> By combining our years of experience in fusion, newly available electronics technologies, and a revolutionary design using cutting-edge physics, Helion is making a fusion engine 1,000 times smaller, over 500 times cheaper, and realizable 10 time faster than other projects.
What?!? I certainly appreciate the ambition, but humanity has spent seven decades and at least hundreds of billions of dollars on this very same project. What in the world is this tiny startup doing with a $5mm grant that is so easy and cheap that could possibly lead to that kind of breakthrough in fusion energy?
Isn't decommissioning nuclear power plants still basically a huge bill underwritten by the tax payer? I'm not really sure about creating radioactive waste that has such huge half lives...
From Wikipedia:
Of particular concern in nuclear waste management are two long-lived fission
products, Tc-99 (half-life 220,000 years) and I-129 (half-life 15.7 million
years), which dominate spent fuel radioactivity after a few thousand years.
The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are Np-237 (half-life
two million years) and Pu-239 (half-life 24,000 years).[39] Nuclear waste
requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it
from interacting with the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment,
followed by a long-term management strategy involving storage, disposal or
transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.[40] Governments around the
world are considering a range of waste management and disposal options, though
there has been limited progress toward long-term waste management
solutions.[41]
The 20th century was the century of carbon-based energy. I am confident the 22nd century is going to be the century of atomic energy (i.e. terrestrial atomic generation and energy from sun’s fusion).
It's silly to describe solar as atomic energy from sun’s fusion as a distinct category from carbon-based energy, because of course carbon-based energy was formed by capturing solar energy from the sun's fusion.
It's great to see you invest your time and money in nuclear power Sam. We already have the nuclear technology to solve our energy emissions problem, we just lack the political will to make the shift away from coal/oil/gas. Great leaps in the efficiency and safety of nuclear power systems will hopefully make the shift politically achievable.
I worked on renewable energy projects a few years back, and while the idea of a large disruptive technology development sounds awesome, the reality is that there are already a plethora of renewable energy turbines and designs that would greatly improve the world... But the engineers and inventors running around with these ideas have no idea how to go from a small scale proof of concept into a fully built out manufacturing and implementation process.
Even if they do figure out how to get engineering and manufacturing in place, then there are regulatory barriers to figure out. There will be politics involved, and legal challenges. And of course, you need to actually operate the sites on an ongoing basis.
All of these challenges can be overcome... but most people who know how to do so already work in the energy industry. What is really needed is a group of people who can bridge those gaps to take an innovate design from an engineers drawing board, and jump through all the hoops to make it a live production site. If such a group were to be built, real change could happen very quickly.
I always wondered why more energy wasn't generated from nuclear. On paper it seems like a great energy source.
Kudos to Sam for putting not just his money, but his time where his mouth is. If only the rest of the internet could do the same!
Recently watched Cosmos Episode 6 where Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks of photosynthesis and how all our energy problems would be solved if we were able to learn the 'trade secrets' of how plants do it.
This makes a lot of sense.
Can anyone point out current research on this field? I don't seem to hear much about it.
Edit: Just found this after searching #photosynthesis in Twitter: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/20/artificial-photosyn...
P.S. I'm not an expert, but this has been in news media in India for a long time.
The reason that China and India are the only countries going after fission is because of a singular element - Thorium. Both India and China have huge reserves of thorium that can be unlocked with molten salt reactors that are unviable anywhere else in the world (including the US, which gave up on this a long time ago[1]). Australia does have large reserves of thorium, but its projected energy needs are dwarfed by India and China's.
China is way ahead than India on this front with more than a billion dollars managed by Jiang Mianheng to conduct research into these new reactors. And which is why India is bending over backwards to sign the India-US Civil Nuclear Energy treaty.
Interestingly, a US company, Thorcon [2], has built a "hackable" MSR - though I dont know if it is any good.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-china-molten-salt-nuclear-... [2] http://fukushimaupdate.com/thorium-molten-salt-reactors-to-g...
This is fantastic. Nuclear fission suffers from a hindenberg-type PR problem, where incidents from early design mistakes and poor choices color the opinions of people even though modern reactor designs are safe, efficient, and essentially clean other than small amounts of waste.
I would love to work on a project like this.
> A lot of problems—economic, environmental, war, poverty, food and water availability, bad side effects of globalization, etc.—are deeply related to the energy problem.
It's worth pointing out that the problems enumerated above are partly the consequence of energy becoming cheap and available during the last century (coal, oil, etc) not lack of it. But the main reasons are the dominating philosophical and ethical standards of humanity during the energy boom. Cheap energy + wrong philosophy = bad application of energy = problems enumerated above.
So if you want to tackle any of those problems, you have to work on both variables in that equation, just increasing the availability of energy without raising awareness of how to apply it, will lead to unsatisfactory results in the long term.
A huge part of the problem is not investment or technology, but the legislative structure which still favors fossil fuels. The lobbying interests and influence are immense. Once this starts to change there will be a rapid shift towards clean energy.
> terrestrial-based atomic energy... has major advantages when it comes to cost
Are we talking public cost? Because that's all that matters. So far the public cost of nuclear power has been extraordinary, due to accidents and waste.
I understand that some of these startups aim to process existing waste in relatively small distributed reactors but what is the public cost of spreading a bunch of "mini" toxic waste sites around the world that remain hazardous for 100 years, instead of centrally storing it?
Plus I've read that although these mini reactors are not directly producing material that could be used in a dirty bomb, that they could be converted to do so if they fell into the wrong hands. I may be oversimplifying here, but the question again is what is the public risk of distributing atomic fuels and reactors in a manner that makes them much less secure? Would this make them more susceptible to "war hacking" and could this be the mini-reactor equivalent of a nuclear disaster?
Nuclear costs have always been about the long term public costs, not the short term $/kWh.
This is before we even consider the taxpayer cost that's gone into nuclear tech development. I wonder if there will be more public money needed to take this tech to market, even if the test reactors bear fruit.
I'm very happy to see independent fusion efforts raising money, given that government R&D has decided to put nearly all its eggs in the tokamak basket.
I am convinced LFTRs are the way to go, they fit in with distributed generation model very well. For what it is worth 21st if it takes Nuclear turn will be clearly fission, actually fission is good enough. But if we were to ascend into space and beyond fusion gives us bigger wings.
Years ago, the story I understood was that renewables couldn't scale up fast enough to sufficiently mitigate climate change, and nuclear was the only answer. Recently, I've read that renewables have scaled up much faster than expected.
Does anyone know the current story? Can renewables scale up fast enough? Also, does the availability problem (i.e., renewables not being available when the sun/wind are not) prevent them from having a sufficient impact? I could imagine that, even if renewables weren't always available, their use still could reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate climate change sufficiently.
> The big government projects, like NIF and ITER, unfortunately have the feel of peacetime big government projects.
Not sure what 'sama means by this, but I guess it's what I feel - government projects tend to go slow unless there's an actual, real security reason for them to go faster, in which case - like with Manhattan project - you get crazy amount of productivity and progress.
One important thing that nobody thinks about when discussing nuclear fission/fusion as energy source of the future, is that it is not climate neutral at all. Popular science tends to forget about that. In fact, nearly all of the energy budget on earth comes from the sun. There is natural fission and energy emission on earth, but you can see that as a background constant and the climate system on earth has adapted to it. Fossil energies are just a very large chemical sink for the energy of the sun, and we just burnt it away at once in geological scales. If humanity now starts to deploy nuclear fission or fusion, it will heat the earth even more. Because that energy was basically trapped inside the atomic core, where it didn't play a significant role for the global climate. With more and more atomic energy usage, the energy will finally end as heat somewhere and increase global temperatures even more (not in the way that fossil energies do with emitted greenhouse gases, but still).
" It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement." Oh, Come on! With similar government subsidies and Mandates, Donkey wheels could deliver a similar power density. With such subsidies and mandates, donkey wheels would double, double and redouble again, and one could therefore project donkey wheels to exceed all power generation.
Ironically enough, a donkey is 1/3 horsepower, which is 748 watts of power. A donkey at about 250 watts is therefore is roughly equivalent to a solar panel the same size. The donkey has the advantage over solar, in that it's dispatchable, while solar is not.
I wish we considered donkeys instead of Solar as a replacement for fossil fules, since the shortcomings might be more obvious to the innumerate.I'm sorry I missed this earlier because I wish Sam could see this comment.
Nuclear energy is inherently centralized and difficult to decentralize. This creates all sorts of political and economic dynamics, some of which you (Sam, and YC) may benefit from, but some of which may be damaging to societies in various ways (think corruption, control, monopolies, etc.)
Obviously this isn't necessarily true for all possible as-yet-unimagined implementations of nuclear technology. But it's something to think about when comparing energy technologies.
Solar, on the other hand, while not necessarily inherently decentralized, is extremely decentralizable, leading to very different dynamics.
I'm not saying Nuclear is bad. I'm just saying this stuff should be factored in.
One problem I see with nuclear power is that it goes the very inefficient way over heat. The prices in the building industry are rising so much that it already is unprofitable to build nuclear power in the west today. (When Hinkley Point C will start producing energy it will have a higher feed in tariff than photovoltaics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...)
I don't see any future for nuclear if it doesn't fundamentally change the way it harvests the energy and when it solves the nuclear waste problem economically
The killer app for these modular reactors is to scale with the same footprint: If you have the infrastructure to house one of these boxcars, for the town's first factory, why not 10 boxcars on the same site once the town grows in population.
That's what you can't do with solar - with solar you already have a big footprint to power that first factory, and your footprint increases proportional to power use. 21 century calls for scaling roughly 20x = 2x (population growth) * 10x (rise in developing worlds livining standards). I don't want 20x solar footprint.
Former fusion startup founder here (Fiat Lux Research, funded by DFJ 1995-2000).
I couldn't agree more with Sam about the importance of energy for our civilization. Kudos to him for putting his efforts towards important stuff.
I have mixed, but mostly positive feelings about venture capital and energy startups. The fact is, it's a tough space. Large capital requirements, prototyping cycles often measured in years, and a low success rate. Everyone is still waiting for the energy unicorn to put Google, Uber, Yahoo, et al. to shame. And energy startups don't benefit from many of the things in SV that infotech startups do, such as ecosystem synergies and being co-located with all the new cool stuff in your industry. This is especially true with regards to one of SV's great strengths, the freedom to fail.
Where SV shines is in the short times from idea to testing. In most of the nuclear energy industry, going from idea to tested prototype can take decades. I think we all know the importance of short debugging and feedback cycles. Hirsch harped on this a few years back, and it's still a good point. Look at ITER, which were were talking about back in 1995. ITERative, it is not.
Some observations:
1) The teams and funding are a bit larger than they used to be. This is probably a good thing. The design turnaround time is a bit better, but not by much though. It's necessary to tweak a design once you have built it to learn from it and see what its ultimate performance can be. But it's all-too-easy to spend a year or two doing that. Do that a few times and then you're out (of money, time, your mind, what-have-you).
2) Location. There is no advantage to locating an energy company in SV except for proximity to funding (and Stanford, I suppose). We located by the NHMFL in Tallahassee. It's cheaper, and the magnet guys would moonlight for us. However, working with Tim over 3 time-zones had its challenges. I don't think we got the benefit of having a great VC as much as some of his other portfolio companies did (no complaints about him, just the distance). Some things are just hard to explain over the phone. But SV still isn't the right place. I think that there is a big opportunity for VCs to improve how they provide the value-added stuff that they do (beyond providing money) remotely, and energy is the space that needs it most. I don't know the VC job well enough to provide good suggestions, I just know there is an unmet need here.
3) Because the failure rate for startups is so high, it's important to have a decent failure path for the people involved. For software devs, SV jobs often provide a soft landing. Energy guys don't have that easily transferable skill set. So, fusion largely consists of old hands who are willing to spend 20 years ramming a single design through, and a bunch of young redshirts who are sure that they can beat the odds. When every design failure becomes a career failure, people aren't incentived to radically iterate designs quickly. Luckily for me, I learned radiation measurement and protection on-the-job (hey we have neutrons! How many neutrons? Woo hoo! Wait, oh shit!) so that skill transfered over into medical physics quite readily. But imagine what SV would look like if almost every software startup founder who failed once had left the software industry.
I wish good luck to Helion, UPower, and all the other teams fighting the good fight.
Why are we so focused on having only one solution for energy? I would understand the cost would decrease when you put all your eggs in one basket but can we really find one type of energy source that has no disadvantages? Wouldn't we be better served with diversity of energy production (more than we have now)?
I find it strange there is no mention about batteries. From what I understand (and it isn't much, I'm way out of my field) getting energy is easy, saving it is hard.
I wonder what environmental impact truly large-scale solar energy will have. In that it is moving energy away from where it would usually fall on the ground/plants, thus reducing heat, less rising air, less photosynthesis etc. Perhaps additionally aid global cooling? Though that energy will mostly end up as heat anyway.
(Of course it's far better for the environment than present coal/petrol/gas/wood, and their energy initially came from the sun anyway, but it will still have some environmental impact.)
Apparently the crust of the earth is floating on huge nuclear energy generator. I guess it's a materials problem to tap into that?
There already is a very well working fusion reactor - the sun - and it's free. We just need better battery tech.
There is actually a lot we could do in terms of promoting passive solar -- i.e. a lifestyle and design-based approach that uses less energy to get the same results. In a finite world, I really wish passive solar got a lot more attention than it does. There are serious costs involved in burning ever more energy. Passive solar brilliantly sidesteps that inconvenient physics-based fact.
Least we forget: Tidal energy & Geothermal energy...
Hmm, major reversals of conflict-of-interest policy? (ie. now chairman of two YC companies and personally investing in them)
Large claims with no hard data comparisons? (eg. atomic power has major cost, density, and predictability advantages)
This(?):
>There will only be one cheapest source of energy
Really? There can't be two sources at or near equilibrium?
These systems are not deployed in isolated, designer environments, but instead are deployed in complex environments. Transportation and project logistics will prefer some sources over others.
The lack of any real metric for cost or "cheapness" is a red flag. Is cost being measured in nominal dollars? Will such a thing even exist in the 22nd century?
Distributed generation is where we should invest. Energy independence for the individual.
Individual solar panels and batteries, personal windmills, personal reactors, etc.
Imagine all the savings in infrastructure for energy transportation and reinvestment in other sectors. Imagine all the possibilities if people could switch their energy generation model as simple as buying a new product and installing it at home.
Individual energy independence, even if it will never be possible, that's where our dreams should be.
Then water, then food. That's disruption at seismic level. Post-scarcity world.
Slightly off-topic, but going to UPower's site shows nothing but a somewhat sparse wintery forest. Perhaps I've too much sci-fi on the brain, but it made me think of a nuclear winter.
Obnoxiously self important attitude.
There are other technologies. Nuclear isomers for example have a lot of potential, but the fossil fuel hegemony really keeps alternatives from flourishing. We can be very thankful that photovoltaics was invented pre-WII, otherwise I doubt we'd be seeing it today either.
The article ignores the elephant in the room: the problems he discusses are all more directly a result of too many humans for the closed system planet. Period.
Probably not. Energy isn't really what is holding the poor back - a lack of stability and security are. If I had to chose one technological improvement to help most people on the planet it would probably be benevolent AI, which could refocus many of our challenges to what is important. Getting people out of poverty and war.
Energy is a tiny component of modern civilization.
I suspect solar (including wind/biomass) + batteries is going to trounce fission reactors in the not terribly long term. If you think of finance in terms of latency/bandwidth (a model I use for lots of things), reactors are high latency - they're expensive and take a long time to set up.
Meanwhile, solar/wind is heading toward dirt cheap and trivial to set up. Environmental impact is minimal, too. It doesn't require giant corporations, government sponsorship, complex regulations, or exotic engineering skills to implement. With those incredible advantages, it doesn't need to be cheaper than nuclear - it just needs to be adequately cheap.