I'm a member of a group of young fusion researchers who are trying to figure out how to make fusion happen in our lifetimes. This is nontrivial because 'young' in this case means under 40, and current plans from DOE don't put fusion power on the grid for another 35+ years. Given the accuracy of government forecasts a whole year down the line, I'm not holding my breath.

I think that the single largest factor holding up the development of commercial fusion is not physics, its program structure. We need to revolutionize the way fusion research is structured, and the best way to do that is to bring the power of the market to bear. Prizes have been suggested (notably by Bob Bussard). I offer here an alternative proposal, seeking your feedback.

The goal is to encourage private funding. This means finding a way to reduce the risk to investors in potential fusion schemes. If a given idea can pass a basic peer reviewed sanity check (doesn't violate any laws of physics), DOE should offer to insulate investors from some measure of risk. As a concrete proposal, say DOE will purchase all the intellectual property assets of any innovative energy company which closes down after raising private venture funding. There would be some limit, indexed to the amount of money raised, say 1/2 the total venture funds raised, up to a limit of $50 million expended by DOE per company. The physical plant would remain property of the investors or creditors. DOE would pay an external auditor to catalog and organize the intellectual property assets, and would make them freely available to interested parties.

There would have to be sensible mechanisms for peer review and for deciding when to shut down (presumably the investors would make that call), but I don't see showstoppers there. I think the idea would work, but getting congress to agree is likely to be hard. There's a real danger of the money disappearing after a venture is funded, thanks to diversion to some more worthy cause, like rainforests in Iowa.

Anyway please comment, kvetch, suggest, advise, discuss, either in comments here or in email to me.

How about an X-Prize for fusion.

Say 40 or 50 Billion dollars for the first bunch who can demonstrate a commercially viable reactor?

If they could demonstrate a commercially viable reactor, there would be no need for a prize...

The problem with a fusion X prize is that you need to put up monster amounts of money. Tens of billions is real money. I'm trying to figure out a way to shake loose some investment money for modest government investment. The reason is not just to develop reactors but also to bring the fusion community into more contact with investors and the business community. Most people outside the business community who think they understand business have no idea at all what they are talking about, and fusion is no different. I learned as much in six months of working at a startup as I did in any given six month period of gradschool. Things that seemed hard turned out to be trivial, things that seemed simple turn out to be flatly impossible.

I would have the government put up the prize.

I think the best thing for fusion funding is to create in the public mind a clear and unambiguous link between fusion funding and lower energy/gas prices with less dependence on the Middle East.

I want to write an article on fusion research and its connection to Helium-3. But I need to do some basic research and correct any misunderstandings I might have. So I have a few questions.

My understanding is that starting in the 1950s the fusion energy research community began predicting that they would achieve break-even in ten years. They made this claim again in the 1960s and the 1970s and the 1980s. But no matter how much money was spent on fusion research, the goal always seemed elusive. They were able to achieve funding by claiming that the Soviets were making real strides in the subject and there was a danger that the Soviets would be the US to break-even.

As one well-known space scientist who worked as a graduate student in fusion research put it to me, this was basic research masquerading as engineering. The community used the promise of commercial fusion as an excuse to fund what was essentially basic research.

Is this chronology and assessment accurate?

How much did fusion research get cut after the Cold War? Can anybody point me to dollar figures and percentages?

Now, coming to today, what is the latest authoritative estimate for when break-even might be achieved?

Dwayne - email me (click the name under the comment - the email address works). We can go back and forth in email. There are some things I'm not willing to say in public that might be relevant.

I like the idea, Andrew. And it can be appplied to many areas; energy research, aerospace, and so forth.

Now ... how to bell that cat. We have a raft of Republicans in Wisconsing gunning after Russ Feingold's seat. Wonder what they would think about this.

JET almost reached break-even, though nobody expected it to get so close:

http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/history-of-jet.html

I visited JET in the late 90's, and the people there said that JET was too small to reach break-even but that after years of refinement they had pushed JET past the performance they thought possible. Their job was to pave the way for ITER, in part by developing scaling laws for how to scale the reaction up to make a reactor that can break even. ITER was to be the prototype for commercial fusion reactors. BTW the JET people characterized it as being as much engineering research as physics research. The engineering that went into that thing was incredible.

If I remember correcly, several of the people we met were dissatisfied with their level of pay, and the leader of our tour told me that without funding for ITER, fusion physics was being kept on the back-burners until oil prices became a more pressing issue. This was obviously frustrating them. On a complete tangent, the fusion physicists served us the best tea and biscuits I've ever tasted. Perhaps it was the long tour, but it really hit the spot.

My fusion physics placemat has a useful diagram showing the progress of fusion research in attaining the expected reactor regime from 1970 to the 1990s:

http://fusedweb.pppl.gov/cpep/chart.html

Here is what Edward Teller thought in 1958 about peaceful fusion:

http://www.osti.gov/dublincore/gpo/servlets/purl/4304490-H3wSx4/native/4304490.pdf

On the subject of D/He-3 reactions, my understanding is that the byproduct of the reaction is protons rather than neutrons. In a conventional fusion reactor, the neutrons must be absorbed to exchange their energy into heat and drive a conventional turbine. This neutron flux corrodes the reactor too. With He-3, the byproduct is a charge carrier (protons) and so the energy of the reaction can be tapped off directly as an electrical current. So, the economics of reactors could be much better with He-3, and the reactor can last longer because of the reduced neutron flux.

This paper:

http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/pres/111890.pdf

...implies that He-3 must be bred in some other fusion reaction on Earth. So presumably this is why it might be cost-effective to gather it on the moon.

This might explain how net helium-3 gets into the solar wind, to be embedded on the lunar surface in the first place:

http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~lms/research/unstable.html

If they could demonstrate a commercially viable reactor, there would be no need for a prize...

True Rand, but we're not in a state where commercially viable reactors exist.

The problem with a fusion X prize is that you need to put up monster amounts of money. Tens of billions is real money. I'm trying to figure out a way to shake loose some investment money for modest government investment. The reason is not just to develop reactors but also to bring the fusion community into more contact with investors and the business community. Most people outside the business community who think they understand business have no idea at all what they are talking about, and fusion is no different. I learned as much in six months of working at a startup as I did in any given six month period of gradschool. Things that seemed hard turned out to be trivial, things that seemed simple turn out to be flatly impossible.

You also don't need tens of billions of dollars to fund a fusion prize. A few hundred million probably would serve as a start. But there seems to be some indications IMHO that you get better return on investment with prizes than sucking up risk for research projects.

With these time scales, I can’t see private investment. I could see prizes for intermediate fusion goals or perhaps a research bond scheme: An investor would get interest on tax-free research bonds, but would get to choose which area of energy research gets the money.

The problems with fusion I see are:

The pathological resistance to anything nuclear in this country. I hope it will change soon, but it has been accepted that Nuclear Is Bad for at least 30 years now.

NIMBY – it is getting difficult to build ANY large power plant of ANY kind in this country. It is darn near impossible in California.

No form of fusion power that I am aware of is radiation free – and to those who are pathologically anti-nuclear/anti-radiation, no amount of radiation is small enough. The easiest to reach reaction (D-T) produces loads of neutrons. Even with D-He3, there are going to be D-D reactions as well – not as bad as D-T, but It Is There. *I* don’t see it as a big issue, but when practical hardware appears, expect lots of resistance unless the attitude changes.

Other options – Fusion is nice, but it isn’t the end of the world if we don’t have it. I think there will be a lot of development in thin film PV and power storage in the next couple of decades. I would like to see a big move to passively safe conventional nuclear, but I don’t see it happening any time soon. And there are plenty of fossil fuels for quite some time to come.

Having said that, if there was a way I could see more money going to fusion research, I’d be a big supporter – along with many other areas of energy research. It seems to me that both parties, since about the mid ‘80s, have largely ignored the energy issue. I’d like to see a real effort to make the U.S. more energy independent and move to non-fossil fuel sources. CO2 or not, it is just a dirty way to produce power.

Dr. Bussard just got Navy funding for another year:

http://powerandcontrol.bl*gspot.com/2007/04/good-news-fusion-project-funded.html

Fusion Project Funded