I was surprised that the fusion researchers reported that they hit and possibly exceeded break-even. I didn’t think it would happen, and I still wonder if it’s a mistake, or something pops up in the research studies next year or so that shows an unaccounted energy source somewhere.
In fact, if I were a better man, I wouldn’t have bet some asshole in a bar in Wichita, $500 that this result is spurious. But I did make that bet, not because I don’t want the best for the men and women in that research program. The people who work in fusion have taken on a difficult assignment that I decided against in my own career. And I was recruited for the Princeton Tokamak program back when I was just a grommet undergrad physicist student at Huntah Collitch in CUNY. There was something depressing about the whole affair. The physicists there had this long line of dusty bottles on a shelf above one of the main control booths. One bottle was labeled 10% of energy break-even, the next was 25% of energy break-even, the next was 50%, 75%, 90%, 95%, 98%, 99% and finally, break-even. And each bottle was some kind of cheap champagne, though I think the “break even” bottle may have actually been a bottle of Moet y Chandon, the same kind of champagne I got my advisor when I finally got passed my defense. So at least someone in Princeton administration had confidence that this Tokamak team would pay their worth. The rest were undoubtedly funded with folding money, and physicists don’t make fat stacks now and they didn’t make fat stacks back then either.
To the man, woman and the ferrets that ran the cleaning brush pilot lines through the feed control tubes, the Tokamak was the best chance we had at fusion as a country, even though it was Russian technology. Was it Russian? I forget, not the point of this. My point is that a physicist who takes a career in fusion is (or at least was) the kind of physicist who had no hopes of moving the needle and just wanted to have a reliable job around people who make him or her happy.
Your note about the artificial intelligence thing, that makes sense, and this is the very first that I’ve heard about it. Had I known that, I wouldn’t have made that bet in Wichita. Artificial Intelligence truly is foundational for doing this kind of work. My own work now is ion separation through laminar flows. I do know why they would need AI to stabilize the plasma, and how that could completely change the fusion equation. Yes, plasmas are fluids, and yes they can be controlled to the kind of relatively low Reynolds numbers that would probably be needed to fuse helium and tritium or whatever it is that they do these days. I know from my own work that it just doesn’t work without at least a first-order approximation on the flow velocity, flow cross section, applied voltage, current draw, etc.. And my actual fluids are far more stable than a plasma, so yes, finding the sweet spot to keep the plasma stable enough for continuous fusion reactions would be tough, and it’s a job for a computer to respond with “feeling” and thus have a handle on the stability of the system, able to turn five or six knobs at a time.
Fusion succeeded? It must have succeeded because we had some help from the robots this time, it was a job too complex for us mere humans. But I have two years before I have to pay off that bet, and between then and now, maybe someone did find some unaccounted energy, or maybe like the Pons and Fleishmann results, perhaps nobody will be able to replicate these results.
I’m not even sure if he will even remember the bet. I had put a good number of tequilas into my constitution, and he had apparently matched mine own. Who am I kidding? That fucking asshole was a low-energy physicist, they never forget a damned thing. They spend half of their day in a clean room taking radiation measurements to detect neutrinos and weak-reactions. If ever there was a physicist who would remember a $500 bet while toe-up on Milagro and plastic cups filled with moldy water from an ancient plastic Igloo cooler in the corner of the bar, it would be a low-energy physicist. He was one of the rare low-energy physicists who didn’t work in academia, he had some kind of defense research contractor gig that he couldn’t discuss due to his contract, but it isn’t rocket surgery to assume that his work is with neutrino detection for military communication, same as Pirelli figured out a few decades ago. If they can neutrino communications figured out, they will have a way to communicate with submarines from a single broadcast center, beamed directly through the center of the Earth if necessary. A Neutrino communication could travel through the Moon like it is a $3 piñata at the Mexican Dollar Store. It would be pretty neat and probably add to our nuclear safety, not just to keep submarines from going Crimson Tide, but also to detect rogue nuclear production, which would be a free side-benefit of the military applications. And maybe by the time our grandkids have grandkids, there will be no more nuclear weapons on our planet, and anyone who decides to violate the NPT by building a secret nuclear reactor, will be detected as easily as a high school sophomore quivering under a bush, while hiding from a police helicopter with infra-red sights was sent by the neighbors to get them to stop lighting off bottle rockets in the middle of the night on a night sufficiently close to July Fourth, that nobody would notice, but apparently there was a shortage of weed or whiskey or Pabst Blue Ribbon in Denver back in those days, and everyone was on edge.
I digress. The point here is that maybe they didn’t fuck up and maybe they actually hit and exceeded energy break-even.
Now what?
We can do one of two things:
- We can stop working on renewable energy, grid storage, cleantech, nuclear non-proliferation, grid stability, grid infrastructure defense, and employee-ownership in the energy industry,
- Or we can continue to work on renewable energy, grid storage, cleantech, nuclear non-proliferation, grid stability, grid infrastructure defense, and employee-ownership in the energy industry.
We have no idea what is in front of us with fusion energy. It might change the nature of transportation and energy. With free unlimited energy, we wouldn’t need oil, or coal, or fission, or grid renewables. All we would need is the miracle of unlimited free energy; a world where unlimited energy destroys poverty, class, hatred, anger, wars and confusion.
Or it might lock us into a future where we owe our souls to the company store.
I am sufficiently more concerned about the latter, that the slim benefits of the former are not sufficient enticement.