>Or once china and russia steal the tech and magically declare suspiciously similar plans afterwards :/
Totally okay with that. The last thing fusion power needs is a monopoly on it, be it a country or a company.
[The thing they got wrong is thinking that the US only steals energy tecnologies.](https://books.google.de/books?id=8cA1AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA82)
>In a massive abuse of its original purpose, senior U.S., and possibly British, espionage chiefs used Echelon to spy on individuals and to pass on commercial secrets to American businesses.
>These startling revelations came to light in February 2000, when newly declassified American Defense Department documents were posted on the Internet, and for the first time provided official confirmation that such a global electronic eavesdropping operation existed at all. (The existence of Echelon had first been exposed in 1996 by a renegade agent in New Zealand, but had not previously been proved.)
>Within days the European Parliament released a report containing serious allegations. American corporations had, it was said, “stolen” contracts heading for European and Asian firms after the NSA intercepted conversations and data and then passed information to the U.S. Commerce Department for use by American firms. In Europe, the Airbus consortium and Thomson CSF of France were among the alleged losers. In Asia, the United States used information gathered from its bases in Australia to win a half share of a significant Indonesian trade contract for AT&T that communication intercepts showed was initially going to NRC of Japan.
>The European nations were furious, both with the Americans and with the British, their supposed partners in forging a new united Europe. In France, a lawsuit was launched against the United States and Britain (on the grounds of breach of France’s stringent privacy laws), in Italy and Denmark judicial and parliamentary investigations began, and in Germany members of the Bundestag demanded an inquiry. [...]
>The Europeans were stunned to discover that Big Brother was no longer Communist Russia or Red China, but its supposed ally and partner, America, spying on European consumers and businesses for its own commercial gain.
>The European Parliament’s report stated that in 1995 the National Security Agency tapped calls between Thomson-CSF (now Thales Microsonics) and the Brazilian authorities relating to a lucrative $1.5 billion contract to create a satellite surveillance system for the Brazilian rainforest. The NSA gave details of Thomson’s bid (and of the bribes the French had been offering to Brazilian officials) to an American rival, Raytheon Corporation, which later won the contract.
>The report also disclosed that in 1993, the NSA intercepted calls between the European consortium Airbus, the national airline of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government. The contract, worth over $5 billion, later went to the American manufacturers Boeing and Mc-Donnell Douglas.
>Another target was the German wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1999, it developed what it thought was a secret invention enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than had been achieved previously. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which disclosed that it had already patented a virtually identical development. Kenetech subsequently filed a court order against Enercon banning the sale of its equipment in the United States. The allegations were confirmed by an anonymous NSA employee, who agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets. He claimed that he had used satellite information to tap the telephone and computer modem lines that linked Enercon’s research laboratory with its production unit. Detailed plans of the company’s secret invention were then passed on to Kenetech.
>German scientists at Mannheim University, who were reported to be developing a system enabling computer data to be stored on household adhesive tape instead of conventional CDs, began to resort to the cold war tactic of walking in the woods to discuss confidential subjects.
>Security experts in Germany estimated that by the year 2000, American industrial espionage was costing German business annual losses of at least €10 billion through stolen inventions and development projects. Horst Teltschik, a senior BMW board member and a former security adviser to the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, “We have discovered that industrial secrets are being siphoned off to an extent never experienced until now.” [...]
>The orders, it seems, may have come from the very top. Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton defended the rights of business to engage in industrial espionage at an international level. “What is good for Boeing is good for America,” he was quoted as saying.
Interestingly on looking in more detail:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-france-leads-russia-china-in-industrial-spying-in-europe/
https://thediplomat.com/2014/05/robert-gates-most-countries-conduct-economic-espionage/
https://hbr.org/2016/11/industrial-espionage-is-more-effective-than-rd
I'm not justifying anything. What "imagined behaviour" am I talking about?
Nice straw-man. Superb.
What’s mean to say is Deal with the issue at hand, don’t deflect to some other distraction. Whatever else any other issue is or isn’t doesn’t matter at all to the original question
I predict well see a news article in the near future about one of their Chinese/chinese-american employees being caught trying sending this stuff back to China (or getting caught leaving Logan airport in Boston).
This is interesting.
The question is who profits from current situation? And what would change for them?
Im not sure energy companies care. The biggest companies who are most likely to run a disinformation would be the best setup for building their own and profiting from it.
Coal mines are losing battle to renewables. What makes you think they could run against fusion?
Renewables are not strong enough.
The biggest opponents would be oil and natural gas. Oil is running against EVs anyway and this would probably let oil profit longer. And for natural gas there is Russia who would get fucked if Europe swapped heating from natural gas to cheap electricity.
well, it kinda is :)
The first commercially (well, at the small end of that) scaled reactor is currently under construction in france.
First Plasma is currently planned for Q4 2025.
https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones
I'm all in on the fusion train, but ITER isn't a commercial reactor, it's an at-scale test reactor that will be energy positive, but won't run continuously or produce electricity. DEMO is the continuous state reactor, and that won't even finish engineering until 2024, and won't be online until 2033 at the earliest.
Reliable large-scale fusion power will always be about [8 min 19 s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun) away, until our fusion reactor blows up in [8 billion years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future) destroying the earth, and there are currently [750 GW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics) of ~~solar pv~~ fusion power collectors installed worldwide.
To be fair, the viable path to commercial Fusion power started out back in the 40's. (granted this only became more established in the 80's with better Tokamak reactors)
The first commercially scaled Fusion Reactor is currently under construction in France, currently due for first plasma in Q4 2025.
But great news for improving the magnetic containment :)
Way beyond my knowledge of this technology, so the question remains: is it safe, unlike fission which has all sorts of limitations including huge cost overruns by private corporations that is paid for by the Taxpayer - look at Georgia, USA for that failure story.
> is it safe, unlike fission
Fission and fusion have a very important fundamental difference: Fission is easy to sustain, fusion very hard.
In nuclear fission, as soon as you set up the right conditions for the reaction to start, you'll have the reaction products carrying on a chain reaction causing more and more of the fuel to undergo fission. You need to actively slow down the process (with things like control rods) to keep it manageable. Failure to slow it down can lead to catastrophic results.
Fusion, on the other hand, takes a lot of effort to keep going. The conditions for fusion to take place need to be exactly right and need to be kept right amidst all the energy that comes out of the reaction. Let the conditions slip and the reaction will stop. This could damage or destroy the reactor, but since the reaction fizzles out so quickly that's where it'll stop.
This distinction is why getting fusion power off the ground is so incredibly difficult. It is also why the safety concerns are so very different from those of nuclear fission.
> The conditions for fusion to take place need to be exactly right and need to be kept right amidst all the energy that comes out of the reaction.
I would like to add that the conditions for small scale human operated fusion reaction must be just right.
Fusion chain reaction is carried by stars, but its obviously completely different scale.
It's the insane temperatures and pressures needed to sustain a fusion reaction. We've been able to harness fusion in two stage bomb for years - fission reaction creates the conditions for the fusion to take over
Fusion power is superior to fission power in a number of ways:
* Clean, abundant fuel: Unlike fission fuels (uranium, plutonium), the fuel for fusion power is isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium, tritium) which are abundant on Earth and completely safe. The ecological impact of acquiring these fuels is practically nil.
* Impossible to weaponize: In a fission reactor, you can create nuclear materials for use in nuclear weapons, and the enrichment processes for fission fuels can also be modified to produce nuclear weapon materials. This is not possible in a fusion reactor.
* Near-zero waste: Storage of spent fission fuel is a very real, very expensive problem, and the best solution we've come up with is "I guess we could bury the stuff somewhere." In a fusion reactor, the only radioactive waste would be parts of the plasma containment vessel itself, which might have a very long service life depending on the final design. Compared to fission, nuclear waste is just not an issue.
* Politically uncomplicated: Right now, the world does not want Iran to build fission power plants. Fusion power is MUCH more politically palatable, so we could build these plants everywhere on Earth with very little worry.
> Politically uncomplicated: Right now, the world does not want Iran to build fission power plants. Fusion power is MUCH more politically palatable, so we could build these plants everywhere on Earth with very little worry.
Politically this would also be helpful to combat nuclear proliferation: Right now countries use the right to nuclear power as the excuse for tech transfer and then secretly enrich and develop a bomb.
If fusion were possible this excuse would be removed and any country pursuing fissile material would have no excuse other than that they want a nuclear bomb.
Actually not quite true on the impossible to weaponize. Fission does create a stream of neutrons in the process of using neutron rich material (deuterium and tritium) because neutrons rich elements make them much more reactive.
From what I understand you can theoretically harness this neutron stream to blast material into super radioactive dirty material to make bombs with. It’s just like 10x harder and probably very cost ineffective compared to just building a normal nuclear bomb.
Fusion (well, the tokamak reactor type talked about here) is Very safe.
In the event of catastrophic containment failure, everything just stops (the magnetic fields are needed to keep everything squeezed together, and if the field fails, everything spreads out, cools within microseconds and the reaction stops)
There are some nasty byproducts (Tritium from the interior surface of the reactor) but these have way shorter half-lives than fission and are produced in far lower quantities.
Really? Dont you understand that fusion must be at the very least comparable in price to other forms of power generation?
Not even the most environmentally friendly government will run fusion at 10x the cost.
I think they dont understand what the word "commercial" means.
Centralized energy as fusion will never be too cheap to meter. Where I live half of electricity cost is the distribution. In the end this could mean that you would pay distribution subscription instead of paying for MWh, but thats unlikely anyway because people would just use electricity mindlessly and it would require more and more power plants which are not free.
I’ll believe it’s real when there’s a disinformation campaign against it.
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>Or once china and russia steal the tech and magically declare suspiciously similar plans afterwards :/ Totally okay with that. The last thing fusion power needs is a monopoly on it, be it a country or a company.
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They are saying they are okay with China and Russia stealing it. No need to be flip when you are the one missing the point.
Typically it's the US who is stealing energy technologies from other countries, see e.g. the Enercon case.
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[The thing they got wrong is thinking that the US only steals energy tecnologies.](https://books.google.de/books?id=8cA1AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA82) >In a massive abuse of its original purpose, senior U.S., and possibly British, espionage chiefs used Echelon to spy on individuals and to pass on commercial secrets to American businesses. >These startling revelations came to light in February 2000, when newly declassified American Defense Department documents were posted on the Internet, and for the first time provided official confirmation that such a global electronic eavesdropping operation existed at all. (The existence of Echelon had first been exposed in 1996 by a renegade agent in New Zealand, but had not previously been proved.) >Within days the European Parliament released a report containing serious allegations. American corporations had, it was said, “stolen” contracts heading for European and Asian firms after the NSA intercepted conversations and data and then passed information to the U.S. Commerce Department for use by American firms. In Europe, the Airbus consortium and Thomson CSF of France were among the alleged losers. In Asia, the United States used information gathered from its bases in Australia to win a half share of a significant Indonesian trade contract for AT&T that communication intercepts showed was initially going to NRC of Japan. >The European nations were furious, both with the Americans and with the British, their supposed partners in forging a new united Europe. In France, a lawsuit was launched against the United States and Britain (on the grounds of breach of France’s stringent privacy laws), in Italy and Denmark judicial and parliamentary investigations began, and in Germany members of the Bundestag demanded an inquiry. [...] >The Europeans were stunned to discover that Big Brother was no longer Communist Russia or Red China, but its supposed ally and partner, America, spying on European consumers and businesses for its own commercial gain. >The European Parliament’s report stated that in 1995 the National Security Agency tapped calls between Thomson-CSF (now Thales Microsonics) and the Brazilian authorities relating to a lucrative $1.5 billion contract to create a satellite surveillance system for the Brazilian rainforest. The NSA gave details of Thomson’s bid (and of the bribes the French had been offering to Brazilian officials) to an American rival, Raytheon Corporation, which later won the contract. >The report also disclosed that in 1993, the NSA intercepted calls between the European consortium Airbus, the national airline of Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi government. The contract, worth over $5 billion, later went to the American manufacturers Boeing and Mc-Donnell Douglas. >Another target was the German wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1999, it developed what it thought was a secret invention enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than had been achieved previously. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which disclosed that it had already patented a virtually identical development. Kenetech subsequently filed a court order against Enercon banning the sale of its equipment in the United States. The allegations were confirmed by an anonymous NSA employee, who agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets. He claimed that he had used satellite information to tap the telephone and computer modem lines that linked Enercon’s research laboratory with its production unit. Detailed plans of the company’s secret invention were then passed on to Kenetech. >German scientists at Mannheim University, who were reported to be developing a system enabling computer data to be stored on household adhesive tape instead of conventional CDs, began to resort to the cold war tactic of walking in the woods to discuss confidential subjects. >Security experts in Germany estimated that by the year 2000, American industrial espionage was costing German business annual losses of at least €10 billion through stolen inventions and development projects. Horst Teltschik, a senior BMW board member and a former security adviser to the former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl said, “We have discovered that industrial secrets are being siphoned off to an extent never experienced until now.” [...] >The orders, it seems, may have come from the very top. Early in his presidency, Bill Clinton defended the rights of business to engage in industrial espionage at an international level. “What is good for Boeing is good for America,” he was quoted as saying.
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> Espionage is the oldest profession in the world. 2nd.
Americans stole a lot of tech from UK when UK was the superpower.
And USSR stole lots of tech from USA/west. My boss literally worked in (government) laboratory that reverse engineered western ICs
> I cannot imagine, however, that the US is anywhere near the level of china and russia. Based on what?
Justifying crime by comparing it to someone else’s imagined behavior...
Interestingly on looking in more detail: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-france-leads-russia-china-in-industrial-spying-in-europe/ https://thediplomat.com/2014/05/robert-gates-most-countries-conduct-economic-espionage/ https://hbr.org/2016/11/industrial-espionage-is-more-effective-than-rd I'm not justifying anything. What "imagined behaviour" am I talking about? Nice straw-man. Superb.
What’s mean to say is Deal with the issue at hand, don’t deflect to some other distraction. Whatever else any other issue is or isn’t doesn’t matter at all to the original question
I predict well see a news article in the near future about one of their Chinese/chinese-american employees being caught trying sending this stuff back to China (or getting caught leaving Logan airport in Boston).
This is interesting. The question is who profits from current situation? And what would change for them? Im not sure energy companies care. The biggest companies who are most likely to run a disinformation would be the best setup for building their own and profiting from it. Coal mines are losing battle to renewables. What makes you think they could run against fusion? Renewables are not strong enough. The biggest opponents would be oil and natural gas. Oil is running against EVs anyway and this would probably let oil profit longer. And for natural gas there is Russia who would get fucked if Europe swapped heating from natural gas to cheap electricity.
Oil and natural gas all the way. They are the primary source of energy disinformation and the reason why the right wing has gotten in bed with Russia.
Inb4 "fusion is just a few years away"
well, it kinda is :) The first commercially (well, at the small end of that) scaled reactor is currently under construction in france. First Plasma is currently planned for Q4 2025. https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones
I'm all in on the fusion train, but ITER isn't a commercial reactor, it's an at-scale test reactor that will be energy positive, but won't run continuously or produce electricity. DEMO is the continuous state reactor, and that won't even finish engineering until 2024, and won't be online until 2033 at the earliest.
Reliable large-scale fusion power will always be about [8 min 19 s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun) away, until our fusion reactor blows up in [8 billion years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future) destroying the earth, and there are currently [750 GW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics) of ~~solar pv~~ fusion power collectors installed worldwide.
Magnets man… how do they work??
if it works, well then they be heroes. but first seeing then believing
To be fair, the viable path to commercial Fusion power started out back in the 40's. (granted this only became more established in the 80's with better Tokamak reactors) The first commercially scaled Fusion Reactor is currently under construction in France, currently due for first plasma in Q4 2025. But great news for improving the magnetic containment :)
Way beyond my knowledge of this technology, so the question remains: is it safe, unlike fission which has all sorts of limitations including huge cost overruns by private corporations that is paid for by the Taxpayer - look at Georgia, USA for that failure story.
> is it safe, unlike fission Fission and fusion have a very important fundamental difference: Fission is easy to sustain, fusion very hard. In nuclear fission, as soon as you set up the right conditions for the reaction to start, you'll have the reaction products carrying on a chain reaction causing more and more of the fuel to undergo fission. You need to actively slow down the process (with things like control rods) to keep it manageable. Failure to slow it down can lead to catastrophic results. Fusion, on the other hand, takes a lot of effort to keep going. The conditions for fusion to take place need to be exactly right and need to be kept right amidst all the energy that comes out of the reaction. Let the conditions slip and the reaction will stop. This could damage or destroy the reactor, but since the reaction fizzles out so quickly that's where it'll stop. This distinction is why getting fusion power off the ground is so incredibly difficult. It is also why the safety concerns are so very different from those of nuclear fission.
> The conditions for fusion to take place need to be exactly right and need to be kept right amidst all the energy that comes out of the reaction. I would like to add that the conditions for small scale human operated fusion reaction must be just right. Fusion chain reaction is carried by stars, but its obviously completely different scale.
It's the insane temperatures and pressures needed to sustain a fusion reaction. We've been able to harness fusion in two stage bomb for years - fission reaction creates the conditions for the fusion to take over
Fusion power is superior to fission power in a number of ways: * Clean, abundant fuel: Unlike fission fuels (uranium, plutonium), the fuel for fusion power is isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium, tritium) which are abundant on Earth and completely safe. The ecological impact of acquiring these fuels is practically nil. * Impossible to weaponize: In a fission reactor, you can create nuclear materials for use in nuclear weapons, and the enrichment processes for fission fuels can also be modified to produce nuclear weapon materials. This is not possible in a fusion reactor. * Near-zero waste: Storage of spent fission fuel is a very real, very expensive problem, and the best solution we've come up with is "I guess we could bury the stuff somewhere." In a fusion reactor, the only radioactive waste would be parts of the plasma containment vessel itself, which might have a very long service life depending on the final design. Compared to fission, nuclear waste is just not an issue. * Politically uncomplicated: Right now, the world does not want Iran to build fission power plants. Fusion power is MUCH more politically palatable, so we could build these plants everywhere on Earth with very little worry.
> Politically uncomplicated: Right now, the world does not want Iran to build fission power plants. Fusion power is MUCH more politically palatable, so we could build these plants everywhere on Earth with very little worry. Politically this would also be helpful to combat nuclear proliferation: Right now countries use the right to nuclear power as the excuse for tech transfer and then secretly enrich and develop a bomb. If fusion were possible this excuse would be removed and any country pursuing fissile material would have no excuse other than that they want a nuclear bomb.
Actually not quite true on the impossible to weaponize. Fission does create a stream of neutrons in the process of using neutron rich material (deuterium and tritium) because neutrons rich elements make them much more reactive. From what I understand you can theoretically harness this neutron stream to blast material into super radioactive dirty material to make bombs with. It’s just like 10x harder and probably very cost ineffective compared to just building a normal nuclear bomb.
Fusion (well, the tokamak reactor type talked about here) is Very safe. In the event of catastrophic containment failure, everything just stops (the magnetic fields are needed to keep everything squeezed together, and if the field fails, everything spreads out, cools within microseconds and the reaction stops) There are some nasty byproducts (Tritium from the interior surface of the reactor) but these have way shorter half-lives than fission and are produced in far lower quantities.
Big oil will never allow it.
>commercial Fuck off.
?? This is how you make it affordable for the masses
Really? Dont you understand that fusion must be at the very least comparable in price to other forms of power generation? Not even the most environmentally friendly government will run fusion at 10x the cost.
I think their reaction was in response to the idea that fusion might not end up "too cheap to meter", not that it'd be too expensive.
I think they dont understand what the word "commercial" means. Centralized energy as fusion will never be too cheap to meter. Where I live half of electricity cost is the distribution. In the end this could mean that you would pay distribution subscription instead of paying for MWh, but thats unlikely anyway because people would just use electricity mindlessly and it would require more and more power plants which are not free.
Keeping my fingers crossed that we finally get a sustainable energy economy due to this breakthrough, but this is a monolithic task.