>

  26. Hey Goatboy, baaaaaaaack up a minute. Good boy. Now sit. Roll over. Good boy. I wrote 3 sigfigs not 4. And in case your unit conversion don’t work, I ended in kW, so my 3 sigfig number ends in kilowatts. Know anywhere a guy, or a girl, can buy something kilowatt accurate? Schmuck! For a disinformation specialist working with Paradigm Management for NNSA SS & PS for MIchael Grimler out of SNL you’re just not that good, Oh and the link was scrubbed. So here it is again: http://vaperpower.com/paene-mihi-intellectum-theoria-motus-malesuada-magnam-stuff-and-things/

  28. Time will tell. IMO fusion is interesting for space travel. Here on Earth we have plenty of coal and thorium – more than enough for a hundred years of strong economic growth. So, whether we get break-even fusion in five years or fifty will make little economic difference excepting the industrialization of space.

  29. The place I work has had a couple of job applications from guys (always guys so far) who come in with a resume including their work on perpetual motion/free energy/warp drive.
    We also have some guys who come in with resumes including work on radical improvements for formula 1 cars, or AI self directed robot swarms or something.

    They often seem the same, but as soon as you ask a question on their hot button topic you VERY quickly see which guys are living in a fantasy world and which ones are actually the real deal. The dividing factors are not always what I would have guessed.
    1. Was the project shut down by a shadowy international conspiracy or classified by a government military agency? Actually, both the crazy guys AND the real guys can have stories like this. But with real people there are always news reports and publications (not self published) backing up the story. The crazy guys find that the suppression is so seamlessly effective that nobody else will ever talk or write about it.
    2. Do they have photographs and other documentation that does not look like it was thrown together using stuff you can find around the house over a single bored afternoon? Are we talking focussed photographs that were taken with the lights on in a cleanroom, or at least a tidied workshop, hopefully against a plain dropsheet background? Or a badly lit, out of focus, pile of welded together scrap in what is clearly a messy bedroom. How do you even get an out of focus photo with modern cameras?
    3. Does their description of their work life always include illness, accidents, personal animosity, betrayal by the people they trusted, lawsuits (or even worse “I talked to a lawyer and he said he would help me but he never did”) and a never ending stream of bad luck?

    We have, mostly, avoided hiring the perpetual motion machines. The formula 1 guy is great. And the AI robot swarm guy was great for a while before he was hired away by a major US university.

  31. They cant, because coal plants that cheap will cost a good deal more than that in health costs to the country it is in. Heck, its nearly that bad with the best filter systems money can buy.

  32. Ditto on your comment. Sadly, a lot of people don’t understand physics especially as pertains to fusion. There was a lot of unknowns and scientists and engineers are learning what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the amount of money spent on nuclear reactors has been miniscule for many decades until recently. With more funding means greater diversity of ideas being tried out and see what works and which tech will lead to commercial success.

  34. Agreed; an accelerator driven subcritical assembly just sounds expensive. It doesn’t improve anything. It becomes a source-critical nuclear reactor with same decay heat problem.

  35. I think the information on Helion Energy is outdated. From a recent article in the Seattle Business Times (and from what I have been hearing), they have managed to get funding for the full scale system and are skipping the intermediary prototype. The build of the full scale system is already pretty well along and is supposed to be ready by the end of the year. So they could be the first to achieve break even as early as next year or 2020.
    Also worth mentioning Tokamak Energy in the UK, who are aiming for break even soonish,. Their timeline is a bit ambiguous, but we are talking about 3 years (+ – 2 years) to break even from what I understand.
    There is one new startup that I consider _extremely_ interesting and that is ZAP Energy Inc. They are in the process of spinning of their Sheared Flow Stabilized Z- Pinch from the UW. They have had solid funding from ARPA-E and are one of the few teams to meet all their milestones. They are about a third of the way to break even, maybe closer to half way by now. They are looking for funding right now.
    http://seattlebusinessmag.com/technology/redmond%E2%80%99s-helion-energy-looks-nuclear-fusion-next-big-thing-power-generation

  38. ‘..for a 2500MWt demo plant, they are handling 18MW of decay heat IN THE OFFGAS STREAM (ORNL-4541).’
    Most of the MSR proposals are for about a tenth that size, so 1.8 MW inside a ~ 250 MW thermal system. Terrestrial and Thorcon’s noble gas compressors have to work for seven or four years untouched, but the AP1000 is supposed to get sixty years out of a sealed feed pump that’s working far harder. In any case, it’s all handled by the same passive decay heat route.
    After 2.8 hours, the ORNL breeder is down to 4.9 MW, so about half a megawatt for the newer designs. They’ve given up on breeding fuel, too – or the ones that have started certification have – so all the fluorination and so forth can wait till whenever. The ones that want to start on plutonium, like Moltex, will eventually have to handle spent fuel, but they can pick stuff that’s had thirty years to cool down, and initially, there’s separated plutonium stock in the UK and Japan, and ex-weapons 239Pu in the US.

  39. ‘Meltdown fears for Gen 3 reactors are nonexistent and if you built 10 a year you would get the cost down to $4 billion/GWe pretty quickly.’
    True, but if developing countries can power up at a dollar a watt with coal or gas, they won’t build much nuclear at $4. The developed countries already have more generation capacity than they need, so they won’t junk already built plants, unless the replacement is cheaper than fuel for what they have. Galloping climate change could alter those priorities, but it would be nice to have some tech developed in advance.

  40. Well, as Doctor Pat pointed out, you only need the energy input for fusion because you haven’t got the 0.1 solar masses to do the compression instead. A sub-critical reactor with a particle accelerator would be the fission equivalent of one of these contraptions, but why anyone except a particle physicist would want to build one is beyond my ken.

  41. Sure, but none of that is about whether the reactor will actually… react. There’s basically no question at all that the MSR will achieve criticality and put out power. All the questions have to do with the practical details of keeping it running for years on end without a pipe corroding through. Material science and engineering.

    If only fusion were that far along. At this point the challenge isn’t keeping the reactor running for 10 or 20 years with minimal maintenance. It’s getting it to fuse atoms in the first place. If an experimental fusion reactor put out net power for 60 seconds and then reduced itself to radioactive scrap, that would be viewed as a huge breakthrough.

    And once they manage that, *if they do*, then come all the same problems as fission faces: Making stuff that doesn’t need maintenance for decades while exposed to high neutron fluxes. Only with the added problem of needing to maintain cryogenics and extremely pure plasma in the presence of that neutron flux.

    The problems of fission are engineering. The problems of fusion are physics, and once they solve those, the engineering problems still await.

  42. Wait… why? (“General Fusion will be first… break-even…”)

    Their absolutely teddy-bear lovable steampunk contraption needs to pass a few benchmarks though, don’t you think? Like… demonstrating that they can keep the swirling bath of liquid lead … swirling … fast enough to maintain the critical fusion-vacuole at the center. And then get a plasma started in it. And then compress the b’Jesus out of it.

    As I see it, the main engineering problems come down to “how to get that plasma set up”. I can envision the swirling lead easily enough (I had a job in the 1960s working with huge — 100 ton — pots of molten lead… so I know a think or two how it behaves). In its liquid (and very pure) state, it is VERY well behaved. Just suck it out “at the poles” and squirt it back in tangentially at the equator. It’ll swirl furiously given enough horse behind the pumps.

    Introducing the fusion-gas tho’ would seem to require something “sitting in the malstrom”. And things “sitting in the malstrom” introduce turbulence and eddies. The same goes for “setting it afire”, turning the blob-of-fusion-gas into a plasma, suitable for compression.

    Anyway… milestones.
    I’m not so sure they’ll be first.
    Lots of “first principles” to overcome.

    GoatGuy

  43. I’ve always kind of wondered, “what do such self-possessed crackpots do in real life?” I mean, the employment possibilities are endless.

    Ideally he would have a “safe-around-society” job, that’d give him plenty of free time to reinvent physics, math and astronomy. Barista squeezing coffee grinds? A “career waiter”? Perhaps manning a public facing post office apparatchik job. Not TOO mundane… janitorial is out. Alternately, he could act as the proverbial one-eye’d king in the land of the blind. The Mombasa University Institute of Astrophysics would need “a chair”. Once they acquire an actual working telescope.

    I suppose self-employment is always an option. As long as the reinvention of known physics doesn’t somehow come up (otherwise, such a soul could handily simulate having “a normal grasp” of reality), its highly likely (in the land of the blind, AKA “small business people” … no, not small people!) that some nature of parasitic consulting work could be scratched out. Its amazing, but being a “flat-earther” or a “creationist” doesn’t materially impact most meso-level technical consulting work. By the time Tim-o is 40, he’ll have learned to keep his theories mostly to himself.

    Again… its just interesting to consider what he DOES day-to-day besides confabulate grandiose alternative narratives to various disciplines of established science. Beekeeper? Roadie? Graveyard baker? Health inspector! That’s it!!! Best fit…

    GoatGuy

  50. I like the way that even the use of the english language is strained to incomprehensibility. Chuck in some big words like “stipulates” or “modulus” and who cares what those words actually mean.
    Anyone who takes the rest seriously would just think “stipp.. whatever. Many syllables. Must be sciencey.)

    If you want to waste some time, google his name. You’ll find that not only did he invent (non-nuclear) Fusion, he also invented Flash animation, and he invented SIRI, and he invented frictionless bearings and improved brakes and half a dozen other things. All of which are being suppressed and/or stolen.

  58. Sadly… of late… it seems like more. But maybe its a good sign: Brian’s site is being more widely read, and the ripening fruit is attracting more fruit flies. [b]Goat[/b]Guy

  59. Since we’re trading likes, I too completely agree with you. “Fusion is just a much more complex machine … and will cost much more”. Prescient.

    Thing is … and it isn’t much appreciated, yet still is … is that FUSION has proved to have the one Big Missing Thing that fission easily demonstrated to the earliest researchers: put a pile of uranium and moderator in a big enough heap, and it’ll generate ridiculous amounts of power, all by itself. Fusion doesn’t have that. Farnsworth … some 70 years back, demonstrated small tabletop “fusors” which used vacuum tube-and-pump technology to generate neutrons. Neutrons from fusing deuterium. A lot of neutrons!

    In fact, the same experiments can (have, and are) be(ing) done by well heeled high school Science Fair students. I’ve seen them first-person. Cool stuff. Vacuum pumps, cute little bottles of deuterium lab gas, needle valves. Tubes. Clamps. High voltage DC supplies. Big glass hemispheres.

    But it doesn’t scale. Fission scales. Fission doesn’t work without scaling! Same too I guess for fusion, but it doesn’t want to scale. Make fusion devices larger, use higher currents, higher voltages, hotter temperatures, and that darn plasma likes to squeeze around any and every ‘bottle’ you impose upon it. Not so fission: the rods (or bâhlls, or liquid salts) stay put. Nice rods.

    Your idea of getting the manufacturing cost of conventional fission down to $4 per output watt is good. Timely. The Chinese, in their infinite competitiveness simply note the going price for American-made and European-made nuclear reactors, and undercharge by 20%. Since the Old Dragon is sitting on trillions of dollars in surplus gilt, to soften the price, She goes on to underwrite the funding cost by masking it with a “price per kilowatt hour” rate. 5 cents. Free delivery. They’ll train your toadies how to keep the needles in the green zones.

    There actually aren’t many reasons why nuclear power reactors need to be anywhere near as expensive as they’ve become, excepting for the fact that between the West’s makers, their bankers and the geopolitics of energy-production being cross indexed to the price of coal, oil, natural gas and long term interest rates for megaprojects like hydroelectric dams … and nuclear reactors … the price is “set” not by fundamental economics but by much simpler, mushier financial analysis.

    $5 to $12 per watt is [i]“what the market will bear”[/i] in a longer-term sense. Amortized over the 40 (or more) year life of just about any power production facility, even with gleefully rich retirement investment manager returns (6%/a), EACH dollar of cost-per-watt corresponds to 0.9¢/kWh at 83% plant utilization. Thank you Excel.

    So a plant running $4/watt becomes 3.6¢/kWh for financial service (TVoM/mortgage). 40 years, 6%. Add to that the refueling costs, operational costs, and it can easily double. But note how significant the primary funding is.

    GoatGuy

  63. I think it’s a combination of not too many groups working with it and the primary group working with it being under military contract. Who knows what they’ve achieved, but correct, they won’t be publishing it any time soon. I don’t think it merits conspiratorial notions that they’re way ahead of everyone else. They’re probably achieving some measure of success in the dark, sure.

  65. Ignition is first step. Breakeven is far from “first step” when you’re 50 years into the pursuit of this technology and it remains to be achieved.

  67. I don’t think you have the technical background to understand the difference between what was being done 40 years ago and what was being said 40 years ago. Virtually nothing meaningful in the grand scheme was actually being achieved. The catch 22 about high energy plasma physics is that the further you probe, the more you learn you didn’t know before. We didn’t start with an alphabetized list of problems in 1965 and say “ok let’s get to solving them”. We’ve been discovering new problems and new hurdles as we’ve probed new designs, new reactions, new architectures and new approaches. Every time we go somewhere new, we find new problems.

  68. Completely agree. Most fusion and all fission are just nuclear heat sources that will spin a turbine to make power. The difference is that you can make reliable fission power with 1950s technology and you need 2030s technology for Tokamaks/Stellarators. Fusion is just a much more complex machine and as such will cost much more.

    Meltdown fears for Gen 3+ reactors are nonexistent and if you built 10 a year you would get the cost down to $4 billion/GWe pretty quickly.

    The biggest carbon free competitor to Tokamaks is a AP1000. The best hope for Fusion is for a physics Hail Mary pass. Tri Alpha, LPP, etc.

  71. I’m sorry… since when has your last name become linked to radically upgraded fusion tech? Mmmm… let’s [i]Google[/i] that … ah, hah. Looks like your Helical Universe book is self-referential to Shrair’s Fusion theory. Nice. It must feel good every morning to wake up knowing that you’ve revised the entire theories of cosmology, climate change, magneto-geology and um… relativistic mathematics. Puts a little punch in the morning tea, doesn’t it!

    LOL… GoatGuy

  72. Well, we didn’t have General Fusion’s amazingly steampunk compressorator pincushion 15 years ago, did we? As you say… 10 to 15 years out, and it all changes.

    AGAIN.

    We’ll still have fission, it’ll still mostly be done by the fuel-in-tube “rod” technology, it’ll be that boring, but also that reliable. The whole fission supply line … mining, ore concentration, refining, enriching, fabrication, storage-and-transportation, rods-to-bundles fabrication, timely bundle swapping, spent rod in-situ cool off (few years), and so on will be the prime tech, even though the Economic Investors for any-alternative-to-status-quo want their piece of pie.

    GoatGuy

  74. “Tio”, you might want to renew your facts. Also to those reading this … and my comment … note as with so many similar exaggerations, the “high precision fluffing” that Tim-o invests in this obviously-cut-and-pasted hit piece. 4.345 MW/m² to 4 sigfigs! How about that. I cannot even purchase 4 sigfig electrical capacitors at my most revered e-parts store that deliver 4 sigfigs.

    Some years (perhaps a decade or more?) ago, I wrote up “GoatGuy’s bûllsnot meter list” of unfortunately over-used patent snake-oil rhetorical devices commonly employed by bûllsnot vendors in the Technology world. I’ve lost that write-up, but the nutshell holds a small list:

    SNAKE OIL BANALITIES

    • (1 ) unrealistic precision
    • (2 ) fantastical claims
    • (3 ) government suppression
    • (4 ) simple math, revolutionary applications
    • (5 ) rewrites physics as we know it
    • (6 ) proven by national labs
    • (7 ) delivers essentially limitless power
    • (8 ) using materials found under one’s kitchen sink
    • (9a) but there’s a conspiracy afloat
    • (9b) by Big Oil, Big Nuclear to suppress it.
    • (9c) And anyone can follow the plans and prove it works.

    Usually with a link to a site that repeats the claim(s), and peddles a full report for a few bucks in printing fees. Or a membership for a few hundred bucks a year.

    Anyway. No membership, no linkie.
    Doesn’t make it legit.

    GoatGuy

  75. Again, looks like a lot of fumbling around with little or no results… Been watching all this for 40 years – progress has been incremental at best… I would suspect conspiracy – but you guys aren’t smart enough.

  76. So you generators have been running over 2 years, and it is Trump’s fault…… But Trump has only been in office a year and a half.?.?.? I’m guessing the rest of your rant is just as “factually challenged”.

  80. Refer to ORNL-4541 and ORNL-TM-3832 to see the numerous difficulties of MSR “technology.”

    The online reprocessing and off-gas handling discussions are particularly interesting… They discuss using “fluorinators” and “hydrofluorinators” and extraction of metals from fuel salts into liquid bismuth and extraction columns, etc… All stuff that needs to be leak tight and work forever from day-one because maintenance by meat bags would be impractical.

    Gosh, when I read these papers, which provide foundation to the current MSR “developers” all I see are problems stemming from the fact that this fuel and the fission products are mobile. Shoot, for a 2500MWt demo plant, they are handling 18MW of decay heat IN THE OFFGAS STREAM (ORNL-4541).

    Does anybody with a critical eye for engineering read the pubs? Nope. They just say there is a conspiracy that keeps these machines from being built.

  81. Level 1 certification defined as: the Canadian regulator gave TE an audience.

    The CNSC has completed a Phase 1 VDR of the Terrestrial Energy Inc. (TEI) 400-thermalmegawatt
    integral molten salt reactor (IMSR400). Based on the documentation submitted, CNSC
    staff have concluded that:

    • TEI has demonstrated an understanding of CNSC requirements applicable to the design
    and safety analysis of the IMSR400

    • TEI has demonstrated its intent to comply with CNSC regulatory requirements and
    expectations for NPPs. TEI has demonstrated that it intends to adequately justify the use
    of alternative approaches in meeting design requirements, as articulated in section 11 of
    REGDOC-2.5.2, Design of Reactor Facilities: Nuclear Power Plants, where:
    o the alternative approach would result in an equivalent or superior level of safety;
    or
    o the application of the requirements in REGDOC-2.5.2 would not serve the
    underlying purpose, or is not necessary to achieve the underlying purpose
    • TEI is integrating Fukushima lessons learned into IMSR design provisions; and
    • Additional work is required by TEI to address the findings raised as part of this review,
    including the need to

    Wow, sounds really far along. NOT

  83. Break even is only the first step – Fermi’s team got break even with fission the very first time they put a stack of uranium and graphite together. From break even to a competitive, reliable and affordable power source is still a long way, and fusion hasn’t even reached the first step.

  86. The future of high energy density physics isn’t even Nuclear. It’s Solid State Electronic Fusion driven by a passive mechanically amplified pressure wave (acoustic) amplifier that generates a 4.345 MW/sq meter energy density with a pressure wave of 186dB. That’s 1 million times more powerful than an Atlas 5 rocket launch contained in a bottle the size of a side by side refrigerator. The energy input is about 530 watts of electric power.
    The intense sound waves create several small areas within the reactors resonators that are almost double the energy density of Nuclear Fusion, about 2.4 MW/sq meter. This sound turns the gaseous medium inside the reactors resonators into a cold ionized plasma, about 150 deg F at optimum power output after warming up. Similar heat to an incandescent light bulb.
    This plasma stimulates the bulk modulus in large (160kV/discharge) mono-crystalline piezoelectric (iii-v Aluminum-Nitride) chips with resonant frequencies between about 1.2 and 3.6 megahertz. This system was patents pending since 2013, but the USPTO denied the small defense contractor their patent, meanwhile Lockheed Martin stole the design from the inventor through Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab and accused him of espionage and treason and when that didn’t stick, they told the Securities and Exchange Commission he was a fraud preventing him from getting development funds.
    The inventor, me, Timothy J sipp, http://www.timothyjsipp.com has made all relevant material publicly available for review, including the computer models developed with LANL. Go to http://www.vaperpower.com to read all about how it works, why it doesn’t violate the Laws of Thermodynamics and download the computer software that LANL developed and my model to check my data for yourself.
    Lockheed Martin had Sandia Labs build several reactors over 2 yrs ago. They have been running ever since, producing clean Green electricity for 2 yrs straight without a day of downtime. Each VAPER-ARC Reactor can produce 4GW of electricity and 6MW of heating and cooling via embedded Axial Regenerating Stack Acoustic Refrigeration Cores invented by Dr. Greg Swift of LANL. The Vibrational and Acoustic PiezoElectric Resonator Acoustic Refrigeration Core Reactor is the future of renewable energy for electric power and it already exists.
    Trump, Russia, Mercer, Tillerson and the usual suspects making money from Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power don’t want you to know about it. So why am I not dead if this is true? Cuz I’m one tough SOB and I know where the other bodies are buried. OORAH! Semper Fidelis. Semper Veritus.
    Timothy J. (Tio) Sipp

  88. Neither is there a lot of basic physics to do, though. A little material science, and just getting permission to try it. There’s basically no reason to suppose a molten salt reactor won’t work the first time it’s tried.

  92. It looks to me like General Fusion will be the first to hit break even. Note, if LPP had gotten 1/10th that level of funding I think they’d have been close to a commercial level by now….

  93. I’ll believe the molten salt reactor is any closer to commercialization than any of these fusion machines when I see it. There hasn’t exactly been a lot of concrete progress for them, either.

  95. I’ve noticed that the electrostatic confinement machines based on the Farnsworth fusor layout has gone absolutely dark, since turning to the US navy for funding. I’ve believed for some time it is one of the paradigms more likely to become cost effective.
    I wonder if secrecy is because it’s nearing success, or sucking wind?

  96. Also the MIT team is insufferable.

    Every MIT video: “If it isn’t a D-T tokamak then it isn’t Fusion!”.

    Good fusion joke:

    A tokamak tells a stellarator that it is too complex to make power in the real world.

  97. I am still mystified by General Fusion’s 70% machine. Either 70% size or 70% power or 70% the pistons… none make any sense.

    “Do or Do Not there is no 70% try” – Master Yoda

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