The Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion
slate.com/technology/2021/12/nuclear-fusion-c...
slate.comPosted Dec 9, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC
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Sadly fusion isn't even close to an energy net positive right now and it's not clear how to get there. That itself is fine, going from an idea to a finished product takes time.
The problem is lying about being close to commercially viable fusion when barely any project can go energy positive in the reaction alone. And this doesn't even account for the massive energy draw of secondary systems (cooling, etc) or the issue of effectively harvesting that energy.
Funding is important and necessary but the fusion problem can't be immediately solved by throwing money at it, especially when these companies are more interested in the investment money than solving the problem. Blatant lying about the progress and time to commercial viability makes this pretty obvious.
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it's not clear how to get there.
No, it is clear, for magnetic confinement anyway. The maths gives us two ways: A larger reactor, which is what ITER is doing, or stronger magnets, which is what SPARC is doing. There are bad actors in any fields but I think the serious cies like CFS or GF are pretty honest about the progress and challenges to be solved.
edit: Ironically I find government organisations and university labs tend to be far more dishonests about the state of things than the private entreprises.
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Pretty sure if you graph the Q-factor achieved over time it's following a similar trend to Moore's Law.
So, going off this trend, we should expect a proper self-sustaining commercial reactor to be done ~8-10 years after ITER.
That's assuming ITER achieves a Q-factor ~0.1 (true Q-factor, of total energy in, total electricity out)
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Pretty sure if you graph the Q-factor achieved over time it's following a similar trend to Moore's Law.
Pretty sure if you graph that it's been flat for 25 years.
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How is fusion even remotely comparable to working, commercial tech?
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Wow, i'm five, and this is deep.
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Yes, of course the private fusion startups are pure fluffery.
The only ones who should be investing in this are governments who have multi-decade horizons. You never hear the government-funded outfits making outlandish claims about commercialization in a few years.
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Brought to you buy a luddite author who makes money selling anti-fusion books and write against space exploration.
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I found this hilarious:
"That’s the one real, concrete success of the fusion startups that you can point to: not extracting energy from seawater, but extracting money from speculators."
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there's a lot of money slushing around in the energy industry nowadays, everyone wants to invest into this market. at the same time, the energy industry is exceedingly hard to get in and even harder to stay successful in. if you're good with words and people, you can fairly easily divorce fools from their money. realistically, though, the money follows the regulations, it rarely goes the other way.
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Are fusion proponents being manipulated by hucksters? Does the recent surge in fusion-related startups point to real hope of commercial fusion power in the next decade, or are there financial shenanigans going on? We see a lot of press releases essentially repeated verbatim in news reports, and this article does a good job bringing up the questions that anyone should ask when they hear claims of progress in fusion: Has this company made similar promises in the past? Do they have a prototype that would be economically viable if they iron out the flaws (or at least a plan to build a prototype)?
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The following submission statement was provided by u/johnpseudo:
Are fusion proponents being manipulated by hucksters? Does the recent surge in fusion-related startups point to real hope of commercial fusion power in the next decade, or are there financial shenanigans going on? We see a lot of press releases essentially repeated verbatim in news reports, and this article does a good job bringing up the questions that anyone should ask when they hear claims of progress in fusion: Has this company made similar promises in the past? Do they have a prototype that would be economically viable if they iron out the flaws (or at least a plan to build a prototype)?
Please reply to OP's comment here: r/Futurology/comments/rcleon/the_theranos_trial_shows_why_we_should_be/hnvbnjb/
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Always be skeptical of everything. That goes without saying but this doesn't mean that fusion should be abandoned. The benefits of fusion would be so great that it's pursuit justified a high financial risk.
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Why would the benefits be "so great"?
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Yes, the 19 year old who grifted stupid old billionaires out of billions is exactly the same as the industry around fusion research which has received less funding since 1970 than it takes to build one aircraft carrier.
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Liquid Fluoride Molten Salt reactors using thorium should be the future..
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The article is complete nonsense. The author should be ashamed. So many false claims by an author who is just trying to promote his book. If the article is any indication, the book is not worth the paper it is printed on. I know that the author never bothered to even try to contact the companies he wrote about (but that seems to be standard practice for "journalism" these days). Mistakes:
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Theranos is ONE BIOTECH company that failed. Nothing to do with fusion. Most fusion companies have a history of peer reviewed papers to back up their claims. None of them have IPOs yet and their investors should be quite well informed about the risks and actual state of the research.
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The claim that there is no hardware is also false. Most of the companies have had at least one, if not several integrated prototypes. Some going back to research at major universities. E.g. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has heritage in Alcator C- Mod. ZAP has had 3 prototypes so far (ZAP, ZAP-HD and FuZE) and they are working on their 4th (FuZE-Q). Helion is currently operating their 6th prototype!
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The passage about Helion claiming a useful reactor in 3 years in 2015 is also false. The company said back then: We are trying to raise 35 million and it takes 3 years to build a machine that will proof our concept. They never said that they would have a full scale power plant in 2018. The funding was simply not there. They finally got the funding in 2019 and Trenta, which has been breaking records and has demonstrated all the major aspects of their design has been operational for almost 2 years. Polaris is currently under development and that will take 3 years to demonstrate net electricity output. But oh well...
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Also, Tokamak Energy never made such a claim either. I have been following them for years. Their timeline originally aimed for Q(sci)>1 in 2025. Covid has played a number on everyone so that one likely slipped a little. But they never said 2021 for energy production.
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General Fusion also has lacked the funding to build a fully integrated machine.
There is a difference between "we need money and then we can do this" and "we are going to do this", but that subtlety is seemingly completely lost on that guy.
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Theranos is ONE BIOTECH company that failed.
Theranos is an example of how long a company can coast on hype with no real plan for viability, just like all these fusion companies.
The claim that there is no hardware is also false.
That wasn't a claim the author made. The author said "not a single one of the nuclear fusion “startups” has produced a prototype machine that they propose to base their business upon". Do you think these prototypes are ones that these companies will base their businesses on? Or are the prototypes still research-focused?
The passage about Helion claiming a useful reactor in 3 years in 2015 is also false
Again, the author said "Helion Energy’s business plan of building “a useful reactor in the next three years” way back in 2015". It's accurate to say that Helion was saying in 2015 that it hoped to build a breakeven reactor in three years. Even now, Polaris is being sold as a demonstration reactor, not a prototype.
The analogy with Theranos is really pretty helpful. Just because a company is getting a lot of money doesn't mean there's any real hope of a profitable business. A lot of investors are so eager to be first that they'll just follow the hype.
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Theranos is an example of how long a company can coast on hype with no real plan for viability, just like all these fusion companies.
That is nonsense. These fusion companies have nothing in common with Theranos.
That wasn't a claim the author made. The author said "not a single one of the nuclear fusion “startups” has produced a prototype machine that they propose to base their business upon". Do you think these prototypes are ones that these companies will base their businesses on? Or are the prototypes still research-focused?
What does that even mean? A prototype is a prototype and not a final machine.
Again, the author said "Helion Energy’s business plan of building “a useful reactor in the next three years” way back in 2015". You do know that this is not how the author is putting it though, right? You are trying to make what he is doing look better, when it is very clear that he is just lying, or at least did not do an ounce of valid research.
It's accurate to say that Helion was saying in 2015 that it hoped to build a breakeven reactor in three years.
No, it is not! What Helion said was and I will repeat myself: "We are trying to raise 35 million USD for a proof of concept machine. It will take us 3 years to do that." That is what they said. In contrast to the author, I actually did my research. Plus I have been following them long enough to remember that very well. So there!
Even now, Polaris is being sold as a demonstration reactor, not a prototype.
Fusion generators are not reactors, but lets put that aside. The Helion website is very clear about what Polaris will do and what it is intended for. "We expect that Polaris will be able to demonstrate the production a small amount of net electricity by 2024. We will continue to iterate our device quickly so we can offer commercial fusion power for the grid as soon as possible."
The analogy with Theranos is really pretty helpful. You do know that there are hundreds of successful biotech startups out there for every Theranos. Theranos just got a lot of hype because Holmes was a media favorite.
Putting that aside, none of the fusion startups is a public company. In Helion's case, the big investors have been with the company for a long time, in at least some cases from the very beginning. They have been on the board, they have very in depth knowledge of what the company is doing and what risks are involved with their investments.
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The two are completely unrelated but we should be suspicious of any "break though" where they refuse to let you see how it works.
But we do know for a fact that fossil fuels is making the planet uninhabitable for humans.
I think a big fossil fuel talking point for the past 10 years has been that there's still a big leap in technology we need to make before we can transition off of fossil fuels. But we really don't. It's an issue of quickly implementing the technologies we already have. We don't need fusion, "next-gen nuclear", solid state batteries, self-driving cars, or really anything else to cut our emissions by 50% over the next 10 years, 90% over the next 20 years.
It's also an issue of funding. A shockingly small amount has ever been invested in fusion. Those "10 more years" statements need to be taken in their context, which is that *with proper funding* we could probably have sustainable fusion within 10 years. And that has been true for 50 years now.
The article states that some of these startups have been getting money since 1998. They've gotten billions. How much more would be proper funding?
Tens of billions. It will take tens of billions to build the reactors when the technology is proven, so the only way we’re going to do that is by spending the money.
I would argue that fusion has gotten more funding than it deserved. It's been known since at least the 1980s that DT fusion (which most approaches use) has fundamental generic problems that render it unlikely to be competitive with fission, never mind the technologies that are now beating fission.
http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf
In addition, at least one of the fusion companies has gotten hundreds of millions of dollars even though they were told 20+ years ago their approach wouldn't work for at least half a dozen reasons.
If your idea of "proper funding" is "orders of magnitude higher than the other zero-carbon technologies", then yes. I agree that we could have plenty of fusion if we spent enough money. But why would you want fusion if it costs 10-100x as much as solar/wind/nuclear/geothermal/hydro?
I would rather we invested in nuclear, but that’s me.
It's the absolute claims, without any backing, that are the problem:
This is all supported by nothing at all. They can't show us anything to support their incredible claims. If they want people to believe this stuff, show us the new tech and how it will work. Otherwise, it might as well be a magic Theranos box.
This should get you started:
Breakthroughs Enabling Thermonuclear Fusion Energy
An Introduction to Inertial Confinement Fusion
The High-Field Path to Practical Fusion Energy
Google is your friend. Append 'filetype:pdf' to your searches.
What I want to see is a basic smell test. Along the lines of:
You never see that because this is all a game of fusion researchers doing fun physics experiments, not a real solution to our near-term energy needs.
Well, just to get you started:
Fusion energy economics
Commercialization of fusion energy
There's a lot more, obviously.
That's really just not true. Every single venture backed fusion research project will say almost exactly the same thing, which is that they need X funding in Y time to create Z output. The wacky physics experiments are mostly PR. Of course they're hoping to sell the idea of a big breakthrough because that's what funding gloms on to. It's pretty well understood now what it will take to create sustainable fusion. The only piece missing is the funding.
Yeah, but the story here is that the funding matters a great deal. The 2015 estimate doubtlessly depended on the assumption of raising more capital. I have worked in venture capital - timing is almost *always* a question of funding. There is very little in venture investing that isn't dependent on the funding timetable being correct.
Why GF and CFS (and some others, I dont know them all)' roadmaps are more believable is that their planned reactors are the size of a large truck, instead of a small village like ITER. This lends itself better to quick iteration because you can build parts with readily available machinery and assemble them on a human scale. CF's plant is set to begin construction soon next year which gives them a whole 3 year to build it, and that sounds feasible.
They have a unique approach but I do like their solution to the neutron escape problem, which really helps long-term commercial viability.
ITER is so exceptionally terrible that one can be an order of magnitude better (metric: volumetric power density) and still be completely uncompetitive.
The two are so unrelated as for any comparison to be misleading. Fusion is known to be theoretically possible. What Theranos claimed to do violated the physics of fluid dynamics. It's hardly comparable in that way.