Tokamak[1] (and other magnetic confinement) reactors seem much more promising and have seen slow but non-zero improvements for decades[2]. Some reactors like JT-60 have come close to being energy positive[3] but are not yet self sustaining. Large ongoing projects like like ITER[4] have the potential to break past limits and provide invaluable data. There are also advances in plasma physics which improve our ability to run computer simulations[5] of Tokamaks and suggest new hypotheses for how they can be improved[6].
If Google were serious about fusion, they would invest in this kind of mainstream research. Unfortunately, that's too big for them to own end-to-end; the most they could do would be to participate in the international process. But that wouldn't result in proprietary, patent-able technology, so they instead they put resources behind fringe science that they can control. This is reminiscent of the Lockheed-Martin CFR[7], which also chose an approach which was extremely unlikely to result in a scientific breakthrough but which did yield a few patents for Lockheed-Martin.
Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling justifies a certain degree of cynicism.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60
[5]: http://www.psfc.mit.edu/research/topics/plasma-fusion-theory...
[6]: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-stabilizes-fusion-p...
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Compact_Fusion...
They do.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/29/18201220/nuclear-fusion-e...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/news/a27...
Just because they also look into other alternatives doesn't mean they are ignoring the more mainstream research. They are approaching it from every angle, because as pointed out, any discovery here can help in other places too.
> Frankly, behavior which is only one step removed from straight-up patent trolling
Google, for as big as it is and as many patents as it owns, has never once used its patent portfolio offensively, so assuming that they want to patent-troll is extremely unfair.
[0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/predicting-properties-of-m...
This is the biggest bs I have ever heard, since an molecular physics simulator that is beat by a neural network can only just be unoptimized as hell.
> Machine learning speeds modeling of experiments aimed at capturing fusion energy on Earth
Nitpick: I don't believe the JT-60 has actually gone energy positive. They achieved a point where they would be power positive if they had been able to use a 1:1 ratio of D-T fuel instead of their D-D fuel but handling D-T fuel is very complicated and the JT-60 facility doesn't have those capabilities.
Beyond big tickets like fusion, I would direct you to things like initial drug investigations (almost all done in University labs with government grants), or rocket development (almost all done under government grants). In all of these cases the initial development of things that are unlikely to work out are done on public funds, and once it looks like it is just down to the details (still a big undertaking) then private funding steps in. The pattern here is almost always: socialize costs/risks, privatize gains.
1. Google, with all of the subject matter expertise they can avail themselves of, is completely wasting their money on this research that has no hope of success.
2. It'd be a bad thing for the world if we got cold fusion, but Google made some money off of it.
Is that right?
3. Google will fail to achieve cold fusion but possibly get some patents which will make them money, but do little to advance overall scientific progress towards economic fusion.
This isn't actually as silly as it sounds. There's a certain culture around self-absorbed futurism alive and kicking within these companies that produces weird and nonsensical projects.
One only has to look at Ray Kurzweil who turned from genuine inventor into some sort of nutrition supplement cyber guru and apparently still is employed by Google. There's also a lot of general silliness in the 'smart city' space, or cryogenics and lifespan enhancement. What all of those projects usually have in common is that they predominantly sound like something out of science fiction novels that the people would read who go on and found tech companies.
I am aware that cold fusion experiments are both much cheaper, and if successful, considerably safer and cheaper than hot fusion. Yet, there is no plausible mechanism for fusion to occur at room temperature. For two protons (hydrogen ions) to fuse, they must be brought to within 10e-15 m of one another. This requires overcoming the Coulomb repulsion between the two positively charged protons. This in turn requires a great deal of energy, roughly 6 KeV even once quantum tunneling is taken into effect. This corresponds to velocities of roughly 10e6 m/s, or roughly 0.5% the speed of light. This is is called the Gamow energy or the Gamow peak[2]. In hot fusion, this is accomplished by heating a gas to something like 10e7 K, at which point the average energy of any given proton in the plasma is roughly 6 KeV. Not coincidentally, this is also roughly the interior temperature of stars. It has been shown time and again that fusion does occur in a tokamak reactor... just not quite fast enough to overcome the cost of creating and containing the plasma.
At room temperature, the fraction of protons traveling at 0.5% of the speed of light is zero for all intents and purposes. Thus, spontaneous does not normally occur at room temperature, which we can all agree on. For cold fusion to proceed, there needs to be some other mechanism capable of making up this difference, either by somehow accelerating protons to an extremely high velocity, or otherwise encouraging them to fuse, perhaps by lowering the Coulomb barrier by some unknown mechanism. For the Fleischmann–Pons experiment (the original "cold fusion" experiment in the 1980s) this was hypothesized to be achieved by the crystal structure of palladium[3]. However, after the failure to replicate the original experiment, this hypotheses appears to have been falsified. In fact, no experiment has ever shown a measurable rate of fusion occurring at low temperatures.
And yet, there is the precedent of the Gamow factor. The classical potential for the Coloumb barrier is 3.4 MeV. Therefore, in a purely classical model, it is literally impossible to get two protons to fuse unless they collide at close to the speed of light. Yet Gamow showed that fusion could occur, with some probability, at much lower energies, thanks to a well known phenomenon called quantum tunneling. Why could there not be some other way taking this further? Furthermore, there is the precedent with fission. In the 1930's, many notable scientists were fission could ever be used as a power source. They were aware that fission could be effected by alpha particle bombardment, but this did not seem "energy positive." Sound familiar? And yet, when Hahn and Meitner[5] discovered spontaneous nuclear fission occuring due to a chain reaction in uranium in 1938, it immediately became apparent it could be used as a massive source of energy, and Einstein immediately warned FDR and the Manhattan project began.[4] Why could not a similar story play out for fusion? Cold fusion is tantalizingly plausible and the experiments, as you say, can be conducted on a tabletop. Why not try?
My answer, which is of course a subjective judgement, is that good science happens by searching where the light is, exploring the implications and edges of existing theories, not out in the dark, trying things completely at random. Rutherford wasn't bombarding gold foil for the hell of it. Randomly trying things in an atheoretic way in the hopes that a previously undiscovered and unsuspected piece of new physics will drop out is closer to alchemy, and just about as likely to be successful. More than 2,000 years of randomly combining urine and lead resulted in not one ounce of gold. (I grant you that tabletop cold fusion experiments may very well find a new bit of chemistry.) But the argument against is simply this: 6 KeV. It's simply too much. No chemical or electrical process is going to get you that, unless it first turns your experiment into plasma, in which case you're back to hot fusion! It's like throwing pebbles at the moon and calling it the Apollo program. It's not a matter of just getting the right pebble. You can try quartz and obsidian, rough and smooth, for as long as you like, but you're not even beginning to address the invariant in the room, which is that you just can't impart enough kinetic energy to your pebbles to even get them out of Earth's gravity well, much less to the moon. That is why I believe that a dollar spent on cold fusion actually has lower expected payoff than a dollar spent on hot fusion.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_mugging
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamow_factor
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleischmann%E2%80%93Pons_exper...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn#Discovery_of_nuclear...
This is because in the long, long term, allowing a company to dictate how a technology this important is used could hamper our ability to build on it or improve it. Over a long enough timescale, it would be better if we delayed getting cold fusion so that we could get the same technology later in a less encumbered form.
If cold fusion is possible, and Google stops working on it, we can still get it through other means. Other people can pick up Google's slack. If Google manages to crack it, and as a result is able to put legally enforceable restrictions on how it's used, then that's it. There's nowhere to go from there.
Another point - how much do you charge for the power? If your goal is to get people to switch, the answer is "as little as you can". If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can".
But that's the case either way. If the technology was public domain, somebody would still have to pay to build the reactors, and then it's even harder to raise capital because with more competition there is less profit.
> If your goal is to make money, the answer is "as much as you can".
But "as much as you can" really means "just under what existing alternatives cost" -- because getting people to switch is how you make money. You don't make money by losing customers to competitors.
> Energy created through fusion is 3-4 times more powerful than the energy released by fission.[0]
Which is just confus(ed/ing) on a fundamental level... More Powerful energy? So each Joule from fusion is actually 3-4 times better than each Joule from fission, in some way? I really can't work out what they are trying to say here.
0. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/compact-fusion...
So, yeah, that's exactly four times the energy per kilogram. Now, why couldn't they just say THAT on the web page instead of the confusing and meaningless "this energy is 3-4 times more powerful than that energy" nonsense? But, thanks 'mikeash for clearing that up for me!
I looked at the numbers about 10 years ago and iirc I concluded that waste heat is about 10% the impact of greenhouse gasses, so not insignificant. I don't remember how I got that number though, and I could have easily messed something up.
Alternatively we can tone down the sun with the shade satellites.
The fact that it "probably will not work" (where "probably" = "almost certainly") is a strong argument for not doing something.
If I told you I had this idea for an over unity generator that "probably will not work", would you invest a million dollars into it?
Research is an investment, resources are extremely limited and they must be allocated prudently.
> “This is not just a chase for cold fusion,” says Matthew Trevithick, a research programme manager at Google in Mountain View, California. “If it were, I don’t think we would have maintained an interest of this calibre of team for so long.”
Here's what I see: fusion power would be a step function in human civilization. Such step functions are pathologically hard to achieve, because new modes of thinking are hard for humans to do. Calling it cold fusion is a calling card to scientists who are serious about researching novel approaches to fusion instead of playing the politics of the research paper game. Will it work? Probably not. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Also, from Google's perspective, if they're the company that owns the IP for fusion energy, that's a pretty massive win. Additionally, if they push just a few other companies into funding fusion research, then the odds that we see viable fusion energy production (not cold fusion) in our lifetimes probably increases. I would love to see a private industry race for fusion research, though, the financial requirements of such endeavors mean the game would only be open to a very small number of global megacorps. Still it would be better than not doing it.