Inside America’s largest magnetic fusion facility and the hunt for limitless energy

1. 😒the energy source of the future…and always will be

2. Nuclear fusion reactor research is often overhyped and the presentations tend to focus on the dreams of the future results rather than about how far away they are from a commercially practical demonstration power plant. The experimental efforts began in the 1950s. Tens-of-billions of dollars have spent on the efforts, at dozens of experimental facilities around the globe. Tokamak type experiments are the most common. The vast majority of the experiments don't even employ fusion fuels, as is the case with the experiments at this DIII-D machine. Increasingly the pitches employ climate change anxiety as a tool to push for the funding of these various technologies. In the case of the privately funded endeavors the pitches tend to be aimed at attracting potential investors. Those who work in the field, and their fans, continue to assume that we have 20-30 years to turn this 'Titanic' around with their favorite nuclear fusion technology. They have masterfully excluded the following warnings from their consciousness. I encourage readers to search for the following article titles.

   IPCC report: ‘now or never’ if world is to stave off climate disaster (TheGuardian)

   UN chief: World has less than 2 years to avoid 'runaway climate change' (TheHill)
   * This statement was made 5 years ago.

   The video talks of achieving clean and unlimited amounts of energy. This is highly deceptive. It depends upon a fuel of uncommon hydrogen isotopes, one of them being radioactive tritium which now has a market value of approximately $30,000 per gram and is sourced from only a few special fission power reactors. The claim that such plants would come without carbon emissions is deceptive as is the claim there would be no radioactive waste. The 14.1 MeV fusion neutrons will activate some of the structural materials in the reactor so that they become radioactive, resulting in a repair and decommissioning problem.

   The 'breakthrough' announcement at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) was mentioned in this presentation. The use of the term 'ignition' is highly deceptive in this case. The nuclear fusion reaction only lasted for approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second and then approximately 96% of the extremely expensive fuel was blasted away from the microscopic reaction center before it had a chance to react. The fuel was contained within a nearly perfect sphere made from diamond and its been estimated the cost of the destroyed target apparatus was greater than $100,000. The resulting fusion energy was around enough to boil two liters of water. The experiment took around a week to set up. Very few of the shots they perform come anywhere close to reproducing that announced experiment. The lab uses a deceptive measure of the input energy. The fact was that over 100 times more energy was used to generate the laser pulse than the amount of fusion energy that was measured during that extremely brief period of time. The operators of the lab have become masters at obscuring the primary purpose of the NIF machine. Since the very beginning it has primarily been funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool. It's been estimated that approximately $11 billion of federal funds have been expended on it. The announced experiment was expected to happen by 2012 but they never got close to the primary goal then.

   The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in France, experimental complex was mentioned in this video. It is decades behind its original plans and many billions of dollars over budget. This experimental facility will likely not start operating before the year 2030. It might take at least a decade after that before a commercially practical nuclear fusion power plant can be demonstrated. It would likely take more than a decade after that before that demonstration power plant could be scaled up to a point where it could significantly displace our continuing reliance upon fossil fuel and nuclear fission power plants.

   This video production failed to include critical assessments of these technologies that dazzle the journalists that are provided tours of such facilities. I suspect that many of the investors rely far to heavily upon reviewers who are fans of the technology rather than on the critics that explain some of the issues I've just pointed out.

   I urge readers to also search for the Wikipedia article titled 'List of fusion experiments' and the following article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

   ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy

3. $1.48 billion for fusion
   $108 billion for infrastructure
   $800 billion for military
   $870 billion for debt interest payments

   Fusion doesn't even register as an error bar in government spending.

4. fusion energy will be a game changer for AI. AI will be a game changer for fusion energy

5. Best energy solution in two words: Hamster Power!

6. Weewu's presale is the investment opportunity of the year.

7. Join the Weewu presale wave and ride it to riches.

8. Weewu's presale is where dreams of wealth become reality.

9. Missed Bitcoin? Weewu's presale is your second chance.

10. Weewu's presale is creating buzz and billionaires.

11. Weewu's presale is the talk of the crypto town for a reason.

12. Imagine if all the money spent on this had been put into solar, wind, and storage. We would already be getting all the energy from those projects. Power "plants" of all kinds take a lot of capital to build and don't generate any revenue until they are completely done. They are also centralized in a way that creates a single point of failure that is so important to the grid that it can bring down the entire grid. Even the wires connecting the plat to the grid are a point of failure. Distributed generation and storage is the correct way to design a grid.

13. Yes, AI requires limitless energy. Humanity is not a priority.

Comments are closed.