Fusion - A New Hope?

A private company has just gotten a $50 million cash infusion for its fusion experiments.

A private company in Foothill Ranch that is reportedly experimenting with nuclear fusion power has raised $50 million in funding, according to a report from Socaltech.com.

Little more information was available Monday about the experiments at the company, Tri-Alpha Energy, or the funding itself. In the past, Socaltech reported, Tri-Alpha has received funding from Goldman Sachs, Venrock, Vulcan Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

Tri-Alpha's experiments, based on the work of UC Irvine plasma physics professor Norman Rostoker, have been rumored for years, but the company has not revealed the nature of its experiments to the public.

Solcaltech calls it a "stealth developer of advanced plasma fusion technology.

Well not exactly stealth. I reported on the work of Rostoker and Monkton in additions to something I first posted in November of 2007. Still, the fact that they are either getting new money or a release of promised money is good news. The more different ideas we explore on the way to practical fusion the sooner we will reach that goal. Because this is an experimental field. And as Einstein once said, "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

Tri-Alpha Energy, Polywell Fusion, and Dense Plasma Focus are all working on the holy grail of fusion physics. The combining of Hydrogen (a proton when ionized) and Boron 11 which is a fusion reaction that gives off very few neutrons and whose reaction product is high energy (relatively) charged particles which would allow converting the resultant energy directly to electricity. This greatly lowers the cost of a power plant. Consider that for a fission (currently Uranium) power plant 80% of the cost is in the steam plant which is used to convert the heat output of the reactor into electricity or shaft horsepower in the case of a ship.

One other point. Consider the millions being spent on these fusion experiments with the billions being spent on ITER which is currently in big financial trouble. The reported fix is to steal money from small research projects in other disciplines.

Of course I like Polywell Fusion. You can learn the basics of fusion energy by reading Principles of Fusion Energy: An Introduction to Fusion Energy for Students of Science and Engineering

Polywell is a little more complicated. You can learn more about Polywell and its potential at: Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

And the best part about Polywell? We Will Know In Two Years or less.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Something Is Missing

In Secular Decline I discussed how we can get out of our current financial troubles. I talked about Kondratieff Waves and what drives economic cycles. Innovation.

Electronic Component News makes a similar point.

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then another 10 million to spark demand over the next decade. That's 15 million to 17 million new jobs. In the 1990s, the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs (a rate of 2.2 million per year), so we know it can be done. Between 2000 and the end of 2007 (the beginning of the current recession), however, the economy created new jobs at a rate of 900,000 a year, so we know it isn't doing it now. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel—critical mass, basic scientific research.

Pretty depressing news.

What we have been doing is eating our seed corn. New ideas have a profitable lifetime. And with information diffusion as fast as it is these days the lifetime is short. Which means we need more discoveries per year just to stay in one place.

...since the 1990s, labs dedicated to pure research—to the pursuit of scientific discovery—have seen funding slowly decline and their mission shift from open-ended problem solving to short-term commercial targets, from pure discovery to applied research. Bell Labs had 30,000 employees as recently as 2001; today (owned by Alcatel-Lucent ALU) it has 1,000. That's symbolic and symptomatic of the broken link in the U.S. business model. With upstream invention and discovery drying up, downstream, industry-creating innovation is being reduced to a trickle.

It's easy to ascribe current job losses in the U.S. to the deep recession or outsourcing. Both are to blame, but neither is at the root of the larger problem, which is lack of new, high-quality job creation. We are in the throes of the fourth recession since 1981. We have been outsourcing jobs for decades, but we have always bounced back with a new industry—a blockbuster industry. Discovery drives innovation, innovation drives productivity, productivity drives economic growth. But this time it's different, and whenever the current recession mercifully ends, the U.S. economy will not respond with the same job-creating vigor we have come to expect.

So what is our esteemed President doing to counter this difficulty? Is he spending the majority of stimulus money on stimulating research. Of course not. It is going into stimulating his cronies. It is the kind of thinking you get when you have lawyers running the government. Zero sum thinking. I win you lose. And of course we got that in spades from our President with the "We won" statement.

Maybe Mr. Obama needs to read The Myths of Innovation. He might learn that innovation is a matter of putting a lot of pieces together and that the more pieces you have to work with the greater are the options for profit. Take one idea from biotechnology, two from computer science and mathematics, and three from management theory and you get a profitable business. Which says that research on a narrow front is not going to do it.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Main Street Savvy

I have a friend with main street savvy.

He thinks we are in for 5 to 7 years of treading water.

One problem is that we have automated away manufacturing jobs. Making stuff no longer requires near as many workers for a given amount of output.

This is similar to what happened to agriculture in the 20s.

At this point there is no “big new thing” to take up the slack. Biotech is not ready. Green energy in most cases is a net loss (green energy is higher cost than coal). Fusion if it was ready tomorrow would take 5 to 10 years to make an economic impact. And fusion is not ready for roll out tomorrow.

If the research goes well the Bussard Fusion Reactor (BFR) might be ready in 5 years. Projects like ITER are not only not ready (30 years more to go) but the energy is expected to cost 5X to 10X current sources.

The nice thing about the BFR project is that it can be done for about $200 million and will take 5 years. If the answer is positive energy costs will be from 1/2 to 1/10th current prices.

What needs to be done is a lot more research on a lot of things. Research is labor intensive. However, it can’t absorb a lot of labor. Say we started a 100,000 new research projects (there aren’t that many good ideas to fund) that would only absorb 500,000 people. Of that number 100,000 would have to be highly trained. We don’t have that many highly trained people not already involved in research.

We will pull out of this. It is going to take time.

Magic Crystals

It looks like the USA has a shortage of Magic Crystals because of under investment in basic science.

The US "is a second-class, if not a third-class, citizen" in terms of investment in the synthesis of high-temperature superconductors, heavy-fermion materials, thin films, single crystals, ultrapure semiconductors, and other specialized samples for condensed-matter experiments, says Cornell University's Séamus Davis. US scientists "have to go cap in hand to the people who lead the development of new materials in these research fields." Davis gets samples for his spectroscopic imaging scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) studies from colleagues in Japan, Canada, and the UK. "From the pure perspective of science," he says, "things are great. It's from the parochial perspective of how much belongs to the US that you may think there is a problem."

With sample synthesis on the decline in the US over the past two decades or so, increasingly the US condensed-matter community does think there is a problem. Art Ramirez, director of device physics research at Bell Labs, notes that Bell, IBM, and a few other companies led the field after World War II. But around 1986, when the first observation of high-temperature superconductivity, by Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller in Switzerland, set off a rash of activity around the globe, "industrial investment in basic research began its rapid decline," Ramirez says. "And no one has picked up the slack."

The situation is reaching crisis proportions, says Jim Eisenstein of Caltech. The US, he adds, has been the leader in uncovering the physics of two-dimensional electron systems, and "the great majority of that success involved samples grown by one person at Bell Labs. It's unstable to have only one individual at one institution making ultrahigh-purity semiconductor crystals—like everyone else, he will someday retire." Worse, he says, what if Alcatel—which last year took over Bell's parent company (see PHYSICS TODAY, February 2007, page 26)—pulls the plug?

A smattering of crystal growers work in national labs and universities across the US, but in recent years, concern in the condensed-matter community has been rising about the availability of samples, a future generation of sample growers, and competitiveness in the discovery and exploitation of new materials. A National Academy of Sciences report exploring these and related issues is due out next year.

The thing is you never know where the next breakthrough is coming from. If you have no place in your army for privates the generals will wind up without any one to command. We need to support the artisans as much as we support the big idea people. Rewards and honors and better labs.

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962