🌟 Star Power: What the stunning nuclear-fusion breakthrough really means
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The Essay
🌟 What the stunning nuclear-fusion breakthrough really means
It was a hopeful-yet-confident expectation for moments like this one that sparked me to begin Faster, Please! A brief news roundup:
“Fusion energy breakthrough by US scientists boosts clean power hopes” - FT
“US Says Scientists Make Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion Energy” - Bloomberg
“US scientists expected to announce long-awaited nuclear fusion breakthrough” - CNN
“U.S. to announce fusion energy ‘breakthrough’” - The Washington Post
What seems to have happened is this: By bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, scientists at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were able to generate more energy from the reaction than it consumed. “The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 percent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed,” according to the Financial Times, which broke the story.
That piece included this quote from Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist whose book The Star Builders documents the effort to achieve an energy dream that goes back a century: “If this is confirmed, we are witnessing a moment of history. Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal.”
Turrell has been featured in this newsletter, and I have podcasted with him. He seems pretty level-headed and he’s excited, I’m excited. But there’s a long way to go to achieve the dream of 1960s futurists of a country — and maybe the Moon and Mars, too — dotted by fusion reactors. As Turrell has explained to me, what happened at Lawrence Livermore was “scientific gain” — a certain amount of energy goes in and as much or more comes back out. After that, there’s another important mark to hit, “wall-plug” energy gain, which Turrell described this way:
I call it the energy it takes to keep the lights on in the facility. So if you’ve got this experimental reactor, it’s the energy to charge up the capacitor banks, a type of battery. It’s the energy to keep the diagnostics running. It’s the energy to keep the lights on. It’s all of that peripheral machinery that you need to do a fusion experiment that isn’t just about the reactor, the experiment, the scientific bit itself, and that requires a gain, not of 100 percent — so one unit of energy out for energy in — but a gain that’s appreciably more than that. It depends on the reactor, but I think what people would really like to achieve is at least 30 times energy out for energy in. Now, that sounds like a long way away.
Lawrence Livermore is using a technique called “inertial confinement,” as illustrated below.
Another technique is “magnetic confinement” fusion which is used by Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a leading private-sector startup. CFS employs powerful magnetic fields through the use of high-temperature superconductors to contain the plasma, a melange of swirling protons and electrons. As Turrell describes the general process: “The thing about charged particles is they interact with magnetic fields, and in magnetic confinement fusion essentially what’s created is a magnetic trap of fields that these charged particles get stuck on, and so when they’re doing fusion, they stick around rather than flinging off away into the walls of the experiment, at least in principle.”
In a 5QQ chat back in February, Turrell outlined the steps that needed to happen before nuclear-fusion energy was flowing into the grid:
“Demonstrating reliable and repeatable net energy gain at scale, with a yield of at least thirty times energy out for energy in. For magnetic fusion, this means running for time periods of at least hours continuously. For laser fusion, it means running 5 or 10 ’shots’ per second.”
“Developing a method of ‘breeding’ one of the key ingredients for fusion, tritium (a special type of hydrogen), from lithium by placing lithium close to the fusion reactions.”
“Mastering the materials science needed to ensure that reactor components can withstand the highest temperatures in the solar system through many years of use.”
“Turning the energy released by fusion reactions into electricity.”
“Rolling fusion reactors out on an industrial scale at reasonable cost.”
But here’s the thing: If the results are confirmed — and I’m guessing it’s a pretty sure thing with the Biden White House already pushing Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm out there to make an announcement Tuesday billed as the unveiling of “a major scientific breakthrough” — then the technology will likely attract even more talent and funding. As it is, nuclear fusion companies have raised nearly $3 billion over the past year, according to the Fusion Industry Association, bringing total private sector investment to date to almost $5 billion.
I’m not a nuclear engineer or physicist. And I don’t know for sure if all the above steps can be reached and then turned into an economical energy source. (Here’s a skeptical take.) Maybe we’ll have to rely on nuclear-fission, solar-wind, and geothermal (where there are also some amazing advances happening) to power our future. But let’s hope this is the beginning of something amazing: a safe source of cheap, clean energy that’s always available — and takes up no more space than a traditional reactor. (Turrell: “We’re talking about a few square kilometers to power several million homes, which for a wind farm would probably take something equivalent to the land area of Washington DC for about three million homes.”) And as a bonus, a fusion reactor would be a great candidate to power a multiplanetary civilization as it spreads throughout the Solar System and beyond.
And for all those reasons, some anti-growth environmentalists are going to hate this news. They are counting on the inability to generate affordable clean power as a constraint on economic growth and consumption. Nuclear fusion is full of bugs, for them, not amazing features.
I don’t think that sort of view will cut any ice with the Biden administration, the GOP, or most Americans who have relearned from the pandemic and inflation-surge what a supply-constrained world looks like. Let’s light this nuclear fusion candle!
Micro Reads
▶ Productivity and Wages: What Was the Productivity-Wage Link in the Digital Revolution of the Past, and What Might Occur in the AI Revolution of the Future? - Edward Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw, Grant E. Hayes & James M. Jedras, NBER | The skill-biased technical change of the last three decades reflects the “computer revolution.” Or, the technological change driving the wedge between the pay of the highly skilled and the less skilled has been the computer revolution, which took time to alter the workplace, as firms changed workflows and products. The new revolution is the AI revolution, and researchers have just begun to show that it is having similar skill-biased effects as past technologies. But over the last 150 years, the extent of skill-biased technical change has itself grown with new technologies, and thus AI is replacing the tasks of those who are more educated than did past revolutions. However, even for the middle-skilled whose routine tasks are disappearing, some will not lose their jobs, but will instead be expected to use more social or interpersonal skills in working with other employees and customers. And lastly, the type of AI now in use in some firms is basic ANI; the AGI that is most feared, is many years away to true adoption.
▶ ChatGPT is less wowed by itself than we are - John Thornhill, FT | Enthusiastic users have been predicting ChatGPT will revolutionise content creation, software production, digital assistants and search engines and may even transform the digital substructure of human knowledge. One tweeted that ChatGPT’s significance was comparable to the splitting of the atom. Such wild rhetoric makes some computer scientists rip their hair out, as they argue that ChatGPT is nothing more than a sophisticated machine-learning system that may be incredibly good at pattern recognition and replication but exhibits no glimmerings of intelligence. Besides, ChatGPT is not even new technology. It is a tweaked version of GPT-3, a so-called large language, or foundation, model released by OpenAI in 2020, that has been optimised for dialogue with human guidance and opened up to more users.
▶ Exclusive satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway - Mark Harris, MIT Tech Review | The Line: a “civilizational revolution” that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters wide. Within its mirrored, car-free walls, residents would be whisked around in underground trains and electric air taxis. Satellite images of the $500 billion project obtained exclusively by MIT Technology Review show that the Line’s vast linear building site is already taking shape, running as straight as an arrow across the deserts and through the mountains of northern Saudi Arabia. The site, tens of meters deep in places, is teeming with many hundreds of construction vehicles and likely thousands of workers, themselves housed in sprawling bases nearby.
▶ We Need an Abundance Agenda - Will Rinehart, Discourse | After the pandemic hit the U.S., new, groundbreaking vaccines were developed, tested and out to the public in less than a year. So, why does it take a decade or more to do the same with cancer drugs? Even today, nearly three years since the pandemic began, the number of physicians needed to treat our population remains in short supply. As Robert Orr uncovered in careful research, the federal government deliberately crafted and implemented a plan to limit the supply of doctors. Policymakers, the commentariat and others in positions of power are waking up to the fact that scarcity is a serious public policy problem. While some of that scarcity comes from technological limitations which will require innovation, a good deal of it is self-inflicted. What is needed is a reversal of the policies that created these scarcity trends. What is needed is an agenda based on abundance.
▶ AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance - Matthew Hutson, SciAm | A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode is bringing humanity one step closer to that vision, according to a new study. Researchers say the system—from the research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company)—might one day assist experienced coders, but probably cannot replace them. “It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” says Armando Solar-Lezama, head of the computer assisted programming group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
▶ The Obvious Answer to Homelessness — and why everyone’s ignoring it - Jerusalem Demsas, The Atlantic | Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness. In their book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the University of Washington professor Gregg Colburn and the data scientist Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate that “the homelessness crisis in coastal cities cannot be explained by disproportionate levels of drug use, mental illness, or poverty.” Rather, the most relevant factors in the homelessness crisis are rent prices and vacancy rates.
▶ 2023 Global Outlook - BlackRock Investment Institute | We’ve entered into a new world order. This is, in our view, the most fraught global environment since World War Two – a full break from the post-Cold War era. We see geopolitical cooperation and globalization evolving into a fragmented world with competing blocs. That comes at the cost of economic efficiency. Sourcing more locally may be costlier for firms, and we could also see fresh mismatches in supply and demand as resources are reallocated.
