Basically they are used to turn Lithium (which is abundent) into Tritium (which isnt). It is very clever, creating a virtually closed loop system. The long term hope is to eventually make tritium from deuterium (not so easy though), in which case the World truely has unlimited power available for virtually forever.

Basically the World has decided to bet on the Tokamak. That’s because it has the best track record to date. But that is also a function of limited money. Fusion researchers have had to concentrate on the safest (not necessarily the best) concept.

Personally I wish the purse strings had been opened a bit and funded 2 or 3 designs to the pre-production level. The Tokamak design would definately have been one and there is at least one other contender (and probably 2) that should be funded as well.

… If the experiments turn out positive (expected since they are a confirmation of previous experiments) look for a full court press (possibly to the level of Manhattanization) to get this technology to market. Expected costs are less than 1/2 of today’s cost for thermal/electrical energy declining to 1/10th of today’s power costs. If the costs of energy are fixed by this type of reactor then the cost of extracting oil declines. i.e. we may in 20 or 30 years find oil costs back in the $10 to $30 a bbl range. The technology is so disruptive that it is impossible to predict the major ramifications let alone the minor ones.

“For All Mankind“, IEC Fusion Technology (19 APril 2008)

Just one possibility: using the neutrons produced from a Deuterium fueled reactor to make all kinds of new fission reactors possible. Another: using the reactors as heat generators making mining for oil and its conversion to fuel much less expensive.

Another possibility: the reactors do not work according to their current theory of operation but the density increase made possible by this new method of confinement (65,000) may make thermal fusion feasible (as opposed to beam fusion which current theories posit).

I do not expect a difficult transition in the liquid fuel market. Except for the Arabian oil producers. Heh.

Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really) — YouTube Video

The FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) is easy. Don’t believe the nonsense about finance being difficult. The average meteorological model is light years more complex than anything in FIRE. Look I built the most complex insurance model in the World (finished it in 1998 and its still not been beat). And I know it is NOTHING compared to a climate model, or an aerodynamic model, let alone QED models, or, as a friend of mine did, a model of an electrons path through crystals.

Real wealth creation is hard work. Hard intellectually, hard emotionally, hard physically (depending on industry of course). It is easier to move imaginary money around and take your cut along the way. And pretend you are making something.

I’ve aways called it the ‘Gentlemans economy’, never get you hands dirty, just trade in money and chat with your ‘masters of the universe’ friends at your club about how clever you are. It is interesting to note that the masters of this have been mostly the Anglo-Saxon countries (plus the Swiss of course), a left over vestage of the English class system I’ve always thought.

It is complete tosh of course, wealth is science, creativity and making things. The thing, of course, can be an object or a computer program or a drug or a new medical procedure or a …. But at its heart it improves quality and/or productivity.

Read (or watch) the Hithchhikers Guide to Universe, when the protagonists end up on a a planet just colonised by the most useless third of the population that got rid of them (management consultants,et al). They invent money using leaves (= the Fed, etc) but no one can do anything useful. Thats the modern US, UK, (yes) Australian , etc, economies.

The kick was in the HHGTTU… that was Earth.
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Fabius Maximus replies: I agree that the shift of the US economy from manufacturing to finance was unwise. This is part of a greater delusion, that we have an intellectual advantage over Asia. We can retain the high-value operations in the US — product development, marketing, finance — and outsource the low-value parts — mining, manufacturing — to others. A “platform company” is the ideal, in this delusional view. The next decade or so might be an unpleasant awakening.

The polywell plasma confinement concept is interesting and has great promise, though the World has gone for the Tokamak design (Russian design) in the ITER, which has also shown great promise as a design.

Part of this has been the paltry funding, until very recently, of fusion. I would prefer a couple, or even 3 designs being turned into pre-production models, 1 or even 2 might fail but 1 would come though. You could even see a 2 stage process, with 1 design being the interim one followed by a later, more efficient design after more R&D.

I personally think the ITER will be success (even a great success), but I’d feel more confident if at least a couple of designs were being trialed.

Given the minute sums of money being spent, compared to:
Advertising of cosmetics,
A Virginia class sub fleet,
A B-2 fleet of planes you can never use, except where there is no possible oppostition.
The vapourware F-35 (the most expensive computer program in the world).
And of course the Afghanisatan/Iraq wars.

Then unfortunately you have to question the collective intelligence of humanity. Because if we don’t crack fusion, and soon, then the human race’s long term future is living in caves picking nits off each other.

Note that the US just cut its commitment to ITER a month or so ago, so what does that day? Fortunately Russians, Chinese or the EU (excluding the UK) will fill in the gap.

Government sponsored R&D is one possible approach. Let the government develop the Internet and eventually blogs will spread. And so forth.

Yet the the American approach to R&D has been private. Hence the heavy emphasis on Intellectual Property, as an incentive for private R&D. One problem - and IMHO there are many others - with private R&D is that it is constrained to those subjects which appear likely to yield present returns. Long term, speculative, far fetched type R&D - that which could yield fusion or what not type radical new solutions - are not viable.

The other type of non-government R&D is the John Robb style of open source development - modeled after Linux and other open source projects. This , too, is antithetical to current Intellectual Property.
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Fabius Maximus replies: How much of US research is funded by for-profit entities? There is a definitional problem here, do we include research on new soaps and floor polish?

I’ll guess it is probably less than half, perhaps less than one quarter. The private scientist making breakthoughs is not a myth, but a tiny part of the whole. National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, DARPA, university funding, foundation funding — not only is this a big slice of the pie, it is most of the “pure” research. The Navy funds the polywell.
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Quoting from Wikipedia: “Similarly, with some exceptions (e.g. biotechnology) government provides the bulk of the funds for basic scientific research. In commercial research and development, all but the most research-oriented corporations focus more heavily on near-term commercialisation possibilities than “blue-sky” ideas or technologies (such as nuclear fusion).”