I link to this post a fair bit, but I hope you’ll find it useful and responsive to your basic question(s):
Click the down arrow to see the post in its entirety (without leaving this page).
I disagree. A quote from a wiki article:
The size of the investments and time lines results mean that fusion research has almost exclusively been publicly funded. However, start-up companies have attracted over 2.5 billion dollars from roughly 2000 to 2020, with most of the funding coming since 2015 [116] with investors including Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Bill Gates, as well as institutional investors including Legal & General, and energy companies including Equinor, Eni, Chevron,[117] and the Chinese ENN Group.[118] In September 2019, Bloomberg found that over twenty private companies were engaged.[119]
I wonder why you disagree because the quote you, well, quoted, seems to back up exactly what he is saying:
Emphasis mine.
It was not uncommon in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, with a number of wealthy people (most notably a number of actors and musicians) who left the UK, and became “tax exiles,” due to the very high income tax for the very wealthy. Those “exiles” included Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Sean Connery, David Bowie, and Rod Stewart.
Yep you’re right. Fusion research is attracting private funding now…but most of the previous research has been military. I shouldn’t make predictions. Sorry Stranger.
Plus, would that private investment be made now if those private investors didn’t look at all the slow incremental progress made using government funds and say “hey, they’re on the verge of something, I better get in on this”?
Fusion energy technology will be guarded carefully by whoever funds it. Fusion has the potential to solve several problems facing humanity. Desalination would be economical, and fossil fuel is no longer the cheapest energy source. No CO2 emissions. I didn’t mean to derail this thread…
So you cherry-picked an example of faddish commercial investment into a technological development that has traditionally been mostly supported by exclusively Department of Energy and Department of Defense funding? (I say “mostly” because there was a previous spurt of investment by energy and particularly oil companies back in the late ‘Seventies and early ‘Eighties when they stared to see the end in sight for cheap oil, but they backed off when they saw how long it would take to get results, the lack of monopolization they would have over fusion power generation, and improvements in oil extraction technology and US government action to secure access to foreign oil by threat of military force and interventions.).
In general, there is little interest in fundamental research, both on the large and small scales, for science without obvious application. Nor would it make sense for a profit-seeking entity to throw money at research that may only have benefits decades down the road and to the community at large instead of offering a competitive advantage to the benefactor. This is the very reason we have public funding of basic research; it has the advantage of a literal “economy of scale” in being able to tap a little from everyone to the benefit of all, there isn’t the concern about proprietary information or return on investment, and it can fund work that is “interesting” rather than immediately applicable, which leads to scientific innovations that no one expected and new industries from no plan or prior expectation.
Not to continue a hijack, but I’ll just say that people are often spinning broad tales of how nuclear fusion, or advances in quantum computing, or genetic engineering, et cetera will solve the problems facing humanity. The problem is that those problems weren’t created by a lack of technology; they were created by a short-sighted view of the impact that the activities of human industrial civilization have on the world, e.g. using fossil fuels as if they are without limit and have no impact on the environment, overfishing of sea life, acidification of the oceans, et cetera. Indeed, whenever we’ve developed a new technology for greater efficiency, it has actually caused us to expand our overall use and footprint, e.g. the agricultural “Green Revolution” which allows us to feed billions of people from land that could previously only support a few hundred million suitably, but at the cost of non-sustainable use of water resources, fossil fuel, unmanaged fertilizer runoff, draining of wetlands that are crucial to ecosystem balance, et cetera.
In fact, if we had practical unlimited nuclear fusion power but no greater scheme to implement it sensibly, it would just encourage societies to further expand and use more resources unsustainably. ‘Economical’ desalination is actually a good example; not only is it a power-hungry activity but to extend it to an industrial scale would require a huge physical footprint in delicate littoral regions, would produce very high local increase in salinity that would have adverse effects on the local biosystem, and we would still have to figure out how to deliver desalinated water from the supply to inland where it is needed, including up elevations and across long distances, all of which have other impacts. Better to figure out how to engage in activities that are consistent with the sustainable resources available and use desalination only where absolutely needed for some necessary industry or activity.
Stranger
You mention Department of Defense funding. Would military-funded projects be “to the benefit of all”, with no concerns about proprietary information?
I think there would be enormous obvious applications for controlled fusion. It’s clean, non-radioactive, doesn’t produce greenhouse gases, and won’t melt down or blow up.
You’re right desalination technology would need significant improvements disposing of brine according to this Scientific American article.
I looked up Fusion technology on SD, found this thread. Sorry about the hijack. Stranger, you’re an awesome writer.
That’s right on the money, with the only exception being monopolies who can fund basic research because they can afford the risk and for the PR value.
That isn’t academic research, which sometimes gets funded by grants and sometimes through consortia like SRC (Semiconductor Research Corporation.) When I was involved in direct funding at one company I worked for, which was close to being a monopoly at the time, I had to fight hard for the funding of out there projects as opposed to ones close to development.
As soon as it looks like the basic research has practical applications, the VCs come swooping in. Happened that way for the Internet also.
When I was at Bell Labs my group was 50% research funded and 50% development funded, and though it was both officially R&D there was a big difference in the stuff we worked on.
So, I’m referring specifically to academic basic research, e.g. in university laboratories, where it is. essentially impossible to maintain information security or vet research workers (primarily graduate students) for security clearances or ITAR restrictions. When research becomes sufficiently applicable to a particular technology problem work is transferred to either one of the many Federally Funded Research & Development Centers (FFRDC) like Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, et cetera, or a lab is spun off into a private, not-for-profit company like Charles Stark Draper Labs or Space Dynamics Laboratory, which may be owned and managed by a university but is an independent organization that can handle secure and proprietary research. Of course, once a technology like radar absorbent “stealth” materials becomes mature, it is provided to government for-profit contractors working on actual applications.
How applicable the basic research is “to all” depends on what technologies it ends up developing but as previously noted there is a lot of technology that was originally developed specifically for military applications but have now become the basis for major commercial industries that did not exist prior to it. You’d be hard pressed to discover a major technology innovation in electronics, communications, or computing, and especially any nuclear technology that did not stem from some kind of Department of Defense or Department of Energy funded research. Biotech is a bit different as a lot of innovations in biotechnology do come from corporate funding
Sure, if it can be done economically. The problem is that the funding baseline for development in controlled nuclear fusion has gotten longer and longer as more problems have been discovered, and while there are many obvious applications (and some less obvious ones as well, such as using fusion as a rich energetic neutron source for producing exotic elements on an industrial scale) it isn’t as if some investor is going to be able to patent a particular process and be able to recoup their enormous investment before the patent expires. Investors want exclusive rights so they don’t have to compete with “the market”, especially if they are paying off the cost of basic research and the free riders drafting behind them can get the basic research for free.
The current ITER project is so large and expensive that it actually required international funding (although the necessity for collaboration and compromise for sourcing components from multiple countries has added to the cost and difficultly) and is even though it is essentially ten years behind the original schedule for first plasma there is little confidence that it will hit the revised targets, and it is just a test project intended to provide technical data for an actual demonstration reactor to be built later this century. It isn’t just a technology any private company, or even a consortium would invest in. (There is the question of whether governments should invest in this, either, because of how difficult it would be to make this fiscally viable for commercial applications.) All of the fusion startups that venture capitalists are interested in now are trying smaller scale and far less expensive efforts at achieving controlled fusion, but personally my confidence in their success is not high, based both on prior efforts and the approaches being taken, although Commonwealth Fusion Systems is at least using advanced high temperature superconducting magnets in a “proven” type of system (advanced high confinement tokamak) so they’ll probably at least achieve fusion pressures; whether it will be of sufficient energy gain factor or stable enough to sustain is another question.
Stranger
There is also a sort of Libertarian / Ayn Rand philosophy that taxes should be as low as possible (or nonexistent). The theory being that wealth people became wealthy by through their own hard work and ingenuity and corrupt governments (AKA “governments”) would take from the rich based on politically expediate populist agendas and squander the money of non-value add things like schools, roads, and feeding non-productive poor people.
How much money are businesses gonna make of all their employees are illiterate and there are no roads connecting the factories, stores, and homes of consumers?
Is this the new euphemism for a “Useless Eater”?
Yeah, this reminds me of another facet of the whole “tax cuts are always good” conservative meme - trickle-down economics + “Starve the Beast”:
" Starving the beast " is a political strategy employed by American conservatives to limit government spending by cutting taxes, in order to deprive the federal government of revenue in a deliberate effort to force it to reduce spending.
The term “the beast”, in this context, refers to the United States Federal Government and the programs it funds, using mainly American taxpayer dollars, particularly social programs such as education, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
You know who funded what became the Internet, don’t you? Sorry, I’m sure you are, it is just an odd question. Multics was funded by ONR, for example, though that was because of some connections with professors who spent time there.
I worked with people at Sandia back when it was managed by Bell Labs. While they were certainly doing super secret stuff, they also published a lot. My colleagues there published a lot of really good work on IC reliability.
In fact, up to about fifteen or twenty years ago there was a lot of encouragement to publish results from defense-funded research and budgeted allocations for attendance at conferences like IEEE and AIAA for those submitting papers. I had a handful of papers in the works that I was a contributor on, and a project that was a combined IRAD/USAF funded effort for collaborative research across industry, and then that all dried up. Whether this was to direct money to fight “The War on Terror” or to plow more money into F-35 and Airborne Laser, or what I do not know, but aside from FFRDC researchers and university labs you find little in the way of industry contributions to such conferences. It certainly wasn’t due to any secrecy issues with publishing ITAR-approved, non-sensitive research.
Stranger
I think there may have been similar questions back in the 1960’s asking whether governments should invest in space-program technology. I would think private companies investing in fusion would fund university research in technologies that might enable controlled fusion (e.g. strength-of-materials, super conductors, etc.) instead of trying to fund development of a functional reactor. It would be interesting to know how far along other stakeholders are, especially in China and Russia.
How is government spending on counterproductive and inflationary policy intrinsically better than billionaires not spending unrealized gains? Now if the government put the money into real infrastructure that’d be great but so much of government spending is unproductive if not counterproductive.
There was no question about governments investing in “space program technology”; setting aside that the cost of development was such that only governments could afford to invest in it, the genesis of all space technologies is in intercontinental nuclear weapon delivery and satellite surveillance, and later the “Space Race” that was essentially a propaganda war between great powers to demonstrate superiority through technological prowess. Even programs like Project Orion (nuclear pulse propulsion) were funded based upon potential if absurd military applications.
How would that recoup the investment on research or give those companies a competitive advantage? Companies, by and large, don’t fund basic research on materials or new technologies; they fund work that will lead to applications, and for the most part, try to maintain more control over proprietary applications than is possible in an academic environment. And to develop and test new mechanisms and materials suitable for the environment of a fusion reactor you essentially need a fusion reactor. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of applications research coming out of ITER because that is what it is really intended to do, but it is way beyond the financial scale that any company or even consortium of companies would develop on their own.
Stranger