Completely agree with this. This is throwing money at an interesting problem with an incredibly low outcome of success.
Given the amount of public dollars already put into this without success and the amount of money they are going to have too continually pour into this to make it successful it seems like a serious hail mary. Even if they do have the brightest minds working on it. I wish them the greatest success - we need this.
To your point it's an incredibly privileged investing position to be in and to be honest - he can take a lot of the gains he has already had in relatively uninteresting companies that have been successful and hope to something truly remarkable for humanity.
> This is throwing money at an interesting problem with an incredibly low outcome of success.
But an incredibly high return if successful. Nuclear fission (edit... accidentally wrote fusion here), if we can figure it out, is potentially the golden ticket to reducing our carbon footprint. Unlike geothermal energy, it can be done anywhere. Unlike wind or solar, it can be done at any time. It doesn't have the safety issues associated with fusion, nor does it generate waste products nearly as hard to deal with.
Right now, carbon emissions breakdown in the US are broken down by:
Transportation - 29%
Electricity production - 25%
Industry - 23%
Commercial and Residential - 13%
Agriculture - 10%
Land use and forestry - 12%
By moving to fusion, you can all but eliminate fossil fuel usage in the first two (and largest) categories. You can knock a large chunk out of the next two categories, where much of the emissions is due to burning fossil fuels for energy (heating, etc.). You'll still have emissions from agriculture and land use, but you can clamp down on most emissions in a big way.
If you can figure out fusion and get it working on an industrial scale level on par with other forms of electricity production (which is a big if), then you'll have achieved a monumental technological leap and you'll make a lot of money while at it.
Listen I'm all for these kinds of investments. Its very high risk and potentially a high reward. I think likely the reward will be some technology development in the process that helps something else but not in the direction they currently are going. Thats just the way things typically shake out. Especially grandiose plans like this.
They need to prove that the research works to actually produce net electricity - which requires a scientific breakthrough. Next after a research breakthrough - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial product. During that process they need to make this a commercially viable economically viable product that can compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace. They will need to get through serious regulatory requirements. And remember that they need to make this commercially viable to produce electricity at a very low cost - its super competitive at baseload power cost range.
By the time this comes to market the energy landscape will be completely different. It is already moving incredibly quickly.
Like I've said on other post - we need these kinds of moonshots but let's not have them distract against the other important work of deploying already commercially ready technology into the market.
Helion might not work out like they hope but if it does, it'll use aneutronic fuel, producing only 6% of its energy as neutron radiation. That's low enough that they don't need a heat cycle, which gives them a shot at a pretty low cost per kWh. I think they've estimated four cents, which is pretty good for scalable, dispatchable power without batteries.
The UK recently announced a regulatory regime for fusion, with significantly lighter requirements than fission since safety and proliferation issues are much less troublesome. That would be even more the case for aneutronic fusion. Possibly the US would be silly enough to get in the way but many other countries certainly wouldn't, including China.
> - they need to make this a product -- then a commercial product. During that process they need to make this a commercially viable economically viable product that can compete against other forms of energy in the marketplace.
They’re in a really good position here because they actually don’t. Being a no-carbon power source puts them in an almost new market. The government can (should) regulate carbon fuel away, and pour money into this in a non-market way to tip scales. Energy is heavily regulated but also heavily government funded.
Actually not quite - it still needs to be economically attractive in order for it to be a viable product in an energy marketplace that is already deploying @ scale zero carbon generation.
Externalities are actually starting to get baked in (depending on jurisdiction) or are essentially getting mandated in by policy (i.e. no coal in-state via political process). For most of North America coal isn't financially viable unless it gets political beneficial treatment - its been losing to natural gas for awhile now.
To be fair to your comment though air pollution relating to climate warming has been treated as a tragedy of the commons problem for ever.
Even better: much of the "industry" emissions are from producing fuel for the "transportation" category. Oil refineries are the biggest emissions generators in the US manufacturing sector, and some of the largest consumers of electricity in the process, to the point that many refineries have their own power plants on site. If we had fusion power and electric cars, much of those "industry" emissions go away too.
Fusion is what they are doing here. Fission we have already figured out and have been generating power from for decades.
Fusion does not have the runaway reaction safety issues that fission has.
Also, what you're describing is what we've known since we fairly easily harnessed fusion to make a hydrogen bomb.
Controlling the reaction rate so it doesn't explode is metastable with fission, and nearly impossible with fusion. This solution is basically just using tiny explosions.
As others have mentioned, you have your terms backwards. We already have nuclear fission, and its only problem is political FUD[1]. I can't imagine that the fossil fuel industry's FUD machine will spare fusion energy.
[1]: Nuclear is one of the safest kinds of energy we have even including every absurd disaster. We already know how to deal with the waste, and the unit cost of managing nuclear waste is very low (the up-front costs are high, but we're already committed to those costs).
It might be not unreasonably unsafe, compared to e.g. coal (which will be phased out). But as an investment it is even riskier than FRC fusion. The ratepayers of South Carolina were made to invest $30B in a fission project that will, in the end, produce exactly zero watt-hours of energy. But might burn even more money, first.
Yes, large fission projects probably aren’t the way to go these days—I’d rather see investment in Small Nuclear Reactor technology. More importantly though, considering the alternative (failing to mitigate climate change) the risk-adjusted cost of nuclear is minuscule. Moreover, I don’t understand how it is “riskier” than fusion, which still hasn’t been deployed anywhere in any form?
You are not factoring in opportunity cost: that $30B would buy a hell of a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, with perfect reliability. Displacing a megawatt of carbon-generated power now is worth a lot more than displacing that same megawatt in 10 years, because 10 megawatt-years worth of carbon did not, thereby, go into the atmosphere.
> You are not factoring in opportunity cost: that $30B would buy a hell of a lot of solar panels and wind turbines, with perfect reliability.
What do you mean "with perfect reliability"? Do you mean it can buy the panels and turbines and batteries? How much reliable energy capacity does $30B buy?
> Displacing a megawatt of carbon-generated power now is worth a lot more than displacing that same megawatt in 10 years, because 10 megawatt-years worth of carbon did not, thereby, go into the atmosphere.
Yes, there are different return-on-investment curves and the short term obviously favors things which can be deployed quickly. The question is which pays off the best for the relevant timescales. Also, we should invest in both--now isn't the time to pinch pennies nor to put all of our eggs in one basket.
Why d'you think? Helion has been super successful with their demos so far. The timelines are optimistic but I don't see why you'd expect the technology itself to fail with, say, >80% probability.
You misread my comment. 80% was in reference to a probability of failure. I think any chance of success 1:4 or greater can't exactly be called “incredibly low [probability] of success”, and even 1:4 seems unduly pessimistic.
Given the amount of public dollars already put into this without success and the amount of money they are going to have too continually pour into this to make it successful it seems like a serious hail mary. Even if they do have the brightest minds working on it. I wish them the greatest success - we need this.
To your point it's an incredibly privileged investing position to be in and to be honest - he can take a lot of the gains he has already had in relatively uninteresting companies that have been successful and hope to something truly remarkable for humanity.