Betting on fusion

37 points by dkirtley 10 years ago | 11 comments

Tossrock 10 years ago |

I'm kind of astonished to hear someone paid money for the e-cat. I'd always thought of Rossi as a crank. Hopefully I was wrong and we get a revolutionary new energy source, but I'm still not convinced.

General Fusion is still awesome though, and it's great to see they're making progress. I wish I were a rich VC because I would have bet on them 6 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8np70/fusion_dream...

ChuckMcM 10 years ago | |

That is because he is a crank. Anyone who actually has a working device would simply sell electricity at below market rates to earn the money to continue the development. And any system which cannot generate enough energy to pay for its cost of operation and generate at least some profit, is not a working system.

That said, since there is a whole of confusion about just what is going on around LENR type systems, it feels a lot like Sarnoff and Tesla arguing about Radio to me.

marcosdumay 10 years ago | | |

Rossi is a crank, not arguing about that.

But have you ever calculated how expensive is to get any amount of heat-generated electricity into the grid? Even if one had a completely free source of heat, any generator that is not at least on the tens of MW isn't economicaly viable. And for tens of MW, one needs tens of millions of dollars.

drjesusphd 10 years ago |

> Scientists are learning much from all this tinkering, but experts say these big projects—if they work—are at best decades away from commercialization.

I don't understand what the rush is. Are we really that shortsighted that we can't wait a few decades or even centuries for the ultimate energy cure-all? We continue to enthusiastically support a space program, even though we know the practical payoff is a long way away. Why can't we have the same attitude about fusion? Traditional nuclear and associated advanced concepts can carry us in the medium term, albeit with some proliferation risk.

It's a shame that the smaller projects got cut from government funding, and I'm glad venture capitalists are stepping in and contributing. But it seems that they are outright dismissing of mainstream academic scientists, and believe that nothing useful can be learned from the scientific community. This seems hubristic, and will just lead to wasted resources and good will.

Plasma physicists have tried many things over the decades and have gotten good at pointing out failure modes. There is no good reason why there can't be more collaboration between academia and industry in this space.

If it's secret, it's not science.

graycat 10 years ago |

At least they are trying to do some real innovation -- powerful, valuable, important, useful, difficult to duplicate or equal, lots of intellectual property and trade secrets, etc.

Much better than yet another social, local, mobile, sharing, membership, app.

Terrific! Go for it, guys.

Uh, guys, original research in applied physics is not the only good direction for especially powerful innovations.

There is also information technology from original research in applied mathematics (theorem and proof kind) for, yes, powerful, valuable, important, useful, difficult to duplicate or equal, lots of intellectual property and trade secrets, etc.